Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia (Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia) 9781786600967, 9781786600981, 178660096X

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Unsettling Food Politics

Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia Series editors: Simone Bignall, Senior Lecturer, Indigenous Strategy and Engagement, Flinders University P. Diego Bubbio, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of Western Sydney Joanne Faulkner, Lecturer in Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of New South Wales Paul Patton, Scientia Professor, University of New South Wales The Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia series transports a tradition of thought understood as belonging to one place – ‘the continent’ – to places that were transformed in its image through colonisation: Australia, New Zealand, East Asia and South Asia. The series aims to explore and showcase the diverse ways in which European philosophy has been interpreted and put to use according to the contexts and questions particular to life in even further, stranger and more ‘exotic’ continents.

Titles in the Series Young and Free: [Post]colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia by Joanne Faulkner The Phenomenology of Gravidity: Reframing the Maternal in Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida by Jane Lymer Deleuze and the Humanities: East and West, edited by Rosi Braidotti, Kin Yuen Wong and Amy K. S. Chan Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia, by Christopher Mayes

Unsettling Food Politics Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia

Christopher Mayes

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 Christopher Mayes All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0096-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mayes, Christopher, author. Title: Unsettling food politics : agriculture, dispossession and sovereignty in Australia / Christopher Mayes. Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Series: Continental philosophy in Austral-Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018022992 (print) | LCCN 2018034205 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786600981 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786600967 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Food supply—Political aspects—Australia. | Agriculture and politics—Australia. | Racism—Australia. | Whites—Race identity—Australia. | Indigenous peoples—Australia. | Self-determination, National—Australia. Classification: LCC HD9018.A8 (ebook) | LCC HD9018.A8 M39 2018 (print) | DDC 338.1/994—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022992 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introduction: Beach Barbeques, Dispossession and Problematization

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1 Cultivating Sovereignty: Agriculture, Racism and the Problem of Settling Australia

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2 Producing ‘Little England’: Farmers, Graziers and the Creation of Home

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3 Alternative Problems, Alternative Solutions: Security and Sovereignty in the Global Food System

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4 Whiteness and the Contested Spaces of Alternative Food

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5 Unsettling Food Sovereignty in Australia

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6 Whose Sovereignty? Competing Sovereignties and the Tactical Return to Rights

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7 Negotiating Relations: Food Politics after the Uluru Statement from the Heart

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Conclusion221 Index225

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Acknowledgements

This book was written on the traditional lands of the Dabee, Gadigal and Wadawurrung peoples. These lands were stolen and sovereignty never ceded. It is on these lands and with this knowledge that I have tried to think through the politics and ethics of the food we grow and eat, and how these everyday acts are bound up with past acts of violence and dispossession. Many people, experiences and conversations have shaped me as I wrote this book. I am deeply indebted to friends, family, colleagues and strangers with whom I have discussed different thoughts, ideas and concerns along the way. I would like to acknowledge friends and colleagues who read chapters and offered invaluable feedback on early drafts. Warwick Anderson, Claire Baker, Andrew Cooper, Shaphan Cox, Jenny Kaldor, Emma Kowal, Alana Mann, Eve Mayes, Tim Neale and Philippa Vaughan all helped to steer me away from errors and challenged me toward a more articulate analysis. Of course, all of the errors and missteps that remain are my own. I am especially grateful to Eve Mayes for her encouragement and support throughout the research and writing of this book. Her insightful comments on the entire manuscript and the inspiration of her own scholarship have greatly contributed to this project. I would like to thank the Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia series editors, especially Simone Bignall and Jo Faulkner for their engagement and feedback on the initial proposal and early drafts. I also wish to note the support and help from the editorial team at Rowman & Littlefield International. Early drafts of some of these chapters were presented at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, Australasian Agri-Food Research Network and Crossroads in Cultural Studies conferences. In addition to feedback from participants, I would like to acknowledge and thank Jenny Kaldor, with vii

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whom I coauthored for an Agri-Food conference paper. My understanding of food politics in Australia has been enriched by these collaborations and conversations. Chapter 3 develops ideas initially explored in ‘Whose Security? The Contest over Food Security in Australia’s National Food Plan and Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper.’ Coauthored with Ms. J. Kaldor (Law School, University of Sydney) for the Australasian Agri-Food Research Network Conference, University of Sydney, 24–26 November 2014. Chapters 2 and 4 draw on aspects of C. Mayes (2014), ‘An Agrarian Imaginary in Urban Life: Cultivating Virtues and Vices through a Conflicted History’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 27(2), 265–86. These chapters also use extracts from C. Mayes (2016), ‘Food at the Nexus of Bioethics and Biopolitics.’ In The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by Mary Rawlinson and Caleb Ward. Chapter 6 expands on ideas introduced in C. Mayes (2015), ‘Revisiting Foucault’s “Normative Confusions”: Surveying the Debate since the Collège de France Lectures’, Philosophy Compass, 10(12), 841–55.

Introduction Beach Barbeques, Dispossession and Problematization

and the bones of the men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun – John G. Robertson (1963, 181), reporting on the 1840 Fighting Hill massacre

Food and agriculture play a central role in the Australian story. Australia, it is often said, rode the back of the sheep into nationhood and prosperity. From the bush ballads ‘Click Go the Shears’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to Goulburn’s fifty-foot concrete ‘Big Merino’, the wool and the meat of the sheep have become embedded in national mythology. The wool made the nation wealthy; the meat made it home. Next to Vegemite, lamb has a privileged place in the Australian national cuisine, so much so that even advertisements for lamb have been woven into the national imaginary. Since 2004, the Meat and Livestock Association’s annual Australia Day ad has used Sam Kekovich as its ‘Lambassador’. Reminiscent of Howard Beale from The Network, the Lambassador sits at a mahogany desk flanked by Australian flags and barks a bombastic direct-to-camera monologue denouncing vegetarians, tofu and hippies while celebrating true Australians – Captain Cook, Burke and Wills and Ned Kelly – for their insatiable appetite for barbequed lamb. He concludes with his catchphrase, ‘Don’t be unAustralian. Serve lamb on Australia Day’. In 2017, however, the lamb ad moved away from jingoistic appeals to ‘Australian-ness’ and derision of its opposite. Instead, the advertisement opens with an Indigenous man walking across an empty beach toward pristine water (Meat and Livestock Australia 2017).1 ‘First here!’ he exclaims to a friend. ‘Cracking spot. Fire up the barbie!’ A number of Indigenous people are barbequing lamb and enjoying the beach. ‘Is anyone else coming?’ his 1

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friend asks. ‘A beautiful spot like this? It’ll be packed before you know it’. At this moment a horn sounds to announce the unexpected arrival of Dutch tall ships. ‘Great spot! How long have you guys been here?’ asks a Dutch sailor. ‘Since forever, mate’. The British and French also arrive uninvited but are welcomed to join the party. The advertisement unfolds with the enfolding of subsequent migrant ‘gate-crashers’ into the party. The Chinese arrive with fireworks, the Germans with beer, Turkish making kebabs and so on. The final scene is of a large multicultural beach party. Whereas previous ‘lamb ads’ divided meat eaters from vegetarians, the 2017 ad divided those who celebrated present-day multiculturalism as a corrective to past injustices from those who celebrated Australia’s British heritage as unquestionably good. However, in giving Indigenous Australians the role of hosts of the national barbeque, some considered this historical pantomime to be irrelevant, sanctimonious or, echoing the Lambassador, ‘unAustralian’. Yet, whether the ad was celebrated or derided, the violence of settler colonialism was hidden and sovereignty of white Australia maintained. Historian Joanna Cruickshank described the advertisement as a ‘cheerful denial of dispossession’ that reinforces the settler-colonial state (2017). The advertisement is clearly not a serious attempt to recount the history of Australia, yet it reflects revisionist histories that minimize and ignore the violence and devastation of settler colonialism. The narrative that British colonisation was a friendly gate-crashing that led to a multicultural beach party serves to strengthen white possession rather than challenge it in a meaningful way. Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that ‘[i]t takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions’ (2015, xi). The advertisement is only a small part of the wider network of institutions, official histories, school curricula, laws and cultural practices that secure Australia as a white possession. Food has been vital to the settler-colonial project, as a necessary means of survival, but also an avenue through which the land was possessed and a culture cultivated. Cruickshank notes that it is ‘almost impossibly ironic that sheep, whose meat the advertisement is designed to sell, were such a central means of this invasion’ (2017). Indeed, vast stretches of ‘vacant’ grasslands were occupied by the sheep and their shepherds (see figure I.1). However, these were not simply grasslands, but fields of ‘vegetables, fruits, and grain, as well as home to smaller game’ that had been carefully managed by the first inhabitants (Kenny 2010, 179). The hard-hooved sheep compressed, transformed and possessed the land. As Robert Kenny has argued, the rapid spread of sheep led Aboriginal people to ‘see the sheep as the settlers’ group “totem”’ (2010, 176) – both symbolically as the lamb of God and the physical expansion of sheep across the continent. It was with the spread of sheep that some of the most violent massacres and bloody cycles of reprisals occurred.

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Figure I.1  George Philip & Son. The New Oxford Wall Maps of Australia. Sheep & Wheat / Edited by Griffith Taylor and H. O. Beckit. National Library of Australia, MAP G8961.J1 [192-?]

In a letter to Governor La Trobe in 1853, John Robertson describes the way fifty sheep were taken from the Whyte Brothers’ flocks. With a group of seven men they located the sheep on an open plain with people from the Konongwootong Gunditj clan in the Western Districts of Victoria. Robertson recounts how the armed men ‘surrounded, and shot them all but one. Fifty-one men were killed, and the bones of the men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at the Fighting Hills’ (1963, 181). This was not an isolated case. The first act of dispossession also occurred at a beach barbeque of sorts. After his brief stay at Botany Bay, Captain James Cook sailed up the eastern coast of Australia. Around June 1770 his ship, the Endeavour, hit a section of the Great Barrier Reef. Taking in water, Cook looked for a safe place for repairs. They sailed into Gangaar, now known as Cooktown, to mend the ship. Cook and his crew, including the naturalist Joseph Banks, spent about seven weeks at Gangaar to repair the ship and recuperate. Cook was concerned to secure fresh food to ward off the ‘Explorer’s disease’ (i.e., scurvy) and ordered Banks to survey the area. Banks was unable to find

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edible plants, yet he killed a kangaroo, which was described as ‘capital eating’ (McCalman 2013, 25). As Cook’s ‘food crisis’ worsened, they saw ‘large numbers of green turtles basking on the surrounding reefs’ and captured about a dozen (McCalman 2013, 27). Banks wrote in his journal that ‘the promise of such plenty of good provisions made our situation appear much less dreadfull’ (McCalman 2013, 27). However, these turtles were central to the ceremonial, economic and culinary life of the Guugu Yimithirr clan. It has been suggested that the reason they were so plentiful at the time of Cook’s landing was because it ‘coincided with a period when the clans prohibited the taking of turtle so that their numbers could replenish’ (McCalman 2013, 27). A group of Guugu Yimithirr men came onto the ship armed with spears and attempted to take the turtles. A fight broke out, and the Guugu Yimithirr men left the ship. However, once on shore they set fire to the grasslands in which the British were camping. The British responded by firing muskets with birdshot, wounding one man. Cook, Banks and four sailors went out to meet with the men, and a reconciliation of sorts was negotiated (McCalman 2013, 28). With the ship repaired, Cook continued his journey up the east coast of Australia. At the tip of the Cape York Peninsula, Cook disembarked on a small offshore island. He claimed this island and the entire east coast for the possession of King George III. He named it Possession Island – a synecdoche for the vast southern continent. POSSESSING AND BELONGING TO THE LAND There are many threads to British possession of Australia. Capital accumulation, Enlightenment progress, scientific racism, empire expansion and military strategy are some of these threads. Food, and its provision and cultivation, is another thread that runs along and cuts across these others. Many threads are needed to possess a continent. In his book Claiming a Continent, David Day outlines three layers to the British claim of proprietorship: legal, physical occupation and moral or ontological claim. Agriculture has been significant in all of these. Its role in the first two layers is relatively clear, at least for the moment. In regard to legal possession, John Locke’s labour theory of property was crucial. This is the idea that ‘Whatsoever then [a person] removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property’ (2003, 288). Not only did the settlers’ cultivation mix their labour with nature and making in property, but the British settlers did not recognise the way local Aboriginal peoples had modified and worked on the ‘State that Nature hath provided’ (Locke 2003, 288). As such they could

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assume that the Australian continent was untouched virgin land ready for ‘improving’ via labour and thereby owning. In the process, the British settlers would physically occupy much of the land (e.g., see figure I.1), thereby underscoring their proprietary claim. Less obvious, however, is the role of agriculture in establishing moral and ontological proprietorship – that is, in creating a place called home and an unquestioned sense of belonging. The cultivation of the land, growing one’s own food and producing the cuisine of one’s birth can transform a foreign and seemingly hostile environment into home. However, much of the British perception of Australia has been romantic make-believe – ‘if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, it looks a little like the Cotswolds’. Ever since 1788, British Australians have been striving to make the land home and establish ontological proprietorship once and for all. This is largely why those who make the bush or outback home are venerated as ‘true’ Australians. However, as Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos argue, ‘white Australia has become ontologically disturbed’ (2014, 14). White Australia has not been able to establish itself seamlessly, and when the edges of its ontological claim are picked at, raw and sensitive nerves are revealed. Responses to the 2017 lamb advertisement demonstrate the acute sensitivity felt by white Australians. For example, one YouTube commenter wrote:2 The advert implies that I personally am only welcome in my country of birth because the Boongs [sic] are allowing it. Well, they can fuck right off with that bullshit. (Big Sam the Video Man 2017)

However, those who approved of the advertisement reflect a subtler attempt to establish belonging. Another YouTube commenter praised the ad: Great ad! Historically accurate and respectful of indigenous Aussies rightful claim as first inhabitants. Sure the Anglo-Saxon invasion is depicted . . . the ad does a good job pointing that out! This ad proves what the Aussie identity is made of . . . no one specific background or culture. History brought us all together. We’re all here regardless of the past. We are a diverse group. On the 26th Jan we all need to throw a lamb chop on the BBQ (and one for our neighbour) and celebrate the greatest country on earth! (Big Sam the Video Man 2017)

Here the ‘success story’ of Australian multiculturalism is used to establish legitimacy of white Australian belonging. The violence of the past is redeemed by the peaceful diversity of the present. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos write that the ‘freedom and a sense of belonging’ of white Australia are not derived from ‘rightful dwelling in this land’ but from the ability to control and ‘manage the perpetual-foreigners-within, that is the Asians, the

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Southern European migrants, the Middle Eastern refugees, or the Muslims’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014, 14). To decide who, when and how others can come to these shores reinforces white Australia’s sense that this is our home and our place. The lamb advertisement is a small window into the way food is used to establish a moral claim of possession that also elides British dispossession of Indigenous people and violence toward new migrants. MASKING AND REVEALING DYNAMIC OF FOOD The pursuit of food and cultivation of the land is deeply entwined with dispossession and violence in settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006). However, such is the power of food and land cultivation that these are also the sources of flourishing and companionship – literally, to share bread. Agriculture, pastoralism, livestock, food and the meal on the table are central to national and individual identity, personal and communal belonging. Yet, they are also central to the dispossession of Indigenous people and settlement of Australia. Like a trompe l’oeil, the lamb chop may evoke ‘mateship’ around the neighborhood barbeque, but it is also entwined with the bloody history of colonial expansion and frontier violence. It is this dynamic of masking and revealing that food politics needs to be attentive to, especially food politics in the context of settler colonialism. Unsettling Food Politics aims to cast critical light on food, land use and political action in Australia. In recent years, there has been an explosion of books, articles and documentaries exploring the ethics and politics of food. These raise crucial questions about the impact of modern agriculture on climate change, animal welfare and farm workers, as well as the influence of transnational food corporations on public health, government regulatory agencies and the global economy (Patel 2009; Nestle 2007; Thompson 2015b; Salatin 2011; Pollan 2006; Rieff 2016). A common solution proposed to address these various problems is a return to environmentally sustainable and socially responsible smallholder agrarian farming. Such proposals are attractive, yet they tend to romanticize past hardships. Furthermore, they often elide the historical role of agriculture in systems of unfree labor, restrictive gender roles and settler colonialism. This book seeks critically to examine the way the cultivation of food enabled settlement, from staving off hunger in the earliest days of British colonialism to strengthening legal claims to property through the improvement and occupation of land. And somewhat more subtly and powerfully, food and agriculture have been used to buttress ontological and moral claims of rightfully belonging. It is to this third dimension that I want to pay specific attention. Romantic narratives of settler

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colonial life, bush ballads and agrarian myths permeate the Australian story. They are also used in contemporary political discourse. This book is a historical and philosophical exercise with moral and political implications. To perform this task, I draw on Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to philosophical inquiry to bring contemporary alternative food discourses and practices into tension with Australia’s colonial past, the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and capitalist relations to the land. This book is critical of food politics that ignores or minimises disturbing chapters of agricultural history; it seeks to unsettle literally, figuratively and affectively. But this unsettling also is intended to be productive, to open space for a postcolonial food politics. That is, can we conceive of a food politics that addresses present and future problems of climate change, environmental degradation, food insecurity – all of which disproportionately affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – while accounting for historical wrongs? WHY A FOUCAULDIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY? Foucault’s concepts of genealogy and problematization are useful for critically investigating the role of food and agriculture in colonisation and settlement of Australia. This approach helps to highlight the historical constitution of contemporary problems and corresponding solutions. For example, small-scale agrarian farming in Australia has been proposed as a solution to a wider variety of social and political problems ever since British occupation in the late eighteenth century. From securing Australia from an ‘Asian invasion’ to resisting ‘Big Ag’ and preparing for climate change, agrarian farming has been invested with a plurality of ideals, many of them contradictory. By using Foucault’s genealogical historiography, we can attempt to untangle the historical forces that have constituted these practices and ideas, and in so doing gain a critical perspective of these problems of the present and ourselves in relation to them. The genealogical method patiently untangles the multilinear network of power, knowledge and subjectification in order to show how certain truths, objects, knowledges and subjects came into existence and can be seen while others remain hidden. That is, genealogies do things – they trouble the solutions of predefined or submerged problems. In the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Foucault describes genealogy as the meticulous analysis of ‘documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’ (2000a, 369). According to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, genealogy ‘records the past of mankind to unmask the solemn hymns of progress . . . it seeks the surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours’ (1983, 106). In so doing, genealogy is able to demonstrate how particular problems

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and corresponding solutions are constructed over time and point to the possibility of their undoing. In Genealogy as Critique, Colin Koopman refers to the problems that genealogy uncovers as ‘depth problems’ – problems that are ‘lodged deep inside of us all as the historical conditions of possibility of our present ways of doing, being and thinking’ (2013, 1). This is why historiography is crucial to genealogy – the historical conditions need investigating and revealing. Yet, it is also philosophical in its concern for the constitution of problems. As such, this is not a detached approach to investigating historical problems far removed from oneself but an investigation into what Foucault famously termed the ‘history of the present’ (1991, 31), which can open up to the possibility for transforming ourselves and our social reality. It is in this sense that Unsettling Food Politics is not simply a cynical critique of other people’s strivings, naive or otherwise, but a positive critique that attempts to open up possibilities of changing who we are. As Koopman notes, ‘genealogy at its best involves a practice of critique in the form of the historical problematization of the present’ (2013, 2). But what exactly does this mean? And how is genealogy distinct from or beneficial to other forms of historical inquiry? In ‘The Confessions of the Flesh’ Foucault states that the genealogical approach sheds light on the ‘heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements . . . in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (1980, 194). Unlike narrative history, a genealogical investigation into the historical construction of problems is not simply what is said in certain documentary sources and texts, but also what is unsaid in practices, bodies, objects, the built environment and so on. For example, Foucault used problematization to untangle the historical constitution of the problem of sex and how it came to be regarded as an explanation for everything (1998, 78). Foucault was less interested in the single dominant discourse on sex than ‘a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions’ to govern bodies, practices and subjects (1998, 33). I see a parallel in the multiplicity of discourses constituting food as the explanation for a wide variety of social problems. It is for these kinds of investigations that genealogy is useful. Koopman writes that the ‘purpose of Foucault’s unique conception of genealogy as problematization is to make manifest the constitutive and regulative conditions of the present as a material for thought and action that we would need to work on if we are to transform that present’ (2013, 18). That is, genealogy shows the contingency of problems in the present and enables a critical response to these constructions. However, Foucault’s genealogy of problems is more than simply pointing out contingencies. A crucial distinction is between the way Foucault’s problematization is taken up as ‘showing that the

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present is contingent’ and the way he used it in ‘showing how the present is contingently made up’ (Koopman 2013, 21). The ‘showing that’ interpretation tends to reduce Foucault’s problematization to the simple task of subversion or vindication of certain practices or rejection of the necessity of the present – for example, common Foucauldian inflected pronouncements about how the family, science, gender or morality are mere social constructions that easily can be subverted. In contrast, the ‘showing how’ interpretation is more patient and nuanced. It seeks to ‘conceptualise and make intelligible that which contingently conditions our present’ (Koopman 2013, 21). In a late interview, Foucault explains what is needed for a ‘project of transformation’ (2000, 383). He says that in addition to knowing ‘the institutions and their real effects’, it is very important to know ‘what type of thought sustains them’ (2000, 383). According to Koopman, this is F ­ oucault’s point in his histories of madness or the prison that ‘we would need to understand how these conditions of possibility were composed if we want to begin the difficult labour of transforming those practices, their assumptions, and the institutions, subjects, and objects they support’ (2013, 22). However, the ‘showing how’ is not merely descriptive but opens space for the important work of critique that seeks to rethink and reorient our relation to the present. To an extent, a number of Australian food activists and scholars have conducted aspects of this critical work in relation to Australian agribusiness and dominance of large-scale agriculture with strong political backing. However, my contention in this book is that many of the critiques of industrial agriculture and the corresponding proposal for small-scale agrarian agriculture fail to make the reflexive step of considering the role of both small and large agriculture in colonial dispossession and the continuation of this legacy. As such, genealogical analysis is able to open up and critique the submerged problems and histories that are often assumed or ignored due the need for the present to remain stable and continue to support the ‘normal’ order of things. Foucault’s notion of critique is indebted to his reading of Immanuel Kant. Until recently scholars have minimised or ignored the Kantian dimension to Foucault’s work (Allen 2003; Hengehold 2007; Koopman 2013; Golder 2015; Cutrofello 1994). This is odd considering that his second dissertation was on Kant’s anthropology, and he continued to reference Kant in his monographs, as well as engage with Kant in his lectures and essays (Mayes 2015). Foucault’s relation to Kant is all the more important for fully understanding what he is doing with genealogy. Clearly Nietzsche is important for this method (Foucault 2000a), but his importance tends to be overread and crowds out the other influences on Foucault’s thought. In his essay on Kant’s ‘Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’, Foucault puts forward a notion of critique that is genealogical rather than transcendental. Whereas the Kantian critical project sought universal structures of knowledge, Foucauldian critique

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is opened up via ‘historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subject of what we are doing, thinking, saying’ (Foucault 2000c, 315). Through his own genealogical investigations into punishment, sexuality and subject formation, Foucault opened up space for critically questioning ourselves. Importantly, this ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ is not a new body of knowledge or information (Foucault 2000c, 319) but a critical ethos or attitude that is performed and lived. The investigation into the contingent formation of ourselves and the present opens the transformative potential of Foucault’s critique. Rather than seeking out ‘who we are’ in some stable or absolute sense, the genealogical approach reveals the contingency of the self and opens the possibility that we can ‘transform ourselves into being otherwise’ (Koopman 2013, 16). Although there has been longstanding debate over the normative – or, rather, lack of normative – coherence in Foucault’s project, I contend that critical possibilities opened up by genealogical problematizations allow for a form of normativity that is not readily recognised by traditional normative theorists. Judith Butler draws on Foucault’s essays on Kant and his relation to the Enlightenment to argue that Foucault’s critique as ethos or virtue has ‘strong normative commitments that appear in forms that would be difficult, if not impossible, to read within the current grammars of normativity’ (2004, 306). The critical ethos operates with a grammar that does not assume a ‘we’ as the basis of normative commitments – a preexisting consensual people. According to Butler, Foucault makes a contribution to normative political theory that is purposeful, yet relies on a different grammar that does not begin with the question ‘what are we to do?’ but, instead, asks ‘who are we?’ And as already is evident from the responses to the lamb advertisement, the ‘we’ of the Australian people and their relation to history is in deep need of questioning. This idea of a critical ethos is intimately bound to Foucault’s approach to history and the genealogical uncovering of submerged problems. In Society Must Be Defended Foucault introduces the idea of the ‘local character of critique’ as dependent on the ‘returns of knowledge’ (2004, 6). The returns of knowledge, according to Foucault, is ‘the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ that on the one hand, have ‘been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations’; and, on the other hand, have ‘been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges . . . naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges . . . below the required level of erudition or scientifity’ (2004, 6–7). The role of genealogy is to resist the effects of discourses ‘regarded as scientific’ that necessitate the rejection, dismissal and disqualification of local knowledges (2004, 9). Colonial disregard for Indigenous knowledges and practices is a clear example of these dynamics. In the uncovering and returning of these knowledges, genealogy is a historiography that takes sides: it becomes part of the fight.

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Genealogy conducts this fight through ‘the meticulous rediscovery of struggles and raw memory of fights’ (Foucault 2004, 8). In so doing, it attempts ‘to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse’ (Foucault 2004, 10). It reactivates local knowledges that can be used to destabilise and question the present order. I intend to use this approach to describe the subjugation of local knowledges and practices via colonial dispossession underpinned by Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement, which combined to possess the Australian continent and promote large-scale export-oriented scientific agriculture. I intend to bring these subjugated knowledges into play with contemporary alternative food politics and highlight the indebtedness of alternative food politics to the very colonial logics and Enlightenment ideals that many of the proponents would wish to reject. This is not an easy or straightforward task. There is a danger in desubjugating local knowledges. Foucault warns, they can be recoded and recolonised by the ‘unitary discourses which, having first disqualified them and having then ignored them when they reappeared, may now be ready to reannex them and include them in their own discourses’ (2004, 11). Foucault discusses the danger of recolonisation of knowledges and practices in a later context during an interview discussing the politics of identity and sexual practice. Foucault is asked, ‘Can we be sure that these new pleasures won’t be exploited in the way advertising uses the stimulation of pleasure as a means of social control?’ Foucault’s response indicates the restless and endless contest between power and resistance. He says: We can never be sure. In fact, we can always be sure it will happen, and that everything that has been created or acquired, any ground that has been gained will, at a certain moment be used in such a way. That’s the way we live, that’s the way we struggle, that’s the way of human history. (2000b, 166–67)

This is a history and a struggle Indigenous people know too well – they have been disqualified, then ignored and then, when they reappeared, included in the dominant discourse as hosts of a multicultural beach barbeque cooking lamb chops but asked to forget the memory of the bleached bones of their ancestors lying in the sun. CHAPTER OVERVIEW It is important to note that although Foucault’s genealogy is used to frame this analysis, the book is not a Foucauldian food politics or Foucauldian postcolonial theory. Discussions of Foucault’s work appear in most chapters but not

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all. I use his theories, where applicable, to illuminate aspects of Australian social and political history and the effects of this history in the present. However, I also draw on literature from a variety of other disciplines, including history, anthropology, geography, Indigenous studies, philosophy and food studies. I recognise that each of these disciplines has its norms and objectives. I seek to respect these disciplinary norms, but also acknowledge that this book does not sit comfortably in any of these disciplines and at times will fail to doff the cap, or perhaps do so at the wrong moment. Chapter 1 – Cultivating Sovereignty: Agriculture, Racism and the Problem of Settling Australia – tells the story of food and agriculture in Australia. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the way Indigenous food practices were not recognised by Europeans and the way European practices were used to establish ownership and sovereignty over the continent. The influence of Locke, Bentham and Malthus is explored as contributing to a governmentality of improvement that used agriculture and an evolutionary style of reasoning to produce a settler population to be cared for and protected while simultaneously justifying the active or passive killing of the Indigenous population. In recounting this history, certain features of contemporary debates over food and agriculture in Australia can be viewed as repetitions of earlier debates and actions. These contemporary debates have long historical roots that are entangled with the role of agriculture in colonial survival and Enlightenment ideas of improvement. Chapter 2 – Producing ‘Little England’: Farmers, Graziers and the Creation of Home – focuses on the role of agriculture in transforming a foreign land into a familiar home. This chapter continues the historical account to highlight different manifestations of agricultural practice in the biopolitics of security. Two different forms of agriculture were put forward as the best means of producing a homeland: farming and grazing. Each offered different – and at times conflicting – approaches to territorial, economic and ontological security. The historical conflict between export-oriented graziers and smallholder farmers reemerges in contemporary disputes over smallholder agriculture and whether environmental sustainability or access to global markets is a more urgent priority. Chapter 3 – Alternative Problems, Alternative Solutions: Security and Sovereignty in the Global Food System – traces the conceptual terrain of alternative food discourse, namely food security and food sovereignty and how they are framed as solutions to specific practical problems (self-sufficiency and environmental sustainability) and political problems (democracy and justice). For those unfamiliar with these ideas, food sovereignty often is characterised as a more politically radical concept than food security. Food security is associated with national and intergovernmental policies that focus on consumer access to food and freedom from hunger, but also trade liberalisation.

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A growing number of Australian food activists and scholars contend that food sovereignty is a powerful movement that should be fostered in Australia. Although it can be beneficial to borrow and modify political ideas from other contexts, chapter 3 argues that food sovereignty discourse in Australia gives inadequate attention to existing debates over sovereignty and indigeneity in the settler-colonial context. In Australia, this has the potential to depoliticise and mask historical injustices associated with colonialism. This chapter contends that framing the solution to neoliberalisation of markets and industrial agriculture in Australia in terms of food sovereignty and alternative food practices risks eliding the specificity of local histories. Chapter 4 – Whiteness and the Contested Spaces of Alternative Food – turns from the rural focus of previous chapters to the city to examine the role of food practices and agriculture in the dispossession and displacement of racialised others and the creation of white belonging. This chapter introduces some of the theoretical debates surrounding whiteness and demonstrates how whiteness melds with an agrarian imaginary that operates through certain alternative food practices, such as farmers’ markets and community gardens. In addition to the operation of white possessive logics, farmers’ markets can reduce and narrow political and ethical acts to individual consumer choice and, in so doing, undermine the transformative goals of alternative food activists. Chapter 5 – Unsettling Food Sovereignty in Australia – builds on the previous chapters by placing food sovereignty in relation to the role of agriculture in settler colonialism and the place of the ‘settler’ in the Australian imaginary. This chapter argues that the deployment of food sovereignty discourse in Australia risks reinforcing the moral and social value of the ‘settler’ and thereby reproducing the colonial logics of land possession. By drawing on Indigenous sovereignty and governance literature, this chapter seeks to think with Indigenous theories and practices of food and land to open up possibilities for a food politics that does not mask or implicitly depend on colonial history. The argument of this chapter is not that the criticisms of industrial agriculture are misplaced or that the objectives associated with food sovereignty movements are irrelevant to the Australian context. Rather, food sovereignty discourse explicitly or implicitly appeals to agrarian-settler notions of community and property ownership. Food politics needs to acknowledge this history and focus on shared governance that privileges the ontologies and epistemologies of local Indigenous communities. Chapter 6 – Whose Sovereignty? Competing Sovereignties and the Tactical Return to Rights – turns to interrogate the competing sovereignty claims of Indigenous and food sovereignty discourses. The chapter examines whose interests are represented and served by these sovereignty discourses and the political nature of these claims. Furthermore, the differing conceptions

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of sovereignty are examined critically to question how sovereignty claims work in practice, who is making these claims, and what is the political nature of these claims. Some proponents of these respective sovereignty discourses appeal to the nation–state, others appeal to international law, and others reject both of these as guarantees of sovereignty. Chapter 6 questions the strategic use of sovereignty declarations and rights claims from below. Food sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty activists seek to intervene in current constitutional debates, assert self-governance and destabilise historical narratives of the settler-colonial state. Although Foucault commonly is counted among theorists critical of sovereignty and rights-based political engagements, chapter 6 offers a reading of the Society Must Be Defend lectures and late interviews to suggest a more nuanced perspective that leaves open the possibility of a critical deployment of sovereignty declarations and rights claims. This chapter contends that sovereignty and rights discourses from below by certain groups can serve as contingent and strategic political instruments that destabilise the sovereignty of the State and its historical claims to political legitimacy. Through the assertion of sovereignty and performance of self-governance, these activist movements point to the hidden instability of the dominant settler-colonial claims of sovereignty and the violence of attempts to enfold Indigenous and peasant populations into the settler-colonial State. Chapter 7 – Negotiating Relations: Food Politics after the Uluru Statement from the Heart – explores the potential for mutual support between food and Indigenous political movements. However, questions remain as to whether these sovereignty discourses and activist movements are compatible. Can food and Indigenous sovereignty coexist in the settler-colonial context of Australia? Does the prominent role of agriculture in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples limit the possibility for cooperation? This chapter takes the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a platform to think about and negotiate a food politics in settler-colonial Australia. Drawing on recent theories and cases of Indigenous governance of land, this chapter examines the potential for negotiation and agreement between alternative food advocates and Indigenous communities. A number of the ideals and principles of alternative agriculture resemble and overlap with those expressed by Indigenous communities, including a concern over degradation of land; interconnection between land, soils and well-being; and the importance of land and place in political resistance. In recoding and repurposing sovereignty discourses and focusing on these points of overlap, there is potential for the development of partnership over sensitive land use. Following the Uluru Statement, such partnerships would need to recognise Indigenous voices, interests and theories in a manner that shifts political debate and

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action toward Indigenous governance that allows for genuine comanagement of land, including negotiating the sustainable use of land for agriculture. I conclude the book by attempting to look forward to new possibilities for ethical and political interactions with food and to explore how these interactions can help build new and transformative relations of the self and communities. TONE, CAVEATS AND DIRECTION OF THE CRITIQUE It is with some trepidation that I write this book. Although it is not my intention, the arguments presented here could be read as a ‘punching-down’ attack on the food activists and scholars who are working against the dominance of multinational agribusiness and neoliberal politics. Food and environmental philosopher Paul Thompson remarks on the potential for miscommunication in the highly charged activists space: There are good reasons for activists to take an uncompromising stand in public forums, but it is also true that many activists are so confident in their ethical assessments that they are unable to view the more careful work of academics as anything other than an attack. (2015a, 84)

In the years leading up to this book, I have met with many food activists and farmers in Australia, the United States and New Zealand. Many of these people work tirelessly both in the field and in the political domain. I admire and respect their determination. Yet, I also believe that it is important to examine our ethical and political positions critically and carefully and to seek blind spots and hidden injustices. Often it is due to the uncompromising belief in the strength of our own position that we fail to recognise the log in our eye. I hope that this book will cause discomfort in unsettling assumptions, but also serve as something of a mirror in assisting with thinking and acting for an alternative food politics in Australia and other settler-colonial contexts. NOTES 1. Meat and Livestock Australia no longer have a version of the video online. However, the Guardian has an embedded version on its site. 2. These comments come from a version of the advertisement uploaded by YouTube user Big Sam the Video Man. This version has since been removed, likely due to infringement of copyright.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, A. (2003). ‘Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal’, Constellations, 10(2), 180–98. Big Sam the Video Man. (2017). 2017 Australian Inclusive Lamb Advert – ‘Australia Day’?, https://web.archive.org/web/20170131111750/https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uGdjX8QqL_Y, accessed 20 June 2017. Butler, J. (2004). ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.’ In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 302–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Cruickshank, J. (2017). Australia Day and the Enduring Power of White Supremacy, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/ 2017/01/20/4606952.htm, accessed 20 January 2017. Cutrofello, A. (1994). Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance. Albany: SUNY Press. Dreyfus, H., and P. Rabinow. (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1980). ‘The Confession of the Flesh’. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (2000). ‘What Is Called “Punishing?”’ In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 382–93. London: Penguin. ———. (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. ———. (1998). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1. England: Penguin Books. ———. (2000a). ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.’ In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion, 369–92. London: Penguin Books. ———. (2000b). ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 163–74. London: Penguin. ———. (2000c). ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 303–320. London: Penguin. ———. (2004). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. London: Penguin. Golder, B. (2015). Foucault and the Politics of Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hengehold, L. (2007). The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kenny, R. (2010). The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World. Melbourne: Scribe Publications. Koopman, C. (2013). Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Locke, J. (2003). Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by Ian Shapiro. Binghampton, NY: Yale University Press. Mayes, C. R. (2015). ‘Revisiting Foucault’s “Normative Confusions”: Surveying the Debate Since the Collège de France Lectures’, Philosophy Compass, 10(12), 841–55.

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McCalman, I. (2013). The Reef: A Passionate History. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin Books Limited. Meat and Livestock Australia. (2017). Australia Day lamb ad. Guardian News and Media. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2017/jan/12/australiaday-lamb-ad-tackles-indigenous-land-rights-and-immigration-video, accessed 22 February 2018. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nestle, M. (2007). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Oakland: University of California Press. Nicolacopoulos, T., and G. Vassilacopoulos. (2014). Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins. Melbourne: Re.Press. Patel, R. (2009). Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Pollan, M. (2006). The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Group. Rieff, D. (2016). The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st Century. London: Verso. Robertson, J. G. (1963). ‘Letter to Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, 26 September 1853.’ In Sources of Australian History, edited by Manning Clark, 171–86. London: Oxford University Press. Salatin, J. (2011). Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World. New York: Center Street. Thompson, P. B. (2015a). ‘Agricultural Ethics: Then and Now’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32(1), 77–85. ———. (2015b). From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, P. (2006). ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.

Chapter 1

Cultivating Sovereignty Agriculture, Racism and the Problem of Settling Australia

The Land naturly produces hardly anything fit for man to eat and the Native knows nothing of Cultivation. – Captain James Cook, 1770 (1963, 50)

The farmer, the surf lifesaver and the soldier: these are Australia’s icons. Resolute, yet good-humoured. Bronzed and lean. Masculine by definition. These men carved out a nation from the bush, the beach and the battlefield. Their heroic acts, whether resulting in success or miserable failure, combined to make Australia what it is. Or so the story goes. In recent years, the hagiographic quality of some of these narratives has been questioned. There have been numerous critical reappraisals of the soldier in Australian nationbuilding myths. The surfer and farmer, however, have not received comparable attention. In the first half of the twentieth century, the beach provided a space for the birth of a new white race and a new egalitarian politics. According to historian Grant Rodwell, ‘the healthy, virile masses gathering at Manly, Bondi, Coogee, and the other famous surfing attractions’ helped to establish the myth ‘about the egalitarianism of the developing Australian racial type’ (1999, 60). On the beach, a person’s wealth, class and clothing did not matter. What did matter however, was their strength, health and virility. Rodwell contends that ‘early advocates of surf culture were attracted to this culture because of its perceived eugenic attributes’ (1999, 60). Harvey Sutton, a leader in racial hygiene and preventive medicine in Australia during the 1930s (Anderson 2002, 168–69), helped establish surf lifesaving clubs and was also a judge at a Manly beach beauty pageant in 1931 (Rodwell 1999, 62). Sutton and other eugenicists encouraged beach culture as it not only strengthened ‘the physical 19

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side of the Australian racial development but also because of its unique contributions to mental hygiene’ (1999, 63). Aileen Moreton-Robinson has critically examined the figure of the surf lifesaver in the popular imaginary of Australian beach life to disrupt and question the white nation. Emerging in 1907, the surf lifesaver policed the beach to ensure the safety of swimmers while disciplining their own bodies through military training drills. The surf lifesaver literally and figuratively regulated the bodies that belonged on the beach and how they were to act. Like Rodwell, Moreton-Robinson suggests that the ‘surf lifesaver’s discipline, strength, bravery, mateship, loyalty, and rigor embodied the attribute of white national identity’ (2015, 38). The surf lifesaver is also part of a wider network and history that has possessed the beach as a place of belonging for white bodies. Racial tensions over what bodies belong on the beach violently erupted in the 2005 Cronulla Beach riots. Bodies of ‘Middle-Eastern appearance’ and foreign practices such as soccer provoked fearful and possessive responses. The white Australian rioters marked their bodies with slogans – ‘Respect locals or piss off’ and ‘We grew here: you flew here’ – and etched ‘100% Aussie Pride’ into the sand of Cronulla beach. It is not only the bodies of nonwhite migrants that provoke possessive responses; Aboriginal bodies also trouble the order of the Australian beach. As Moreton-Robinson notes, ‘Aboriginal surfers are out of place; they are not white in need of a tan, they belong in the landscape in the middle of Australia’ (2015, 45). From the landing of the First Fleet to the sunbathers at Bondi or rioters at Cronulla, the beach ‘remains a heteronormative white masculine space entailing performances of sexuality, wealth, voyeurism, class, and possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 37). These historical and contemporary performances function to make the beach home, a place of belonging, and to establish ontological proprietorship for white Australia. This chapter extends Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of white possession of the beach, to examine the role of the farmer and agriculture in possessing the continent. Although farming and rural life occasionally attract derision in popular discourse (Brett 2011), its role in the settler-colonial myth of nation-building is repeatedly celebrated in film, music, literature and politics. The countryside and the bush, writes Don Watson, is where ‘the real Australians live’ (2014, 94). The existence of these real Australians – the bushman and the farmer – authenticates and deepens urban-dwelling Australians’ claim to the continent. As will be shown below, the taming of bush and cultivation of the land not only furthered sovereign possession, but also transformed Australia into a new home for white Europeans. The celebration of the farmer’s possessive and home-creating work, however, has masked their role in settler-colonial violence. As such, they have not received sufficient critical attention in popular or scholarly analyses.

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This silence is striking considering the special place Patrick Wolfe gives agriculture in his influential account of settler-colonial violence. Wolfe argues that agriculture, unlike extractive industries, has ‘a rational means/ends calculus that is geared to vouchsafing its own reproduction, generating capital that projects into a future where it repeats itself’ (2006, 395). Although mining only lasts as long as minerals remain to be extracted, agriculture has a permanence. Farmers put down literal and metaphorical roots. They don’t flee to Canada when the British come, as was Thomas Jefferson’s concern with urban workers, or rush from Victoria to Queensland in search of new gold deposits. Furthermore, agriculture ‘enables a population to be expanded by continuing immigration at the expense of native lands and livelihoods’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). In so doing, agriculture ‘progressively eats into Indigenous territory’ for its own reproduction while simultaneously curtailing ‘the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). This dynamic forces Indigenous people to either enter the new economy, usually in the form of unfree labour, or raid farms for food, which Wolfe notes is ‘the classic pretext for colonial death-squads’ (Wolfe 2006, 395). However, the violent dispossession of Indigenous Australians did not occur simply because they were ‘in the way’ of agriculture or killed a few sheep. The violence towards Indigenous Australians and disregard for their prior claim to possession of lands also was enabled through a new form of racism. COLONIAL FOUCAULT AND THE BIRTH OF BIOPOLITICAL RACISM In the Society Must Be Defended lectures (1975–1976), Foucault introduces the notion of ‘state racism’. This is distinct from the age-old racism that hates ethnic others. State racism certainly uses old ideas of race hatred, but it emerges with, and deploys, medical and evolutionary discourses to justify the death (or exclusion) of the biologically weak in order to strengthen and protect a specific population. Foucault defines state racism as that which ‘justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population’ (2004, 261–62). Rather than use state racism, I prefer to use biopolitical racism. First, using ‘state’ as a qualifier on ‘racism’ is too state-centric and does not account for the plurality of relations, knowledges and mechanisms that Foucault himself identifies as contributing to the racism of biopolitical societies. The phenomena that ‘state racism’ describes occur through networks of relations and modes of government that operate beyond the narrow juridical confines of what is often thought of as ‘the state’. For example, in his lectures from the previous

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year, Abnormal (1974–1975), Foucault charts the way psychiatry instituted a new ‘racism against the abnormal’ (2003, 316). He elaborates that ‘this neoracism’ operates as ‘the internal means of defense of a society against its abnormal individuals’ (2003, 316). A second reason why I prefer biopolitical racism to state racism is that the idea of the state in colonial context is ambiguous. The authority and strategies of governance in the colonial period came from a plurality of sources, including the Crown and British Parliament, but also the military, the Church, medical societies, administrators, pastoralists, journalists, bankers, and so on. Each of these sources contributes to racialised rationalities of governance that seek to protect and foster a specific population from internal and external threats. As such, I will use biopolitical racism rather than state racism or just racism to designate the way the life of a population is regulated and normalised via the identification and exclusion of weaker, abnormal or inferior others. Whereas Foucault was primarily focused on the rise of biopolitical racism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social reform movements in Europe, biopolitical racism was deeply enmeshed with colonialism. The development and implementation of biopolitics in Europe is intimately connected to colonial expansion. Yet it would be a mistake to think that these ideas and practices were simply exported from Europe to the colonies. Foucault, and others such as Arendt (2017), described a ‘boomerang effect’ where the exported European jurdico-political structures were transformed in the colonies and that a ‘whole series of colonial models’ were ‘brought back’ (2004, 103). Despite these remarks on colonialism in the Society Must Be Defended lectures, Foucault did not fully account for the interconnection between Europe and the colonies in his analyses of racism and sexuality. Ann Laura Stoler righty critiques Foucault’s account of discourse of racism and technologies of sexuality in Europe for missing the colonies as ‘key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided contrasts for what a “healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body” was all about’ (1995, 7). That is, it was in the colony that white, bourgeois and healthy subjects were conceptualised. On this point, it is worth noting that Bentham, Malthus and Darwin – social reformers who influenced the implementation of biopolitical strategies – all had significant interest in the new southern colonies. Their interest not only shaped life in the colonies but life at the heart of the British Empire. Notwithstanding the limitation of Foucault’s analyses, like Stoler, I believe his work ‘offers ways to rethink the colonial order’, particularly in relation to biopolitical racism (1995, 13). Biopolitical racism can result in the violence of colonial death squads, but its most devastating effects are less obvious and more widespread. Although the British may have established legal sovereignty over the continent through

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Cook’s initial claim of Possession Island in 1770 – which was subsequently reinforced by Captain Phillip hoisting the flag and clearing some land on 26 January 1788 – the occupation of the land and creation of a governable population was a much longer process. In colonial Australia, we see the emergence of the biopolitical racism Foucault describes in the­­Society Must Be Defended lectures. Foucault argues that from the seventeenth century the mode of political power shifts from sovereignty – ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ – to biopolitics – ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (1998, 138). According to Foucault, biopolitics exceeds the sovereign politics of the Crown, which claims possession of a territory and authority over the subjects within that territory. Whereas sovereignty is occupied with juridical questions of legitimacy and right, biopolitics is occupied with medical and scientific knowledge in managing the conditions of life and enabling the growth of healthy and productive populations. For instance, biopolitics is focused on measuring and controlling the vital signs of the population through statistics of birth rates, death, distribution of disease and population growth. However, if biopolitics is a politics of life, asks Foucault, a politics that is entwined with the liberal-democratic project that holds freedom, reason and the rule of law as ideals (even if imperfectly enacted), then ‘how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations?’ (2004, 257). Foucault’s answer: ‘By using the thesis of evolutionism, by appealing to racism’ (2004, 257). This is not the specific evolutionary theory of Darwin, but a broader evolutionary ‘style of reasoning’ that included a constellation of ideas such as degeneracy, heredity, purity, development, improvement, all of which blur the lines between the biological, moral and political (Hacking 1992). Furthermore, the violence generated by biopolitical racism is not necessarily the bloody and intentional violence of death squads. Rather, it is structural and infuses a social reality to become the normal order of things (Mayes 2010). It is not even necessarily malevolent and may give rise to a sense of pity and sincere concern for those whose lives require exclusion from the whole. This evolutionary style of reasoning gave rise to biopolitical techniques and institutions that aimed to protect the population from the ill and dangerous – for example, sterilization via the public hygiene programs of the eugenics movement and practices of excluding sections of the population in asylums, poorhouses and orphanages. The biopolitical management and control of the life of the population uses a generalised conception of racism. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault asks, ‘What in fact is racism?’ He responds in arguing it is ‘primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (2004, 254). Racism is a means of separating groups within a population, designating some as

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‘good’ and others as ‘inferior’ based on epidemiological, medical, pedagogical and psychological knowledges. Racial interventions into a population are not simply based on ethnicity and phenotypic difference. As mentioned, biopolitical racism emerges in conjunction with the advancement of the life sciences and development of the modern nation-state. In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes that biopolitical racism produced a variety of interventions designed to protect and promote the life of the population that involved a whole politics of settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concerning with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. (Foucault 1998)

The racism of the Nazi regime is the most obvious and extreme example of these biopolitical dynamics seeking to protect racial purity. However, Foucault traces the same biopolitical logics to nineteenth-century social reform movements and public hygiene campaigns associated with the birth of the welfare state (2000). As such, biopolitical racism cannot be reduced to brutal authoritarian regimes, but it is pervasive in shaping the welfare institutions of liberal democracies and their involvement in settler and exploitative colonialism. As Warwick Anderson observes in colonial Australia, nineteenth-century medicine ‘was as much a discourse of settlement as it was a means of knowing and mastering disease’ (2002, 4). Doctors would advise communities on ‘hygienic behaviour and civilized conduct’ as well as appropriate ways to ‘inhabit a place’ as a member of the white race (Anderson 2002, 4). ‘Race and environment’, writes Anderson, ‘jostled together in the civic vision’ (2002, 4). The interconnection between race, environment and civic vision is a theme to be explored throughout this book. With this background we can examine the biopolitical racism of settlercolonial Australia. It was biopolitical in that it produced and bracketed off a population to be cared for – to make live – and a population to be excluded from care – to let die. It was racist in that it fragmented a biological continuum and introduced a ‘break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault 2004, 254). Killing in this context was not simply a function of a war relationship (although it was also that) (Moses 2004b) but a biological relationship where ‘the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer’ (Foucault 2004, 255). The killing in the biological relation is not simply murder, but it occurs through ‘exposing someone to

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death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2004, 256). This is a subtler and often ignored form of violence that occurs through the biopolitical racism of the biological relation that chooses to foster some lives (e.g., free settlers) as a vital part of the strength of the population while disallowing other lives (e.g., Indigenous peoples) as weakening and burdening the population. Although colonial medicine was used to create a break in the population and establish a racial hierarchy (Anderson 2002), agriculture was also a central part of evolutionary reasoning at the time and served as a vehicle for biopolitical racism to sort the population into those lives to be cared for and the lives to be disallowed. For the British, ‘the progress of humankind could be marked by the movement from hunter-gathering to herding, then to agriculture, to trading and finally to manufacturing’ (Hirst 2014, 7). On this index of development, Indigenous Australians were considered an inferior race and a ‘backward people’ (Hirst 2014, 7). As Dirk Moses notes, the influence of the Enlightenment ideas and natural law theories shaped the British attitude that ‘hunter-gathers stood at the bottom of human social evolution because they did not fulfil their human potential by cultivating the land’ (2004a, 12). In contrast, settled agriculture was seen as a more evolved practice that fulfilled ‘human potential’. In 1770 Cook observed that ‘the Natives know nothing of Cultivation’ (1963, 50). Cook’s assessment has echoed throughout Australia for the past 240 years. Moses observes that residents of Hobart in the 1870s believed ‘the “natives” had rights only to what they caught and gathered, while uncultivated land belonged to no one (res nullius), and was therefore available to Europeans to settle and exploit’ (Moses 2004a, 13). These ideas of agriculture and social evolution not only served to justify dispossession, ‘but also wars of extermination against Indigenous people if they resisted the loss of their land and customary ways’ (2004a, 13). Entwined with the physical possession of Indigenous lands for colonial agriculture were Enlightenment ideals of improvement, ownership and civilisation. These ideals contribute to what Scott calls ‘the political rationalities of colonial power’ (1995, 193). Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of governmentality, Scott argues that colonial rationalities of governance are ‘historically constituted complexes of knowledge/power that give shape to colonial projects of political sovereignty’ (1995, 193). Colonial governmentality articulates the ways colonial institutions, and their relation back to Britain, were organised and designed to govern the land, convict labour, settlers and Indigenous populations. Rather than thinking in terms of ‘the colonial state’ or simple implementation of British rule over the colony from afar, colonial governmentality highlights the way different political rationalities operate in different configurations of power, at different points of time, and with different objects as its target. Colonial governmentality did not merely import

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English ideas and insert them into a new context, but it depended ‘upon the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived’ (Scott 1995, 205). This chapter, and the following one, explore the systematic redefinitions and transformations of the land and production of a colonial population to be cared for and a colonised population that was disposable. Agriculture not only helped claim the Australian continent as the legal property of the Crown, but it also assisted in occupying it as a home for British settlers. Ideas of cultivation, racial hierarchies and economic expansion were shaped and materially manifest in the farms and on the plains that sought to ensure colonial survival and improvement. This analysis of colonial governmentality in Australia involves examining the way a cocktail of ideas from John Locke, Jeremey Bentham, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Edward Wakefield, Charles Darwin and others were redeployed and came to bear on the very ground and practical activity of agriculture. This chapter traces the role of agriculture and an evolutionary style of reasoning that produced a settler population to be cared for and protected while simultaneously justifying the active or passive killing of Indigenous populations. In critically exploring the early history of colonial agriculture, this chapter highlights the role of the farmer in masking colonial violence by focusing attention on the settler’s survival in the early colony and improvement of the land. This initial period of struggle and hardship created a narrative that could be used to justify belonging to the land. This chapter seeks to examine the way colonial governmentality operated through agriculture and in so doing open the possibility for critical assessment of its role in sustaining contemporary practices. SURVIVING THE HUNGRY YEARS 1788–1792 ‘Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century’ (1963, 3). With this sentence Manning Clark opened his six-volume A History of Australia. According to Clark, the Indigenous inhabitants ‘created cultures but not civilizations’ (1963, 3). That is, they merely secured basic human needs of food, clothing and shelter, but they essentially remained within ‘a state of barbarism’ (Clark 1963, 3). Leaving aside spurious definitions of civilization,1 the first years of British occupation could hardly have been described as heralding a new dawn of civilization, let alone securing the basic needs of the settlers. The so-called advanced and civilised Europeans could barely keep themselves from starving to death. Watkin Tench gives one of the few detailed firsthand accounts of the first years of the colony. He describes the ever-present threat of famine, heavy

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rationing, disease, robbery of food stores leading to public executions, failure to grow crops, inability to befriend or learn from Indigenous peoples and the need to eat crows. In sum, ‘the misery and horror of such a situation cannot be imparted, even by those who have suffered under it’ (Tench 1997, 120). Their misery was compounded by the realisation that Cook’s 1770 report of the land did not match the reality they were experiencing. Cook wrote that ‘the whole country or at least great parts of it might be cultivated without being oblig’d to cut down a single tree’ and that he ‘found in many places a deep black soil which we thought was capable of producing any kind of grain’ (1963, 45). Although it is likely Cook was observing different lands in a different season, Phillip and the settlers at Port Jackson did not find the soil or conditions favourable to growing crops or vegetables. To the eyes of the British colonialists, the Australian landscape was harsh and barren. From 1788 to 1792, Governor Phillip and the fledgling colony were on the brink of famine. For the entirety of his five-year tenure as governor, Phillip’s ‘first concern and unceasing worry was to find enough food to keep his people alive’ (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 192). During these years the colony was almost entirely reliant on rationing and supply ships. Attempts were made to grow their own food, but these were hampered by insufficient knowledge of local ecosystems and conditions. Of the 1,035 people aboard the First Fleet, only two men had any knowledge or experience of farming (Santich 1995, 9). Also, the new arrivals seemed incapable or unwilling to learn any additional skills from the land’s original inhabitants (Hutchinson 1958). Phillip ordered the kidnapping of two Indigenous men, Bennelong and Colbee, ‘for the purpose of knowing whether or not the country possessed any resources by which life might be prolonged’ (Tench 1997, 116). However, this strategy did not prove successful. As Davey, Macpherson and Clements note, ‘[t]he settlers seem to have learned almost nothing from the aborigines which would have helped them to adapt their English food habits to Australian circumstances’ (1945, 193). As a result, they were almost wholly dependent on imported staples such as flour, rice, salted meats, peas and fats from England, South Africa or Indonesia (Hutchinson 1958, 1). The early diet of both convicts and free settlers differed little from the rations aboard the ships – and was progressively decreased to as little as eighteen hundred calories per day, as Governor Phillip attempted to maintain the food supply (Santich 1995, 7; Hutchinson 1958, 1–2). The new colony was vulnerable to caloric and micronutrient deficiencies (such as scurvy); to infectious diseases such as dysentery, cholera, smallpox, venereal diseases and typhus; and to natural disasters such as the droughts that plagued the first attempts at agriculture (Hutchinson 1958, 1–2; Lewis 2003, 28). Tench writes of the desperation at this time, saying, ‘The dread

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of want in a country destitute of natural resource is ever peculiarly terrible’ (1997, 92). With much of the farming around Port Jackson producing little, they ‘turned [their] eyes with impatience towards the sea’ to spot the return of supply ships (Tench 1997, 92). For the first five years, the colony was dependent almost exclusively on European sources of sustenance, either in the form of supply ships or the cultivation of their own crops. Yet neither could be relied on. The Indigenous peoples of the Eora clans (the Gadigal, Cammeraygal and Wangal peoples), however, did not appear malnourished and in the same desperate state. Geoffrey Blainey suggests that ‘Aboriginals in most parts of Australia appear to have had an impressive standard of living at the time of the European invasion’ (1985, 217). The settlers did try to observe and adopt some of their foodways, particularly fishing, yet they did not learn much regarding edible native flora or how to catch and prepare native fauna. Davey et al. note that ‘[e]xtensive searches in the bush for native foods yielded very little in the way of edible plants and shrubs’ and that ‘many attempts were made to shoot kangaroos, but they proved difficult to kill’ (1945, 194). Despite their own miserable condition, Davey et al. note that the military officers, free settlers and convicts generally ‘scorned the aborigines as people who “barely existed” on this hostile soil’ (1945, 193). Relations were not helped by Phillip’s strategy of kidnapping to befriend. With Bennelong and Colbee in their custody, Phillip tried to gain knowledge about ‘any resources by which life might be prolonged’ (Tench 1997, 116). This was not a successful strategy, and while they were held captive, the British invaders continued to suffer from food shortages. However, Phillip maintained that even during the period of extreme rationing, Bennelong was exempt because they were afraid that if he knew their dire state, he would exploit it (Tench 1997, 125–26). Thus overcome by fear and hunger, the British performed a charade of plenty while also failing to build sincere trust or gain new knowledge. It was not only with the capture of Bennelong and Colbee that the invaders demonstrated hostility and a lack of understanding. On two occasions recorded by Tench, convicts provoked violent conflict with Indigenous fishermen by attempting to steal their fishing equipment (1997, 91, 101). The scarcity of food also led to difficulties in maintaining order among the settlers. Convicts and marines would eat their rations and then resort to stealing food from the stores or others. Tench describes a ‘terrible example of justice’ where six marines were hanged for having ‘robbed the public stores of flour, meat, spirits, tobacco and many other articles’ (1997, 102). Phillip needed a stable supply of food to establish social order. Yet, this had not been secured. Tench writes of the experience in Sydney:

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Our cultivation of the land was yet in its infancy . . . the governor had established a government farm . . . Almost the whole of the officers likewise accepted small tracts of ground for the purpose of raising grain and vegetables, but experience proved to us that the soil would produce neither without manure and, as this was not to be procured, our vigour soon slackened and most of the farms . . . were successively abandoned. (1997, 90–91)

The supply ships would ‘procrastinate’ famine, in Tench’s words, but without the local production of food it meant that soon after the return of a supply ship, famine would again be ‘approaching with gigantic strides and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance’ (1997, 119). With the repeated failure to grow crops at Port Jackson, Phillip looked elsewhere for fertile soils. Exploration for more fertile soils resulted in a new settlement at Rose Hill, approximately twenty-five kilometres west of the Sydney Cove settlement. Tench observed, ‘the soil here [is] being judged better than that around Sydney’ (1997, 92). In 1789 James Ruse, an ex-convict and one of the few people aboard the First Fleet with a farming background, was sent to Rose Hill along with several convicts to assist in cultivating the land. With the better quality soil they soon saw promising results from their early labour. Although the farm in Rose Hill almost immediately produced a larger harvest than the farms in Sydney, it was also an ‘impossible task’ to transport the produce to Sydney (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 197). With poor transportation and its fledging status, the Rose Hill farm still did not produce enough food for the colony, and 1790 was the hungriest year, which ‘saw famine and complete disaster for the settlement an almost accomplished fact’ (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 199). All attention was given to procurement of food. However, the insufficiency of the ration for both convicts and officers meant they could barely work due to weakness from hunger (Tench 1997, 124). The arrival of the Second Fleet in July 1790 averted immediate disaster, but it did not provide long-term stability. It also brought more hungry and sick bodies requiring food, yet unable to labour. A drought from July 1790 to August 1791 led to many giving up on farming and discouraged further experimentation (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 200). Despite these failures in Sydney, agriculture in Rose Hill continued to flourish. The year 1791 became a turning point for the colony. Successes at Rose Hill put them on the path towards self-sufficiency (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 202). More work was needed, but the farm at Rose Hill, in combination with supply ships, enabled the easing of extreme rationing. The cultivation of land at Rose Hill also foreshadowed the conflicts to come as British agriculture expanded across the continent. Tench recounts an

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exchange with two Indigenous inhabitants of Rose Hill who ‘expressed great dissatisfaction at the number of white men who had settled in their former territories’ (1997, 140). Here the biopolitical dynamics of care and violence come into view. The care for one population via the cultivation of land and production of food implied the exclusion and dispossession of another population of that land and its use for custom and procurement of food. However, it was not simply that their land was taken from them; the expression of dissatisfaction resulted in the deployment of military reinforcements to secure the Rose Hill settlement. This was an act that would signal the beginning of a more violent approach to colonisation. The 1788–1792 period became known as the Hungry Years, and it set the tone for the relationship between the settlers’ need for food and the land that refused to produce. Barron Field, a judge on the NSW Supreme Court (1817– 1828) and part-time poet, described the colony in his poem ‘The Kangaroo’ as the ‘after-birth’ of God’s creation – ‘Not conceiv’d in the Beginning’ but emerging after the fall ‘When the ground was therefore curst; And hence this barren wood! (1998)’. Despite the ‘cursed’ and ‘barren’ ground, the redemptive power of the farmer brought forth fruits from the god-forsaken land. While religious language was used to understand and describe the A ­ ustralian landscape as both a site of banishment and a Promised Land (Lake 2008), these were overlaid with Enlightenment ideals that the cultivation of land produced property and improved moral character. The intersection of Christianity and ideas of liberal social reformers shaped the colonialists’ relationship to the land and Indigenous populations, and justified the legal fiction of terra nullius. As such, the farmer and cultivation of the land were instrumental in securing the Australian continent as a possession of the Crown. As much as the early settlers had clung to their imported British diet in the face of near starvation, the colonial governors and later parliaments clung to the idea of English small-scale farming (Lewis 2003, 51). Their rhetoric drew on ‘the ancient and rich concept of the British yeoman farmer’ operating a ‘small self-supporting, family-operated freehold farm’ (Lewis 2003, 51). Echoing Roman practice of renumerating soldiers with land, Phillip offered noncommissioned officers and private soldiers land, tools and convict labour as an incentive for them to settle in the colony on completion of their service (Tench 1997, 129–30). Smaller land grants were also extended to exconvicts. Tench recounts the incentives offered to ‘men who may be desirous to become settlers and continue in the country’: clothes, provisions for one year, seeds, grains and suitable agricultural tools (1997, 130). The purpose of these schemes was to provide an incentive to ‘improve’ the land and produce a self-sufficient colony. As mentioned, James Ruse was instrumental in establishing successful farming in Rose Hill. Ruse received an allotment in November 1789 and was self-sufficient by the beginning of 1791.

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Ruse’s success vindicated ‘Phillip’s belief that the solution to all his troubles was free settlers with a vital interest in the land itself’ (Davey, Macpherson and Clements 1945, 201). The importance of small-scale agriculture in helping the colony survive and achieve self-sufficiency has remained within the Australian imagination ever since, even if the dream of a nation of yeoman farmers never corresponded with reality. In the following chapter I discuss the way the vision of a self-sufficient colony populated by small-scale farmers was challenged by the early dominance of pastoralism (Santich 1995, 9), and more fundamentally, the rapid transformation of Australia into one of the most urbanised countries in the nineteenth-century world (Lewis 2003, 51).2 Yet, the rhetorical appeal of the agriculturalist has endured well into the twenty-first century. In concluding their article on the Hungry Years, Davey et al. suggest that the fear of famine and struggles with drought ‘are in part responsible for what many feel to be the Australian attitude towards the soil – to regard it, not as a bounteous mother who, having been cherished, will in return nourish her offspring, but as a churlish thing from whom a living must be wrung with sweat and tears’ (1945, 207). Such an attitude reinforces the myth of ‘the battler’ as the Australian archetype. The battler, according to Cameron Muir, is ‘founded on a perception of the Australian environment as hostile and useless, and hence why the moral character of those who battled the land and made it grow European commodity plants was revered’ (2010, 64). The myth lives on today even in official policy statements. For example, ‘Australian agriculture has maintained its leading position by producing food on the driest inhabited continent, on low quality soils and in the face of continual climate variability’ (Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council 2010). Yet, the myth also ignores the fact that Aboriginal cultures had lived and enjoyed the varied landscapes of the Australian continent for more than sixty thousand years. Yet, over the past 230 years, their foodways have progressively been decimated, and today Indigenous Australians suffer disproportionally from food insecurity and diet-related diseases. Thus, the myth of the battling farmer not only celebrates but silences historical wrongs and their present-day effects. IMPROVEMENT AND A GROUNDED ENLIGHTENMENT ‘Improvement’ soon became the mantra that replaced hunger pangs of the colony. The early colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were partly established as solutions to problems of overpopulation and criminality in Britain (Kociumbas 1992; Bashford 2014). Yet the governors

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and colonial administrators soon encountered local problems requiring local solutions: problems of claiming and settling land, problems of population growth and problems of how to respond to the presence of Indigenous inhabitants. A thread running through these problems is agriculture. Agriculture was a solution to the problem of how to secure the colony from starvation and achieve a self-sufficient and productive population. Agriculture was vital to achieve the biopolitical aspirations of securing the Australian continent for the Crown while generating a loyal and governable settler population that produces wheat and wool for the Empire. Agriculture would also play a role in the problem of original inhabitants by provoking either direct confrontation and conflict or indirect governmental practices of ‘care’ and control. With the Hungry Years shaping the relation to the land, the political actors in nineteenth-century Australia were concerned with the objectives of securing material needs and enjoying modest prosperity. Radical agitators drawing inspiration from the American Revolution, Irish Republicans and physicalforce Chartism desired to usher in greater and more immediate freedoms than were on offer by British Parliament or colonial governors (Kociumbas 1992; Llewellyn 2016). However, the general tenor of political discourse was reformist rather than revolutionary. It was also focused on pragmatic solutions to immediate problems rather than idealist projects. The mid-nineteenth century historian John West wrote, ‘In seeking the improvement of colonial government, a prudent colonist will guard against the extravagance of theory’ (Gascoigne 2002, 35). This is not to suggest that political ideals were absent, but that the political rhetoric and aspirations of the colonialists were tied tightly to the ground. Who owns it? What could it produce? Who would work it? And how can it be improved? Colonial governmentality – rationality or mentality of governing – was influenced by a kinship of ideas related to improvement, including reform, growth, development, evolution and progress. These ideas emerged from the intellectual milieu of liberal political philosophy and social reform movements associated with traditions of Locke, Bentham and Malthus. Locke, in Two Treaties of Government (1698), believed God and reason appointed humanity the task to ‘improve [the Earth] for the benefit of Life’ (2003, 291. Book II, chap. V, § 32). Bentham opened his Fragment of Government (1766) proclaiming, ‘The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection. In the natural world . . . every thing teems with discovery and with improvement’ (1948). Malthus, however, was more of an ‘anti-improvement’ thinker. His theory of population growth questioned the possibility of improvement. The subtitle of the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population reads: ‘as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society’ (1993). Christianity was

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also an important influence of social reform and improvement. However, the Church’s authority was not well established in the early decades of the colony, and the social reforms based on rational planning and hard work were regarded as more useful for ordering society. Historian John Gascoigne suggests that rather than being in a state of conflict the Church and utilitarian social reformers complemented each other in Australia and shared the idea that ‘the world could be improved and human beings made better as the result of conscious human planning and disciplined endeavour’. (Gascoigne 2002, 7) The colonisation of Australia occurred as the ideas of Locke, Bentham, Godwin, Malthus and others were being domesticated from their philosophical contexts and implemented into policy. The idea of improvement and its manifestation in agricultural practice provides a window into the governmentality of the colonial administration (Atkinson 1997, 6–7; ­Kociumbas 1992, x–xi). Many of the British philosophers of improvement had a keen interest in the colonial project in general (Locke) and Australia specifically (Bentham, Mill, Malthus and Darwin). Historians have described the way improvement developed an Australian character in its colonial deployment. Gascoigne writes that in Australia ‘improvement meant productive labour for convicts, transforming themselves from a liability into an asset to the larger empire’ (2002, 74). Jan Kociumbas notes the ‘ambitious and novel experiment in social engineering’ that ‘aimed at creating a community’ in which delinquents ‘might be transformed into colonizing material’ (1992, 2). Agricultural activity played an important role in transforming convicts into a productive settler population. Although it was not the only means by which convicts were transformed into a productive and governable population, it was significant as it fed the colony, occupied territory, produced economic wealth and enabled population growth. That is, it served the biopolitical objective of inserting ‘bodies into the machinery of production’, which enabled the ‘growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces’ (Foucault 1998, 141). In the words of Bain Attwood, ‘this was a vision in which moral and economic considerations were tightly linked’ (2007, 101). The idea of improvement and these effects of agricultural labour contributed to the justification of British sovereignty. Locke: Improvement for Ownership Agricultural labour became a means of improvement that justified ownership, transformed the self, established social order and enabled the growth of the colony. Much has been written about John Locke and the use of his theory of property in colonial expansion, particularly in North America (Arneil 1996;

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Armitage 2004; Tully 1993; Lebovics 1986). Locke begins with the premise that God gave the world to all people ‘to make use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience’ (2003, 286. Book II, chap. V, § 26). Originally, there was no private property, except over oneself and the ‘Labour of his Body and the work of his Hands’ (2003, 287–88. Book II, chap. V, § 27). Owning one’s labour and the work of one’s hands is central to the creation of property. From these two premises Locke concludes, Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. (2003, 288. Book II, chap. V, § 27)

Mixing labour with nature transforms the common into the private. It also transforms the useless and uncultivated into the useful and cultivated. Locke, like many before and after him, assumed an almost limitless supply of ‘waste lands’ lying vacant and waiting to be cultivated. This is particularly true of his assessment of the ‘vacant places of America’ (2003, 293. Book II, chap. V, § 36). According to Locke, there is ‘waste Land’ such that ‘every Man should have as much as he could make use of . . . without straining any body’ (2003, 293. Book II, chap. V, § 36). Of course, it is not the mere abundance of land that justifies private possession, but the cultivation of common land ‘lyeing wast’ serves not only to create private property but ‘increase[s] the common stock’ by producing ‘provisions serving to the support of humane life’ (2003, 294. Book II, chap. V, § 37). Improvement is measured in terms of production. Cultivation ‘improved land’ contends Locke, arguing that ten acres of cultivated land in Devonshire would yield as much as a thousand acres of ‘the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America’ (2003, 294. Book II, chap. V, § 37). Although Locke has been interpreted as justifying the wholesale exploitation of the commons for private use (Moses 2004a, 13), he does offer a number of caveats. Most relevant here is the provision that we may only enjoy the fruits of nature ‘before it spoils’ and that ‘beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others’ (Locke 2003, 290. Book II, chap. V, § 31). Locke argues that taking more than one needs, even if by one’s labour, is an offense ‘against the common Law of Nature’, and the person is ‘liable to be punished’ as if ‘he invaded his Neighbour’s share’ (2003, 295. Book II, chap. V, § 37). Locke offers other caveats relevant to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North America and Australia: for example, the limits and obligations of conquerors towards the conquered (2003, 388. Book II, chap. XVI, § 179), the perpetual rights of descendants of the conquered to ‘shake

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off’ government they have not consented to (2003, 394. Book II, chap. XVI, § 192) or the rights to resist with force (2003, 418–19. Book II, chap. XIX, § 231). These provisions often are ignored for the simpler formula for legitimation of property creation through the cultivation of land. Locke’s ideas were not just floating around Europe and North America; they also influenced British colonialism in Australia. There was a common belief among colonialists that ‘for all the strangeness and harshness of the [Australian] landscape it was amenable to improvement’ via the application of ‘reason and industry’ (Gascoigne 2002, 9). Lockean theory of property shaped debates around land use and ownership in New South Wales during the early nineteenth century. Locke was directly appealed to by the Squatters in the attempt to prosecute their case for land. In an article in The Sydney Herald, 5 December 1839, Locke’s arguments about the mixing of labour with nature to make private property were quoted to support the squatter’s argument that they had ‘“improved” vast tracts of “waste” land’ and ‘had thereby acquired a “natural” claim to ownership’ (Reece 1974, 171). A prominent grazier, John Macarthur, who was a British officer turned influential agricultural entrepreneur, drew on Lockean ideas to describe Australia and America as ‘the two continents seem undoubtedly to have been reserved by Providence, as fields in which the energies of the British character . . . were destined to spread over the uncultured regions of primeval nature, the triumph of peace, and the empire of civilization’ (Gascoigne 2002, 8). Preceding the squatters’ agitation for land in the 1830s and 1840s, Governor Phillip and Lord Sydney regarded the cultivation of land as a means of furthering the sovereignty of the Crown over the continent as well as providing ‘support for human life’, to use Locke’s phrase. With the American Revolution and costs of administering colonial India dominating lateeighteenth-century British political opinion (McMichael 1984, 38ff), the initial objective for land use in the Australian colonies was self-sufficiency and social stability. The best way of achieving this was through allocating small parcels of land for farming to emancipists and expirees, while using convict labour for prison farms and public manufacturing (Gascoigne 2002, 123ff). This approach was expected to reinforce the Crown’s claim of sovereignty by effective proprietorship while creating social cohesion for the moral improvement of convicts. It would also avoid the potentially destabilising effect of a class of wealthy settlers controlling vast lands and seeking equally vast economic gains. This was not so easily avoided, as is discussed in the following chapter. Underlying these theoretical and practical uses of improvement to claim ownership was the belief that Indigenous peoples did not own the land because they had not cultivated the land and therefore left it as vacant wastelands. Even when Indigenous people made it clear that farms were

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encroaching on their territory, as in the case of Rose Hill, these were simply ignored or viewed as acts of aggression. Without improvement via cultivation, claims to ownership and sovereignty were dismissed, often violently (McMichael 1984, 42; Kociumbas 1992, 49; Reece 1974, 166ff). This was the manifestation of the devastating biopolitical dynamic where the improvement and possession for some results in the eradication and dispossession of others. As historian David Day notes, following the initial settlements at Sydney Cove and Rose Hill, the ‘subsequent history of the colony would be one of continuing conflict . . . as Phillip’s original claim was gradually extended to cover the entire continent and the Aborigines were steadily dispossessed’ (1996, 67). Bentham: Improvement of Self and Society Agriculture not only produced private property, but agricultural labour was believed to improve individual moral character and social stability. Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian disciples, James and John Stuart Mill, influenced public debate among British social reformers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Law reform, women’s rights, animal welfare and liberalisation of attitudes and laws regarding homosexuality were some of the progressive causes they addressed. They were also keenly interested in, and largely supportive of, British colonialisation as a civilizing process. For example, J. S. Mill was an employee of the British East India Company from 1823 to 1858. In an 1836 essay titled ‘Civilization’, Mill defines civilization as a kind of ‘human improvement’ (1973, 160) (italics in the original), but then he narrows his use of it to be ‘the direct converse or contrary of rudeness or barbarism’ (1973, 161). Mill argues that markers of the uncivilized or ‘savage life’ are the absence of commerce, agriculture and manufacturing, whereas ‘countries rich in the fruits of agriculture . . . we call civilized’ (1973, 162). Again, agriculture serves as a break or marker between civilised and uncivilised, or the cared for and the disposable. Bentham was also interested in British colonialism, although he had a more nuanced and shifting position. In 1793, he was opposed to colonisation (particularly French) as it made people dependent on foreign governments. In 1803 Bentham described the colonial governors as a ‘lawless power’ that ruled autocratically. Yet, by 1831, following reforms that gave colonies more governmental control, he was supportive of the colonising project in South Australia and believed the Australian colonies would eventually emancipate themselves and install representative governments (Llewellyn 2016, 50–51). Related to his thoughts on colonialism was Bentham’s initial opposition to the transportation of convicts to New South Wales (Llewellyn 2016). In an 1802 pamphlet, Panopticon versus New South Wales, Bentham argued that

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the implementation of his panopticon – a prison design that made inmates believe they were constantly being observed and had an elaborate system of rewards and punishments – would be a significantly more efficient and effective means of transforming criminals, delinquents and paupers into useful contributors to society than banishing them to the colonies (Bentham 1995; Kociumbas 1992, 12; Kerr 1989). Bentham introduced his panopticon as a ‘new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind’ that would result in ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened . . . all by a simple idea in Architecture!’ (1995, 31) (italics in the original). The panopticon design was never fully realised, although it did influence colonial prisons in Port Arthur, F ­ remantle and Parramatta. Bentham’s influence on Australian social and political life goes deeper than his concerns over transportation and prison design. According to Hugh Collins, ‘the mental universe of Australian politics is essentially Benthamite’ (1985, 148), by which he means that ‘dominant ideology of [Australian] society conforms to the essential character of Jeremy Bentham’s political philosophy’ (1985, 148). Bentham’s views on legislation, interests of the individual and secular democracy were particularly influential in the Australian colonies. Motivating Bentham’s thought and designs were the ideas of improvement and the power of human thought to govern conduct rationally. This rational power over conduct could be manifest through legislation, but also through the norms and in the material form of architectural design that would use the ‘two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure’ (Bentham 1948, 125) to arrange things such that ‘people, following only their own selfinterest, will do as they ought’ (Scott 1995, 202–3) (italics in the original). The principle of utility or maximisation of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is central to Bentham’s ethic of improvement. Furthermore, it reveals his secular and instrumental approach to politics, which is relevant to the role of agriculture as improvement. For Bentham, there is no providential deity that provides a basis for the constitution or that designates the people as chosen for a particular purpose. As Collins notes, for Bentham ‘political institutions are human contrivances, not divinely ordained’ (1985, 149). Likewise, for the agnostic Governor Phillip and the early settlers, the land was not readily seen as a gift from God. The First Fleet was not the Mayflower and was not full of Puritans. The strangeness of the southern land and the lack of food did not make the settlers believe they had arrived in Eden, but like Adam, were exiled and would have to toil the earth and contend with thorns and thistles (Lake 2008, 61). This experience melds with the utilitarian ethic of improvement that was practical in orientation insofar as it sought to work with reality to produce greater pleasure and avoid pain in the here and now.

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Food is necessary for survival, but it also gives pleasure and helps to avoid the pain of hunger, as such cultivation of the land serves to increase individual happiness and puts in place material conditions for the continuation of that happiness. However, it was not merely the fruits of cultivation per se, but the way cultivation improves the land and the moral character of the farmer. Like the material layout of a panopticon, the labour involved in practices of cultivation would, in turn, discipline and improve moral character, transforming male convicts into productive free men and female convicts into women who will rear the next generation (Kociumbas 1992, 28–29; Day 1996, 57). Farming imbued the individual as well as the community with virtues of selfreliance, resourcefulness, productivity and resilience. Common tasks such as clearing land, digging wells, constructing fences and protecting livestock from predators cultivated an individual and communal ethic that would provide a basis for a just society. The yeoman farming tradition regards the family farm as valuable for generating a form of interdependence that stabilizes the social order. The yeoman and agrarian tradition draws on many sources beyond utilitarianism. However, the emphasis on individual freedom to pursue one’s own ends in the context of concrete material and social conditions is congruent with Benthamite ideas that prioritise the individual, yet believe that a collective of individuals pursuing their own interests will produce the greatest happiness. As Gascoigne observes, the ‘Benthamite view of society . . . emphasised the role of the individual and found protection for individuals not in rights, but in the capacity to balance individual interests with the needs of society as a whole’ (2002, 171). Of importance, the more general concern over social stability was also achieved through increases in the production of food. In Europe, agricultural improvement produced a more stable supply of food, thereby dispelling the fear of starvation and famine (Gascoigne 2002, xi). This, in turn, provided greater political stability as the nutritional and biological life of the population could be managed such that there were fewer food shortages and corresponding food riots (Foucault 2007; Taylor 1996). In Australia, Tench described the unrest and instability during the Hungry Years. It was not until the farms in Rose Hill and Parramatta became productive that greater social stability and future planning were possible. In 1806, the increased social stability and belief in improvement are evident in Mary McDonald’s letter to her daughter back in England. An ex-convict, now married to a settler, encourages her daughter to come to New South Wales, ‘the most healthful country in all the Globe’ where crops grow to ‘Greatest perfection’, ‘where one acre of wheat will produce from Forty to Fifty Bushels of wheat’ (cited in Day 1996, 79–80).

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The new land, however, was not always regarded as so accommodating and beneficial to the health of the settlers. The heat, harsh light, hot winds, poor soils and abundance of flies not only caused discomfort, but they were thought to contribute to conditions such as eye-blight, ‘colonial fever’ and nervousness (Anderson 2002, 24). Rather than an ‘antipodean paradise’, doctors questioned whether Australia might be ‘no place for a white man or woman’ (Anderson 2002, 18). Colonial medicine was crucial in negotiating the ‘intimate connections of race, environment, and well-being’ (Anderson 2002, 22). Colonial medicine focused on trying to get ‘the bodily constitution’ of the white race in ‘harmony with its environment’ (Anderson 2002, 28). In the 1850s, doctors such as James Kilgour in Geelong would advise that ‘more shade trees, the extension of cultivation, and the provision of spaces for public recreation’ were the best ways to harmonise the white body with environment (Anderson 2002, 23). As such, agriculture served an important therapeutic purpose; ‘with increased cultivation and grazing of sheep and cattle, colonial fever and other constitutional disorders had almost disappear’(Anderson 2002, 22). With the transformation and improvement of the land, it was possible to transform and improve the healthfulness of the new white settler. It was not just the morality and physiology of Europeans that could be improved. The ‘improvement ethics was applied to Aboriginal society’ in an attempt to shape it to ‘achieve ends considered desirable by white Europeans’ (Gascoigne 2002, 12). Historian John Hirst argues that in the 1810s Governor Macquarie was determined to transform the local Indigenous populations into farmers. This was based on the stadial theory that posits four stages of civilisation: hunter and gather, pastoral and herding, settled agriculture and commercial exchange. Macquarie wanted local Aboriginal peoples to ‘settle in one place’ as a ‘necessary first step for their advancement’ (Hirst 2014, 21). However, there was little interest on the part of the Aboriginals – not because of the hard work, as many colonialists assumed, but they ‘sussed out the social arrangements of farming: the men who did the hard work were looked down upon and the gentlemen owners got the rewards’ (Hirst 2014, 22). According to Hirst, the Aboriginal peoples thought of themselves as equal to the status of gentlemen rather than the convicts labouring in the fields. As such they ‘asked for convicts to be allocated to them to do the farming work’ (2014, 22). The British regarded this as unacceptable – not only because of the belief that Aboriginal people had a lower status than the convicts, but that in order to improve themselves they needed to embrace hard work as a necessary civilising activity. Although a Benthamite ethic of improvement was used to encourage free settlers, convicts and Aboriginal people to improve themselves through

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agrarian acts of land cultivation, Bentham himself was more interested in improvement through legislation and the structures of government. His interest was in developing rules of government that conform to the principle of utility. Bentham believed that legislation designed by ‘the people’ (which entailed universal suffrage) could be used to order society in such a way that it maximises happiness in the population (Llewellyn 2016, 40ff). As will be discussed more fully in the following chapter, key colonial political figures and reformers, such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Governor Bourke, Henry Parkes and Henry Carmichael, were influenced by Bentham’s ideas on improvement, legislation and democracy. According to Gascoigne, ‘Australia was fertile ground’ for Bentham’s vision of ‘improvement [and] . . . emphasis on the practical and the useful’ (2002, xi). Gascoigne argues that it was the Benthamite version of social reform and calls for democracy, in combination with Protestant values of work, that ‘chiefly influenced the attitudes of those who founded the infant colony of New South Wales’ (2002, 7). Despite the occasional rebellion, the reformist agenda adopted by those influenced by Bentham worked within the colonial frame and ‘helped to give the irksome, and even brutal, business of bringing the Australian continent firmly under the sway of British colonial rule something of the character of a civilising mission’ (Gascoigne 2002, 7). Malthus: Improvement for Growth Improvement as growth is the final thread to the governmental use of agriculture to be considered here. Agriculture allowed for the systematic colonisation of a territory and for a population to not only feed itself, but also reproduce and grow. To settle the vast territory of Australia required a growing population to supply the farmers, labourers, police, governmental official and settlers (Kociumbas 1992, 8). From the beginning of the colony, reproduction was monitored, not only in terms of birth rates but circumstances, spaces and quality. It was considered to be better for women to be married and breeding on a small and productive farm than to be unmarried and living in urban environments or poorhouses of England. Tench suggests that the new agrarian-colonial circumstances and warmer climate also improved the quality of the children produced. In a footnote he remarks, To [the climate], I ascribe the great number of births which happened, considering the age and other circumstances, of many of the mothers. Women who certainly would never have bred in any other climate here produced as fine children as ever were born. (1997, 235)

Although the climate may have been pleasant, Kociumbas argues that the life for women and children in the colony was anything but (1992, 1–31). Almost

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by design women were dependent on the protection of men, both from other men and from the hardships of the early settlement. Although ‘cohabitation was more common than marriage’ (1992, 26), marriage was encouraged by colonial officials. On 8 February 1788, only a few days after landing in Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip recommended that convicts marry and that they would receive government assistance for land and additional provisions not available to unmarried men (Kociumbas 1992, 23). These incentives were in place to encourage ex-convicts to marry, start a small farm and produce an improved next generation. As such, the cultivation of land worked together with marriage to populate and settle the territory. The colonial administration monitored the population to gain information about marriages and reproduction – ‘By December 1799 the number of children in the colony had grown from the mere thirty-six who had disembarked in 1788 to 862’ (Kociumbas 1992, 27), or from 3.2 percent of the total population to 16.9 percent. The colonial administration and the Church sought different ways to not only achieve population growth, but the right kind of growth. Workhouses, schooling and supervision of home life were used not only to produce the right kind of children but the right kind of woman. These labouring activities would discipline and improve the women. Men also presented the colonial administration with a disciplinary problem. The hard work of running a productive family farm is venerated in Australian history, but it was not readily embraced by the majority of the convicts and free settlers who were from urban centres in Britain and Ireland, largely because the reality was quite different from the rhetoric. As Russel Ward notes, smallholder farmers were usually ‘extremely poor and wretchedly over-worked’ (2003, 198). As such, it proved difficult to persuade the men ‘to settle down and win a living for their wives and children on their tiny plots of colonial land’ (Kociumbas 1992, 31). It was not only the growth of the local settler population that concerned officials, but the population pressures back in Britain (Bashford 2006, 133). The transportation of convicts and other ‘surplus’ populations not only helped to populate and thereby strengthen the British claim over the southern continent, but it also helped to relieve some of the pressures of overpopulation, especially in the cities. It was in this context that Thomas Robert Malthus was formulating and reformulating his arguments about population growth and the scarcity of food (Bashford and Chaplin 2016; Malthus 1993). Malthus’s basic idea was that food and population are intricately connected. More food will support a larger population, which will grow and, in turn, will require more food. However, Malthus argued that an increase in the supply of food would shift the dynamics from a subsistence level of agricultural production, where there is an equilibrium between food and the population, into a scenario where the population grows exponentially while the production

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of food cannot keep up due to limiting conditions, notably the availability of arable land. When population exceeds the finite food supply, the equilibrium is restored through a reduction in the population via famine, disease or bloodshed – a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus’s thesis posed a serious challenge to the reformers working towards social improvement. Rather than viewing population growth as a sign of social virility, Malthus believed that if left unchecked it would lead to inevitable catastrophe. Malthus’s solution to the catastrophe was to focus on the population side of the equation. ‘Preventive checks’ such as sexual abstinence, celibacy and delaying marriage could slow population growth (1993, 20ff). However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the food side of the equation seemed like a more obvious solution – that is, to take advantage of the seemingly abundant and underused wastelands of the New World. Writing a century earlier, Locke thought there was enough land to sustain the near limitless production of food to support growth of the population (2003, 293. Book II, chap. V, § 36). Likewise, Friedrich Engels argued that better use of abundant lands was the solution to overpopulation and associated social problems. For example, Engels believed that there is ‘enough waste land in the valley of the Mississippi for the whole population of Europe to be transplanted there’ (1967, 173–74). Interestingly, Engels also draws on the case of Australia to argue against Malthus. He writes, ‘[i] n Australia, with a population density of only one per square mile, savages suffer just as much from over-population as the more civilized inhabitants of England’ (1967, 170). Engels’s point seems to be that it is not population that is the cause of social ills and hunger, but the capacity to cultivate and organise society. Engels (and Marx) rejected Malthus’s thesis as an attack on the poor and working classes. He argued that ‘Malthus’s theory implied that since it is the poor who are the surplus population nothing should be done for them except to make their starvation as easy as possible’ (1967, 170). However, Engels facetiously thanked him for drawing ‘our attention . . . to the productive power of the earth and of mankind’ (1967, 172). Engels argued that Malthus neglected the role of scientific advancement in preventing a Malthusian catastrophe. Scientific progress, according to Engels, was ‘as unceasing and at least as rapid as the growth of population’ (1967, 173). Thus, the cultivation of vacant lands using the latest scientific knowledge would avoid the harsh conclusions of Malthus’s ‘vile and infamous theory’ (Engels 1967, 170). Although Malthus is often regarded as the theorists behind brutal social engineering strategies that disregard the lives of the poor, Indigenous or Third World, he was less sanguine than Locke, Mill or Engels about the use of ‘waste lands’. Not only did he think using more land was only a temporary

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solution to the inevitable problem of exponential population growth, but he was less confident in the right of overpopulated Europeans to claim lands in the New World as ‘vacant’. Anticipating Wolfe, Malthus recognised the violence of colonial land grabs. In the more expansive two-volume edition of his Essay that appeared after 1803 (Bashford 2012, 99–100), Malthus observes, There are many parts of the globe, indeed, hitherto uncultivated, and almost unoccupied; but the right of exterminating, or driving into a corner where they must starve, even the inhabitants of these thinly-peopled regions, will be questioned in a moral view.3 (1826, 7)

After predicting that ‘the Indians will be driven further and further back into the country, til the whole race is ultimately exterminated’ if the population in the United States continues to increase, Malthus states that to ‘exterminate the inhabitants of the greatest part of Asia and Africa, is a thought that could not be admitted for a moment’ (1826, 8). Malthus’s anticolonial sentiment has been significantly less influential than his articulation of the need for more land to produce the food necessary for population growth. As such, the thought of Malthus is often regarded as justifying colonial expansion and the extermination of Indigenous peoples – the very activities he cautioned against. The young Charles Darwin came under the influence of Malthus’s theory of population and observed firsthand the effects of European colonisation and its implications for Indigenous populations. In 1836 Darwin spent two months in Sydney, Hobart and King George Sound (Albany, Western Australia). Darwin’s diaries reveal the effect of the biopolitical racism that enabled the improvement and growth of the European population, while masking in plain sight the death of Indigenous populations. Darwin was impressed by the economic prosperity and social progress of the early colonies in Sydney and Hobart. He wrote of the ‘march of improvement’ and that, Australia is rising . . . into a grand centre of civilization, which, at some not very remote period, will rule the empress of the Southern hemisphere. It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a certain consequence wealth, prosperity and civilization. (1988, 446)

However, as Tony Barta asks, ‘Did he know at what cost the prosperity there had been bought?’ (2013, 28). Amid his observations of the landscape and praise of the social and economic development, Darwin also notes, ‘The Aboriginal blacks are all removed and kept (in reality as prisoners) in a Promontory . . . I believe it was not possible to avoid this cruel step’ (1988, 408). Darwin is aware of violent murders of Indigenous people, but he

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suggests that ‘there appears to be some mysterious agency generally at work’ that explains why ‘[w]herever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’ (2001, 459). This ‘mysterious agency’ removes any suggestion of intention to commit genocide and therefore the need to blame, judge or hold anyone or anything to account. Evolutionary style of reasoning naturalises the decimation of Indigenous society without appreciating the complicity of European invasion. Well into the twentieth century, the accepted view among history professors was that ‘Europeans were not responsible for the eventual passing of the Aborigines; the laws of nature decreed that backward societies gave way before advanced ones’ (Moses 2004a, 15). Moses suggests that ‘the rhetoric of Indigenous decline also served to mask choices open to policy-makers, choices they were not prepared to entertain because they fundamentally approved of the civilizing process in which they were engaged’ (2004a, 29). The colonial governmentality of improvement and its evolutionary style of reasoning meant that the rapid decrease in Indigenous populations could be explained as an inevitable, if unfortunate, outcome that could not be blamed on anyone in particular. CONCLUSION The colonisers’ desire to use, improve and populate the Australian continent via agriculture served to offset British overpopulation problems as well as solve local underpopulation problems. Gascoigne argues that these practices also served to ‘justify dispossession’ of Indigenous populations and affirm ‘white supremacy’ (2002, 13). Lockean ideas, as well as the influence of Malthusian theories of population growth, served to legitimate the possession of underused lands. Britain was too populated, and the people were hungry (Gascoigne 2002, 69). In Australia, there was an abundance of vacant or near empty land, therefore the British were entitled to claim it and use it, or so the argument went. However, this reasoning has meant that a spectre of underuse of land haunts Australia. As is explored in chapters 2 and 3, an anxiety persists in the Australian psyche that the same logic the British used to dispossess Indigenous Australians will be used against the settlers. From the first settlement to the present, there has been concern, bordering on paranoia, that other colonial powers (France, Germany or Russia) or ‘overpopulated’ neighbours (India, Japan, Indonesia or China) would see the vast empty spaces, especially in the north, and claim large sections of the Australian continent under the same pretext that the British colonists took it from the Indigenous inhabitants. As Alison Bashford notes, ‘World population growth was not just about colonialism, it was about sovereignty’ (2006, 134). To fully establish sovereignty, Australia needed not only to be legally claimed, but there was urgency to ‘close

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the frontiers’ and effectively settle the continent. This implied the dispossession and denial of those already living in these lands. Agriculture (among other practices and knowledges) served as a marker or break that indicated the lives to be fostered, and those to be disallowed to the point of death. The improvement and care of one population led to the exclusion and extermination of another. Improvement was always for the benefit and growth of European populations, either in Britain or the Australian colonies. Improvement was not something achieved via learning from Indigenous peoples, but applying European ideas and practices to the Australian landscape to transform it and change it for the ‘better’. As Gascoigne notes, ‘Agricultural improvement was the most outward and visible sign of deeper faith in the possibilities of progress which energised the early colonies as they attempted to remould a strange land into more familiar forms’ (2002, 85). As is discussed in the following chapter, a variety of schemes were developed throughout the nineteenth century and into the present as a means of possessing the vast and thinly populated lands throughout the continent. Central to all these schemes is some form of agricultural use of land. The governmentality of improvement used agriculture to transform the landscape and strengthen the claim of ownership, to improve the moral character of convicts and create social stability. It also was used to produce a population that can sustain itself and grow. Significantly, this governmentality of improvement helped to cultivate sovereignty through biological survival and economic prosperity, which transformed and occupied the land. These processes of the farmer laid the foundations for the ontological claim that possessed the continent as a home for white belonging. NOTES 1. Clark later expressed regret over this sentence. ‘My error was my failure to pose the question: Whose country is it? That is, I did not question the assumption of the invaders – that before they took possession this was terra nullius’ (1992, 30). 2. Australia did not strictly urbanize. Rather, it settled cities from which settlers spread out to occupy territory and then retracted back into cities following gold rushes or rural depressions. 3. The 1826 edition is unabridged and includes the expanded material developed in the 1803 edition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, W. (2002). The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Arendt, H. (2017). The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin Books.

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Armitage, D. (2004). ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political Theory, 32(5), 602–27. Arneil, B. (1996). John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Atkinson, A. (1997). The Europeans in Australia: Volume One – The Beginning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Attwood, B. (2007). ‘Thieves Like Us’, Meanjin, 66(3), 99. Barta, T. (2013). ‘Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide.’ In Colonialism and Genocide, edited by Dirk Moses and Dan Stone. New York: Routledge. Bashford, A. (2006). ‘Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health’, History of the Human Sciences, 19(1), 67–88. ———. (2012). ‘Malthus and Colonial History’, Journal of Australian Studies, 36(1), 99–110. ———. (2014). Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Bashford, A., and J. E. Chaplin. (2016). The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the ‘Principle of Population’. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bentham, J. (1948). A Fragment on Government and an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. (1995). The Panopticon Writings, edited by Miran Bozovic. London: Verso. Blainey, G. (1985). Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia. Melbourne, VIC: Sun Books. Brett, J. (2011). Fair Share: Country and City in Australia. The Quarterly Essay 42. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Clark, C. M. H. (1963). A History of Australia: From the Earliest Tomes to the Age of Macquarie, vol. 1. 6 vols. London: Melbourne University Press. ———. (1992). A Historian’s Apprenticeship. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Collins, H. (1985). ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, 114(1), 147–69. Cook, C. J. (1963). ‘Captain Cook Sums Up His Impressions of New Holland, August 1770.’ In Sources of Australian History, edited by Manning Clark, 48–55. London: Oxford University Press. Darwin, C. (1988). Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, edited by Richard D. Keynes. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2001). The Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin’s Five-Year Circumnavigation. Santa Barbara, CA: Narrative Press. Davey, L., M. Macpherson and F. W. Clements (1945). ‘The Hungry Years: 1788–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Australian and His Diet’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 3(11), 187–208. Day, D. (1996). Claiming a Continent: A History of Australia. Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers. Engels, F. (1967). ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844’. In Engels: Selected Writings, edited by W. O. Henderson, 148–77. Middlesex, England: Pelican.

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Field, B. (1998). ‘The Kangaroo and Other Poems’. In First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Sydney: Barn on the Hill. Foucault, M. (1998). The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1. England: Penguin Books. ———. (2000). ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’. In Power, edited by James Faubion, 134–56. London: Penguin. ———. (2003). Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Picador. ———. (2004). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. London: Penguin. ———. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gascoigne, J. (2002). The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1992). ‘“Style” For Historians and Philosophers’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 23(1), 1–20. Hirst, J. (2014). Australian History in 7 Questions. Collingwood, VIC: Black. Hutchinson, R. C. (1958). Food for the People of Australia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Kerr, J. (1989). ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales’, Fabrications, 1(1), 4–32. Kociumbas, J. (1992). The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2, 1770–1860 Possessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lake, M. (2008). ‘Such Spiritual Acres’: Protestantism, the Land and the Colonisation of Australia, 1788–1850, Department of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW. Lebovics, H. (1986). ‘The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47(4), 567–81. Lewis, M. J. (2003). The People’s Health: Public Health in Australia, 1950 to the Present. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Llewellyn, D. G. M. (2016). Australia Felix: Jeremy Bentham and Australian Colonial Democracy, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies; School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Locke, J. (2003). Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by Ian Shapiro. Binghampton, NY: Yale University Press. Malthus, T. R. (1993). An Essay on the Principle of Population: As it Affecs the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. London: Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project. ———. (1826). An Essay on the Principle of Population; Or, A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, vol. 1. 2 vols. London: John Murray. Mayes, C. (2010). ‘The Violence of Care: An Analysis of Foucault’s Pastor’, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, 11(1), 111–26. McMichael, P. (1984). Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mill, J. S. (1973). Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical. New York: Haskell House. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moses, A. D. (2004a). ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australia.’ In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 3–48. New York: Berghahn Books. ———, ed. (2004b). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, vol. 6. New York: Berghahn Books. Muir, C. (2010). ‘Feeding the World’, Griffith Review, (27), 28–40. Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council. (2010). Australia and Food Security in a Changing World: Can We Feed Ourselves and Help Feed the World in the Future?, edited by The Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Innovation Council. Canberra. Reece, R. H. W. (1974). Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Rodwell, G. (1999). ‘“The Sense of Victorious Struggle”: The Eugenic Dynamic in Australian Popular Surf-Culture, 1900–50’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23(62), 56–63. Santich, B. (1995). What the Doctors Ordered: 150 Years of Dietary Advice in Australia. South Melbourne: Hyland House. Scott, D. (1995). ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, (43), 191–220. Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. London: Duke University Press. Taylor, L. (1996). ‘Food Riots Revisited’, Journal of Social History, 30(2), 483–96. Tench, W. (1997). ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson’. In 1788 Watkin Tench, edited by Tim Flannery, 85–274. Melbourne, VIC: Text Publishing. Tully, J. (1993). An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, vol. 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ward, R. (2003). The Australian Legend. London: Oxford University Press. Watson, D. (2014). The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia. Melbourne Victoria: Penguin Random House Australia. Wolfe, P. (2006). ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.

Chapter 2

Producing ‘Little England’ Farmers, Graziers and the Creation of Home

White bodies, as long as they remained clean, pure, and productive, had come to seem natural, even innocent, in the more hygienic and purified environment of southeastern Australia. – Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness (2002, 38)

‘We grew here, you flew here!’ This couplet demarcates the local population as belonging to a place, whereas racialized others are positioned as transitory, alien and foreign. It is the slightly more convivial version of ‘blood and soil’. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the ‘We grew here, you flew here!’ slogan was used during the 2005 Cronulla riots, but it has also been seen and heard at the Reclaim Australia rallies of the far right and annual Australia Day events of the mainstream. Although this statement often is accompanied with acts of aggression and performances of hegemonic masculinity, the prevalence of such speech reflects Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos’s diagnosis that ‘white Australia has become ontologically disturbed’ (2014, 14). That is, white Australia is anxious about its status as occupier and whether it can provide a convincing answer to this question: ‘Where do you come from?’ The persistent presence of Indigenous Australians makes ‘from here’ ring hollow. To reassure itself that it does belong, white Australia interrogates the status of the migrant and declares, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (Howard 2001). The capacity to adjudicate who does and does not belong deflects the question of one’s own belonging. Rather than relying on indigeneity to guarantee belonging, alternative sources are used: demographic dominance, economic wealth, legislative controls, territorial possession and a tight policing over national history. 49

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The dominant narratives of Australian history serve to reinforce Australia as a white possession, a home and place of belonging. As Foucault observes, ‘the discourse of the historian’ is a ‘sort ceremony’ that produces ‘both a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power’ (2004, 66). This reinforcement occurs through drawing attention to ‘the lustre of power’ by using ‘its examples and its exploits, to fascinate men’ (Foucault 2004, 66). The telling of Australian agricultural history follows this course, recounting stories of brave and resilient men triumphing despite repeated failures and threats to life, family and community. Indigenous voices, faces, concerns, desires and interests are largely void from these histories. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos argue that ‘the writing of the white nation proceeds through the development of narratives that unfold as if the land might indeed have been unoccupied’ (2014, 20). In these narratives, they continue, ‘the real decisive moment that shaped the ontology of the white collective was the fall of the first eucalyptus to the axe of the white settler and not the death of the first Indigenous Australian at the hands of the white invader’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014, 19). Narratives about the felling of eucalypts, planting crops, grazing sheep and overcoming the obstacles of colonial life are celebrated as key points in the formation of a resilient national character and creation of home in a formidable environment. The spilling of Aboriginal blood rarely features in these histories. As an example, these are the opening sentences from Ted Henzell’s Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges: It all began with the arrival of the first European settlers in 1788. The indigenous people, who had occupied the continent for at least 60 000 years, had come close to developing agriculture, but had not actually cultivated the soil or raised livestock. So the first settlers brought their agricultural technology with them, and one of the main aims of this book is to relate what those people did at home to what they did, or tried to do, in Australia. (2007, ix)

Likewise, Sustaining a Nation: Celebrating 100 Years of Agriculture in Australia opens with ‘The first white settlers arrived in Australia with high hopes of recreating a rural landscape just like the one they had left behind’ (Cornwall, Collie and Ashton 2000, 5). The only reference to Indigenous Australians is some ninety pages later, and here it is in reference to their ‘contribution’ to the pastoral industry as ‘shearers, stockmen, drovers, fencers, cooks and providing household help’ (Cornwall, Collie and Ashton 2000, 96). These histories, and they are not isolated examples, are written as if Indigenous people did not occupy these lands and that even if they did, the arrival of Europeans was inevitable and beneficial. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos contend that this use of history is ‘an integral part of the processes of

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annihilating the question that Indigenous sovereign being poses’ (2014, 20). The questions remain: Where did you come from and where do you belong? The history of agriculture in Australia is the story of riding the sheep’s back and producing a cornucopia of foods, not the frontier wars, black-birding, unfree labour and mass dispossession. In this context, the claim ‘we grew here’ takes on a very literal meaning with ontological implications. ‘We grew here’ established ownership of land, thereby denying prior claims of Indigenous inhabitants. But this phrase also serves to lay claim to belonging to the lands that have been cultivated. ‘You may have lived here, but we cultivated, improved and grew here!’ The focus in this chapter is the role of agriculture in transforming a strange land into a familiar home. From the early nineteenth century, the colonialists were concerned not only about becoming self-sufficient and surviving, but in creating a homeland in which to flourish. ‘Little England’ was a refrain repeated throughout newspaper editorials and letters from the nineteenth century. An 1828 editorial in The Monitor talked of the ‘advancement of this little England in the Southern Hemisphere’ (Editorial 1828). A letter to The Sydney Gazette in 1840, signed ‘An Earnest Advocate for Colonisation on Right Principles’, described how the churchyard and parish school gives ‘to the place the character of a little England’ (1840). However, it was not just churches and English architecture that would create a little England. Land and those who had access to it was central to debates about the best way of producing this little England on the vast Australian continent. In 1853, the Melbourne newspaper The Argus proclaimed: ‘If we avail ourselves of the advantages of our present position and boldly throw open our lands to the occupation of the energetic, willing and intelligent minds now flocking in upon us, we may create a little England in Australia’ (Editorial 1853). The previous chapter told part of this story through the ideas of improvement and ownership. This chapter continues the historical account to highlight different manifestations of agricultural practice in the biopolitics of security. Two different forms of agriculture were put forward as the best means of producing a homeland: farming and pastoralism (or grazing). The divide between farmers and pastoralists is relevant for addressing the role of agriculture in securing the land as a British possession, providing economic prosperity and securing ontological belonging. The farmers and pastoralists represented two entwined threads in the history of Australian agriculture and its role in colonisation. Farmers are associated with the rural working class and the agrarian tradition of political thought that regards the farmer as the most virtuous citizen and backbone of a nation. As such, it has been argued that the farmer deserves special treatment and protection from the government. The pastoralist, however, is associated with the ruling class of landed gentry who have access to capital and seek trade liberalisation to

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open up new markets. From the earliest days of colonisation to the present, both have provided competing visions of how Australia should be improved and colonised (Botterill 2009). And both have framed different problems and corresponding solutions. Finally, both have been used for different security ends. That is, farmers and pastoralists have played central roles in securing territorial integrity, population belonging and economic prosperity. GOVERNING A VIBRANT TERRITORY The previous chapter outlined the biopolitical racism used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous inhabitants and the governmentality of improvement to foster the colony; this section broadens the analysis to include the biopolitics of security as outlined in Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population lectures. These lectures expand on themes introduced in The Will to Knowledge1 as well as foreshadow ideas developed in later interviews, lectures and essays (Foucault 1983, 2000b, 2000a, 2008). In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault maps the emergence of biopower and security mechanisms that have the life of the population as their object. He situates security in a matrix with law and discipline. While the juridical is concerned with sovereignty and territory, and discipline is concerned with individual bodies and surveillance, security is focused on the population as a whole (Foucault 2007, 11). Foucault is quick to emphasise that these mechanisms do not progress in a linear fashion with one replacing the other – ‘[t]here is not the legal age, the disciplinary age, and then the age of security’ (2007, 8). Rather, they are interrelated, entwined and reinforce each other. This is apparent in Foucault’s account of dispositifs2 of security. Foucault outlines four general features of the dispositifs of security: ‘spaces of security’, ‘treatment of the uncertain’, ‘form of normalization’ and ‘reality of the population’ (2007, 11). In contrast to the spaces of discipline, which are artificial and fabricated to achieve perfection and precision, the spaces of security rely on the ‘material givens’, such as water, land, terrain, air and so on. The uncertainty of these givens and the unpredictability of their use are managed in manner of ‘maximizing the positive elements’ and ‘minimizing what is risky and inconvenient’ (Foucault 2007, 19). This mode of management operates through a mode of normalisation that is centrifugal. Foucault argues that discipline is centripetal. That is, it centres down on an object. For example, the gaze of the panopticon centres in and internalises the norms of the prison into the body of the prisoner. Security, however, is centrifugal. It expands out and seeks to guide conduct with minimal direct intervention. This centrifugal approach effects the emergence of the reality of the population or what Foucault also describes as ‘a multiplicity

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of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live’ (Foucault 2007, 21). Governing the material and physical elements in which a population exists serves to indirectly yet purposefully govern and ‘change the human species’ (Foucault 2007, 23). Foucault used town planning, epidemics and food scarcity to illustrate the emergence of security as a rationality of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century government. In the case of town planning, Foucault argues that ‘a good town plan takes into account precisely what might happen’ (2007, 20). That is, mechanisms of security will seek to manage ‘indefinite series of mobile elements’ (number of vehicles, pedestrians, thieves, spread of diseases), ‘indefinite series of events’ (arrival of goods, trade, riots) and ‘indefinite series of accumulating units’ (housing, population growth, schools) (Foucault 2007, 20). The circulation of disease, overcrowding or failure of a crop cannot be known definitively but ‘can only be controlled by an estimate of probabilities’ (Foucault 2007, 20). This, writes Foucault, ‘is pretty much the essential characteristic of the mechanisms of security’ (2007, 20). Although the cases of town planning, overcrowding and epidemics are illustrative, it is important to remember their historical and geographic situation. The problems of eighteenth-century France and Europe, and the governmental solutions, do bear some resemblance to the problems in colonial Australia. Food shortages, town planning and disease control were certainly pressing concerns for the colonial administration. However, the related problems of overcrowding, a post-feudal system and vagrancy were experienced differently. As such, it is important that the historical, political and geographic differences of colonial Australia are not shoehorned to fit with Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of security in Western Europe and France. A key point of difference is the role of territory. Foucault’s analysis of territory is focused largely on eighteenth-century Europe and can be read to imply that territory recedes in importance as a political problem. In the fourth Security, Territory, Population lecture, Foucault states that he has focused on security, population, government (2007, 88), and in concluding the lecture admits that he ‘certainly would not have chosen “security, territory, population”’ as the title and that he is really trying to do ‘a history of “governmentality”’ (2007, 108). The desire to undertake a history of governmentality leads Foucault back to the Hebrew and Christian figure of the shepherd or pastor (Mayes 2010). The literal shepherd of sheep and figurative pastor of souls had the responsibility to feed, protect, heal, guide and breed the flock. In contrast to a sovereign model of power that uses law to rule over a territory, the pastor governs, guides and entices the flock as it wanders over the land in search of fresh pasture. The Christian image of a shepherd caring for

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the flock and managing its safety and reproductive cycles led Foucault to conceive this model of power as the birth of governing a people rather than a territory. Foucault writes that pastoral power is the ‘embryonic point of . . . governmentality’ and ‘marks the threshold of the modern state’ (2007, 165). The figure of the pastor helps Foucault open up new questions about governing and politics that are not reduced to sovereignty and the state – that is, to examine how the conduct and activity of a people is governed. However, in Foucault’s historical analysis he marginalizes the significance of the territory, both in the form of the temporal Promised Land for the Hebraic pastor or the role of territory and Christendom for the Christian pastor. Foucault’s focus on security, population, government gives the false impression that territory is no longer politically relevant and merely associated with ‘old’ problems of the sovereign, whereas security is concerned with ‘new’ problems of governing unpredictable events occurring within a population. In discussing the Security, Territory, Population lectures, Stuart Elden asks: What happens to territory? Why is the object of government explicitly population? (2007, 563). Elden states that ‘whatever Foucault says about territory he is not suggesting that security is aspatial’ (2007, 566). According to Foucault, the traditional understanding of territory is as the ‘foundation . . . of sovereignty’ (2007, 96). On this understanding, inhabitants are separate from the territory, and both are under the rule of the sovereign. Following Guillaume de La Perrière’s writings from the sixteenth century, Foucault argues that the understanding of territory shifts to a collection of qualities to be governed: fertility, dryness, climate, resources and borders. These qualities are the ‘things that government must be concerned about’ (2007, 96). Things and people become the object of government, which helps to explain why territory slips out of Foucault’s analysis. However, the qualities of the territory and their spatial relation to the population remain crucial objects of government; hence the dominance of population in F ­ oucault’s analysis. According to Foucault, government is not concerned with the territory as such, but the relationship between the qualities of a territory and the population. Elden writes that this ‘relational approach’ of understanding territory ‘takes territory not as some static terrain but as a vibrant entity’ (2007, 575). Thus, the pastor is to guide and govern the flock in relation to the qualities of the territory. Although Elden has concerns about the historical and geographical specificity of Foucault’s analysis and his silence on ‘the numerous governmental practices of colonial empires’ (2007, 576), he believes Foucault has provided ‘an important way to understand the relation between governmental practices and territory’ (2007, 577). In particular, Foucault’s thinking of space and the vibrancy of territory powerfully develops ‘a spatial imaginary’ and furthers ‘analysis of concrete spatial practices’ (Elden 2007, 577). This spatial

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imaginary and vibrancy of territory are particularly useful for understanding the relationships among territory, governance and population in colonial Australia. Pastoralists, agrarians and colonial administrators all contributed to a spatial imaginary in which the variables of territory were modified and governed to foster and care for a British population in the Southern Hemisphere. In Australia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the same periods Foucault argues saw the spread of governmentality and mechanisms of security in Europe – there is a clear deployment of security mechanisms focused on ‘things’ to be controlled (rivers, soil, plains, mineral deposits, vacancy and Indigenous inhabitants). However, there is also an acute awareness of the need to control, occupy and rule territory. As described in detail below, both the pastor (or pastoralist) and the agrarian (or farmer) had different relations to the territory. Whereas the pastor moves across a territory in search of fresh pastures, the agrarian is connected to the land. The different relations to territory also lead to differing visions for how that territory should be controlled, occupied and governed. In turn, these differing visions produce different implications for territorial, economic and ontological security – that is, for the production of a home. COLONIAL ARISTOCRACY – GRAZIERS AND PASTORALISTS Although ‘commercial expectations did not motivate the foundation of white Australia’, McMichael notes that ‘just fourteen years after settlement, the British state was encouraging wool growing as a potential export industry’ (1984, 39). The small economic returns, environmental challenges and ­difficulties of securing labour for cultivation of crops led officers and wealthy free settlers to turn away from small-scale agriculture and invest in pastoralism. The acquisition of vast stretches of ‘vacant’ and ‘underused’ lands by extralegal means of squatting or leaseholds made sheep and cattle grazing possible (McMichael 1984, 71). Although the use of these lands would ­create difficulties for the colonial administration as well as provoke hostilities with Indigenous populations, the development of the pastoral industry furthered the economic and territorial security of the colony. In a short period (1810–1850), Australian wool came to dominate London markets. In 1810, Britain imported 80 percent of its wool from Spain and only 3.8 percent from Australia. In 1830, it imported 75 percent from Germany and 8 percent from Australia. By 1850, 47 percent of wool imports were from Australia (the largest percentage) with only 10 percent coming from Germany and 3 percent from Spain (McMichael 1984, 55). These figures not only represent the massive growth of the wool industry in Australia, but a significant

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shift in the British and global economy. Britain was no longer dependent on rival European nations and could draw on its colonies to supply the raw materials for its growing textile industry. Although welcomed in some quarters, these developments presented significant challenges to the social, political and legal order of the colony. The early success of John Macarthur, a former officer, in breeding Spanish merino sheep led to ‘the arrival in New South Wales of several settlers with capital who were acquainted with stock farming’ (McMichael 1984, 52). This also contributed to the notion of the ‘gentleman settler’ who was socially distinct from military officers, emancipists and other free settlers who did not have access to British capital. In comparison to crop production or horticulture, grazing sheep was more profitable and closely connected to global markets. Although it didn’t require significant amounts of labour, grazing required capital investment and access to large tracts of land in order to negotiate territorial variability. There was an abundance of land in Australia, but only those with preexisting wealth or access to capital could enter the pastoral economy. Gascoigne suggests that more than anything else it was the sheep that ‘embodied the spirit of improvement’ (2002, 73). The sheep transformed ‘“waste lands” into profitable ventures, improving convicts into honest workmen and dispossessing the Aboriginal population’ (Gascoigne 2002, 85). The merino sheep in particular ‘took over the grasslands which had long been the hunting grounds of Australia’s original inhabitants’ (­ Gascoigne 2002, 73). Not only did the sheep aid dispossession, but their hooves compacted and deteriorated the land (Muir 2014; Gascoigne 2002, 83). This ‘improvement’ was not aesthetic or environmental but took the form of economic prosperity and production. The growth of the wool industry was not a straightforward matter and created a rift between different conceptions of how the colony should evolve. Governor Macquarie (1810–1821) and Macarthur were at odds about the direction of the colony. Macquarie viewed grazing as a form of ‘social parasitism’ that would not improve the land or settle the colony whereas smallholder farming would (McMichael 1984, 87). In 1819 John Bigge was sent by Lord Bathurst from London to New South Wales to report on the colony (Bennett 1966). Bigge did not have an easy relationship with Macquarie but did form a friendship with Macarthur (Bennett 1966). Bigge’s report The State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales (1822–1823) issued a number of recommendations, many of which favoured the interests of Macarthur and the pastoralists. Bigge concluded that due to the poor fertility of the land, emancipated convicts would not have the capital or means to cultivate thirty acres of land to either subsist or generate a profit. Due to the aridity of the territory, he believed the colonial administration should encourage the growth of the wool industry and ‘need to favour the large landowner rather

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than the small’ as this offered ‘the greatest improvement’, and ‘the future of the colony lay with the pastoral industry’ (Gascoigne 2002, 75). He also recommended the development of ‘joint stock ventures’, such as the Australian Agricultural Company, to advance ‘the fine-wool industry by channelling British capital into the colonies’ (McMichael 1984, 66). In 1822 the pastoralists established the New South Wales Agricultural Society to represent their collective interests in the colonies and to petition the British government ‘to remove import duties on colonial wool’ (McMichael 1984, 65). They were able to secure a favourable tariff arrangement that enabled the fledgling colonial industry to compete with established European producers (Day 1996, 83; McMichael 1984, 65). Australian pastoralists also benefited from convict labour. As Day notes, following ‘Macquarie’s departure in 1822, government policy became one of turning convicts en masse into shepherds’ (Day 1996, 82). The link between cheap land and labour ‘was fundamental to capital accumulation in the pastoral economy’ (McMichael 1984, 183). However, when that link was jeopardised through land reform (1860s onwards) or abolition of convict transportation (1840s), the pastoral economy was thrown into crisis (McMichael 1984, 183). Following the abolition of convict transportation, pastoralists increasingly sourced cheap labour from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Harrison 2004, 32), especially as pastoralism moved north and into remote areas. Partly in response to Bigge’s report and agitation from graziers, the 1820s land regulations ‘ended the tradition of accommodating the small farmer’ and responded to graziers’ demands by opening up fresh pastures outside what is now metropolitan Sydney, areas such as the Hunter Valley and Orange (McMichael 1984, 73). Access to more territory was needed to manage the variability of the terrain and unpredictability of pastures to support stock. This use of territory, however, did not lend itself to growth of a population. As noted by Bigge, ‘the most lucrative form of land use, the grazing of sheep, favoured the large holder’ (Gascoigne 2002, 36). This reinforced Macarthur’s belief that ‘agricultural improvement’ – in the form of grazing – ‘had an overtly political dimension’ that required ‘a government sympathetic to the needs of larger landowners’ (Gascoigne 2002, 81). The political and economic dominance of a landholding class was something colonial governors wished to avoid, but it was proving difficult. Macarthur proposed to Bigge that New South Wales should be ‘controlled by men of real capital, with “estates of at least 10,000 acres (4047 ha) each” who would maintain transported convicts as their labour force and keep them landless and “in proper subjection”’ (Steven 1967). Macarthur criticised Macquarie for encouraging ‘democratic feeling’ in the colony and believed that New South Wales should not seek to emulate the democratic institutions of America but the hierarchy of England (Gascoigne 2002, 36). Other influential colonial figures such as William Wentworth supported the idea of

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replicating English social and political structures, notably an aristocracy in the form of a House of Lords that consisted of elected representatives of landowners. Wentworth was also a supporter of graziers and pastoral industry as the foundation of the society, considering them more important than merchants in adding ‘real wealth to the colony’ (Gascoigne 2002, 57). The potential wealth available (for some) through grazing plus the legal ambiguities over the authority to allocate and use land led to the 1830s rush on land and emergence of ‘squatters’. Initially a pejorative term for men of ill repute illegally occupying land, the term came to be applied to men who were technically illegally occupying land but had significant social standing and capital. McMichael defines the 1830s squatters as graziers who were ‘new emigres, sometimes representing companies floated in Britain . . . landholders from the settled districts . . . and overseers for absentee flockowners from urban centres’ (1984, 89). The squatters upset some of the more established landholders; however, many of the squatters were also from the upper class and had political influence in the colony and in Britain. The squatters’ impatience and disregard for the colonial administration overlapped with aspects of the more general democratic reform movement. Following Bentham and the Chartists, reformers argued that free settlers should have greater representation in the matters of governments. They argued that the colonial governors’ authority only applied to those in the military or convicts and ‘were not binding on free settlers’ who needed to have some form of representation ‘in the formulation of the laws by which they were governed’ (Gascoigne 2002, 41). Although the squatters and graziers were not interested in the democratic reform of Chartists (Llewellyn 2016), Macarthur agreed with this Benthamite reasoning insofar as it could be used to delegitimise the governors’ power over free settlers and land use. A noteworthy example of the grazier-squatter challenge to colonial authority is the John Batman and Port Phillip Association’s Treaty. In 1827 Batman and the Port Phillip Association applied to Governor Darling (1825–1831) for a land grant in Port Phillip, encompassing the area now known as Melbourne. However, a year earlier Darling had restricted land settlement to within the Nineteen Counties – an area that stretched 730km along the New South Wales coast from Kempsey in the north to Bateman’s Bay in the south, and to Wellington, approximately 350km to the west of Sydney. Batman’s request to establish a settlement in Port Phillip, some 700km to the south of Bateman’s Bay, was well outside of this area, and the request was denied. In defiance, in 1835 Batman sailed from Launceston in Van Diemen’s Land to explore the areas surrounding Port Phillip. Meeting with Wurundjeri elders, Batman and the Port Phillip Association negotiated the purchase of six hundred thousand acres in exchange for goods (blankets, axes, clothing, flour, etc.) and an annual tribute (Attwood 2007, 99).

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It is impossible to know the motives of Batman. It could be that he was simply an impatient, land-hungry explorer keen to access new lands and generate wealth. However, Bain Attwood argues that Batman may have been responding to the well-known precedence of treaty making in the North American colonies (2007, 100). Furthermore, coming from Van Diemen’s Land where the frontier wars had been ‘protracted and severe’, Batman may have been sensitive to discussions among evangelicals and humanitarians ‘to contemplate ways of avoiding another war’, which ‘made treaty-making attractive’ (Attwood 2007, 101). Whatever his motives, Batman’s Treaty not only undermined British sovereignty over land allocation, but it was the first instance where the authority of Indigenous inhabitants over land was recognised. However, this recognition and the treaty were short lived. In 1835, Governor Bourke (1831–1837) issued a proclamation rendering Batman’s treaty void. Bourke states: Whereas, it has been represented to me, that divers of His Majesty’s subjects have taken possession of vacant Lands of the Crown . . . under the pretence of a treaty, bargain, or contract, for the purchase thereof, with the Aboriginal Natives; Now therefore, I the Governor, in virtue and in exercise of the power and authority in me vested, do hereby proclaim . . . that every such treaty, bargain, and contract with the Aboriginal Natives as aforesaid . . . is void and of no effect against the rights of the Crown. (1835)

Bourke’s proclamation reestablished the Crown’s sovereignty over the whole continent, even if it had no physical presence in a territory. A year later, Bourke opened up the Port Phillip District for settlement. There was no treaty with Wurundjeri elders or recognition of their prior claim. In a few short years ‘English investors, the Government, and the local banks, settlers and speculators all combined in a wild spree which assisted the pastoral advance’ into the southeast corner of the continent (Powell 1970, 6). Although Batman may not have benefited personally from this expansion (he died in 1839), his fellow graziers quickly possessed the best lands. In 1844 Governor Gipps (1838–1846) tried to control the squatters and graziers through a licence fee and obligation to purchase the land, but in 1847 the British government intervened and issued fourteen-year leases. As Stuart Macintyre notes, ‘[b]y this time they had legitimated their illegal possession into property’ (2009, 75). The pastoralists and squatters improved the land and colony insofar as they generated economic wealth and extended British physical presence. However, pastoralism did not secure or stabilise a governable population. Furthermore, even the pastoralists began to occupy a precarious position. As the pastoral industry became the focus of British merchant bankers, the pastoralist in the colony became increasingly dependent on merchant capital and thereby vulnerable

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to fluctuations in the global price of wool and the world economy. The pastoral industry experienced a number of booms and busts. The 1840s economic depression was an early shock to the industry that initiated a transition of towards ‘urban-based capitalism’ and recognition of the need for ‘alternative patterns of capital accumulation for settlers’ (McMichael 1984, 117). Connection to global markets enabled the growth of the colonial economy, but it also exposed local practices to global fluctuations as well as creating new sociopolitical problems. Although grazing may have produced an aristocratic class of ‘gentlemen settlers’, it did not provide the conditions for an organised and stable settlement of a colonial population. There was also a growing recognition that the cloven hooves of cattle and sheep were having a detrimental impact on the environment (Muir 2014; Gammage 2011). Furthermore, grazing intensified violent conflict with Indigenous inhabitants. Historian Lyndall Ryan and her colleagues at Newcastle University have produced a detailed map of the estimated 172 massacres that occurred in New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland between 1788 and 1872. Many of these massacres were associated with grazing, often justified as acts of retaliation for the theft of stock. Most notorious was the Myall Creek massacre. In June 1838, twelve white stockmen slaughtered twenty-eight unarmed Kamilaroi men, women and children (Gascoigne 2002, 155; Day 1996, 119; Kociumbas 1992, 202; Muir 2014, 18). Myall Creek is not the site of the most murderous event.3 However, it is the most well known event as it resulted in the first convictions of white settlers for violence against Indigenous Australians. Seven of the stockmen were found guilty of murder and hanged, which inflamed tensions between graziers and the colonial administrators. Events in the early twentieth century on the other side of the continent also evidence the disturbing impact of pastoralism on Aboriginal life. The 1906 Canning Stock Route is celebrated in the dominant history as one the great achievements of European explorers. The Western Australian government appointed Alfred Canning to lead a team to survey a route from the southern beef markets into the far north of the Kimberley region to allow the droving of cattle. The 1850km route is the longest stock route in the world. Canning was treated as a hero on his return to Perth. However, the expedition’s cook, Edward Blake, soon alleged that Canning had overseen and instructed the mistreatment of local Indigenous people along the route. A Royal Commission was established where it was heard that Indigenous men were restrained with chains and used as guides. One surveyor testified, It was necessary at times to use chains on our guides but we padded them and made sure they did not chafe the men’s necks. This method of securing them at night left their arms and legs free and . . . they were happy with the arrangement. (Austen 1998, 170)

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When Canning could not find water for his cattle, he caught local Indigenous men, chained them and fed them salt. He then released them to see where they went for water (Ma 2016). Paul Daley writes, that for the Indigenous clans living along the route, ‘the waters were home – the focal point of family, social, spiritual and economic existence. They were – and remain – part of a continuum of the Dreaming and the story and song lines that criss-cross the water and stretch back to creation’ (2015). However, for ‘Canning and the graziers . . . water was a vital commercial asset that was theirs for the taking’ (Daley 2015). On finding their sacred water sites, Canning dug the waterholes into wells for the cattle to drink from, thereby desecrating the sacred sites and abusing the custodians of them. After 7,309 questions, the Royal Commission exonerated Canning and the expedition. Foucault’s analysis of the Hebrew and Christian pastor led him to characterise pastoral power as a power of care, concerned with life of the population. Had he examined the pastor of colonial Australia, violence may have played a greater role in his formulation. Of course, violence eventually does appear in biopolitics. As I have argued elsewhere, violence is the flip side of the pastor’s power of care (Mayes 2009). The colonial pastor’s care for his flock, the bankers and their fellow graziers comes at the expense of the land, Indigenous inhabitants and wider colonial population of labourers and smallhold farmers. As discussed in the previous chapter, biopolitical violence is not merely direct murder and massacres, but structural and systemic. It is the theft of lands and food sources and the introduction of pests and disease. In his 1968 Boyer lectures, W. E. H. Stanner identifies ‘the pastoral industry’ as the ‘greater wrecker’ of Aboriginal life (1991, 34). In comparison to mining and the establishment of villages, ‘pastoralism easily wins’ and ‘must wear the laurels both for the number of tribes dispossessed and dispersed and the expanse of territory over which this happened’ (Stanner 1991, 34). Pastoralism regarded the territory as a vacant resource wanting to be used. The only barriers were the colonial authorities, who were delaying access and the territorial variabilities of water and pastures, which could be managed via cheap or unfree labour of convicts and the Indigenous inhabitants. According to Macarthur and his ilk, pastoralism would establish a strong economy and an ordered aristocracy that would possess the continent and subdue potential political action from convicts, Aboriginal peoples or labourers. In contrast, small-scale yeomanry farming was regarded by the colonial administrators as capable of producing a more stable, self-sufficient and selfgoverning colony. It was also seen as less antagonistic to Indigenous ways of living. As Max Weber notes in his study of agrarianism and European civilisation, ‘the transition to fixed settlement meant a change from the dominance of cattle breeding . . . to an economy dominated by agriculture’ (2013, 37). That is, grazing cattle and sheep may take advantage of the vast tracts of

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land leading to profits for a few, but it does not produce a settled population in the same way farming does. The tension between the economic value of pastoralism and the social value of farming emerged in the early nineteenth century and continues to run through Australian agricultural discourse (Botterill and Cockfield 2009). EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY – SMALLHOLDERS Unlike the United States, where the fertility of the soils in the northeast and access to water enabled smallholder farms to flourish, the Australian landscape was less favourable. ‘Australia was’, in the words of Joseph Powell, ‘long on space and perilously short on water and soil fertility’ (Powell 2002, 157). However, these territorial variables did not dissuade romantic visions of a society based on agrarian farmers. Governors in New South Wales, and later South Australia (established 1834) and Victoria (established 1851), desired a smallholder farming class that would sustain a population and contribute to a domestic economy (Powell 2002, 25). Although graziers and pastoralists brought in wealth for aristocratic elites and eased British dependence on imports from European competitors, it did not cultivate a population of loyal and morally improved citizens. Likewise, the volatility of gold rushes meant that large numbers of men moved quickly from region to region with little sense of communal stability, which fomented radical politics. In 1856 the Victorian Land League, for example, sought to mobilise an egalitarian movement against squatters using the slogans ‘a vote, a farm, a rifle’ and ‘free selection and free grass’ (Toscano 2007, 14). With the growing power of graziers, unregulated possession of land via squatting and unpredictability of the gold rushes, there was growing recognition among colonial administrators that there needed to be a systematic approach to colonisation. These sentiments are captured in the 1855 poem ‘Unlock the Lands’: Not squatters rich or mines of gold, Can make Australia flourish; But horny hands the plough that hold, Its surest wealth can nourish The rulers wise, regard the cries Of thousands seeking toil; Unlock the lands – and thriving hands Shall dress a happy soil. (Anonymous 1855, 355)

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Despite the economic and environmental difficulties, the horny hands of the farmer were promoted as an effective way to colonise the continent and limit the power of graziers. In 1845, Edward Hall, editor of The Australian: Journal of Commerce, Agriculture and Politics and political reformer, lamented ‘the social condition of a pastoral community’ with ‘the obvious tendency . . . to concentrate political influence in the hands of an Oligarchy of large landed proprietors and stockholders, and to preclude anything like a legitimate and wholesome balance being maintained between the constituent interests of the Colony’ (1845). Hall warned that the governor was in danger of becoming a ‘functionary without power’ and ‘passive instrument’ for the ‘overbearing Oligarchy’ (1845). He suggested that an ‘independent yeomanry or intelligent middle classes’ is needed to keep the ‘quasi aristocracy’ in check (1845). But to achieve this, power needed to be wrested from graziers and a more systematic approach to colonization adopted. This involved land reform, which ‘was seen as the catalyst of wider change’ (Powell 1970, 64). As McMichael has argued, although ‘the goal of land reform was to open the squatting leaseholds to selection by small farmers’, it also ‘served the urban bourgeoisie as a political weapon against the economic power of the squatters’ (1984, 245). As discussed in the previous chapter, Benthamite utilitarianism played a significant role in shaping colonial governmentality of improvement and reform. This influence was evident in plans for land reform and creation of a society that does not perpetuate ‘hierarchy and inherited privilege’ while offering ‘possible blueprint for a new political order’ (Gascoigne 2002, 38). A prominent adherent to Bentham’s ideas was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. From the late 1820s through to the 1840s, Wakefield advocated for an approach to colonisation that would make Britain and the Australian colonies prosper. Wakefield’s father was a close friend of Bentham’s, and Wakefield discussed his system of colonisation with both Bentham and Mill (Mills 1974, 76, 91). Initially, Wakefield circulated his ideas on colonialism through his popular, yet fictional, Letter from Sydney (1829). Following Bentham and Mill’s encouragement he wrote a more systematic account of his ideas: England and America (1833) and A View of the Art of Colonization (1849). According to Richard Mills, Wakefield’s ideas ‘originated a new era of colonization, and furnished the inspiration for a new colonial policy’ (1974, 80). Wakefield’s approach to colonisation was a formula that sought to balance the relationship between territory and population in order to secure the colonies and Britain. Wakefield’s plan would not only remedy ‘existing evils in the colonies and in the mother-country’, but would result in prosperity for both (Mills 1974, 90). For Wakefield, the problems of the colony

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stemmed from the combined effects of a scarcity of labour (population) and an abundance of land (territory). In his Letter from Sydney, Wakefield argues that the excess of land means that ‘every man who has capital to cultivate a farm, can obtain one of his own for nothing’ (1968, 104). The low supply of labour drives up and inflates costs. With America in mind, Wakefield argues that the ‘superabundance of land to which English economists, from Adam Smith downwards, attribute the prosperity of new colonies, has never led to great prosperity without some kind of slavery’ (Wakefield 1968, 479). He also attributes the prosperity of New South Wales and Van ­Diemen’s Land to the supply of ‘slave-labour in the shape of convicts’ (Wakefield 1968, 480). Like Bentham, Wakefield argues against transportation of convicts. He suggests that convict labour cannot be relied on and that despite the pastoralists ‘extreme fear’ that transportation will be discontinued, convict labour is not a long-term solution to establishing a prosperous society (1968, 832). Furthermore, Wakefield believed that the association of convict transportation with the Australian colonies dissuaded ‘the gentry class of emigrants’ (1968, 832). Successful colonisation for Wakefield consisted of two key ingredients: ‘waste land and emigration’ (Mills 1974, 93). These served the aims of extending markets for surplus produce, relief from overpopulation and the ‘enlargement of the field for employing capital’ (Mills 1974, 93). For Wakefield, the problems of the colony (abundance of land, scarcity of non-convict labour and lack of capital investment) are solved by addressing the problems of England (excess of capital and oversupply of labour) (Mills 1974, 90). As such, ‘a good system of disposing of colonial waste lands’ was the linchpin to Wakefield’s plan. Wakefield proposed a government-controlled ‘system of restricting the amount of available land’ (Mills 1974, 98). A price on land would stall labourers’ capacity to become landowners and keep them as wage earners for a period to help build and improve the colony. Wakefield was not interested in aristocratic desires to prohibit certain classes from becoming landowners; he merely wanted a sufficient or restrictive price to slow the transition from labourer to landowner. How this price should be determined remained a point of debate throughout Wakefield’s life, as did the question about what to do with the money generated from the sale of land (Mills 1974, 104–5). A primary use of the money was to develop a fund to attract high-quality immigrants. According to Wakefield, Australia needed to learn from Canada’s mistake of accepting paupers from England. The effect of ‘these pauper-shovellings is to make the common people think of emigration with dislike and terror’ (Wakefield 1968, 831). Instead, Australia needed to encourage young married couples and ‘respectable people’ to migrate and replenish the stock of labourers who had progressed to landowners (Wakefield 1968, 872).

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Karl Marx discusses Wakefield’s approach to colonisation in the final chapter of Capital: Volume 1.4 According to Marx, Wakefield did not discover anything new about the colonies, ‘but in the colonies’ he discovered ‘the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country’ (1990, 932) – namely, the necessity of wage labourers for capitalism. In Marx’s assessment, Wakefield discovered that money, machinery and the means of production does not ‘stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer’ (1990, 932). On Marx’s reading, Wakefield’s system amounted to an attempt to create a ‘class of wage-labourers’ in the colonies to provide the necessary conditions for ‘capitalist accumulation and the capitalist mode of production’ (1990, 933). Aside from Marx’s derisive tone, it is unlikely that Wakefield would disagree with his summary. Wakefield was trying to create a class of labourers and did want the ‘government to set an artificial price on the virgin soil, a price independent of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work for a long time for wages’ (1990, 938). Wakefield was not interested in Marx’s ideal of turning ‘a dream into a reality’ in the colonies (1990, 934), but he wanted to create an economically prosperous and rationally ordered society. Like Bentham’s attempts to create rationally ordered systems of punishment and social welfare, Wakefield sought to develop a rational and ordered system of colonisation. In sum, his systematic approach to colonisation sought to regulate the use of land, encourage high-quality immigrants and attract capital investment. This would produce a ‘civilised society’ with ‘a range of occupations’ and ‘discourage large underutilised estates and promote denser settlement’ (Gascoigne 2002, 63). That is, it would produce a population to be cared for and encouraged to flourish. However, in the biopolitical dynamics it would also create another population that was to be disallowed and excluded. Wakefield’s system was an explicit challenge to the disorder resulting from both convict transportation and pastoralism. According to Mills, ‘Wakefield always had in view the development of agricultural industry in a colony . . . where the tillage of arable farms was gradually displacing the grazing of sheep and cattle’ (1974, 112). This is the point where Marx approved of Wakefield for denouncing the pastoralists and the ‘shameless squandering of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats and capitalists’ (1990, 940). Small-scale agriculture, rather than grazing, worked with Wakefield’s system to create a denser or ‘closer settlement’. The call for a ‘closer settlement’ carried with it a political agenda of reform and egalitarianism that directly confronted the interests of the graziers and squatters (Muir 2014, 32). It was also put forward as a rational and efficient approach to the development of necessary infrastructure (railways, communication lines, irrigation, etc.) to connect key rural, regional and urban hubs. Closer settlement was regarded as crucial for the development of a nation.

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As Judith Brett notes, ‘[n]o matter how economically profitable the pastoral industry, underpopulated sheep runs were not regarded as sufficient basis for a nation’ (2007, 6). Foreshadowing aspects of the regenerative farming movements of the late twentieth century, Wakefield’s closer settlement of smallholder farmers combined mixed arable crops with ‘animal husbandry to promote the fertility of the soil’ (Gascoigne 2002, 84). A variety of schemes to foster closer settlement were implemented well into the twentieth century, such as soldier-settler and migration schemes (Baker 2015; Powell 1989, 136; Fry 1985). It could be argued that current programs to resettle refugees in rural and regional areas are the not-so-distant echoes of the desire for closer and denser settlements to populate the interior (Razaghi 2017). These settlements would not only serve to strengthen the nation, but they were tied to ‘the agrarian belief that it was better for people to live in the country than the city’ (Brett 2007, 7). Closer settlement holds out the promise for the improvement and transformation of convicts, migrants and, perhaps today, refugees into virtuous citizens. However, there was a large gap between rhetoric and reality. Although there was support to reduce the power of the graziers and squatters through egalitarian social and political reforms, by the 1860s this had not been achieved. In 1861 New South Wales passed the Crown Lands Alienation Act (also known as the Robertson Act), and Victoria passed the Sale of Crown Lands Act. These acts, and the amended versions, sought to address the growing legal issue of squatters subverting the authority of the Crown by occupying vast tracts of arable land (Fitzpatrick 1947, 9). Land legislation also sought to solve the ‘problem of putting a large new population to productive work’ by making arable land available for the 150,000 exgoldminers. However, squatters used loopholes, economic power and inside knowledge about the condition of certain lands to circumvent the intention of these acts and to occupy and possess more land. The subversion of land reforms did not work towards the long-term benefit of graziers or farmers. The 1890 economic depression led to bankruptcy and transfer of wealth from graziers and farmers to the lending banks. This combined with a series of crises in the global wool market as well as drought, which forced many graziers and famers off the land (Blainey 1983, 318ff). As such, one hundred million sheep were no longer the property of wealthy grazing families such as the Macarthurs, but they were owned by the banks (Fitzpatrick 1947, 12). Fitzpatrick argues that the 1860s land legislation had two lasting effects: First, it failed to create and support small farming. Second, it transferred the squatters’ homesteads away from producer control to financial control. Fitzpatrick concludes that corporate ‘control of the Australian pastures, leasehold and freehold, was the chief result of the legislation which had been designed to make arable pastures available to small farmers’ (1947, 12). Those farmers

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who were able to prosper ‘did so as large-scale commercial producers who brought additional land, hired extra labour and combined farming with grazing’ (Macintyre 2009, 99–100). The 1890s also saw a transformation in the role of small-scale farming. The increasing concentration of the population in urban centres meant there was less material connection to the vision of a nation of farmers. In 1891, ‘two-thirds of the Australian population lived in cities and towns, a fraction matched by the United States only in 1920 and by Canada not until 1950’ (Lewis 2003, 51). Infrastructure and economic development focused on the urban environment. Wakefield’s scheme may never have been fully realised, but farming retained an important social role that could ‘redeem the settler project’ (Muir 2014, 4). Whereas pastoralism and mining scarred the land, farming was thought capable of restoring and beautifying the landscape. It was the small-scale farmer who could produce little England – a new home that looked and tasted like the old one. An agrarian imaginary, ‘charged with aesthetic, moral, political, and social presumptions’, was nurtured by government officials as early as the 1890s (Powell 2002, 156). The New South Wales Department of Agriculture offered prizes to farmers not only for agricultural production, but ‘“cleanliness” of the land, and the general “neatness and suitability of their home and farm buildings”’ (Muir 2014, 4). Small-scale agriculture also had a therapeutic role. As mentioned in the previous chapter, colonial medicine negotiated the relationship among race, the environment and civic well-being. This has important implications for knowing and governing the variability of territory. According to Anderson, ‘colonial medicine was another way of knowing the country’ (2002, 31). The variability of topography and climate had crucial implications for the well-being, health and adaptability of the new settlers. Cultivation of the soil not only ‘cleaned the land’, but it was regarded as good for health and made ‘the place more English’ (Anderson 2002, 31). In contrast, digging, as in mining, was considered aesthetically, socially and physiologically damaging. It was believed that disturbing the soil could release ‘powerful emanations [that] might beset bodily systems’ (Anderson 2002, 31). As such, it was hoped that cultivation would transform the chaos generated by minefields and grazing into an orderly, settled and English homeland. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some settlers began to ‘feel as though they had never left England’ (Anderson 2002, 37). According to Anderson, ‘[w]hite bodies, as long as they remained clean, pure, and productive, had come to seem natural, even innocent, in the more hygienic and purified environment of southeastern Australia’ (2002, 38). A range of influences made it possible for white bodies to transform from being an alien presence to a natural and innocent belonging. Agrarian practices, in particular, were able to work with and control the territorial variabilities, making them more

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productive, self-sufficient and capable of nurturing an egalitarian population. These practices would secure the population and transform the territory into a British home in the Southern Hemisphere. What would become of those who already called these lands home? And could British settlers feel completely at home while the original inhabitants remained as wandering reminders of an uncomfortable truth? SECURING A TERRITORY, CREATING A HOME The pastoral industry and small-scale farming each presented a differing vision for how Australia should be settled, the kind of political order that should be established and the type of population that should be fostered. In short, each presented a vision for how the alien and barren Australian continent could be secured and transformed into a home. Despite the economic challenges faced by the pastoral industry in the late nineteenth century and difficulties of establishing small-scale farming, agriculture and the mythic farmer continued to play an important role in the Australian imaginary throughout the twentieth century and into the present – specifically, by grounding Australia’s territorial, economic and ontological security. Charles Thatcher’s5 anti-squatter poem from the 1850s reveals the way the security objectives of territory, economy and ontology are enmeshed and entangled: Upset squatterdom domination, Give every poor man a home, Encourage our great population And like wanderers no more we’ll roam; Give, in mercy, a free scope to labour Uphold honest bold industry, Then no-one will envy his neighbour But contented and happy we’ll be. (cited in Macintyre 2009, 98)

Access to territory creates wealth and home for a great population where honest industry flourishes and envy dissipates in egalitarian harmony. Through the activities of pastoralists and farmers, the British sought to secure and govern the territory, not as a static entity, but as what Elden refers to as a ‘vibrant entity’ (2007, 575). The fertility of soils, dryness of a region, presence or absence of resources and the creation of borders became variables to be managed and controlled. As discussed in the first chapter, the governance of territory drew on Enlightenment ideals of improvement. Gascoigne argues that the application of human reason ‘took root’ in Australia ‘largely through

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the transplantation of agricultural techniques and habits of mind designed to improve the land and to make it better serve human demands’ (Gascoigne 2002, 85). Here the relationality of territory and population plays out. The demand of the human population is noteworthy. These are not passive needs but active demands that require governance and management: demands of physical survival and subsistence initially, but also demands of economic wealth, freedom, a national identity and secured homeland. The pastoralists and agrarians are concrete expressions of the governmental drive to improve and secure the variabilities of territory in order to produce a home for the population. Each presented different, yet at times overlapping ways for the vibrancy and variability of territory to be governed and arranged in order to secure the human demands of the fledging British population. Wakefield’s scheme is a telling example of the desire to control and govern a population in relation to the territory. This was a period that marked the beginning of the European world’s anxiety concerning overpopulation. According to Mitchell Dean, overpopulation was the ‘prism’ through which an array of domestic and international political issues was viewed: poverty, economic development, national security, immigration (2015, 19). In Europe, the combined effects of overpopulation and scarcity of arable land exposed the limits of the laws of life. This is the hard reality that Malthus sought to draw attention to. Yet, Malthus is surprisingly absent from Foucault’s discussions of the governmental practices that sought to manage the limits of life by controlling the movements and productivity of European populations. However, it was not merely the internal management of European populations that tried to overcome the limits of the laws of life. The other side of the equation, arable land, was of special interest in the European colonial project. Dean argues that Foucault needed to pay greater attention to Malthus to see that the emergence of population did not replace territory, but ‘the very notion of population . . . was inextricably linked to the appropriation of land and the establishment of territory’ (2015, 22). Nineteenth-century Australia presents a different perspective to European bureaucrats and philosophers regarding the population debates. In Australia, the governmental link between population and territory was obvious. The ­­concern was not overpopulation of territory, but the occupation of a territory with the right kind of people. This was evident in Wakefield’s concern that Australia should not become a dumping ground for paupers and vagrants, but that ‘well-born emigrants’ and good middle-class couples should be encouraged to settle (1968, 872). Wakefield and those following him expressed a strong desire for people to populate Australia who would biologically and economically produce for the Empire. In the 1880s this desire was increasingly expressed using the rhetoric of white supremacy. With growing ­concern about ‘serious competition from Asians’, whiteness emerged as a

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racial category while former identifiers such as English, Scottish or AngloSaxon began to recede (Anderson 2009, 67). The Australian Natives Association, for example, was an association established by and for white men born in Australia who gave financial and organizational support for the federation of the Australian colonies. One of its members was Alfred Deakin, a young up-and-coming politician who would eventually become prime minister. Speaking in 1901, Deakin expressed the importance of racial homogeneity for Australia, saying: The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, an aspiration towards the same ideals, of a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought. (2014, 335)

Later, in 1903 he said: A white Australia is not a surface, but it is a reasoned policy which goes down to the roots of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial, and political organisations is governed. (1903)

The white supremacy espoused by Deakin, the Australian Natives’ Association and others serves to connect the racial quality of the population with productive use of the territory and security of the nation. Like colonial medicine and early eugenicists, agriculture played an important role in the matrix by cultivating ‘the land in order to establish a natural harmony of race and circumstance, to feel comfortably at home and thus healthy’ (Anderson 2002, 255). This territorial expression of white supremacy was not merely concerned with control over who can cross Australian borders and become part of the population, but it is bound up with historical acts of dispossession and denial of  Indigenous sovereignty. Population and territory were entwined in this nation-building project. The ‘[l]andholders sought to remake the continent’s interior as a paddock for England’ that would be populated by white British people and stock (Muir 2014, 2). Landscape would not only be transformed to look like home, but the attempt to create a place of belonging manifest in the use of British names for regions – a New England, a New South Wales – and towns, such as Perth, York, Newcastle, Richmond and so on. Of course, the landscape did not simply yield to the British attempts to control and tame it, but it forced the new population to adapt and change to the new conditions and unpredictability of the territory. Drought, fires, unpredictable rainfall, erosion and floods required careful negotiation. The unyielding difference of the Australian landscape is why the myth of the bushman, the farmer and the

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grazier transforming it into a liveable home is so enduring. As Don Watson observes, the ‘settlers in Australia yearned for the feeling of ancestral connection to that English scenes evoked’ (2014, 108). The farmer helped soothe this yearning. Agricultural activity not only transformed the land and allowed for the reproduction of a population, but it produced British foods via British means of cultivation, further shaping a foreign land into home. Davey et al. write, ‘early settlers clung as closely as they could to the dietary pattern to which they had been accustomed, however unsuitable it might be of their altered circumstances’ (1945, 206). In the early years, it could be argued that the settlers were simply ignorant of native foods or so arrogant in the belief of European civilisation as to risk starvation rather than learn from Indigenous foodways. However, the importation of the cuisine and food practices of the homeland was a significant means of maintaining cultural identity and making the new lands home. Of course, recipes were adapted and local substitutes adopted for unavailable ingredients. The culinary history of Australia reveals an intricate relationship between British settlers and the innovative use of native flora and fauna (Santich 2012). Edward Abbott, for example, wrote the first Australian cookbook in 1864, which included recipes for roasted wombats and kangaroo brains in butter, as well as traditional British dishes such as toad in the hole and bread and butter pudding (1864). Although some settlers expressed enthusiasm for dishes using native fauna, they were always substitutes for ‘the real thing’. The place of lamb, pork, beef or chicken in the Australian paddock and diet has never been rivalled by wombat, wallaby, kangaroo or emu. British meats, and vegetables such as potatoes and pumpkins, reproduced the taste of home and helped to transform a new land into a homeland. Cultural anthropologist Claude Fischler examines the complex relationship between food, cuisine and identity. According to Fischler, ‘food and cuisine are a quite central component of the sense of collective belonging’ (1988, 280). Cuisine is a key avenue through which we define ourselves and other human groups. A cuisine binds together a community and grounds it in the natural environment. As such, ‘culinary systems’, writes Fischler, ‘play a part in giving a meaning to man [sic] and the universe, by situating them in relation to each other in an overall continuity and contiguity’(1988, 281). It is through eating together that we become who we are and connected to a place. Similarly, Steven Shapin comments in relation to the cliché you are what you eat, ‘the practices attending the production, preparation and ingestion of food make up much of the substance of moral and social order. We are, literally and fundamentally, what we eat’ (2004). The yeoman farmer not only ensured survival and developed economic prosperity, but he helped establish a social and moral order into which the British could

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belong. To eat mutton and potatoes, rather than kangaroo and yams, was a step towards ontological possession as much as it was physical and legal possession. Significantly, the production of a population that belongs to the land, that is at home in this place, required the insecurity of those who were previously at home. Whether it was Wakefield’s ‘closer settlement’ or Macarthur’s ‘squattocracy’, agricultural activity often provoked and justified frontier violence. Cameron Muir notes that the result of transforming the land into an English paddock was ‘brutality, massacres, corruption, animal cruelty and environmental waste on a scale that threatened to derail the entire settler project’ (2014, 2). It was not just the settler project that was threatened, but the entire life world of the Indigenous population was irrevocably scarred. As the traditional lands of Indigenous Australians were increasingly explored, invaded and occupied, they ran out of spaces to practice their own foodways. This created tensions among tribes and with the invading British over access to land. As traditional food sources were destroyed and hunting grounds stolen, Aboriginal peoples were forced into more regular interaction with the invading population, often leading to violence and death squads issuing reprisals for the theft of sheep and cattle. This is the murderous side of biopolitics that disallows the lives of some in the process of fostering a population to be cared for. In Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power, and later governmentality, he argues that a new model of power emerges that seeks to govern a people rather than a territory. However, in a settler-colonial context we see that the Indigenous population is governed in order to secure and possess the territory from under them. Like water, aridity or soil fertility, the Indigenous inhabitants fell into the category of the ‘given things’ of a territory requiring management (Foucault 2007, 19). A central part of this approach to governing Indigenous populations was moving them onto reserves in order to protect and civilise them. British authorities in London were concerned by reports of massacres in the colonies. In 1837 the Select Committee Report on Aboriginal Tribes sought to establish greater oversight from London and reduce the drastic decline of Indigenous populations via disease, malnutrition and massacres (Moses 2004b, 29). This report was largely ignored, and Aboriginal peoples became dependent on the food available through towns, charitable services or in return for performing menial duties. This dependency led to further exploitation (economic and sexual) by the settlers. Some settlers and officials wanted to murderously eradicate the unpredictable problem. For example, Charles Gale, a squatter in northwestern Australia, told a magistrate that the theft of stock by Aboriginals could be stopped if ‘the government shut its eyes for six months and allowed the settlers to deal with the natives in their

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own way’ (Austen 1998, 168). Gale later went on to become Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. Stories of brutality continued to trouble British officials and colonial authorities. Humanitarians, evangelicals and colonial administrators argued that the British had a moral duty to ‘protect’ the Aboriginal population. In 1840 the London-based Imperial Land Commissioners advised Governor Gipps that, The different Settlements in New Holland have been planted without reference to the feelings and to the necessities of the Natives, who wander over the Land; and it appears just that . . . reserves of Land should be made for their use and benefit in order that the best means should be taken for enabling them to pass from the hunting to the agricultural and pastoral life. (Elliot, Torrens and Villiers 1924, 738)

Aboriginal populations became characterised as a wandering and unpredictable element of a territory that required management. Foucault points to this dynamic of governing the given ‘things’ of a territory in Security, Territory, Population where he argues that governmentality is no longer preoccupied with the problems of ‘fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad . . . [ensuring] that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out’ (Foucault 2007, 65). The protectorates were part of this governmental process that sought to sift the good (sedentary and productive) from the bad (wandering and traditional). Whereas the graziers suggested violent eradication of the ‘danger’, the humanitarian solution was to allocate lands as protectorates where Aboriginal peoples could be taught the advantages of ‘civilised’ and ‘settled’ life. The Aborigines Protection Act 1869 (Victoria) was the first piece of legislation in Australia that created a ‘system of administration for Indigenous people living insides its borders’ (Boucher 2015, 76). This served as a model for the other colonies (soon to become states). The designers of the Act argued that it was for ‘protection and justice’; however, it also entailed ‘the most far-reaching intrusions into the lives and liberties of Indigenous peoples yet seen in the nineteenth century’ (Boucher 2015, 74). This involved confining the Aboriginal population to ‘isolated reserves under oppressive regimes of discriminatory regulation’ (Moses 2004a, 7). This enabled a series of governmental regimes that determined where they could live, what schools their children attended, the clothes they wore, the occupations they could pursue and, significantly, the food they ate. Tim Rowse, for example, has powerfully demonstrated the role of the reserves and rationing of flour to infantilise and transform Aboriginal peoples into governable subjects (1998).

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It was hoped that in these reserves they would ‘congregate, learn the truths of Christianity and also agricultural knowledge’ (Shaw 1990, 46). The biopolitical rationale was that these protectorates would ‘afford them security from the exploitation and violence of frontier existence’ (Moses 2004a, 7). However, they also served the interests of the colonialists ‘who were happy to have Aborigines removed from fertile farmland and country towns’ (Moses 2004a, 7). Or at least they were happy until ‘the neighbouring squatters cast envious eyes on the land held by the Protectorate and criticised what they saw as the soft life of its inhabitants’ (Gascoigne 2002, 160). CONCLUSION Agriculture not only cultivated sovereignty and improved the land, but it helped produce two populations with two different ontological belongings: the white settler population and the dispossessed Indigenous population. One was cared for, fostered and encouraged to reproduce; the other was excluded, secured and, until the 1930s, quite literally expected to die. One belonged to a new little England, while the other was quarantined within little England. The boundaries between these populations have tightened and relaxed over the course of the twentieth century. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, as well as postwar migration, challenged the governmental logics that tried to control the territory and produce a white population. This is an ongoing struggle that is addressed in later chapters. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the farmer and the grazier were central to enactment of the governmental rationality that dispossessed the original inhabitants and introduced mechanisms of security that transformed the land into a British and then white possession. These agricultural practices also provided economic prosperity and created a homeland. The original occupants, however, did not simply fade away, but they have remained to defiantly ask the unsettling question: Where do you come from? No matter how often ‘we grew here, you flew here’ is chanted or ‘British settlement was a good thing’ is declared, this is a question that continues to trouble the being of the occupiers and their relation to the land they possess. As Anderson notes, the ‘[h]arsh landscapes and persistent Aboriginality – each substituting at time for the other – repeatedly returned to unsettle the modern white nation, making it feel strange and uncanny again’ (2002, 257). This strange and uncanny feeling needs to be embraced and used to rethink and retell the dominant history. The telling of agricultural history cannot begin with the felling of eucalypts and success of James Ruse while ignoring the spilling of Indigenous blood, unfree labour and reservations, among other things. However, such a

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rethinking and retelling of history is tightly policed. The narrative of triumphal and relatively peaceful settlement is too important to white belonging and white possessing. It cannot simply be opened up and exposed. It is also too important for economic prosperity, which is the topic of the following chapter. The farmer not only secured and created a homeland for the white settler, but in the twentieth century the mythic farmer serves to negotiate a set of alternate problems relating to the biopolitics of global population growth, the profitability of export agriculture and Australia’s self-understanding as beneficently ‘feeding the world’. NOTES 1. La Volonté de savoir was published in France 17 November 1976. The Sécurité, territoire, population lectures were delivered 11 January 1978–5 April 1978. 2. Social apparatuses or arrangements. For a discussion of dispositif in Foucault, see Mayes 2016; Bussolini 2010; Deleuze 1992. 3. In January of the same year at a nearby location, now known as Waterloo or Slaughterhouse Creek, two hundred to three hundred Kamilaroi were massacred by fifteen men using swords, pistols and shotguns (Milliss 1992, 189). 4. I acknowledge Warwick Anderson for drawing my attention to this text. 5. For an account of Thatcher’s life, see Anderson 1976.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, E. (1864). The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. An Earnest Advocate for Colonisation on Right Principles. (1840). ‘Church Schemes in South Australia.’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 2 May. Anderson, H. (1976). Thatcher, Charles Robert (1831–1878). In Australian Dictionary of Biography, edited by Robert Kubicek. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Anderson, W. (2002). The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ———. (2009). ‘Traveling White.’ In Re-Orienting Whiteness, edited by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus, 65–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anonymous. (1855). ‘Unlock the Lands.’ In Sources of Australian History, edited by Manning Clark, 354–55. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press. Attwood, B. (2007). ‘Thieves Like Us’, Meanjin, 66(3), 99. Austen, T. (1998). A Cry in the Wind: Conflict in Western Australia, 1829–1929. Beaconsfield, WA: Darlington Publishing Group.

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Baker, C. (2015). From Nation-Building to Neoliberalism: Agriculture, Change and the Social Imaginary in Australia. Paper read at Refereed Proceedings of TASA 2015 Conference. Bennett, J. M. ‘Bigge, John Thomas (1780–1843)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb. anu.edu.au/biography/bigge-john-thomas-1779/text1999, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 4 November 2017. Blainey, G. (1983). A Land Half Won, rev. ed. Melbourne: Sun Books. Botterill, L. C. (2009). ‘An Agrarian Party in a Developed Democracy.’ In The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors, edited by Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield, 10–26. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Botterill, L. C., and G. Cockfield, eds. (2009). The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Boucher, L. (2015). ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular Ethnography and the Governance of Aboriginal Subjects.’ In Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, edited by Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, 63–94. Canberra, ACT: ANU Press. Bourke, G. R. (1835). Proclamation of Governor Bourke, edited by Colonial Office of the British Government: British Government. Brett, J. (2007). ‘The Country, the City and the State in the Australian Settlement’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42(1), 1–17. Bussolini, J. (2010). ‘What Is a Dispositive?’, Foucault Studies, (10), 85–107. Cornwall, J., G. Collie and P. Ashton. (2000). Sustaining a Nation: Celebrating 100 Years of Agriculture in Australia. Edgecliff, NSW: Focus. Daley, P. (2015). ‘A Dark Chapter of History Is Tied Up in the Canning Electorate.’ The Guardian, 5 September. Davey, L., M. Macpherson and F. W. Clements (1945). ‘The Hungry Years: 1788–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Australian and His Diet’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 3(11), 187–208. Day, D. (1996). Claiming a Continent: A History of Australia. Sydney: HarperCollins. Deakin, A. (1903). Delivered at Ballarat, Victoria. 29 October. In Australian Federal Election Speeches, https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903alfred-deakin?highlight=deakin. Accessed 1 March 2018]. Canberra, ACT: Museum of Australian Democracy. ———. (2014). ‘The Commonwealth of Australia Shall Mean a “White Australia.”’ In Well May We Say . . . : The Speeches That Made Australia, edited by Sally Warhaft, 328–42. Melbourne, VIC: Text. Dean, M. (2015). ‘The Malthus Effect: Population and the Liberal Government of Life’, Economy and Society, 44(1), 18–39. Deleuze, G. (1992). ‘What Is a Dispositif?’ In Michel Foucault, Philosopher, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 159–68. New York: Routledge. Editorial. (1828). ‘To Sir James Macintosh, M.P.’ The Monitor, 28 May, 3–8. Editorial. (1853). ‘Unlock the Lands.’ The Argus, 8 February. Elden, S. (2007). ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(3), 562–80.

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Elliot, T. F., R. Torrens and E. E. Villiers. (1924). ‘Land and Emigration Commissioners to Under Secretary Stephen.’ In Historical Records of Australia: Governors’ Dispatches to and from England, Volume XXI, October 1840–March 1842, 7–8. Sydney, NSW: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament. Fischler, C. (1988). ‘Food, Self and Identity’, Social Science Information/sur les sciences sociales, 27(2), 275–92. Fitzpatrick, B. (1947). ‘The Big Man’s Frontier and Australian Farming’, Agricultural History, 21(1), 8–12. Foucault, M. (1983). ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power.’ In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (2000a). ‘The Risks of Security.’ In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. London: Penguin Books. ———. (2000b). ‘Technologies of the Self.’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 223–52. London: Penguin. ———. (2004). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. London: Penguin. ———. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2008). Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart, François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana,. Hampshire, Great Britain: Palgrace Macmillan. Fry, K. (1985). ‘Soldier Settlement and the Australian Agrarian Myth after the First World War’, Labour History, (48), 29–43. Gammage, B. (2011). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Gascoigne, J. (2002). The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, E. (1845). ‘Responsible Government for New South Wales.’ The Australian, 4 February. Harrison, R. (2004). Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. Sydney, NSW: University of New South Wales Press. Henzell, T. (2007). Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges. Collingwood, VIC: CSIRO. Howard, J. (2001). Speech at Sydney, NSW, 28 October 2001. In Australian Federal Election Speeches, https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/2001john-howard Accessed 1 March 2018]. Canberra, ACT: Museum of Australian Democracy. Kociumbas, J. (1992). The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2, 1770–1860: Possessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, M. J. (2003). The People’s Health – Public Health in Australia, 1788–1950, vol. 1, Contributions in Medical Studies. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Praeger. Llewellyn, D. G. M. (2016). Australia Felix: Jeremy Bentham and Australian Colonial Democracy, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies; School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

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Ma, N. D. (2016). Putuparri and the Rainmakers. Northcote, VIC: Sensible Films. Macintyre, S. (2009). A Concise History of Australia, 3rd ed. Cambridge and Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin. Mayes, C. (2009). ‘Pastoral Power and the Confessing Subject in Patient-Centred Communication’, Journal Bioethical Inquiry, 6(4), 483–93. ———. (2010). ‘The Violence of Care: An Analysis of Foucault’s Pastor’, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, 11(1), 111–26. ———. (2016). The Biopolitics of Lifestyle: Foucault, Ethics and Healthy Choices. London: Routledge. McMichael, P. (1984). Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milliss, R. (1992). Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales. Ringwood, VIC: McPhee Gribble. Mills, R. (1974). The Colonization of Australia: The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Moses, A. D. (2004a). ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australia.’ In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 3–48. New York: Berghahn Books. ———, ed. (2004b). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, vol. 6. New York: Berghahn Books. Muir, C. (2014). The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History. London: Routledge. Nicolacopoulos, T., and G. Vassilacopoulos. (2014). Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins. Melbourne: Re.Press. Powell, J. M. (1970). The Public Lands of Australia Felix; Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834–91 with Special Reference to the Western Plains. Melbourne and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. ———. (1989). Watering the Garden State: Water, Land, and Community in Victoria, 1834–1988. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin. ———. (2002). ‘Colonial Translations: Peasants and Parsons in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Historical Geography, (30), 155–76. Razaghi, T. (2017). ‘More Regional Refugee Resettlements Likely, Backed by Deputy Prime Minister.’ ABC New England, 18 January. Rowse, T. (1998). White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press. Santich, B. (2012). Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press. Shapin, S. (2004). ‘The Great Neurotic Art.’ London Review of Books, 5 August, 16–18. Shaw, A. G. L. (1990). ‘The Aborigines and the Land: Port Phillip, 1835–48.’ In New Perspectives in Australian History, edited by Carl Bridge, 39–51. London: The Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies.

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Stanner, W. E. H. (1991). After the Dreaming. Crows Nest, NSW: ABC Books. Steven, Margaret, ‘Macarthur, John (1767–1834)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb. anu.edu.au/biography/macarthur-john-2390/text3153, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 2 June 2017. Toscano, J. (2007). The Victorian Land Convention. Anarchist Media Institute 2007. http://anarchistmedia.org/pdf/The-Victorian-Land-Convention-A-Vote-A-FarmA-Rifle.pdf, accessed 9 September 2017. Wakefield, E. G. (1968). The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, edited by Muriel F. Lloyd Prichard. London: Collins. Watson, D. (2014). The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin Random House Australia. Weber, M. (2013). The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: Verso.

Chapter 3

Alternative Problems, Alternative Solutions Security and Sovereignty in the Global Food System

The way we do modern agriculture will determine the fate of our species. – Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress (2014, 7)

In 2012, Governor-General Quentin Bryce launched the Australian Year of the Farmer where she acknowledged ‘Australia’s long history is linked to the land. Our society rode on the sheep’s back for decades. Vast areas of our country were opened up by pioneers searching for good pasture’ (Bryce 2011). The goal of the Australian Year of the Farmer campaign was to celebrate the ‘contribution of farming in Australia to the economy, society and environment’. Events were held around the country, and promotional videos were used to advertise the significance of farming in Australia’s history as well as its contribution to local and global economies. The flagship video adapted its title from the 1965 Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told. The success of Australian farming, according to the video, is the “Greatest Story Never Told” (Year of the Farmer 2011). Messianic themes did not end with the title. The video opens by stating, ‘1970–2010 the world population doubles’, but ‘farm land does not’, which ‘makes for one hungry planet!’ The problem: ‘Who will feed it?’ The answer: ‘Our farmers, that’s who!’ Australian farming plays the role of saviour not only for Australia but for a growing and hungry world. According to the video, in 2010 ‘Australian farmers used 7.3% less land than they used in 1950’, yet ‘produced 220% more’. This increased productivity was made possible by advances in research and development, new technology and innovation. Anticipating questions about 81

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sustainability, the video claims that as productivity has increased so have ‘techniques for sustaining all our resources’, which has helped to balance ‘feeding the world’ with ‘responsible conservation’. Finally, the viewer is asked to imagine the future with an ever-growing population. In ‘2050, there will be 9.3 billion’ people, and ‘farmers around the world will need to increase productivity by a massive 70%’ using ‘the same amount of land!’ In this future, the video concludes, the farmer will be vital. The viewer is asked to consider the mutual dependence of farmer and consumer – ‘Your future is in our farmers’ hands!’ and ‘their future is in yours!’ The Australian Year of the Farmer campaign draws on the power of the farmer in the moral and social imaginary of Australia to promote an economic agenda that may not, in fact, be good for farmers or those who buy and eat their produce. In repurposing colonial ideals of feeding the Empire, Australian agriculture in the early to mid-twentieth century saw itself as part of a new ‘productionist’ agenda of feeding the world (Lang and Heasman 2012; McMichael 2009). Agriculture dramatically changed over the course of the twentieth century. Advances in chemistry (e.g., synthesizing ammonium nitrate) and improvement of petrol-powered farm machinery enabled the production of greater yields that were less vulnerable to pests and environmental contingencies. Yet, the spectre of Malthus reappeared at the global level in the form of social and political turmoil leading to humanitarian crises. Early and mid-twentieth century famines in Russia, China, Greece and India contributed to the death and displacement of millions of people. The 1930s Dust Bowl in North America exacerbated the effects of the Great Depression and led to rural decline and ecological degradation. Food rationing in postwar Britain also served to shape collective understanding of hunger and food insecurity. These different food events motivated international discussions about how to establish a productive, secure and stable global food system. ‘Food security’ emerged in the context of these discussions as an international policy concept that captures the humanitarian importance of agriculture in maintaining a stable and secure food system. Although a small player in international politics, Australia was at the forefront of food security discussions and the re-formation of agriculture as the solution to global hunger and a growing population. Contrary to this productionist agenda, food activists, scholars and farmers argued that the solution to a ‘hungry world’ was not more efficient and scientific large-scale modern agriculture, but a global embrace of small-scale farming using fewer petrochemical inputs and producing more sustainable yields. From at least the 1940s onward, numerous critical analyses began highlighting the negative consequences of large-scale agriculture for the environment, animal welfare, human health, rural communities, food security and climate change (Mitchell 1946; Carson 2002; Berry 1977/2015).

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Food activists in Australia also argued that modern industrial farming was not only incapable of feeding the world, but was a central part of a global food system that was producing a vast array of problems threatening the very existence of human and nonhuman animals. Furthermore, food activists and scholars contended that humanitarian concepts, such as food security, have been co-opted by the productionist agenda to serve the interests of government and industry. And as such, new conceptual tools are needed (Patel 2009a). Coinciding with the celebration of the Australian Year of the Farmer and its productionist model of agriculture, a diverse group of activists, scholars and farmers established the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). The AFSA advocates for an Australian food system that is comprised of small-scale farmers operating according to principles of sustainability. According to Nick Rose, a leading voice of the Australian food sovereignty movement, ‘Our food system is not merely broken. It is killing us, and ruining any chance that future generations have for a decent and livable future’ (2015, 2) (emphasis in the original). According to Rose and others (Massy 2017; Muir 2010), the industrialised food system is responsible for food insecurity, public health crises, rural decline and climate change. Food sovereignty is a new concept that is used to address a range of related issues. Borrowing ideas from agrarianism and peasant movements, food sovereignty proponents seek the transformation of the current system and creation of an alternative economic and regulatory structure that gives control to small sustainable agriculture to produce food that is good for the health of consumers, cares for the environment and gives a fair return to producers (Rose 2015). Advocates of food sovereignty argue that food security has been captured by industry and government interests, and instead call for a necessary and radical transformation of the food system. These Australian activists and farmers are part of both a longer history of agrarian thinking and a wider global movement that contends that a food system based on small-scale regenerative farming is the only way to feed the world and slow the negative effects of industrial agriculture (Ahmed 2014). The previous chapters introduced theoretical insights regarding biopolitical racism and governmentality to examine the historical role of colonial agriculture in cultivating sovereignty, improving the land and producing a population that belongs to a continent gained via violent means. With Foucault in the background, the purpose of this chapter is to map the conceptual terrain of more recent food politics discourse, namely, food security and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is often characterised as a more politically radical concept than food security. Food security is commonly used in national and intergovernmental policies that focus on consumer access to food and freedom from hunger, but also support trade liberalisation. In contrast, food sovereignty focuses on the peoples’ control over the food system and has

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developed out of peasant movements in the global South, where it is used to establish the right of people to land and to determine their own food systems. Food sovereignty is an emerging discourse in the Australian alternative food space. It seeks to adopt the radical politics of the global food sovereignty movement to address injustices associated with Australian agriculture. Although it can be beneficial to borrow and modify political ideas from other contexts, this chapter points to a problem that is taken up in later chapters, namely, that food sovereignty discourse in Australia gives inadequate attention to existing debates over sovereignty and indigeneity in the settler-colonial context. In putting forward a progressive vision of an ethical alternative food system that does not address Indigenous dispossession via agriculture, food sovereignty arguments have the potential to depoliticise and mask historical injustices associated with colonialism. FOOD SECURITY, THE FAO AND PRODUCTION The Australian Year of the Farmer is not the first time ‘feeding the world’ rhetoric has been used to boost recognition and support for Australian agriculture. Although it is rarely acknowledged, Australia played a significant role in the formation of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization and the deployment of the policy idea of ‘food security’. This history is not only important for understanding the continuing role of agriculture in Australian national identity and political imagination, but it reveals the way moral and social values are applied to agricultural production so as to deflect examination of injustices arising from agricultural activities. Humanitarian objectives, such as the elimination of poverty and hunger, are pursued sincerely by many involved in food security initiatives. However, as is argued below the lines between the moral, social, political and economic motives are easily blurred. Following federation of the colonies in 1901, the idea that Australia’s security depended on settlement of the country became increasingly prevalent. This was emphasised by Earle Page and the Country Party. Page was the leader of the Country Party from 1921 to 1939 and was treasurer of Australia in Stanley Bruce’s government (1923–1929). In the post-federation political environment, the Country Party emerged to provide a political voice for the farmers and graziers who felt the city-based political parties did not adequately represent their interests or appreciate the importance of agriculture to the nation. During this period, cities such as Melbourne and Sydney began to flourish in size and wealth, a growth that was not replicated in rural towns and villages. Farmers and graziers lay the blame for this unequal distribution of wealth on the centralising and corrupting forces of the city.

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While the farmer worked the land and made the nation prosperous and secure, the urban dwellers squandered and misused the wealth they did not create, or so the argument went. The Country Party was galvanized around the idea of ‘country-mindedness’. Don Aitkin describes country-mindedness as an ‘attitude towards society and politics’ that developed in the late nineteenth century due to the prosperity and economic growth of primary industries, namely, wool and wheat (1973, 416). Aitkin identifies seven features of country-mindedness: 1) Australia depends on its primary producers for its high standard of living; as such, 2) all Australians should support policies aimed at improving the position of primary industries; 3) farming and grazing are virtuous and ennobling and bring out the best in people; 4) city life, however, is vicious, competitive and dependent on primary industries; 5) those living in the Australian country forge the core elements of the national character through struggles to tame their environment and make it productive; 6) people should be encouraged to settle in the country, not in the city; 7) but power resides in the city, where politics is trapped in a sterile debate about classes (1985, 35). As will be seen below, these seven elements of country-mindedness overlap with many of the ideas associated with the agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson, Wendell Berry and others, particularly the purported moral and political virtues of smallholder farming. Earle Page outlined his country-minded policies in his 1934 paper ‘The Policy of the Australian Country Party’. This laid out a platform to ‘secure markets for our producers, work for our people, and security for investment’ (Page 1934, 34). Page emphasised the role of farmer-settlers as the best means of defending the nation – ‘the defence of Australia is best assured, first by the effective and contented occupation of this country’ (1934, 34). Closing the frontiers and occupying the continent was a pressing concern for colonial governments. However, in the 1920s and 1930s Australia’s lack of physical occupation, especially in the north, had become the focus of global overpopulation debates. Scholars, explorers and policymakers looked for empty lands to produce the necessary food to avoid the Malthusian trap of global population outstripping food production. At the 1927 World Population Conference, it was argued that the ‘right of the occupants to hold the territory as against all comers, and equitably so from an international or world standpoint’ was dependent on the cultivation of that land (Bashford 2014, 139). Australia was regarded as one of the ‘least cultivated and least densely populated continents of Earth’ (Bashford 2014, 140). This assessment was considered a threat to the sovereignty of Australia, and it provoked fears that ‘overpopulated’ and ‘hungry’ Asian neighbours – Indonesia, China, Japan or India – would see the vacant lands and dispossess the fledging white nation in much the same way that the British dispossessed the Indigenous inhabitants.

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Page and others advocated for increasing Australian agricultural production as a solution to securing the threat of dispossession. However, the global attention on Australia’s ‘vacant lands’ also raised the question as to whether the white race could work in the regions north of the Tropic of Capricorn. As Anderson notes, in the late nineteenth century ‘[e]veryone admitted that whites in the northern tropics could not work the land’ (2002, 73). Reliance on Pacific Islander and other nonwhite labour was an unhappy solution, especially following Federation and the implementation of the White ­Australia Policy. According to Anderson, ‘the ability to undertake hard manual labor, while remaining healthy and vigorous and innocuous, was an index of racial fitness in these territories, and thus of rightful possession’ (2017, 49). As such, the crucial question was: If white settlers could not labour in the north, ‘must they ultimately cede sovereignty’? (2017, 49). Medical science was mobilised to resolve this threat to sovereignty and assist in adapting the white race to the tropics. The Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine in Townsville implemented surveillance, hygiene and eugenic programs for white labourers and their families (Anderson 2017, 52). Leading medical figures, such as Raphael W. Cilento, soon began to declare success. In The White Man in the Tropics (1925), Cilento declared that Australia had ‘the unique distinction of having bred up during the last seventy years a large, resident, pure-blooded white population under tropical conditions’ (cited in Anderson 2017, 52). Although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander labour was still relied on, it was this mythic ‘pure-blooded white population’ that Page hoped would secure and occupy the north via productive agriculture. Increased agricultural production was also seen as a way to stimulate international trade following the Depression and world wars, as well as serving the humanitarian goal of feeding a hungry world. While Page was concerned about the role of agriculture at the national level, another key figure associated with Bruce was changing the way agriculture was thought about at the international level. Frank McDougall, a fruit grower from South Australia and largely forgotten diplomat, was an economic adviser to Bruce. Following his election defeat in 1929, Bruce became High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (1933–1945). This was a unique and influential position that allowed Bruce to represent Australia and shape its foreign policy during a period when Australia ‘had no distinct diplomatic representation outside of Britain’ (Turnell 2000, 66). Bruce and McDougall formed a close working partnership that ‘lent Australia an unusual “voice” in international forums at a time it was scarcely heard’ (Turnell 2000, 51). Over the course of his career, McDougall had two main approaches to economics. The first, which he later moved away from, was the imperial model or ‘sheltered markets’ (Turnell 2000, 52). Like the graziers in the nineteenth century, McDougall believed that Australia’s agricultural sector

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should ‘gain preferential access to the British market’ via lower tariffs (Turnell 2000, 53). McDougall outlined his ideas in his 1925 book Sheltered Markets: A Study in the Value of Empire Trade. In 1926, Canadian economist Kenneth Taylor reviewed the book and concluded that it ‘contains little that is new’, except that the ‘emphasis on raising the standards of living among the backward peoples of the Empire as a means of enlarging their purchasing power for British exports’ was ‘clear and forceful’ (Taylor 1926). Like Wakefield almost a hundred years earlier, McDougall produced a system that he believed would increase agricultural trade within the Empire, encourage British emigration to Australia and fund public infrastructure ‘with the aim of establishing intensive settlement’ (Turnell 2000, 54). The imperial model became British policy in 1932; at the same time, McDougall began to move away from the idea in favour of freer trade and a global agricultural market (O’Brien 2000, 166). McDougall’s second approach to economics was the nutrition model, which morphed out of the imperial model. In a 1935 paper titled ‘The Agricultural and the Health Problems’, McDougall articulated the nexus between the benefits of a nutritious diet, improvement of agricultural cultivation and the economic implications of increased agricultural production and global trade (O’Brien 2000, 169). The idea of increasing agricultural production to trade beyond the Empire went directly against the imperial policy that McDougall had recently lobbied for as well as against the League of Nations policy that restricted agricultural trade. Bruce, however, was convinced that the nutrition model would not only have humanitarian benefit but ultimately would favour Australia’s economic interests even more than preferential tariffs in the Empire market. In 1935, Bruce took McDougall’s ideas to the League of Nations, which was pursuing a policy to restrict grain production to drive up prices and stimulate economic growth. Bruce petitioned for a policy reversal that would encourage ‘rapid expansion of agriculture and industry’ (Bashford 2014, 208). It was here that he famously argued for ‘marrying health and agriculture’, believing the increased production of essential crops would ease postwar tensions and revitalise international trade (O’Brien 2000, 170). Bruce and McDougall were able to win the support of key scientists and politicians in Britain. A notable ally was Dr John Boyd Orr, who was researching links between poverty and malnutrition, finding ‘that half the British population had an income insufficient for basic nutrition’ (Turnell 2000, 58). McDougall drew on Boyd Orr’s research to argue that ‘much of the world’s population was malnourished’ due to the high price of food, especially what Boyd Orr referred to as ‘protective foods’: fruit and vegetables, eggs, meat and dairy products. The reason for this, according to McDougall, was ‘agricultural protectionism’ that discouraged trade in protective foods and drove up prices (Turnell 2000, 58–59).

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As such the key to securing better nutrition was ‘[r]educing the retail price of food’ via increased production and free trade (Turnell 2000, 59). While the economic dimension of the scheme appealed to diplomats, McDougall was also motivated by a biopolitical or humanitarian vision of lifting the living standards and improving the welfare of the global population via increased agricultural production (Way 2013, 197). The outbreak of the Second World War and demise of the League of Nations meant that McDougall needed the support of the United States for his ideas to be implemented. In 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt read a memorandum on the ‘Freedom from Want of Food’ that McDougall had prepared for the United States Department of Agriculture. Eleanor Roosevelt ‘became enamoured of the nutrition approach’ and invited McDougall to dinner with her and the president (Turnell 2000, 64). McDougall took the opportunity to advocate for an international agency for food and agriculture under the auspices of the United Nations. President Roosevelt recognised that agriculture and nutrition were unlikely to be controversial topics in postwar reconstruction and presented an opportunity for the United Nations to do something concrete to deliver on the ‘freedom from want’ ideals (Turnell 2000, 64). In 1943 President Roosevelt invited UN member states to a conference in Hot Springs, Virginia, to discuss ‘plans and prospects for the production and trade in food stuffs’ (Turnell 2000, 64). Convinced of the humanitarian and economic benefits, Roosevelt agreed to the establishment of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) with Boyd Orr as the director-general. McDougall, with the support of Bruce and Boyd Orr, laid the foundations for an international organization that would attempt to marry agriculture and health in order to ensure food security and eradicate world hunger – quite an achievement for a man from South Australia who described himself in 1925 as a ‘working farmer with no knowledge of economics, politics or anything’ (O’Brien 2000, 164). Food security emerged from these early discussions on the freedom from want of food and the importance of increasing agricultural production to establish a secure food system. This was first expressed in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 states that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food’. The 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights reiterated the 1948 statement through Article 11 – ‘the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger’ – and stated that signatory States will use international co-operation to ‘improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge’ (UN General Assembly 1966). In 1974, following famines in Ethiopia (1972–1973) and Bangladesh (1974), the FAO held the first World Food Conference. The conference led to the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, which proclaimed that

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‘[e]very man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop fully and maintain their physical and mental faculties’ (UN General Assembly 1974). To achieve this, it stated that ‘the well-being of the peoples of the world largely depends on the adequate production and distribution of food as well as the establishment of a world food security system which would ensure adequate availability of, and reasonable prices for, food at all times’ (UN General Assembly 1974). By the time of the FAO’s 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, the world had again witnessed devastating famines in Ethiopia (1984–1985), as well as Somalia (1991–1992) and another unfolding in North Korea (1996). The Rome Declaration on World Food Security reaffirmed ‘the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger’ (Rome Declaration 1996). The Declaration acknowledged that ‘[f]ood supplies have increased substantially’, yet a range of political, economic and environmental factors ‘prevent basic food needs from being fulfilled’ (Rome Declaration 1996). While noting that ‘[p]overty is a major cause of food insecurity’, the declaration also affirmed that ‘[i]ncreased food production, including staple food, must be undertaken’ (Rome Declaration 1996). The Declaration encouraged public and private investment and for governments to make finance available to help promote local agricultural production that fosters ‘food security for all through a fair and market-oriented world trade system’ (Rome Declaration 1996). Emerging from the 1996 Summit, and reaffirmed in the subsequent 2001 and 2009 Summits, was the definition of food security as ‘all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (Rome Declaration 1996). This would be achieved via the five principles devised at the 2009 World Summit: 1. Invest in country-owned plans, aimed at channelling resources to well-designed and results-based programmes and partnerships. 2. Foster strategic coordination at national, regional and global level to improve governance 3. Strive for a comprehensive twin-track approach to food security that consists of: 1) direct action to immediately tackle hunger and 2) develop programmes to eliminate the root causes of hunger and poverty 4. Strong role for the multilateral system by sustained improvements in efficiency, responsiveness, coordination and effectiveness of multilateral institutions 5. Ensure, sustain and substantial commitment by all partners to investment in agriculture and food security and nutrition (World Summit on Food Security 2009)1

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Over the course of the different conferences greater attention was given to the root causes of poverty and hunger. However, the emphasis on the need to increase food production and use markets for efficient distribution was a constant from the 1940s. A further important constant has been the emphasis on the nation–state. The 2009 declaration states: ‘food security is a national responsibility’ (World Summit on Food Security 2009). Although this statement reinforces the sovereignty of the state under international law, the responsibility to feed its citizens also creates the biopolitical conditions for other actors to intervene if the state fails to take up its responsibility. That is, if a state is not fulfilling its obligations to its people, then nongovernment organisations can seek to intervene and encourage the international community to act. This approach has had mixed results and is often tied to broader geopolitical concerns. As Jessica Whyte has shown, NGOs and governments in the West increasingly use the international relations policy idea ‘responsibility to protect’ to justify intervening in the affairs of other states to avert humanitarian crises, usually in the Global South or Middle East (2017). The statement that food security is a national responsibility also firmly places the control of the food system and agricultural policy in the hands of national governments rather than the people. A food sovereignty approach actively resists this. The FAO and McDougall ushered in a new way of thinking about domestic agricultural production, international trade and humanitarian welfare. Food security emerged as the concept that captured these interrelated dimensions. However, in the following decades questions were asked as to whether the FAO and food security merely provided a humanitarian face to an economic and productionist agenda. The agricultural and social dimensions of food security became increasingly frayed and separated, echoing a wider neoliberal shift in Western democracies, ‘from a collective or societal focus in the 1970s, to an individualized notion of responsibilities in the 1990s’ (Lang, Barling and Caraher 2009, 256). The term ‘food security’ came to be used in contexts ranging from antipoverty advocacy and environmental sustainability movements to promoting biotechnological advancements and agricultural trade negotiations. The emergence of these different meanings and associated practices of food security also marks the point at which the term began to acquire multiple uses in agricultural and social policy. The flexibility of this concept is evident in its use in Australia. Aside from the Hungry Years of the first British settlement, Australia has not experienced famine, mass starvation or prolonged rationing. In agri-food terms, Australia is unique among developed nations due to its small population and net food exporter status. Yet, since the early 2000s food security has emerged as a key phrase in food, agricultural and health policy discourses. Public health and social work researchers concerned about health effects of poverty have

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used food security to examine food insecurity at the level of the household (Rychetnik et al. 2003). Food security has also been used in relation to Indigenous populations (Ma Rhea 2012), particularly those living in remote communities (Pollard 2013). In these contexts, food security functions to highlight some features while minimising others. Remoteness, for example, is often identified as a key contributor to Indigenous food insecurity. Yet, the effects of colonial violence, dispossession and genocidal destruction of traditional foodways rarely are addressed. Rather than a matter of justice and redressing past wrongs, the framing of food insecurity as a matter of remoteness inspires technical solutions such as efficient transportation of food, improvements in storage and preservation or government-forced closure of remote communities. Australia’s self-understanding as an agricultural nation that feeds the world has meant that domestic food insecurity of remote Indigenous people and urban poor often is ignored or attributed to the moral failings of the insecure individuals and communities. While Australian researchers, nongovernment organisations and activists using food security discourse generally are motived by humanitarian and environmental concerns, the productionist dimension of food security has attracted government and agribusiness interest. The FAO’s call to increase agricultural production and the living standards of the world’s poor melds with the agenda of some of the largest agricultural companies. Monsanto (the agrichemicals multinational), for example, uses the language of food security and FAO declarations in its press releases to investors. In 2017, Robert Fraley, the executive vice president and chief technology officer at Monsanto, delivered a lecture at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he argued that the agricultural innovations made by Monsanto are crucial for a ‘60–100% increase in global food production’ in order to ‘feed a population of nearly 10 billion people by 2050’ (Fraley 2017). These are the same figures used by the Australian Year of the Farmer campaign. Although governments and policy makers are willing to embrace large agricultural companies such as Monsanto, many food activists and NGOs argue that these companies and the productionist agenda are making the world more food insecure (Patel 2009b; Wittman, Desmarais and Wiebe 2010; Rose 2015). The marriage between agriculture and health envisioned by Bruce and McDougall has become strained. The economic interests and production imperative arguably have co-opted the health and humanitarian agenda, and as demonstrated in the following section, are exacerbating the problems of hunger, poverty and food insecurity. The ambiguity of economic and humanitarian dimensions of food security have practical consequences. The Australian government’s use of food security discourse in response to two of its closest neighbours illustrates this ambiguity. In 2015–2016 Papua New Guinea (PNG) experienced its worst drought

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since 1997, when more than fifty thousand people were without water and food, and hundreds died from malaria and dysentery. The 2015–2016 drought created an ongoing food crisis among vulnerable rural and urban populations. As a close and prosperous neighbour, there were calls for Australia to assist with the immediate food crisis and to help PNG become food secure in the face of an increasingly changing climate. The bulk of Australia’s aid package went towards acute disaster relief and charitable efforts (Bishop 2015), with only a small proportion ($500,000) allocated to developing drought-resistant crops (Tlozek 2015). In August 2015, just as the drought was taking hold in PNG, the federal agriculture minister at the time, Barnaby Joyce, announced a $12-million deal to strengthen food security in Indonesia. According to Joyce, ­‘Australian beef cattle producers have a vital role to play in assisting Indonesia to achieve food security as suppliers of high-quality cattle in the years ahead.’ The Indonesia– Australia red meat and cattle sector deal aims to ‘improve the productivity, sustainability and competitiveness of the Indonesian red meat and cattle sector and to further strengthen both nations’ bilateral trade relationship’ (Joyce 2015). The deal with Indonesia was framed in terms of food security, but its real objective was the economic interests of the Australian beef industry and expanding markets. By contrast, working with rural farmers in the PNG highlands offers little economic benefit to Australian producers. Despite their growing needs to develop a food system that can adapt to a changing climate, Australia’s interest in food security has not resulted in a substantial partnership with PNG or other vulnerable regional neighbours. These differing uses of food security not only reveal the malleability of the concept, but also the way different uses highlight or mask different problems and serve different interests and needs. That is, food security initiatives that have the potential to open up new markets are prioritised over food security initiatives that do not have clear long-term economic gains. The ease with which food security has been made amenable to the ends of agribusiness and production-focused governments has led some critics to suggest that the concept should be abandoned. Despite the humanitarian concerns of McDougall, Boyd Orr and many others since, the social and moral dimension of food security has arguably become a front for economic gains. Muir notes that the ‘promise of scientific, industrialised, globally traded agriculture was that it would save the land and feed the world’ (2014, 7). However, over the past seventy-five years this promise increasingly rings hollow. Muir contends that ‘feeding the world’ has become the mantra deployed by ‘agribusiness lobbyists and rural politicians’ concerned that agriculture is no longer central to the Australian imaginary and that the iconic farmer has been eclipsed by new archetypes.

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The ‘feeding the world’ rhetoric was explicitly deployed in the Australian Year of the Farmer initiative, which aimed to celebrate the farmers’ past achievements as well as underscore their importance for feeding the world in the future. The reality, however, is that Australia contributes less than 2 percent of the global food production, and rather than ‘feeding the world’, the majority of Australia’s food exports are ‘premium products’ sent to wealthy nations: Japan, South Korea, the UK, New Zealand and the United States (Muir 2010). Yet, these details, like the food insecurity of Indigenous and poor Australians, are rarely acknowledged and often sidelined. Such is the power of the farmer in the moral and social imaginary of Australia. FOOD SOVEREIGNTY, AGRARIANISM AND SUSTAINABILITY Although increased agricultural production in the mid-twentieth century may have stimulated economic growth and provided solutions to aspects of global hunger, by the 1960s scholars and activists argued that the approach of increasing global agricultural production had created and contributed to a range of new globally interconnected problems, such as food insecurity, epidemics in diet-related noncommunicable diseases, rural decline due to centralisation of agriculture, animal welfare concerns associated with intensive farming, biosecurity threats and climate change. The combination of these effects leads critics such as Muir to conclude that productionist and intensive forms of large-scale ‘[a]griculture has played a major role in plunging the earth into another mass extinction event, the sixth in 4.6 billion years’ (2014, 7). This assessment of modern agriculture that threatens ‘the fate of our species’ has motivated scholars, activists and farmers to explore alternative ways of ­thinking about and practicing agriculture (2014, 7). Food sovereignty emerged in the 1990s out of growing dissatisfaction with food security and its role in a global food system that favoured the interests of large agricultural producing companies and nations. Critics believed that food security was unevenly distributed and differently experienced. Whereas some consumers may experience a cheap and secured food supply, it could lead to the insecurity of others – for example, undermining farm workers’ wages and safety, eroding local markets via dumping cheap grain from large producers or the acquisition of peasant farm lands for large-scale monocropping. These concerns were raised at the 1996 FAO World Food Summit by grassroots and peasant organisations, specifically La Via Campesina. They argued that food sovereignty was a precondition for food security. To be truly food secure, they claimed, people needed to have control over the food system. Agribusiness, governments and free-trade agreements may make food

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available and accessible, but they also take control of the food system away from the people. As Raj Patel puts it, ‘it is entirely possible for people to be food secure in prison or under a dictatorship’ (2009a, 665). Food sovereignty is not opposed to food security but connects it to a range of other social and political justice issues, such as agrarian reform, rights of women, return of land to indigenous peasant farmers and environmental sustainability. Although the definition and history of the concept food sovereignty is contested (Edelman 2014), the various declarations of La Via Campesina over the past twenty-five years serve as important reference points. Established in 1993, La Via Campesina (‘the peasants’ way’) is an international movement that represents about two hundred million people, including peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It comprises about 164 local and national organizations in seventy-nine countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. La Via Campesina is concerned with the ‘monopolization of our water, seeds, land and territory’, ‘corporate domination of the food system’, ‘concentration of wealth’ and ‘human rights violations’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2017). Food sovereignty is a key concept used to encapsulate a variety of principles and practices that seek to address these concerns. While the concept did not necessarily originate with La Via Campesina (Edelman 2014), the declarations on food sovereignty have largely set the terms of the debate for scholars, farmers and activists (Edelman et al. 2014; Wittman, Desmarais and Wiebe 2010; Patel 2009a; Mann 2014). Bina Agarwal has mapped the shifting definitions to highlight the different points of emphasis that reflect the dynamic nature of La Via Campesina and the food sovereignty movement (2014). The first definition comes from 1996 following the FAO World Food Summit. Here food sovereignty is defined as ‘the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods, respecting cultural and productive diversity’ (Agarwal 2014). In 2002 the definition moved away from the nation as the vehicle for food sovereignty to declare food sovereignty as ‘the rights of peoples to define their own food and agriculture, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives, to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant’ (Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2005, 109). The 2002 statement also clarifies that food sovereignty is not opposed to trade, stating, ‘Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production’ (Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2005, 109). The shift from 1996 to 2002 reflects the global spread of La Via Campesina and increasing dissatisfaction with food security

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initiatives controlled by the nation–state, agribusiness and international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni was a watershed moment for the food sovereignty movement and produced an expansive definition that continues to be debated and used by food activists, farmers, policy makers and scholars. Below is part of the declaration: Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations . . . It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime . . . Food sovereignty . . . ensures the rights to use and manage lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups and economic classes and generations. (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007)

In comparison to the 1996 and 2002 definitions, which were more congenial to international food policy discourse, the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni makes radical claims about dismantling the current system, giving control to producers and introducing new social relations free from oppression for all people. Patel, Agarwal and other food scholars have pointed out the various contradictions contained within this declaration. For example, the objective to put ‘those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems’ effectively includes everyone, including Monsanto and other multinational corporations. There is a growing critical literature of food sovereignty and its place in agrarian studies and role in food activism (Edelman et al. 2014; Wittman, Desmarais and Wiebe 2010). These debates will be referred to throughout the remaining chapters. The Conceptual Terrain of Food Sovereignty To achieve the diverse objectives of the food sovereignty movement, the declaration identifies six principles or pillars of food sovereignty. First, a focus on food for people, which rejects the idea that food is a commodity and instead argues it is a right for all people, especially ‘those who are hungry, under occupation, in conflict zones and marginalised’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). Second, values food providers, which rejects policies and trade agreements that ‘threaten the livelihoods’ of ‘peasants and small scale family farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, forest dwellers, indigenous peoples and agricultural and fisheries workers’ (Delegates of

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La Via Campesina 2007). Third, localised food systems that promote sustainable trade that ‘brings food providers and consumers closer together’ in a relation that protects consumers from ‘poor quality and unhealthy food’ and protects ‘providers from the dumping of food and food aid in local markets’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). Fourth, food sovereignty puts control locally by rejecting the privatisation of natural resources and commercial contracts, and instead ‘places control over territory, land, grazing, water, seeds, livestock and fish populations on local food providers and respects their rights’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). Fifth, it builds knowledge and skills of ‘food providers and their local organisations that conserve, develop and manage localised food production’, while rejecting technologies such as genetic engineering that undermine control and contaminate the environment (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). Finally, food sovereignty works with nature through ‘agroecological production and harvesting methods that maximise the contribution of ecosystems and improve resilience and adaptation’. This also has a restorative function to ‘heal the planet so that the planet may heal us’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). It also rejects intensive agricultural and aquacultural practices and ‘other industrialised production methods’ that contribute to global warming (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). The six principles are supposed to be flexible enough to guide food sovereignty movements in different geographic, regulatory and political locales. However, as with the declaration itself, these principles are both radically ambitious and potentially contradictory to the broader range of actors and activities that are included. As such, there is the risk that food sovereignty, like food security before it, is vulnerable to co-option or capture by practitioners who do not necessarily share in the spirit of food sovereignty. For example, Paul Nicholson, a peasant farmer and cofounder of La Via Campesina, argued at the Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue conference that ‘food sovereignty is not “to eat local, to eat good”, it is not petite bourgeoisie’ (2013). Nicholson and others are aware that industrial agriculture is not the only threat to the movement, but that the ‘industrial organic’ food system that provides organic goods for middle-class Western consumers also requires critique (Guthman 2004). More on this in the next chapter. The Declaration of Nyéléni has influenced organisations throughout the La Via Campesina network. Although there are not any Australian organizations in La Via Campesina, the Declaration of Nyéléni influenced the recently established Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). The long-term goal of the AFSA ‘is to democratize food systems’, which means replacing the current ‘food oligarchy’ and the system run by a ‘small number of powerful players’ with a system that gives everyone the ‘right to participate in how key decisions are made’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 51). These aspirations are

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expressed in the AFSA’s People’s Food Plan, which was partly developed in response to the productionist-oriented Australian Government’s National Food Plan. The People’s Food Plan is based on the principles of food sovereignty and seeks to implement sustainable farming practices and regulations in Australia to redress the environmental, social, political and public health harms associated with ‘the current corporate food system’ (Parfitt et al. 2013). Food sovereignty movements in Australia, as at the international level, draw on a mix of political ideas, some of which are made explicit, but most are implied. An important thread running through these alternative food discourses is agrarianism, although it is part of a kinship of terms and practices that includes agroecology and regenerative farming. In Australia, I contend that the food sovereignty of La Via Campesina has been grafted onto preexisting Anglo-American ideas and practices of agrarianism and yeomanry farming. While not always explicitly referred to, the writings of Thomas Jefferson have shaped alternative agricultural discourse in the Anglophone world. According to environmental philosopher Paul Thompson, Jefferson is ‘easily the most emblematic figure, if not the patron saint, of an agrarian mentality’ (2010, 157). In a passage from Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson emphasizes the significance of the virtuous farmer in stating: ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, in whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue’ (1984, 290). Agrarian virtue, as described by Jefferson and articulated by Thompson, is not an ethics learned from books or philosophy classes; it is an ethics that is lived and demonstrated in the character of the person. ‘Farming itself’, writes Thompson, ‘was thought to form the character of rural people’ (2010, 78). For example, by cultivating the land individuals develop an awareness of ‘the limiting conditions of life’ that encourages a humble and patient character (Wirzba 2003, 6). By humbly recognizing the ‘fragility and impermanence’ of life, the farmer views food, health, prosperity and land not as calculable commodities but as a gift (Wirzba 2003, 6). Wendell Berry, farmer, activist and writer, draws on this idea of humbly receiving the gift of nature to argue that the agrarian farmers’ intimate and caring connection with the land is what distinguishes them from industrial agriculture by creating the conditions where the ‘farm gives gifts because it is given a chance to do so; it is not overcropped or overused’ (2009, 128). In humble and respectful relation with the land as a gift, agrarian virtues of self-reliance, interdependence, sustainability and community are purported to be grounded (Berry 2009, 45). Such ideas are echoed both in Page’s ‘country-mindedness’ of the 1930s and food sovereignty movements of the present. Jefferson’s remark that farmers are ‘the most valuable citizens’ has become a central tenet of agrarianism and influenced agrarian political thought in

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North America, Australia and beyond (Thompson 2000, 120; Craig and Phillips 1983; Botterill 2009; Thompson 2010, 53). According to Charles Eisinger, three political principles are emphasized in Jeffersonian agrarianism: 1) ‘every man [sic] has a natural right to hold some land’, 2) ‘agriculture is the mother of organized society’ as it provides the conditions for private property and 3) due to agriculture’s position as the ‘mother of organized society’ and condition of private property, it ‘must be the primary concern of the state’ (1947, 13). The idea that every person has a natural right to hold some land draws on Lockean notions that by mixing labor with what nature provides, the individual ‘makes it his Property’ (Locke 2003, 112). According to Eisinger, Jefferson and American colonial thought drew on Locke to justify the idea that ‘[f]armers who occupy and improve the land thereby have a natural right to it’ (1947, 14). The ownership and improvement of the land tie the farmers to the land and give them a strong interest in the organisation of society. For Jefferson, agriculture stabilised democracy as small family farming encouraged loyalty and interdependencies with surrounding farmers and established a mutual interest in securing the Republic (Hofstadter 1956; Thompson 2010, 44; Berry 2003, 29). In contrast, Jefferson believed that manufacturing produced ‘subservience and venality, [and] suffocates the germ of virtue’, therefore advised that ‘[w]hile we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench . . . let our work-shops remain in Europe’ (1984, 290). As Jefferson was writing his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), the British government was planning on establishing a penal colony in New South Wales. Jefferson’s agrarian ideas influenced land reform debates and the formation of country parties in Australia (Wear 2009, 82; Graham 1966, 1). However, more recently he has influenced neo-agrarian thought and practice. Berry draws on Jefferson to argue that if the ideals and practices of agrarianism are adopted, then American life could be resettled and reordered through communities of smallholder farmers with intimate and nurturing connections to the land. Berry argues that small-scale farming imbued with agrarian values would cultivate an ‘independent, free-standing citizenry that Jefferson thought to be the surest safeguard of democratic liberty’ and, crucially, produce ‘a dependable, long-term food supply’ (2015, loc. 336). Berry’s advocacy for an agrarian settling of the land in response to the ills of large-scale industrial agriculture has influenced alternative food writers, farmers, activists and scholars well beyond his family farm in Kentucky. Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva and other popular authors and activists have helped spread Berry’s ideas on food and agriculture. Quotes from Berry are often scrawled on chalkboards at farmers’ markets, used on food co-op websites or inserted as epigraphs in books. The People’s Food Plan also references Berry, and

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more recently his disciple Joel Salatin has made regular visits to Australia from his Polyface Farms in Virginia to run workshops with AFSA farmers (Parfitt et al. 2013). It is important to note, however, that food sovereignty and Berry’s neoagrarianism are not identical. Whereas Berry’s agrarianism draws largely on Jefferson and the North American experience of industrial capitalism, the agrarianism of the food sovereignty movement has roots in Marxist politics and the Latin American experience of neoliberalism. Furthermore, in Australia, alternative food discourses are shaped by the history of colonialism, the myth of the battler-farmer and the desire for a closer settlement that reflects European aesthetics. These are distinct traditions, but they overlap on a number of points: First, a rejection of (or at least firm regulations on) the free market as a mechanism for governing land and food production; instead, they seek to establish alternative food systems that will organise ethical relations around a system of small-scale farms and localised distribution networks that cultivate communal interactions between producers and consumers. Second, these alternative agrarian systems introduce new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship. For example, farmer-citizen, consumer-citizen, foodcitizen and agrarian-citizen are terms often used in these discourses. These new citizenship discourses attempt to broaden one’s obligations beyond the nation–state or self-interest of an individual consumer in a capitalist system, and to think and act on the global, climatic and justice implications of the food system. These new forms of citizenship are related to a third point of overlap, rights. Organisations such as La Via Campesina and AFSA increasingly use rights-based discourses that appeal to national and international governing bodies. As Patel observes, ‘the language of food sovereignty inserts itself into international discourse by making claims on rights and democracy, the cornerstones of liberal governance’ (2009a, 665). Fourth, a central part of these overlapping political projects is the redistribution of land into the ‘hands of those of us who produce food’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). That is, agrarian smallholder farmers should receive land to produce food in a manner that settles and orders society. Finally, there is a biopolitical dimension to these discourses that blurs the lines between seeking to work with the nation–state to reform practices or to reject the nation–state due to its failure to protect the people. This is a biopolitical approach that argues that food sovereignty needs to be recognised as a way for populations to secure themselves from Malthusian catastrophe (be it climate change, peak oil or environmental degradation). That is, the reforms and changes that food sovereignty activists are seeking involve a ‘new economic, social and political order’ that challenges the sovereignty – or

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biopolitical sovereignty – of the nation–state and seeks to secure the population (Mann 2014, 59). I expand on these points in the following chapters. Agrarian thought has helped shape Australian food sovereignty and alternative food practices to resist the dominant, productionist agenda in numerous ways. It has helped to shape a resistance to the hegemony of large-scale agribusiness, to critique government policies and regulations, to foster links between regional producers and urban consumers, to institute sustainable practices that restore the environment and to solidify bonds among smallscale producers. Although these are important positives associated with a food sovereignty movement in Australia, they also raise two major issues: colonial logics and neoliberal consumerism. First, there is no peasant class in Australia. While peasant farmers associated with La Via Campesina have effectively agitated for land reform, in the context of Australia’s settlercolonial history, similar calls for the redistribution of land based on agrarian food production are problematic. As Alana Mann notes, the ‘concept of food sovereignty encompasses various dimensions of land tenure, land use and land rights relevant to Asia and the Global North’ (2014, 58). However, it is not immediately clear how relevant these ideas are to the settler-colonial context of Australia. The objective of La Via Campesina to address ‘highly unequal patterns of land ownership’ is certainly relevant to Australia. Yet, aspects of food sovereignty discourse echo older agrarian ideas and practices that have been involved in processes of dispossession under the banner of settlement. As discussed in chapter 1, the colonial logics of ownership through cultivation underpinned the farmers and pastoralists claims to land. There is a danger that food sovereignty discourse in Australia will repeat these earlier iterations. The second main issue that needs to be addressed is the co-option of alternative food initiatives by neoliberal consumerism. Much of the agitation in Australian alternative food politics is over scale-appropriate regulation to enable producers to sell high-end artisanal products via alternative food networks such as farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture. Consumer-focused alternative food has the advantage of delivering financial gains to small-scale producers as well as raising awareness of alternative food politics among urban-based consumers. However, the consumer-focused dimension of alternative food also has the potential to reproduce rather than challenge inequalities and exclusion based on class and race. Peter Andrée’s research with Australian farmers engaged in alternative food systems found that these food networks are often ‘all about pricey niche products that allow well-off consumers to feel good about themselves and only some farmers to reap the benefits’ (2014, 157–58). This is not to suggest that meaningful social and political action is absent from these networks. As Mann argues, ‘critics of industrial agriculture’ need to move beyond consumer-based

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solutions and ‘concentrate on creating democratic food publics to tackle structural problems with the food system’ (Mann 2015). These two concerns are examined over the next two chapters. CONCLUSION The provision of food for hungry people is perhaps one of the most fundamental ethical acts. As this chapter has demonstrated, it is also a deeply political act or, more specifically, biopolitical. McDougall, Boyd Orr and others involved in the history and implementation of food security policies have been motivated to ensure a stable and reliable food supply for many of the most vulnerable people. However, there are questions prior to the ethical imperative to feed those in need: Whose stomachs will be filled? Whose food will they eat? And why are they hungry in the first place? These questions are political in nature and precede the consumer and questions of individual ethics. In Australia, these questions are largely sidelined by governments and agribusiness interests to increase production and ever-expanding markets. Or, more precisely, the ethical imperative of feeding the world is enlisted to reinforce the high esteem for Australian agriculture. Cameron Muir argues that Australian myths about farmers and battlers serve a social function to generate goodwill and public support for the economic interests of the A ­ ustralian agricultural sector. The Australian Year of the Farmer, for example, tried to tap into this mythology and perpetuate the perception that Australian agriculture is the beneficent ‘food bowl’ of the world. In contrast, food sovereignty discourse seeks to articulate the way productionist agriculture has made the most vulnerable more food insecure as well as contributing to a variety of environmental catastrophes. Food sovereignty activists and environmentalists argue that the food system needs to be rethought and redesigned if food security is truly to be achieved. In the introduction to his book The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress, Muir states that his purpose is to ask ‘whether it is possible to reimagine the world’s food systems. Understanding our past frees us to choose our future’ (2014, 7). Muir does important work towards understanding the present environmental effects of past choices and points towards a reimagined future. However, in addition to the role of agriculture in environmental catastrophe, we need greater moral clarity about the role of agriculture in the settler-colonial project and the historical injustices it is implicated with. As Kyle Whyte observes, settler-colonial domination has destroyed Indigenous foodways and ‘capacities for exercising collective self-determination’ (2018, 363). With this perspective ‘[f]ood injustice . . . can be understood as derivative of settler colonial domination’ (2018). The next two chapters explicitly focus on

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the way race and Indigenous interests have been ignored and marginalised in alternative food discourses. I focus on the alternative agriculture not because it is the form of agriculture and food distribution most in need of de-colonial transformation, but because it presents the greatest possibility for such a transformative project. NOTE 1. I have shortened and paraphrased the principles for brevity.

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Bishop, J. (2015). Supporting Drought Efforts across the Pacific. Canberra, ACT: Office for the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Botterill, L. C. (2009). ‘An Agrarian Party in a Developed Democracy.’ In The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors, edited by Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield, 10–26. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Bryce, Q. (2011). Launch of the Australian Year of the Farmer. Canberra, ACT: Office of the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia. Carson, R. (2002). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Craig, R. A., and K. J. Phillips. (1983). ‘Agrarian Ideology in Australia and the United States’, Rural Sociology, 43(3), 409–20. Delegates of La Via Campesina. (2007). Declaration of Nyéléni. La Via Campesina 2007. http://nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290, accessed 7 October 2015. ———. (2017). Declaration Euskal. La Via Campesina 2017. https://viacampesina. org/en/viith-international-conference-la-via-campesina-euskal-herria-declaration/, accessed 10 October 2017. Edelman, M. (2014). ‘Food Sovereignty: Forgotten Genealogies and Future Regulatory Challenges’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 959–78. Edelman, M., T. Weis, A. Baviskar, S. M. Borras, E. Holt-Giménez, D. Kandiyoti and W. Wolford. (2014). ‘Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 911–31. Eisinger, C. E. (1947). ‘The Influence of Natural Rights and Physiocratic Doctrines on American Agrarian Thought during the Revolutionary Period’, Agricultural History, 21(1), 13–23. Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2005). The State of Food and Agriculture. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fraley, R. (2017). Joining Forces to Protect the Future of Agriculture and the Planet. New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Graham, B. D. (1966). The Formation of the Australian Country Parties. Canberra, ACT: ANU Press. Guthman, J. (2004). Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Oakland: University of California Press. Hofstadter, R. (1956). ‘The Myth of the Happy Yeoman’, American Heritage Magazine 7(3). Jefferson, T. (1984). Writings, edited by Merill D. Peterson. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S. Joyce, B. (2015). $12 Million to Strengthen Food Security in the Indonesia-Australia Red Meat and Cattle Sector. Canberra, ACT: Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources. Lang, T., D. Barling and M. Caraher. (2009). Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lang, T., and M. Heasman. (2012). Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. London: Earthscan. Locke, J. (2003). Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by Ian Shapiro. Binghampton, NY: Yale University Press.

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Ma Rhea, Z. (2012). ‘Knowing Country, Knowing Food: Food Security and Aboriginal-Settler Relations in Victoria’, Artefact: The Journal of the Archaeological and Anthropological Society of Victoria, (35), 17. Mann, A. (2014). Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2015). ‘Food Democracy: Why Eating Is Unavoidably Political.’ The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/food-democracy-why-eating-isunavoidably-political-43474. Massy, C. (2017). Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth. Brisbane, QLD: University of Queensland Press. McMichael, P. (2009). ‘A Food Regime Genealogy’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), 139–69. Mitchell, E. (1946). Soil and Civilzation. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Muir, C. (2010). ‘Feeding the World’, Griffith Review (27), 28–40. ———. (2014). The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History. New York: Routledge. Nicholson, P. (2013). Paul Nicholson, keynote at conference held at Yale University, 14–15 September 2013. In Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, edited by Yale University Agrarian Studies Program and The Journal of Peasant Studies. New Haven, CT: Transnational Institute. O’Brien, J. B. (2000). ‘FL McDougall and the Origins of the FAO’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 46(2), 164–74. Page, E. (1934). The Policy of the Australian Country Party, edited by Australian Country Party. Sydney, NSW: Australian Country Party Bureau of Publicity. Parfitt, C., N. Rose, C. Green, J. Alden and A. Beilby. (2013). The People’s Food Plan: A Common-Sense Approach to a Fair, Sustainable and Resilient Food System, edited by Nick Rose and Carol Richards. Kambah, ACT: Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Patel, R. (2009a). ‘Food Sovereignty’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3), 663–706. ———. (2009b). Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Pollard, C. (2013). ‘Selecting Interventions for Food Security in Remote Indigenous Communities.’ In Food Security in Australia, edited by Quentin Farmar-Bowers, Vaughan Higgins and Joanne Millar, 97–112. New York: Springer. Rome Declaration. (1996). The Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action, edited by Food and Agriculture Organization. Rome, Italy: United Nations. Rose, N., ed. (2015). Fair Food: Stories from a Movement Changing the World. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Rychetnik, L., K. Webb, L. Story and T. Katz. (2003). ‘Food Security Options Paper: A Planning Framework and Menu of Options for Policy and Practice Interventions.’ New South Wales, AU: New South Wales Department of Health. Taylor, K. W. (1926). ‘Sheltered Markets: A Study of the Value of Empire Trade by FL McDougall’, Canadian Historical Review, 7(1), 78–79.

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Thompson, P. B. (2000). ‘Thomas Jefferson and Agrarian Philosophy.’ In The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism, edited by Paul B. Thompson and Thomas C. Hilde, 118–39. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. (2010). The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Tlozek, E. (2015). ‘Julie Bishop Announces $9 Million Aid Package for Pacific during Trip to Drought-Affected PNG.’ ABC News, 9 November. Turnell, S. (2000). ‘F. L. McDougall: Éminence Grise of Australian Economic Diplomacy’, Australian Economic History Review, 40(1), 51–70. UN General Assembly. (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, edited by Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Geneva: United Nations. ———. (1974). Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, edited by Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Geneva: United Nations. Way, W. (2013). A New Idea Each Morning: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in One International Organisation. Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press. Wear, R. (2009). ‘Countrymindedness and the Nationals.’ In The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors, edited by Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield, 81–99. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Whyte, J. (2017). ‘Always on Top?: The “Responsibility to Protect” and the Persistence of Colonialism.’ In The Postcolonial World, edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim, 308–24. London: Routledge. Whyte, K. P. (2018). ‘Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance.’ In Oxford Handbook on Food Ethics, edited by Anne Barnhill, Tyler Doggett and Mark Budolfson, 345–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wirzba, N. (2003). ‘Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matters – Even to Urbanites.’ In The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, edited by Norman Wirzba, 1–20. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Wittman, H., A. A. Desmarais and N. Wiebe, eds. (2010). Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature & Community. Cape Town: Pambazuka. World Summit on Food Security. (2009). Declaration of the World Summit on Food Security, edited by Food Agriculture Organization. Rome, Italy: United Nations. Year of the Farmer. (2011). Australian Agriculture – The Greatest Story Never Told. YouTube.

Chapter 4

Whiteness and the Contested Spaces of Alternative Food

We’ve been working closely with the community to develop a vision for the City Farm as a place that offers inner-city residents a taste of life on a farm. – Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney (Office of the Lord Mayor 2015) The aboriginals have already moved out, now Redfern as the last virgin suburb close to city, it will have great potential for the capital growth in the near future. – Great Fortune Investments, property developers (Pearlman 2014)

Over the past fifteen years, the profile of alternative agricultural practices such as farmers’ markets and community gardens has risen in Australia. Motivated by a variety of reasons, most major Australian cities and regional centres have encouraged the transformation of vacant lots and public spaces into farmers’ markets and community gardens. Food sovereignty and alternative food activists regard these sites as important spaces for political action and community resilience in response to environmental harms associated with large-scale industrial food systems. City planners, politicians and residents, however, view these sites as a means of ‘renewing’ and ‘revitalizing’ urban landscapes. Reflecting the earlier governmentality of improvement, many of the areas that have undergone transformation have been inner-city neighborhoods historically populated with Aboriginal, migrant and workingclass communities. Although the introduction of alternative food practices has been praised for renewing abandoned industrial sites and providing a

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place for community engagement and flourishing, there has also been criticism that these spaces are exclusionary. The previous chapters focused on colonial contexts and rural spaces. This chapter turns to the city to examine the role of food practices and agriculture in the dispossession and displacement of racialised others and the creation of white belonging. Libby Porter argues that ‘cities remain a fundamental contradiction for the urgent demands of Indigenous sovereignty, land restitution and cultural justice in contemporary Australia’ (2017, 22). Although a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples live in cities and towns, these spaces are fiercely held as settler-colonial possessions, and any discussion of returning sections of these lands to Indigenous control or compensating for their theft is swiftly denounced (Kerr and Cox 2013). Porter contends that ‘cities in a settler-colonial context like Australia are both emblematic of the structure of dispossession and the genocidal impulse of settler colonialism’ as well as ‘material to the persistence of both of those logics’ (2017, 22). Considering the importance of agriculture in feeding and securing colonial cities (Wensing and Porter 2016, 92), it is worth considering the return of agriculture to those spaces and to question critically its contemporary function in ‘improving’ and ‘revitalizing’ urban terra nullius or ‘vacant’ spaces. Global food sovereignty movements tend to focus on the political and social concerns of rural and peasant farmers in the global South. However, food sovereignty and alternative food movements in countries such as Australia are closely tied to the city. With 88.9 percent of the Australia population living in urban environments, the majority in the large coastal cities, the demographic, economic and geographic realities mean that Australian alternative food systems have little choice but to engage with the metropole (Capuano 2014). The Australia Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) acknowledges this situation by emphasizing the need for ‘urban farms for every town and city’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 34). Focusing on urban residents may be necessary, but it risks exposing the transformative objectives of food sovereignty to co-option by urban consumer interests. Peter Andrée’s analysis of alternative food systems in Australia identifies the citizen-farmer and citizen-consumer relation as a key locale for the expression of values associated with food sovereignty (2014, 153). According to Andrée, the farmerconsumer relationship primarily occurs in urban alternative food spaces such as farmers’ markets or through communal systems that distribute food from peri-urban to urban locations. Andrée writes, ‘in contemporary agrienvironmental politics, the concept of citizen-farmer might be most easily understood in relation to the related concept of citizen consumer, which is defined as the political economic actor who identifies not with consumerism but political change, and who uses his or her own consumer behaviour to

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promote change’ (Andrée 2014, 153). This is the citizen who proverbially ‘votes’ with his or her dollar. The citizen-consumer occupies an ambivalent space in food sovereignty discourse. In the foreword to the AFSA’s People’s Food Plan, celebrity gardener and food activist Costa Georgiadis regards the citizen-consumer as a locus for change: When we see ourselves as a sovereign state and question everything that goes into our bodies, then the basis of a real food plan has been created. Labelling becomes the true passport for all food, a full and clear disclosure of food and its history to the person consuming it. (Parfitt et al. 2013, 9)

However, the citizen-consumer is also regarded as potentially skewing or limiting a broader conception of food politics. Political and ethical consumption tends to focus on values of individual consumers in relation to a food product and less on broader systems and labour relations – the very things alternative food activists wish to highlight. Encouraging political and ethical acts of consumption is a popular strategy among NGOs, consumer groups and activists. However, this approach faces difficulties of perpetuating economic disparities as well as masking racial inequalities in regard to labour and spatiality. Julie Guthman, a geographer and food studies scholar in the United States, has argued that not only is the labour of racial minorities hidden in consumer-focused alternative food systems, but the spaces of alternative food, such as farmers’ markets and community gardens, instantiate ‘whiteness’ and serve middle- to upper-class interests. Guthman contends that ‘in agro-food scholarship and practice, concerns about race and whiteness are notable for their absence’ (2008, 390). Although there has not been significant attention to ‘whiteness’ of A ­ ustralian alternative foodscapes, Indigenous studies scholars, such as Aileen MoretonRobinson and Irene Watson, argue that whiteness functions as an invisible measure of who can hold possession, which is intimately part of the history of dispossession and undermining of Indigenous ownership. I draw on this perspective to examine the whiteness of alternative food spaces and how this functions in processes of gentrification that grant use and possession of urban spaces to some while they displace and dispossess others. This chapter introduces some of the theoretical debates surrounding whiteness and demonstrates how whiteness melds with an agrarian imaginary that operates through certain alternative food practices, such as farmers’ markets and community gardens. Although these practices have been embraced in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and most other major Australian cities and centres, this chapter focuses on Sydney, where the embrace of urban agriculture has coincided with gentrification and development. I use the case of

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Eveleigh Street Markets in Redfern to highlight the way markets contribute to the whitening of a space known for its Aboriginal culture and community. Further, the dovetailing of gentrification and class mobility with alternative agriculture operates with the logics of settler colonialism. That is, agriculture is used to establish ownership, belonging and possession of urban lands purported to be vacant or in need of renewal. Although alternative food practices have the potential to fulfill the promises of drawing together diverse communities, they can also represent symbolic and actual sites of exclusion and marginalization of individuals and communities that lived in these areas prior to the markets. A QUESTION OF WHITENESS: ‘NOBODY KNOWS WHAT WHITE PEOPLE EAT’ Whiteness studies has emerged in recent years as a way of examining race relations and the effects of racism by focusing on whiteness and assumptions that ‘white’ occupies a position of normalcy and neutrality. Julie Guthman describes whiteness as a ‘messy and controversial concept’ that variably refers to ‘the phenotype of pale bodies, an attribute of particular (privileged) people, a result of historical and social processes of racialization, a set of structural privileges, a standpoint of normalcy, or particular cultural politics and practices’ (2008, 390). It is most of these things, but it cannot be reduced to one of them, especially not simply as the phenotype of pale bodies. Whiteness is not simply pigmentation. At different historical junctures, racialised groups have moved in and out of the white category. Whiteness is about raced bodies, but also discourses and practices. Sara Ahmed traces the birth of whiteness studies to the work of black feminists such as Audre Lourde, who showed ‘how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that privilege on the b­ odies of those who are recognised as black’ (Ahmed 2004). Lourde and others turn the critical focus from the racialised other to the dominant institutions, beliefs, systems and practices that do the work of racialising while ­reinforcing white privilege. John Gabriel suggests that the political and analytic utility of ‘whiteness’ is that instead of focusing on and producing yet more ‘sociological knowledge of the “victim”’ of racism, prejudice and discrimination, whiteness ‘problematises the perpetrators and related processes’ (1998, 12). Rather than focusing exclusively on the injustices suffered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, for example, the whiteness analytic lens allows scholars such as Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson to draw attention to the material conditions, histories, ideas and practices that make such racialised injustices possible.

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The work of whiteness studies is to question the historical forces that have reinforced whiteness as a position of privilege and draw attention to its political and material effects. In Anglophone countries such as Australia, the United States, Canada and Britain, whiteness forms the background – the normal order of things – in which others appear as a racialized other. For example, comedian Dave Chappelle has a sketch on the culinary stereotypes that black people eat chicken and watermelon, and Latino people eat beans and corn. He observes that ‘the only reason these things are even an issue is because nobody knows what white people eat’ (2004). That is, the cuisine of racial others is identifiable and conspicuous. It can be exotified, demonised, mocked or, as in the case of ‘soul food’, made into a public health issue (Godoy 2013; Whitehead 1992). Traditional cuisine of black communities, such as fried chicken, collard greens and cornbread, is often used to explain why some black communities in America suffer from high incidence of chronic disease. Such explanations reduce the complex effects of historical injustices, intergenerational poverty and systemic racism to a stereotypical cuisine (Mayes and Thompson 2014, 165). The cuisine of white people, in contrast, is everything and nothing. It is the nonidentifiable neutral norm. In the words of Chappelle, ‘nobody knows what white people eat’. In The Future of Whiteness, Linda Martín Alcoff writes that for so long whiteness has gone ‘unnamed because white presence required no explanation or justification, not because it was invisible’ (2015, 71). Alcoff articulates three aspects of whiteness as a visible social identity: empirical, imaginary and subjective. Empirical whiteness is the ways ‘an identity can be objectively located, measured, and traced out historically in time and space’ (2015, 74). This may include phenomena such as demographic data, consumer behavior, places of residence, schools of choice, religious beliefs, leisure activities or attitudes towards governmental authorities. Imaginary whiteness is the ways in which whiteness ‘constitutes a shared social imaginary that organizes and prescribes normative or acceptable lifestyles, both for the in-group as well as for outsiders’ (2015, 74). Importantly, the imaginary is collective, rather than individual, and provides the normative background in which identities are performed, social values circulated and future possibilities enabled or foreclosed. Subjective whiteness is the ‘white way of being in the world’ (Alcoff 2015, 83); that is, the historical and social constitution of a white subject with ‘peculiar inclinations, affects, practices, and modes of perception’ (2015, 84). These three aspects of whiteness are not separable, but they comingle to produce a variety of material effects. For example, whiteness has a ‘predictive capacity in standardized test performances, treatments by police, wealth, home ownership and real estate values’ (Alcoff 2015, 71). Yet these and other effects of whiteness require

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no justification and are simply explained as the result of individual merit and personal responsibility. Whiteness orders spaces and conditions what bodies can appear and how they appear in these spaces. Porter describes whiteness as ‘the privilege that comes with being expected at any time and in any place in Australia – an already anticipated right to belong’ (2017, 24). Moreton-Robinson writes that the white space of the city is a particular pernicious form of white possession of Aboriginal land. It is in the city, writes Moreton-Robinson, that ‘we experience ontologically the effects of white possession. These cities signify with every building and every street that this land is now possessed by others; signs of white possession are embedded everywhere in the landscape’ (2015). The effects of the white possessive logic are many. Moreton-Robinson calls attention not only to the ontological effects in shaping the being of the occupier and the being of the dispossessed, but the way this logic produces certain spaces and determines what bodies can appear in those spaces. In a similar vein, Alcoff argues that whiteness is embodied and exhibited in the assumption of white people to be ‘entitled to all public spaces and to inhabit, and move into, any and every neighborhood’ (2015, 11). This is achieved through numerous historical and mediating factors such as ‘class, geographical region, age, religion, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, able-bodiedness, sexuality, language’ (Alcoff 2015, 70). Food practices are another way in which whiteness is mediated. Alcoff writes that the ‘[c]enturies of preferences for white skin are not so easily turned to dust’ and that ‘[w]hite supremacy is built into our material culture, from our neighborhood schools, to our university faculty’, to the way we grow our food, shop and consider what is ethically salient (2015, 26). The spaces in which food is grown, purchased and distributed mediate the effects of whiteness and racial othering. Speaking into the U.S. context, Guthman contends that ‘much alternative food discourse hails a white subject to these spaces of alternative food practice and thus codes them as white. Insofar as this has a chilling effect on people of color, it not only works as an exclusionary practice, but it also colors the character of food politics more broadly’ (2008, 388). That is, food politics is reduced to what white people see as morally and politically salient in food practices. Breeze Harper, for instance, identifies a difference in the ethical and political motivations for white and black people to adopt a vegan diet. According to Harper, veganism in the United States is overwhelmingly associated with white and thin people primarily concerned with animal rights and countering speciesism in food systems, fashion and cosmetic industries and biomedical research. Harper argues that it was her experience of life ‘as a working-class, Black-identified female’ that led her to ‘eventually practice ahimsa-based veganism from a different point of entry that didn’t initially

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involve animal rights as the catalyst to [her] “awakening”’ (Harper 2009, 13). Harper explores the way black female vegans use ‘veganism and other holistic health practices to decolonize their bodies and engage in health activism that resists institutionalized racism and neocolonialism’ (2009, 11). Harper and her Sistah Vegan Project aims to bring an intersectional approach to the vegan food movement to articulate the way white privilege can mask the exploitation of farm workers (usually in the Global South) who suffer in the production of animal-free products purchased by vegan consumers in the Global North. In drawing attention to the role of whiteness in veganism, Harper has attracted harsh criticism from figures within the vegan community who question her commitment to veganism. Harper’s critics argue that her concern with whiteness, race and colonialism detracts from the core vegan position that is against using animals for human needs (Philpott, Patel and McInroy 2016). In Australia, whiteness influences alternative food discourses in a variety of ways. A brief example is the way the emergence of alternative food practices such as farmers’ markets and community gardens is often dated to the early 2000s. This is the time that mainstream white culture started embracing these food practices. However, almost every non-British migrant community (Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Sudanese and so on) since the nineteenth century has set up gardens and sold produce through local markets (Head, Muir and Hampel 2004; Graham and Connell 2006). Some of the first ‘urban farms’ (to use the phrase anachronistically) in Australia were established by Chinese workers on the foreshore of the Swan River in Perth during the 1880s (Anonymous 2014). These gardens became a source of controversy, and restrictions were placed on growers, such as where the produce could be sold. A series of complaints with strong racial overtones were issued against Chinese growers. An 1887 letter to a Perth newspaper, The Inquirer and Commercial News, described Chinese vegetables as ‘unwholesome’ and ‘abominably grown’ (Sanitas 1887). The Australian Natives’ Association (mentioned in chapter 2) repeatedly pressured the Western Australian government to evict the growers and give the land to citizens (Anonymous 1911). The introduction of the Restricted Immigration Act of 1901 (White Australia Policy) meant that the numbers of Chinese farmers declined due to lack of immigration. As such, the gardens were closed, and their place in Australia’s agricultural history largely was forgotten. These histories and practices, however, are rarely told as part of the alternative food narrative – a narrative that is overwhelmingly white and that is grafted into the Anglo-American imaginary of yeomanry farming. Using the lens of whiteness, this chapter explores how the spaces of alternative agriculture are ordered and racialised, and how these intersect with processes of gentrification.

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AGRARIANISM AND URBAN RENEWAL So how do the politics of white possession play out in alternative agriculture? To answer this question, we first need to examine the way agrarian ideals are deployed in alternative agricultural practices in urban environments. Describing the urban and suburban embrace of agrarian ideals in the United States during the middle of the twentieth century, Richard Hofstadter wrote, the ‘more commercial [American] society became . . . the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values’ (1956). At the time Hofstadter was writing, 16 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. Half a century further on, less than 2 percent of the U.S. population lives on farms. As mentioned in chapter 2, Australia urbanized at a faster rate than the United States. The distance between urban communities and rural environments allowed mythic ideals to flourish. Rae Wear notes that in the mid-twentieth century, ‘many urban Australians were as susceptible to the claims of countrymindedness as their country compatriots’ (2009, 90). This was despite country-mindedness denigrating the city and regarding farmers as the most virtuous citizens who gave society economic and material prosperity as well as moral depth (Aitkin 1973, 416). If Hofstadter’s and Wear’s respective assessments of the 1950s are correct, then arguably the desire today to restore or imagine a connection to the agrarian past is even stronger. This desire could be evidenced by the popularity of farmers’ markets, community gardens and urban renewal projects. In recent years, city councils and nonprofit organizations have launched urban renewal projects that emphasise food production in inner-city environments. Most large Australian cities offer grants and allocate land for urban farms, community gardens and farmers’ markets. From 2004 to 2011, Australian cities witnessed a 53 percent increase in farmers’ markets (Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry 2012). Both motivating and responding to local government initiatives have been numerous popular books, television programs and documentaries encouraging urban residents to transform the built environment and embrace agricultural practices. Echoing the governmentality of improvement in the nineteenth century, university researchers in human geography, built environment, environmental sciences and urban studies argue that agrarian practices of small-scale agriculture have the potential to beautify postindustrial sites and positively impact community health and the environment (Duany and DPZ 2011; Franck 2005; Dixon and Capon 2008; Dixon et al. 2009). The rise in popularity of urban agriculture among residents of large cities can partly be explained as a response to concerns over climate change and a general belief that industrial agriculture has negative effects on health, the environment and society. In many ways, this story is not new. Narratives

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of industrial ruin and the need to return to simpler practices coevolved with narratives of industrial progress (Foster 1999). However, unlike nineteenthcentury critiques of industrialization or the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s and 1970s, urban food practices increasingly are accepted as part of the mainstream. A suspect but unsurprising demonstration of the power of these agrarian stories is the way food companies have sought to represent an agrarian aesthetic on their packages with images of tranquil farm scenes and claims that the food is ‘natural’, ‘organic’, ‘humane’ or ‘local’. This phenomenon has been called the ‘supermarket pastoral’ (Pollan 2006, 139; Thompson 2011). Clearly, there is not a uniform acceptance of this narrative of industrial ruin, either in whole or part. The agrarian imaginary has a flexibility that allows for diverse rationalities and levels of commitment without expecting individuals to have an explicit theoretical understanding that informs these practices. For instance, politicians such as former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and the National Party (a traditional agrarian party) reframe agrarian myths to justify their political push to increase export capacity of Australian agriculture in global markets (Keane 2012). Likewise, community developers are less dependent on narratives of industrial ruin and seek to tap into sentiments of beautifying the urban environment, developing public spaces for community interaction and creating new commercial and educational opportunities. Although activists associated with food sovereignty movements genuinely seek an alternative to industrial agriculture, the agrarian imaginary often operates at the level of aesthetics and community building by reconnecting urban residents to food production activities to increase health and well-being (GreenThumb 2012). But whose well-being? Urban agriculture is often promoted as a form of resistance to the dominance of Australia’s supermarket duopoly of Coles and Woolworths. Although other supermarket chains, such as Aldi, have entered the Australian market, Coles and Woolworths control 74 percent of the retail food market (LaFrenz 2014). Alternative practices of food production, distribution and consumption are characterised as avenues for political and social change (Mann 2014, 26; Parfitt et al. 2013, 51–58). While urban agriculture may contribute only a small percentage of total urban food needs, contemporary uses of agrarian narratives and images have a powerful influence on the way individuals and communities imagine their relationship to nature, food and the people that produce it. The relationship between agrarianism and urban agriculture is simultaneously deep and vague. Wooly ideas such as ‘local food is good’ or ‘industrial agriculture is killing the environment’ serve as proxies for specific political or theoretical positions. The vagueness and imprecision of these ideas should not lead to the conclusion that they are unimportant or insignificant. Charles Taylor’s notion of

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the ‘social imaginary’ is a useful mechanism for understanding the simultaneously deep and vague influence of agrarian thought in contemporary urban environments. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the nation as an imagined community (2006, 7), Taylor argues that the social imaginary is ‘the way in which our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain’ (2007, 161). The imaginary carries deep normative ideas that motivate the way individuals and communities believe social practices and relations should be conducted (Taylor 2004, 23). The constellations of ideas that create the social imaginary are not formally expressed in a coherent theory or doctrinal statements that individuals choose to adopt or reject. According to Taylor, the social imaginary can ‘never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines, because of its very unlimited and indefinite nature’ (2004, 173). Individuals and communities are socialized into traditions, histories and practices that operate in the background, yet make it possible to understand particular objects, activities and subjects as meaningful. In this sense, I use imaginary as a descriptive or diagnostic tool for drawing attention to the way agrarian ideas and narratives shape the food practices of urban residents. Taylor offers three signposts to identify what he means by the notion of social imaginary. First, it focuses on ‘the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surrounding’ (2007, 171–72). Stories, images and narrative fragments often are used to express the imaginary. Second, the social imaginary is ‘shared by a large group of people’ – not the whole society, but it can be (2007, 172). Third, the common or shared understanding of the social imaginary enables ‘common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (2007, 172). In sum, the imaginary is the collective use of stories and images to legitimate certain practices and articulate their meaning for a community. I contend that an agrarian imaginary operates to make certain practices of rural life, self-sufficiency and food production meaningful to urban communities attempting to draw on and replicate those practices. Importantly, the agrarian imaginary also functions to legitimate and confirm or hide and reveal certain practices and beliefs. The agrarian imaginary draws on and reinforces a white imaginary. As discussed above, Alcoff argues that whiteness not only has an ‘empirical referent’ in the form of specific practices or behaviours, but ‘the imaginary representation of whiteness is just as important to study’ (2015, 78). Like Taylor, Alcoff argues that the white social imaginary is collective rather than individual and forms the ‘background layer of understandings and dispositions that both enables and constrains our ability to produce new ideas and responses’ (2015, 78–79). There are multiple reasons why people are appealing to these agrarian ideas, certainly not all reducible to whiteness. A common appeal to these

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agrarian ideals appears to be food security and climate change (Mann 2014, 59ff; Rose 2013). Advocates of alternative food networks argue that agrarian smallholder farming of the food sovereignty movement is the best approach to achieving food security in the face of global climate change – a neo-agrarian solution to a neo-Malthusian problem. Although La Via Campesina and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance articulate the problem of climate change, global hunger and the role of small-scale agriculture in a detailed manner, much of the broader discourse about alternative food networks is less specific and talks in general terms alluding to practical, social and political benefits of participating in these food practices. The practical benefits can be summarized as adaption to climate change, food security and sustainability. With increasingly dire predictions about the effects of climate change, it is argued that the more urban and peri-urban communities are able to produce and grow food through small-scale farming, the better prepared they will be for either spikes in food prices or scarcity. In his analysis of food security, Bryan McDonald writes that a ‘result of recent rising food prices and interest in food sustainability and self-sufficiency has been a renewed interest in urban gardening’ (2010, 122). There is debate over the extent to which urban farms can feed entire communities and meet all of their nutritional needs (Sexton 2011); however advocates emphasize the practical benefits of urban agriculture to supplement the cost of food in low-income urban populations (Atkinson 2012). In addition to providing food in the face of shortages as a result of climate change or poverty, urban agriculture provides an avenue to assist in the prevention of climate change. According to the Sydney City Farm, urban agriculture is ‘environmentally responsible’, provides ‘[h]ands on involvement in local food production, composting, and sustainable living’ and is a ‘tangible expressions of a more comprehensive environmental commitment’ (Clouston Associates 2010). These practices do not come close to the political ambitions of La Via Campesina. However, in urban and peri-urban Australia these practices are characterized as ‘tangible expressions’ of a broader commitment to the environment and demonstrate the relationship between the imaginary and normative assessments of practices as indicators of responsible and ethical conduct. Andres Duany writes ‘that because of its mitigating effect on climate change, a neo-agrarian way of life should be made available to as many as possible, for ethical reasons no less than practical ones’ (Duany and DPZ 2011, 3). The normative claim that these practices should be adopted and made available to more people is reinforced by, and reinforces, the collective understanding of virtue provided through the agrarian imaginary. As discussed in chapter 3, many of the organizers and producers involved with the alternative food movement are interested in much more substantial political goals than raising awareness about the hardships of farmers, effects

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of mining or unsustainability of industrial agriculture. For instance, the longterm goal of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance ‘is to democratize food systems’, which means replacing the current ‘food oligarchy’ and the system run by a ‘small number of powerful players’ with a system that gives everyone the ‘right to participate in how key decisions are made’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 51). The political rhetoric of alternative food attempts to move people beyond individual ‘ethical consumption’ and towards collective action and participatory democracy. However, these political goals tend to be overridden by the interests of urban consumers and residents. Tropes of urban restoration or renewal figure prominently in discussions articulating the communal benefit of urban agriculture (Wirzba 2003, 5; ­Ottman et al. 2010). The idea of renewal echoes the earlier colonial notions of improvement and similarly depends on a belief that there is some kind of decay. From the perspective of the agrarian tradition, the urban environment has been, and continues to be, in desperate need of renewal. For advocates of urban agriculture, such as Brian Donahue, the ideals and practices of agrarian smallholder agriculture can lead to a transformation of the urban environment if citizens participate in food production and consumption informed by agrarian ideals. Community-supported agriculture, community gardens and farmers’ markets are characterized as avenues to build ‘political constituency of citizens willing to curtail the excesses of the industrial economy’ (Donahue 2003, 44). Thus, for Donahue and others, the agrarian imaginary encourages the development of food practices that motivate political, social and economic change. Like earlier agrarians, the communion with nature provides the basis through which individuals can restore their relationship with others, the land and themselves. Likewise, Russ Grayson from the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance encourages individuals to get involved in these agrarian acts: For even if only growing a small container garden on your apartment balcony, apply a little imagination about you can see the link between how you manage your urban microgarden and how an agroecological farmer manages their land. Apply a little more imagination and you start to see the connections between our urban food aspirations and those described in the Nyéléni Declaration. (2015)

In the absence of opportunities for urban residents to farm for themselves, farmers’ markets are characterized as an optimal space for establishing the social virtues of communal engagement and mutual respect. Philosopher Paul Thompson argues that farmers’ markets can function to develop agrarian virtues through a deeper involvement in the ‘preparation and consumption of one’s food’, which ‘can serve as antidote to the spiritual alienation’ of the city (Thompson 2010, 121). Urban farming and frequenting farmers’

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markets is purported to help urban dwellers establish a ‘deeper connection with nature’, ‘interact-face-to-face with people who produce food’ and ‘brush up against someone who is actually living out a life premised on self-reliance and stewardship’ (Thompson 2010, 121). These ideals are reflected in the Lord Mayor of Sydney’s description of ‘the City Farm as a place that offers inner-city residents a taste of life on a farm’ (Office of the Lord Mayor 2015). The implication is that these practices, however small, allow for the transaction of virtue through either an association with the land or with those who depend on and live off the land. Yet, the focus on the consumer replicates the practices of global food systems that many activists are trying to critique. This is something Thompson acknowledges as the crux of food ethics, and ‘[w]e should be suspicious of grand ideas that resolve the tension between food producers and food consumers with a sweep of the pen’ (2015, 129). However, it is not only the tension between producers and consumers that requires ethical attention, but the very spaces in which food is produced and consumed. Spaces such as farmers’ markets have the propensity to reinforce unequal class and race relations. In these spaces virtues are claimed to transfer to consumers through relationships with producers that are more than an economic transaction but a vicarious cultivation of virtue through an imagined agrarian community that extends beyond an individual farmers’ market. To transpose Anderson’s remarks on the role of the newspaper for imagined political communities, the exchange of virtue from the farmer to the consumer is a ceremony ‘replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion’ (2006, 35). The imagined community enables the recognition of farmers’ markets as sites of meaningful activity that cultivate agrarian virtues of mutual respect and interdependence both between the consumer and producer, as well as between consumers. This raises crucial questions: Who is doing the imagining, and who is imagined in and out of these communities? Furthermore, what material conditions do these imaginings ignore or presuppose? Mid-twentieth century critics of agrarianism such as Hofstadter and Govan suggested that appealing to an agrarian way of life was a smokescreen for industrial agriculture and/or a nostalgic notion propagated by teachers, writers, philosophers and poets ‘who milked no cows, shoveled no manure, and picked no cotton or peas’ (Govan 1964, 44). Many of the urban residents frequenting farmers’ markets or joining community-supported agriculture schemes are teachers, office workers or philosophers who don’t shovel manure. It is, therefore, worth following Hofstadter and Govan’s critical line of inquiry to ask if the contemporary agrarian imaginary serves to cover over or legitimate certain problematic practices.

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A major concern is gentrification and the well-documented effects of changing social and economic dynamics in inner-city neighborhoods. Although there is much to interrogate regarding the intertwinement of alternative agricultural practices with processes of gentrification, I wish to focus specifically on the displacement of urban indigenous communities. While writers, teachers and philosophers might imagine themselves into a shared social reality through agrarian practices, others are figuratively and materially imagined out of these communities. As Porter argues, ‘the city is framed as a place so modern that it erases the ability to be Indigenous in a way that is recognisable to mainstream society’ (2017, 24). That is, Aboriginal people do not really belong in the city, let alone deserve any substantial say over the way the city should be designed or planned. Strangely, the idea of authentic Aboriginal Australians living in the city cannot be imagined, whereas many white city dwellers easily imagine agricultural practices in the urban landscape. Whiteness is part of the answer to why agricultural practices can be accepted as part of the city, whereas Aboriginality cannot. As Porter observes, the city is a ‘geographically intensive form of dispossession’ that is ‘saturated with white possessiveness’ (2017, 24). Therefore, it is crucial to examine the possessive logics of whiteness and how they operate through processes of gentrification and alternative food discourses. These logics are not only historical or rural, but they have contemporary relevance to urban expressions of the agrarian imaginary. The gentrification of areas such as Harlem in New York and Redfern in Sydney has been described as the process of recolonisation (Shaw 2000; Stratton 1977; Lawson 2001). Human geographers describe white middle-class ‘pioneers’ as returning to urban ‘frontiers’ through ‘beachheads’ in a ‘neo-colonial land grab’ (Shaw 2000, 296; Smith 1996). If the period of gentrification of Harlem and Redfern in the 1980s and 1990s was led by ‘pioneers’, the continuation of this neocolonial pantomime is occurring through neo-agrarianism and practices of urban agriculture that transform and improve a strange environment into a habitable home. REDFERN AND THE EVELEIGH STREET FARMERS’ MARKET The material and social effects of the white agrarian imaginary manifest in a variety of ways. I am particularly interested in the role of a farmers’ market in Redfern and the way it signals who belongs and who is excluded from a community. Before examining the market, it is important to give a greater appreciation of the importance of Redfern and what it means in the Australian political and social landscape. Due to the rural recession in the 1930s, many

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Aboriginal people in New South Wales left reserves and moved to Sydney looking for work (Anderson 1993, 88). The affordable housing and proximity to transport hubs and employment encouraged migration, such that by 1971 ‘there were between four and nine thousand Aborigines living in inner Sydney’ (Anderson 1993, 88). Redfern soon became a locus of community action and support in relation to health, housing and legal services. Redfern has a central role in the urban imaginary of Sydney and Australia more broadly. Redfern evokes a spectrum of responses: it is a slum, a key site of political action, a riot, a modern sacred site, an investment opportunity, an urban adventure, a footpath on the way to Sydney University or the last stop before Central. Wendy Shaw describes Aboriginal Redfern, commonly known as The Block, in the following way: This indigenous place existing within another place has had a pressured and contested existence. In a complicated battle for Aboriginal rights and the accompanying storm of non-Aboriginal protest, the federal Labor government granted The Block, a site consisting of 70 Victorian terraced houses, to the inner city Aboriginal community in 1973. (2000, 291)

The history of Aboriginal Redfern is one of vibrant struggle and imaginative forms of communal resistance for those living in poorly maintained terraces in Redfern. Shaw writes that its ‘continuance provides a focal point for some of Australia’s most contentious race relations issues. It is presented, simultaneously, as a place of successful Aboriginal political struggle and as an example of failed (urban) Aboriginal self-determination’ (2000, 291). It was at Redfern Park in 1992 that Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered a speech acknowledging that ‘it was [white Australia] who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life’ (1992). It was significant for a sitting prime minister to acknowledge past and present injustices and failures, an acknowledgement that came about due to the constant presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and activists who have articulated and resisted injustices since 1788. As Kay Anderson observed at the same time as Keating’s address, Redfern is ‘a sphere of indigenous protest, an heroic site of resistance to European culture and colonialist control’ (1993, 81). Writing in 2000, Shaw describes Redfern as sitting ‘in glaring juxtaposition to the predominantly non-Aboriginal suburbs that surround it’ (Shaw 2000, 291). In Shaw’s words, ‘the impoverished “blackness” of the inner Sydney Aboriginal community has become bounded by a sea of increasingly affluent “whiteness”’ (Shaw 2000, 291). Almost two decades later it appears that the Aboriginal Housing Commission’s (AHC) plans for redeveloping The Block will result in Aboriginal Redfern seamlessly slipping into the

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company of the renovated and restored areas of Darlington and Chippendale. The Block is in the process of being transformed into The Pemulwuy Project.1 According to the AHC website, The Pemulwuy Project is the redevelopment of the land known as ‘the Block’ in Redfern, owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company Ltd. We are redeveloping the land into a mixed use site which includes affordable housing for 62 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, a gymnasium, commercial and retail space, a gallery, student accommodation, and a childcare centre.

This project has generated tension among Aboriginal residents and activists (Visentin 2015). Jenny Munro, an Aboriginal community leader, set up the Redfern Tent embassy on the site proposed for development. For Munro, The Block is ‘sacred, it’s sovereign, and every inch of it is black. It’s the first piece of land that was acknowledged as Aboriginal land in the country’ (­ Trenoweth 2014). For more than a year, Munro and other activists lived at the tent embassy, demanding that the redevelopment include more housing for Aboriginal people. According to Munro, the AHC was not putting Aboriginal housing first, which was its mandate. In 2015 an agreement was reached, and the tent embassy disbanded when the federal government pledged $5 million for affordable Aboriginal housing. However, it appears that this provision already may be undermined (Zhou 2017). Although many complex factors exemplify and contribute to these developments, I suggest that urban agriculture plays a material and symbolic role. As agricultural practices move into urban areas, simultaneously following and clearing the path of gentrification, I contend that the colonial logics of terra nullius are in operation to whiten and take possession of urban spaces. As Sue Jackson, Louise Johnson and Libby Porter note, the core of ­‘Australian planning continues to ignore the fact that its practice is intricately woven into the story of Indigenous dispossession and unjust relations with the Australian state, a story that reverberates across Australian history to the present’ (2017, 1). Obvious examples such as the crude statements made by Great Fortune Investments that the ‘aboriginals have already moved out’ attract the ire of commentators and the public (Pearlman 2014), but Jackson, Johnson and Porter make a more fundamental point: from ‘the moment of first contact, Indigenous peoples have struggled against and within Western modes of governing space and place, at the same time as forging alternative pathways and possibilities’ (2017, 1). The terra nullius logics underpinning planning and development occur on a grand scale in the form of city planning, public works, agriculture or mining, but also in everyday and seemingly innocuous acts.

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Disused blocks, abandoned industrial sites or vacant lots are declared to belong to no one and suitable for development or cultivation. Pocket City Farms, for example, is a not-for-profit ‘start-up’ that ‘is taking to Sydney’s neglected spaces, from spare plots to rooftops, in an effort to make good of that unused space – by growing fresh organic produce!’ (2015) Their first farm is at Camperdown Commons, a former bowling green that is now a fine-dining restaurant. The farm provides the restaurant with onsite-grown seasonal produce. Despite the name, the commons certainly are enclosed. Whereas the bowling club used to serve pub food affordable for low-income residents, today, a main meal at the Commons costs between $27 and $43. Pocket City Farms’ goal to farm ‘Sydney’s unused spaces’ has certain appeal, especially compared to the for-profit developments that are swallowing much of the inner-west of Sydney. However, the rhetoric about ‘unused’ and ‘vacant lands’ echoes the ‘wastelands’ and ‘uninhabited spaces’ used by colonialists. These lands and spaces can be defined as vacant or unused due to the fact that any claims that the original inhabitants may have to these spaces are dismissed out of hand, and the people using those lands today are not recognized or seen; this is particularly true of the invisibility of people who use these spaces for homes (Mitchell 1995). The claims of original inhabitants (or homeless and displaced rough sleepers) go unrecognized or regarded as illegitimate (Schmelzkopf 1995, 371). As Porter notes, ‘[n]early 99 per cent of lands in which native title has been recognized are in remote Australia’ (2017, 22). The idea that urban spaces would be returned to Indigenous Australians is anathema to the logics of white possession of the city. Government agencies and new middle-class residents have praised renewal initiatives for ‘breathing new life’ into abandoned industrial sites, offering alternatives to supermarket chains and providing a place for community engagement and flourishing (Hunt 2007; Clouston Associates 2010; Knowd, Mason and Docking 2005). In 2004, the NSW state government established the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (RWA) to ‘revitalize’ Redfern, Waterloo, Eveleigh and Darlington (Morgan 2012). Part of the RWA plan was to establish the Eveleigh Street Markets (Redfern-Waterloo Authority 2008, 32–33). The Eveleigh Street Markets were established in 2009 and derived its name from one of the main streets of The Block. The name has since been changed to the ‘Carriageworks Markets’. The Market is housed in the former railyards that has been redeveloped and renewed as a theatre venue and art space with restaurant and bar. Kirsten Seale describes a Saturday morning at the markets in the following way: the view from the concrete ramp that leads down to the regenerated Eveleigh train yards is of a marketplace thick with shopping trolleys, prams and pugs

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on leashes . . . It looks like a parody of a French street market, shoppers in striped tops fill Provencal-style straw baskets with expensive fruit and veg. At street level, members of Socialist Alliance hand out leaflets urging consumers to ‘Take the power back!’ and an animal welfare organization seeks homes for rescued cats as if offering absolution for the conspicuous consumption down below. (Seale 2016, 82)

Although there is a great deal of so-called progressive politics associated with farmers’ markets, they also can be viewed as part of gentrification and whitening processes that establish economic and symbolic barriers that exclude low-socioeconomic residents from participating in the agrarian community (Wood 2012; Vidot 2012). In the case of the Eveleigh Street Market, at the time of its opening in 2009 it was described in a local community newspaper as providing ‘ethical food choices’ (Black 2009). However, it also was acknowledged that ‘the prices are too expensive for many public housing residents’ (Black 2009). A local politician, Irene Doutney, proposed that the city council assist public housing residents, many of whom are Aboriginal, in establishing ‘their own regular market, probably in conjunction with other local charities, to make sure residents can have access to ethical food at affordable prices’ (Black 2009). This is a pragmatic solution, yet it runs counter to the communitybuilding goals purported by proponents of farmers’ markets as it demarcates residents along economic lines. Rather than providing a common ground of communal embrace and belonging, the Eveleigh Street/Carriageworks example demonstrates the potential for urban agricultural practices to exclude and divide urban residents into two communities: one willing and able to pay the high price (what some argue is the real price) for produce, and the other that is excluded and ‘left out’ due to economic and cultural barriers (Wood 2012). These are the very concerns raised by Paul Nicholson, cofounder of La Via Campesina and a key figure in the food sovereignty movement. At Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue conference, Nicholson defended the radical agenda of La Via Campesina and food sovereignty from what he labelled ‘petite bourgeois’ interests (Nicholson 2013). Nicholson emphasised that ‘we are not speaking about farmers markets. We are not speaking about having a good price for those who can pay, and the industrial food for those who cannot pay . . . We are speaking of a social and political concept’ (Nicholson 2013). AFSA isn’t necessarily speaking about farmers’ markets either, but these are one of the most visible forms of alternative food in Australia. Although some food activists deny that alternative food has a problem with class or race (Starr 2014), it is a problem that needs to be addressed if the progressive politics of food sovereignty are to be realised.

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Alternative food practices can and do serve to define a community; however, in the process they also exclude those that do not or cannot fit into that agrarian-white imaginary. In a place such as Redfern, these socioeconomic class barriers and codes are intimately entwined with the discursive effects of whiteness. This occurs not only in the statistical representation of different bodies with or without pale complexion, but through the ‘setting of the table’, that is, the implicit terms and conditions that shape who is allowed to be in these spaces, how are they allowed to be in them and what kinds of knowledges and practices are permitted. However, at the present moment, these concerns cannot be fully heard above the din of the conversation among the citizen-consumers comfortably seated at the table. INDIVIDUAL ETHICS OF CONSUMERISM The criticism that alternative food ignores class and race is not necessarily new (Alkon and McCullen 2011; Slocum 2008). Yet, it is often met with hostility or defensiveness from activists and practitioners who are quick to point to examples of progressive action that is addressing race and class. Urban gardens in Detroit are often used as an example of poor black urban communities coming together to offer mutual support in a context where they largely have been abandoned by government and the private sector (White 2011). Although these examples are important to bear in mind, it is also important to take the critique seriously and examine how the progressive politics of alternative food is so easily captured by regressive forces. Part of the answer to this question is that these broader socioeconomic dimensions and racial politics get sidelined by an individual consumer approach to food ethics and politics. In discussing Guthman’s contribution to critical agrarian studies, Jane Dixon observes that ‘alternative food movements frequently work against social justice in privileging individual behavior change’ (2016, 1113). The rise in alternative food practices is entwined with the rise in consumer autonomy and ethical consumption. The belief that consumers are alienated from their food is a common trope deployed throughout alternative food discourse and contributes to the rise in ethical thinking about food. Processes of reformulation, genetic modification, globalized food system, perennial availability of seasonal foods, industrial agriculture, disconnection of rural and urban communities and the competing messages regarding healthy diet all contribute to a belief that consumers don’t know what is in their food, where it comes from or the conditions under which it is produced (Ristovski-Slijepcevic, Chapman and Beagan 2010; Brom and Gremmen 2000; Guthman 2011; Scrinis 2013). These epistemological concerns compound fears about potential consequences for individual

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and population health. That is, if consumers do not know what is in their food or where it came from, then they cannot make informed decisions about their own health. As such, the autonomy of consumers has been undermined, and they are dependent on producers and retailers. Or so the argument goes. Autonomy is a central value in liberal moral philosophy, and it is this tradition that dominates much of Anglo-American ethical thinking (Callahan 2012; Charlesworth 1993). Closely tied to autonomy is the idea of consumer choice, a central value in neoliberal economics. These two values combine to establish rhetorically powerful arguments for the need to respect and enable consumer autonomy in relation to food choice. Frans Brom writes that respect for consumer autonomy ‘implies that they have the prima facie right to live their life according to their own value system. Their right to live according to their own life plan implies that they ought to have the choice for products that fit in with their view of life’ (2000, 131). However, due to the many stages involved in producing and distributing modern food items, there is concern that consumer autonomy can be manipulated, thereby undermining the right for individuals to live their life according their own values system. The manipulation or undermining of choice is a concern for ethicists who believe that food choices are not only a matter of an individual’s culinary preferences, but they are connected to a host of societal issues, such as obesity, climate change, fair trade or animal welfare (Singer 2012; Callahan 2013). Ethicists also argue that food safety is an issue of consumer autonomy that is particularly salient in the large-scale industrial food system (Resnik 2010; McGee 2007; Gostin 2010; Siipi and Uusitalo 2008). Outbreaks of mad cow disease and E. coli, as well as anxieties about trans fats and genetically modified foods, reinforce suspicion about industrialised food systems and lead to calls for greater transparency and the establishment of various regulatory practices and organisations (Loureiro and Umberger 2007; Draper and Green 2002; Brom 2000; Jensen and Sandøe 2002; Beekman 2008). A key point of contention in these debates over consumer autonomy is the role of knowledge and information. The issue of consumer autonomy, whether related to health, environment or food safety, is often dealt with through mechanisms that purport to offer great knowledge and information. Food labels, for example, are positioned as being vital for consumer autonomy and ethical choice (Mayes 2014, 2016). Practices such as farmers’ markets also purport to allow consumers to ‘get to know the producer’, thereby enabling ethical choice based on unfiltered information. As Guthman observes, a popular phrase in alternative food movements is ‘If people only knew where their food came from . . .’ (2008, 387). The underlying logic is that the ‘lack of knowledge as the most proximate obstacle to a transformed food system’ (Guthman 2008, 387); with the

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right knowledge, consumers will make the ethical and political choice that will lead to a just food system. Ethical consumption is the idea that individuals have a responsibility towards others in the way they consume. Rob Irvine states that ‘ethical consumption may mean buying different products and boycotting others’ (2013, 146). Peter Singer has argued for a long time that individuals have a responsibility to spend their money and consume in ways that do not harm others, particularly animals and vulnerable people (1972, 1977). In 2006, Singer coauthored with Jim Mason The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, which identifies a range of areas – environment, animal welfare, health – that can be benefited by ethical consumption (2006). Alternative food practices such as community-supported agriculture, farmers’ markets and purchasing ethically sourced products identified by special labels are central for ethical consumption. Information becomes the key for consumers to act ethically towards others and to develop an ethical self by knowing what it is that they are eating. This is what underlies the alternative food virtue of ‘getting to know your farmer’. Then you can really know whether a certain item is cruelty-free, vegan, contains GMOs, fair-trade or aligns with particular political views. Advocates of alternative food systems claim to give individual consumers the knowledge that they need to make choices that are responsible and respect others. Ethical consumption is an avenue into raising awareness about important issues. I am not suggesting that these practices should be dismissed as irrelevant. However, there is a strong tendency for these ethical analyses to focus on the individual consumer (Ashby and Rich 2013), which narrows the perspective to market economies and liberal moral philosophy. As Alana Mann notes, ‘individual action cannot counter the overpowering influences of liberalized markets and their impacts on rural livelihoods in a global economy’ (2015). Rather, there needs to be a wider understanding of food politics and ethics that is historically aware and questions the political economy of food systems that condition individual choices (Patel 2009). Thompson suggests a broader definition of food ethics that ‘might include not only making better choices yourself but also designing menus, public policies, or even cities to encourage better food choices by everyone’ (2015, 5). This is a useful broadening of food ethics, yet it is still oriented towards the choices of a consumer as the ultimate point of reference. Thompson recognizes this when he identifies ‘the “fundamental problem” in food ethics [as] the enduring tension between the interests of poor farmers in the developing world and the hungry masses of growing urban centers’ (2015, 7). This tension and unequal relations of power between producers and consumers will not be resolved by consumer choice ethics or boutique farmers’ markets.

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CONCLUSION The widespread interest in food provides an opportunity to draw on that interest and explore broader social, political and historical issues. Guthman concludes her book Weighing In by suggesting that ‘we need to harness this exploding interest in food and use the power of public politics to change food systems’ (2011, 195). This is a possibility. However, this chapter also shares Guthman’s concern that ‘when food itself becomes the locus of social change, it tends to erase from consideration the countless ways in which the food system has gone awry socially and environmentally, especially for those who labor in the food industry’ (2011, 161). This book also recognizes the potential of food to generate social and political change. In this process we need to recognise the complicity of food and agricultural systems in historical injustices of colonialism and the effects of these injustices on the present. I am not arguing that markets such as the Eveleigh Street Markets should not have been developed. But they are the manifestation of exclusionary processes, and they could have been developed very differently. There needs to be a greater awareness that these spaces are not terra nullius and that community development and building cannot be done with complete ignorance or disregard of the communities that existed prior to farmers’ markets or community gardens. As Guthman notes in the U.S. context, the solution to racism and raced spaces it not a push towards equal numbers or equivalent statistical representation but substantive participation in defining the terms and conditions. If alternative agriculture is going to be true to its progressive food politics, it needs to allow local communities to set the agenda of the metaphoric and literal table of alternative food. In Australia, there needs to be a nuanced analysis of the relationships between urban agriculture, gentrification and the colonial legacy in the agrarian imaginary. The dominance of individualized ethics and the ease with which such ethics are incorporated into consumer-driven forms of political action are wholly inadequate for attending to the reproduction of historical injustices in the present. Although food sovereignty, as articulated by La Via Campesina, does present a radical vision that could address some of these issues, questions remain about its applicability to the Australian context. In the following chapters I explore this possibility and contend that food sovereignty can be strengthened by adopting a biopolitical lens that includes Indigenous sovereignty movements. But before that argument can be made, we need to explore more fully the unsettling effects of Indigenous sovereignty and their continued presence in the settler-colonial state.

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NOTE 1. This is an interesting choice of name considering Pemulwuy was a warrior in the Bidjigal clan of the Eora nation who resisted European settlement.

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the-nyeleni-declaration-relevant-even-in-the-city/ Created 18 March 2015. Accessed 23 September 2016. Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Greenthumb. (2012). About. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation 2012. http://www.greenthumbnyc.org/about.html, accessed 22 October 2012. Guthman, J. (2008). ‘“If They Only Knew”: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions’, Professional Geographer, 60(3), 387–97. ———. (2011). Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harper, A. B., ed. (2009). Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books. Head, L., P. a. T. Muir, and E. V. A. Hampel. (2004). ‘Australian Backyard Gardens and the Journey of Migration’, Geographical Review, 94(3), 326–47. Hofstadter, R. (1956). ‘The Myth of the Happy Yeoman’, American Heritage Magazine, 7(3). Hunt, A. R. (2007). ‘Consumer Interactions and Influences on Farmers’ Market Vendors’, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 22(01), 54–66. Irvine, R. (2013). ‘Food Ethics: Issues of Consumption and Production’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 10(2), 145–48. Jackson, S., L. C. Johnson, and L. Porter, eds. (2017). Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis. Jensen, K., and P. Sandøe. (2002). ‘Food Safety and Ethics: The Interplay between Science and Values’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 15(3), 245–53. Keane, B. (2012). ‘Get Fact: Is Barnaby Australia’s Own Thomas Jefferson?’ Crikey. http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/09/17/get-fact-is-barnaby-australias-ownthomas-jefferson/. Keating, P. (1992). Redfern Speech – Year for the World’s Indigneous People. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Reference Group 1992. https://antar.org.au/ sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf, accesssed 10 March 2015. Kerr, T., and S. Cox. (2013). Setting up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy: A Report on Perth Media. Bentley, WA: Ctrl-Z. Knowd, I., D. Mason, and A. Docking. (2005). ‘Urban Agriculture: The New Frontier’, City, (23), 1. Lafrenz, C. (2014). ‘The Supermarket Duopoly Is Starting to Fray.’ Australian Financial Review. Lawson, B. (2001). ‘Living for the City: Urban United States and Environmental Justice.’ In Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, edited by Laura Westra and Bill Lawson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Loureiro, M. L., and W. J. Umberger. (2007). ‘A Choice Experiment Model for Beef: What US Consumer Responses Tell Us about Relative Preferences for Food Safety, Country-of-Origin Labeling and Traceability’, Food Policy, 32(4), 496–514. Mann, A. (2014). Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Chapter 5

Unsettling Food Sovereignty in Australia

By the year 2000 I would like to see an Australian nation comfortable and relaxed . . . about their history. – John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia (1996) If you have title to the ground on which you stand, you traffic in stolen goods. – Raj Patel, Letters to a Young Farmer (2017)

In 1977 Wendell Berry published The Unsettling of America, a text that drew attention to the plight of small-scale farmers and influenced a generation of environmental and agricultural activists around the globe. Berry argued that industrial agriculture, and what he called the economics of ‘anxiety, fantasy, luxury and idle wishing’ (2015, Loc. 336), had unsettled American life. According to Berry, the agricultural policies of the midtwentieth century had produced a ‘corporate revolution’ that exploited farmlands for profit with detrimental results for farmers, consumers, the environment and society as a whole (2015, Loc. 78). American life was unsettled and disordered. According to Berry, it could be resettled through communities of smallholder farmers with intimate and nurturing connections to the land. As discussed in previous chapters, settling the land to produce a reliable and ordered food supply has been an abiding objective of the British, and then Australian governments, since 1788. How the land would be settled (family farming or grazing) and the purpose of the food supply (self-sufficiency or export) were the main questions. What was largely left unquestioned was the right fulness of British occupation and settlement. Today, this 135

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remains unquestioned in both industrial and small-scale sustainable farming ­discourse. Like Berry, Australian alternative food advocates argue that largescale corporate agriculture has had a negative impact on Australian society and the environment (Rose 2015; Mitchell 1946). It is argued that a return to small-scale family farming will regenerate the land, improve population health and restore community values. Small-scale regenerative agriculture may be able to achieve a variety of social and environmental goods. However, questions remain about its entwinement with settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It is worth pausing to address the normative implications of the term settling and its variants. To settle is good. It is rest, peace, order, reconciliation. Unsettling, by contrast, is bad. It is disturbance, disorder, trouble and strife. In Berry’s thesis, the unsettling of America’s small-scale agriculture has been ‘catastrophic’ (2015, Loc. 78). Yet, for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the ‘settling’ that occurred via the agriculture Berry praises also has been catastrophic. From the perspective of postcolonial studies, the act of settling and to be a settler is ‘inappropriately apolitical terminology that serves to obscure the violence of dispossession’ (Jackson, Johnson, and Porter 2017, 2). In the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, settling and settlers wrought catastrophe for indigenous peoples. Berry does refer to the destruction of Native American ways of life, but only as a ‘parable’ that helps to illustrate what has happened to small-scale farmers (2015, Loc. 108). Berry brackets the small family farmer from the processes that subjugated Native Americans and stole their lands. Ultimately Berry’s concern is the unsettling effect of corporate agriculture and the importance of the family farm to resettle and bring rest, peace, order and reconciliation to the land and society. Although corporate agriculture and food retailers may wreak havoc on the environment, population health and farmers’ lives, ‘the question “to whom does Australia belong?” is thoroughly settled’. In 1968 W. E. H. Stanner famously identified the depths to which Australia was settled – not only in terms of physical occupation, but the nation’s self-understanding and collective memory were settled and beyond dispute. Stanner argued that Australians were sleeping comfortably in ‘the great Australian silence’, oblivious to the violence and disruption that colonisation caused (1991, 18). According to Stanner, historians and scholars in the mid-twentieth century were not interested in asking questions such as, ‘What were the relations between the squatters and the aborigines?’ (1991, 23) Stanner points to books on Australia’s history and culture written by scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, including some of his own, that fail to mention the existence of Indigenous Australians (1991, 23). Although Indigenous voices had long attempted to break this silence through protest and struggle, as well as the

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language of Empire via petitions and letters, the white nation rarely has had ears to hear. When historians, politicians and activists eventually challenged the silence, hostilities were waged over how to understand the national story (Manne 2003; Windshuttle 2002). In 1996 John Howard was on the cusp of winning the federal election and becoming Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister (1996–2007). In a pointed response to Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech, which acknowledged the injustices of colonialisation, Howard outlined his vision for an Australia that was ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about its history and place in the world (1996). Howard believed ‘it is very important that we as a nation don’t spend our lives apologising for the past’ (1996). Australians in the present, argued Howard, should not be held responsible for alleged wrongs in the past (Alcorn 2001; Sandel 2010). The past was settled, and there was no reason to disturb it. Although it is politically and morally convenient to believe that present generations have no responsibility for past actions, it is also true that the effect of the past on the present eventually will recede. But how this happens is a key question. David Rieff observes in his book In Praise of Forgetting that ‘forgetting and being forgotten are what must happen sooner or later’ (2016, 17). This may be true. However, Rieff also notes that ‘one cannot forget what one never knew’ (2016, 20). This captures the tension surrounding the discourse of Australia’s colonial history. Some want to forget, while others contend that we have not fully known what we are trying to forget. As recent disputes over statues memorialising Captain Cook and Governor Macquarie suggest, Australians find it difficult to remember injustices perpetrated against the first inhabitants (Scates 2017). Even if the dispossession of original inhabitants is known as factual information, the political and ethical significance of that history of dispossession is rarely acknowledged and almost never results in substantial changes in the present. This phenomenon of ignoring, discounting and silencing history is not simply a problem of “awareness raising” or education. It is a learned or active forgetting reinforced by education systems, popular histories, monuments and national stories. This active forgetting can be understood through Charles Mills’s analysis of white epistemology of ignorance. According to Mills, social reality is not essentially egalitarian and inclusive, with sexism and racism as anomalies. Rather, they are the norm on which patriarchy and white supremacy rely (Mills 2007, 17). By ‘white supremacy’, Mills is not referring to individual racists who may or may not be members of organisations such as the KKK or United Patriots Front. Rather, he is referring to the ‘socialstructural’ forces that maintain white privilege and enable white ignorance of past wrongs in the everyday order of the social fabric (2007, 20). That is, white supremacy operates in and constitutes the social arrangements that

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permit and depend on a learned ignorance in relation to the past. Linda Martín Alcoff describes Mills’s ‘epistemology of ignorance’ as ‘a set of substantive epistemic practices designed to protect their belief that society is basically a meritocracy, people of color are responsible for their troubles, and racism is a thing of the past’ (2015, 84). This social epistemology quarantines racism as a relic of an unenlightened past and espouses a new era where racism is a blemish on an otherwise equal and harmonious society. However, Mills argues that this way of knowing and perceiving the world is borne out of and caused by the social apparatus of whiteness. This chapter seeks to unsettle the silence of food politics discourse in relation to racism, dispossession and colonial violence. It asks: If race plays a ‘crucial causal role’ in ‘ignorance’ and ‘non-knowing’ (Mills 2007, 20), then how can we unsettle the silence and disturb the epistemologies of ignorance? According to Chris Healy, Stanner’s solution to his diagnosis of the great Australian silence was more scholarship (2008, 16, 204). However, as Mills argues, the problem is not so easily solved. We need to ‘understand how certain social structures tend to promote these crucial flawed processes’ and ‘to personally extricate oneself from them (insofar as that is possible)’ (2007, 23). This task is more than to produce ‘correct’ or ‘unbiased’ knowledge. It is here that Foucault’s genealogical approach to history and the formation of the self can be useful. As discussed in chapter 2, Foucault observes that ‘the discourse of the historian’ is a ‘sort of ceremony’ that produces ‘both a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power’ ­(2004, 66). This reinforcement occurs through drawing attention to ‘the lustre of power’ (Foucault 2004, 66). That is, dominant historical discourses of monuments, school curricula and national holidays serve to celebrate the ‘lustre’ and ‘glory’ of Australia that battled and endured the hardships of a hostile continent to become a prosperous modern nation. However, Foucault also notes the way these histories ‘buried or masked’ alternate accounts of the past (2004, 8). According to Foucault, the ‘reappearance of these knowledges from below’ can serve to unsettle the unity and ‘fight the power-effects’ of dominant historical discourses (2004, 9). The reappearance of knowledges from below can take many different forms. In the juridical context, Miranda Johnson has shown how ‘indigenous claimants accessed and opened up legal institutions in new ways’ to convince judges that their histories need to be heard and taken into account (2016, 6). This contributed to ‘reforms to evidentiary practices and the shift in the location of hearing that indigenous peoples instigated opened up access to powerful institutions’ (2016, 6). Johnson argues that the ‘admission of their testimony redefined the legal and political status of indigenous peoples as bearers of distinct rights’ (2016, 7).

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The work of Lester-Irabinna Rigney also highlights the way in which contestation over knowledge and knowledge production in the academy is a powerful vehicle for Indigenous Australian ‘intellectual sovereignty’ (2001). Rigney argues that Indigenous ethics, epistemes and methodologies are ‘paramount to advance political sovereignty, self-determination and the maintenance of self-identity for Indigenous Australians’ (2001, 10). Rigney concludes that this scholarship and control over knowledge production is vital ‘for the possibility of a non-neo-colonial future’ (2001, 10). Other examples of knowledge disrupting and transforming Indigenoussettler relations include the oral testimonies used in the Bringing Them Home report on the government policy of removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (Wilson and Dodson 1997); archaeological discoveries such as the Madjedbebe excavations, which date Indigenous presence on the continent to much earlier than previously thought (Griffiths 2018); archival work on letters from various Indigenous groups in protest or petition to the State (Hunter 2015); cartographies of massacre sites during the frontier wars (Ryan et al. 2017); anthropological research on the sophisticated uses of fire-stick farming or fish traps (Bird et al. 2016; Pascoe 2015a; Gammage 2011) or the hearing of personal testimony of peoples silenced by the ordinary order of things. These all contribute to an eruption of submerged knowledges, all of which can have unpredictable effects. In thinking with Foucault’s genealogical approach, we can ask what these counter-histories do? How should we remember? And what are the dangers? This chapter seeks to remember rightly and hear the voices that disturb the silence and unsettle the comfortable and relaxed stories we tell ourselves. Specifically, this chapter places food sovereignty and neo-agrarian ideas in tension with the role of agriculture in settler colonialism and the place of the settler in the Australian imaginary. Although Marxist analyses have led food sovereignty activists and scholars to recognise the role of dispossession in the accumulation of capital (Rose 2013, 158; Wittman 2009; McMichael 2009a, b), their concern is primarily with the dispossession of small-scale agrarian farmers and not the prior dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Parfitt et al. 2012, 18). Yet, all agricultural practice in Australia, whether large-scale input-intensive or small-scale regenerative, occurs on stolen lands. This fact needs to be reckoned with. Although the food sovereignty discourse has been used in processes of decolonisation (Grey and Patel 2015; Dunford 2017; Kamal et al. 2015), I contend that the deployment of food sovereignty and agrarian discourse in Australia risks using white epistemologies of ignorance to reinforce the moral and social value of the settler and thereby reproducing the colonial logics of land possession. As such, if food sovereignty in Australia is to offer a set of viable tools to motivate sociopolitical action, it needs

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to be unsettled. And if unsettled, it, in turn, can assist in processes of unsettling the wider effects of epistemologies of ignorance. Unlike agrarian food sovereignty movements that emphasise the ordering of society through settlement of the land by smallholder farmers, Australian food sovereignty needs to acknowledge and unsettle the history of settler-colonial agriculture. Such a process will not just consult Indigenous voices, but let their ontologies and epistemologies set the terms and conditions of food sovereignty in Australia. THE SETTLED NATURE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY The global food sovereignty movement and its Australian manifestation consider redistribution of land to small-scale farmers as more than a ‘peasants’ exclusive need or banner, but as a social solution for the whole of society’s problem’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2000). The reforms and changes that alternative food activists are seeking involve a ‘new economic, social and political order’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2000). Like Jefferson, country-mindedness and other agrarian movements, food sovereignty privileges those who cultivate the land and considers them central to ordering a just society that addresses pressing practical and political problems. The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni makes clear that food sovereignty will ensure ‘that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food’ (Delegates of La Via Campesina 2007). That is, a central objective of food sovereignty is that agrarian smallholder farmers should receive land to produce food in a manner that settles and orders society. The practical, social and political goals of the alternative food movement are attractive and compelling, particularly when positioned as a solution to narratives of food insecurity, neoliberal erosion of the public sphere and climate change. As outlined in chapters 3 and 4, the narratives, images and goals of these practices weave into and sustain a social imaginary of the idyllic and therapeutic nature of rural and agrarian life. The agrarian form of life serves as a remedy to the destructiveness of industrialization and the city. However, the apparent obviousness and unquestioned goodness of incorporating agrarian ideals hides significant concerns with contemporary food politics. In contexts where there are indigenous peasant farmers, food sovereignty has served as an important avenue through which anticolonial struggles are waged. In Latin America, for example, ‘La Via Campesina’s initial members had included coalitions involving Indigenous Peoples’ (Grey and Patel 2015, 433). In comparison, food sovereignty in settler-colonial contexts of the United States, Canada and Australia has produced a degree of friction with anticolonial politics that requires careful negotiations (Daigle 2017; Grey

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and Patel 2015; Coté 2016; Ma Rhea 2016). The friction between food sovereignty and the decolonising project is particularly significant in Australia, where there has not been a peasant class, and Indigenous peoples did not use agrarian methods. As demonstrated in the earlier chapters, the absence of recognisable forms of agriculture was used to justify dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Although examples from Latin and Central America illustrate the capacity for food sovereignty movements to aid processes of decolonisation, there is also the potential for these movements to mask continued effects of colonisation in contexts such as Australia. Grey and Patel note that food sovereignty is ‘about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system’ and that ‘we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts’ (2015, 431). In the Australian context, food sovereignty thus far largely has taken on the character of Anglo-American small-scale family farming. Small-scale agriculture may provide a solution to climate change and present the possibility of organizing a more just and democratic society, yet these practices are historically tied to a continuing legacy of stolen lands and violence (Taliaferro 2000, 88; Eisinger 1947, 17). Alternative food discourses explicitly and implicitly appeal to agrarian-settler notions of community and property ownership, which risk reinforcing the moral and social value of the ‘settler’ and thereby reproducing the colonial logics of land possession. In his essay ‘The Resettling of America’, Brian Donahue baldly states that the expansion of small agrarian farmers in the colonial period was due to there being ‘so much land in America (once the original inhabitants had been swept aside)’ (2003, 42) (emphasis in the original). The ‘original inhabitants’ are reduced to a parenthetical aside in Donahue’s praise of American agrarianism. This story is not unique to the United States. The agrarian ideas of settling the land and developing moral communities echo in the discourse of Australian alternative food movements. As detailed in previous chapters, these grassroots organisations are trying to transform the food system to be fairer for producers and consumers, as well as address a range of ethical goals. However, the ‘great Australian silence’ over the dispossession of Indigenous Australians is also a feature of progressive food politics discourse. Comparing the two versions of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance’s People’s Food Plan serves to illustrate the way this silence operates. The first edition was released in September 2012 as a discussion document and ‘does not presume in any way to set out a definitive “solution”’ (Parfitt et al. 2012, 5). That being said, it does align the People’s Food Plan with the core principles of ‘the global movement for Food Sovereignty’ and uses A People’s Food Policy for Canada as a ‘guiding compass’ (Parfitt et al. 2012, 4-5). The first edition outlines the importance of agroecology and family farming for establishing an environmentally sustainable and just food

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system. The document powerfully articulates the national and global effects of ‘corporate-dominated and oligarchic food system’ on family farmers, rural communities and the urban poor. However, at no point are colonialism or the concerns of Indigenous peoples mentioned. This is curious considering that the Canadian model places Indigenous food sovereignty at the forefront and is explicit about the importance of Indigenous elders in helping ‘guide all stages of policy development’ (Food Secure Canada 2011, 8). I am not suggesting that the authors of the People’s Food Plan are unconcerned by the plight of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Rather, the default position is a white epistemology of ignorance, or what Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos identify as ‘narratives that unfold as if the land might indeed have been unoccupied’ (2014, 20). The default silence is not unique to the AFSA. The charters of the Australian Farmers’ Markets Association, Carriageworks Farmers’ Markets and other alternative food networks make gestures to radical transformation of the food system while forgetting the original inhabitants of the land (Carriageworks 2016; Australian Farmers’ Markets Association 2017; Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network 2017). Following community consultation, the second edition of the People’s Food Plan features a chapter on indigenous food sovereignty. This will be discussed further in chapter 7. The default silence pervades many discourses and spaces in Australia. According to Stanner, ‘we have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so’ (1991, 25). Increasingly prevalent practice to keep Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and colonial dispossession in mind are Welcome to Country (WTC) and Acknowledgement of Country (AOC) rituals.1 These practices are usually intended as a mark of respect and recognition. Yet, even with these rituals commonly performed, Indigenous issues, peoples and histories are soon ‘disremembered’. The WTC and AOC practices are vulnerable to being swallowed by the silence of disremembrance that functions as a remembering to forget. That is, the brief acknowledgement of dispossession and recognition of Indigenous belonging allows a nonindigenous audience to forget the uncomfortable history and move on with its event. An alternative food politics event in Melbourne that I attended illustrates these dynamics. The organiser acknowledged the traditional owners of the land on which we were meeting and added that ‘we need to look no further than Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations who have led 40–60 thousand years of sustainable food systems’. Yet, the discussion did look further. From that point on, there was not a single mention of what could be learned from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and, more importantly, there was no mention of what cannot be learned because it has

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been lost through the decimation of Indigenous foodways and the disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems. Furthermore, not a single person on the panel was Indigenous or anyone working with Indigenous communities. Although the intention of the AOC was likely well meaning, its performance served to reinforce a silence. Anthropologist Emma Kowal has examined AOC as ‘White anti-racist “speech acts” that perform “identity work” for White Australians who wish to address and overcome the legacy of colonialism’ (Kowal 2015, 176). In acknowledging the traditional owners, a nonindigenous speaker demonstrates their ‘antiracist credentials’ (Kowal 2015, 185). It could be argued that my critique of the silences of alternative food is a performance of my own antiracist credentials. Perhaps. But what I am trying to argue is that food politics spaces need more than rituals of recognition. AOC practices can do the opposite of their intention and contribute to the forgetting, the silence, the acting as if Indigenous people were never here. As Kowal observes, ‘as a purely symbolic statement of Indigenous ownership’ these rituals ‘mean nonindigenous people can enjoy Indigenous culture and presence without feeling threatened by Indigenous sovereignty’ (2015, 189). Victor Hart goes further to argue that WTC and AOC are an ‘iteration of terra nullius mythology where blackfellas can appear at the beginning of the event (i.e., the beginning of history) and then conveniently disappear whilst whitefellas do their serious “business”’ (Kowal 2015, 189). AOC does not always or necessarily operate this way, but what once was a radical act has been blunted through repetition and co-option. This is a risk faced by many of the returns of submerged knowledges. How do we reremember in a way that doesn’t follow the logics of terra nullius? How do we embrace a return of knowledge in ways that don’t simply use these knowledges as a means to reinforce white settler belonging or buff the lustre of the settler-colonial state? Alternative food politics in Australia risks operating as if Indigenous inhabitants were not here, as if terra nullius were not a fiction. The legal concept of terra nullius – land belonging to no one – was used in Australia to justify the British occupation of Indigenous lands for settlement and agriculture. Although there is debate over the history of terra nullius in British law (Fitzmaurice 2007; Borch 2001), its logics were in place allowing Australia to be colonised as an uncultivated and therefore not possessed land (Borch 2001: 237, 239). Calls for food sovereignty and access to land by predominantly white non-Indigenous farmers and activists depend on the earlier colonial ownership of land and continuation of white possession. Calls for land reform and control over food systems, even if presented as an alternative politics to more overt colonial authorities, sit uncomfortably next to the fact that ‘the majority of Indigenous people in Australia do not have land rights, nor do they have legal ownership of their sacred sites’ (Moreton-Robinson

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2015, 10). I do not suggest that a solution to this discomfort is to ignore the political critiques of globalisation made through alternative food discourses, but by thinking with Indigenous theories and practices of food and land, new possibilities for a food politics may be opened. As Kowal argues in relation to WTC and AOC rituals, we need to ‘develop deeper understandings of the complex and contradictory workings of belonging and non-belonging on the continent’ (2015, 192-193). Food could be a useful avenue through which to do this, but first we need to unsettle white ignorance and continue to disturb the great Australian silence. UNSETTLED FOODWAYS Food sovereignty largely assumes agrarian methods of cultivation, yet these ideas and practices of land use leave little room for Indigenous peoples’ practices, ontologies or relationships with country. Indigenous food practices and relationship to the land occasionally are mentioned in Australian food discourses; however, these practices and relationships are assumed to fit within the agrarian-settler narrative. The assumption of agrarian and settled forms of agriculture is significant as this was one of the arguments used to justify the occupation of the Australian continent. Entwined with the stadial logics of dispossession discussed in chapters 1 and 2, Patrick Dodson and Darryl Cronin describe the dispossession of Indigenous Australians as ‘justified on the basis that Indigenous people did not have organised societies, did not make use of the land and had no recognisable form of sovereignty’ (2011, 190). The British colonialists believed Australia was populated by ‘people who knew nothing about agriculture’ and therefore had no property in the land (Dodson and Cronin 2011, 191). As such, ­Indigenous people were classified as propertyless ‘nomads’. In contrast, the bushman and agrarian farmer entered the continent as peaceful settlers, ­creators of property and cultivators of social and economic value. These myths and narratives – the lustre of power – allowed the violent invasion and dispossession of the early settlers to be forgotten and ignored. As Dodson and Cronin note, ‘[d]erived from the myth of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one), it has created a distinctive form of Settler-Colonialism in Australia where the recognition of Indigenous rights – and, for that matter, respect for Indigenous people – was considered unnecessary’ (2011, 189). The agrarian-settler ideas and practices of food sovereignty can be read as part of the broader colonial logics of white possession. This makes the agrarianism of food sovereignty particularly problematic in societies such as Australia where agriculture played a central part in dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands.

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Indigenous food practices are not ‘settled’ or agrarian. Rather, they have a complex ontology that has been marginalised or dismissed since colonisation. These practices are problematic for alternative food discourse and for liberal political theory to respond to. There is a political and empirical component to this analysis. The political component questions how food politics can address the past dispossession of Indigenous lands and simultaneously critique the industrial food system that adversely impacts the environment, democratic politics and population health. The empirical component addresses the forms of Indigenous food practices and relations to the land. This empirical component also leads to the question of whether alternative food advocates sincerely believe Indigenous knowledge and practices of food can offer a framework for alternative food practices and politics. In addressing the empirical question, I seek to avoid invoking a ‘mysterious otherness’ or ‘fetishisation’ of Indigenous practices and knowledges as if they contain all of the answers to our environmental, social and political problems (Paradies 2016; Neale and Vincent 2017). This is the reverse side of the coin that denigrates Indigenous knowledge as primitive. However, this empirical question also is entwined with the political question of what knowledges and whose claims are recognised; in the words of MoretonRobinson, ‘who has the power to be a knower and whether their knowledge is commensurate with the West’s “rational” belief system’ (2015, 13). This is connected to Mills’s ideas of white epistemologies of ignorance and the type of knowledge that gets to make up that background of the social imaginary and the type of knowledge that is discarded. As Moreton-Robinson argues, the control of what knowledge counts and the effects of the white possessive logics serve to establish ‘commonsense knowledge, decision making, and socially produced conventions’ (2015, xii). These logics are seen in many areas. Relevant to this chapter is the ‘commonsense’ empirical knowledge that white colonial practices of food production are superior to Indigenous practices, and that these practices have improved and cultivated the land in a more sophisticated fashion. Comments from recent Australian prime ministers – Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull – illustrate the valorisation of British-settler knowledge and dismissal of Indigenous knowledge. In welcoming British Prime Minister David Cameron to a Sydney breakfast function prior to the G-20 Summit, Tony Abbott remarked, ‘As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush’ (Henderson 2014). In a similar, although less overt manner, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on the floor of Parliament during question time that ‘the ones that understand the water and the country better than anyone, are Australia’s farmers’ (House of Representatives 2015). Further,

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the AFSA’s People’s Food Plan makes similar statements that privilege the moral and epistemological position of the settler-farmer, such as ‘Farmers have local knowledge necessary to get the best from the land and act as stewards of the land for future generations’ (Parfitt et al. 2012, 6). These ideas reinforce the notion that white settler-farmers made this land and have exclusive and intimate knowledge of it. Meanwhile the question of how the farmers came to possess and know the land remains unasked. Empirical claims that colonial-agrarian food practices unquestionably are superior to Indigenous foodways also played out in responses to the Garnaut Climate Change Review. In 2008 Professor Ross Garnaut was commissioned by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to study the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy and identify areas to improve sustainability. One of Garnaut’s many recommendations was to slowly shift the national diet away from lamb and beef, which significantly impact the environment, to kangaroo. Garnaut stated that ‘[f]or most of Australia’s human history— around 60,000 years—kangaroo was the main source of meat. It could again become important’ (2011). Many commentators labelled the recommendation as ‘absurd’ (Gray 2008) and ‘ridiculous’ (Bardon 2008). There are certainly serious culinary and economic hurdles to implement such a shift. Barbara Santich observes that ‘eating indigenous foods should be the most elemental way of expressing Australianness’, yet ‘the reality is that, with the exception of fish . . . most Australians do not consume them, and certainly not in significant quantities’ (2012, 30). However, the immediate dismissal of the recommendation to eat more kangaroos further demonstrates a knee-jerk dismissal of Indigenous foodways and knowledge. Statements denying the relevance of Indigenous knowledge and practices serve to polish the lustre of the historical narrative that battlers, settlers and farmers cultivated the land and built a modern society that is ‘unimpeachable’ (Moses 2004a, 8). Contemporary denials of Indigenous knowledge also repeat the folly of the First Fleet by believing that there is nothing to learn from Indigenous Australians. As David Lowe observes, ‘[l]ike Burke and Wills refusing help from their potential saviours, many white Australians have arrogantly refused to acknowledge . . . that black Australians have anything significant to teach them’ (1994, ix). Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos argue that such statements are manifestations of an Australian history that ‘affirms the conviction that the white Australians are essentially settlers and only accidentally occupiers’ (2014, 19). This is a belief that Australian history has unfolded ‘as if the land might indeed have been unoccupied’ and the key theme of colonial history is the settling and cultivating of the land, ‘not the death of the first Indigenous Australians at the hands of the white invader’ (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2014, 19). Despite its claims

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to progressive and radical politics, this history runs through the alternative food and food sovereignty discourses. Like Indigenous peasant farmers in Central and South America, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia have had their lands stolen and their property rights denied. However, there are differences in the relation to land and the way food was procured. There is a long history of farming in Central and South America, which involved tilling the soil, cultivating crops and settled social arrangements. Indigenous Australians, however, had a different relation to land that is reflected in their procurement of food. Moreton-Robinson describes this relation ‘as an ontological belonging [that] is omnipresent, and continues to unsettle non-Indigenous belonging based on illegal dispossession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 4). Indigenous peoples on the Australian continent did not engage in agrarian or food cultivating practices that Europeans could or would recognise as constituting ownership. As such, ‘Indigenous people have never been recognized as property-owning subjects in our own right as Indigenous peoples, and this continues in current law and policy’ (2015, 94). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a distinct ontological and moral claim to the land. Land is not property that can be simply exchanged via a contract or is the sole ownership of an individual. This is a challenge for liberal political theory to understand and accommodate. As Duncan Ivison observes, Indigenous ways of being and knowledges ‘challenge fundamental liberal notions of public reasons, citizenship and justice’ (2002, 1). Likewise, Brigg and Maddison note that although ‘communal ownership of land by Aboriginal people could not be recognised as a proprietary interest in common law, it did constitute a unique form of title to land that had existed before colonisation’ (2011, 3). Moreton-Robinson describes this unique form of title as embodied and ‘occurs through the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans, and land’ (2015, 12). She elaborates to say, ‘Indigenous people are the human manifestations of the land and creator beings; they carry title to the land through and on their bodies’ (2015, 84). The idea of ancestral or creator beings as the grounds of belonging is a challenge to settler law and materialist ontology, which is partly why such conceptions have been misrecognised and ignored. This historical and embodied relationship to the land does not fit readily within European ideas of ownership, property or sovereignty. And as such, colonialists and their non-Indigenous descendants assume an ‘epistemological privilege of defining who Indigenous people are and that to which they are entitled’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 85). This epistemological privilege is expressed through legal-political institutions (courts, parliamentary inquires, government agencies and so on), as well as scientific-knowledgeproducing institutions (agriculture, medicine, anthropology and so on).

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The misrecognition of Indigenous relations to land and the denial of sovereignty served to justify British claims of possession, while colonial-agrarian practices simultaneously dispossessed and created a sense of belonging for the non-Indigenous subject. This sense of possession and belonging is ‘derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital, and it mobilizes the legend of the pioneer, “the battler,” in its self-legitimization’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 3). Indigenous sense of belonging and foodways, however, radically challenge the non-Indigenous narratives of the ‘settler’ that ground claims to home and place. Indigenous relations to country and land, in the production and sourcing of food, are distinct from agrarian food practices. A number of examples serve to illustrate this distinctiveness. This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the diversity of Indigenous foodways (O’Dea et al. 1991; Ma Rhea 2016). Rather, it is an indication of the variety and sophistication with which Indigenous peoples have worked and continue to work with the environment to source food. Caution is needed in outlining the social ontology of Indigenous cultures and communities, especially in the context of food production. Prior to colonisation, more than several hundred nations had attachments to geographically and environmentally distinct areas across the continent. Although there was trade of foodstuffs and exchange of knowledge, food production practices of different people groups varied across the continent. Some of these practices continue today and are a testament to the ongoing resistance to processes of colonisation. However, it is important to avoid conflating these differences into a pan-Aboriginality. Historian John Hirst notes the practical implications of differences between settler-farmer and Indigenous foodways. ‘Being a farmer is to follow a settled life’, writes Hirst, and ‘Aborigines wanted to be on the move, connecting with all parts of their land’ (2014, 10). Indigenous sourcing of food is not agrarian, yet the generic, and largely pejorative, notion of ‘hunter and gatherer’ does not capture the intricate practices and intimate knowledges used to source food (Pascoe 2015a). An example of these sophisticated practices is the use of nets to trap ducks on the Murray River. Hirst describes this practice based on the diaries of an early explorer, Thomas Mitchell (2003). They stretch a long net across the river, just above the water. They disturb a group of ducks grazing on the river a little distance away. The ducks fly along the river towards the net. Should they fly too high, one of the hunters throws a bark disc over them and gives a shrill whistle like a hawk. The ducks dip down – and fly into the net. (2014, 8)

A similar level of sophistication is seen in the creation of fish traps. The Ngemba, local Aboriginal people in the northwest of New South Wales,

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arranged an intricate system of rocks into ‘12 teardrop-shaped pools across half a kilometre’ (Tan 2015). The fish were then ‘herded in through small openings’ that could be closed quickly. ‘The pen walls are at different heights, allowing them to be used at different water levels, and have proved resistant to damage in the face of high and fast water flows’ (Tan 2015). In 2005 the site of these traps was placed on the national heritage list and described as a ‘very efficient method for catching fish involving a thorough understanding of dry stone wall construction techniques, river hydrology and fish ecology’ (Campbell 2005). Yet, in the 1840s, when the use of similar traps were observed, the Europeans did not praise them for their efficiency but viewed these practices through the lens of a preexisting deficit narrative of Aboriginal life as indolent and lazy (Pascoe 2015a, 15). Fire-stick farming is another Indigenous practice that has attracted a lot of attention both recently and historically (Neale 2018). Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth provides a detailed – though problematically pan-Aboriginal – history of Indigenous management of land, plants and wildlife using fire (2011). Gammage describes the refined use of fire to create and maintain templates. Templates are distinct from agrarian plots that are worked on a daily basis and if neglected for a short period will soon fall fallow. Rather, templates ‘set land and life patterns for generations of people’ in a manner that offers ‘abundance, predictability, continuity and choice’ (2011, 211). Templates were a defined area for the growth of particular plants or animals – there was overlap and multiple use, ‘but together they rotated growth in planned sequences, some to harvest, some to lure and locate’ (2011, 211). The system of templates was defined and maintained through regular burning in different seasons. These fires were not random but refined over millennia in a manner that would manage the movement of animals and release of seeds, both for present and future needs. There also are practices that could be considered similar to agrarian practices, such as cultivating plots of tubers or harvesting seeds to make flour. The Wathaurong people from the country near Geelong in Victoria, for example, cultivated plots and harvested Murnong or yam daisy, which was like a small sweet potato (Pascoe 2015a, 23). The Pintupi and Kukatja people in the Western Desert region of Western Australia collected, stored and processed a variety of seeds. Processes included grinding and soaking to remove toxins (Cane 1989). In addition to supplementing a diet of game, tubers and various fruits, seeds could be stored and relied on during seasons of scarcity (Cane 1989, 111). Cultivating plots of tubers and harvesting seeds may resemble farming practices, yet there is a distinct difference between European and Australian Aboriginal relationship to the land, flora and fauna. The work of Bruce Pascoe has been significant in reframing the narrative of Indigenous foodways in Australia. Pascoe seeks to challenge the ‘accepted

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view of Indigenous Australians [as] simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism’ (Pascoe 2015a, 12). He catalogues a variety of food practices that shaped the landscape, used tools and devices and developed techniques of preservation and preparation. Pascoe points to a number of examples to argue that Indigenous peoples did practice a form of agriculture (2015a, 24-25, 30-32, 44-46). Pascoe mounts the case for Indigenous agriculture because he recognises that ‘the insistence on using the hunter-gather label is prejudicial to the rights of Aboriginal people to land’ (Pascoe 2015a, 103). The attempt by Pascoe and others to characterise Indigenous practices as agrarian may have political utility for establishing native title claims that can be understood within European institutions. However, this move reinforces and privileges European conception of agriculture as the benchmark for sourcing food, producing property and organizing society. For example, the role of gardening was crucial in the High Court’s Mabo decision and abolition of terra nullius, yet comparable practices were not used on the mainland of Australia (Hirst 2014, 11). Rather than challenge European conceptions of civilisation used to justify dispossession, the Mabo decision ruling served to reinforce gardening and settlement of land as the gold standard for title. Arguments that Indigenous foodways are agrarian pose a danger for other native title claimants by maintaining a narrow European conception of what qualifies as sophisticated food practices that create ownership and evidence attachment to a place. Although the tactical use of submerged knowledges regarding gardening in the Torres Strait contributed to one of the most momentous rulings in Australian legal history, it also can be redeployed by the state expecting other non-gardening Aboriginal groups to demonstrate the continuation of gardening-like practices. These dynamics are addressed in greater detail in the following chapter. The point here is not that Indigenous practices can fit neatly within the framework of colonial-agrarian ideas of sophisticated agriculture, but that on their own terms these practices represent a unique and significant relationship to the land, which was violently disrupted and continues to be neglected. Tragically, many of the food practices mentioned here have been lost to us, and more importantly to descendants, due to British colonisation. This is an unsettling and uncomfortable fact that Australian food sovereignty politics needs to wrestle with. DESTRUCTION OF FOODWAYS AND THE QUESTION OF GENOCIDE Successive Australian governments have enabled the destruction of Indigenous forms of life by denying the use of language, prohibiting cultural practices

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such as corrobboree and taking the land that is vital to Indigenous being-inthe-world. These have been well documented and critiqued (Reynolds 1996; Day 1996; Moses 2004b; Barta 2008; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Blainey 1983; Rowley 1970), even if largely ignored by politicians and the wider public. However, a related element that has devastated Indigenous people is the denial of their foodways. Examining the context in North America, Michelle Daigle argues that ‘the dispossession of Indigenous foodways is a direct attack on Indigenous ontologies, kinship relations, governance structures, and their political and legal lives’ (2017). Gascoigne observes in Australian history that at ‘almost every point the practice of agricultural improvement undermined Aboriginal society’ (2002, 153). From the theft of lands to forced agricultural labour under the pretence of a civilising process, ‘[a]grarianism was the most universal ideology foisted on Aborigines’ (Gascoigne 2002, 167). Although some traditional foodways are being restored through programs initiated by Pascoe and others (Pascoe 2015b), the vast majority are not recoverable because these practices were intimately tied to the land – or more specifically the country – on and with which each distinct group lived. The concept of country, rather than land or territory, is used to emphasise the distinctiveness of Indigenous relations to place. Megan Davis and Marcia Langton note that ‘[i]n most Indigenous cultures in Australia, land is regarded not just as a physical resource, but as a social resource: “country” is the term used by many Indigenous people to refer to customary estates’ (2016, 1). They suggest that ‘the term “country” permits a more careful account of Indigenous cultural and social concerns and aspirations and opens up the possibility of analysing the use of “country” in terms relevant to the Indigenous stewards’ (2016, 1–2). Country can include lands and waters that may or may not be owned or claimed under some form of legislation. The ‘[c]ustomary management of “country” involves special knowledge and practices that the traditional owners bring to the task’ (2016, 2). This conception of country is quite distinct from the conception of land as a resource or territory as a legal jurisdiction. Anthropologist Deborah Bird-Rose defines country as ‘multidimensional’; it is material and immaterial. It is not reducible to territory, nor is it independent for specific spaces and places. Rose continues: Humans were created for each country, and human groups hold the view that they are an extremely important part of the life of their country . . . All living things are held to have an interest in the life of the country because their own life is dependent on the life of their country. (2004, 153-154)

Existence is tied to country. It nourishes, yet it is also in need of care. The destruction of country is the destruction of being. This view of country

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means that the theft of lands was not simply an economic or legal theft, but something much deeper; something much closer to a genocidal act that not only destroyed the lives of Indigenous peoples, but erased language, culture and foodways that developed over millennia. The claim that British colonisation of Australia amounts to genocide has been debated fiercely. This is largely due to the way the Holocaust, in the words of historian Mark Mazower, ‘has been turned into a standard against which all other instances of suffering can be measured and found wanting’ (1994, 5). In comparison to the Holocaust, British colonisation of Australia, it is argued, did not occur with the same degree of coordination or intent to murder from the state (Manne 2004, 218). Mazower contends that the belief that mass murder within Europe is the only true genocide rests ‘upon an implicit racism, or simply upon a failure of historical imagination’ (1994, 8). This is reflected in the belief that it was not British colonisation that destroy Indigenous society, but it merely ‘collapsed under the weight of its own pathologies’ (Moses 2004a, 15). However, in developing a historical imagination and broadening our understanding of genocide, then the effects of British colonialism rightly can be conceived as genocide. Raimond Gaita cautions that the concept of genocide is often used ‘carelessly, even frivolously’ such that those using it ‘have become inoculated against its serious meaning’ (1999, 110). I have been wary about invoking this concept so far. However, I believe this is where the argument leads. Dirk Moses helpfully overviews the conceptual debates in regard to genocide and Australia. Moses identifies two paradigms: ‘intentionalist’ and ‘structuralist’. The intentionalist paradigm holds that genocide occurs when a specific agent, usually the state, has the official intent to exterminate groups of people (Moses 2004a, 23). Nazi Germany is the archetypal case. In comparison, colonial violence in Australia allegedly does not amount to genocide because the intent of the state was ambiguous, as disease and malnutrition rather than mass murder were responsible for the majority of deaths, and when mass murders did occur they could be attributed to ‘scurrilous whites . . . rather than to the colonization project as a whole’ (Moses 2004a, 24-25). This is why biopolitical racism, rather than state racism, is a more flexible concept. The structuralist account arose in response to perceived limitations of the intentionalist. Patrick Wolfe argues that British invasion is a ‘structure not an event’ (Wolfe 1999, 2). Wolfe contends that the settler comes to stay, to establish a new society, with new institutions. The Indigenous population can be absorbed into this new society as citizens, or they will be eliminated. The possibility of Indigenous peoples and social arrangements remaining distinct, independent and sovereign alongside the colonisers is foreclosed. It is not possible to isolate an intentional agent in this process. The structuralist

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paradigm argues that seeking to isolate the intent of perpetrators reduces genocide to the activities of totalitarian States and ignores the way cultural, material and ideological forces operate in other political contexts, such as liberalism, to combine to set in motion ‘anonymous “genocidal processes”’ (Moses 2004a, 23). That is, it is argued that the intentionalist paradigm excludes too much when it seeks to identify agents acting with explicit genocidal intent and who use modern methods of mass killing. Furthermore, there is an implicit supposition about progress and civilisation in the intentionalist paradigm. Mazower suggests that there is ‘a widely-held assumption that the mass killing of African or American [or Australian] peoples was distant and in some sense an “inevitable” part of progress while what was genuinely shocking was the attempt to exterminate an entire people in Europe’ (1994, 8). This is the idea that the Holocaust represents a betrayal of the Enlightenment. However, as Mazower argues, the betrayal of these ideals occurred much earlier in the colonial period, and it was through colonialism that German and European racial ideologies were given their ‘scientific’ basis and enabled eugenic practices such as segregation and sterilisation, ideologies and practices redeployed in the Holocaust (1994, 6; Stone 2011; Arendt 2017). As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, Foucault argues that this biopolitical racism was not simply a betrayal of the Enlightenment, but it was intimately entwined with Eurocentric notions of civilisation, progress and improvement. Even if one subscribes to the intentionalist paradigm, two cases of BritishAustralian activity are commonly understood as genocidal. The first case of genocide in Australia that fits the intentionalist paradigm is the (attempted) extermination of Palawa or Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Henry Reynolds lists the prominent genocide scholars who include Tasmania as a ‘legitimate case’, including Ralph Lemkin, Leo Kuper and Ward Churchill (2004, 128). Governor Arthur’s (1823–1837) well-kept records help to make the charge stick. Although in 1824 Arthur initially expressed humanitarian concern for Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples and encouraged protection and respect of ‘The Native’ (Reynolds 2004, 130), by 1828 he had declared martial law and sent ‘2,200 well-armed men’ to trek ‘across Tasmania from north to south’ in order to remove and drive out Aborigines from settled areas (Reynolds 2004, 133). Arthur stated that his objective was not to kill but ‘capture the savages’ (Reynolds 2004, 136), however not all officials held this view. On the eve of their departure, Solicitor General Alfred Stephen declared in a public meeting ‘capture them if you can, but if you cannot, destroy them’ (cited in Reynolds 2004, 143). What has become known as The Black Line failed to capture Palawa (aside from a boy and an old man), but it did inflame fear among the settlers as the Palawa easily evaded capture while also attacking the line from multiple directions. By 1831 newspaper editorials

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and military officials were stating that extermination was ‘the only means of securing our settlers from their cruel and indiscriminate attacks’ (Reynolds 2004, 142). The expansion of settlement, spread of disease and acceptance of violence combined to erode the Indigenous population in Tasmania. By the late 1820s, the settlers ‘outnumbered the Aborigines by twenty to one’, and by 1876 the last ‘full-blood’ Tasmanian Aborigine, Truganini, had died (Reynolds 2004, 144). Although Arthur opposed a war of extermination against the Indigenous population, his government did play a central role in explicit and implicit acts that resulted in the eradication of the Indigenous population. For this reason, scholars consider this case to fall within the ‘range of systematic and well-planned genocides’ (Reynolds 2004, 145). The second case is the Australian government policies to forcibly remove Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. During the 1930s, administrators initiated a series of ‘absorption policies’ that included ‘child removal, institutionalization, and marriage control’ (Manne 2004, 238). Those who designed and enacted these policies did so for purportedly benevolent and humanitarian reasons. However, these reasons were based on biopolitical racism that regarded Indigenous populations as naturally inferior and in a state of inevitable decline. The effect of removals was devastating for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report argued that these policies amounted to genocide. When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide. (Wilson and Dodson 1997)

Although governments, popular media and some historians rejected this charge (Manne 2004, 218), moral philosopher Raimond Gaita outlines a cautious argument that leads him to the conclusion that ‘genocide was sometimes committed against the indigenous peoples of Australia during the period when it was Australian policy to absorb mixed blood children into the white community’ (1999, 123). Gaita argues that widespread racial violence and brutal treatment of Indigenous Australians since 1788 does not, on its own, equate to genocide. However, when this is combined with official intent to eradicate a population, then these acts become genocidal. Gaita cites statements from senior government officials outlining the aim of absorption. For example, in 1937, A. O. Neville, commissioner of native affairs in Western Australia, rhetorically asked a delegation of officials from State and Commonwealth governments: ‘Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in

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Australia?’ (Gaita 1999, 122). For Gaita, this evidence of intent transforms the evil of treating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples brutally and ‘with racist disdain’ into something ‘different and more serious’ (1999, 123); namely, genocide. Gaita reasons, ‘If the forcible sterilisation of a people counts as genocide, then in my judgment so too does the forcible, brutal and relentless abduction of a people’s children for the purpose of making that people extinct’ (1999, 124). Although these events fit within the intentionalist paradigm, they do not fully represent the genocidal effects in settler colonial Australia. Proponents of a structuralist paradigm argue that anthropological ideas of racial superiority, philosophical conceptions of European progress and improvement, agricultural practices of cultivation and theological notions of providence served to create the conditions in which the annihilation of Indigenous peoples was a natural, if unfortunate, occurrence. As noted in chapter 1, Charles Darwin states as much in saying ‘there appears to be some mysterious agency generally at work’ that explains why ‘[w]herever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’ (2001, 459). The structuralist account helps to make sense of the devastating effects of colonisation across the Australian continent. It is important to remember that there is not one pan-Aboriginality, but ‘approximately 600 Indigenous cultural-linguistic groups’, many of which no longer exist (Moses 2004a, 19). This suggests that ‘many genocides took place in Australia, rather than being the site of a single genocidal event’ (Moses 2004a, 19). Agriculture has been intimately tied to these processes. The expansion of agriculture led to many of the bloodiest massacres in the nineteenth century. Declarations of the intent to murder were not kept quiet. In 1824, L. E. Threlkeld, an English missionary, recalls a public meeting in Bathurst where a Mr Cox, ‘one the largest holders of Sheep in the Colony’, declared ‘that the best thing that could be done, would be to shoot all the Blacks and manure the ground with their carcases, which was all the good they were fit for!’ (1974, 49 and 178). In September of that year, at least forty-five Wiradjuri men, women and children were massacred at the nearby Turon River (Ryan et al. 2017). It is unclear if Cox was involved in this massacre; however, there was certainly a strong and publicly declared will among prominent graziers and farmers to use violent force, state sanctioned or otherwise, against Indigenous populations. As brutal as these attacks were, it was the structural effect of agriculture that undermined the existence of Indigenous communities. Although many farmers, graziers, shepherds and farmhands may not have intended to kill, their sheep needed to graze, the colony needed to eat, land needed to be cleared, crops needed to be planted and order needed to be maintained. All of this implied the destruction of Indigenous ways of life. According to Barta,

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‘the violence accompanying the appropriation of the land was of a scale and ruthlessness . . . which could leave no doubt in black or white minds as to the fate of those who resisted the “inevitable” course of events’ (Barta 1987, 248). The initial invasion and plan to colonise the land set up a genocidal logic that operated regardless of intention. Moses summarises the ‘colonization process’ as ‘objectively lethal for Aborigines’; ‘irrespective of initial intentions of the state and settlers [they] ensured that the process of elimination was continued by consciously expediting its fatal logic’ (Moses 2004a, 35). This logic continues today, in a variety of forms, but I wish to focus on food and agriculture. Food is significant as it is both biological and cultural. It sustains and nourishes biological life. Yet it also gives meaning and substance to cultural life. Therefore, the destruction of an intricate and unique network of food practices that have developed over millennia significantly jeopardises the biological and cultural life of individuals and communities (Ma Rhea 2012). I contend that the eradication of foodways is part of the logic of genocide. Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide, argued that genocide did not entail the ‘immediate destruction of a nation’, but it included the ‘forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feeling and their religion’ (1945, 39). Elsewhere Lemkin describes genocide as ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups themselves’ (2005). Food is not only an essential foundation of life, but as has been argued throughout, cuisine and food practices are intimately entwined with individual and collective identities, as well as connection to the past. The elimination of these practices, collectives and senses of belonging is no small matter. The theft of land, conceived as resource for food, led to malnutrition and mass death. It also created a dependence on European foods – flour, sugar, alcohol – that not only exposed Indigenous peoples to exploitation, but contributed to the breakdown of social relations as well as undermined population health by introducing new chronic diseases (Rowse 1998). However, these immediate and material effects do not go to the moral and ontological depths of the forced removal from the country and the role of associated food practices in structuring collective existence. The theft of country and destruction of foodways contributed to a death of self, irrevocably altering the material reality such that the spiritual and moral norms of Indigenous communities could not be lived. As Galarrwuy Yunupingu says, ‘[w]ithout land we will be the lowest people in the world, because you have broken down our backbone, took away my arts, history and foundation. You have left me with nothing’ (cited in Barta 1987, 237). These effects persist today, yet Australian food political discourse is largely silent.

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CONCLUSION In his critique of agriculture in Australia, Muir asks, ‘What does it mean to live at a time when the way we feed ourselves threatens the social and ecological fabric of the planet?’ (2014, 1). This is a profound question on which to meditate. However, it is also a question that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are best placed to answer. For they have already experienced the tearing apart of their social and ecological fabric in order for British-Australian setters and others to feed themselves and export produce. In the words of Barta, without the land to which their whole being belonged, without the sacred sites and ceremonies which expressed the meaning and purpose of Aboriginal life, how could a future life be envisioned? (1987, 246-247)

The way that we – inheritors and beneficiaries of colonialisation – fed ourselves not only threatened but decimated the social and ecological fabric of the world in which Indigenous Australians had lived for sixty thousand years. Whether large-scale or small-scale farming, both contributed to the eradication of Indigenous foodways. How are we supposed to respond to, and live with, this history? How is the politics of food sovereignty to be understood in this place, with this history? The dominant view is that we should praise the farmer and be relaxed and comfortable. To date, the alternative view is not much different, although we should be anxious about climate change. However, prominent food scholar Raj Patel addresses aspects of the moral problem of settler colonialism for new farmers seeking to restore the land as well as social relations. He urges ‘younger farmers’ to listen to the ancestors of the stolen lands that they now plough, to ‘look for the iron of their spilled blood in your soil; turn yourself into a historian of loam’ (2017, 44). Patel suggests that this is one more skill to add to the long list of a farmer’s talents. But this skill, as a historian of the soil, is one that ‘should make you uncomfortable’ (2017, 44). Charles Massy is an Australian farmer, scientist, writer and may also be a historian of loam. Massy’s practice of regenerative agriculture is an example of how nonindigenous small-scale farmers and food producers can interact with the history of the land they have come to possess and work. Massy inserts his approach to regenerative agriculture into the history of Australian agriculture, a history that he considers environmental and socially destructive, yet he acknowledges the past and continuing connection of Indigenous peoples to the land. Like Gammage and Pascoe, Massy contends that much can be learned from the first inhabitants of Australia, who ‘were able to survive and

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build a sustainable human culture until the arrival of the second group’ (2017, 19). Massy writes that to ‘manage, nurture and regenerate country, then we need to fathom where it came from and how, what it is made of, how it works and functions, how it was managed before us’ (2017, 2). It is not just the farmer who needs to be unsettled and discomforted by the history of the soil. ‘If you eat, you are involved in agriculture’ is a popular saying among agrarian and alternative food advocates that is often attributed to Wendell Berry. This saying expresses the idea that consumers and producers are intimately connected (Coff 2010, 35). The decisions of shoppers and eaters in urban contexts are in a relationship, whether acknowledged or not, with the farmers and growers in rural communities. According to Berry, eaters are kept ignorant of the agricultural processes that go into producing their food. He contends that in thinking of eating as an agricultural act, eaters will make more responsible decisions that respect the environment, farmers and animal welfare (2010, 145). However, as has been argued in this chapter, eaters also are kept ignorant of entanglement of agriculture and settler-colonial violence. As such, this adage can be pushed further: If eating implicates one in agriculture, and agriculture is implicated in colonial violence, then eaters, not just farmers, are implicated in this history. ‘If you eat, you are involved in settler colonialism.’ What are we to do with knowledge that eating implicates us in agricultural and colonial history? Firstly, many will deny that this relationship places any great moral burden on contemporary eaters. Although Gaita contends that ‘citizens of a democratic nation which is guilty of genocide cannot for long avoid asking questions about the role they played in it’, he is largely operating within the intentionalist paradigm and would dismiss the relationship as thin (1999, 128). Likewise, many Australian citizens will declare that they played no role in frontier violence, clearing of land, establishment of protectorates or removal of children, and, therefore, they are guilty of nothing. Barta’s relational approach, however, is useful here. He argues that ‘all white people in Australia do have [relationships with Aboriginal peoples]; that in the key relation, the appropriation of the land, it is fundamental to the history of the society in which they live; and that implicitly rather than explicitly, in ways which were inevitable rather than intentional, it is a relationship of genocide’ (Barta 1987, 239). To be historians of loam, as Patel puts it, farmers and eaters need to remember the blood spilled in the past, which has allowed for benefits to be gained and enjoyed in the present. Eaters and farmers who embrace food sovereignty politics in Australia need to reckon with this history seriously and sincerely. As Gaita observes, ‘[t]he claim that one understands the wrong one has done to another while not being seriously affected by it is as suspect, I believe, as the claim that one loves someone even though one is untroubled by their death or loss’

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(Gaita 1999, 5). Indigenous-settler relations are plagued by insincere claims made by nonindigenous Australians that we do understand and acknowledge past wrongs. However, rarely is there much evidence that this understanding troubles, disturbs or inconveniences the normal order of things. The final two chapters explore how alternative food politics in general, and food sovereignty in particular, can respond to the knowledge of this relationship of genocide. Although the unsettling effect of acknowledging these relations of genocide can trigger defensive responses, it can also open up space for what Foucault calls local critique. This critique is tied to the returns of knowledge in a way that can destabilise present understanding of ourselves and the social reality. Such a critique should move beyond symbolic acknowledgement of country and the past, to create possibilities for the complex work of allowing Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to set the terms and conditions of food sovereignty in Australia. NOTE 1. A WTC is ‘conducted by a person recognised as an “elder” and is most often a short speech’ welcoming an audience onto Aboriginal country. An AOC is when ‘a non-indigenous person (or an Indigenous person who is not a Traditional Owner) acknowledges that the site where the audience is meeting is regarded as ancestral country for a particular Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander nation’ (Kowal 2015, 174).

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Chapter 6

Whose Sovereignty? Competing Sovereignties and the Tactical Return to Rights

To speak of Aboriginal rights is to be switched off from, yawned at, to have the subject changed to that of a more ‘deserving victims’ agenda —Irene Watson 2007, 21

In the 1950s and 1960s, colonised peoples around the globe pushed for independence from European colonial powers. Some of these movements involved armed struggle, while others achieved peaceful transition via negotiations with colonisers or international organisations. This period of decolonisation saw countries with a majority indigenous population ruled by a European minority transitioning to become new sovereign nations, such as Laos, Chad and Algeria. However, decolonisation in settler-colonial contexts, such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, presented significant hurdles. The most difficult obstacle has been the refusal of the majority colonial population to relinquish power to, or share it with, a minority indigenous population. Undeterred, Indigenous activists in Australia persisted in resisting settler-colonial rule through a variety of creative avenues (Foley 2012). Although some concessions were made, such as granting indigenous populations civil rights, settler-colonial states took the question of ‘sovereignty off the table’ (Johnson 2016, 10). Yet, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, Indigenous activists have ‘insisted on their sovereignty and demanded recognition of their land and historical treaty rights’ (Johnson 2016, 1). Indigenous declarations of sovereignty and rights have crucial implications for thinking about food politics and the creation of a just food system in Australia. This is especially the case if food sovereignty discourses are going to be adopted. Food sovereignty demands for control over the food system 165

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and access to land have the potential conceptually and practically to clash with the political struggles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. With the preceding chapters on food sovereignty politics in mind, this chapter primarily focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ political struggle for sovereignty and rights. I do this in order to highlight that how food sovereignty claims are to be made in Australia must be through the broader question of Indigenous sovereignty, not apart from it. The idea of ‘Indigenous sovereignty’ or ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ is used in Australia to intervene in constitutional debates, to assert self-governance and to destabilize historical narratives of the settler-colonial state. Although there are a variety of conceptions of Indigenous sovereignty, the phrase ‘never ceded’ has become something of a unifying declaration among Indigenous activists. Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap regard this claim as representing ‘both an assertion to the right to self-determination and a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the settler-colonial state that has incorporated them as citizens’ (2012, 535). Entwined with declarations of sovereignty are claims for distinct rights. For the first half of the twentieth century, Aboriginal activists campaigned for the right to vote, desegregation of public spaces and an end to the White Australia policy (Foley 2012). The focus in this period was on achieving equality with the rest of the white Australian population. However, there were also calls for distinctive rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These calls focused primarily on land rights, but there were also demands for the right to practice Aboriginal Customary Law and its recognition in the Australian legal system. The shift from civil rights to distinctive rights initiated a transition in Aboriginal politics from assimilation to self-determination. The political history of Aboriginal activisms and fight for self-determination is vast. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a detailed overview of this history, but to think about how Indigenous sovereignty declarations and rights claims should set the conditions for how food politics is thought about and practiced in Australia. Importantly, the declaration of Indigenous sovereignty and distinct rights claims is not only directed at the state, but also the majority nonindigenous population. That is, it is not only a juridical or political statement calling for changes to the constitution, but it is also a declaration of moral significance for the Australian population. Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman from Queensland and professor of law at the University of New South Wales, has argued that the recent call for sovereignty and treaty in the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a ‘moral challenge to all Australians: hear our voices, and pause to listen and understand’ (Davis 2017, 142). As such, the declaration of Indigenous sovereignty and claim of distinct rights have implications for thinking about food politics in Australia, especially the idea of food sovereignty.

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This chapter examines Indigenous sovereignty and rights claims and their implications for food sovereignty politics. As argued in previous chapters, food sovereignty makes demands for land and involves practices that historically have been associated with the dispossession and exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I argue that in instances where there is a clash, priority needs to be given to Indigenous sovereignty. Although both have a legitimate case against oppression and exploitation from dominant social, political and economic powers, the Indigenous claim has ontological priority to land. Furthermore, food sovereignty and alternative food claims are problematic in Australia not simply because Indigenous people, ontologies and practices are not represented, but as argued throughout, the ideas of agrarian–settlement are European and were involved in the colonial injustices visited on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Brigg and Murphy argue that we need to ‘consider the origins and implications of ideas’, even if the speakers are well-intentioned (Brigg and Murphy 2011, 18). Using Foucault’s genealogical approach, this book has been trying to show that agriculture is not neutral, but like medicine and science, it is involved in the racialised oppression of settler-colonial history (Rigney 2001). Considering the potential for these discourses to compete and create antagonisms among these different claimants, I contend that it is imperative that attempts to import and apply food sovereignty to the Australian context, well intentioned or not, need to respect the priority of Indigenous sovereignty politics. Failure to do so risks repeating colonial logics and undermining the ideal of food justice. Leaving aside the relationship between Indigenous and food sovereignty claims for a moment, it is worth pausing to note that these movements are markedly curious, for at least two reasons. First, in recent years a diverse array of political theorists and scholars have questioned the contemporary relevance of sovereignty due to the rise of globalisation and its perceived association with outdated notions of the nation–state (Moyn 2014; Negri 2008; Benhabib 2011). In a global world where products, bodies, objects and populations flow across borders, and new multinational organisations and trade agreements govern social and economic life, some question the usefulness of sovereignty. According to Danielle Celermajer, scholars and activists increasingly consider the sovereign state ‘as a superfluous impediment to the exercise of rights best protected by cosmopolitan or global laws and institutions’ (2014, 137). The second reason why the claims by these minority groups are curious is that if one does hold to older notions of ­sovereignty and the nation–state, then it is unlikely that these claims will gain much traction. That is, these grassroots sovereignty declarations are made by peoples and collectives that are among the lowest of the low; they are made by those who have been disposed of their lands, by those who are

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statistically irrelevant in general elections, by those who may not even be allowed to participate in the political sphere. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, these declarations and claims are made by the subaltern. Yet, there is something curious and potentially powerful about these sovereignty declarations and rights claims from below. Specifically, I am interested in examining the political force of these declarations and claims. What can they do? How are they established? What are the points of conflict, and where do they overlap? To do this, I return to an explicit analysis of Foucault. Specifically, I draw on Foucault’s critical analyses of sovereignty-based politics and recent scholarship on a Foucauldian conception of rights. Although Foucault is commonly counted among theorists critical of sovereignty and rights-based politics due to its association with a humanist subject and political liberalism, I contend that a closer reading of the Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population lectures suggests an alternate reading that leaves open the possibility of the critical deployment of sovereignty declarations and a tactical use of rights. Some scholars have argued that Foucault’s late discussions of human rights represent a confused turn to a form of liberalism and break with his earlier critiques of the subject (Fraser 1983; Dews 1989); others suggest that there is a continuity and a tactical and strategic use of rights as a political instrument (Golder 2015; Patton 2004; Whyte 2012). I suggest sovereignty declarations can also be deployed in a tactical manner. This is not an attempt to revitalise an idea of sovereignty as a central source of power or legitimacy, but to explore the critical possibility of sovereignty declarations and rights claims from below, at the periphery of things, as a means of destabilising the sovereignty of the state and its historical claims to political legitimacy. That is, what effects do Indigenous sovereignty declarations have on the State as well as on the population? Can these declarations open new possibilities to reconceive sovereignty and new forms of engagement between Indigenous and settler populations? Whereas previous chapters outlined returns of knowledge regarding colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands in the establishment of the settler-colonial state, this chapter examines how this return of knowledges make ‘local critique possible’ (Foucault 2004, 7). Through the assertion of sovereignty and performance of self-governance, these activist movements point to the hidden instability of the dominant settler-colonial claims of sovereignty and the violence of attempts to enfold Indigenous populations into the colonialsettler State. This chapter examines whether these sovereignty declarations from below and rights claims may serve to influence the emergence of a critical social and political formation of the present that gives greater space and possibilities for the interests of Indigenous activists, as well as those of food activists, to be realised.

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SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHTS FROM BELOW Subaltern sovereignty has a nice alliteration, and perhaps I could be accused of simply using a trendy, yet meaningless, phrase. Spivak is wary of such uses, stating, ‘subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie’ (1992, 45). The working classes and women in the West are oppressed, but they are not subaltern. Rather, it is a postcolonial concept referring to ‘everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism’ (Spivak and De Kock 1992, 45). For Spivak it is the silencing of Indigenous and colonised peoples – whereby their voices, ideas, concepts and ways of being are not recognised and not heard as they do not fit within Western or Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies. Despite repeated efforts to speak in the public sphere and through political channels, no one listens. In her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak argues that the subaltern cannot be heard due to the foreclosure and manipulation of agency by the ‘violence of imperialist epistemic, social and disciplinary inscription’ (1988, 80), all of which is reinforced by industrial capital, law and the education system. In short, the answer to her question is ‘no’, the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1988, 104). According to Spivak, someone needs to speak for the subaltern. Yet, the problem of representing the other is acute in the postcolonial context. This is due largely to the long history of colonial representations of Indigenous peoples, knowledges and practices as negative, limited and inferior. In a conversation between Deleuze and Foucault that drew sharp criticism from Spivak, they state that their objective is ‘to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak’ (Foucault and Deleuze 1977, 206). This ideal of helping the silenced other to speak has strong resonance among scholars and activists engaged in antiracist and decolonising work. Yet, it is on this point that Spivak critiques Foucault and Deleuze for assuming that the subaltern can speak for herself. According to Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, the challenge of Spivak’s critique is that it ‘is not enough for Western intellectuals to resist the imperial temptation to “speak for” the colonised other’ (2010, 5). To refuse to ‘speak for’ carries the ‘danger that the other will remain inarticulate, having already been silenced within colonial history’ (Bignall and Patton 2010, 5). Although the intellectual may find it uncomfortable to speak for the subaltern, those controlling the political and juridical institutions find it difficult to hear the voice of the subaltern. To do so would require the acknowledgement and acceptance of a significant political and ethical obligation. Furthermore, the ‘West has a vested interest in remaining “deaf” to the alternative worlds “spoken” by postcolonial subjects’ (Bignall and Patton 2010, 6). To truly hear and respond to the testimonies of those who continue to suffer the effects of settler-colonial violence and

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dispossession would fundamentally alter the fabric of settler-colonial society (just as colonisation did to Indigenous societies). As a result of this inability or unwillingness to hear, the colonised draw on the language of the coloniser in order to have their voice legitimized. In an attempt to be heard, the concepts of the European coloniser are deployed: rights, sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy and so on. This move has not gone unquestioned among Indigenous scholars and activists. Taiaiake Alfred, for example, argues that sovereignty is an ‘inappropriate concept’ for Native leaders in Canada and the United States as it endorses a hierarchical mode of authority that is foreign to traditional indigenous governance (2009, 79–94). However, there is also recognition that Indigenous peoples ‘walk in two worlds’ and are primarily governed according to the logics of European notions of sovereignty, citizenship and rights. It is, therefore, strategically and practically important to use these concepts when the State will only listen in its own language (Rigney 2011). Speaking and listening are two key practices that need to be developed in postcolonial societies. The following chapter explores the importance of developing ‘alternative forms of “listening”’ in order for the voice of the subaltern to ‘be adequately heard and properly acknowledged on its own terms’ (Bignall and Patton 2010, 5). Notwithstanding the concerns of postcolonial and Indigenous scholars, this chapter seeks to examine subaltern uses of the colonisers’ language – namely sovereignty and rights – and the extent to which this ‘speech’ can be heard and has effects in the sociopolitical sphere. Although it may seem at odds with both Spivak and Foucault to suggest that declarations of sovereignty and rights claims by the subaltern can have political effects, the use of these discourses among the peasant farmers of La Via Campesina and Indigenous peoples have disrupted the sociopolitical landscape. Despite their subaltern status as people who have endured the violence of colonial dispossession, capitalist accumulation and biopolitical control and disallowance of life, their voice has at times, if briefly, produced effects. Chapter 3 outlined aspects of the global food sovereignty movement. Before revisiting that discussion, it is necessary to take a closer look at Indigenous sovereignty: What is it? How are such declarations put forward? What do or can these declarations do? Indigenous or Aboriginal sovereignty declarations have been used in a variety of ways in Australia, not all of which can be canvassed here. For the sake of convenience, but at the risk of over simplification, I suggest that Indigenous sovereignty has been declared in three main ways: as a declaration of independence from the State (state-sovereignty), as a declaration of special inclusion into the nation–state (coexisting sovereignties) and as a declaration of unique belonging that unsettles the colonial order (embodied sovereignty). The means and objectives of these three sovereignty declarations overlap

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and are entangled. However, I suggest that dividing Indigenous sovereignty declarations in this way can help us to see some of the distinctive ways this concept is used. Sovereignty is most commonly thought of in relation to the authority and power of the state or monarch. State-sovereignty is conceived as ‘supreme authority within a territory’ and associated with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and political philosophers such as Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) (Philpott 2014). In this sense, sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. It cannot be shared. Recently a number of Indigenous groups have declared independence from Australia: the Murrawarri Republic, the Euahlayi Nation and the Yidindji Nation, for example. In doing so, they implicitly appeal to the idea of state-sovereignty and declare their authority within a particular territory and simultaneously deny the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia. At present, this is a minority position, and these declarations have not been recognised by the Australian government or international law. Yet, this form of sovereignty has a wide influence over the popular imagination of what Indigenous sovereignty would look like – that is, a series of distinct Indigenous nation–states with territorial integrity and control. These declarations of sovereignty provoke the anxieties of conservative commentators such as Keith Windshuttle, who contends that the constitutional recognition movement harbours a secret separatist agenda that aims to break up Australia and create a series of Indigenous nation–states (2016). However, not just white conservatives are dismissive of these ideas. Marcia Langton rejects Aboriginal sovereignty as ‘a slogan, one that points to a vaporous dream of self-determination but one that does not require any actual activity in the waking world to materialise it’ (2013). Both Langton and Windshuttle, intentionally or otherwise, conflate the more radical declarations of state-sovereignty made by a minority of Indigenous activists with a more pluralistic conception of sovereignty that has been put forward as part of the Referendum Council’s Uluru Statement from the Heart (Morris 2017, 232ff). Whether or not these declarations for sovereign nations have merit, and I certainly do not think they should be merely dismissed as naive or extreme, they represent a minority position on Indigenous sovereignty. The conception of sovereignty used in current discourses surrounding constitutional reform in Australia seeks to develop a model of sovereignty that allows for coexistence of the state-sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty. The Uluru Statement proposes such a definition. The Statement asserts Indigenous peoples as ‘the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs’ (Referendum Council 2017, i). This sovereignty ‘has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’ (Referendum

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Council 2017, i). The idea of shared or pluralistic sovereignty runs counter to the common understanding of sovereignty as absolute power inherited from Hobbes et al. However, there is precedence: for example, the domestic dependent nations in the United States or the shared sovereignty between Australian state and federal governments (Patton 1996, 164–66; Reynolds 1996, 6). Megan Davis argues that Aboriginal sovereignty proposed by the Uluru Statement would not conflict with sovereignty of the Australian parliament (2017, 120) but would function to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ‘the right to participate in decision-making in matters that impact upon their lives’ (2017, 120). In this sense, Indigenous sovereignty would give Indigenous Australians a voice in parliament specifically to monitor Parliament’s use of Section 51 (xxvi) and Section 122 of the Australian Constitution. These sections allow the federal government to create laws that single out Aboriginal people. A prominent example is the Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention (2007–2022). Following a 2007 report about the neglect of children in remote Indigenous communities, the federal government deployed the military, federal police and a variety of health workers to ‘stabilise, normalise, and exit’ these communities (Colvin 2007). In doing so, the government introduced interventions that only applied to Aboriginals living in the Northern Territory communities, including but not limited to removing the permit system for access to Aboriginal land, restricting the sale of alcohol and pornography, eliminating customary law considerations from within criminal proceedings, quarantining welfare payments, suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act (1977) and requiring Aboriginal children to undergo mandatory health checks without consulting their parents (Altman and Hinkson 2007). The Intervention has been hugely controversial and attracted criticism from the United Nations (Anaya 2010). Davis argues that the purpose of the Indigenous ‘voice to parliament’ is not to monitor all laws, but to monitor specific legislation that targets Aboriginal people, such as the Northern Territory Intervention (Davis 2017, 128). Similarly, Noel Pearson argues that the coexisting sovereignty proposed by the Referendum Council would ‘ensure that Indigenous people can take more responsibility for our own lives within the democratic institutions already established’ (2017, 108) (italics in the original). For Pearson, sovereignty is not about ‘separatism’ but ‘inclusion on a fair basis . . . We want our voices to be heard in political decisions made about us’ (2017, 108). These declarations of sovereignty seek to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the nation–state, yet also secure a distinct position that is institutionally guaranteed and has distinct rights. Johnson writes that in the wake of civil rights movements, Indigenous activists argued that they ‘were entitled to the same benefits as other citizens and to additional rights that protect their collective identities as distinct nations’ (2016, 16).

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These claims placed a limit on the sovereignty of the state and sought to establish political-legal guarantees for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples, particularly by ‘recognising land rights as core to their collective identity’ (Johnson 2016, 25). The claim for distinct rights can be thought as illiberal and undemocratic as they appear to run counter to the ideals of individualism, egalitarianism and universalism (Patton 2016, 14). However, a number of political theorists argue that distinct rights are compatible with political liberalism (Ivison 2002; Kymlicka 1999; Pettit 2000). Will Kymlicka, for example, argues that a liberal-democratic system ‘can and should’ protect the distinct rights of Indigenous minorities in order to ‘promote fairness between groups’ (1995, 37). That is, without distinct rights, Indigenous minorities are vulnerable to external economic and political decisions made by the majority. For Kymlicka, this vulnerability leads to unequal and unfair circumstances that compounded across time. By providing some protections for minority Indigenous groups from external decisions, minorities gain control over central aspects of group life (e.g., land use, ceremonies, customary laws) in a manner that does not impede the rights of all citizens (Kymlicka 1995). Seeking to achieve sovereignty and distinct rights via arrangements within the nation–state is also seen as the best way to provide a legitimate foundation for the State, albeit in a post-hoc fashion. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders examine the difficulties of political liberalism to respond to colonial history and Indigenous dispossession. In attempting to establish a legitimate political order, the state and the Australian people need to deal with the history of theft and illegitimate dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A key feature of this problem is how the state can be ‘“morally rehabilitated”, even if it began in an illegitimate fashion’ (2000, 3). Johnson writes that the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and distinct rights may serve to ‘redeem the state and establish it in new terms’ (2016, 9). The most substantial answer to the question of morally rehabilitating the State is by recognising a form of Indigenous sovereignty and working towards treaty or treaties with First Nations peoples (Patton 1996; Ivison 2015, 2002; Davis and Langton 2016; Brigg and Maddison 2011). Declarations of sovereignty and calls for distinct rights may legitimise the state and give Indigenous peoples a place in the legislature and political processes (Kymlicka 1995, 132ff). This is particularly pertinent when Indigenous groups are an extreme minority. A significant reason why the Referendum Council’s Uluru Statement argued for Indigenous sovereignty in the form of a voice in Parliament was due to the electoral insignificance of the Indigenous population. Noel Pearson argues that the ‘extreme minority status’ of the Indigenous population ‘is a defining feature of our condition’ (2017, 64). Making up approximately 3 percent of the population means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are ‘effectively shut out of the

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Australian democracy’ as their concerns or interests rarely influence political debate or policies aimed at the majority (Pearson 2017, 64). Likewise, political philosopher Philip Petitt argues that the rights and interests of minorities have little chance of succeeding in democracies oriented towards ‘popular electoral control of government’ (2000, 199). Although Petitt, Kymlicka and others believe that it is possible for democracies to recognise group-specific rights, a dominant focus on electoral victory means that the interests of the majority invariably will overshadow those of the minority. Without the numbers to influence electoral politics or protections via distinct rights, more often than not a minority population has to have faith that certain individual politicians or political parties will deal sincerely and justly with them. However, as Ivison acknowledges, ‘the history of liberal colonialism demonstrates how that promise [of constitutional recognition and justice more generally] is, more often than not, experienced . . . as colossal bad faith’ (2015, 17). Indigenous sovereignty seeks to remove or minimise this element of faith, bad or otherwise, by giving Indigenous people their own voice within the mechanisms of the nation–state. For Pearson and Davis, the current liberal political arrangement is the best opportunity to secure Indigenous sovereignty, as well as to begin repairing the violent and unjust foundations of the settler-colonial state. This has involved a gradualist or reformist agenda that regards the nation–state and its institutions as the best avenues to pursue claims to sovereignty and self-determination. On this view, events such as the 1967 referendum, Mabo v Queensland (1992), Native Title Act (1993), Wik Peoples v Queensland (1996) and the possibility of constitutional recognition in a future referendum are regarded as the surest avenues through which to secure sovereignty. After the Mabo decision, Paul Patton (and others) argued that ‘indigenous sovereignty need not be construed as implying the formation of an independent state, nor as incompatible with the sovereignty that inheres in the postcolonial state’ (1996, 166). Yet almost thirty years later, it seems that the political class will not entertain the idea of alternate forms of sovereignty or agree to a pathway towards meaningful self-determination. Pursuing sovereignty and distinct rights via avenues within the nation–state can result in the reinforcement of the sovereignty of the State. Writing from the experience of Native Canadian politics, Alfred argues that indigenous sovereignty failed to challenge the ignorance and racism of state sovereignty that ‘exclude the indigenous voice’ and instead ‘serve to perpetuate them’ (Alfred 2009, 83). Likewise, Irene Watson argues that Native Title legislation and governmentendorsed Aboriginal councils ‘are essential to the colonial regime’ and ‘pose no challenge to Australian real property law, nor to the governance of the state’ (2007, 25).

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In dealing with the nation–state, Spivak’s claim that the subaltern is not heard is validated most clearly by the historical record. There has been a long history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples declaring sovereignty and seeking self-determination. These almost always have been denied, or willfully misheard. Most recently Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated this mishearing in his response on national television to a question about the Uluru Statement. When asked by Teela Reid, a Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman and lawyer who was part of the constitutional dialogue process, why he rejected the Uluru Statement and recommendations from Referendum Council, Turnbull responded that the proposal would create a ‘third chamber in parliament’ that would undermine parliamentary sovereignty and give Indigenous members ‘the right, if it so chose, to examine every piece of legislation’ (Davidson 2017). Similar to Windshuttle and other conservative commentators, Turnbull mischaracterised the declarations in terms of statesovereignty, thereby positioning the ‘voice to parliament’ as an irreconcilable challenge to the indivisible authority of the nation–state. In doing so, Turnbull stoked old anxieties among the majority population about Indigenous legal claims over people’s backyards (Bachelard 1997). This is the active silencing that the subaltern suffers. Davis describes this mishearing, or failure to hear, through Jill Stauffer’s work on ethical loneliness. Ethical loneliness, according to Stauffer is the compounding of abandonment with silence – alone and not heard. Davis argues that Stauffer’s analysis resonates with the ways in which the Uluru Statement has been rejected by politicians and commentators (Morris 2017, 232ff). Davis quotes Stauffer: Ethical loneliness is the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities. It is a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to or cannot properly hear their testimony – their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed them – on their own terms. (Davis 2017, 140–41; Stauffer 2015, 1)

The unwillingness for the nation–state to hear Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices has led some activists to turn to international avenues for support, notably the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Falk and Martin 2007, 43). Johnson describes how international agencies and campaigning can be used strategically by indigenous peoples who ‘might be minorities in their own homelands, but they could win wider sympathy for their causes and exert strong moral pressure on governments to change their

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policies about indigenous rights’ (2016, 33). It is also argued that because sovereignty is nonjusticiable in Australian courts (i.e., an Australia court cannot rule on its own legitimacy), international law is the only place that can rule on the legality of sovereignty in Australia. However, Aboriginal leaders such as Pearson contend that the international route is not a practical solution, for ‘Indigenous self-determination is a domestic democratic question’ (2017, 77). Although Pearson may be correct, the domestic political environment has shown great hostility to any proposals that are more than symbolic gestures. There is a third form of sovereignty declaration that I have yet to address. In addition to these separatist and state-centric avenues is an argument of ontological and historical belonging to the land and country. This form of sovereignty can be characterised as spiritual or embodied sovereignty. As argued in the previous chapter, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have distinctive claims to the land that are historical and ontological. MoretonRobinson writes, ‘our sovereignty is carried by the body’ (2007, 2). This sovereignty is not something that can be given or taken away by the State. It is not a form of citizenship but indicative of indigenous belonging to a place over time. ‘Our sovereignty’, Moreton-Robinson continues, ‘is embodied, it is ontological (our being) and epistemological (our way of knowing), and it is grounded within complex relations derived from the intersubstantiation of ancestral beings, humans and land’ (2007, 2). This idea of sovereignty does not fit neatly within political liberalism and has failed to convince the institutions of the State when it has been used. For example, in Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty. Ltd. and the Commonwealth of Australia (1971) (known as the Gove land-rights case), the Yolngu people brought land-rights claims before the Commonwealth. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner was an expert witness and used the idea of spiritual sovereignty to describe the depth of Yolngu connection to the land and ancestors (Johnson 2016, 48). However, this resulted in some unintended interpretations. For instance, Johnson notes how Justice Blackburn’s ruling against the Yolngu land claim interpreted their ‘spiritual attachment to land’ as not corresponding to a ‘coeval status as modern political actors with economic and social rights’ (2016, 55). The focus on spiritual sovereignty did not translate into legal rights or recognition. Although such ontological declarations may be dismissed on legal grounds, they have a moral and political force that continues to remind white Australia of its non-belonging. The continuation of Indigenous peoples and their calls for land rights unsettle white Australia’s sense of belonging and point out the hypocrisy of the application of political liberalism in Australia and the pretence of governing through principles of justice and fairness. Whereas some of the radical or separatist declarations of sovereignty use a statist conception, and the Uluru Statement seeks a coexisting conception, Indigenous theorists such as Irene Watson, Aileen Moreton-Robinson and

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Wendy Brady seek an unsettling conception of sovereignty that does not necessarily serve to morally rehabilitate the colonial state. This is not the sovereignty of Leviathan or sovereignty as a single locus of absolute power over a territory. Watson argues that attempts to secure sovereignty through Native Title legislation and inclusion of Indigenous people in the constitution of the nation–state serve to contain Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in some prehistoric space that is safely neutered of political power. Watson asks, ‘who am I when I stand outside native title recognition – the untitled native? Do I remain the unsettled native, left to unsettle the settled spaces of empire?’ (2007, 15). Watson writes that even if Aboriginal sovereignty could establish itself in the model of the nation–state, this would not correspond to Aboriginal social organisation and structure. She writes, for there is not just one sovereign state body but hundreds of different sovereign Aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal sovereignty is different from state sovereignty because it embraces diversity, and focuses on inclusivity . . . Aboriginal sovereignty poses a solution to white supremacy in its deflation of power. (2007, 20)

Watson’s version of sovereignty is one that maintains difference. The state or the nation does not need to become Aboriginal, but nor do the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples need to become undifferentiated citizens. For this to occur, Watson contends that the dominant Western conception of sovereignty (and its political implications) needs to be ‘deflated’ from its totalising and absolute conception to allow for difference, heterogeneity and, importantly, for Indigenous peoples to govern themselves and their lands. Similarly, Wendy Brady argues that Indigenous sovereignty is distinct from the hierarchical Western notion and is formed through ancestral and communal relations. Brady writes: Unlike the sovereign of the European nation, authority does not reside in one figurehead and is not exercised downwards through layers of ever-declining levels of power. In the Indigenous nation, each individual is part of the fabric of both authority and power that is interdependent on the other. (2007, 142)

If coexisting sovereignty seeks to work with and maintain the setup of the nation–state, albeit in a new form, what does the declaration of embodied and spiritual sovereignty do? First, as argued by Watson this conception seeks to deflate the all-consuming notion of state-sovereignty. This is not cutting off the king’s head, as per Foucault, but deflating the power of the sovereign by allowing multiple others to exercise a reduced form of sovereign power. Second, the declarations contest the status of Indigenous peoples as the subjects of the settler-colonial state. They give an alternate basis for political identity other than the overly determined juridical subject or citizen. Finally,

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these declarations are a provocation from Indigenous peoples that ‘their prior and continuing occupation of and belonging to the land’ challenges ‘white settlers’ self-conception of rightful belonging’ (Johnson 2016, 5–6). These embodied declarations may not lead to constitutional reform, but, as Muldoon and Schaap contend, ‘Aboriginal sovereignty fundamentally contests the basis of the constitutional order’ (2012, 536). It is a repurposing of the colonisers’ language that can force ‘the state to recognize major inconsistencies between its own principles and its treatment of Native people’ (Alfred 2009, 79). It is a reminder that the settler-state does not have the consent, recognition or acceptance of the first peoples. For many Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, the moral stain of colonialism is a long way from being adequately addressed. As should be clear from the above and previous chapters, Indigenous sovereignty declarations and rights claims hold a significance place in the Australian political landscape. These declarations and claims are often met with volatile resistance from politicians and commentators, as well as mining and agricultural industries, who wish to ignore these voices entirely or offer symbolic gestures. Considering this, the recent entrance of food sovereignty discourses into the Australian political landscape raises questions about how food sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty relate to one another. As discussed in chapter 3, food sovereignty is associated with La Via Campesina, a subaltern movement of peasant and indigenous farmers. These movements and the objective of decolonisation share many potential points of overlap (Grey and Patel 2015). As Moreton-Robinson observes, ‘[g]lobalisation has made it possible for Indigenous groups to enhance their capacity to organise and distribute Indigenous perspectives’ (2007, 11). However, great care is needed to avoid conflating food sovereignty in Australia with food sovereignty in India, Mali or Ecuador. Food sovereignty in Australia is deployed by small-scale agrarian farmers who inherit the benefits of dispossession and seek access to land. Much of the alternative food discourse in Australia implicitly assumes the legitimacy of the settler-colonial state and the rightfulness of their attempts to own and cultivate the land. This presents a potential clash with Indigenous sovereignty. Although many of these small-scale farmers and growers do face economic hardships, they cannot be described as subaltern in any meaningful sense. Whereas peasant farmers of La Via Campesina and Indigenous activists rarely have access to cultural imperialism, small-scale farmers in Australia are predominantly white and have connections with media, economic, educational and political institutions. As to be explored in the final chapter, this presents an important opportunity to speak with, if not for, Indigenous activists. The point here, however, is that it is important to take care in speaking and declaring nonindigenous forms of sovereignty,

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and even greater care in listening to Indigenous voices making declarations and claims. FOUCAULT AND THE RIGHTS OF THE GOVERNED In terms of almost all meaningful markers, the grassroots groups making Indigenous sovereignty and food sovereignty declarations are powerless. This is not the sovereignty of Rousseau, the people as sovereign who determine the general will. It is not ‘we the people’. These people tend to be excluded from popular and state sovereignty. They are the landless, the dispossessed and the statistically insignificant. Yet, they are declaring sovereignty and claiming distinct rights over territory and cultural practices, and control over particular political processes. It is here that Foucault is useful for understanding these political gestures. Admittedly, he is a curious choice. Foucault wanted to ‘get around the problem of sovereignty – which is central to the theory of right’ and instead ‘to reveal the problem of domination and subjugation’ (2004, 27). By domination Foucault does not mean the ‘domination of the one over the many’, but ‘the multiple forms of domination that can be exercised in society’ (2004, 27). In thinking of domination and subjugation as multiple, Foucault decentres the sovereignty of the king to expose the polymorphous relations of power. It is in these polymorphous relations that resistance and critique occur. In addition to getting away from the problem of sovereignty, Foucault is often considered to be among those who led the turn away from political thought tied to conceptions of rights. Foucault rejected the idea that there was a stable and essential human subject of rights. Famously he wrote, ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (1973, 387). Foucault goes on to conclude The Order of Things with the evocative image of man being erased ‘like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (1973, 387). Foucault’s antihumanism and constructivist approach to subjectivity have long been considered to preclude the possibility of human rights entering his thought. Furthermore, Foucault’s analysis of power relations attempts to move away from the sovereign model of power and the presupposition of ‘the individual as a subject of natural rights or original powers’ (2000e, 59). He sees political theory as ‘obsessed by the person of the sovereign’ (1980, 121). Instead of considering power as possessed by a central sovereign who represses, dominates or grants rights to a subject, Foucault reconceives of power as relational, diffuse and productive. Yet, as he says in The Will to Knowledge and Society Must Be Defended, we have yet to decapitate the king. The persistence of political thinking in terms of sovereignty is not only evident in the rule of nation–states but in countermovements. It could be argued that Indigenous and food activists have also

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followed the obsession with the sovereign and rights discourses. Perhaps they have. However, in some of Foucault’s late interviews and lectures, he seemingly takes up the language of rights, albeit in an idiosyncratic way. I suggest that engaging with some of the recent debates regarding Foucault and rights is useful for examining the sovereignty and rights discourses of Indigenous politics in Australia. Foucault’s discussion of rights is by no means exhaustive and is mainly limited to a few brief observations in the context of interviews about specific events at the time, such as gay rights (2000d), the right to the ‘means of health’ (2000c) and the right of asylum for political refugees, which he claims ‘goes back to a time beyond memory’ (2000b). I will not address all of the instances where Foucault uses rights discourse in an apparently affirmative way. Instead, I will briefly outline three texts that I consider to be the most politically interesting and relevant to the present discussion: ‘Confronting Governments’, ‘Interview with Jean François and John De Wit’, and the ‘14 January 1976 lecture’ in Society Must Be Defended. I contend that in these texts Foucault is deploying rights in a nonnormative manner, yet these tactical deployments have normative implications. That is, Foucault’s approach to rights exposes the hypocrisy of power (Kelly 2018, 149), and in that way it may open a door or an exit, so to speak. However, he does not say whether we should walk through it. Despite Spivak’s accusation, Foucault did speak for others and in the broad context of a colonial struggle. In a short text, Confronting Governments: Human Rights, Foucault speaks on behalf of Vietnamese boat people fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. He says, ‘Who appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right’ (2000a, 474). Foucault claims it is the ‘rights of the governed’ that permit private individuals to speak against sovereign governments. He bases it on three principles: first, as individual members of the international community who are ‘obliged to show mutual solidarity’ and ‘speak out against every abuse of power’ (2000a, 474). Second, governments claim to be concerned with the welfare of their citizens; therefore, when they fail to do this, it is the duty of the ‘international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments’ (2000a, 474). The suffering of people at the hands of their governments ‘grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power’ (2000a, 475). Third, Foucault also points to the activity of nongovernment organisations such as Amnesty International as initiating a ‘new right – that of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy’ (2000a, 475). They are private individuals appointed by no one and therefore independent from state-sovereignty. These principles ground the ‘rights of the

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governed’ to intervene in the sovereignty of other states in order to protect those suffering under the abuse of power. Unlike Foucault’s criticism that the right of the sovereign operates as a mask of domination, Jessica Whyte observes that in this text, ‘right no longer appears as an instrument or mask of domination but, rather, as that which enables “the will of individuals” to wrench from governments the monopolisation of the power to effectively intervene’ (2012, 13). It is important to note that this right emerges in the context of liberal governmentality, the right of the governed, and is not attached to and dependent from the right of the sovereign. Patton observes that the ‘mutually accepted relationship between governors and governed’, whereby the former is concerned with the welfare of the latter, ‘is one of the conditions that enables governments to be held responsible for the suffering of citizens and allows the emergence of a duty on the part of the international citizenry to speak out against abuses or derelictions of power’ (2005, 280). It is a new right that obliges the governed to point out the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of specific governmental rationalities. However, it is important to note that this right draws on and reuses the ideals of social welfare and representative democracy found in liberal governmentality. That is, if a government does not accept the premise that it is responsible for the care and protection of its citizens, then the rights of the governed to intervene will have little effect.1 The second text is a 1981 interview with Jean François and John De Wit in which Foucault is directly asked, ‘Do you reject any engagement in the name of human rights on the grounds of the death of man?’ and ‘if it is possible to reconcile the movement in favour of human rights and what you have said against the humanist subject’ (2014, 264–65). In response, Foucault first contextualises his critique of humanism by joking that in the 1950s and 1960s everyone from Camus to Stalin was a humanist – ‘there was not a single discourse with a moral or political philosophical pretension that did not feel obliged to place itself under the sign of humanism’ (2014, 265). Foucault states that he was trying to think outside of humanist categories, to ask, ‘Is there not a historicity to the subject?’ It is in this intellectual milieu that Foucault ‘tried to consider human rights in their historical reality while not admitting there is a human nature’ (2014, 266). This move, however, does not lead him to completely abandon human rights. He states: Human rights were acquired in the process of a struggle, a political struggle that posed a certain number of limits on governments and that attempted to define general principles that no government should break. It is very important to have clearly defined frontiers against governments – no matter which governments – that incite indignation, revolt, and permit struggle when they are crossed. So as

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a historical fact and as a political instrument, human rights appear to me to be something important. (2014, 266)

Foucault then reiterates that he does not associate rights with human nature, the essence of the human being, or with any form of government. For Foucault, governments do not have to respect human rights. Rather, foreshadowing his comments on the Vietnamese refugee situation, he says, ‘human rights are the rights of the governed’, which set a limit on and define the frontiers of government (2014, 266). The François-De Wit interview is noteworthy for Foucault’s comments on personal experience and history in the context of political struggle. In regard to experience, Foucault talks about the importance of his experiences in psychiatric hospitals, with the police and in relation to sexuality that led him into political struggles. These are political and subjective: ‘I am fighting for such and such an issue’, he says, because ‘it is important to me in my subjectivity’ (2014, 266). It is not out of a ‘general theory of man’ or that he understands himself as a ‘universal combatant for a humanity suffering in all of its different forms and aspects’ (2014, 266). Foucault insists, ‘I also remain free with regard to the struggles with which I have associated myself’ (2014, 266). Thus, Foucault’s engagement in political struggles broadly, and his use of rights more narrowly, emerges out of experiences of institutions, knowledges and relations of power that seek to dominate and subjugate in specific ways at specific times. The role of history is clearly significant in Foucault’s work as well as in his political engagements. In the François-De Wit interview, he states that what his historical analyses ‘seek is a permanent opening of possibilities . . . which I hope have a political meaning’ (2014, 267). This political meaning and opening is achieved by tracing the contingencies and means by which the present has been constituted. Foucault states that he is trying to reach ‘back up as far as possible to grasp all of the contingencies, events, tactics, and strategies that have brought forth a certain situation’ (2014, 267). Foucault contends that by showing how a certain situation was constituted, it ‘can be unconstituted’ (2014, 267). This is the political gesture of his genealogical analyses – ‘Yes, it is the movement of reaching back historically, with a projection on the space of political possibilities: this is the move I am making’ (2014, 267). The François-De Wit interview is important for the ongoing debates surrounding Foucault’s use of rights as he explicitly addresses questions on the relationship between his thought on rights and his antihumanism and critique of the subject in The Order of Things. This interview furthers the understanding that Foucault is primarily interested in the rights of the governed, which partly come from personal experience of the multiple forms of domination that led him to engage in political struggles to unconstitute the order of things in the present.

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The third and final text is from the Society Must Be Defended lectures. Foucault has been talking about how discourses of discipline draw on scientific and medical knowledge to colonise procedures of law and normalise society. Faced with these power/knowledge effects, Foucault asks, ‘what do we do in concrete terms? What do we do in real life?’ (2004, 39). The answer: ‘We obviously invoke right, the famous old formal, bourgeois right. And it is in reality the right of sovereignty’ (2004, 39). Foucault goes on to suggest that this is a failed strategy as sovereignty is unable to limit the effects of discipline. ‘Truth to tell’, continues Foucault, ‘if we are to struggle against disciplines . . . we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for a new right that is both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty’ (2004, 40). But what is this new anti-disciplinary and non-sovereign right? This passage has provoked mixed responses. Roger Mourad, for example, reads Foucault normatively, suggesting that we in the West need to develop a ‘new theory of right’ freed from discipline and sovereignty. However, ­Mourad notes that Foucault was unable or uninterested in doing this work (2003). Patton argues that Foucault’s comments are a mix of descriptive analysis and normative gestures. That is, when faced with the effects of disciplinary mechanisms, modern society invariably appeals to the rights of the sovereign. Yet, according to Foucault, this strategy has historically led to an impasse. Therefore, if one is to continue to play the rights game, one should look for, or head towards according to Patton’s translation, a new form of right. Patton suggests that the admonishment for a new right is both descriptive – seek out ‘other forms of right that already operate in our present’ – and normative – such a form of right ‘should provide effective counterarguments to the techniques, justifications and goals of disciplinary power’ (2005, 283). Mark Kelly, however, contends that Foucault’s statement is ‘strictly hypothetical’ (2018, 158). More generally, Kelly dismisses the idea that a normative conception of rights can be found in Foucault (2018, 154ff). According to Kelly, the ‘invocations of rights by Foucault is a call for rights only qua limitations on power’ (2018, 156). From these three texts we can see that Foucault considers human rights important political instruments, insofar as they are understood as having developed via contingent historical political struggles. That is, rights are not based on the external legitimacy of the sovereign or internal essences of a universal human subject. Foucault’s approach is to trace how subjects and circumstances have been constituted and to seek critically to unthread and unconstitute those effects. This is seen in the ‘rights of the governed’ to intervene into the strategies of governments in order to protect those suffering under the abuse of power. The right of the governed is not attached to and independent from the right of the sovereign. It emerges in the context of

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liberal governmentality and is a new right that obliges the governed to point out the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of specific governmental rationalities. It is the rights of the governed, which partly come from personal experience of the multiple forms of domination, that led him to engage in political struggles to unconstitute the order of things in the present. Although these theoretical sketches provide grist for the scholar’s mill, the question remains: How does this help us understand the contemporary political struggles of Indigenous and food activists? COUNTER-CONDUCT AND THE TACTICS OF RIGHTS CLAIMS Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights is one of the most detailed analyses of Foucault’s use of rights discourse. In bringing the insights from the three texts just discussed into conversation with Golder’s work, I suggest that we can enrich our understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists critical deployment of rights claims and sovereignty declarations and start to think about how food activists and non-Indigenous Australians should respond. Building on Golder’s analysis, I contend that the deployment of sovereignty and rights discourses can open new possibilities for individuals and communities to engage with each other, the land and food systems in ways that elide and resist the current dominant modes of governance. Golder argues for a Foucauldian politics of rights without suggesting that Foucault reneges on his earlier critiques of the universal human subject and sovereign models of power. Golder exegetes Foucault’s lectures and late interviews as a continuation of his previous work, leading to what he calls ‘Foucault’s curious deployment of rights’ (2015, 13). Golder suggests that Foucault’s appeal to rights is not a late embrace of the liberal subject of inalienable rights derived from their humanness but a ‘critical counter-conduct of rights’ (2015, 23). There are three dimensions to this use of rights: contingent ground of rights, ambivalent nature of rights (both liberatory and subjectifying) and tactical and strategic possibilities of rights as political instruments (2015, 23). Drawing on the Security, Territory, Population lectures, Golder understands Foucault’s deployment of rights in the late 1970s and early 1980s as akin to the counter-conduct tactics used in the lead-up to the Reformation. According to Foucault, the activity of conducting others as well as being conducted ‘is doubtless one of the fundamental elements introduced into Western society by the Christian pastorate’ (2007, 193). As discussed in chapter 2, Foucault contends that the Christian pastor marks the threshold of the modern state and the birth of government of the life of the population.

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The figure of the minister – both religious and governmental – is a reminder of this legacy. The pastorate would conduct the behaviour, thoughts and activities of the community. By establishing a division between clergy and laity, creating the doctrine of purgatory, hearing confession, issuing penance, withholding the Eucharist and a range of other tactics, the pastorate would conduct the conduct of the community. They would lead the community away from heresy, insubordination and sin and towards conformity to certain ecclesial norms. In addition to tracing the historical development of the techniques used to conduct and govern the life of the church, Foucault was interested in the critical and tactical responses. Counter-conduct is the active ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (2007, 201). Foucault examines the historical manifestation of counter-conduct that contributed to the Reformation. To resist these pastoral relations, they need to be countered with practices and strategies that ‘redistribute, reverse, nullify, and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in the systems of salvation, obedience, and truth’ (2007, 204). One such strategy was hyper-obedience – an ‘exaggerated and exorbitant element’ of obedience (2007, 208). This is not merely disobedience against an authority, but an intimate work of the self on the self that disrupts the pastor’s authority. Foucault describes this strategy as ‘a sort of close combat of the individual with himself in which the authority, presence, and gaze of someone else is, if not impossible, at least unnecessary’ (2007, 205). In adopting the countering conduct of hyper-obedience, the individual or group ‘stifles obedience through the excess of prescriptions and challenges that the individual addresses to himself’ (2007, 275). A second form of counter-conduct was the formation of Christian communities that decentred the pastor. The writings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, as well as the formation of different Christian communities, tactically repurposed the governmental instruments used by ecclesial authorities and opened the possibility for insurrection and resistance. By emphasising that the pastor shares in the congregations’ sinful state, these communities remained true to scripture while deflating the pastor’s ‘sacramental power’ to determine who can enter the community (baptism), whether their sins are forgiven (confession) or united to the body of Christ (Eucharist). According to Foucault, these communities led to an egalitarianism that overturned ‘social relations and hierarchy’ and implemented social relations where, quoting Matthew 20:16, the ‘first really will be the last, but the last will also be the first’ (2007, 212). Foucault addresses three other forms of counter-conduct that I won’t discuss here (mysticism, return to Scripture and eschatological beliefs). The point, however, is that these practices of resistance use the instruments, knowledges and relations of power used to conduct and redeploys them in ways that create new possibilities for individual and communal life. As Arnold I. Davidson

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argues, ‘counter-conduct . . . is an activity that transforms one’s relation to oneself and to others; it is the active intervention of individuals and constellations of individuals in the domain of the ethical and political practices and forces that shape us’ (2011, 32). The transformation of individuals and communities in the Middle Ages and Reformation drew on the instruments and forces that shaped and conducted to open up new and different ways of living. They did not go outside the Church or Christian communities but repurposed the tools used on them. As Jessica Whyte notes, ‘the counter-conducts that contest governmentality rely on the same elements as this governmentality itself’ (2012, 25). The elements of the economy, population, security, social welfare and freedom are used to govern and conduct but also to resist and counter-conduct (Foucault 2007, 354–55). These counter-conduct practices can be co-opted and redeployed, and as such, Foucault describes this relation as an ongoing and continuing struggle. In conceiving rights as critical counter-conduct, Golder, like others, reads Foucault’s practices of critique through his relation to Kant (Allen 2008; Cutrofello 1994). Foucault’s use of Kant in his essays and lecture courses in the early 1980s enabled him to develop a critical ethos (Koopman 2013, 26ff; Butler 2004). Whereas the Kantian critical project sought universal structures of knowledge, Foucauldian critique is opened up via ‘historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subject of what we are doing, thinking, saying’ (Foucault 2000f, 315). Koopman argues that from Kant, Foucault develops an immanent critique, which enables an inquiry into the constitution of knowledge, power and ethics that opens up an understanding of ‘who we are, where we have come from, and where we may go’ (Koopman 2013, 29). Golder identifies the way narratives of human rights and associated events have formed a prominent story that we tell ourselves and in which we recognise ourselves as subjects. Golder suggests that a genealogical critique can reveal the contingent grounds of rights and expose areas vulnerable to contestation and reform. In this sense, Golder’s conception of rights as critical counter-conduct is an affirmative move of redeploying rights to retell a story about ourselves and develop a critical ethos that can transform the present. In the lecture ‘What Is Critique?’, Foucault further articulates the relationship between governmentality (conduct of conduct) and the development of a critical ethos that resists or counters conduct. He says, ‘if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated’, then ‘critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination’ (Foucault 1997, 32). Importantly, he sees this as an art, a practice of oneself, or an ethos, and not a universal principle or external rule to follow. The process of voluntary insubordination through counter-conduct and critique ensures ‘the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call . . . the politics of

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truth’ (Foucault 1997, 32). Critique as counter-conduct enables the subject to question norms of behaviour and being ‘governed like that’, opening up the possibility of desubjugation and allowing a transformation of the self. Like the proto-Reformers who used ecclesial tools to create openings to resist the pastorate, Golder suggest that rights, as a practice of critical counter-conduct, can resist governmental strategies that subjugate and govern too much. Likewise, Whyte argues that the interpretive key for understanding Foucault’s ‘new form of rights’ is his late interest in ‘the art of not being governed, or the art of not being governed like that and at that cost’ (2012, 14; Foucault 1997, 29). Ambivalence of Rights and the Native Title Act Having established that Golder gives us a powerful way to view Foucault’s contribution to the political use of rights, I will now turn to the Native Title Act to demonstrate the ambivalence of rights. This is not to concede that rights are a failed strategy, but it is important to be aware of their limitations and vigilant about their multiple uses. That is, a Foucauldian approach to rights cannot regard the attainment of rights as the end of a struggle. Rather it is a continuation of a struggle. In reading rights as a form of critical counterconduct, Golder stresses the ambivalent nature of rights and the reversibility of power relations. That is, the use of rights as a political instrument or tool is always vulnerable to co-option by the governmental strategy – a moment of liberation can be transformed into another instance of containment and constriction. Foucault warns of these tactical reversals in the context of sexual politics in the 1970s. Foucault cautions that de-subjugated local knowledges can be recoded and recolonised by the ‘unitary discourses which, having first disqualified them and having then ignored them when they reappeared, may now be ready to reannex them and include them in their own discourses’ (Foucault 2004, 11). Indigenous activists are fully aware of the ambivalence of rights. They have experienced and lived through the practical implications of the bad faith of liberal politics. This dynamic has been seen in the context of Indigenous land-rights struggles. The 1992 Mabo decision overturned the idea that prior to European settlement Australia belonged to no one (terra nullius) and led to the Native Title Act 1993 (NTA) that granted certain Indigenous groups rights to native lands. Although these legal events are celebrated as significant achievements in liberal politics and Indigenous struggles for rights, scholars have argued that rather than rehabilitating it has led to ‘further dispossession through the disavowal of [the] indigeneity’ of groups who failed to meet the criteria set by the courts (Brigg and Murphy 2011, 20). According to Gary Foley, ‘[m]any Indigenous political activists regard the Native Title Act as

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a “sell-out” of sovereignty and a legislative failure’ that resulted in the more substantial calls for treaty to be placed at the back of the national political agenda (2007, 118). Land rights for Foley were part of a strategy that sought to move away from and radically challenge the old formal rights that needed recognition from the sovereign. However, the path of land-rights politics led to the High Court of Australia and into Parliament, where the more radical claims were neutered. The manifestation of land rights in the NTA instituted rigid criteria of what it meant to be a ‘traditional owner’, which ‘required claimants to mount a high degree of proof in showing continuity of attachment to the land or waters under claim’ (Johnson 2016, 106). It thereby perpetuated certain ideas about authentic indigeneity, ideas that excluded the majority of Aboriginals, especially those living in cities. Furthermore, historian Henry Reynolds argues that the Mabo decision may have ‘demolished the concept of terra nullius in respect of property’, but ‘it preserved it in relation to sovereignty’ (1996). That is, it perpetuated the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples did not have anything resembling a political or juridical order, and therefore British common law and the sovereignty of the Crown could be implemented seamlessly. Therefore, Native Title Law reinforced the sovereignty of the settler-colonial state and strengthened the legitimacy of the courts and legislature over Indigenous lands and culture. A striking example of the dynamics of the state redeploying rights as well as submerged knowledges occurred in the failed Native Title claim of the Yorta Yorta people. In 2002, the High Court ruled against the Yorta Yorta by arguing that their ‘traditional connection with the land had not been sufficiently maintained as to justify traditional title’ (Yaxley 2002). As in the Mabo case, agriculture and food production were pivotal in the Yorta Yorta case, except with a very different result. A key piece of evidence used against the Yorta Yorta claim was a petition from 1881. Land for cultivation and self-sufficiency were asked for in a ‘petition to the Governor of New South Wales signed in 1881 by 42 Aboriginals’ (Yorta Yorta v Victoria 1999, 109). The signatories requested ‘sufficient area of land granted to us to cultivate and raise stock’ as they were ‘earnestly desirous of settling down to more orderly habits of industry, that we may form homes for our families’ (Yorta Yorta v Victoria 1999, 109). The High Court considered this petition as evidence that the Yorta Yorta peoples had embraced farming and desired a settled life, and had therefore moved away from traditional Indigenous life, which the NTA required. It is plausible that the signatories were sincere in their request. It is equally plausible that they were using the language strategically and ideas of the colonialists in a bid to secure their land and have some independence. Whatever the original intention, the petition was used as evidence that the Yorta Yorta had departed from traditional and customary life. The ruling against

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the Yorta Yorta claim denied the possibility for Indigenous culture and practices to adapt or change in response to new circumstances. Moreton-Robison argues that the courts and legislature assumed ‘the epistemological privilege of defining who Indigenous people are and that to which they are entitled’ (2015, 85). The very ‘attempts by the Yorta Yorta people to assert proprietary interests in their land’ on the terms of colonialists meant that their Native Title had been extinguished. Biopolitical Failure and the Right to Intervene Although engaging with the old right of the sovereign in the form of the NTA resulted in a variety of negative consequences, there is another move that is made by those declaring sovereignty and claiming rights. This move is similar to that made by Foucault in ‘Confronting Governments’ and is arguably the call for new rights that do not come from the sovereign. The sovereignty declarations of La Via Campesina and Indigenous activists, by the subaltern who do not have influence of the courts or state-sovereignty, are responding to biopolitical failure of sovereign states to protect biological life of populations. For the proponents of food sovereignty, governments have failed to protect the environment, farm workers, public health and endangered the future survival of human and nonhuman life. Likewise, for Indigenous activists, the Australian government has failed repeatedly to protect the social, cultural and biological life of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These failures justify the rejection of government control over life and search for new forms of governance in which activists have control and voice. Like Foucault’s proclamation of the rights of the governed to intervene when governments do not protect the welfare of their citizens as they claim to, the subaltern sovereignty claims of the food sovereignty movement in particular, but also Indigenous sovereignty, are pointing out that sovereign states have failed to protect their biological life, culture and communities, and therefore they have lost the authority and justification to control their lives. The rights of the governed and the rights of private citizens to intervene, however, are not without problematic consequences. Whereas Foucault saw the ‘possibility of a new, non-sovereign right’, Whyte argues that the right to intervene used by NGOs in the late 1970s was redeployed to justify military interventions on humanitarian grounds – most notably the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (2012, 27ff). This same right to intervene was partly invoked by the Australian government in the Northern Territory Intervention (NTI). Whyte warns that the ‘attempt to mobilise the natural life of the population against the government and to ground a new form of right in suffering [or survival] has proved unable to offer a real challenge to the power of the state’ (2012, 31). This move also creates ‘a new basis for the legitimacy of the state

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militarism, as well as a new foundation for sovereign power’ (Whyte 2012, 31). Whyte’s analysis of the historical development and use of the right to intervene is compelling. However, it is also worth noting that in the case of Indigenous politics the struggle by the governed and those in solidarity with them continues. That is, the right to intervene does lead to strategies such as the NTI. However, the controversy and damage caused by the NTI have been used by Indigenous activists as further evidence of the government’s failure to take care of the people (Davis 2017). The failure of the NTI and its discriminatory effects have been used to further justify the need for Indigenous sovereignty in the form of a Voice in Parliament. This is to say that the articulation of the biopolitical failures of the government and the right to intervene should not be abandoned, but it is crucial to use such discourses with caution and remain vigilant in looking for the ‘domination masked by discourses of right’ (Whyte 2012, 31). These examples of the ambivalence of rights and sovereignty discourses demonstrate the way historical knowledges and rights-based arguments are open to reinterpretation. What can be an initial tactical manoeuvre that opens up new possibilities may soon turn into a constraint and blockage. Yet, in the case of the Yorta Yorta, Moreton-Robinson maintains that the ‘Yorta Yorta sovereignty will continue to unsettle and challenge the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty’ (2015, 92). This is the flexibility and potential power of the embodied form of sovereignty that does not seek to replicate the sovereignty of the West but deflate and unsettle with an embodied presence. CONCLUSION It has been difficult for rights-based politics to find purchase in Australia. Even beyond Indigenous rights, Australia is unlike comparable  liberal democracies as it ‘has no Bill of Rights to protect human rights in a single document’ (Commission 2006). This reluctance to embrace rights-based politics is partly due to the Benthamite legacy discussed in chapter 1. The Australian social and moral imaginary has had little time for ‘nonsense on stilts’ as Bentham (in)famously characterised rights. Collins argues that the deep influence of Benthamite utilitarianism in Australia has meant that the language of rights has been looked at with suspicion. Collins argues that men in the 1960s had no moral or legal language to respond to demands of conscription in the national interest. Likewise, in the 1980s, Collins points to the way women’s rights and Aboriginal land rights ‘offend the utilitarian tradition’ by presenting demands that ‘it can scarcely recognize, let alone make allowance for’ (1985, 161). This incapacity for rights claims to be recognised is reflected in

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Watson’s lament that ‘to speak of Aboriginal rights is to be switched off from’ (Watson 2007, 21). Collins suggests that this is why both women’s rights and Indigenous rights activists have ‘appeals to international conventions that rest upon natural rights doctrines’ (1985, 161). As discussed in chapter 3, food activists have had to look to organisations such as La Via Campesina or the Food and Agricultural Organization. Likewise, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists look to the UN as well as global connections and collaborations among First Nations Peoples. Collins concludes that despite the tenacity of Benthamite ideology, it ‘has exhausted its capacity to cope with Australia’s most serious political predicaments’ (1985, 163). However, in the three decades since Collins’s analysis, Benthamite politics has arguably stayed the course, and rights-based politics continues to occupy the margins. Notwithstanding this legacy, Patton argued in the 1990s that Indigenous sovereignty declarations and rights claims may not only serve to further the interests of these groups, but ‘might also be regarded as arguments for a reconceptualization of sovereignty itself’ (1996, 150). The way Indigenous activists have told their history and positioned themselves in relation to the dominant colonial narrative is a counter-history of the present. According to Golder, the critical mobilization of rights ‘is to seize hold of rights discourse, and, in a deliberately partial, particularized, and polemical way, to turn it against regimes of sovereignty in order to undo their claims to the universal’ (2015, 95). These subaltern rights claims draw their authority from an alternate history or a genealogical critique of the present, rather than seeking rights or recognition from a sovereign as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of that sovereign. Patton observed the way this alternate history was instrumental in changing ‘contemporary attitudes toward the past treatment of indigenous peoples’ such that the judges in the Mabo case could ‘express the view that the law should be altered to conform with current conceptions of justice’ (1996, 159). In a similar way, Davis and others have argued, following the government’s rejection of Uluru, that it is the people of Australia who need to respond, not simply the lawmakers and politicians. My analysis of Foucault has shown the flexibility and potential power of the embodied form of sovereignty to deflate the settler-colonial state and that a critical ethos of rights can open new possibilities of engagement among the wider population. On this point, it is important to remember that for Foucault government is not equivalent to the State, but a ­multiplicity of relations of power emanating from a plurality of sources, such as schools, businesses, farmers’ markets, intellectuals, public health, celebrities, churches, activists and so on. As such, it is not simply the role of the state to respond to a demand ‘not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles’ (Foucault 1997, 28). Rather, all of us benefiting from ­settler-colonial dispossession need to respond. If the wider Australian

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public embraces the Uluru Statement, it could lead to new forms of collaboration and negotiations among food and Indigenous activists. That is, private individuals and nongovernment organisations that no one appointed could start negotiations and dialogues among themselves. It could also sow the seeds for a shift in communal attitudes such that a constitutional referendum would change the strategy with which the game is played by giving a voice to Indigenous peoples and enable coexisting sovereignty. Of course, these strategies are all open to the dynamics of power relations, and an opening for freer relations may quickly close into a constraining knot. Yet, despite the examples of co-option, the struggle continues. Whereas tactical and strategic uses of rights and sovereignty can continue the struggle, the nation–state is very resistant to negotiate the terms of its existence. Johnson observes that settler-colonial states, particularly Australia, are anxious that any creation of substantial treaty or title would legitimate Indigenous claims for autonomy and ‘break apart the unitary notion of “perfect” sovereignty’ (Johnson 2016, 9). As such, there is a need for the governed to mutually negotiate and develop new forms of self-governance that reject biopolitical violence and the failure of the state to protect, foster and care for life. Yet this has to be more than mere symbolism. Watson asks, ‘Can we speak of justice that is justice from a black, or Aboriginal, perspective – one that lives beyond the assimilation of the native?’ (2007, 27). What would food sovereignty and alternative food discourses look like if the starting point were with local Indigenous understandings of land and food? Rather than including or assimilating Indigenous perspectives to alternative food discourse post hoc, the final chapter looks to ways space can be created for Indigenous knowledge, conceptions and practices to set the terms and conditions of food politics in Australia. NOTE 1. This is similar to Arendt’s observation that if ‘Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy – ­Stalin’s Russia [or] Hitler’s Germany . . . the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission’ (Arendt 1970, 53).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alfred, T. (2009). Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Allen, A. (2008). The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Altman, J. C., and M. Hinkson. (2007). Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia. Fitzroy, VIC: Arena Publications. Anaya, J. S. (2010). Observations on the Northern Territory Emergency Response in Australia. United Nations. Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books. Bachelard, M. (1997). The Great Land Grab: What Every Australian Should Know about Wik, Mabo and the Ten-point Plan. South Melbourne, VIC: Hyland House. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Bignall, S., and P. Patton. (2010). ‘Deleuze and the Postcolonial: Conversations, Negotiations, Mediations.’ In Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, 1–19. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brady, W. (2007). ‘That Sovereign Being: History Matters.’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 140–51. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Brigg, M., and S. Maddison. (2011). ‘Unsettling Governance: From Bark Petition to YouTube.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 1–14. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Brigg, M., and L. Murphy. (2011). ‘Beyond Captives and Captors: Settler-Indigenous Governance for the 21st Century.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 16–31. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Butler, J. (2004). ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.’ In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 302–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Celermajer, D. (2014). ‘The Politics of Indigenous Human Rights in the Era of Settler State Citizenship: Legacies of the Nexus between Sovereignty.’ In The Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights, edited by Peg Birmingham and Anna Yeatman, 137–58. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Collins, H. (1985). ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, 114(1), 147–69. Colvin, M. (2007). ‘Brough Still Hopes to Work with NT Govt.’ PM, 21 June. Commission, A. H. R. (2006). How Are Human Rights Protected in Australian Law? Australian Human Rights Commission 2006. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/ how-are-human-rights-protected-australian-law, accessed 2 February 2018. Cutrofello, A. (1994). Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance. Albany: SUNY Press. Davidson, A. I. (2011). ‘In Praise of Counter-Conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, 24(4), 25–41. Davidson, H. (2017). ‘“Elaborately Dishonest”: Turnbull Remarks on Indigenous Voice to Parliament Cause Anger.’ The Guardian, December 12.

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Davis, M. (2017). ‘Self-Determination and the Right To Be Heard.’ In A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition, edited by Shireen Morris, 119–46. Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc. Davis, M., and M. Langton, eds. (2016). It’s Our Country: Indigenous Arguments for Meaningful Constitutional Recognition and Reform. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Dews, P. (1989). ‘The Return of the Subject in Late Foucault’, Radical Philosophy, 51(1), 37–41. Falk, P., and G. Martin. (2007). ‘Misconstruing Indigenous Sovereignty: Maintaining the Fabric of Australian Law.’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 33–46. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Foley, G. (2007). ‘The Australian Labor Party and the Native Title Act.’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 118–39. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. ———. (2012). ‘A Short History of the Australian Indigenous Resistance 1950–1990.’ In Nelson Aboriginal Studies, edited by A. Cadzow, J. Maynard and L. Behrendt, 114–27. South Melbourne: Cengage Learning. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things. New York: Vintage. ———. (1980). ‘Truth and Power.’ In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–33. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (1997). ‘What Is Critique?’ In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 23–82. New York: Semiotext(e). ———. (2000a). ‘Confronting Governments: Human Rights.’ In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 474–75. London: Penguin. ———. (2000b). ‘Letter to Certain Leaders of the Left.’ In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 426–28. London: Penguin Books. ———. (2000c). ‘The Risks of Security.’ In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 365–81. London: Penguin Books. ———. (2000d). ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will.’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 157–62. London: Penguin. ———. (2000e). ‘Society Must Be Defended.’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 59–66. London: Penguin. ———. (2000f). ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 303–20. London: Penguin. ———. (2004). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. London: Penguin. ———. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, edited by Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2014). Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Foucault, M., and G. Deleuze. (1977). ‘Intellectuals and Power.’ In Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 205–17. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fraser, N. (1983). ‘Foucault’s Body-Language: A Post-Humanist Political Rhetoric?’, Salmagundi, (61), 55–70. Golder, B. (2015). Foucault and the Politics of Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grey, S., and R. Patel. (2015). ‘Food Sovereignty as Decolonization: Some Contributions from Indigenous Movements to Food System and Development Politics’, Agriculture and Human Values, 3(3), 431–44. Ivison, D. (2002). Postcolonial Liberalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2015). ‘Justification, Not Recognition’, Indigenous L. Bull, (8), 12. Ivison, D., P. Patton, and W. Sanders. (2000). ‘Introduction.’ In Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, edited by Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, M. (2016). The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelly, M. (2018). For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory. Albany: SUNY. Koopman, C. (2013). Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. (1999). ‘Theorizing Indigenous Rights’, Review of Indigenous Peoples in International Law, S. James Anaya. University of Toronto Law Journal, 49(2), 281–93. Langton, M. (2013). Boyer Lectures 2012: The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins Australia. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2007). ‘Introduction.’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 1–11. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. ———. (2015). The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morris, S. (2017). ‘False Equality.’ In A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition, edited by Shireen Morris, 209–38. Carlton, VIC: Black Inc. Mourad, R. (2003). ‘After Foucault: A New Form of Right’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 29(4), 451–81. Moyn, S. (2014). Human Rights and the Uses of History. London: Verso. Muldoon, P., and A. Schaap. (2012). ‘Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(3), 534–50. Negri, A. (2008). Empire and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity Press. Patton, P. (1996). ‘Sovereignty, Law, and Difference in Australia: After the Mabo Case’, Alternatives, 21(2), 149–70.

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———. (2004). ‘Power and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault’, International Studies in Philosophy, 36(3), 43–61. ———. (2005). ‘Foucault, Critique and Rights’, Critical Horizons, 6(1), 267–87. ———. (2016). ‘Philosophical Justifications for Indigenous Rights.’ In Handbook of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, edited by Corinne Lennox and Damien Short, 13–23. New York: Taylor and Francis. Pearson, N. (2017). ‘A Rightful Place.’ In A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition, edited by Shireen Morris, 5–17. Carlton, VIC: Black Inc. Pettit, P. (2000). ‘Minorty Claims under Two Conceptions of Democracy.’ In Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, edited by Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, 199–215. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Philpott, D. (2014). ‘Sovereignty.’ In Stanford Encylopedeia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/ entries/sovereignty/. Referendum Council. (2017). Final Report of the Referendum Council. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Reynolds, H. (1996). Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State, and Nation. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Rigney, L.-I. (2001). ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in Science: Framing Indigenous Research towards Indigenous Australian Intellectual Sovereignty’, Kaurna Higher Education Journal, 7, 1–13. ———. (2011). ‘Epilogue: Can the Settler State Settle with Whom it Colonises? Reasons for Hope and Priorities for Action.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 206–11. Leichhardt, NSW: Federation Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Spivak, G. C., and L. De Kock. (1992). ‘Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa’, Ariel, 23(3), 29–47. Stauffer, J. (2015). Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson, I. (2007). ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 15–32. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Whyte, J. (2012). ‘Human Rights: Confronting Governments? Michel Foucault and the Right to Intervene.’ In New Critical Legal Thinking, edited by Matthew Stone, Illan rua Wall and Costas Douzinas, 11–31. New York: Routledge. Windschuttle, K. (2016). ‘The Break-Up of Australia: Part 1.’ Quadrant, 1 November. Yaxley, L. (2002). ‘Yorta Yorta Lose Native Title Case.’ World Today, 12 December. Yorta Yorta v Victoria. (1999). “Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community V the State of Victoria & Ors.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter, 4 (1), 91–113.

Chapter 7

Negotiating Relations Food Politics after the Uluru Statement from the Heart

We thus enter a new time with a heavy backlog of unsolved older problems. – W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming (1991, 28)

In 1946 Elyne Mitchell published Soil and Civilization, in which she argued that Australians had ‘indiscriminately denuded our landscape’ (1946, 4). The introduction of sheep and rabbits and removal of trees had dramatically altered the conditions necessary for soil health and climatic stability. Sand choked the once-flowing streams, and the absence of humus meant the soils were incapable of absorbing rainwater. Mitchell blamed commercial farming for these developments and argued that those living in cities as well as the country need to ‘deeply know the land’ in order to ‘rebuild the living soil of Australia’ (1946, 5). For Mitchell, the greed of commercial farming and hubris of scientific interventions had disrupted the ‘organic rhythm of the universal life cycle’ (1946, 139). Mitchell’s solution to restoring this rhythm is the embrace of agricultural methods that work with natural cycles and organic materials. Since Mitchell’s writings, food scholars and activists in Australia have continued to advocate for small-scale forms of agriculture as a means of regenerating the Australian landscape and repairing the damage caused by input-intensive commercial practices. As has been argued throughout, there have been clear and powerful articulations of the environmental, public health and social damage wrought by industrial agriculture. However, the full extent to which both small- and large-scale agriculture is implicated with historical and ongoing injustices toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is not readily addressed. I consider it important to address 197

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this silence not simply because agriculture benefits from past dispossession. This charge could be levelled at the automotive industry, the university sector or any activity that occupies and uses land in Australia. Agriculture, however, is uniquely implicated with dispossession on two fronts: 1) it was used as a biopolitical mark of distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’. Those who cultivated the land had a life worthy of respect and care; those who did not had a life that could be disallowed; and, 2) it physically occupied the continent by grazing livestock, planting crops, erecting fences and damming rivers, which instigated violent clashes and severely disrupted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of life. I have argued throughout this book that these two aspects of agriculture cannot remain in silence if we sincerely desire food justice in Australia. How can we talk about a just food system when the original inhabitants and traditional owners of the very land our food is grown on still struggle with past and present injustices? This chapter explores the possibility of food practices and cultures to provide a site for attending to this question. The chapter examines how the cultivation, distribution and preparation of food can provide a metaphorical and literal space for negotiating and restoring relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Simone Bignall argues that ‘the passage of transition to postcolonial society relies upon participating communities to imagine strategically joyful modes of power and desire, and create these through common notions and local relations of practice, which, with repetition, can subsequently cause the broad emergence and establishment of postcolonial social existence’ (2010b, 153). Following Bignall’s suggestion for joyful engagements in the formation of postcolonial sociality, I contend that growing, preparing or eating food with others can be a joyful engagement that can foster agreement, mutuality and new forms of subjectivity. However, this is by no means an easy or straightforward process. Notwithstanding the possibility of food to provide an avenue for negotiations, there are reasons to be suspicious. Patrick Dodson and Darryl Cronin observe that ‘the Australian nation state appears to be stuck in a cycle of colonisation’, and as such it is ‘unable to deal with its colonial history or the status of Indigenous people’ (2011, 192). The ‘heavy backlog of unsolved older problems’ identified by Stanner in 1968 remain, and new problems have been added to their number (1991, 28). The onus to work out how food politics can avoid repeating past injustices is on the non-Indigenous participants. As Morgan Brigg and Sarah Maddison demonstrate, there has been a long history of Indigenous peoples attempting to negotiate with British colonialists and later with Australian governments. The Coranderrk Petition (1886), Yirrkala bark petitions (1963), Wave Hill walk off (1966), the Barunga Statement (1988) and tent embassies in Canberra (1972), Heirisson

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Island (2012) and Redfern (2014) are some of the examples of imaginative approaches to negotiation and performing sovereignty. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is the latest sincere and profound attempt by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to speak to the settler-state. Despite this long history of creative resistances and engagements, ‘Indigenous efforts to enter into dialogue with mainstream Australia have thus far received little or no reciprocal movement from the Settler State and its associated institutions’ (Brigg and Maddison 2011, 5). Brigg and Maddison contend that this is because dialogue always has to be ‘palatable to mainstream liberalism’, and there is a ‘take it or leave it’ approach to negotiation (2011, 6). Brigg and Murphy argue that the ‘mobilisation of Indigenous difference and interests are directed by the intellectual authority of liberalism – by “outsiders”’ (2011, 20). The ‘outsiders’, according to Brigg and Murphy, are people who attempt to represent Aboriginal people, yet implicitly reinforce settler-colonial sovereignty and rely on liberal frameworks. Using liberal frameworks gives these representatives greater traction in mainstream Australia, as the mainstream can hear in their claims a ‘warm echo of their own values and traditions’ (Brigg and Murphy 2011, 21). The previous chapter explored how a critical ethos can be developed that does not depend on liberal frameworks and may offer new possibilities for resistance to governmental effects. Drawing on those insights, this chapter attempts to hear the Uluru Statement of the Heart and to begin thinking about what food politics in settler-colonial contexts such as Australia could look like. Despite claims of a progressive and egalitarian politics that seeks to give voice for those oppressed or neglected by global capitalism, Australian alternative food discourse risks being part of the cycle that is unable to deal with colonial history of dispossession. Acknowledgement of these historical injustices and their present effects would, according to Dodson and Cronin, ‘contribute to a process of repudiating the ideology of Settler Colonialism that has become ingrained into the practices and attitudes of Australians’ (2011, 203). However, there needs to be more than acknowledgement. Tony Birch argues that the ‘collective psyche of white Australia’ needs to ‘embrace the realities of living on and in Indigenous country’ (2016, 364). Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos go further to contend that ‘it is not enough for us to remember and admit that to be white Australian is to be implicated in the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It is not even enough for us to remember or admit to past injustices whose effects are still being suffered today. We need to make a deeper more reflective turn to the emptiness of our being’ (2014, 103). Previous chapters sought to remember and admit past and present injustices; this concluding chapter seeks to ask:

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How we can move forward? Specifically, how can contemporary forms of agriculture and food production be part of unsettling the narrative of settlement and the being of the occupier? Rather than a resettlement and repetition of the logics of colonisation, can small-scale agriculture and food production provide an avenue for negotiation and commonality? AFTER THE ULURU STATEMENT On 25 October 2017, it was leaked to the media that the Turnbull government would reject the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The following day the prime minister, attorney general and Indigenous affairs minister released a joint statement that the Uluru proposal was neither ‘desirable or capable of winning acceptance in a referendum’ (Office of the Prime Minister, Office of the Attorney General and Office of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs 2017). As outlined in the previous chapter, the Uluru Statement asked for ‘constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country’ (Referendum Council 2017). Specifically, this involved ‘the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’ and ‘a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’ (Referendum Council 2017). Makarrata is a Yolngu word and practice that involves ‘coming together after a struggle’ (Referendum Council 2017). In addition to these proposals, the Statement outlined the crises suffered by Indigenous Australians: ‘we are the most incarcerated people on the planet’; ‘children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates’; and ‘our youth languish in detention’ (Referendum Council 2017). The Statement points to the structural and historical reasons for the crisis, which is ‘the torment of our powerlessness’ (Referendum Council 2017). The Voice in Parliament was designed to address this voiceless powerlessness, and the Makarrata Commission would negotiate a process of truth telling and formation of new relationships between Indigenous peoples and the settler-state. However, this was all swiftly rejected by the government. From Cook’s interaction with the Guugu Yimithirr men at Cooktown in 1770 to the rejection of the Uluru Statement, the government has a long history of ignoring, wilfully mishearing or simply disregarding Indigenous requests. Following the government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement, some of the members of the Referendum Council emphasised that the State was not the only addressee, but also the people of Australia. Megan Davis clarifies that the Council ‘decided during the Uluru convention that the statement, the logic and motivation for our reforms should be directed to the Australian people because politicians are too self-interested to listen’ (2017). Although

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the government may have rejected the Statement, there is an opportunity – and arguably an obligation – for the wider population to respond. This can and should occur in a variety of ways, such as advocating for the establishment a voice in the Constitution. However, I wish to examine ways outside of state-sovereignty politics that may contribute to a deflating of the state’s sovereignty. This is not to suggest that the State is irrelevant. However, as Bignall argues, ‘postcolonisation not only calls for measures of formal justice acknowledging and addressing the state’s failures to uphold indigenous human rights in the past and guaranteeing such human rights in the future, but also for a less mediated, more intimate kind of ethical assessment and commitment’ (2010a, 78). This chapter looks to modes of engagement that are more akin to a critical ethos of counter-conduct and the right of the governed to intervene and to speak about the abuses of government. This approach does not focus on changing the constitution or the State as such. Rather, it seeks to alter and contest the governmental rationalities that silence, confine and restrict ways of living that challenge narratives of peaceful settlement, accepted sovereignty and productionist agriculture. Specifically, I am interested in how those interested in a just and ethical food system should respond to the Uluru Statement. How can those of us concerned with food politics seek to listen, negotiate and collaborate with Indigenous Australians in ways that hear their voices and accept the invitation to walk toward a ‘fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination’? (Referendum Council 2017). NEGOTIATIONS, PLAY AND JOYFUL ENGAGEMENTS At the end of a published lecture given by Cornel West, the publishers wrote, ‘The questions were inaudible. Only the answers are available’ (West 1993, 77). In reading the answers, one can get a sense for what the questions were. But it is hard to be sure. Without being there or knowing the questions, the reader needs to trust that West is responding faithfully to the questioner. This is an example of the hermeneutic task, which Hans-Georg Gadamer describes as the imperative to reconstruct the question that a text (in the broadest sense) is the answer. To do this, ‘we the interrogated must ourselves begin to ask questions’ (2004, 367). However, not all answers are sincere responses to questions. The effect of power relations in a dialogue means that answers may flow from a mishearing or even not hearing the question. The response from Australian political leaders to Aboriginal requests for constitutional reform is a case in point.

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Although Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders have requested substantive changes that go beyond symbolic recognition, prime ministers have repeatedly answered by offering the very measures that were rejected. Megan Davis, who was involved in these processes, concluded that ‘although they seemed to be listening, they did not hear’ (2016). Gadamer describes the way a bad interlocutor asks ‘apparent questions’, questions to which they believe they already know the answer (2004, 357). Here we see the reverse – the apparent answer, where the person believes he knows the question that is being asked of him and so answers without really hearing. Like the apparent question, the apparent answer shuts down a dialogue and forecloses the prospect of it opening a space for new possibilities. On the occasions when the subaltern or voiceless speak of past wrongs and their continuing effect, there is an ethical duty to listen and hear. Failure to do so means that a genuine dialogue that opens up the possibility of negotiation cannot proceed. Alternative food movements offer a potential site for hearing, dialogue and negotiation. Yet currently they risk repeating many of the same mistakes as mainstream politics, such as including and consulting Indigenous peoples as an afterthought. However, an advantage of alternative food spaces is a greater recognition and appreciation for land as a place of belonging that is more than an economic resource. As such, the negotiation between food sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty does not need to be framed as a zero-sum game between Indigenous peoples and alternative food proponents. There is much overlap and mutual benefit, but this needs careful negotiation (Hemming, Rigney and Berg 2011). As Dobson and Cronin argue, there is significant overlap between the concerns and challenges facing the nation and the recognition of Indigenous rights. Examples they note that are relevant to the food sovereignty movement are climate change, northern development and regional governance. They lament that ‘the question of resolving the status of Indigenous people is not seen as connected to these other issues’ (2011, 198). That is, an Indigenous food sovereignty movement could serve the interests of alternative food advocates and Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Indigenous communities, especially those in remote locations, suffer from food insecurity due to dysfunctionality of the industrial food system (Hume, O’Dea and Brimblecombe 2013; Hume et al. 2014; Johnston et al. 2007). Importantly, these negotiations cannot be held on the terms and conditions of white Australia. As Brigg and Maddison note, debate often runs ‘the treadmill of European derived Settler-liberalism without asking questions about the social and political values that inform the terms of debate’ (2011, 5). Rather, spaces for dialogue and negotiation that are shaped and conditioned by Indigenous values and ideas need to be established. According to Dodson and Cronin, dialogue is a ‘first step in decolonising the colonial relationship between Indigenous people and the nation state’ (Dodson

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and Cronin 2011, 190). However, there is much debate of the form such a dialogue should take. Dodson and Cronin have a more liberal conception of dialogue that serves to reveal the basic assumptions and the justifications behind the opinions and ideas being debated (Dodson and Cronin 2011, 199). This dialogue can lead to mutual understanding. Brigg and Murphy, however, propose a dialogue that is explicitly ‘not aimed at establishing easy equivalences or progressing instrumental negotiation’ (Brigg and Murphy 2011, 27). They suggest a dialogue that addresses the philosophical and historical forces that shape the political reality of contemporary Indigenous and settler approaches to governance. Reading Gadamer and Foucault together, I construct an approach to dialogue that relies on a moral bond to foster humble listening and serious play. Gadamer and Foucault are uncommon bedfellows to be sure; however, their respective approaches to dialogue are cognizant of the historical forces shaping political reality. They also recognise the need for dialogue participants to adopt a particular attitude that is playful. For Gadamer, play is the structure of genuine dialogue. Gadamer says that entering a dialogue is like being absorbed by the to-and-fro play of a game. Whereas play often is thought of as light or frivolous, Gadamer contends that it has ‘sacred seriousness’ in which the participants lose themselves, giving the game an ‘essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play’ (2004, 103). That is, the subject of the game is not the player or players but the game itself. Like the to-and-fro of play, the question and answer of dialogue draws the interlocutors in and requires that they ‘do not talk at cross purposes’ but allow ‘the subject matter [to be] developed in the conversation’ (2004, 360–61). The participants coproduce the subject matter of the dialogue, with neither having control over it. This requires those engaged in the play of dialogue to risk something of themselves, to place their self into the dialogue and risk being transformed. Gadamer argues that a ‘person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond’ (2004, 354). This moral bond is established through humble listening that opens one’s self to the other. ‘Without such openness’, writes Gadamer, ‘there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another’ (2004, 355). Foucault is not known for his thought on discourse ethics or for having much time for the hermeneutics with which Gadamer is associated (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, xxiii; Kelly 1995). However, in a 1984 interview with Paul Rabinow, Foucault makes a series of remarks that are not dissimilar to Gadamer’s account of play and dialogue. In response to Rabinow’s opening question about polemics, Foucault states that he does not like to ‘get involved in polemics’ and prefers discussion (2000, 111). He elaborates that

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in a discussion, ‘a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other’ (2000, 111). Furthermore, he notes ‘the serious play of questions and answers’ (2000, 111). Foucault outlines a reciprocity of rights between the interlocutors that is immanent to and depends ‘only on the dialogue situation’ (2000, 111) – by which he means that the right to ask questions and to be answered sincerely depends on and occurs only in the context of the moral bond of a dialogue. In discussing this interview, Patton argues that Foucault ‘distinguishes the language games of dialogue and polemic in terms of the rights of participants immanent to each of those games’ (2004, 52). For the participants in the dialogue game, there are ‘symmetrical rights’, whereas the participants in the polemic game have ‘asymmetrical rights’ (Patton 2004, 52). The polemicist does not recognise or respect the rights of the other to ask questions or have their questions answered. The Australian government, and in many instances the Australian public, has conducted a dialogue according to the norms of the polemic game. That is, ‘the other is not an equal partner engaged in a collaborative enterprise but an enemy to be overcome’ (Patton 2004, 53). In this came the ‘unequal-enemy’ does not have the right to ask or be answered and ‘the polemicist is the sole judge of the rights and privileges he assigns to himself in the course of this imaginary combat’ (Patton 2004, 53). In combining these remarks from Gadamer and Foucault, we can isolate three main features of sincere dialogue: the moral bond between the participants that seeks to neutralize asymmetrical relations of power; humble listening to the other participant; and the serious play of to-and-fro that leads to cocreation of the subject matter of dialogue, which neither is in complete control of. I suggest that his approach to dialogue can open the possibility for different languages, voices and concepts to be heard (Dodson and Cronin 2011, 190). Lewis Gordon observes that decolonising knowledge is often characterised as a form of justice.1 However, he suggests that we not only need to decolonise knowledge, but also decolonise justice. A dialogue that is humbly entered into and in which one risks oneself is an important path toward a decolonisation of justice as it helps to provide a space in which the concepts and procedures of justice are not always in the language of the dominant interlocutor. Gordon contends that Indigenous Australians have the problem of colonisation in their face, and as such have privileged access to it and views and theories about its effects, its weaknesses and ways to dismantle it. They do not have ‘special’ knowledge (à la Gnosticism), but as subjects of these power relations they do have knowledge and experience unique to their situation and views on the form justice needs to take. An example of the Indigenous view of the form justice needs to take is makarrata. Makarrata is a deep and complex concept that I do not pretend to understand. The Referendum Council proposed a Makarrata Commission as

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part of the Uluru Statement. Makarrata is a Yolngu word and practice of treaty or agreement making following a conflict between two parties. The Council does not elaborate on specifics of the Makarrata Commission as it did not fall within their terms of reference, but they state that its function is to supervise ‘agreement-making and facilitating a process of local and regional truth-telling’ (Referendum Council 2017, 2). Makarrata is a way for ‘a fair and honest relationship with government and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination’ (Referendum Council 2017, 21). Yolngu elder Galarrwuy Yunupingu describes his father’s role in a makarrata that brought peace to a ‘terrible feud among the clans’ that was ‘very deep and very serious’ (Referendum Council 2017, 55). Yunupingu notes that it was not simply his father’s ‘status by right’ as an elder, but his character as a man who was responsible, caring and had ‘peace and harmony’ as a ‘way of life’, which enabled him to ‘bring about reconciliation’ (Referendum Council 2017, 55). As a Yolngu practice and concept, makarrata may not be necessarily appropriate for all Indigenous groups in Australia. The point, however, is that the norms of dialogue, as opposed to those of polemic or debate, open the possibility for different languages and concepts to be brought into the mutual cocreating play in which neither party controls the terms of reference or outcome. The to-and-fro of dialogue produces something new that they are both part of. This approach to dialogue may prove useful for negotiations between Indigenous and food activists, leading to multiple dialogues across multiple sites. TOWARD AN UNSETTLING FOOD POLITICS After the Turnbull government rejected the Uluru Statement, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance national committee issued a press release expressing its disappointment and calling for the prime minister to reconsider his decision (National Committee 2017). The press release went on to say that as ‘stewards of the land, our farmer members are endeavouring to work with the original owners of this country to create a more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable nation, and a truly food sovereign future’ (National Committee 2017). The practical implications of this statement are unclear. However, the AFSA put this endeavour into the context of its association with La Via Campesina and ‘solidarity with the global movement for recognition and inclusion of indigenous and First Nation Peoples everywhere, without whom there can be no true food sovereignty’ (National Committee 2017). This statement raises important political and practical questions regarding the relationship between food sovereignty and Indigenous peoples, particularly by making the inclusion and recognition of Indigenous peoples as the condition for ‘true food sovereignty’.

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As discussed in chapter 3, food sovereignty has its conceptual and political roots in the struggles of peasant and Indigenous farmers in Central America. In this context, food sovereignty happily melds with decolonisation movements. However, in settler-colonial contexts such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, there is friction between non-Indigenous farmers using food sovereignty rhetoric and decolonisation movements. As argued in chapter 5, alternative food politics, particularly food sovereignty, needs to be unsettled. Alternative food politics needs to listen to and be disturbed by settler-colonial history in a manner that leads to a reevaluation of the assumptions regarding land use, belonging and justice. However, I have also suggested that alternative food politics can be unsettling. By hearing Indigenous voices and working with Indigenous groups, alternative food politics can be part of the processes that push forward both Indigenous and regenerative agricultural concerns regarding greater control of land and waterways, environmental justice and a fair food system. In recent years, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have started to question what Indigenous food sovereignty looks like in a settler-colonial context. Although the bulk of this literature is from North America or New Zealand (Hutchings 2015; Desmarais and Wittman 2014; Whyte 2018; Coté 2016; Daigle 2017; Grey and Patel 2015; Stein et al. 2017; Whyte 2017), it can still provide some clues for thinking about Indigenous food sovereignty in Australia. Central themes in this literature are decolonisation, resistance against global capitalism and resurgence of Indigenous ways of life. Michelle Daigle describes Indigenous food sovereignty as a form of resistance to ‘colonial-capitalist legacies’ as well as ‘a more general political, legal and economic resurgence’ (2017, 5). Likewise, Charlotte Coté suggests that the decolonising effect of Indigenous food sovereignty ‘entails decreasing dependence on the globalized food system and revitalizing Indigenous foods systems and practices’ (2016, 2). Coté contends that the revitalisation or resurgence of Indigenous food practices and spirituality is a mark of distinction from the ‘rights-based discourse’ of other food movements and instead emphasises the ‘cultural responsibilities and relationships that Indigenous peoples have with their environment’ (2016, 2). Coté conceives of Indigenous food sovereignty as ‘positioned within a restorative framework that places responsibility and action on individuals and communities to repair and strengthen relationships to ancestral homelands weakened by colonialism, globalization and neoliberal policies’ (2016, 12). In discussing the resurgence and resistance of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, Kyle Powys Whyte frames indigenous food sovereignty in terms of collective continuance, by which he means ‘the overall degree of adaptive capacity a society has when we take all its collective capacities into account’ (2018, 347). Whyte considers food systems to be

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a collective capacity as ‘they motivate human institutions that produce or facilitate certain valuable goods, such as political sovereignty, nutrition and spirituality and avoid preventable harms, such as starvation and undernourishment’ (Whyte 2018, 353). Collective capacities of a food system describe an ecology of humans, nonhumans, entities and landscapes that enable and facilitate ‘adaptation to change’ (Whyte 2018, 353). According to Whyte, U.S. settler colonialism severely undermined the Indigenous food systems and thereby jeopardised their collective capacity to adapt and continue. In this framework, food sovereignty is control over the food system capacities necessary for a people to continue and adapt. For example, the collective continuity of the Karuk people in Northern California and parts of Oregon revolves around salmon ecologies – ‘without salmon there is no treaty’ (2018, 363). Yet, the interventions of settler-colonial governance has jeopardised these ecologies through various activities and laws, such as mining and outlawing traditional fishing methods (2018, 360). Whyte argues that the ‘[v]iolations of food sovereignty are one strategy of colonial societies . . . to undermine Indigenous collective continuance in Indigenous peoples’ own homelands’ (2018, 347). Food Secure Canada is an organisation attempting to incorporate an Indigenous food sovereignty perspective into its approach. It introduced a seventh pillar to La Via Campesina’s six pillars of food sovereignty (discussed in chapter 3), which is ‘food is sacred’.2 This pillar came via extensive consultation with Indigenous leaders, who described food as ‘intrinsic to who we are as persons and as peoples’ (Kneen 2012, 4). This seventh pillar is designed to account for past injustices and the present importance of Indigenous foodways in Canada. Cathleen Kneen, former chair of Food Secure Canada, outlines this pillar as helping to establish Indigenous food sovereignty by acknowledging Canadian Indigenous peoples’ belief in ‘the essential relationships between human beings and the natural elements, including all the other creatures’. Furthermore, it ‘means that those who provide food must be seen as central to the food system, it must be shared with everyone, and of course it cannot be commodified’(Kneen 2012, 4). Indigenous food sovereignty is not necessarily just for Indigenous peoples. According to Daigle, Indigenous food sovereignty is a space for solidarity and collective action among diverse actors. Daigle makes a crucial point regarding the scale of resistances. That is, ‘everyday acts of resurgence’ can be cultivated over time to open up ‘renewed possibilities for negotiations, engagements, power sharing and solidarity building amongst diverse sovereign actors and institutions at multiple levels’ (2017, 5–6). Small and everyday acts can develop over time into something that has a more widespread effect. However, such acts can be stunted and never proceed further than symbolism. This leads Daigle to ask a related question that appears

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throughout this literature, and has been a focus of this book: ‘How might well-intentioned settler food activists impede Indigenous efforts for land reclamations and self-determination?’ (Daigle 2017, 16). There has not been significant scholarly attention to Indigenous food sovereignty in Australia. A notable exception is Zane Ma Rhea (2016). Ma Rhea discusses Indigenous food sovereignty in the context of debates about an Australian national cuisine and ecological concerns with industrialised agriculture. Ma Rhea suggests that Indigenous food sovereignty could achieve three interrelated goals: 1) retrieve Indigenous food practices and incorporate them into a uniquely Australian cuisine; 2) develop an Indigenous food industry that serves the material and cultural interests of Indigenous communities; and 3) reintroduce food practices that are more suited to the Australian environment and do not exacerbate ecological damage (2016, 180ff). For this to be achieved, the nation must ‘acknowledge Indigenous Australians’ loss of food sovereignty’ as a result of colonisation and recognise the value and importance of Indigenous foodways for ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations of Australia’(2016, 182). Ma Rhea’s work on Indigenous food sovereignty in Australia will be discussed further below. The AFSA also recently has moved toward exploring the relationship between Indigenous food practices and food sovereignty by running workshops with Bruce Pascoe and issuing statements regarding constitutional reform. In concluding its press release following the rejection of the Uluru Statement, the AFSA ‘implore the parliament to revisit its decisions, and to begin implementation of the recommendations this historic report and statement’ (National Committee 2017). However, there are things that the AFSA is doing in relation to Indigenous sovereignty that do not rely on the State. Following a series of public forums, the AFSA sought to incorporate Indigenous food sovereignty into the second edition of the People’s Food Plan (Parfitt et al. 2013). In addition to the concerns raised in the earlier version (discussed in chapter 5), the revised version states that ‘supporting a return to Indigenous food sovereignty’ is also a step toward achieving a ‘sustainable transformation of the current corporate food system’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 10). However, it is also acknowledged that further work is needed ‘as regards the goals and proposed actions and engagements with the Indigenous population’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 10). In a new chapter – ‘Food Sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ – the AFSA suggests that the loss of biodiversity and hunting rights are key issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Parfitt et al. 2013, 21). The widespread decline and extinction of mammals, birds, frogs and plant species since colonisation are said to have undermined Indigenous food sovereignty in Australia (Parfitt et al. 2013, 21). Furthermore,

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the current food system exacerbates the situation by trucking and flying food in from ‘interstate markets and sold via retail outlets at vastly unaffordable prices’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 22). Solutions include ‘supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to have access to their traditional hunting and gathering practices’ as well as programs on ‘food planning and education around remote Indigenous gardens which reduces the reliance on costly foods from distant locations’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 22). The chapter concludes by stating that government policies and NGOs are dominated by ‘“white fella” thinking’ and that a ‘food sovereignty approach puts Aboriginal people at the centre of the decision making process and enables grassroots approach to food production and security’ (Parfitt et al. 2013, 22). The inclusion of this chapter in the People’s Food Plan is an important development on the first version, which did not acknowledge the devastating effects of colonisation in Australia. However, like some of the literature on Indigenous food sovereignty in other settler-colonial contexts, there is an overwhelming focus on traditional Indigenous food practices and remote communities. Certainly, these are important issues. The capacity for Indigenous people in remote communities to hunt traditional foods and gather bush tucker is crucial for well-being and connection to country (Johnston et al. 2007). Likewise, the food insecurity faced by Indigenous peoples living in remote areas is a pressing public health concern (Browne, Hayes and Gleeson 2014). However, conceiving Indigenous food sovereignty as primarily concerned with traditional practices and remote communities relies on a rather narrow conception of indigeneity. This conception mirrors the settler-colonial imaginary that ‘authentic’ Indigenous people live ‘out there’ in the bush and that ‘authentic’ Indigenous culture is static. Yin Paradies argues that narrow constructions of indigeneity can alienate individuals and fragment communities, particularly those living in urban contexts (2016, 25). Paradies contends that ideas of ‘unique spirituality’, ‘relationship to land’, ‘Indigenous look’ are ‘fantasies of Indigeneity’ (2016, 26–28). The expectation for Indigenous people to perform these identities does not account for heterogeneous experiences of ‘actual Indigenous people who, by adapting and changing, have survived colonialism while unavoidably shedding their pristine primeval identity’ (Paradies 2016, 28). Furthermore, narrowly constructed Indigenous identities can be used by the state in ‘native title law’ that recognises ‘prior sovereignty only for those Indigenous people’ who can prove continuing connection to traditional ways of life (Paradies 2016, 28). For many Indigenous people, even if they desire to live on country and eat traditional foods, the effects of colonisation and government policies of protectionism and assimilation mean that they no longer have the language, tribal connection or knowledge to engage in such practices (Paradies 2016, 25). Likewise, Ma Rhea observes that ‘many Indigenous people know

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little about such foods and no longer have access to their traditional food sources’ (2016, 202). Paradies suggests that we free Indigeneity from ‘identity straitjackets’ and recognize that, although the poor and the rich Indigene, the cultural reviver and the quintessential cosmopolitan, the fair, the dark, the good, the bad, and the disinterested may have little in common, they are nonetheless all equally but variously Indigenous. (2016, 30)

Adopting a broader and more inclusive definition of indigeneity has important implications for Indigenous food sovereignty. It is no longer only a matter of traditional foodways and remote living, but also includes the urban dweller, the gastronome, the peri-urban agrarian and the traditional revivalists. As argued in chapter 4, alternative food discourses need to give greater attention to dispossession and race in regional, peri-urban and urban areas. These are spaces that are heavily populated and have been physically transformed by settler colonialism. This is a call to unsettle the spaces that are most settled. What does Indigenous food sovereignty look like in the Macedon Ranges region of Victoria or the Central Tablelands in New South Wales where a lot of regenerative agriculture and alternative food producers operate? Importantly, this is not only a question for producers, but also eaters. As discussed in chapter 5, if eating is an agricultural act, and agriculture is entwined with colonial dispossession, then eaters also have a responsibility to attend to this history. What does Indigenous food sovereignty look like in the urban farms and gardens of inner-city Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane or Perth? What does Indigenous food sovereignty look like in our kitchens, restaurants and supermarket aisles? Or to borrow a question from Daigle, ‘what do everyday practices of responsibility and accountability look like for settler food actors as they live and work on contested and occupied Indigenous lands?’ (2017, 16). POSSIBILITIES AND DANGERS Joel Salatin, a globally prominent voice among small-scale farmers, famously described himself as a ‘Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalistlunatic’. Like Salatin, those engaged in small-scale farming and food production occupy an ambiguous place in the Australian social and political landscape. They are environmentalists, yet they do not seek to preserve or protect wilderness from human control. They are animal welfare advocates, yet many breed, slaughter and sell animals and animal products. They critique agri-capitalists, yet many are focused on creating and accessing new markets

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to sell high-quality artisanal goods. I am not suggesting that these are contradictions, but tensions within a diverse group of people that at times can tear and fray. See, for example, the recent debates about whether or not Joel Salatin is a climate change sceptic and how this debate brings to the surface many other tensions around science, politics, theology and morality (Readfearn 2017). Considering the nuanced objectives and goals of small-scale regenerative agriculture, it is unsurprising that those engaged in these practices have unpredictable political allegiances. Likewise, the potential relationship between small-scale farmers and Indigenous groups will be unpredictable. In their edited collection Unstable Relations: Indigenous People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia, Eve Vincent and Timothy Neale describe Indigenous-environmentalist relations as ‘persistently unstable’ (2016, 3). By that they mean the interests of environmentalists and Indigenous communities are diverse and continually changing via internal and external forces. As such, it is naive to assume a natural affinity between environmentalist projects protecting certain ecosystems or landscapes and Indigenous communities’ desire to have access and use of their traditional lands. Marcia Langton, for example, has been a vocal critic of environmentalists interfering with remote Indigenous communities who negotiate and work with mining companies (2013). However, it is equally naive to assume animosity and discord (Ritter 2014, 10). Alternative food practitioners and advocates are not environmentalists in the sense discussed by the contributors to Vincent and Neale’s volume. However, they do have a comparable unstable relationship with Indigenous groups as well as the potential for creating something new and transformative. Vincent and Neale contend that ‘encounters between environmentalists and Indigenous people might prove profoundly transformative for all involved’ (2016, 5). Yet, they caution that these encounters ‘must be understood as both unequal and unstable’ (Vincent and Neale 2016, 5). It is imperative, therefore, that there be the moral bond of dialogue that fosters humble listening and serious play. Tony Birch, a contributor to the edition, contends that ‘new conversations, framed through humility, are required to shake Western discourses from a sense of arrogance and apathy’ (2016, 360). These new conversations will need to reject the view of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as static (Hemming and Rigney 2008), or the ‘new noble savage’ who can only exist as caretakers of wilderness (Langton 2013). Unfortunately, a number of contemporary examples of Indigenous-settler relations over food continue the logic of colonial exploitation, undermine Indigenous control over their foodways and characterise Indigenous peoples as ‘noble savages’ – for example, biopiracy and theft of the intellectual property regarding Indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants and foods (Watson

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2007, 18; Ma Rhea 2016, 193, 199; Bosse 2016). Related to biopiracy is the commercialisation of ‘native foods’ or ‘bush tukka’ without the involvement, respect or benefit of Indigenous people or communities (Craw 2012). In recent years, guidelines have been developed for ethical engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in relation to research, industry and enterprises involving bush foods (Merne Altyerre-ipenhe Reference Group, Dougals and Walsh 2011). However, these guidelines are not enforceable and not followed by many commercial operations. A further example of negative Indigenous-settler interactions over food is the rise of nutritional primitivism in health-food movements (Gressier 2017; Knight 2015; Loyer 2016). The paleo diet, for example, claims that the human ‘species took a wrong turn at the advent of agriculture’ and seeks to re-create a diet based on ‘politically problematic, and often inaccurate, imaginaries of both an ancestral past, and contemporary indigenous peoples’ (Gressier 2017, 11). Ma Rhea also observes a ‘growing niche marketability’ of Indigenous foods as ‘clean foods’ that ‘satisf[y] the health conscious’ (2012, 23). In addition to the concerns around the commercialisation of Indigenous foods, there is something disquieting about high-end health-food companies marketing these products based on racialized views of Indigenous food and peoples. These are examples of the undermining of Indigenous control over their food, knowledges and imagery. There are significant parallels to the scandals and general exploitation in the art world. In 2003 Richard Bell won the twentieth National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Award with his entry ‘Aboriginal Art: It’s a White Thing’. Bell wrote an accompanying essay in which he argued, ‘Aboriginal Art has become a product of the times. A commodity. The result of a concerted and sustained marketing strategy, albeit, one that has been loose and uncoordinated’ (2002). Bell suggested that this industry does not serve the interests of Aboriginal people or artists who are Aboriginal as the ‘key players in that industry are not Aboriginal. They are mostly White people’ (2002). He concludes in saying, ‘It is extremely doubtful whether Aboriginal People in Australia will ever be able to regain control of this important part of our culture. Obstacles and barriers have been cruelly and thoughtfully placed to deprive us of an equitable future’ (Bell 2002). Similar questions could be posed to the Indigenous food industry: Who benefits? Who has control? To borrow Bell’s provocation, is Aboriginal food a white thing? There is a real danger that Bell’s critique could be applied to so-called progressive engagement with Indigenous foodways. Like in the art world, there needs to be greater oversight over the conditions under which native foods are produced and whether the sales and profits from these products and images benefit local Indigenous communities. This gives a form of sovereignty over the use of products and images to represent Indigenous communities.

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Notwithstanding these negative examples of Indigenous-settler interactions over food, there are also more positive and socially engaged ways that encounters over food take place. Not all of these cases use the language of food sovereignty. However, as Desmarais and Wittman observe in Canada, ‘communities might not be using the language of food sovereignty but in fact are engaged in initiatives that fit within a food sovereignty framework’ ­(2014, 1157). That is, they are seeking to take control of their own food systems. There is a long history of Indigenous Australians seeking to take control of their food systems, despite opposition and violence from colonial governments and settlers. A prominent example is Coranderrk, an Aboriginal reserve near Healesville, Victoria (Cruickshank and Grimshaw 2015). During the 1860s, the residents in this reserve developed a productive farm and had some control over their lives (Furphy 2015, 97). However, by the 1870s a series of bureaucratic and economic interventions undermined the little autonomy they had, and the reserve was to be abandoned. In the midst of this turmoil, William Barak, the leader of the community at Coranderrk, petitioned the government to allow his people to manage the farm themselves (Furphy 2015, 108). Barak famously stated, ‘we will show the country that the station could self support itself’ (Nanni and James 2013). This is arguably one of the first declarations of Indigenous sovereignty or self-rule within the confines of settler-colonial governance, and it is intimately tied to food production and small-scale cultivation. Although Coranderrk is a rich and important historical case that could be examined in much greater detail for its relevance to Indigenous food sovereignty, instead I will point briefly to some recent forms of Indigenous food sovereignty in remote, regional and urban contexts. Although Langton’s Boyer Lectures analysis is unfairly dismissive of environmental concerns, her argument that Aboriginal peoples need to be able to control resources is important (2013). Likewise, Pascoe’s attempt to correct the historical record regarding Indigenous food practices leads him toward rethinking the status quo of Australia’s agro-economy and the place of Indigenous peoples and knowledges. He states, ‘[i]f we can reform our view of how Aboriginal people were managing the national economy prior to colonisation, it could lead us to reform the ways we currently use resources and care for the land’ (2015a, 146). Yet, this should not just be in remote and regional areas, but in the cities and populated regions in the southeast of Australia. However, as Zane Ma Rhea observes, the colonial legacy of dispossession makes it ‘extremely complicated, retrospectively, to reinstate Aboriginal rights to food security to the fullest expression without disrupting the food security preferences of the descendants of the colonizing population of Victoria’ (2012, 18). This may be so, and the rights of descendants are protected by law, but as Ritter suggests, as ‘a matter of

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normative preference, environmentalists (and I would add alternative food activists) should respect Indigenous peoples’ right as traditional owners to make deals, particularly given the widespread statutory absence of any ability to veto development’ (Ritter 2014, 8). There are a number of different food projects in remote regions. For example, horticultural and cooking programs have been used in remote schools to improve child health outcomes and reduce costs associated with purchasing food, as well as develop confidence in growing and preparing food (Hume, O’Dea and Brimblecombe 2013). There also have been projects, such as the Remote Indigenous Gardens Network, which seek to help people grow native, as well as introduced, fruits and vegetables for commercial and private use. The objective of the network is ‘to support local food production in and by remote Indigenous communities for food security, better health, wealth and wellbeing’ (Remote Indigenous Gardens Network 2018). The network also assists in sharing knowledge, research development and advocacy. Importantly, these projects are not just about retrieving or preserving culture, but also economic and material security. These are just two examples of the many different groups and organisations that may not necessary use the concept ‘food sovereignty’ but are seeking to strength the control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples over their food systems. As in the remote context, there are many different cases in regional Australia of practices that could be viewed as examples of Indigenous food sovereignty. Using crowd-funding, Pascoe has been working at revitalising certain seeds and plants that were part of Indigenous foodways. Pascoe and his colleagues have ‘growing murnong or  yam daisy (Microseris lanceolata), cumbungi (bulrush), warrigal greens, lilies and orchids. Experiments have begun with beverages made from daisy bush and saltbush and banksia flowers’ (Pascoe 2015b). He also describes the importance of working with local elders, which ‘allows us to induct the young Yuin people in Lore. The story of the ground and climate and plants has an historical cultural foundation which is intrinsic to the care of country’ (2015b). This is not the only case of either revitalising projects or practices that continue Indigenous foodways in regional areas. The point is, however, that there are Indigenous food procurement practices already in regional areas, and that more could be possible if alternative food practitioners and regenerative farmers are able to enter into sincere dialogue and negotiations with elders and community leaders. Finally, the urban context is also an important space for the emergence of Indigenous food sovereignty. A growing number of Indigenous cafes and celebrity chefs are exposing urban residents to Indigenous cuisine and food practices. Chefs such as Clayton Donovan and Mark Olive and cooking television shows such as Kriol Kitchen are significant in challenging stereotypes

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and demonstrating an Indigenous-controlled representation of food cultures. Although much more work is needed, especially in relation to mutual collaborations and reclaiming spaces for Indigenous people, these urban practices are an important step towards challenging perceptions that Indigenous food and indigeneity is something that happens in remote areas. CONCLUSION In listening to Indigenous voices and making space for meaningful dialogue, new forms of engagement can unfold. These forms of engagement do not need to be formalised earnest exchanges or reliant on the State. Rather, they can be joyful and everyday. Bignall argues that the ‘starting point for postcolonial engagement is found by looking for examples of positive­ experience . . . of social connection’ (2010b, 235). Although there is a ‘majoritarian muddle of violence and hostility’, Bignall argues ‘there also exist minor modes of positive social engagement, quotidian acts of kindness, and exemplary practices of genuine care and concern that join participating bodies in mutual experience of joy’ (2010b, 235). Of course, such mutual experience of joy is predicated on the moral bond of the playful dialogue discussed above. If one participant does not commit to the play of the exchange, then rather than joy there will be a continuation and reinforcement of pain, anger and frustrations. Food can be a site for such joyful engagements that negotiate difference and build new forms of social relations. Like the history of creative engagements and negotiations of Indigenous peoples with non-Indigenous settlers, perhaps food and land can be caught in the ‘unsettling winds first stirred by the bark petitions’, which ‘have continued to blow through the corridors of Settler institutions’ (Brigg and Maddison 2011, 4). Rather than opposing food sovereignty to Indigenous sovereignty, is it possible for a shared interest in food to provide a new and interesting avenue to decolonise and unsettle the nation–state and the industrial food system that is intimately tied to that state? A potential catalyst for these transformative relations is climate change. If climate change is forcing us to critically rethink land use and how we design cities, as per the discussion in chapter 4, then we also need to use this as an opportunity to rethink the role of Indigenous land management, food practices and creative industries. Birch, and others such as Muir (2014), Flannery and Massy, notes ‘the usurpation of land not suited for wide-acre agricultural farming had led not only to the appropriation of Indigenous land, but also the destruction of local ecologies and the wasteful use of natural resources such as water and soil’ (Birch 2016, 361). He continues in stating that we need ‘equitable dialogue’ and to ‘find new ways and places to talk . . .

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unless cultural and intellectual exchange is genuinely equitable, strategies for dealing with climate change within the wider Australian community will remain limited’ (Birch 2016, 363). Likewise, Ma Rhea contends that given the concerns raised about European farming practices and the observable negative impacts in Victoria, ‘it is important that the Aboriginal claim to country is acknowledged, ensuring that they are “at the table” by right and also in order that their ecological philosophies be part of any future considerations about food security in Victoria’ (2012, 24). However, as discussed in chapter 4, it is not enough to invite Indigenous peoples to ‘the table’. To continue the metaphor, they need to be involved in setting the table and designing the menu. That is, to be part of setting the terms and conditions of agreements, negotiations and collective actions. Of course, this requires nonIndigenous Australians to acknowledge the unequal relations of power and to willingly forgo some of the legal rights and privileges they have been granted by the colonial settler-state. As discussed in the previous chapter regarding the tactical use of rights, the path forward does not necessarily rely on the government (as in the State), but can work within and against the governmental logics that seek to conduct, guide and administer life. Obviously, the State is involved in these processes, but it does not fully define or control them. As Birch writes in relation to climate change, ‘[s]olutions will not come from a reliance on government. In fact, progress on climate change will remain stifled if governments dominate discussions’ (2016, 376–75). Food, the environment and climate change provide crucial sites for mutual negotiation among individuals and collectives. If a true dialogue is entered into, then new forms of engagement and governance can be developed. However, as Daryle Rigney and Steve Hemming warn, ‘disengagement from State mechanisms is not a choice in settler societies where the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the State continues to be constructed and mediated in multiple political, economic, social and educational environments’ (2014, 541). The State cannot be completely avoided, especially not by communities whose lives, bodies, practices and knowledges are overdetermined by the State. As such, the relations fostered via joyful engagements in nongovernment and civil societies contexts need to find ways to reshape and resist the State. Cutting off the king’s head may not be possible, but following Watson’s analysis discussed in the previous chapter, perhaps it can be deflated. Indigenous food sovereignty that enables Indigenous control, enjoyment and use of their foodways is one avenue that can be both joyful and also deflationary by showing the country, showing agribusiness, and showing the supermarkets that they cannot control all aspects of the food system and what foods people choose to procure, prepare and eat together.

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NOTES 1. Gordon made these comments in the context of panel discussion on ‘Justice and the Decolonization of Knowledge’ at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy conference, University of Tasmania (La Caze et al. 2017). 2. I thank Alana Mann for drawing my attention to this resource.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bell, R. (2002). Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art – It’s a White Thing! The Koori History Website 2002, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html, accessed 21 February 2018. Bignall, S. (2010a). ‘Affective Assemblages: Ethics beyond Enjoyment.’ In Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. (2010b). Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Birch, T. (2016). ‘Climate Change, Recognition and Social Place-Making.’ In Unstable Relations: Indigenous People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia, edited by Eve Vincent and Timothy Neale, 356–83. Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press. Bosse, J. (2016). ‘Biopiracy in Queensland: A Broken Record That Needs Repair’, Trade Insight, 12(2), 35–38. Brigg, M., and S. Maddison. (2011). ‘Unsettling Governance: From Bark Petition to YouTube.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 1–14. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Brigg, M., and L. Murphy. (2011). ‘Beyond Captives and Captors: Settler-Indigenous Governance for the 21st Century.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 16–31. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Browne, J., R. Hayes and D. Gleeson. (2014). ‘Aboriginal Health Policy: Is Nutrition the “Gap” in “Closing the Gap”?’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 38(4), 362–69. Coté, C. (2016). ‘“Indigenizing” Food Sovereignty. Revitalizing Indigenous Food Practices and Ecological Knowledges in Canada and the United States’, Humanities, 5(3), 57. Craw, C. (2012). ‘Gustatory Redemption? Colonial Appetites, Historical Tales and the contemporary Consumption of Australian Native Foods’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 5(2), 13–24. Cruickshank, J., and P. Grimshaw. (2015). ‘Indigenous Land Loss, Justice and Race: Ann Bon and the Contradictions of Settler Humanitariansism.’ In Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism, edited by Z. Laidlaw and A. Lester, 45–61. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Daigle, M. (2017). ‘Tracing the Terrain of Indigenous Food Sovereignties’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–19. Davis, M. (2016). ‘Listening but Not Hearing’, Griffith Review 51. ———. (2017). ‘The Injustice of Not Being Heard.’ ABC Religion and Ethics, November 24. Desmarais, A. A., and H. Wittman. (2014). ‘Farmers, Foodies and First Nations: Getting to Food Sovereignty in Canada’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1153–73. Dodson, P., and D. Cronin. (2011). ‘An Australian Dialogue: Decolonising the Country.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 189–205. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Dreyfus, H., and P. Rabinow. (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (2000). ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.’ In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 109–19. London: Penguin. Furphy, S. (2015). ‘“They Formed a Little Family as It Were”: The Board for the Protection of Aborigines (1875–1883).’ In Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, edited by Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, 95–116. Canberra, ACT: ANU Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method. London: Continuum. Gressier, C. (2017). Illness, Identity, and Taboo among Australian Paleo Dieters. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Grey, S., and R. Patel. (2015). ‘Food Sovereignty as Decolonization: Some Contributions from Indigenous Movements to Food System and Development Politics’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32(3), 431–44. Hemming, S., and D. Rigney. (2008). ‘Unsettling Sustainability: Ngarrindjeri Political Literacies, Strategies of Engagement and Transformation’, Continuum, 22(6), 757–75. Hemming, S., D. Rigney and S. Berg. (2011). ‘Ngarrindjeri Futures: Negotiation, Governance and Environmental Management.’ In Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance, edited by Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, 98–113. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Hume, A., K. O’Dea, and J. Brimblecombe. (2013) ‘“We Need Our Own Food, To Grow Our Own Veggies . . .” Remote Aboriginal Food Gardens in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 37(5), 434–41. Hume, A., A. Wetten, C. Feeney, S. Taylor, K. O’Dea and J. Brimblecombe. (2014). ‘Remote School Gardens: Exploring a Cost-Effective and Novel Way to Engage Australian Indigenous Students in Nutrition and Health’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 38(3), 235–40. Hutchings, J. (2015). Te Mahi Mara Hua Parakore: A Maori Food Sovereignty Handbook. Auckland, NZ: Wheelers. Johnston, F., S. Jacups, A. Vickery and D. J. S. Bowman. (2007). ‘Ecohealth and Aboriginal Testimony of the Nexus between Human Health and Place’, EcoHealth, 4(4), 489–99.

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Kelly, M. (1995). ‘Gadamer, Foucault, and Habermas on Ethical Critique.’ In The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Lawrence Schmidt, 224–35. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kneen, C. (2012). The People’s Food Policy Project: Introducing Food Sovereignty in Canada. Montreal: Food Secure Canada. Knight, C. (2015). ‘We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years’, Food, Culture & Society, 18(3), 441–61. La Caze, M., E. Miller, L. Gordon and S. Jöttkandt. (2017). ‘Plenary Panel: Justice and the Decolonisation of Knowledge.’ In Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, conference 29 November–1 December 2017. Hobart, TAS: University of Tasmania. Langton, M. (2013). Boyer Lectures 2012: The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom. Sydney, NSW: HarperCollins Australia. Loyer, J. (2016). ‘Smoothies as Talismans: The Allure of Superfoods and the Dangers of Nutritional Primitivism.’ In Food Values Research Group, https:// blogs.adelaide.edu.au/food-values/2016/07/21/smoothies-as-talismans-the-allureof-superfoods-and-the-dangers-of-nutritional-primitivism/ Created 21 July, 2016. Accessed 21 February, 2018. Adelaide, SA: University of Adelaide. Ma Rhea, Z. (2012). ‘Knowing Country, Knowing Food: Food Security and Aboriginal-Settler Relations in Victoria’, Artefact: The Journal of the Archaeological and Anthropological Society of Victoria, (35), 17. ———. (2016). Frontiers of Taste: Food Sovereignty, Sustainability and Indigenous–Settler Relations in Australia. Singapore: Springer. Merne Altyerre-Ipenhe Reference Group, J. Dougals and F. Walsh. (2011). Aboriginal People, Bush Foods Knowledge and Products from Central Australia: Ethical Guidelines for Commercial Bush Food Research, Industry and Enterprises. Alice Springs, NT: Ninti One Limited. Mitchell, E. (1946). Soil and Civilization. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Muir, C. (2014). The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History. New York: Routledge. Nanni, G., and A. James. (2013). Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. National Committee. (2017). AFSA – Response to the Turnbull Government’s Rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, edited by Katie Johnston. Kambah, ACT: Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Nicolacopoulos, T., and G. Vassilacopoulos. (2014). Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins. Melbourne, VIC: Re.Press. Office of the Prime Minister, Office of the Attorney General and Office of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. (2017). Response to Referendum Council’s report on Constitutional Recognition. Canberra, ACT: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Paradies, Y. C. (2016). ‘Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity.’ In Handbook of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, edited by Damien Short and Corinne Lennox, 355–67. London: Routledge.

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Parfitt, C., N. Rose, C. Green, J. Alden and A. Beilby. (2013). The People’s Food Plan: A Common-Sense Approach to a Fair, Sustainable and Resilient Food System, edited by Nick Rose and Carol Richards. Kambah, ACT: Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Pascoe, B. (2015a). Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, WA: Magabala Books. ———. (2015b). Sow the Seed: Aboriginal Agriculture. Pozible. https://pozible.com/ project/202236, accessed 1 March 2018. Patton, P. (2004). ‘Power and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault’, International Studies in Philosophy, 36(3), 43–61. Readfearn, G. (2017). ‘Hero Farmer Joel Salatin Rejects Climate Change Science Using ‘Standard Denier Talking Points.’ In DeSmog: Clearing the PR Pollution That Clouds Climate Science, https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/07/06/herofarmer-joel-salatin-rejects-climate-change-science-standard-denier-talking-points. Created 6 July 2017 Accessed 1 March 2018. Vancouver, BC: DeSmogBlog. Referendum Council. (2017). Final Report of the Referendum Council. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Remote Indigenous Gardens Network. (2018). Home. Remote Indigenous Gardens Network. http://www.remoteindigenousgardens.net/, accessed 1 March 2018. Rigney, D., and S. Hemming. (2014). ‘Is “Closing the Gap” Enough? Ngarrindjeri Ontologies, Reconciliation and Caring for Country’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(5), 536–45. Ritter, D. (2014). ‘Black and Green Revisited: Understanding the Relationship between Indigenous and Environmental Political Formations’, Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, 6(2), 1–11. Stanner, W. E. H. (1991). After the Dreaming. Crows Nest, NSW: ABC Books. Stein, K., M. Mirosa, L. Carter and M. Johnson. (2017). ‘Case Studies of Food Sovereignty Initiatives among the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand).’ In The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by Mary C. Rawlinson and Caleb Ward, 366–76. London: Routledge. Vincent, E., and T. Neale, eds. (2016). Unstable Relations: Indigenous People and Environmentalism in Contemporary Australia. Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press. Watson, I. (2007). ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?’ In Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 15–32. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. West, C. (1993). Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Whyte, K. P. (2017). ‘Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Renewal, and US Settler Colonialism.’ In The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by Mary C. Rawlinson and Caleb Ward, 354–65. London: Routledge. ———. (2018). ‘Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance.’ In Oxford Handbook on Food Ethics, edited by Anne Barnhill, Tyler Doggett and Mark Budolfson, 345–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conclusion

In 2012, I attended a food studies conference at New York University. It was there, far from Australia, that some of the initial seeds that led to this book were planted. It wasn’t anything that was said at the conference that led me to undertake writing this book. Rather, it was on a field trip organised the day before the conference. We were guided on a tour of different examples of urban agriculture that were happening around the boroughs of New York City. One example that has stuck with me was a community garden in the South Bronx. The garden was wedged between a train line and freeway. In this space, flanked by concrete and steel, a haven was created for local women to grow food, enjoy some solitude and congregate. The garden was designed as a safe place for women, many of whom were new migrants and facing economic hardships. The plots were well maintained and bursting with life and colour. It was obvious that this space was cared for and nurtured by a strong community of women and supporters, and that this space cared for and nurtured them. As we were led around the garden, our host pointed toward the back where the freeway passes under the railway bridge and said, ‘We recently raised enough money to install that fence’. She pointed to a cyclone wire fence that was about three metres high. As the group moved on, I asked her what the fence was for. She explained that, prior to the space becoming a garden, homeless people used to sleep and camp there, and some of them continued to sleep in the garden, which made the women feel unsafe. The fence was installed to protect the community and secure the vulnerable women. Yet, it also excluded another vulnerable population. This experience deflated my somewhat uncritical interest in alternative food and urban agriculture. Here I encountered the duality of alternative agriculture: its capacity to reveal and address injustices while it also hid and 221

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contributed to other forms of injustice. In the space of that South Bronx garden, competing vulnerabilities clashed. There was not an easy or straightforward answer. I am not suggesting that the fence should not have been built, but I also find it hard to be enthusiastic about it. This experience in New York, among others while I was a postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University, served as a mirror to think about alternative food politics in Australia. What did practices and ideas of food justice reveal, and what did they hide? The power of food and land cultivation can be a source of flourishing and companionship, but as has been argued, it is deeply entangled with dispossession and violence. Is it possible to untangle this history? Can things be done differently? This book aimed to be more than a cynical critique, but to open possibilities of changing the way we think and act in relation to food and agriculture in Australia. As with the fence in the South Bronx, there is not a simple or straightforward answer. Considering the foregoing chapters, it would be glib to conclude by suggesting that having a neighbourhood barbeque or community garden would bring everyone together to solve our problems. Rather, in the words of Colin Koopman, we need to ‘understand how these conditions of possibility were composed if we want to begin the difficult labour of transforming those practices, their assumptions, and the institutions, subjects, and objects they support’ (2013, 22). This book has attempted to begin this difficult labour. Much more work, especially from a plurality of others, is needed in terms of diagnosis as well as transformation of the conditions of possibility for a food politics that does not mask or implicitly depend on past and present injustices. Some the examples discussed throughout this book offer some clues, but there is neither one right approach nor an approach that will always be right. For instance, in chapter 4 I discussed the work of Breeze Harper and how she used veganism as an intersectional decolonizing practice. For Harper, veganism is a powerful response to racism and social injustice not only perpetuated by meat eating and animal use, but also in wider society. This practice may be relevant for some people and communities, but it will not be relevant for all and may actually transform into a form of domination. Another opening could be via the People’s Food Plan and its proposal for ‘urban farms for every town and city’. As discussed in chapter 4, the motivation for reshaping the city and urban landscapes is to revitalise secure urban populations against the effects of climate change (Parfitt et al. 2013, 34). These are goals that many people support. However, the governmental rhetoric of revitalisation could be tactically co-opted and reused to open a path toward postcolonial ideas of the city and returning urban spaces to the control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

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Similarly, the People’s Food Plan outlines the objective to democratise the food system by replacing the centralised ‘food oligarchy’ with a multiplicity of people engaged in agriculture and decision making in the food system (Parfitt et al. 2013, 34). This objective has the potential to be mapped onto Irene Watson’s notion of deflationary sovereignty. As discussed in chapter 6, Watson contends that the dominant Western conception of sovereignty, and its political implications, needs to be ‘deflated’ from its totalising and absolute conception to allow for difference, heterogeneity and importantly, for Indigenous peoples to govern themselves and their lands. There is potential for overlap that retains difference but is able to negotiate a path forward. Such a path forward will require sincere dialogue and humble listening to Indigenous knowledges, ethics and practices (Rigney 2001). However, there is also the potential for new forms of domination. A danger that often forecloses the possibilities of these ethical and political activities in relation to food is the interests of the individual (white) consumer. The focus on food already leads toward the individual consumer rather than wider considerations of the food system. As Julie Guthman observes, ‘when food itself becomes the locus of social change, it tends to erase from consideration the countless ways in which the food system has gone awry socially and environmentally’ (2011, 161). This book has tried to bring into focus the continued effect of settler-colonial history on contemporary food politics and how this initial injustice continues to operate through an awry food system. Knowing the past and its effects in the present is an important part of the critical approach outlined in this book. To follow Foucault, knowing how things were constituted is crucial for the political struggles to unconstitute the order of things in the present (2014, 267). As Raj Patel observes, those of us living, growing and eating in settler-colonial societies are the beneficiaries of stolen goods. He suggests we need to become historians of loam; to remember the blood spilled in the past, which has allowed for benefits to be gained and enjoyed in the present. To adopt this perspective, this counterhistory, growers and eaters may open possibilities for troubling and disturbing the normal order of things and develop counter-conducts. However, it is crucial that such counter-conducts do not remain symbols but have material and political effects. I do not believe that these suggestions will solve problems of injustice associated with the way we grow, distribute and eat food, but they may continue the struggle toward new openings and possibilities for individuals and communities to live lives that are not governed too much and that are not overly determined by forces that they have little control over.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, M. (2014). Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guthman, J. (2011). Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Koopman, C. (2013). Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parfitt, C., N. Rose, C. Green, J. Alden and A. Beilby. (2013). The People’s Food Plan: A Common-Sense Approach to a Fair, Sustainable and Resilient Food System, edited by Nick Rose and Carol Richards. Kambah, ACT: Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Rigney, L.-I. (2001). ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in Science: Framing Indigenous Research towards Indigenous Australian Intellectual Sovereignty’, Kaurna Higher Education Journal, 7, 1–13.

Index

Page references for figures are italicized. Abbott, Edward, 71 Abbott, Tony, 145 Aboriginal Australians. See Indigenous Australians Aboriginal Housing Commission, 121–22 Aborigines Protection Act 1869, 73–74 advertising, 1–2, 5 AFSA. See Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance agrarianism, 7, 13, 30–31, 38, 98–99, 114–19, 140–41, 197–98; contrast to pastoralism, 35, 51–52, 55–57, 61–63, 65–67; moral virtue of, 25, 38, 62–63, 85, 97–98 agricultural history, Australian, 50–52, 74–75, 136, 146–47 agriculture: and biopolitical racism, 25– 26, 39, 43–44, 197–98; in colonial Australia, 27–31; and dispossession of Indigenous Australians, 6–7, 21, 25–26, 56, 60–61, 72–74, 139–40, 144–45, 155–59; and improvement of land, 33–35, 39, 45, 56; and improvement of people, 25, 33, 38, 39–40, 62, 66; in national identity, 1, 6, 20–21, 31, 50, 67–68, 81–82; and

possession of land, 4–5, 21, 25–26, 32, 45. See also agrarianism; food sovereignty; Indigenous foodways; industrial agriculture; pastoralism; urban agriculture Ahmed, Sara, 110 Aitkin, Don, 85 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 111–12, 116, 138 Alfred, Taiaiake, 170, 174 alternative food practices, 107–10; and agrarianism, 114–19, 140–41; consumer focus, 100, 108–9, 126– 27; and gentrification, 120, 122–25; whiteness of, 13, 109, 112–13, 116, 120, 125, 141–44, 199–200. See also community gardens; farmers’ markets; food sovereignty; urban agriculture Anderson, Benedict, 116, 119 Anderson, Warwick, 24, 39, 49, 67, 74, 86 art, Aboriginal, 212 Arthur, George, 153–54 Attwood, Bain, 33, 59 Australian environment, attitude to, 31, 39, 40, 62, 67, 70 225

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Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA): and Indigenous food sovereignty, 141–42, 205, 208–9; purpose and goals, 83, 96–97, 118, 205, 208; and urban agriculture, 108, 117–18. See also People’s Food Plan Australian Year of the Farmer, 81–82, 83, 93, 101 Banks, Joseph, 3–4 Barak, William, 213 Bashford, Alison, 44 Batman, John, 58–59 beach culture, in Australia, 19–20 beef industry, 92. See also pastoralism Bell, Richard, 212 Bentham, Jeremy, 32–33, 36–37, 58, 63. See also utilitarianism Berry, Wendell, 97, 98–99, 135–36, 158 Bigge, John, 56–57 Bignall, Simone, 198, 215 biopiracy, 211–12 biopolitical racism, 12, 21–26, 42–45, 61, 72, 74, 152–54, 198 biopolitics of security, 12, 52–55. See also territory Birch, Tony, 199, 215–16 Blainey, Geoffrey, 28 Blake, Edward, 60 Bourke, Richard, 59 Boyd Orr, John, 87–88 Brady, Wendy, 176–77 Brett, Judith, 66 Brigg, Morgan, 198, 199, 203 Bruce, Stanley, 84, 86 bush foods, 71–72, 211–12. See also Indigenous foodways Butler, Judith, 10 Canada, 141–42, 207, 213 Canning, Alfred, 60–61 Carriageworks Markets, Redfern. See Eveleigh Street Markets Chappelle, Dave, 111 Cilento, Raphael W., 86

cities, 67, 84–85, 107–9, 112, 120; agriculture in, 108, 109, 114–20, 122–24, 128, 210, 222; and Indigenous Australians, 108, 120–25 Clark, Manning, 26, 45n1 class, 39, 42, 51, 57–58, 62–63 climate change, 6–7, 83, 93, 117, 146, 202, 211, 215 Collins, Hugh, 37, 190–91 colonialism, 6–7, 35–37, 136; and biopolitical racism, 22–26; Wakefield’s ideas of, 63–66, 69. See also decolonisation community gardens, 107, 113, 114, 118, 125, 221. See also urban agriculture consumer focus of food practices, 100, 108–9, 126–27 convicts: labour of, 35, 39, 57, 64; transportation of, 36–37, 41, 57 Cook, James, 3–4, 19, 25, 27 Coranderrk settlement, 213 country, Indigenous terminology of, 151–52 country-mindedness, 85, 97, 114 Country Party, 84–85 Cronin, Darryl, 198, 199, 203 Cronulla Beach riots, 20, 49 Daigle, Michelle, 206, 207–8 Darling, Ralph, 58 Darwin, Charles, 43–44, 155 Davidson, Arnold I., 185–86 Davis, Megan, 151, 166, 172, 175, 200, 202 Day, David, 4, 36, 57 Deakin, Alfred, 70 Dean, Mitchell, 69 Declaration of Nyéléni, 95–96, 118, 140 decolonisation, 139–41, 165, 169, 178, 206. See also subaltern dialogue, 201–5 dispossession, of Indigenous Australians, 3–4, 34–36, 43–44, 70, 121; by agriculture 6–7, 21, 25–26,

Index

56, 60–61, 72–74, 139–40, 144–45, 155–59 Dodson, Patrick, 198, 199, 203 Donahue, Brian, 118, 141 Donovan, Clayton, 214 Doutney, Irene, 124 Elden, Stuart, 54, 68 Engels, Friedrich, 42 environment of Australia, attitude to, 31, 39, 40, 62, 67, 70 Eora clans, 28 ethical consumption, 126–27 ethical loneliness, 175 eugenics, 19–20. See also biopolitical racism Eveleigh Street Markets, Redfern, 110, 123–24 famines, 82, 88, 89 FAO. See Food and Agriculture Organization farmers: moral character of, 25, 38, 62– 63, 97; in national identity, 20–21, 31, 50, 70–71, 81–82, 92–93, 101 farmers’ markets, 107, 109–10, 113, 114, 118–19, 123–24, 142 farming. See agriculture Field, Barron, 30 Fischler, Claude, 71 Foley, Gary, 187–88 Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations (FAO), 84, 88–90 Food Secure Canada, 207 food security, 12, 82–84, 88–92, 93–94, 117 food sovereignty, 12–14, 83–84, 93– 101, 128, 189; and decolonisation, 139–44; and Indigenous sovereignty, 14, 140–48, 158–59, 166–67, 178, 202, 205–10, 213–16; urban focus in Australia, 107–9, 115, 117–18. See also Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance food summits, 88–90

227

Foucault, Michel: dialogue, 203–4; genealogical method, 7–12, 50, 138, 182; governmentality, 25, 55, 73, 186–87; pastoral power, 53–54, 61, 184–85; racism, 21–24; returns of knowledge, 10–11, 138, 168; security, 52–55; Security, Territory, Population, 52–55, 73, 168, 184–85; Society Must be Defended, 10–11, 14, 21–23, 168, 183; sovereignty, 14, 168–70, 179–87, 191; territory, 53–55, 69, 72, 73 Gabriel, John, 110 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 201–4 Gaita, Raimond, 152, 154, 158 Gale, Charles, 72–73 Gammage, Bill, 149 Garnaut Climate Change Review, 146 Garnaut, Ross, 146 Gascoigne, John, 33, 38, 40, 44, 56, 68–69 genealogical method, 7–12, 50, 138, 182 genocide, 152–56 gentrification, 120, 122–24, 128 Georgiadis, Costa, 109 Gipps, George, 59, 73 Golder, Ben, 184–87, 191 Gordon, Lewis, 204 governmentality, 12, 25–26, 32, 53–55, 63, 72–73, 186 Grayson, Russ, 118 grazing. See pastoralism Guthman, Julie, 109, 110, 126, 128 Guugu Yimithirr people, 4 Hall, Edward, 63 Harper, Breeze, 112–13, 222 Hart, Victor, 143 Hirst, John, 39, 148 history: agricultural, 50–52, 74–75, 136, 146–47; and Foucault, 7–12, 50, 138, 182; whiteness of Australian, 49–51, 136–37, 146–47 Howard, John, 135, 137

228

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human rights: and food, 88–90, 94–95; and Foucault, 168, 179–87. See also food security; sovereignty ‘The Hungry Years’, 26–31 immigrants, 5–6, 20, 49, 64, 69, 113 improvement, through agriculture: of land, 33–35, 39, 45, 56; of people, 25, 33, 38, 39–40, 62, 66 Indigenous Australians: and biopolitical racism, 25–26; and cities, 108, 120–25; dispossession, 3–4, 34–36, 43–44, 70, 121; dispossession by agriculture, 6–7, 21, 25–26, 56, 60–61, 72–74, 139–40, 144–45, 155–59; exclusion from narratives, 20, 26, 45n1, 50–51, 136–37; genocide, 152–56; legislation, 73–74, 166, 172–74, 187–89; massacres, 3, 60, 75n3, 155. See also Indigenous foodways; Indigenous sovereignty; individual peoples by name Indigenous foodways: destruction of 31, 60–61, 142–42, 150–51, 156, 157; food production methods, 27–28, 145–50, 156–57; outside Australia, 142, 151, 206–7; and sovereignty, 39, 142–48, 188, 208–10, 211–12, 214–16 Indigenous sovereignty: Acknowledgement of Country, 142–43, 159n1; and cities, 108, 120–22; and food sovereignty, 14, 140–48, 158–59, 166–67, 178, 202, 205–10, 213–16; forms of, 13–14, 170–78, 191, 198–201, 204–5; land rights, 58–59, 165–66, 176, 187–89; outside Australia, 170, 206–7; returns of knowledge, 138–39; silencing of, by white Australia, 1–2, 51, 136–40, 141–44, 175–76, 200–202 Indonesia, 92 industrial agriculture, 6, 9, 82–83, 91– 93, 114–15, 135–36, 197 Ivison, Duncan, 147, 173, 174

Jefferson, Thomas, 97–98 Johnson, Miranda, 138, 172, 192 Joyce, Barnaby, 92, 115 Kamilaroi people, 60, 75n3 Kant, Immanuel, 9–10, 186 Keating, Paul, 121, 137 Kelly, Mark, 183 Kenny, Robert, 2 Kneen, Cathleen, 207 Koopman, Colin, 8–9, 186, 222 Kowal, Emma, 143–44 Kukatja people, 149 Kymlicka, Will, 173 labour. See agrarianism, moral virtue of; convicts, labour of land: colonial settlement of, 30–31, 35, 41, 56–57, 62–64, 66–67; improvement through agriculture, 33–35, 39, 45, 56; ontological possession of, 4–5, 26, 49–51, 71, 74, 112, 147–48; ownership through cultivation, 33–35, 98, 100, 147. See also territory Langton, Marcia, 151, 171, 211, 213 large-scale farming. See industrial agriculture La Via Campesina, 93–97, 99, 117, 124, 178, 205, 207 League of Nations, 87–88 legislation, 73–74, 166, 172–74, 187–89 Lemkin, Rapheal, 156 ‘Little England’, creation of in Australia, 5, 51, 67–68, 70–71 Locke, John, 32–35, 42, 98 Lourde, Audre, 110 Mabo land rights decision, 150, 174, 187-88, 191 Macarthur, John, 35, 56–57 Macintyre, Stuart, 59 Macquarie, Lachlan, 39, 56, 57 Maddison, Sarah, 198, 199 makarrata, 200, 204–5

Index

Malthus, Thomas Robert, 32–33, 41–44, 69 Mann, Alana, 100, 127 Ma Rhea, Zane, 208, 209–10, 212, 213, 216 marriage, 41 Marx, Karl, 65 Mason, Jim, 127 massacres, 60, 75n3, 155 Massy, Charles, 157–58 Mazower, Mark, 152, 153 McDonald, Bryan, 117 McDonald, Mary, 38 McDougall, Frank, 86–88 Meat and Livestock Association, 1–2 medicine, 24–25, 39, 67, 86 migrants. See immigrants Mill, John Stuart, 36, 63 Mills, Charles, 137–38 Mitchell, Elyne, 197 Monsanto, 91 Moore, Clover, 107 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 2, 20, 109, 110, 112, 145, 147, 176, 189, 190 Moses, Dirk, 25, 44, 152, 156 Mourad, Roger, 183 Muir, Cameron, 31, 81, 92–93, 101 Munro, Jenny, 122 Murphy, Lyndon, 199, 203 Myall Creek massacre, 60 national identity, Australian: agriculture in, 1, 6, 20–21, 31, 50, 67–68, 81– 82; farmers in, 20–21, 31, 50, 70–71, 81–82, 92–93, 101; whiteness of, 5–6, 19–20, 69–70, 120 National Party, 115 native fauna and flora, consumption of, 71–72, 146, 211–12. See also Indigenous foodways Native Title Act 1993, 187–89 Neale, Timothy, 211 Ngemba people, 148–49 Nicholson, Paul, 96, 124

229

Nicolacopoulos, Toula, 5–6, 49, 50–51, 142, 146, 199 Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention, 172, 189–90 nutritional arguments for free trade, 87–88 Nyéléni, Declaration of, 95–96, 118, 140 Olive, Mark, 214 ontological possession of land, 4–5, 26, 49–51, 71, 74, 112, 147–48 overpopulation, 41–42, 44, 69, 85 Page, Earle, 84, 85–86 Palawa people, 153–54 Papua New Guinea (PNG), 91–92 Paradies, Yin, 209–10 Pascoe, Bruce, 149–50, 213, 214 pastoralism, 12, 35, 51–52, 55–56, 65. See also sheep farming pastoral power, and Foucault, 53–54, 61, 184–85 Patel, Raj, 94, 99, 135, 141, 157, 223 Patton, Paul, 173, 174, 183, 191, 204 Pearson, Noel, 172, 173-74, 176 People’s Food Plan, 97, 141–42, 146, 208–9, 222–23 Petitt, Philip, 174 Phillip, Arthur, 27–29 Pintupi people, 149 PNG. see Papua New Guinea Pocket City Farms, 123 Porter, Libby, 108, 112, 120, 122, 123 Port Phillip Association’s Treaty, 58–59 private property, 4, 34–35 race: and environment, 24–25, 39, 67– 68, 86. See also biopolitical racism; whiteness Redfern, Sydney, 120–25 Reid, Teela, 175 reproduction, 40–41 returns of knowledge, 10–11, 138, 168 Rieff, David, 137 rights. See human rights; sovereignty

230

Index

Rigney, Lester-Irabinna, 139 riots, 20, 49 Robertson, John, 1, 3 Rodwell, Grant, 19 Rome Declaration on World Food Security, 89 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 88 Roosevelt, Franklin, 88 Rose Hill farm, Parramatta, 29-30, 36, 38 Rose, Nick, 83 Rudd, Kevin, 146 rural Australia, 20, 50–51, 56–58, 67, 84–85, 114–15. See also farmers, in national identity Ruse, James, 29, 30–31 Salatin, Joel, 98–99, 210–11 Santich, Barbara, 146 Seale, Kirsten, 123 security. See biopolitical security; food security Security, Territory, Population (Foucault), 52–55, 73, 168, 184–85 settlement, terminology, 136 Shapin, Steven, 71 Shaw, Wendy, 121 sheep farming 1–3, 3, 56, 60, 197. See also pastoralism Singer, Peter, 127 small-scale farming. See agrarianism social imaginary, 115–16 Society Must be Defended (Foucault), 10–11, 14, 21–23, 168, 183 soldiers, in Australian identity, 19 sovereignty: deflationary, 177–78, 201, 223; and Foucault, 14, 168–70, 179– 87, 191; and settlement of Australia, 44–45, 84–85. See also food sovereignty; Indigenous sovereignty Spivak, Gaytari, 168, 169-70, 175 squatters. See pastoralism Stanner, W.E.H., 61, 136, 138, 142, 176, 197 state racism. See biopolitical racism

Stauffer, Jill, 175 Stoler, Ann Laura, 22 subaltern, 169–70, 175, 178 surf lifesavers, in Australian identity, 19–20 sustainability, 6, 82–83, 93–94, 100, 116–17, 146 Sutton, Harvey, 19–20 Sydney, 26–31, 109–10. See also Redfern, Sydney Tasmania, genocide of Aboriginal people in, 153–54 Taylor, Charles, 115–16 Taylor, Kenneth, 87 Tench, Watkin, 26–30, 40 terra nullius doctrine, 4–5, 25, 30, 35–36, 122, 143–44, 187. See also Indigenous Australians, dispossession of territory, 40–41, 62–63, 68–71, 85–86; and Foucault, 53–55, 69, 72, 73 Thatcher, Charles, 68 Thompson, Paul, 97, 118–19, 127 Torres Strait Islanders. See Indigenous Australians trade, international, 55–57, 86–88, 94–95 Turnbull, Malcolm, 145, 175 Uluru Statement from the Heart, 14, 166, 171–72, 173–74, 199–200 United Nations, 88, 175. See also Food and Agriculture Organization Unsettling of America (Berry), 135–36 urban agriculture, 108, 109, 114–20, 122–24, 128, 210, 222 urban Australia. See cities utilitarianism, 37–40, 63, 190–91 Vassilacopoulos, George, 5–6, 49, 50–51, 142, 146, 199 veganism, 112–13, 222 Vincent, Eve, 211

Index

violence. See biopolitical racism; dispossession, of Indigenous Australians; genocide; massacres Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 63–66, 69 Wathaurong people, 149 Watson, Irene, 109, 110, 165, 174, 177, 192, 223 Weber, Max, 61–62 ‘we grew here, you flew here!’, 49, 51 Wentworth, William, 57–58 white Australia: ontological claim, 5–6, 20, 50–51, 86; policy, 69–70. See also biopolitical racism; whiteness whiteness: of alternative food practices, 13, 109, 112–13, 116, 120, 125, 141–44, 199–200; of Australian history, 49–51, 136–37, 146–47; of

231

Australian identity and culture, 5–6, 19–20, 69–70, 120; studies, 109–12, 137–38. See also white Australia Whyte, Jessica, 90, 186, 187, 189–90 Whyte, Kyle Powys, 101, 181, 206–7 Windshuttle, Keith, 171 Wiradjuri people, 155 Wolfe, Patrick, 21 women, in colonial Australia, 40–41 wool industry, 55–57 Wurundjeri people, 58–59 Year of the Farmer, Australian, 81–82, 83, 93, 101 yeoman farmers. See agrarianism Yolngu people, 176, 200, 205 Yorta Yorta people, 188–90 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, 156, 205