Translations, an autoethnography: Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter 9781526158055

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Translations, an autoethnography

Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography (ACE)

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Series editors: Faye Ginsburg, Paul Henley, Andrew Irving and Sarah Pink

Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography provides a forum for authors and practitioners from across the digital humanities and social sciences to explore the rapidly developing opportunities offered by visual, acoustic and textual media for generating ethnographic understandings of social, cultural and political life. It addresses both established and experimental fields of visual anthropology, including film, photography, sensory and acoustic ethnography, ethnomusicology, graphic anthropology, digital media and other creative modes of representation. The series features works that engage in the theoretical and practical interrogation of the possibilities and constraints of audiovisual media in ethnographic research, while simultaneously offering a critical analysis of the cultural, political and historical contexts. Previously published Lorenzo Ferrarini and Nicola Scaldaferri, Sonic ethnography: Identity, heritage and creative research practice in Basilicata, southern Italy Paul Henley, Beyond observation: A history of authorship in ethnographic film David MacDougall, The looking machine: Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking Christian Suhr, Descending with angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry – A film monograph

In association with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology

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Translations, an autoethnography Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter Paul Carter

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Paul Carter 2021 The right of Paul Carter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 5804 8  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Paul Carter Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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Contents

List of figures List of maps

page vi viii

Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny 1 Movement forms: migrant prehistory 2 Native informants: enigmas of communication 3 Walking the line: the endless arrival 4 Flow paths: topologies of coexistence 5 Dirty art: decolonising public space 6 The prodigal son: parables of return 7 Story lines: creative belonging 8 Silenced relations: migrant poetics Postlude: human symbols, doubled identities Works discussed

1 12 50 83 123 160 207 245 280 301 314

Index

318

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Figures

1 Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Hinges 7, 2006 (Photo: the artists). 2 Paul Carter, composition and photograph (Source: Paul Carter, Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, 2020, 131). 3 Paul Carter, Edmund Carter, Christopher Williams, Kelp, Hidden Histories exhibition, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool, Victoria, April–May 2014 (Photo: the artists; Sources: James Dawson, Australian Aborigines (1881), i–xlvii, lxxix–lxxxiv, City of Warrnambool Allotments Plan, 1922).  4 Ruark Lewis and Paul Carter, Raft, 1995 (Photo source: Art Gallery of New South Wales, accession number 75.2008). 5 Bharatam Dance Company, Jadi Jadian, The Malthouse, Melbourne, 25 September–4 October 1998 (Photo: Bharatam Dance Company). 6 Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, concept sketches and text treatments (Photo: Paul Carter). 7 Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, detail of blue tier, Fig Grove, Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, New South Wales, 2000 (Photo: Paul Carter). 8 Material Thinking, Rival Channels, Brisbane 180, Ann Street, Brisbane, 2015 (Photo: Daisho). 9 i Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, 2015, figure 12; ii Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, figure 13; iii Yagan

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List of figures

Square, south-west aspect, digital render, 2015 (Source: Lyons Architects, IPH, Aspect). 10 Paul Carter, ‘Waullu’, in Material Thinking, ‘Scarborough Edge, a Creative Template for the Scarborough Redevelopment Area’, 2015, 8. 11 Rachael Swain, Serge-Aimé Coulibaly and artists, Sugar, Merseyside Caribbean Centre, Liverpool, UK. June 2007 (Photo: Stalker Theatre Company). 12 Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Involutes, 2011 (Photo: the artists). 13 Paul Carter, ‘Walking Crowd’, sketch for Passenger, September 2014 (Photo: Paul Carter). 14 Material Thinking, Passenger, Yagan Square, 2017 (Photo: Material Thinking). 15 Ramus and Material Thinking, The Pipes, Prahran Square, Melbourne, 2020 (Photo: Ramus).

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193 232 263 264 289

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Maps

1 Faringdon and district, Oxfordshire (pre-1974 Berkshire), UK. 2 Western District, Victoria, Australia.

page 16 21

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Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

On the two hundredth anniversary of Australia’s white colonisation, I scored a notable success. Responding to the complaint that the country had produced no great figures of original genius, I invented one. An architect of places we needed, Vincenzo Volentieri was a builder of bridges (metaphorically). Perhaps Sicilian, perhaps Indigenous, at one fell swoop he established the mestizaje tradition, whose want had inhibited our self-determination, and a new approach to home-making. Who could forget how the formulaic respectability of people in glass houses became in his mishearing mobile communities inhabiting grass houses? But Australians had forgotten, for reasons I explained in my memoir: looking elsewhere they had omitted to look where they were, a zone Vincenzo had called ‘The Originarium’.1 The reaction to my hoax hero was surprisingly serious: concerned that they had overlooked him, historians contacted me for more details. All sorts of mésalliances were at play in this cultural joke, besides many overlooked clues, the most obvious of which was concealed in his name: Volentieri or, as any migrant quickly learns to say, Yes, willingly, volontariamente, as they accede to whatever task, mask or origin is assigned them. The nation’s native informant, I was saying back what the nationalists longed to hear. Pretending to be someone else, I felt perhaps at home. As the name suggested, authenticity was to be pidginised, identity a function of echoic mimicry. Volentieri evoked the migrant’s utopian hopefulness and metaphysical scepticism. Can fictions like this make a dent in what Jennifer Rutherford calls ‘the national myth’?2 Or, like the migrant, must they inhabit an ‘as if’ state, permanently suspended in the mid-stride of becoming? Translations reports a personal history of creative encounters, mostly post-dating 1988, that have (most willingly) linked a revisiting of Australia’s

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2 Translations colonial past to a revisioning of a future place. Bizarrely ambitious, or lucidly naive, their explorations of language, in radio, public art, and dramaturgically extended to street and stage performance, are not art in the Bicentennial genius mode: they are channellings of the migrant experience, poetic ethnography, whose theme is language itself, the enigma of translation – or, as we learned when a selection from Volentieri’s Notebooks was published a few years later, the problem of ‘getting in’.3 Willingly could be the secret signature of these creative encounters. Early colonial accounts of Aboriginal languages often include ‘promiscuous sentences’ – phrases that are unattached to any identifiable context or conversation and on this account readily recruited to new contexts and applications. In my experience, the migrant artist’s encounters are similarly promiscuous. It would be difficult to stratify the different genres in which I have played: radio art did not yield to typographical engravings in public places; writing and directing performance works in and outside the theatre did not lay the foundations of a later discovery of my true metier in cross-cultural urban design. A critic once described my interests as polyhedral, referring to the coexistence of different facets. But the explanation of this is sociological as much as psychological – most of the creative encounters discussed in Translations emerge from encounters in a human sense; they have been responses to invitations extended to me by artists (architects, composers, dancers, directors) secure in their own disciplinary formation but disposed to extend the boundaries of historical outreach or cultural expression. In a way, works like The Calling to Come (sound installation) or Passenger (sculptural ensemble) are mirrors to a desire that my collaborators could recognise but not realise – the migrant artist as the secret sharer in the twinned historical traumas of silencing and forgetting. At any rate, when I was writing Translations, I found I was navigating generically diverse islands of activity rather as one might sail through an archipelago. In the archipelago, I had written in a recently published book, there are no islands, and the islands are numberless. The crossings narrated in Translations fit this description: to judge from my diaries, no work has ever emerged in isolation – it has been a coalescence of promiscuous thoughts, dreams and images, some of whose other offcuts have migrated to other places; in the passage between different cultural performances, the only constant has been the horizon; as

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Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

3

regards the relationship between different parts of the archipelago, the effect of parallax means that it keeps changing. One object of Translations is to give a positive twist to self-division – I characterise the migrant as a half person in search of a host, but also attribute a formative value to the journey, which, understood archipelagically, is endless, scaleless and infinitely divisible. Viewed as an attitude towards change, a willingness to adopt different personae, the journey stretches out in all directions but especially back and forth; if distancing is a prerequisite of understanding, the antipodal relationship between England and Australia creates the strongest hermeneutical tool for placing migration in an historical perspective. There is personal chance: in the first chapter, a surprising ‘discovery’ is made of an Australia inside England – the estate where I used to birdwatch turning out to be the picturesque wish-fulfilment of an Australian entrepreneur. But beyond and behind that, clustered on the larger horizon with industrialisation, land enclosure and their colonial corollaries, migration turns out to have been ancestral – a fact I subsequently trace in the inner migrations (spiritual as much as spatial) of Yorkshire and Berkshire forebears. The double journey described in this chapter finds its own double in a later chapter where, in the guise of the Prodigal Son, I go home. Giving the exilic experience of self-becoming at that place (however incomplete or deferred) an existential value, my Vincenzo look-alike wonders how a culture of land theft can moralise about miscegenation. Take the Uffington White Horse, the late Bronze Age hill figure, familiar to me from earliest childhood: annexed to the mythohistorical fortunes of Saint George (yes, the hill has a dragon), King Arthur and King Alfred, its ‘matter’, the ‘whole res of which the poet is himself a part’ (as David Jones puts it) consists of invasions – yet any acknowledgement of this is missing.4 This Brexit self-blinding was foreseen in my radio work The Native Informant and, in a series of photomontages made with my son, I later translated limbs of the hill figure to public spaces in Australia where I had created ground patterns of my own. Coming back is twinned with bereavement and rebirth, and in a positive twist, the totemic aspect of the White Horse emerges. A migrant ethnography of the creative encounter begins in the vicissitudes of welcome – in the opening to the other mirrored in the host’s invitation. But, dependent on the charity of strangers,

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4 Translations acculturation and socialisation through these channels proceed precariously. In my experience, actual hosts are shadowed by historical hosts, avatars of an original act of recognition or translation missing in the national self-narration. For a time in Australia I lived as much in the foreign country of the past as I did in the equally unceded ground of the present: figures like William Light, responsible for Adelaide’s distinctive urban design (1836), James Dawson, amateur ethnolinguist and co-author of Australian Aborigines (1881) and T.G.H. Strehlow, whose interwar studies of Arrernte culture led to the monumental Songs of Central Australia (1971), a manifesto for a bicultural Australian literature (Vincenzo would have approved) shadowed me. My relationship with these father figures was, it seemed, anti-Oedipal, a reflection of my growing conviction that the Sophoclean tragedy made much better sense as an allegory of migration. Studying these figures was ancestral homework; they fitted me out with a genealogy not my own but whose voices (in a kind of creative family romance) endowed me with the authority to speak. Coming after them, I positioned myself as a tracker. In the Adelaide multimedia performance, Light (1996) this worked out rather literally; in Raft, from the same time, Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend, a mythologised narration of his father’s last journey, inspired a gallery installation (yet even there the sound of my footsteps recorded at Horseshoe Bend was audible). The relationship with Dawson was more intimate, persistent, frustrating and aggressive: unable at first to look past the enigmas of the Gundidjmara and Djab Wurrung wordlists he and his daughter collected in southWestern Victoria, I wrapped his practical humanism in a cloud of poetic free association. To free him from this imaginative levy, I had at last to track him back to his family roots in Scotland, a return journey that repatriated him to the historical congregation forming my own past; then I could see that I walked in an older migrant’s footsteps whose legacy was a transcript of encounters broken off rather than finished, a personal account of voices on the edge of echo eventually withdrawn into silence. The question of family is at the heart of the migrant condition, emerging critically in the discovery of a lost relation. Alongside the positive crowd of history there walks a shadow file of lost subjects – prodigal sons, if you like, who did not fit in, who did not come back and who had to be forgotten because they did not conform

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Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

5

to the fictional pattern of triumph over trials. My own passage in Australia has been haunted by these feisty but forlorn orphans of empire, in whose disappearance from the official record I have discerned analogies with the migrant who consciously plunges out of sight to be reborn Pythagoras-like, in another country, in another port. Figures like the Adelaide Plains Kaurna woman Kalloongoo, discussed in the final chapter, are not necessarily abjected by the doorkeepers of legitimate descent – they may get recognition in the most surprising ways – as when generations after her death a unique record of Kalloongoo speaking her language was found secreted in a list of Tasmanian Aboriginal words. The problem is that these characters – and my sound installation for the Museum of Sydney is populated entirely by their type – rebel against getting back in the right way: they refuse the second conversion that happens when, reclassified as anomalies, they are adopted (in a second silencing) by a late revisionist history. The point was that they came to life in the to-and-fro of discourse, as actors deploying an echoic mimicry of their own. This, my spoof memoir contended, was Vincenzo’s position: ‘Every time we set out on a journey conscious of its beginning in a word, its ending in the experience of a road truly travelled, as if for the first time, we owe our sensation of being at home on the move to Volentieri’s vision.’ 5 Here, first of all, a migrant poetics is a way of talking back differently: interpellated by the noise of society, the list of eccentrics accumulating at the margins improvise new families of association. In another context, I characterised the peculiar gift of the artwork as an act of material thinking, the transmutation of ‘rubbish’ into something oddly affecting because the strangeness of its parts has been reconciled. Likewise with the discourse of those ‘named in the margin’: the poetry is in the recycling of what is to hand. In sifting syllables caught on the street, passed down lines (waiting in queues), retained from broadcasts in foreign languages, a new poetic community begins to coalesce, oddly informative and disturbing. Talking about the recuperation of rubbish does not exclude the possibility that some forms of expression resist aesthetic elevation and absorption into the koine of cultural production. In fact, the historical and ethnographic category of ‘lost subjects’ – to which in an act of retrospective affiliation I annex contemporary migrant artists – has its counterpart in what I call ‘dirty art’, the class of

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6 Translations creative encounters discussed in Translations that pass unnoticed and anonymous where the cultural custodians come and go. The ‘creative templates’ I have written and drawn for urban redevelopment projects fall into this category: they are story networks plotted in place that contain, fractally as it were, a creative pattern reproducible across scales. Descriptive, rather than prescriptive, they foreground topological features that could conceivably lead through doorways to new arrangements (environmental, social, political). Ironically, these professional reports cast into the most sceptical of quarters contain the most ambitious poetic claims, proving that urban designers could usefully translate Blake’s dictum, a world in a grain of sand, infinity in the palm of your hand, into a practice of place-marking. Approaching places where Waugul, the Rainbow Serpent creator figure lives, Noongar people throw a handful of sand on the water and await the place spirit’s reaction. That is at one scale. At another, in a story we alluded to in the Tjunta Trail, an interpretation track beside the surf beach at Scarborough (Western Australia), constructed on the recommendation of my ‘creative template’, Waugul is linked to the stars – for her collection of lost children (the motivation is ambiguous), Tjunta, the Charnok Woman, and companion of Waugul as he travels north creating lakes, turns back ‘leaving a trail of stone behind her leading to the largest stone (Kartakitch), Wave Rock, where she stepped onto the stone and was lifted into the sky. Her hair is the Milky Way and the stars in the sky represent those children she collected.’ 6 Dirty art is not sullied art; it is art that refuses to detach itself from the always contested business of worldmaking; like the portable cases made by caddisfly larvae, dramaturgical designs such as these incorporate the grains of sand picked up along the way externally, fusing the self-protection proper to precarity to a repatterning of relations that implicates the host. Does this imply a degree of complacency, a certain satisfaction that the migrant, suspended axolotl-like in an immature state of development, can avoid the sticky landing place of colonial recapitulation? For myself, sovereignty will have to be internal as well as external: acknowledging the original land theft in Australia takes me back to its British prehistory, but it also looks forward to a transformation that incorporates a different view of being in place. Such a translation, however incomplete, cannot be divorced from the journey and its conduct. Translating one of his favourite lines

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Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

7

from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as ‘Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought’, the poet Shelley commented that the words Sophocles used for ‘ways’ (hodous) and ‘wanderings’ (planois) prevented the line from being read metaphorically: ‘they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet; and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert, or roams from city to city – as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse was destined to wander, blind and asking charity’. And he added, ‘What a picture does this line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.’ 7 Romantic existentialism, no doubt, but, in its recognition that the road is not metaphorical, its traverse a balancing act of inner and outer landscapes, an accurate description of the migrant condition. But, writing from a Europe where the Indigenous gods had long died out or migrated to canvases and pedestals, Shelley did not think of the country talking back, its mythopoetic topography supporting his footsteps from underneath, the poetic logic of its spatial organisation compassionately, but not uncritically, reaching out. In Australia, I cannot say that this awareness of a prior and never-ending choreography carried in story is widespread. Perhaps this explains the touchiness of public discourse here, the white hosts feeling at their back nothing. In any case, unless the improvised creative encounters along the endless path are understood echoically, the valued thing in the external universe will remain hidden, and with it the real story. Wandering in a wilderness is one myth: here is another, better sense of place. In Kulin myth from the Melbourne region, the creator deity and ancestral being, Bunjil, the Eaglehawk or Wedge-tailed Eagle, sees that ‘men and women were many and very bad’. Conjuring up storms and whirlwinds, he goes with his knife into the encampments and, as I paraphrased it in the words I arranged and sandblasted into the surface of Federation Square, ‘cut this way, that way; and men, women, children, like worms writhing’. It was this second creation that produced space, the distribution of points that nourished all life. The worms turned into flakes of snow that the clouds carried ‘hither and thither over all the earth’. Bunjil ‘caused

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8 Translations the pieces to drop in such places as he pleased. Thus were men and women scattered over the earth.’ 8 So here was one story – that I repeatedly came back to as the external precedent for an inner reformation (as if what had gone before had to be torn up and reassembled in a migrant collage); but in Australian Aboriginal ontology, one story leads to another (journeys are the tissue culture of a spirit nervature that reconciles Being and Becoming, space and time). To extend his jurisdiction, Bunjil, the Great Ancestor Spirit, appointed the Bram-bram-bult brothers ‘to name the plants and animals and bring order to the world’. They did more than this, as the journeys of these and other ‘ancestral beings “sculpted the landscape” and created the land, animals, plants and people’.9 They were occupied with the north–south mountain ranges that the explorer Major Mitchell (whom I wrote about in The Road to Botany Bay, 1987) called ‘The Grampians’, now Gariwerd, where they caught up with the ferocious Emu Tchingal who, in his pursuit of Waa the Crow, ‘split the Gariwerd ranges with a ferocious kick, creating Victoria Gap’.10 Then, as punishment for her continuing violence, the brothers hurled three spears at Tchingal (they ‘are visible in the Southern Cross, while the brothers themselves are the two Pointers to the Southern Cross’) and another story journey began. The wounded Tchingal fled northwards, her blood formed the Wimmera River,11 a path I unconsciously followed, reporting my experiences in The Sound In-Between (1992). Proceeding beyond the Wimmera, the Bram brothers spread out across the Mallee,12 deep into Wergaia country, their subsequent adventures explaining the origin of ‘a range of places from the Lower Wimmera River to the south to Pine Plains in the north’,13 thereby creating the country I traversed years later and far more self-consciously in my book Ground Truthing (2010), an advance that was also a return, going back again to the enigmatic historical orphan ‘Jowley’, who first inspired What Is Your Name (1986). Here is an exact spatial history of creative encounters; these ‘Creation stories also served as a mechanism of wayfinding through the landscape’ 14 for me. And another translation begins when the existential journey is located inside the ‘creative template’ of the mythopoetic landscape and the care of those who, recognising that the present arrangement of things embodies the Law, await the original trespass to be confessed and repaired. I suppose we are a

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long way from deposing the tyrant Freud; yet isn’t it obvious that, in promoting the Oedipus complex, he overlooked what was hidden from him on the surface? I mean his own journey in someone else’s country. What could not be admitted, it seems, was his own ancestral migrancy. Freud thought modern audiences must find the original drama, ‘a curse or an oracle … fulfilled in spite of all the efforts of some innocent man’, unengaging. He created a modern (more appealing) allegory about repressed sexual desire. But Freud was a modern Swellfoot as his fear of the gap showed,15 and his fear of ‘paths and roads’, overcome by treating them metaphorically, repressed the prehistory of journeys undertaken because of the Abrahamic curse laid on his people. Neither Sophocles nor Freud refers to the origin of the curse on Oedipus – while guest of Pelops, king of Pisa (near Olympia), Laius had raped Pelops’s son, Chrysippus. The curse Zeus lays on Laius and his son concerns the abuse of hospitality. Sophocles’s audience can be presumed to have known the tale; Freud disregards it as irrelevant to his case. One aspect of the curse is that it condemns a man to return to his origins: under the impression he is avoiding the curse, Oedipus leaves Corinth for Thebes, on the way encountering his birth-father, the Theban king, Laius, and killing him. As the sequel shows, there is no path out: against his will, Oedipus is enfolded in a repetition compulsion, a curse laid on him by Zeus to return to an earlier state of things. It is notable that Oedipus does not rely on xenitia to get into Athens: instead of submitting himself to the protocols of hospitality, he relies on his skill in solving riddles. The drama of rights in a foreign country is also the drama of self-discovery; Oedipus is defined by the ambiguity of the statements made about him (their riddling room for doubt or misinterpretation) and by his persistence and skill in interpretation. These traits, the inversion of home and exile and the obscurity of meanings (origins), define Oedipus’s situation. The crimes against Laius and Jocasta can be defined non-sexually as products of exile and the concealment or forgetting of territorial and family ties: after all, the stranger can do and say miraculous things (as indeed Oedipus does at the conclusion of Oedipus at Colonus) and there is no way of verifying their truthfulness. One thing, though, is clear: in the host’s recognition of the guest, a transference occurs. ‘Strange that I / Whom ye have led so long should lead you now’, the blind Oedipus remarks to Theseus in

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10 Translations Athens where, protected from his Corinthian avengers by the laws of hospitality, he shows his host the place where, uniquely in his territory, future hostility can be defeated. The stranger becomes the host when his skill in finding a path through foreign country is recognised. In his blindness, he sees that he treads foreign soil; negotiating with the Furies, he at last finds a place that, in an echo of the gift given him, he can give back (a pledge of future security). The historical curse is broken when he disappears, and no one knows where he goes.

Notes (All hyperlinked references were accessed between 1 January and 30 March 2021.) 1 The reference is to Paul Carter, ‘Grass Houses: Vincenzo Volentieri, a Bicentennial Memoir’, Living In A New Country, London: Faber & Faber, 1992, 149–158. 2 Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Pess, 2000. 3 Paul Carter, ‘Getting In: From the Sayings of Vincenzo Volentieri’, The Sound In-Between, Voice, Space, Performance, Sydney: New Endeavour Press/University of New South Wales Press, 1992, 177–191. 4 David Jones, ‘Preface’, Anathemata, London: Faber & Faber, 1951, 20. 5 Carter, ‘Grass Houses: Vincenzo Volentieri, a Bicentennial Memoir’, 158. 6 ‘Charnok Woman’, www.joondalup.wa.gov.au//Files/Joondalup_Mooro_ Boodjar_Brochure.pdf. 7 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 273. Oedipus Tyrannos, l.60. A passage from Shelley’s notebooks preserved by Mary Shelley. Shelley’s point is well made by the Loeb translation (‘And threaded many a maze of weary thought’). 8 The story is told in R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne: Government Printer, 1876, vol. 1, 427–428. Also Paul Carter, Mythform: The Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square, Melbourne, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2005, 50–51. 9 Greater Gariwerd Landscape Draft Management Plan, Melbourne: Parks Victoria, 2020. At https://s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ hdp.au.prod.app.vic-engage.files/6616/0499/1696/GGL_DMP_Plan_ and_Maps_Low-Res.pdf, 23.

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10 Aldo Massola, Bunjil’s Cave, Myths, Legends and Superstitions of the Aborigines of South-East Australia, Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1968. 11 https://budjabudjacoop.org.au/about/gariwerdgrampians/. 12 Although in another story one of the brothers was killed and turned into Mount Abrupt at the northern end of Gariwerd. 13 Edward Ryan, ‘Blown to Witewitekalk: Placenames and Cultural Landscapes in North-west Victoria’, in L. Hercus, F. Hodges, J. Simpson (eds), The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia, Canberra: ANU Epress, 2009, 157–164, 159. 14 Greater Gariwerd Landscape Draft Management Plan, 23. 15 The argument from Freud’s acknowledged agoraphobia is set out in Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia, London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

The Australian poet, Robert Gray, has a poem called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ that opens with these lines: Once, playing cricket, beneath a toast-dry hill, I heard the bat crack, but watched a moment longer A swallow, racing lightly, just above the ground. I was impressed by the way The bird skimmed, fast as a cricket ball. It was decided for me, within that instant, Where my interests lay.1

When I first read these lines, I had to read them twice to make sense of them. I could not understand the decision Gray said he had made. I could recognise the similarity he saw between the flight of the swallow and the trajectory of the cricket ball (speeding perhaps towards him across the ground), but I failed to appreciate the deeper difference he detected in the apparent similarity: superficially similar flight paths hold for him entirely different associations. I am guessing that cricket was associated with the regimentation of school discipline. Where a tiny lapse of concentration – after the ball had been struck, watching the bird an instant longer – could be fatal to the team’s fortunes (not to mention endangering personal safety), daydreaming was clearly discouraged. The swallow’s zigzagging trajets, by comparison, were comparatively free to follow their own direction. These opening lines are not only about an autobiographical moment, they indicate a poetic direction. With great subtlety, Gray calls out the poetic figure of simile, suggesting that exact observation describes his ‘interests’ better. In that ‘instant’ Gray saw through the similarity to grasp an absolute difference. It is not clear whether two movement forms differ – a matter of physics and mechanics – or whether two

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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associative universes collide. The difference is that the swallow is free to fly ‘fast as a cricket ball’, and converges at will, as it were, on a flight path (the skimming ball) dictated by convention and governed by predetermined laws of motion. While the ball may hit our daydreaming fielder, the swallow is the maestro of detour, never bumping into anything – ‘diving at us’, as Gray writes in another poem, ‘continuously’, but ‘planing off’. So cricket is left behind, the boredom of its ballistic theatre, the longueurs of those hot afternoons, replaced by a new kind of attention akin to Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – a capacity for ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ defines the good birdwatcher, too. I could not understand the distinction being made: while the difference was obvious – the cricket ball is a kind of ballistic missile, the swallow a genius of errancy, continually self-correcting – I was struck by the observation of a similarity, not a superficial one but a profound one, rooted, as I now see, in my own autobiographical ‘interests’. You see, unlike this great poet, I was an enthusiastic cricketer. (I was also an enthusiastic birdwatcher, but we will come to that.) The high profile roles in cricket are played by batsman and bowler but I preferred being in the field, positioned like my idol, Colin Bland, in the covers, ready to pounce on any drive into the forward offside field, with a decision and deftness intercepting the skimming ball and pirouetting, returning it as from the sling of my arm to the expectant wicket-keeper. Unlike those reluctant recruits to the cricket field who, blind to the tactics of attack and defence, see only the vacancy of the afternoon ahead (and who find scant comfort in the schoolmaster’s sardonic ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’), I patrolled my ground like a hunter, alive to the smallest movement in my hinterland. I kept my fellow fielders and the bowler coming up to bowl in peripheral vision but concentrated on the minutest scrutiny of the batsman’s body language as in mid-stride the bowler released the ball, and in the instant between delivery and arrival, the batsman made his decision. Walking in as the bowler approached, I played a game with space and time, narrowing the angle of possible flight paths, I also reduced the reflex time. Detecting the slightest deviation of line or preparatory change of stance, my own approach swayed left or right. These were the economies of anticipation. Until now nothing

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14 Translations had happened but my sense of what could be had filled the air with possible lines of flight, populating the visible field with an invisible dome of possible paths. Transposed to the laws of chance (and the rules of cricket), I found nothing absurd about the proposition of a thousand angels standing on the point of a needle. To anticipate all the lines of flight, to hold that imagination of flight in the tense arrest of the reaction as ball was struck, was to gather into a single point all the filaments of the cobweb: The body of the atmosphere is full of infinite pyramids composed of radiating straight lines (or rays of light), which are produced from the bodies of light and shade, existing in the air; and the further they are from the object which produces them the more acute they become, and although in their distribution they intersect and cross they never mingle together, but pass through all the surrounding air, independently diverging, spreading, and diffused.2

If I had known this passage, I would instantly have recognised it, not as ‘a remarkable insight into the mechanism of light as it reflects off our surroundings’,3 but as a cricketer’s perception of the Spielraum of the game where the base of the ‘pyramid’ is the curvilinear boundary of a quadrant of space and the apex is the eye (where the incoming lines are most acute); but most akin to the space of anticipation is Leonardo’s generalisation that, if all the possible views of the same environment or ‘atmosphere’ are imagined, then the air is full of such pyramids or, in layperson’s terms, while the ball could go anywhere, its flight path would always intersect and cross other ‘pyramids’ or fields of view. Leonardo’s observation would also, had I been aware of Robert Gray’s poem and the ‘decision’ it produced, have provided support for my sense of puzzlement; for, imagining the totality of lines of flight, Leonardo also describes the reason of the swallow’s flightpath entirely composed of intersections and crossings dictated by the random distribution of flying insects, where the only rule is that, however dense the net they appear to project, they never ‘mingle together’, passages in-between always remaining open to be threaded. At this more fundamental level of random fluctuations and their geometry, the similarity between the ball and the bird skimming fast across the ground is greater than the difference. Birds may be known by their songs, but also by their flight, and an artist influenced by one might naturally find inspiration in the

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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other. The skittering intimacy of swallows quartering the grass was a lesson in opportunism; it conformed exactly to the possible line in Leibniz’s thought experience able to join up a field of dots: harvesting insects randomly distributed through air, swallows cultivated a natural calculus. Other local species conceptualised the intervals of chance differently, their flight style reflecting an attitude to air: whether to drive through it resolutely fixed on a prescribed destination or whether to circle in Vichian ricorsi, climbing on invisible thermal involutes – that might be the question. In between the extremes, a variety of species, from woodpecker to goldfinch, practised what the bird books called switchback flight: alternately opening their wings in rapid beats and closing them in short glides – although in the smaller finches this flow and arrest suggested the fluttering of the quickly out-of-breath – these species divided the line of flight into bars, units of undulation in the larger musical stave of motion. Scaled up to the ensemble of flight paths in any day, an avian movement form was a palimpsest of infant arabesques, a dense blot formed of all the criss-crossing deviations between field and hedge, rooftop and puddle, one weather and the next. Framing even the steepest descent line (falcon or gannet) was a ceiling of loops, long, thoughtful circuits, abrupt incurvings and speculative inclines. Inside the appearance of empirical aptitude ancestral habits persisted, not simply reflecting physiology or ecology but memory: I remember that the rooks continued their ragged east–west course each evening for years after their ancient rookery had been destroyed. In this regard the greatest proof that the impulse to flight was internal was the phenomenon of migration, the seasonal evacuation of the coppices and lakes, the seasonal resurrection of song, so often prefigured in the sighting of the first spring swallow insouciantly skimming the water. Whether incubated on the cricket field as projectile probabilities or through days of binocular-assisted projections of flight into the clearing – extending the line that disappeared into the foliage to its most likely point of reappearance – a spatial history of this kind defines creativity as a curiosity about the logic of chance: the earliest expression of repair will likely be the invention of those trajets that successfully bridge the gap, lending the multiplicity of passages a pattern. Obviously, this is metaphorical in its primary sense of joining distant ideas or places that apparently have little in common, so that they find together a new, transformed common sense.

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UPPER THAMES VALLEY

SOUTHROP

COTSWOLDS

FAIRFORD

RIVER LEACH

LECHLADE RIVER COLN

INGLESHAM

RIVER COLE

RIVER THAMES

BUCKLAND BUSCOT

KINGSTON BAGPUIZE

THRUPP

FARINGDON

FOLLY

HATFORD

COLESHILL CRICKLADE

LONGWORTH HINTON WALDRIST

RADCOT

DOWN AMPNEY RIVER THAMES

BAMPTON

STANFORD -IN-THE-VALE

LONGCOT

HIGHWORTH

CHARNEY BASSETT RIVER OCK

BAULKING

SHRIVENHAM

UFFINGTON WOOLSTONE

SWINDON

WAYLAND’S SMITHY

BISHOPSTONE

WANTAGE

DRAGON HILL WHITE HORSE

BERKSHIRE DOWNS

16 Translations

10 kms

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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A territorial sensibility is less likely to value these flights of fancy – which, in the highly enclosed corner of England where I grew up, were inevitably associated with an enviable transcendence of property divisions. To judge from my dreams, an aerial perspective was also part of the attraction but the courses I took over rooftop or under the clouds were methods of idling rather than speeding to a foreign destination. The local lie of the land looked different from up there, the stubborn division of houses and allotments subject to the logic of my avian spirals: the interest was in the imaginative power of the inter esse to generate a tissue of flight paths that spun the wall-divided habitations back together; in my curvilinear gyrations the ground plan discovered a new shared surface, a Riemannian topology in which all angles were drawn together like the squares of the fishing net altering into diamonds and narrowing as the catch is hauled from the water. As nothing was represented, the artist of the interval was the subject himself as the promotor of movement forms. The street, like the surface of the pond or the ballistic possibilities of the game, ceased to be a theatre set where things happened. I perceived it as a geometrical figure whose reason, the infinity of pyramids, was found in imagining the flight path of a ball thrown against its walls: in the ricochet, in the clinamen of deviation under the influence of gravity, in the period and diminishing amplification of the bounce (its profile like the dragon’s dorsal undulations). I populated the public spaces where I grew up with an imaginary territory of interconnected comings and goings, in interrelated geometrical gymnastics finding the key that unlocked the line of flight liberating me from enclosure; the parcours of my thrown body broke out of the sullen Georgian cuirass, free to soar, to circle and to settle where I wished under the open sky. I say ‘public spaces’, but a prehistory of the lines I spun around me as a child was a history of land division and enclosure that left nowhere to stand. The story is well-known: Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain’s land has been privatized – that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our “property-owning democracy”, nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.

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18 Translations This was our condition and Simon Crosbie’s further observation – ‘There are many factors that have led to such extreme levels of land concentration, but the most blatant and the most contentious has been enclosure – the subdivision and fencing of common land into individual plots which were allocated to those people deemed to have held rights to the land enclosed’ – entirely framed the lives of my forebears.4 In the Hammonds’s succinct formulation, ‘The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a labourer without land.’ 5 But it was not the whole story: enclosure acts occurred piecemeal and, particularly in the later nineteenth century, began to be resisted piecemeal – allotment provision and a certain delegation of authority to local councils produced around many country towns a fringe of ersatz smallholdings. But the balance of space that could not be reallocated continued to contract: the pragmatic cause of this was the advent of vehicular traffic from the 1960s that transformed former marketplaces, narrowly paved streets, country lanes into carparks, one-way car circuses and frightening tunnels for trucks. Recapitulating Cobbett’s disenfranchised Cricklade labourers (‘It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside’),6 we were flung against the wall every time an articulated lorry thundered through. There was anecdotal evidence that the local lord of the manor regarded Faringdon’s marketplace as his private bailiwick but this was a restriction on free access that a child was unlikely to notice; but the second enclosure act, marked by our enforced flight from the streets, did not mark a further, revolutionary contraction of public space, it simply made plain the fact that the Voice, as David Marquand puts it, by which he means the accountability in the public domain achieved by ‘argument, discussion, debate and democratic engagement’, remained scarcely heard, and even less heeded.7 It was curious that throughout my growing up the largest spatial emancipation regularly enjoyed was the result of access to cricket fields: usually located in the grounds of country estates, an exception was made to the rule of trespass for weekend cricket matches. But, in general, the countryside around Faringdon was a foreign country, jealously protected by walls, electric fences, ditches, hedges, and in case the message didn’t get through, signs promising prosecution.

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

19

Historically, we had become migrants in our own country: if my grandfather’s graduation from below-stairs gardener to market gardener with a smallholding of his own was a remarkable arrest of our slippage from the land, it was also the stratagem of an internal exile determined to stay at home. This rearguard action produced a horticultural plot, called simply ‘the land’, where I followed the birds, but it could not entirely allay the sensation that we had been forced out, that resumed residency was provisional and further change likely.8 Methodism helped my forebears rationalise an uneasy sense of being in a state of translation but emigration was always a possibility, if not for us, then for the entire imagined community of agricultural workers galvanised by Joseph Arch. These early identifications with the infinite pyramids invisibly demonstrating the existence of an alternative architecture were not middle-class caprices entertained from behind the lace-curtain safety of ownership – ‘Press homeward down the dark green park’, but let not the huntsmen ‘wind the horn, or be/Disturbers of my privacy’, declared Edmund Gosse, complacent in a class coexistence secured by property ownership.9 This was not our case: I sometimes felt that I stalked through the Lilliput world of our enclosure like the stilt shepherds of the Garonne. In the absence of unfettered horizontal extension, access to the lost commons might be a matter of vertical elevation. Generally, the heights of trees were associated with magical rewards – was there a folk reminiscence of this benefit in ‘Tom and the Parson’, a song Alfred Williams recorded?10 But the association of tree-climbing with spying is an old one. Swaying in the uppermost boughs, the commons might be oceanic: ‘Our fruit trees stood unfelled. / My father knew the branches’ yield:/ I, their sway. / I stood at the masthead / Shading my eye / Admiral of that inland fleet’, I wrote optimistically in an early poem. Such fantasies of command had their amusing side. When our former lord of the manor, Gerald Tyrwhitt (Lord Berners) proposed building what, half a century later, the local tourist office boasted was ‘the last Folly in England’,11 a retired admiral complained that it would block his view; when it was pointed out that the tower would be invisible except through a telescope, the admiral ‘answered that this was the exact reason why he objected since it was his habit to scan the horizon with a telescope every morning’.12 Innocent eccentricity, the admiral’s view had a local genealogy in Henry James Pye’s prospect poem ‘Farringdon Hill’ and an exact

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20 Translations structural analogue half a world away in Victoria’s Western District where the signature of successful invasion was a parklike prospect that potentially stretched in all directions uninterrupted to the horizon. Here, Berners’s Folly had a local antecedent whose symbolic function was antithetical. In 1881 the Scottish colonist James Dawson had just published Australian Aborigines, a remarkable ethnography complete with lengthy vocabularies for the local Dhauwurd or Djagurd Wurrung (Gundidjmara) and Djab Wurrung languages and was ‘Guardian of five pure-blood Aborigines’, four men and a woman who resisted moving to the government mission at Framlingham, and who lived at large sometimes visiting Dawson and his family in Camperdown. While Dawson was away in Scotland – he had not visited his family since landing at Hobson’s Bay, Port Phillip (Melbourne) in May 1840 – one of them, Wombeetch Puyuun, also known as Camperdown George, died: ‘horrified on his return two years later to learn that Camperdown George had been buried in a boggy spot outside the Camperdown cemetery’, he ‘appealed for funds to honour his memory’. What he mainly got instead was ‘religious advice from men holding Magnificent Estates from which the Aboriginals were expelled and massacred wholesale’.13 Inscribed onto the obelisk in the Camperdown cemetery, raised largely at Dawson’s own expense, are the words: ‘In memory of the Aborigines of this district. Here lies the body of the chief Wombeetch Puyuun and last of the local tribes.’ Dawson’s gesture mingled respect and reproach; it signified his admiration for an ‘ill-used and interesting people’ and also his bitter contempt for many of his white neighbours, ‘men holding Magnificent Estates from which the Aboriginals were expelled and massacred wholesale’.14 Dawson’s folly, as it seemed to his landowning neighbours, was a 25-foot obelisk of grey granite into whose main face were etched the moulds of three Aboriginal weapons, a returning boomerang, a leangle or kind of club and a short stick possibly of the kind used for beating time during a corroboree. The object was clear: at the historical vanishing point of local Aboriginal culture Dawson wanted to make sure that an obstacle was placed in the path of the destructive character (here understood as the squatters who had stolen Aboriginal land and refused to acknowledge what they owed) and the view to the untrammelled horizon of capitalist prosperity forever blotted and interrupted.



50 kms

ARARAT

MOUNT WILLIAM/ DUWIL

JARDWADJALI

DJADJA WURRUNG

BALLARAT

WOI WURRUNG/ WURUNDJERI

BUNINYONG

CHAAP WUURONG (Dawson)/ TJAPWURRUNG (Blake)/ HAMILTON DJAB WURRUNG (Clark)

WADA WURRUNG

MELBOURNE YARRA RIVER

MOUNT ROUSE / KOLOR

BUNURONG KUURN KOPAN NOOT (Dawson)/ PEEK WHUURONG (Dawson)/ GUNDITJMARA/ WARRNAMBOOL LANGUAGE (Blake)/ DJAGURD WURRUNG (Clark) KANGATONG TOWER HILL

PORT FAIRY

GIRAI WURRUNG

LAKE CAMPERDOWN CORANGAMITE

GEELONG

PORT PHILLIP BAY

Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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GRAMPIANS/ GARIWERD

FRAMLINGHAM

WARRNAMBOOL BASS STRAIT

21

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22 Translations The cost of invisibility was made visible. Yet the back story remained hidden. The pastoral invasion had been rehearsed at home. The Scottish Clearances were associated with invasion by sheep – the same Cheviots that replaced the ‘old native Highland sheep’, crossing over the Highland Line (‘In 1790 they were across the Cromarty Forth into Ross, and two years later they reached Caithness in the far north’) were ‘like an army sweeping the people from the land’. Meanwhile in the south another Scotsman, Sir John Sinclair, was recommending another invasion: ‘We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country’, he informed the House of Commons. Why, then, he asked, ‘should we not attempt a campaign also against our great domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the kingdom? … Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.’ 15 The back story to this back story is that, after Wellington’s defeat of the Napoleonic forces in Portugal and Spain, the colonial surveyor of Western Victoria, Sir Thomas Mitchell, created a new colonial toponomy out of Wellington’s battle sites and leading soldiers. But to go back to the comparison of enclosure to invasion, and the association of both with an improved pastoral industry: the long-term corollary was obvious at least to Joseph Arch – ‘parliament spent some twenty millions of money to wipe out slavery in the West Indies, but how about the slaves at home? We who have been white slaves, and those of us who are white slaves still, are driven to desperate remedies. I say that, if our country means to go on treating us as mere machines in the hands of a money-mongering few, we will leave her, let her fate fall how it may. Waves of men have rolled from her shores to foreign strands, and waves of men will follow. Yes, the tide of labour will ebb away from these island shores, and agricultural England will be left bare.’ 16 Here was a second-order colonial clash waiting to happen as emigration (to Australia, for example), however much it might help the ‘over-population’ problem in the home country created by exclusion from the land, must recapitulate the original unlawful colonial land grab; and the fact that we were historically ‘white slaves’ in Arch’s lurid formulation, was hardly an excuse to enslave others.

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Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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Another symptom of a prehistory of internal colonisation related to what Marquand called ‘the Voice’, which, as he indicated, was as hard to locate as public space. If a pre-migratory sensibility was discernible in my attraction to lines of flight, it was logical to expect a comparable habit of communication. Robert Gray’s decision to follow the flight of the swallow signified embracing his poetic vocation – with, as we noticed, quite rigorous rules of metaphor. But what if the habit of speech resisted this split and, instead of fulfilling the etymological meaning of discourse, whose hither and thither the swallow’s zigzag path exactly describes, remained arrested and fused in an earlier stage of psychic development, in which an awareness of ‘infinite pyramids’ meant that the space manifold of meaning accommodated ball and bird simultaneously without any irritable desire to choose between them? Here there would be no cognitive dissonance between walking and rhyming; in fact, the birds might help. About beginning a poem John Shaw Neilson wrote, ‘I have no voice. Riding slowly along on a quiet hack I would try to hum the tunes I knew.’ Dissatisfied with these, he tried making up his own, but without success: then ‘as a consolation to my wounded pride I would start to make a rhyme’.17 And, as we know, Neilson associated finding his own line with songbirds and, notably, with ascension into a tree: ‘I would have many sweet singers and far would I climb / Right into the purple of heaven to reach me a rhyme’ 18 – lines I have always connected with Sappho’s unattainable ‘sweet apple on a high branch [which] the apple pickers forgot – well, no, they didn’t forget – were not able to reach’.19 For here what counted, in cricket as in migration, was the gesture of outreach that tore open the envelope of sovereignty and insisted identification lay in the direction of desire. Writing about this poem, Anne Farley comments, ‘Eros is the instability of always reaching, never grasping’, essentially delighted by something that is absent, aroused by that which ‘eludes totalisation’.20 All the possible lines of flight imagined in the game’s region of chance or found and lost in the swallow’s hunting dérive elude representation. The nurse of these lines finds herself in losing herself in the other: the poetic expression of this self-doubling or, more exactly coming into being through the migration of desire, is mimicry, not as ironic self-distancing but as the echoic amplification of a possibility lying somewhere in the environs between what is said and what might be meant.

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24 Translations At the border post one question is perennial: What is your name? Aboriginal censuses conducted by government officials or missionaries had the twinned goals of subjugation and indoctrination. Curiosity about authenticity or origin was muted because what counted, and it was the same in the records of convict transportation, was an inescapable cipher uniquely identifying the subject for discipline. At the border, though, a human geography is implied, a background analogous to that betrayed in Australian place names, whose compressed stories are a poetic ethnography of cultural origins, conceptual horizons and wish fulfilments. Bundled up in ‘What is your name’ is an entire ideology of authority predicated on territorial priority, legitimating genealogy and, most obscure but comprehending all other questions, convincing evidence of a story; and the thoughtful migrant realises that the diplomacy of strangeness depends on finding a convincing throughline. Certainly, from this perspective I was ill-prepared for immigration. An attraction to playing all the parts, finding satisfaction in suspending village identity politics in favour of masquerade – imagining the voice, the history, the outreach I would, as a schoolboy, like to have – was rendered less playful, more existential you might say, by the ban on story in our household. ‘4. Boys of Down Ampney, Ogbourne, Bishopstone, Filkins, Southrop, Longcot and Thrupp. 1. Who in another time were. 3. The champion singers of the land. 2. While the pound is devalued another time. 4. Sit at their desks’, I wrote many years later in a radio work called The Native Informant. Church censorship of local custom, pursued as zealously in the Vale of the White Horse as in regional Victoria, was part of the reason why we as a community lacked organic credentials. An ally in the extirpation of folk song, local accent and, indeed, local attachments was a Methodism that linked social and educational progress to spiritual purification, a democratisation of dogma that interpreted talking about yourself as prideful and curiosity about the family as a dangerous distraction from service to the larger community of God.21 When my uncle heard the ‘voice’ that led him to train for the Methodist ministry, he readily embarked on a journey to a new, spiritual country. Lapsed Methodists, we were not zealots; besides there was mixed spiritual ancestry – Primitive Methodism being a late entrant into the family from the distaff side. Yet a heritage of identity theft, whether manifested as expulsion from cottage and garden or as the



Movement forms: migrant prehistory

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active goal of conversion produced, curiously, a certain freedom to choose one’s historical identity. In fact, it is likely that one exile was linked to the other. Commenting on the impact of enclosure on a Sussex village, George Sturt observed, What has most obviously happened to the village population resembles an eviction, when the inmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the road-side with their goods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling of their home, and aware only of being removed against their will. It is a genuine movement of them; yet it does not originate with them; and the first effect of it upon them is stagnation. Unable to go on in their old way, yet knowing no other way in which to go on, they merely wait disconsolate.22

This observation was widely shared: Richard Jefferies, commenting on the anomie of the labouring class in rural Wiltshire saw no solution except emigration or ‘village organisation’ to reclaim some powers of local self-government. Trying to remedy the mass unemployment caused by enclosure, Joseph Arch distinguished between migration (by which he meant relocation inside England – recommended) and emigration (to Canada, Australia, etc. – a last measure), but even by these criteria the Carters were stay-at-homes. A name like ours – defining a genre of labour, it suggested the irrelevance of any personal identification – supplies whole villages of agricultural labourers in the Victorian censuses: I can find my grandmother’s name in the Hinton Waldrist census for 1890 and other related surnames swarm like tadpoles between Highworth and Kingston Bagpuize. But in any case, is this the right genealogy? Identification with the rural oppressed engenders a belated self-pity, as if my migration can be blamed on the Tories, but it is speculative at best. Besides, in our case, the dismay of displacement found, let us speculate, consolation in religious conversion. In this latter guise, the first Methodists in Faringdon conceived their task in imperial terms. One snowy morning the ‘pioneer’ missionary Thomas Russell stood on the Downs near Bishopstone and gazed down into The Vale of the White Horse, he assured his companion: ‘Brother Ride, yonder country is ours, and we will have it’ – a sentiment entirely comparable with Major Mitchell’s ‘We had at length discovered a country ready for the immediate reception of civilised man; and destined to become a portion of a great empire.’ 23 Once Faringdon was ‘taken’, the task

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26 Translations of the first converts was to assist Mr Russell, ‘that the borders of the mission might be enlarged’, and, having been enlarged, to ensure that no outpost should fall to the enemy.24 Whether my lot were indigenous inhabitants of north-west Berkshire or strangers, spiritual immigrants committed to rooting out heresy, corruption and local superstition, the net legacy is the same: an induced historical coma as regards anything to do with family history. In the absence of story, one was free to make it up. Not so on my mother’s side where her great-grandfather had bequeathed us a remarkable memoir of his life on and around the Calder in Yorkshire’s West Riding as bargeman (by courtesy, ‘master’), miller, rag merchant (even emigration agent).25 A Unitarian strong in the Chartist cause and a (finally disillusioned) promotor of the Cooperative movement, Joseph’s story spans the period between the trade depression of the Napoleonic War and its aftermath, the price inflation of the Crimean War and the ultimate impact of the American Civil War on transatlantic trade. If the Carters endured the ebb and flow of enclosure, its revolution in master–tenant relations, its casting adrift from the smallholding, Joseph Terry and his Mirfield kin floated on the tides of industrialisation. His narrative is a Bildungsroman that seeks to derive a spiritual lesson from economic fluctuations. Life on the canals secured a certain independence from the social revolution occurring onshore as up and down the wool weaving valleys of the Calder and the Spen work was migrating from the cottage to the mill. Barges were mobile smallholdings: you could sleep next to the cargo and the return on the journey was a subsistence to live on. Hence Joseph’s infant entanglement with the industrial revolution was a consequence of a literal shipwreck that forced his family on land. Alcohol abuse and what we would now call post-traumatic stress did the rest and at the age of six or seven the young Joseph found himself put to work in ‘what was called the “Setting Shop” where some part of my time was spent setting cards or inserting the card teeth into leaves and garters, as they were called, to fit the scribbling machines for scribbling wool. This was a most wearisome and dreary task as we had sometimes as many as sixteen hundred teeth to prick for one half-penny … great numbers suffered much in health from this, worse than slavish employment.’ 26 Joseph retained no Luddite nostalgia: ‘I am very happy to know that for many years now this

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business has nearly all been done by machinery, and the children of the poor are either at school or much better employed and that too at much higher wages.’ 27 Enslavement to wage labour is an exile from self-determination associated with land employment: Joseph was a businessman of remarkable ingenuity and thrift, yet a combination of cooperative idealism, repeatedly volatile trading conditions and the call of a growing family caused a concatenation of ‘setbacks’. The central setback is the failure of the Brackenhill flour mill whose freehold purchase had placed Joseph in serious debt. The business prospered for seven years before the coming of the Crimean War: ‘Mainly owing to our war with Russia, Trade was depressed on all hands and Bread stuffs had risen to an almost famine price.’ In a curious metaphor, Joseph internalises the imperial conflict, imagining millers as officers somehow implicated in the collapse: ‘Numbers fell in the deadly strife to rise no more … As in a great battle, when the ranks get sadly thinned, the officers must come in for their share of the loss, so it was in our Trade.’ 28 Among the fatally wounded was Joseph himself, who now most reluctantly gave up Coppin Hall, associated in his memory with the happiest period of family life and prosperity. But Joseph was also a moral economist: no loss without its hidden profit, as these lines from ‘Cottage Poems’ declare, ‘Life’s cup of joy can ne’er wax full, / Some wrecking storm disturbs each lot, / Or else some darker sadder lull.’ 29 Running a temperance hotel, acting as a shipping agent, an emigration agent, an auctioneer and a carpet salesman are Joseph’s involuntary avocations over the next years culminating in a business opportunity that is an allegory of what mercantile capitalism did to the human spirit. Acquiring capital enough to clean his own flocks and rags for markets, Joseph noticed that cleaning produced dust and, more surprising, that ‘the sale of the small dust which came out of them, and most of which went to America for various uses’ was extremely profitable (so much so that the dust production technique was a jealously guarded trade secret. In any case, it comes to an end: ‘the American Civil War had such an effect on Trade there that I felt no desire to renew it.’ 30 And the long sequel is a return to the water: in a retrospect dated around 1888, Joseph wrote: ‘I may say that for the last thirty years I have been more or less connected with the boating trade, and have had once over for

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28 Translations numbers of years a nice yacht, in which we sometimes took long voyages to Goole, Hull etc. and in which I gave my boys some training in the managing of sails &c. I have also had at one time as many as six boats employed in the coal trade &c. and also one kept fitted up like a large camp in which I took all my large family on long trips during the summer seasons. Sometimes for over a month together all sleeping on board.’ 31 Inside the apparent stasis of my father’s forebears is the hidden movement form of local dislocation. Fred Carter’s purchase of ‘the land’ after the First World War, conformed to Joseph Arch’s advice: ‘Migration not emigration is the cure I cry for now, as I cried for it in 1873; but with migration must go partial redistribution of land and readjustment of land tenure … If he [the labourer] finds he has a bit of English soil to stand on he will soon say: “I am going to stay in the old country; there’s hope for a man here now.”’ 32 Our land was an isthmus overlooking an ocean of privatisation, providing foothold enough to imagine flight from this continental contraction to another, more ample utopia. But at this impersonal level of historical ethnographic characterisation Joseph Terry’s narrative is similar as concealed within it is a movement form, the migration conducted by water, the liquid medium that cuts through the Pennines of white enslavement maintaining extraterritorial connections between the opposite ports of Goole and Liverpool and their maritime extensions, respectively the Humber and the Mersey. Joseph himself understood the water connection allegorically. The heart ‘by sorrows chasten’d’, for example, rises ‘Better arm’d for storms and tempests, as o’er life’s rough sea it sails; / Ready for each fanning zephyr, or the wild, terrific gale.’ 33 Conventional imagery of this kind gives a better insight into the Victorian imaginary than more original formulations. Allegorical and real shipwreck, tempests real and imagined, the voyage poised between gale and lull lend meteorology a political meaning. Remember Caroline in Shirley: ‘I have seen such storms in hilly districts in Yorkshire; and at their riotous climax, while the sky was all cataract, the earth all flood, I have remembered the Deluge.’ 34 This recollection occurs overlooking Nunneley Common. Nunnwood is described as ‘the sole remnant of antique British forest in a region whose lowlands were once all sylvan chase’. Caroline explains: ‘It is like an encampment of forest sons of Anak. The trees are huge and old. When you

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stand at their roots, the summit seems in another region: the trunks remain still and firm as pillars, while the boughs sway to every breeze. In the deepest calm their leaves are never quite hushed, and in high wind a flood rushes – a sea thunders above you.’ Shirley asks: ‘Was it not one of Robin Hood’s haunts?’ 35 Indeed it was, as Joseph recalls in his poem ‘A Morning Walk, near Kirklees Wood’, where the following thought association occurs: the poverty of childhood (‘I … A daily outcast, used to roam / Far from my poor and cheerless home’), the protector of the poor (‘The hero’s name was Robin Hood’) and the ultimate return to a pre-enclosure paradise (where ‘thy foliage’ is among ‘Sweet emblems of the great and good, / In God’s vast garden, Kirklees Wood).36 In articulating an inner landscape, familiar poetic clichés worked better than subtler comparisons: when Gray chooses the path of the swallow, he opts to find his own poetic way and to establish a smallholding of interests protected from the unthinking, regulatory framework of received habit. But in the culture I am evoking, one brought up on Bible reading and hymn singing, the quickest route to rhapsodic self-transcendence was regularity of beat and banality of rhyme. Such measures once set had the predictability of the well-struck cricket ball; their performance was a reaffirmation of a poetic universe in which pilgrimage, storm and shipwreck, and the eventual return of the Prodigal Son to the fold were parables. ‘Methodism was born in song’, declares The Methodist Hymn Book but, more precisely, it was launched with a number of tunes on which endless religious verses could be sung. The lexicon of worship was similarly repetitive, and precisely because it offered little conceptual distraction, served as a common spiritual argot. Hence, it seems to me, even writing that wears its artistic pretensions on its sleeve (like my own poem quoted earlier) may arise from this unacknowledged substrate, whose rote imagery it may seek to remint but whose ancestral associations remain uncontested. And, in a colonial context, this poetic patterning is hardly innocent as, once colonised, it is a servant of empire – as the calling to serve rapidly becomes indistinguishable from the second Deluge of service abroad, according to which we: ‘Bear the news to every land, / Climb the steeps and cross the waves’,37 a programme greatly assisted when the ‘waters’ freely ‘roll, / Til, like a sea of glory’, ‘His story’ ‘spreads from pole to pole’.38 And the apotheosis of this oceanic tumult? It

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30 Translations is the end of bad weather: when ‘all the lands shall worship … every storm is stilled’.39 Other images in this parabolic ecology are marginalised: the sylvan renewal of Bronte’s Nunnwood, paralleled in the symbolic value I gave to the orchard, not least because its labyrinth of perches modelled angelic communication, forms little part of the Methodist orthodoxy. It returns, though, in the humanist expression of religious conviction in the sentimental literature of the smallholding. Here, in an unusual twist, Joseph’s barge substitutes for the front porch appreciation of the picturesque. But everything has its price; Joseph’s opportunities to enjoy the countryside passing by was a function of canalisation when obstacles to navigation had been largely removed, one was free to skim softly across level waters – a new freedom of movement that, according to pro-enclosure writer John Howlett, embodied a double improvement. Howlett, who thought that ‘enclosures, navigable canals, agriculture, our fisheries and our naval strength seem inseparably united’,40 accordingly argued that the benefits of canals were pretty much those said to flow from enclosure: ‘Particular injuries are easily compensated, and as to the mere charms of fine views, and delightful prospects, navigable canals more frequently tend to heighten them than to diminish them, not only by means of that various shifting scene they immediately introduce, but by that richer luxuriance of pasturage and those higher improvements of culture, which they finally accomplish.’ 41 If a migrant ethnography concerns the prehistory of translation, narrated in terms of real and symbolic movement forms, then Joseph’s history of his life is a sequence of flows and catchments corresponding to alternating periods spent on land or on water. His Bildungsroman as the picture of a man who grows from abject poverty and neglect to philosophical self-understanding, economic respectability, ethical clarity and political forwardness describes a psychological and emotional economy that can be compared to the gradual conversion of the wild and unenclosed Calder into a suite of canals in which potential tumult and shipwreck are engineered into flat, glassy reflective reaches and passage between their different levels controlled by locks. Two psychic geographies meet here. Writing about the Warwickshire agricultural trade unionist, Joseph Tysoe (whose views, social, political and religious so closely anticipate those of my paternal grandfather), A.K. Ashby comments on an often overlooked

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consequence of enclosure. Even in her grandmother’s childhood, she reflects, it was forty years ‘since the open fields of Tysoe’s great communal farms … could be freely crossed in all directions’, since ‘she and her companions were restricted to footpaths’.42 The forfeit of space, the alienation caused by enclosure, involved another, poetic contraction: ‘Before enclosure, every brook, every slight hill, every path, every group of trees had had its name and been called by it. Now, no one person in Tysoe, except those who had pored over the enclosure map, knew which was Shortmoor Shilch or the Ass Brook.’ 43 In Faringdon it was the same: the once numinous and eloquently called-out features of the neighbourhood lay incarcerated within the hedges of privately owned farms, an entire mythological heritage brutally extirpated and translated into the calculus of annual yields and efficiency of labour. In this alien environment we boys waged a guerrilla warfare: in the interests of play, turning drainage ditches into trenches by means of which we skirted fields as far as the nearest woods; exploiting the hedges that curtailed our freedom as screens to thwart the farmer’s surveillance. But to return to our Joseph: the most eloquent pages of his autobiography are devoted to account of the rivers Calder and Aire as they stood at that time (1825–1828) before the canal improvements (the Calder and Hebble Navigation, further downstream Aire and Calder Navigation). The local names alone are evocative: entering the Calder at Park Nook Lock near Elland, first the ‘Bites’ and ‘Nesses’ were negotiated; next father and family entered Tug Cut (‘It was said to be haunted by a man of the name of Nichalty Tagg’ who could shut the lock gates even when the water was level), before issuing from Tug Lock into Tug Pond: the place at the time I allude to, shut out as it appeared to be from all the world, the winding and often impetuous Calder cutting it off on one side, and the precipitous unending hills mounting to the clouds, and thickly and impenetrably wooded on the other, caused dread to creep over our young hearts when moored on some dark winter’s night in this horrible place, where the death-like silence was broken by the moaning of the wind amongst the towering oaks, or the thunders of the roaring storm.

Then into the ‘New Cut’ leading to Brighouse Pond (‘very difficult to pass’ because ‘the channel changed several times from one side to the other’); thence ‘we entered Kirklees Cut and from Kirklees

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32 Translations Cut into Kirklees Pond – and so on, always navigating by alternating ‘cut’ and ‘pond’ – Cooper Bridge, Batty, next (beyond Mirfield, always hauling east) ‘Ledgard Bridge, Shipley Bridge and Greenwood Lock and Pond’, opposite which stood ‘the ruins of a very large Foundry or Iron Works’ long since ‘obliterated by the cutting of the railway’. Above Wakefield they entered Thornhill, ‘or Long Cut as it was called’, then Double Lock, Figure of Three Lock/Pond to Horbury (‘where the channel lay right over on the far side of the river and we had to have a very long line out to the horse, which was very awkward when there was a strong current’). It is a landscape of childhood reminiscence: the itinerary is interrupted here as in his mind’s eye Joseph sails past and revisits ‘the same old pasture’, his cottage home (‘The same flagged front or door stone’), ‘Its memory shall still cherished be, / Where’er my wandering footsteps tend.’ But this autobiographical pond, stilled in the mirror of memory, is exceptional. Generally, the riverine environment has disappeared, straightened out, deepened, by-passed – like Selby (when they were laid up there Joseph remembers ‘boating, fishing, bird-nesting, riding horses …) when the Knottingley-Goole canal was opened.44 The autobiographical association of childhood with a pre-enclosure England is a widespread trope in Victorian life-writing, from the Brontes to Ruskin and William Morris. Its associated trope is the village as childhood. Although dotted with picturesque literary episodes, although replete with Wordsworthian regret for preindustrial Edens lost, the originality of Joseph’s narrative is its cinematic fusing of remembering with movement. ‘O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, / How often has my spirit turned to thee’, Wordsworth exclaims, paying tribute to ‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts’.45 Naturally, Joseph is not a poet in these vocational terms, but he is an exact observer, not least because, instead of anthropomorphising the Calder, he identifies himself as the wanderer. Unlike Wordsworth’s enduring memory place, Joseph’s world of flows and catchments is going to be locked up in the interests of better communication. Mirfield Railway Station 1865 ‘has direct communication with almost every other line in the land … having completely revolutionised the neighbourhood, destroying all the ancient landmarks’.46 The irony was that opening up the trans-Pennine waterways to international trade, while it masqueraded as an expansion of opportunity, simply

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exposed the old watermen and the associated water edge industry to the fluctuations of international trade. The ballast of local knowledge was thrown out and replaced with foreign goods. A particular identification with places was rendered redundant and the emotional topography derived from voyaging through it no longer had exchange value. Despite the picturesque prospects cultivated from his Coppin Hall front porch, Joseph’s habitual viewpoint is low: from a floating home, the world glides by at water level. Joseph inhabited an anastomosing environment where channel and pool were fused; destination sat within destination as each night they paused to moor; and when reached bestowed their names on ‘cuts’ or channels linking them to other places. To the end of his life Joseph travelled sublimely within a tiny dendritic network; an itinerant worker who, unlike the expelled agricultural worker migrating in search of work, carried the dignity of home-owning snail-like on his shoulder. Perhaps this explains Joseph’s extraordinary versatility and resilience. As an 11-year-old boy prematurely thrown into the ‘Liverpool trade as it was called – carrying goods, grain etc., from Yorkshire towns’ – Joseph had stood on the ‘Slip’ at George’s Dock Basin ‘occupied with the thoughts of ships and going to sea’.47 But care for his ill mother drew him back. At the other end of his life, he contracted to take a cargo of shoddy manure to Driffield, some 19 miles north of Hull in the Yorkshire Wolds, explaining, ‘As this trip was a long one, and through a new country to us, beyond Hull, I was anxious my wife should also go.’ Sarah Ann took a dim view of their ill-smelling cargo but endured, like Joseph fascinated by the sensation of entering an entirely foreign country. When they stopped at nights ‘at some very lonely turn of the river’, it was ‘like being out in the wilds of America’.48 An impersonal history of movement forms may provide the best foundation of a personal history of migration. An environmental unconscious secreted in habitual turns of phrase, automatically internalised spatial prohibitions and (what went with them) a correspondingly rich fantasy world of flight does not produce a memory landscape richly populated with novelesque shocks, revelations and other educational events. Closer to the unnoticed mobile body of everyday life, it expresses itself as a series of projections that rationalise the actual enclosure of social, physical and poetic pathways

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34 Translations in terms of a heuristic geometry of possible relations. Later, in Dark Writing, I promoted a concept that I thought useful in explaining how we navigate urban space. ‘The eido-kinetic intuition refers to the inherent sense mobile subjects have of their relationship with their surroundings. It is highly developed in ball players who are able simultaneously to see all the passages forming and closing about them. It is the capacity to intuit directly the nearness of things, and to have the measure of them. It seems to stem from our capacity to see the components of our world under the aegis of movement. Perhaps this is the condition natural to hunters. In this, a wall, a tree, a gap, another person carries with its appearance the memory of all the approaches that constitute its movement history – a history spelled out in the running, leaping and walking that has mediated its place in our lives. Is this what a building is? The architecture of dreams. House flies beating the bounds of their polyhedrons propose a metaphysics of middle-air …49

Such observations are eido-kinetic because the recollected mental image associated with them is kinetic and enjoys an internal topology, a region, if you like, of coordinated reflection. Arguing that ‘passage’ is inhabited first, fixed objects, I suggested, manifested themselves as ‘landing places, diving boards, rebounding surfaces, angles of incidence’, a world, in short, of ‘potential geometrical figures’ whose relationship we draw through the mobile body.50 Here, at least, the flight paths of the cricket ball and the swallow are both accommodated. In Amplifications I suggested that this could produce a uniquely personal measure of the gap able to be translated from one country to another, a way of navigating that put the pass back into passport. Referring to an art experiment, where I laid sections of the Uffington White Horse over ground figures designed in Australia, I wondered whether the compound of these eido-kinetic moves was a figure of some stability, a forest of possible poses and passes we carried with us wherever we went (Figure 1). In a passage I much liked quoting, Thomas de Quincey had imagined that a commercial history of the Ocean would comprise the sum of all its voyages, ‘eternally running up and down it, and scoring lines upon its face’. If these ephemeral traces could be

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preserved, the weave of them would yield a pattern: ‘in some of the main “streets” and “squares” (as one might call them) their tracks would blend into one undistinguishable blot’. This is a marvellous way of reconceiving the meeting place as the exception to Leonardo’s rule: here, transposed to the history of tracks and their lingering after image, his infinite pyramids are allowed to mingle. It also illustrates a process of intellection that De Quincey compared to a whorled shell or involute – ‘far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract states’.51 It would be the same with a migrant Gestalt (if we can entertain this idea for a moment). In a developmental series we pass from the simplest to the most complex. But the etiology of the movement form is different as its perplexed combinations, here signifying all the possible paths of propinquity coeval with the attention of the mobile body (witness the schoolboy cricketer anticipating a catch), cannot be unravelled without the surrounding environment collapsing like a house of cards. It is possible to derive all possible figures from the line and a good pedagogical strategy, as Paul Klee showed, is to start with the dot beginning to walk – but, already, the bipedal stride of the embodied walker has translated the dot-line into a figure of his own, a pattern of alternating stresses and glissandos. If we examine the footfall more closely, we discover a passage inside the print, broadly the angle of landing, the elastic shifting of balance and the push off into the next stride. Personally, I cannot imagine poetic style except in this way, as the subtlest suspense, interruption or running together of phrases, a syncopation doubly indicated by exploiting the tension between ordinary speech rhythms, contrapuntal inner rhythms and the mediator of these, the line ending. Already, in the glissando of the stride and its elastic inner divisions, we have introduced the principle of the curvilinear interval, whose external projection is the leap or the dive but whose inner horizon is the pose exemplified by the arrested striving of the contrapposto. Poses multi-dimensionalise the stride and communicate the desire of outreach in all directions. They express the Eros of overflow and the multiplication of such energy centres, and their arrangement produces a version of De Quincey’s woven pattern, a string figure of knots

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36 Translations

Figure 1  Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Hinges 7, 2006. Photomontage of Uffington White Horse (detail of photograph) and Paul Carter, ‘Re-imagining the wall’, Artline 200 black 0.4mm sketch 14.5 × 20.0 cms, notebook A36, 241, June 2005.

(or holes) tied together because held apart. It would be impossible to unravel this figure of the self-organising crowd without relapsing into a straight line whose human analogue is refugees walking in single file. As a combination of connecting paths, the arrangement is not simply a distribution of nodes, an urban fabric, say, in which De Quincey’s streets and square might comfortably fit. Nothing, in fact, is fixed: everything is suspended in a state of self-becoming through the other. It becomes archipelagic when the timing of the opening to the other is factored in – when, as it were, Robert Gray’s decision is not passed over but relocated at the centre of future relations, an alteration of perspective in favour of keeping probabilities in play whose implications are both poetic and political: in the archipelagic environment, where the setting of exchange rates may constitute the entire content of trade (not simply the framework), discourse as a whole may be metaphorical. Politically, as already



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indicated, as an open-ended decision-making structure, a stochastic region where probabilities outweigh certainties and contradictory positions not only co-exist but are essential to the distribution of governance, the archipelago may turn out to be nothing else than the extraterritorial project of public space.52

A creative region of this kind is turbulent. Turbulence, the principle of self-organising complexity, prevents the lines of flights from slumping into an undistinguishable blot. When I illustrated my essay Turbulence, Climate Change and the Design of Complexity with a suite of drawings I characterised as ‘graphic involutes’, I explained, Involutes, or thought forms, are four dimensional objects. Drawings of them, which are confined to the two dimensions of the page, seek to represent an act of turning over, of condensation and extraction that can be compared to the activity of the centrifuge. The graphic involute gives epistemological value to the interference patterns that arise when the principle of involution acts to fuse the incongruous into a harmonious form. Involuted shells are types of non-linear growth; their helical expansion is a product of feedback; they model the vortical motion of turbulence, when it is understood to be the maelstrom of creativity.53

This vortical figure of growth completes the translation of the simplex into the complex when both are conceived as phases of the movement form, understood here as a different way of doing history, appropriate to a migrant ethnography. A migrant creative practice is ‘dirty’, as we shall see, because it is solicitous of external support and feedback and consequently vulnerable to (or desirous of) mimetic mingling and mutation. Internally, as well as externally, essential powers of creative mobilisation are experienced in translation. The German Romantic poet Novalis made the apparently unexceptionable statement, ‘Only through representation does anything become clear.’ 54 But, if this is not simply a truism, it has the intriguing corollary that translation is prior to the understanding of the Word. Certainly, this reversal of Walter Benjamin’s influential thesis is congenial to the migrant, who, having abandoned the myth of self-legitimation framed in terms of territorial priority, genealogical continuity and unimpeachable story, finds that translation is more original than any appeal to origin. Dirty externally, such a practice is promiscuous internally: could poems and drawings be different expressions of the same existential

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38 Translations movement forms? These lines about ‘the riddles engraved in the skin / of public space’ suggest a positive answer: ‘Outsiders take refuge in the overlooked / “other place” that is occupied for free. / It is somewhere in between you and me, / the measure of passages that otherwise / could not be told apart from their movement.’ 55 But this, after all, is only a representation of an idea: to isolate a movement form permeating all expressions of a multimodal creative practice, while aesthetically pleasing, fails to reflect the echoic mimetic contingency of migrant sense-making and symbol creation. The best one can say is that these contingencies begin at home. I mentioned my interest in birdwatching. I have discussed elsewhere the importance of birdsong both then and as a creative resource in Australia. In sketching a migrant ethnography, though, my records of bird migration are more relevant. Throughout my secondary school years, like a latter-day Gilbert White, I kept notes of first and last sightings as summer migrants arrived and parted and winter migrants moved in or retreated north. Meteorologically or magnetically induced interference patterns introduced a thrilling illusion of geographical enlargement when vagrants, occasional visitors and rarities mingled with our temporary residents and citizen species. Other anthropomorphised species belonged to the order of the overlooked – sighting a notoriously secretive water rail or a famously nervous woodcock was a red letter day. My proto-scientific surveys concentrated on three artificial lakes located on the Buscot Estate, a short bike ride north of Faringdon in the upper Thames Valley. Curiously, the main lake adjoined the local cricket field: playing matches there, I experienced Gray’s decision as an acute practical dilemma that had nothing to do with poetry. Planted in the covers awaiting the next delivery, I was hard-pressed not to yield to a sudden movement in my peripheral vision or, the next over gazing in the opposite direction, to look right through the batsman to a movement in the trees. Generally, though, cricket’s high season was migration’s low season, and as we packed up wickets, pads and balls, it was time to extract my binoculars from their case and resume my solitary surveys. Proceeding carefully round the lakes, contrapuntally pausing at the slightest sign of movement, I had little sense of Buscot as a picturesque paradise. I knew nothing about the history of its house, its gardens, its occupants; successful bird watching involves a kind

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of sympathetic magic – the overlooked is observed because the observer is overlooked. My censuses of duck immigration and emigration, my ponderous descriptions of wheeling and settling flocks, my oddly peremptory weather notes evoke an enchanted environment of empirical lucidity, as if here I could study in the purest parenthesis the ideal involutions of migration, the full glory of the flocks flung like grain across the cold glittering water or ascending, gathering and wheeling away towards the Thames. Under the sky-bounded dome of autumn light, I had full rein to theorise the reasons of these flights, to experience an exaltation of spirit when, adapting Shelley to my interests, ‘to outstrip thy skiey speed / Scarce seemed a vision’. If family romances can exist, why not geographical ones, and perhaps for comparably unacknowledged reasons? My investment in Buscot was not simply ornithological: the woods and lakes offered an escape from the siege of enclosed fields surrounding Faringdon. A breach in the tightly woven skein of farming interests where the ‘real’ countryside was replaced by ‘a more distinguished one’, Buscot was perhaps ‘merely the expression of the child’s longing for the vanished happy time’,56 when all the fields and woods lay open and the brooks, rills and freshets minutely veining the Thames Valley and the Vale of the White Horse were free to form their own channels and pools. Adapting Freud’s thesis, couldn’t one say that my studies were motivated by a secret desire for upward mobility, as if my apprenticeship might serve as an initiation into the interests of the gentry and, as a sign of loyalty to their class interests, as a passport to a better life estate? Recognised as a knowledgeable native informant about the natural history of their holdings, they might even embrace me as a Prodigal Son, happily returned to the fold. If so, in this fantasy psychology mingled with the picturesque, revised descent lines merging with landscape design. In reality, there was nothing prelapsarian about Buscot Park and any historical innocence projected onto its (usually untenanted) solitudes – as if I could say with Sir Thomas Mitchell in Victoria’s Western District, ‘Of this Eden I was the first European to explore its mountains and streams’ 57 and, with my own scientific studies in mind, ‘It was evident that the reign of solitude in the beautiful vales was near a close’ 58 – was to entertain what we might call an Eros Complex, the conviction of being self-born.

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40 Translations In fact, my Arcadia largely owed its present appearance to the efforts of one owner, a highly successful Australian businessman, Robert ‘Tertius’ Campbell of Sydney, who purchased the estate in 1859 (when he was 48 years old) and proceeded to become ‘the largest sheep-raiser in England who was running 9,000 to 10,000 sheep mostly of the Lincolnshire breed plus 1000 bullocks on the approximate 5000 acre in area’;59 who, not content with pastoralism on an Australian scale, embarked on an ambitious scheme to create the first beetroot distillery in England, draining, irrigating, building a narrow gauge railway around the estate with three trains to collect the sugar beet and, for communications, equipping the estate with a private telegraph system.60 Coming across Buscot, whose scenery, soil and ‘abundance of water’ ‘contrasted strangely with the circumstance of … lying waste and unoccupied’, as Mitchell might have said,61 Campbell had by the 1870s transformed it into ‘the most highly industrialised farm in England’.62 And, just as Mitchell had sold antipodean pastoral capitalism in the guise of the picturesque,63 so sugar and spirit production coexisted with a park that was ‘beautifully wooded, variegated picturesquely in surface, and of great extent’.64 The significance of this is to demystify the idea of migrant autobiography, the romantic illusion of reflective self-determination – where even the glassy levels of Buscot’s lakes were regulated catchments serving irrigation lines to designated meadows, the idea of natural piety wears thin. In this upside-down world, the England I walked in was someone else’s Australia or, rather, what Australia could look like if, breaking the Oedipal spell that leaves the Prodigal Son penniless, the colonist could come home with resources enough to make England resemble the country he would like to inhabit. The impact of these aesthetic ironies on my sense of place – unsettling, surely, to find one lived in a picture – are, though, of far less interest than their implications for a migrant ethnography. Behind the capital poured into the Buscot Estate was a successful career in land speculation, whose profits Campbell had invested in every industry associated with Australia’s colonial growth: besides wool and beef, whaling, gold, coal, sugar, shipping, communications, finance, Campbell even, in 1852, purchased half of Port Fairy, apparently in expectation of its successful subdivision and improved land value.65 In partnership with his father, Robert invested in pastoral stations in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

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The territorial outreach of Campbell’s firm was extraordinary, as even a partial listing suggests: 1844–1849, ‘Telemon’ and ‘Melcombe’ runs, Moreton Bay, later Queensland (combined area 70,000, estimated carrying capacity of 21,000 sheep); 1845–1873, six stations, Darling Downs (combined area 286,000 acres with a government estimated carrying capacity, 44,000 sheep and 1800 cattle); Liverpool Plains, 1847–1873, eleven stations (just two of these, ‘Borah’ and ‘Burrumbulla’, run by Campbell’s brother-in-laws totalled 36,000 acres and were stocked with 9,500 sheep and ‘Bengaria’ near Warialda on the Gwydir River was surveyed at 16,000 acres); 1847 three stations on the Murray and Loddon rivers below Swan Hill (combined area 370,000 acres with an estimated carrying capacity of 52,000 sheep and 1500 cattle). Nor is this to mention the vast landholdings that Tertius’s son built up in New Zealand, in which Campbell also had an interest. Conservatively, Campbell’s land holdings between 1847 and 1873 were of the order of 850,000–900,000 acres, an area almost twice the size of pre-1974 Berkshire (then surveyed at 462,000 acres).66 What is the salient connection? It might be terms of employment. In his book Round About the Upper Thames, folklorist and social historian, Alfred Williams, gives us a glimpse of Squire Campbell’s impact on the local economy: ‘many people came to the little riverside village in order to obtain employment at one or other of the great works he took in hand’. The biblical cast of this extends into the next semi-mythical summation, ‘He brought into cultivation hundreds of acres of land that before had been useless, dug lakes and reservoirs at the costs of many thousands of pounds, and turned what had been a wilderness into a beautiful and fertile paradise.’ 67 The political quietism of such parabolic language should not be under-estimated: close kin to missionary discourse, it lends enclosure a theological justification. Still, ‘The men on his estate worked nine hours a day and received fair wages.’ 68 The closure of the beetroot distillery in the late 1870s overlapped with agricultural depression: ‘I could not help feeling that this agricultural depression was a natural judgement on the farmers for their treatment of the labourers’, Arch wrote,69 yet Campbell carried on – ‘After the cessation of beetroot growing and distilling and the plant sell-off at the 1881 census there were still listed 80 men, women and, girls and boys employed plus 13 domestic servants and employees in the mansion and lodge.’ 70

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42 Translations But Campbell died six years later and the estate was sold. The desuetude into which some labourers fell as a result may be guessed from Richard Jefferies’s classic essay ‘Village Organisation’, for the combined impact of enclosure and industrialised farming had produced a wage labourer who, once unemployed, had nothing to do.71 Information about working conditions on Campbell’s Australian holdings is scanty. Campbell relied on Aboriginal labour – his New South Wales stations were located in mainly Kamilaroi land – where, again, we are told he and his family were fair employers. But they were also pragmatic: when European shepherds deserted their posts for the gold fields, the brothers replaced them with Chinese coolies brought up from Victoria.72 Eric Rolls reports that on the Borrumbulla and Borah runs Aboriginal shepherdesses were employed. Was this usual? Dressed in long red flannel, they could be seen with their flocks from miles away. The Orr brothers (Campbell’s in-laws) stood up for their workers: when in 1855 an Aboriginal shepherd was murdered, they offered a generous reward for arrest and conviction.73 Very good, but this event is unlikely to have been isolated (or punished): Campbell’s great pastoral holdings, ‘Bengaria’ and ‘Borah’ stood on the Gwydir River, respectively north and south of the notorious massacre site, Myall Creek (1838). Recommending the pastoral occupation of country north of the Liverpool Plains, Mitchell (who was, incidentally, Campbell’s neighbour in Woolloomoloo) described ‘an almost boundless extent of the richest surface … still uncultivated and unoccupied by man’.74 In the same way the English agricultural labourer was invisible. ‘These white slaves of England stood there with the darkness all about them’, Arch wrote of his impressions of the Wellesbourne meeting where the resolution to form a Union was passed: ‘like the Children of Israel waiting for someone to lead them out of the land of Egypt’.75 But no less significant are the places where this and subsequent meetings occurred: pushed off the land, such people had nowhere to stand. They gathered where they could, sometimes ‘by the roadside’.76 And now there comes back to me a memory that shame has repressed, or time and circumstance annulled. Much of my Sunday cricket was played, as I have said, on cricket fields extracted for our use from large rural estates: the ban on public access was temporarily lifted to permit what was, after all, a reassuring affirmation of rural order. A middle-distance prospect of white clad

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men and boys performing their dreamlike drill back and forth across the sward was picturesque. It suggested that class division could be resolved aesthetically. As in an Aboriginal corroboree, there was no expectation that our audience would join in. There was, though, a rule that we should not look back: while the weekend guests were free to congregate on the parterre, and enjoy an entertainment flattering to their self-esteem, our role as actors in this especial rural scene was, like Sir Joseph Banks’s Gadigal, to pursue our way ‘in all appearance intirely unmovd by the neighbourhood of so unlikely an object as’ a country house and its crew. What is shameful is not the courtesy of respect – ahead of any meeting discretion is respectable – but the act of self-enclosure forcing it. Our advice to behave as if enjoying no independent existence in the eyes of our beholders – entirely marionettes of the picturesque – came from our captain. There hadn’t been a televisual moment of reproval, rather a tacit understanding that certain bounds would not be breached. In this regard, there was more at stake when the poet diverted his gaze from the speeding cricket ball to the skimming swallow. My greatgreat-grandfather also wrote a poem about swallows which, although conventionally expressed, has an unusual sentiment. Apostrophising the swallow for bringing joy in the spring, for breeding ‘A happy brood’ that ‘O’er the same pathless track are taught to roam’, Joseph’s thoughts turn to the journey: ‘Hid from our view yet take a long farewell’ and to the sobering thought that, before the swallow returns next spring ‘many a blooming youth … Who watch’d your sports’ will have died. Imagining life’s meaning in the double movement of parting and returning, Joseph adopts a migratory perspective, one in which appearing and disappearing are twinned, where looking back resumes its double meaning.77

Notes 1 Robert Gray, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, Selected Poems, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1985, 150. 2 English translation in Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Volume I, New York: Dover Publications, 1970, 39. 3 Donald Shambroom, ‘Leonardo’s Optics Through the Eyes of Duchamp: A Note on the Small Glass, tout-fait’, The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol. 1, Issue 2, May 2000.

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44 Translations 4 Simon Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’, originally in The Land Magazine, issue 7, Summer 2009, www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/ articles/short-history-enclosure-britain. 5 J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987, 100. 6 William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. G. Woodcock, London: Penguin, 1985. 7 David Marquand, Decline of the Public, Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 61. 8 What was signified by ‘land’ in our usage? To explain the duties of the Vale of the White Horse ‘fogger’ – contraction of ‘fodderer’, referring to ‘the farm-hand who tends the cow-cattle and pigs’ – Eleanor Hayden contrasts his field of operations with that of the carter, who ‘drives the plough and the harrow; he sows and carries the crops, and is responsible for the work and the welfare of the farm horses’. Additionally, the carter may travel to adjoining farms or even counties to bring home new horses or equipment and, of course, he is responsible for carting produce to station or market: ‘The fogger, on the other hand is never “on the land”. His duties lie about the homestead; his time is divided between the farmyard and the meadows’ (Islands of the Vale, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1908, 195). 9 Edmund Gosse, ‘Dunster Mill’, in The Autumn Garden, London: William Heinemann, 1909. 10 Alfred Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames, London: Duckworth & Co., 1923, 190. Concealed in an apple tree, Tom observes the dalliances of the local parson; caught out, the parson buys Tom off: ‘Come, take this purse of shining gold, / And never do thou the truth unfold.’ 11 On the authority of Pevsner. 12 Mark Girouard, ‘Faringdon House – II’, Country Life, 19 May 1966, 1247. 13 Jan Critchett, Untold Stories, Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1988, chapter 8. 14 From Jan Critchett’s excellent but unnumbered ‘Introduction to the Facsimile Edition’ of James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981. 15 John Sinclair, Memoirs of the Life and Works of the Late Right Honourable Sir John Sinclair, Bart. 2 vols, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1837, vol. 2, 111. Quoted by Helena Kelly, ‘Austen and Enclosure’, www.jasna.org/ persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/kelly.html. 16 Joseph Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself, London: Hutchinson, 1898.

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17 J. H. Phillips, Poet of the Colours: The Life of John Shaw Neilson, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1988, 89. 18 John Shaw Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, ed. Margaret Roberts, Canberra: Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, UNSW at ADFA, 2003, 455. 19 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton, NJ: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998, 26. 20 Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 69. 21 As touched on in Paul Carter, Amplifications, Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory, New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. 22 George Bourne, Change in the Village, London: Duckworth & Co., 1966, 193. 23 Major T.L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, London: T. & W. Boone, 1839, 2 vols, vol. 2, 170. 24 For the information about the Methodists in Faringdon, see www.myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/place-2/berkshire-2/ faringdon_circuit_berkshire, including the enigmatic resolution about asking one brother to speak to another about the danger of ‘letting Langford fall’. 25 Joseph Terry’s ‘Recollections of My Life’ consists of seventy-three typed pages, transcribed from Joseph’s original manuscript and in the author’s possession. A copy is held in the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, University of Brunel Library, Special Collection. From internal evidence the MS can be dated to 1871. However, the narrative mainly covers the period between Joseph’s birth (1816) and the conclusion of the American Civil War (one of the many merits of the narrative is its unblinking recognition of the direct connection between the repeated downturn in Joseph’s business prospects and cycles of trade protectionism associated with British imperial policy overseas). Besides offering a close-up picture of the industrialisation of the West Riding, notably in its impact on the water trade, Joseph’s narrative is a distinctive portrait of the writer, evoked through a series of ‘scenes’ or associative landscapes that represent the writer’s feelings at different periods in his life. 26 Terry, ‘Recollections’, 6. The impact of industrialisation on cottage-based spinning and weaving is widely told – see the Hammonds’ classic account in The Skilled Labourer. Brought up in Mirfield, Joseph had close personal and professional connections with Cleckheaton, and the West Yorkshire Luddite rebellion of 1812 when ‘a large body of men, including the Huddersfield and Leeds Luddites, some armed with pistols, others with old swords and home-made weapons and sledgehammers, set out

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46 Translations to attack William Cartwright’s Mill in Cleckheaton’ would have been prominent in his community’s memory. (See ‘Martha Arnold of Mirfield and the Kirkless Luddites’, March 2019 at: https://kirkleescousins.co.uk/ luddite-rebellion/) 27 Terry, ‘Recollections’, 6. Scribbling is another name for carding. ‘Common to all carders is card clothing. Card clothing is made from a sturdy flexible backing in which closely spaced wire pins are embedded. The shape, length, diameter, and spacing of these wire pins are dictated by the card designer and the particular requirements of the application where the card cloth will be used.’ The first practical machine to use a wire card was invented in 1834 – earlier ones were hand-driven. (‘Carding’, Wikipedia which also notes: ‘By 1838, the Spen Valley, centred on Cleckheaton had at least 11 card clothing factories and by 1893, it was generally accepted as the card cloth capital of the world.’) 28 Terry, ‘Recollections’, 56. 29 Joseph Terry, Poems, Manchester: John Heywood, 1874. 30 Terry, ‘Recollections’, 69. 31 Joseph Terry, note added to Sarah Ann Terry’s ‘Diary of a Voyage to Drifield, 1988’. Author’s possession. 32 Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself, 220. 33 Terry, Poems. 34 Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, Harmondworth, UK: Penguin, 1981, 220. 35 Bronte, Shirley, 220. 36 Terry, Poems, 35. 37 The Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes, London: Methodist Conference Office, 1933, 280. 38 The Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes, 693. 39 The Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes, 703. 40 John Howlett, Enclosures, a Cause of Improved Agriculture, of Plenty and Cheapness of Provisions, London: W. Richardson, 1787, 93. 41 Howlett, Enclosures, 93. 42 A.K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919, The Merlin Press, London, 1979, 7. 43 Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919, 281. 44 The paragraph summarises chapter 9 of ‘Recollections’ (11–14), evoking the Calder and Aire as they stood when Joseph was a boy (approximately 1825–28). 45 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines’, Poetical Works, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, 164, ll. 94–95. 46 Terry, ‘Recollections’. 47 Terry, ‘Recollections’. 48 Sarah Ann Terry, ‘Diary of a Voyage’, 1888.

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49 Paul Carter, ‘humdrum’, in Paul Carter, Ecstacies and Elegies: Poems, Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2013, 22. 50 Paul Carter, Dark Writing, Geography, Performance, Design, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, 268–269. 51 See the discussion in Paul Carter, Turbulence, Climate Change and the Design of Complexity, Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2015, 61. See also: Thomas de Quincey, ‘The Palimpsest of the Human Brain’, Suspiria de Profundis. (See also https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/de_quincey/thomas/ suspiria-de-profundis/chapter2.html.) 52 Paul Carter, Decolonising Governance, Archipelagic Thinking, London: Routledge, 2018, 23. 53 Carter, Turbulence, 85. 54 Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 4 vols, 1960, vol. 3, 246, no. 40 (trans. Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4199n921/). 55 Paul Carter, ‘A lecture in Warsaw’, in Carter, Ecstacies and Elegies, 53. 56 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Exploration of Myth, G. Richter and E. J. Liebermann (trans.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 71. 57 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, vol. 2, 173. 58 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, vol. 2, 174. 59 Elihu Burritt, A Walk from London to Land’s End and Back, 1864. Quoted in https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm. 60 John Gray, ‘An Industrialised Agricultural Estate in Berkshire’, www.buscotpark.com/history/an-industrialised-agricultural-estate-in-berkshire. 61 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, 2 vols, vol. 2, 173–174. 62 https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm. This source, although factually reliable, tends to the hagiographic. Buscot’s previous owner, Edward Loveden, had already turned it into ‘one of north Berkshire’s most progressive estates’ (Nigel Hammond, Rural Life in the Vale of the White Horse, 1780–1914, Reading: William Smith, 1974, 10). Like a number of his contemporary agricultural entrepreneurs, Loveden took advantage of enclosure, using selective animal breeding, drainage of farmland, fertilisation of the soil, development of new crops and intensive husbandry, both arable and pastoral, to increase the land’s yield and the landowner’s profits (Hammond, Rural Life, 6). And Hammond notes that we also owe the construction of Buscot’s two lower (and ornamental) lakes to Loveden (27). If Campbell’s biographer attributes all of Buscot’s improvements to his subject, Hammond errs

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48 Translations in the opposite direction, managing his discussion of Buscot without a single reference to Campbell. The truth lies somewhere in-between; hence, however innovative and productive Loveden’s Buscot may have been, the house he built between 1780 and 1783 was by the 1850s semi-derelict, and we know that Campbell and his family rented in Stanford-in-the-Vale while extensive repairs were carried out to make the house habitable. See https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/ index.htm. 63 See Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, chapter 8; ‘The picturesque in Australia made the space of travelling visible to the traveller. It realised for him his own historical destination – to travel or to settle down’ (242). 64 https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm. 65 See https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm. But also Marten A. Syme, The Belfast Fantasy: James Atkinson in the Antipodes, Port Fairy: the Author, 2009, 60 and J.W. Powling, Port Fairy, the First Fifty Years, 1837–1887: A Social History, Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1980, 100. While Campbell had a close professional relationship with the land developer, William Rutledge, it appears that Campbell’s father was the first to invest in Port Fairy (see Syme, The Belfast Fantasy, 20). Typically, Tertius held on to the land he had purchased cheaply until the sale price was right (1869): ‘In the mid to late 19th century Belfast was one of Australia’s largest ports catering to the whaling industry. Like many of Robert’s land holdings there was a time to buy and a time to sell.’ (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm.) 66 The significance of (intermittently) using Aboriginal names for the new ‘runs’ is discussed by Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall, who conclude that such names, taken out of context and applied without any reference to their rich diversity of Indigenous meaning, ‘simply served to secure the privileged position of the white presence in the pastoral landscape’ (Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall, Imperial Spaces: Placing the Irish in Colonial Australia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, 148). In other words, colonial enclosure acts were advanced lexically as well as by lex, the Law. The same authors note that ‘Acts of enclosure’ ‘created a new and, for settlers, arguably universal vocabulary of landscape. Terms like paddock, yard, homestead or run formed part of a lexical currency that connected squatters to a shared system of functional understanding that transcended ethnic consciousness or national origins’ (Proudfoot and Hall, Imperial Spaces, 155). 67 Alfred Williams, Round About the Upper Thames, London: Duckworth & Co., 1922, 97.

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68 Williams, Round About the Upper Thames, 101. Although inaccurate in historical detail, Williams is an acute first-hand observer, providing, for example, a detailed account of the 20 acre hilltop reservoir that Campbell constructed, including the birdlife that attracted me to it. Only much later did I realise that the ‘Reservoir’ followed the model of an Australian ‘dam’. 69 Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself, 67. And: ‘Their poverty had fallen to starvation point (67) – the direct cause of the formation of the Union – for which daring, as Arch reminded his would-be followers, Unionists of an earlier time (1834) ‘had been sent in hulks to Australia’ (70). 70 John Raymond, Rootsweb, Free pages, 3 June 2017–8 June 2019. (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~jray/campbell/index.htm) 71 Richard Jefferies, The Hills and the Vale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 167. 72 Raymond, Rootsweb, Free pages, 3 June 2017–8 June 2019. 73 This was £70, said to be greatly more than a shepherd’s annual wages. But were Aboriginal shepherds and stockmen paid in wages? 74 T.L Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, London: T. & W. Boone, 1848, 292. 75 Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself, 73. 76 Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself, 97. 77 Terry, Poems.

2

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Native informants: enigmas of communication

The Native Informant, a work for radio made in 1993, is discussed in Amplifications; the script is published in Absolute Rhythm. The name is promising but what is its relevance to a migrant ethnography? The immediate circumstances of its making are easily told – I came across tape recordings made in 1965–1966 which, when transcribed, proved to contain schoolboy recitations of ancient Greek verbs and French conversation. No doubt this work served to articulate a migrant persona: ‘As a representation of another (“In exile at home you practised being a stranger”), the autobiographical subject can be cast without any fear of betrayal; for nothing, strictly, is private; no interiority needs to be imagined. Whatever personal history is communicated is echoic, found through the sound recordings and their poetic commentary.’ 1 No doubt, it took the articulation of a migrant position another step further when, scripting a role for the ‘Author’, I cast myself as my own interpreter, as if I was an acoustic archaeologist in search of the treasure of the lost voice: ‘As an instance of the actor spoken through by another, and thereby achieving a doubled identity, I offered my experience of listening to myself.’ 2 And finally, illustrating ‘the ethnographic claim that the native informant might be none other than the ethnographer talking to himself or herself’,3 it suggested a migrant poetics whose interest, and even techniques, were coterminous with postcolonial revisionist ethnography.4 Yet the analogy was hardly developed: early colonial ethnography plays a far more prominent role in other scripts from that period, in What Is Your Name (as the title implies) as well as Lost Subjects where the kidnapping of Arabanoo is referred to. While I riffed on the scandalous assertion of the remarkable linguist Walburga von Raffler-Engel that, ‘Most of the time the

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lonely subject was one mystical native speaker who could even be the author himself’, I did not refer this back to her autoethnography of the discipline, where the earliest students of Aboriginal cultures limited the informant to speaking ‘in a monologue. When he was not limited to short answers he was asked to recount a story.’ Finding the ‘unnatural language samples’ this produced unsatisfactory, the next generation of ethnographic enquirers, according to her genealogy, began taking account of ‘the interpersonal relationship between subjects’. In this ‘interactional approach’ the linguistic robot had still to acquire limbs, gestures and gender, but when these were eventually granted, the mirror flipped the other way; confronting someone able to think for him/herself, the researcher became painfully self-conscious of the limits to translation. The apotheosis of the revolt against the myth of a seamless convergence of interests and mutual is a colonial subject who has ‘a good laugh at his analyst. He laughs with sound (paralanguage), with a twinkle in his eyes (kinesics) and he even says how funny we all are (language). This is his considered opinion (informational), and by it he regulates the conversation we have with him (interactional).’ 5 In reality, revolt against the mirror state might be a matter of days not decades. When I started working with Noongar communities in Western Australia, I soon became aware that a Noongar language was an ethnolinguistic fiction – not that precolonial communication was in any way lacking but because the history of translation had been so meagre. Efforts to maintain and regenerate conversational Noongar rest on the discursive debris of empire, picking through a rubble of repressed customary law, broken family lines and disconnection from country. Instead of internalising systemic deracination as compromised cultural identity, speakers of this remnant, pidginised regional language accurately register the traumatic impact of colonisation. Efforts to reassert a kind of dictionary-perfect grasp of lexicon produce an artificial competence that oddly recapitulates the nostalgia of the ethnographer for a pre-Babelic linguistic constitution. Trauma is repressed not addressed. But the question of right information, the challenge of hearing the other speak (before the colonised subject slipped into silence, interpellated by Christian conversion and English law) was not an expression of retrospective regret: it was there at the beginning, in an instant, if you like. The early Swan River Colony displayed a remarkable (but typical) ignorance of local languages.

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52 Translations

Figure 2  Paul Carter, composition and photograph (magnetic recording tape, 3 inch spool; six-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map of Faringdon; log of tape recordings used in making The Native Informant).

As a result, the chief native informant was one of their own, the Methodist minister, Francis Armstrong, who, perhaps uniquely, had acquired some facility in speaking Noongar. But what could Armstrong tell fellow colonists? Only this, ‘That much of the information which they do give is willfully incorrect, is not surprising; it is very natural that, when pestered and bewildered by questions which they do not understand, either from the broken language in which they are couched, or from the subject being beyond their conceptions, they should state the first nonsense that occurs to them, by which harmless exercise of their wit they obtain a meal, while the “white fellow”, probably, gains a bargain, at the cost of a few pence, of the ground work of some ingenious theory.’ 6 Von Raffler-Engel’s short history of ethnographic attitudes recapitulates what native informants knew within a few minutes of the first, coercive attempts at finding common ground. Successive ideologies of state control and subject compliance lead (in Australia after two hundred years of colonisation) to a reluctant admission that Aboriginal people

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exist, and have a good laugh at whitefellas, but in general they go on spinning ingenious theories. Likewise, as a migrant interpreter shot into the role of native informant – the part I played in writing Lost Subjects (a historical script for the new museology) or composing the words for Relay (whose brief was to capture the meaning of the Olympic Games to Australians) – I faced the question of what, in a situation of inherited silences, could be communicated. It was necessary to develop a stance towards translation, and in the context of an always incomplete record, what might be called an ethics (and aesthetics) of gaps, interruptions, apostrophes and even distances (kinesics) from which strangers approached each other. Far from being a neutral go-between, the native informant must develop a style of his own, a way of speaking that preserved the incommensurable cultures, situations and powers. If colonial relations were theatrical, and imperial historiography followed suit, aspiring to complete control of script and actors, the museum that reflected on this historical plot would have to communicate differently, attending to the discourse that sprang up along linguistic borderlands, not excluding the intimations of dreams and the phantasmagoria of look-alike and sound-alike mere coincidences. A passage in Lost Subjects illustrates this: 1. 2. 3. 2. 3. 5. 6. 3. 2. 3. 2. 3. 4. 3. 2. 5. 6. 7.

Kangaroos, they said back to us, taking it for our word. Starring Mr Simes as Badehin the selfish. Opposite there stood a man deceptively similar. Mr Lee as Syabonk the simpleton. Yet by some secret and ingenious operation infinitely distant. Kangaroos, you? Booral, booral, sang the owl. Shockingly foreign, as if dead, cut off by an invisible barrier. Mr Simmons as Ibad the sensible. As if in a blinding flash of lightning I saw tragically circuslike the image of man. As Tembula the snuff merchant, Mr Knowles. Myself, for the first time, an effigy, and yes. As if creeping out of a mirror. Myself, a living actor. Fishermen, Officers, People, etc by the rest of the Company. You? Who are? What is your name? The Native Informant.

54 Translations

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5. Remember Me? 1–7. Ou, ou, ou.

The kangaroo story in this passage is a good example of an ‘ingenious theory’. Ganguru (now ‘kangaroo’) was a north Queensland Guugu Yimidhir word recorded by James Cook in 1770. As First Fleet writer annalist, Watkin Tench, explained, ‘Kanguroo, was a name unknown to them for any animal, until we introduced it. When I showed Colbee the cows brought out in the Gorgon, he asked me if they were kanguroos.’ 7 But remembered in ‘Kangaroos, you?’ was the far more outlandish speculation of E.M. Curr, a Victorian squatter with ethnolinguistic pretensions, who, a century later, convinced himself of a ‘tendency to express Blackfellow and kangaroo by the same term’: ‘I am inclined to believe that the tribal name of the firstcomers to this continent began with the sound koo, and that they, finding no human inhabitants in the new land, whimsically called the kangaroo, which they saw standing erect like themselves by their own tribal name.’ 8 Reading this passage, I am reminded of Paul Cezanne’s remark, ‘Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.’ 9 Bending a little to the left or right of Curr’s utterance, what strange landscapes of cultural narcissism come into view, how many unacknowledged fears of being lost and found; what extremities of emotionally starved imagination are discernible, symptomatic of the homo imperiosus complex where, identifying attachment to another with self-loss, the subject is ‘much less unhappy when he is absolutely alone than when he is afraid he may not be’;10 how deep and unfulfilled a desire of being heard, of materialising as a man, of finding the track and casting a shadow finds confused expression here, as if Freud’s ‘Ersatz products’, originating ‘from unsatisfied love’ 11 and Borges’s ‘other shapes’ emerging from the mirror (‘Little by little they will differ from us’)12 had bred, producing hybrids, these Cooee men, antipodean centaurs, half human, half kangaroo. ‘All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth’, Georges Bataille once reflected. Curr’s

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koo fantasy is one of those threads: tugged, it sets off tremblings right through the labyrinthine colonial imaginary. The ‘living actor’ invokes Polish theatre director, Tadeusz Kantor – ‘The appearance of the live actor as a revolutionary moment. The discovery of the image of man.’ 13 But, in giving to the actors their own burlesque identities, Lost Subjects walks with Kantor one step further – ‘I will even try to compile and “ascribe to History” a completely different picture, in which the course of events will have a meaning quite the opposite!’ 14 In this spirit Lost Subjects begins and ends: ‘2. Who are these approaching? 3. Amazing production. 1. Almost lost in this country. 5. Stop! 6. The natives never use the letter “S”. 7. “Top,” they said, “the man”. 5. And that was how Death came in. 6. Slurred speech has no place in the theatre. 7. But in the Museum it echoes.’ 15 But this has been discussed elsewhere and there is no need to go over it again.16 The question the previously quoted passage raises in our context is different, and it turns on the reference by title to three of my radio works: who licenses the introduction of What Is your Name, The Native Informant and Remember Me into a colonial pageant? ‘From the common realm of customary and religious rituals, common ceremonies and common peoples’ activities advanced SOMEONE who made the risky decision to BREAK with the ritualistic Community’:17 who is this someone who, in Lost Subjects, made the risky decision to break with historiographical custom and its teleological rhetoric of terra nullius (‘no inhabitants in the new land’), civilisational advance (to explore and appropriate ‘as if I had been the earliest man’)18 and ultimate reduction to the administration of English? It appears to be the native informant, for the actor in Lost Subjects who represents nothing but himself and yet finds his voice is the one who poses the question of translation. Prior to understanding, translation is a hermeneutical, not a historical, problem. The author of Lost Subjects, and works like Cooee Song, Columbus Echo or Mirror States, finds a speaking voice through the persona of the native informant. If the migrant inhabits a dream dreamt by another, this stance is emancipatory: treating the ‘ingenious theory’ of the ‘analyst’ ironically, it insists that the context of quotation is poetic not ideological. Quotations are not bricks to repair a wall; they are gifts extended to those approaching. The ‘amazing production’ is happening here when in the echo words have a meaning quite the opposite.19

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56 Translations Native informants occupy an ambiguous position. As figures of ethnographic nostalgia, they are projections of colonising desire. More than this, the ventriloquial puppet conjured up in this way allows the missionary, the interested property-owner or ‘student’ of culture to speak off the cuff and outside the law. On the other hand, there is a folie à deux, as the knowing informants (assuming they are not mystical) necessarily cultivate a part that meets expectations. So long as the subject is the setting of exchange rates, the native informant internalises the mask of the other (the enquirer) and, what is more, to fulfil the new function as go-between, cultivates a nostalgia of their own – reporting back to their own families involves another kind of translation, a rationalisation of expectations that on the face of it make no sense. These mirror-state paradoxes and their discursive offcuts were not only a commonplace of the early colonial literature: I found them prevalent in the new migrant writing. Picking up on the phenomenon of ethnographic projection, Sneja Gunew, writing in Australia’s Bicentennial year, argued that the perception that nostalgia was the only subject of non-Anglo-Celtic writing was host nation wish-fulfilment: ghettoised as the same old story of leaving, travelling and arriving, ‘the migrant experience’ feeds ‘the nostalgia of “older” white Australians’, reminding them both of their own origins, and of their difference – ‘Migrant writing thus returns the earlier generations to the scene of their own origins: colonial nostalgia.’ 20 Nevertheless, certain migrant writing intentionally or not internalises the native informant role. The cattle-train mentality of the Australian Department of Immigration which he experienced on his arrival at Port Melbourne in 1958, led Efthimios Kondos, a migrant from Epirus (via Alexandria and Syria), to reflect, ‘Only the chronology changed. Nothing was different from the time of the first settlers. That picture and thousands of similar ones seen by millions of migrants will remain unforgotten and will leave, inscribed deeply in their souls, the stigma of shame and humiliation.’ 21 Another Greek-Australian writer, Yota Krili-Kevans, who arrived in Australia in 1959, writes in ‘Motherland’, a poem dated May 1981: ‘Motherland, how can we know you?’ Geographical return is not barred, only ‘Cut off from your nourishment / we have lost our rhythm, / we are like tourists.’ The confusion of what Gunew would call speaking positions is palpable: ‘Defectors / we built other lands. /

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We are your “internal haemorrhage”, / your rejected children.’ Krili-Kevans understands the betrayal historically, but her conclusion returns Greece to the realm of myth where, a final irony, it might be the Australia of post-war immigration propaganda: ‘Motherland / forever tormented / marionette of fate / illusion of the poor.’ 22 As far as a migrant poetics goes, at issue here is not the motherland (and mother tongue) but the agency of the translator: even if the native informant is stuck in the role of go-between, irony can be deployed. The irrepressible R.A. Baggio recalled, ‘We were the first Italians to live at Little River [in 1935], and we were, accordingly, fairly exotic. We were known as “Chinamen” not only because of our earthy occupation [market gardeners], but also because “Chinamen” in this case functioned as a descriptive term.’ That is, it signified difference; and there was a language to go with his or, rather, a mode of address: ‘Several locals even spoke “Chinese English” to my father and mother, very slowly and in a loud voice, just as one did with real Chinese or deaf mutes.’ 23 The neo-Baroque ‘fantastication’ of Baggio’s memoir protests against this internalised infantilisation. As a colonising strategy, it was scarcely new: observing that ‘It is peculiar to English-speaking travellers that they endeavour to impress their meaning on the “foreign” natives by speaking very loudly and distinctly, and by using what has often been called “jingalese” syntax … which consists in uttering a series of names of things and actions without any attempt at connecting them’, Hermann Ritz, lecturer in modern languages at the University of Tasmania in the first decade of the last century, opined without a hint of irony, ‘this is precisely the style of the Aboriginal speech.’ 24 Humiliated as deaf or dumb, the colonised subject experiences a double loss. In the early 1990s, wanting to understand the inside experience of these failed encounters as they played out in the dynamics of first contact languages, I found Sergej Karcevskij’s description of the linguistic sign as asymmetrically doubled intriguing and helpful. Asserting ‘an essential disjunction between thought and language’, he saw the translation of thought into language as a kind of little death: ‘As soon as the other appears, indicative language – another name for the relation with death – can no longer be effaced.’ 25 To get round this, Karcevskij theorised that each speech performance subtly affected the meaning of the sign, impressing it with new, context-dependent connotations.26 Historical ethnolinguistics offered

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58 Translations plausible analogies. Take the emergence of Delaware Creole: it excelled in the improvisation of ‘indicative language’ – ‘given a new vocabulary which they must learn, people will make guesses about what their interlocutors will understand as they try to talk to one another. Those guesses that promote intelligibility will be the “right” guesses’ 27 – on the other hand, its users ‘rather design to conceal their language from us than to properly communicate it, except in things which happen in daily trade … and then they speak only half sentences, shortened words … all things which have only a rude resemblance to each other, they frequently call by the same name.’ 28 Language as a whole is Janus-faced, translating between inner states and outer performances. Assimilation to outer speech mutes the difference between what is meant and what is said; it disregards the mask of irony that prevents echoic mimicry from sinking into an imitation experienced as alien (and ridiculous). It is the difference of the sign, its asymmetrical aspect, that makes translation desirable and doubtful, but the alternative is worse. I think this is the sense of José María Valverde’s poem ‘The Tower of Babel’ falls on poets. ‘Mature in age and poetry / you moved to a foreign speaking country’ – only, the poem continues, to experience the immigrant’s typical humiliation: while what they say is ‘easy as breathing, easy, rich, accurate, / you’re trying to mimic them with effort, / and hear your voice, ridiculous and strange, / fail as a child always right here, / end up saying something not yours.’ 29 Assuming this is autobiographical, Valverde pinpoints the migrant’s frustration in a failure of translation: death enters in, whether in Karcevskij’s language theory or in Lost Subjects’s unavoidable mispronunciation, because nothing of the migrant’s inner experience can be brought out. Valverde is a distinguished translator, fluent in literary English. In moving to the United States, he was not like other arrivals in that foreign-speaking country; what he forfeited was not outer speech but inner speech (poetry). This is why ‘it is not living’. Inside the native informant there is, as it were, another figure able to preserve the difference and, perhaps not surprisingly, it takes a poet to find it. In Ground Truthing, a poetic history of the Mallee, a unique bio-region in southern Australia, I repeatedly detected this performer of difference in the guise of the fellow traveller. The origin of the radio work What Is Your Name had been a story about the

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three names used by a late nineteenth-century farm worker of Wotjobaluk descent (Lake Hindmarsh region, north-west Victoria): ‘To avoid confusion [with his benefactor and guardian] others referred to him formally as Black Peter McGinnis, but because he greeted everyone he met with the Yarrikuluk word jowley, meaning countryman or fellow traveller, it was by that name that he was generally known.’ 30 In What Is Your Name, the interrogators (named for McGinniss and another of Jowley’s assumed identities, Hatcher) want only the prisoner’s proper name – to insist on the elimination of ambiguity, that is how death comes in. The poetic double of Jowley in Ground Truthing is the agricultural labourer poet, John Shaw Neilson, who was, one might say, a connoisseur of ‘mystical’ speakers: ‘the ‘fellow in the mist’ might stand in for many – ‘Slowly he wandered in the dust, / Red was the world and red the sky; / On his gray head his hat was thrust / And weariness was in his eye. / Sitting beside a fence he saw / A tall man, he who would persist / In murmuring things outside the law.’ 31 ‘Things outside the law’ are like leaves blown against the barbed wire of the prison camp and sticking there; they draw attention to the threat of enclosure always haunting translation. From this perspective, communications that defy easy paraphrase may have a greater psychic and poetic power than formulations that easily elide with eloquence. In the Australian vernacular the brolga, a bird in the crane family, used to be known as the ‘native companion’. It inspires ‘The Crane is my Neighbour’, one of Neilson’s greatest poems, and one which in our context can be read as an allegory about the relationship that avoids ‘saying something not yours’: ‘The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim.’ As for what he has to say, ‘The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme, / And the ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.’ 32 Birds and birdsong have frequently been my messengers. I am not talking about the migrant’s relief on hearing familiar farmyard sounds; nor about geographical theories attached to bird migration.33 I am referring to translations I have made of birdsongs. An example of exercises played on passages from Memory as Desire illustrates how ethnographic interests and migrant poetics blend. One of the characters, explorer Charles Sturt, recalling the avian flight paths that influenced his course, muses: ‘If we inhabited the country they inhabited, Mr Flood always used to say, why, they would speak to

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60 Translations us and we would understand.’ 34 Taking this as my cue, I tried translating the script into bird language. Again, the secret sharer (or native informant) in this thought experiment was local, evidence that in many Aboriginal languages the derivation of bird names was onomatopoeic. I crossed this with a consideration of the territories traversed in the radio work: George Augustus Robinson’s Tasmania and Victoria’s Western District and Sturt’s Simpson Desert, north-east of Lake Eyre. My ethnographic data were not collected with any great rigour, but I thought they were suggestive. In Tasmania, the aforementioned Hermann Ritz, given as we saw to speculation, expressed the view that one of the Tasmanian songs he helped record in 1899 was an imitation ‘of the melody of the native magpie, which most unmelodiously the zoologists call a “piping crow”’. In the Western District, James Dawson had stood up to the influential theory advanced by Max Müller, that sounds represented ‘essential powers’, remarking that, on the basis of names given to birds and animals at least, ‘the facts are against him’: ‘the native names have been applied to the various animals in imitation of the peculiar sounds they utter’, a phenomenon that supports ‘an onomatopoetic theory of the origin of speech’.35 The value of these remarks in grounding a migrant poetics is in inverse proportion to their ethnolinguistic reliability: they are an insight into the dissatisfaction produced by the ‘Ersatz products’ of colonial communication. On the other hand, an article from our own time about sound classification in Pitjantjatjara speaking areas (west of Sturt’s expedition) was a reliable scientific benchmark: documenting ‘an extensive vocabulary of onomatopoeic words which suggest that much of the classification of the surrounding environment is done on the basis of the sounds produced by the thing named’,36 Catherine Ellis and colleagues suggest that ‘one of the most critical elements in classification by Aboriginal people, probably throughout Australia, is sound, both musical and environmental’.37 As the Diyari, whose country is east of Lake Eyre say, tana paya tala dika-tadi-yi or ‘These birds name themselves’, reflecting the fact that the bird’s name ‘is similar in phonetic shape to the Diyari version of their call’.38 Theoretically, an onomatopoeic speech power would vocalise everything, translating all components of the script – lines, stage directions and even the characters’ names into one universal expression.

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To extend the new language beyond self-naming (a kind of ultimate interiorisation of Karcevskij’s double-edged sign where the impression of thought was a unique unindexed utterance), a code was needed, a system of equivalences. The wilder fringes of nineteenth century philology are replete with solipsistic wish-fulfilments, but few are more extreme than Hermann Ritz’s reduction of Müller’s language theory to the proposition that in Tasmanian languages ‘All things were distinguished according to two ideas, namely, rest and motion. The liquid consonants expressed motion, and all the others, rest.’ 39 I don’t want to spend much time on the OuLiPian exercises that followed. A summary of one suffices. Ritz had arranged the English consonants according to his theory – ‘The labial consonants [like p] represent a sudden puff, a sending forth of energy, and are therefore very appropriate for expressing action and purpose’, while ‘labial plus liquid’ [like l] signifies ‘projection plus motion’, and so on – surely suggesting a reverse translation was possible where concepts communicating these essential ideas of rest and movement could be represented by bare alphabetical combinations.40 On this theory, the phrase ‘Where are my children?’ becomes ‘KU-KU, KU-KU’, while the following thought, ‘Fill me with your voices, my rooms are empty’, generates ‘KU-PA-LU-PA-LU, KU-PA-LUPA-LU.’ Meaning is now fused with the speech act – as the stage instructions provided indicate: the first phrases, for example, should be ‘imitative of the mopoke’s call’, should be repeated and should die away. The speaker of the next lines is asked to render them as ‘An eddy of notes, uttered as if from a dream, rising, dying away’, and offered the further genial hint that ‘variable lengths and pitches can be tried.’ Evidently, the language of essential powers delivers less information than ordinary conversation. But that may be the point, to peel indicative speech away from the vocal gesture and see what is left.41 As for the birdsongs, it was difficult to improve on what they already said in Pitjantjatjara: patil(pa) (Port Lincoln ring-neck parrot), tjulily-tjulily(pa) (mulga parrot), killykillykari (budgerigar) and kakalyalya (Major Mitchell or pink cockatoo) – referring to themselves, what could be clearer? Or, as the crested bell-bird remarks, panpanpalala. Clearly, native informants also need native informants if they are to avoid spiralling inwards towards a kind of autopoetic tinnitus or madness. Like anyone else, approaching a likely candidate, they

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62 Translations will foist onto them their own desire of self-becoming at that place, finding the repertoire of common or improvised communicational tokens that can secure that translation in which the echoic mimic gets beyond hearing their voice as ridiculous and strange. Even more fundamentally, they need a native informant to tell them what a native informant is and, obviously, in this search there is bound to be a certain self-projection, not least of precarious inadequacy for the task. The focus of my projected need to equip myself for, in Vincenzo’s phrase, ‘getting in’ was the already mentioned author of Australian Aborigines, James Dawson. Yet Dawson was not my first ethnographic dalliance. Leading up to Cooee Song and Mirror States, I find between pages 104 and 111 of Australian notebook 12, covering the period 14–18 October 1990, annotated references to L.E. Threlkeld, another advocate of the idea that ‘every sound forms a root’ (A Key to the Structure of the Aboriginal Language), N.J.B. Plomley (A Wordlist of Tasmanian Languages), E.M. Curr (The Australian Race) and R. Brough Smyth (The Aborigines of Victoria). The description of a Victorian ‘corroboree’ by James Bonwick (The Daily Life of the Tasmanians), extensive commentary on George Taplin’s compilation, Tribes of South Australia and Peter Beveridge’s observation (Aborigines of the Riverina) that ‘sign language is used to effect communication on taboo subjects’ – and my thought, ‘It is possible that the dead are kept alive via physical gestures’ – are interleaved with references to Roman Jakobson, Oliver Sachs and Mallery and the Sebeoks’ magisterial survey, Aboriginal Sign Languages of the Americas and Australia. Writing on the recto page, I liked to keep the verso available for subsequent annotations. A month after copying out Threlkeld’s alphabet of essential powers, I find added a passage from Mitchell’s Third Expedition, describing an Aboriginal woman encountered at Portland Bay who imitated a Scotswoman: ‘The imitation was ridiculously true, through all the modulations of that peculiar accent, although, strange to say, without the pronunciation of a single intelligible word.’ 42 (An instance of echoic mimicry where a ‘voice, ridiculous and strange … saying something not yours’, represents a triumph of ironic distancing that Baggio might envy.) Revisiting these pages after so long, it occurs to me that they are the primary sources for my migrant ethnography – impersonal sources for a colonial prehistory, they have been involuted into my most personal possession.

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An early notebook entry for what eventually became The Native Informant explains, ‘words selected from Berkshire and Buninyong vocabularies will be associated with fragments of 1966 recordings’.43 There follows a reference to Major B. Lowsley’s A Glossary of Berkshire Words and Phrases and the comment, ‘To decline these verbs will render them as strange, as primitive, as the Buninyong vocabularies.’ 44 Buninyong is a small, ex gold-mining settlement located south of Ballarat, in the lee of an extinct volcano, the eponymous Mount Buninyong. The bush block we co-owned in the Black Range, a twenty minute drive further south, adjacent to the Leigh River, represented for me a rebirthing place: there the migrant learnt the songs of the local Australian birds and the smells of wattles and gums. Yet the absence of Aboriginal people rendered the utopian nature of this Eden palpable. Further south the Wathaurong had been missionised by Methodists – the Buntingdale Mission was established around the time the first Methodists reached Faringdon – but the ethnographic data collected during this shortlived enterprise had gone up in flames. The destruction of Aboriginal culture and the dispersal of those who survived the first wave of the pastoral invasion produced a new, regionally peripatetic population. ‘The Wathawurrung and Djab Wurrung peoples lived in and travelled around the district as small groups, loosely referred to as the Mount Cole, Mount Emu and Wardyallock “tribes”. Large gatherings were occasional; the usual praxis was for groups of about a dozen people to travel by themselves.’ 45 In the colonial mind such wanderers had the potential to be strolling players. In 1867 the local Aboriginal Guardian ‘received a letter from the Borough Council of Buninyong, requesting him to send as many Aboriginal people as possible to Buninyong, as the Borough Council was determined to stage a grand corroboree on the arrival of His Royal Highness Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh.’ 46 As ‘Dawson’s (1881) ethnography is a basic source of information for the dialects, language name and boundary’ of the Djab Wurrung language,47 and these different West Kulin peoples evidently understood one another, it was plausible to expect that Dawson’s information would have some relevance to Buninyong. In the event, this hypothesis proved ill-founded,48 and in the absence of reliable information about the local language, specifically that spoken by the Keyeet balug of Mount Buninyong,49 this dimension of ‘Ground Sound’ fell away. Still, it is via this labyrinthine

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64 Translations thread that I first made my way to the native informant I was looking for. One way to introduce James Dawson is retrospectively, to provide the reader with a posthumous cameo. There will be distinctive perspectives. His obituary in the Camperdown Chronicle devoted more space to Dawson’s ‘sport with the gun’ and amateur taxidermy than to his services to the Aboriginal people, which, if we trust this memorialist, consisted in handing out blankets on time.50 In her introduction to the facsimile edition of Australian Aborigines (the work goes unmentioned in the obituary), Jan Critchett, distinguished historian of early Aboriginal–European relations in Victoria’s Western District, naturally takes a different view, and her overview of Dawson’s life and achievement from the time of his arrival in Port Phillip (1842) until his death nearly sixty years later, is comprehensive, succinct and balanced.51 If any reservation might be expressed, it is one analogous to Adorno’s complaint that the past life of émigrés is always annulled: Dawson’s Scottish ancestry and cultural formation go unmentioned as irrelevant to his advocacy of Aboriginal rights, his promotion of Aboriginal culture and, above all, his language studies. In the event, this proves not to be the case, although the one attempt to find Dawson’s humanitarianism ethnically biased fails in my view. The real repositories of memory in the colony are fires not libraries: Buntingdale’s conversations with local informants were reduced to ashes and the same fate overtook Dawson’s papers when house and effects were sold. As a result, the sole record of Dawson’s activities and interests is a scrapbook, long held in the family and recently made available online. From entries in the scrapbook Raymond Madden purports to find a discriminatory view of the ‘Australian Irish peasantry’, who are, he says, contrasted unfavourably with Aboriginal people, in their ‘native state’. But the evidence does not stack up. To make his case, Madden juxtaposes over a hundred notices recording Dawson’s intense engagement with Aboriginal culture and politics with three items (two newspaper cuttings and one letter that Dawson penned to The Oban Times in 1883 detailing his disdain for Australian Irish politician Gavan Duffy, whose Victorian Land Reform Act of 1862 broke up the old squatting runs, producing a mosaic of potential smallholdings that by themselves could not be economically sustainable).52 The parti pris is clear: Madden’s forebears were, he explains,

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post-Irish Famine immigrants to the Western District. The motivation is Oedipal. Yet isn’t this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? To ignore conventions of scene-setting, equipping readers to form an impartial judgement, and to descend headlong into some provincial historical squabble suggests uncritical devotion to a figure idealised as an untouchable hero – undoubtedly a father figure of my own that, in the way of father–son relations, is likely to generate opposite (equally irrational) impulses towards piety and patricide. To step back for a moment: the three wordlists printed in Australian Aborigines that form the centre of our interest, and the associated cultural and linguistic annotations, may well be our ‘basic source’ of information, not only for the Djab Wurrung language but also for the closely related language of the Gundidjmara (Clark thinks a better name is Dhauwurd Wurrung), but how reliable are they? While it seems that the wordlists were mainly compiled by Dawson’s daughter, said to be familiar from childhood with the local languages spoken by station workers and domestic servants, the evidence is that the majority of the language research reported in Australian Aborigines dates from after the Dawsons gave up their Kangatong sheep property and settled in Camperdown to the north: although Isabella publishes a single column wordlist in a local newspaper in 1870, comparison with what is published a decade later suggests that the major language investigations date from the 1870s. Writing about nineteenth-century ethnography in Victoria, Richard Eldridge identifies three problems.53 It was often the case that the Aboriginal people being studied ‘were a generation or more removed from pre-contact life, and may not have full knowledge of the precolonial situation’.54 Gary Presland argues that ‘the very rapid dislocation of traditional Aboriginal culture in south eastern Australia … before the development of ethnography as a field of discipline’ led to there being ‘no ethnographic studies of Aborigines in this region’.55 Then, the questions asked of Aboriginal informants were shaped crudely and ‘were often framed in such a way that they solicited answers that confirmed the ideological presupposition of the collator’.56 Finally, the collators in some cases were subject to ‘ideological prejudice and myopia’ and only asked questions of informants that suited their purpose.57 Clearly, these are problems when, following von Raffler-Engel’s typology, the native informant is imagined as

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66 Translations the untainted custodian of authentic stories; but such a state of communication could only exist at the vanishing point of difference, where some ideal other approached from the infinite distance, mirroring the ethnographer’s own ‘mystical’ projection. Given that mutual deception characterises strangers meeting, even if first contact could be recreated, transparency in translation would remain an illusion. Recognising this, anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere proposes three precepts for field work: do not interview ‘cold’, know the language at least as well as a native, be a native of the culture you intend to study.58 In short, ethnography as auto-ethnography. My interest in Dawson and the wordlists was different. As a migrant beset by the problem of address and the attendant nightmare of narcissistic detachment, I was drawn to the evidence in Australian Aborigines that the Dawsons faced comparable problems, and to the possibility that the main value of their language work was autoethnographic, rather than ethnographic in a traditional sense. I was not concerned about the accuracy of verbal reproduction but about the poetics of translation. I was not aiming to restore a lost language but to ground communication differently in the present. The Dawsons also knew about this: respecting the intelligence of their own native informants, they were also aware of the limitations of their own performance. As a nice example of the colonial subject who has ‘a good laugh at his analyst’, Dawson recalled that ‘if levity was shown by an individual present who could not always resist a pun on the word in question, the sedate old chief, Kaawirn Kuunawarn, reproved the wag, and restored order and attention to the business in hand’.59 Yet he also admitted candidly that in getting the ‘Native Grammar’, ‘though much trouble was taken, it was found very difficult to make the aborigines understand what was wanted’.60 From my perspective, these insights into the role humour and guesswork played in understanding each other were a key to the interpretation of the wordlists. Unlike the professional ethnolinguist, I did not lament that ‘the usurpers spoke a variety of English with a silent r in words like car and card’. I was not concerned that ‘This makes nineteenth century notations such as karnda [call] and gnullar [No] hard to interpret. Is the r representing some kind of rhotic or is it just contributing to the representation of the vowel?’ 61 I valued such undecidable phonological deafspots as authentic traces of encounter across difference.62 (Besides, in the Lallans dialect that

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James Dawson presumably spoke, was the r silent?)63 Orthographical inconsistencies in the wordlists suggested a care to reproduce accurately individual speech acts: there was no irritable rush to certify reliable lexemes.64 Respecting individual idiolects, the Dawsons preserved the asymmetrical duality of the sign, as divergent spellings of demonstrably identical word concepts served to prevent la parole from disappearing into the grammarian’s la langue.65 Inventing a spelling system of their own – ‘Some sounds which lie beyond the scope of the English alphabet are represented by the letters which come nearest to them’ 66 – the Dawsons preserved a record of their own listening. From these considerations, it seemed that the wordlists were the unique record of an exchange about the limits to translation – one that opened up, rather than closed down, the possibility of a different kind of coexistence. Beyond the limits of the lexicon, I detected ripples, ‘thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream’. Migrant identifications may be dreamlike but any associated creative practice is, in my experience, dirty, that is, the opportunistic offspring of propitious circumstance. Perhaps Freud’s notion of stratified memory traces ‘subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription’ answers to my situation: like memories revisited over time, the wordlists drew me back, always from a different angle, always in a new external context. Transcription, the reworking of the material, was the bridgehead between inner and outer worlds. I doubt that more extensive investigation of the poetic logic informing the Dawson vocabularies would have materialised except for another metaphorical materialisation mediated through an artwork developed as part of a city renewal public art and spaces strategy for Warrnambool, a regional centre on Victoria’s south-west coast located within a few miles of Dawson’s first pastoral property, Kangatong. Dawson had called the language of the Gundidjmara inhabitants of what are now Warrnambool and Port Fairy Peek whuurong, translating this as ‘kelp lip’. Writing about Aboriginal placenames, Dawson had contrasted European names that distinguished general features (a river, for example, with one name) from Aboriginal names for the same feature, where every waterhole, intermediate ford and reach has its own name, one that may even be seasonally variable.67 In devising Kelp, I recalled another fact: the recent and catastrophic decline of the Giant Kelp forests found in the waters off Tasmania

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68 Translations

Figure 3  Paul Carter (script and direction), Edmund Carter (design), Christopher Williams (sound), Kelp, animation, built in Adobe Flash. Duration: 15′ 48″.

and Victoria: overharvesting, nutrient reduction and rising water temperature levels have combined to contract these marine rain forests to about five per cent of their original area. The parallel with the near extinction of the Gundidjmara language was obvious and, taken together with Dawson’s hint about Aboriginal toponymy, an opportunity to imagine the Warrnambool environment differently. Kelp was a 15-minute animation of early coastal maps across which we sequentially floated forty-nine word clusters derived from Australian Aborigines, treating individual words and letters as units within a continuous Brownian motion of migration, dispersal and reassemblage. Sound artist Christopher Williams recorded water at various venues from the ocean to the trickle of creeks inland and his composition corresponded to the south–north traverse of the coast performed in the animation. I proposed the result as a new environmental story, explaining:

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Kelp shows us a coast that is not a narrow line but a gathering and interweaving of many interrelated habitats that lie on a spectrum between wet and dry: deep sea, coastal shelf, offshore reefs, sandbanks, islands, isthmuses, intertidal expansions and contractions of shore and associated appearance and disappearance of navigable channels, estuarine sandbars, mudflats, shifting river and creek mouths, beaches, rocky outcrops, extracts of cliffs with fallen boulders, hummocks of sand, pools, fresh water, more or less defined creeks leading into and out of swamps, wetlands, morasses, sandy soil, firmer ground, conglomerate, ground cover, titree, low bush, stands of mallee-like gum, sandy valleys and hills (ancient coastlines) with stringybark, richer soils in places, limestone ridges, fallen timber and stands of native cypress … and eventually lava.68

The Peek whurrung words floating over the graphic hieroglyphs of early Warrnambool charts and maps were expressions of these topographical particularities. If naming habits classified environments differently, perhaps the reverse was true: perhaps the kinds of place named threw light on relationships within language. On this supposition, I found Dawson’s remark that a section of the feature known as Mount Emu Creek was called Tarnpirr or ‘flowing water’ intriguing. It suggested to me that a movement form was being described: instead of the European conception of the river as a linear water enclosure, Tarnpirr captured the particular modality of water behaviour that produced continuous overflow. I connected this idea with another peculiarity of nomenclature, the fact that Dawson named the Camperdown property he moved to around 1867 ‘Wuurong’, the Djab Wurrung and Gundidjmara word for ‘lip’ and used in Australian Aborigines as a language name (Chaap wuurong, Peek whuurong, etc).69 Could it be, I asked, that, in naming the farm where the language studies took place, ‘lip’, Dawson alluded to the kind of linguistic landscape he sought to inhabit, one defined by accidence (its moving parts, such as case and declension) rather than a grammar statically defined in terms of noun equivalents? There was a further poetic possibility, that a distinctive human facility was associated with Wuurong: perhaps the association was more precisely with fluency for, according to Dawson, the word was found in place names such as ‘Wuurong killing’ (‘Lip of waterhole’, with reference to a ‘particular spring where a bunyip lives’) and Bukkar whuurong (‘Middle lip’, referring

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70 Translations to a ‘Bank between Lakes Bullen Merri and Gnotuk. A gap in this dividing bank is said to have been made by a bunyip, which lived at one time in Lake Bullen Merri, but, on leaving it, ploughed its way over the bank into Lake Gnotuk, and thence at Gnotuk Junction to Taylor’s River, forming a channel across the country’).70 And who is this bunyip, trivialised in colonial folklore as a kind of sulkie or Loch Ness monster? The anthropologist Charles Mountford identifies him as a regional cousin of the Australia-wide Rainbow Serpent.71 As a creative ancestor, a place is reserved for him among the stars – the Coal Sack Nebula is named for him on account of its supposed resemblance to a waterhole.72 Dawson reports an ‘anecdote’ that Morpor related to his daughter and her husband.73 It describes an encounter between two brothers and a bunyip: one of the brothers has stolen eggs from the centre of a lake near Mount William (in the Grampians): ‘When returning to the shore, he heard a rush of water behind him, and saw the water-fowls in front of him hurrying along the water as if frightened. At the same time, the bottom of the marsh became so soft that he stuck in the mud, and could not go forward. A great wave overtook him and carried him back to the nest, where a large bunyip caught him in its mouth.’ 74 The bunyip is the zoomorphic manifestation of a bow wave, associated with overflow – with the passage of air (breathing, speaking), with water (brimming waterholes, weirs and channels). It is what cannot be carried over in translation, the desire of relating that exceeds what can be exchanged. In poetic logic, it is no accident that the great wave despatched by the bunyip recalls the ‘ripples’ stirred by the neighbourly crane. Elsewhere, Neilson imagines ‘The Bunyip paddling in the dark’.75 Custodian of soft borders that lack distinct definition, the bunyip is also the spirit of a translation without edge or ending. Dawson had become my native informant and I looked in Australian Aborigines and whatever supporting material I could find for answers to my questions. My core curiosity, the challenge of translation – including the primary circumstances of contact, the initial devices of mutual recognition, the exercise of echoic mimicry, the daily conduct of language getting and the performative protocols of the meeting place – was not entirely a projection. There was certainly an interesting history of entanglement to unfold. There was the occasion in 1855 when Eugen von Guerard met Johnny

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Kangatong, a 14–15-year-old Aboriginal stockman working on Dawson’s property, and encouraged him to paint and draw: a sketch exists of von Guerard sketching.76 When, later, Johnny Kangatong was baptised, he adopted ‘Johnny Dawson’ as his name.77 This was not new; Jan Critchett writes about an ‘Isabella Dawson’, born to an Aboriginal woman named ‘Mary’, explaining, ‘King David had a close relationship with both Patrick Mitchell and James Dawson. Isabella Dawson, who was widely regarded as King David’s daughter, was in fact the daughter of Patrick Mitchell’; and she speculates that the two men ‘shared’ ‘Mary’.78 Kaawirn Kuunawarn taught Isabella, Dawson’s daughter, elements of his language, and when she began a more systematic collection of Aboriginal vocabularies acted as master of ceremonies. A traditional habit of name exchange was adopted to weave an unusual white settler-Aboriginal kinship skein. Engagement was practical-symbolic in other ways. The painting of ‘Tower Hill’ outside Warrnambool that Dawson commissioned from von Guerard as part of his campaign to have the extinct volcano gazetted for public leisure was another expression of his ambition to develop a distinct sense of regional place, one in which the spirit of Aboriginal cultural and environmental literacy was woven into the colonial map. As curator and taxidermist, assembling a representative collection of local animals and birds, as patron and as historian, Dawson ingeniously and tirelessly advocated for the mitigation of a governance disaster. He was decidedly persistent. Besides his concerted critique of the Victorian Government’s Aboriginal policy (between the date of his appointment as Local Guardian in 1873 and his necessary retirement in 1883, ‘when the last Aborigine of the district Camperdown George died’), Dawson peppered the newspapers and government offices with descriptions of the impact of land theft, missionisation (and associated cultural genocide), proposed ‘reserves’ located outside traditional country and called out what he saw as sheer white moral turpitude: yet, ‘In most situations James Dawson was a lone voice.’ 79 While Wathaurong writer Bruce Pascoe is no doubt right to point out that Dawson’s humanitarian concerns do not exculpate him from the charge of occupying Aboriginal land illegally.80 While his paternalism often hovers in the background – as Leigh Boucher notes in a discussion of the emergence of Aboriginal ‘protection’ in nineteenth-century Victoria, ‘Presbyterian notions of individual reform

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72 Translations as a spiritual work unfolding over a lifetime could be easily mapped onto projects of social reform and the improvement of others’ 81 – Dawson was well aware of his own function in that colonial society: in relation to white indifference to the impact of physical and spiritual invasion, he was the white native informant that his brethren did not want to hear, self-consciously a go-between. The story of Dawson’s erection of a memorial to Wombeetch Puyuun has already been mentioned, but there is more to it.82 Dawson had a sense of the theatrical: when the memorial was erected – ‘the obelisk in the Camperdown Cemetery has two dates, 1840 and 1883, which mark the mere 43 years it took for white settlement to displace the Djargurd Wurrung from the Camperdown area’ – he organised a photo opportunity, asking his good friend, Kaawirn Kuunawarn (‘Hissing Swan’) (c.1820–89), also known as ‘King David’, chief of the Kirrae wurrung, or ‘Davie’, to pose next to the Wombeetch Puyuun obelisk.83 The lithograph derived from this was puzzling: those unfamiliar with the story would assume that the standing figure in possum rug and brandishing traditional weapons was either the defunct or an actor representing him; contradicting the assertion that the last of the Aborigines had died, Kaawirn Kuunawirn appeared posthumously as it were, his political significance curiously blunted. Probably in the year of the obelisk, a corroboree was organised on Dawson’s property to celebrate his return from Scotland. I think it is likely that the recent immigrant composer and music teacher, Louis Bayer, made Kaawirn Kuunawarn’s acquaintance there; three years later Bayer produced Muutchaka, The Last of His Tribe, an opera in two acts, inspired by Kaawirn Kuunawarn and dedicated to Dawson. Incorporating a corroboree-influenced choreography, and onomatopoeic bird calls and key words (including ‘muutchaka’) directly taken from Australian Aborigines, Muutchaka and the memorial are different expressions of one story about failed meeting – the root sense of muutchaka is shake hands as in covenant or exchange, but at the opera’s end Sandy, ‘the Aboriginal’, is shot in cold blood; both illustrate the role of creative resourcefulness in keeping open and prolonging an unfinished (scarcely begun) conversation.84 In a number of publications, I have speculated about how the Dawsons researched their wordlists.85 I have, for instance, reflected on the gendering of the conversations and on the likelihood that what we chiefly read, encrypted into the word selection, is the echo

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of the ethnographer. Isabella’s primary informant was another woman Yaruun Parpur Tarneen. There is little doubt that the extremely detailed information about family relationships and the account of ‘mother-in-law’ language reflect her interests and influence.86 Dawson indicates that lists of English words were distributed among the participants at the word-getting sessions. The three parallel wordlists printed in Australian Aborigines, together with the ‘illustrative grammar’, are ‘the dot point summary of a ten-year long conversation, composed of repeated formalized gatherings (two photographs of Isabella (seated) and her native informants, standing or reclining on the lawn exist) where information already gathered was, we imagine, subjected to review, new alternatives were aired, fresh voices and insights offered. It is commonsense that the interlocutors commenced mimetically, Isabella pointing to things, gesturing to convey actions, objects or locations that interested her – and eking out her intent with the limited Gundidjmara she had learned as a child.’ 87 A peculiar feature of the wordlists is the listing of many English words with the adjacent comment ‘None’ or ‘Unknown’ or ‘Only specific’, suggesting that Isabella’s primary motivation was to find Indigenous terms for her own language. But the motive is subtle, and it may be that the deeper object is to fit out the local languages for circulation in white society. Take the term ‘kulliitch’ embedded in the Djab Wurrung phrases ‘Kuumba kulliitch’ (glossed as ‘sleep twilight’ and translated as ‘Twilight in the morning’) and ‘Wueetpa kulliitch’ (glossed as ‘dusk’ and translated as ‘Twilight in the evening’)88: now the same word evidently appears in the following entries – Kulleitch/‘Peep of day’ ‘Kuurn kuurn kulleitch’ (glossed as ‘call for daylight’ and translated ‘domestic Hen’) and, most idiomatically in ‘Gloaming light in the west’ where ‘Kulleitch’ is glossed ‘evening light’.89 Inconsistent spellings are a feature of the wordlists, perhaps indicating multiple question-and-answer sessions and different speakers. Presumably treating ‘Gloaming’ as a regional (Scottish) synonym for ‘Twilight’, Blake does not include it. Curiously, though, as we have next to nothing in her own hand, Isabella’s voice comes out most clearly where translation is impossible and poetic analogy has to serve instead. Interpretations of the kind summarised here may have some value, but they seem to be self-interested; in the absence of a clearly articulate migrant speaking position, they represent a surrogate poetics. In a

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74 Translations way, I have wanted to keep the ethnolinguistic data ambiguous and have emphasised how one phrase leading to another produces ultimately the semantic equivalent of De Quincey’s ‘undistinguishable blot’ where, as in the discourses of everyday life, endlessly renewed, there is no ending to the possibility of beginning again, differently: la parole all the way down, and never la langue. A kind of prelanguaging is explored, as if in the language-getting sessions an experimental epoche in the Husserlian sense were being practised, bracketed off from the constant humiliations of colonial servitude. There may even be a self-serving feedback loop, as these situations of ‘thirding’, where a jargon emerges at once simplified (grammatically) and sophisticated (as it self-consciously incorporates metacommunicational devices of mimicry and irony), were already being explored in my polyphonic sound installations, notably Columbus Echo, a multilingual sound composition designed for the Acquario di Genova that presented the ‘discovery’ of the New World in terms of ‘emergency languages’ improvised along the shorelines of empire: pidgins, jargons and lingua francas were to be interwoven to form a ghost crowd whose echoic mimicry was intended to haunt or double the living crowd visiting the aquarium. This work had reasonably sound historical and ethnolinguistic credentials but its major innovation was to recruit a multicultural and multilingual cast in Melbourne and replicate the conditions of ‘first contact’ in the studio. I wrote afterwards, ‘First contact is never utopian: it is the convergence and clash of culturally conditioned systems of signification: echoic mimicry operates to amplify “mere phonic coincidences”, usually producing a parodic or mimic double-speak that can in extreme cases become institutionalized … In the safe Spielraum of the rehearsal studio, the negotiation of the border between sense and nonsense becomes therapeutic: misunderstandings serve to bind as both parties recognize them as a familiar feature of everyday communication in a super-diverse city.’ 90 And, a point of direct relevance to my projections onto James Dawson: ‘Perhaps the most interesting feature of these unscripted interludes – later used in the soundscape production – was the emergence of the role of translator’, a role defined situationally not vocationally. I could relate to a study of multilingual women from ethnic minority migrant backgrounds living in the North-East of England: experiences of displacement, where the women had ‘little, if any, linguistic knowledge or capital’ had ‘exposed them to

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experiences of either being translated or translating for someone else’. The authors of this study found that an empathetic understanding of differential linguistic competence produced a new kind of translation, baroque, provisional, periphrastic – elaborated to no other end than to keep relations fluid.91 I cannot deny the poignancy I found in the Dawson wordlists, the sense they gave me of a conversation trapped in time, the words and their constellations like the photograph of a distant galaxy. I had the impression of looking back into the earliest history of colonial communication when the original impulses of sociability to fly to their proper places (finding expression) were still in play. I detected in the end a desire of communication that exceeded any obligation to ethnolinguistic accuracy. What mainly shone out were the dark spots which, in the attention drawn to them, were discursive asterisks, designed to make what could not be exchanged shine out more brightly. The wordlists were a temptation to a kind of waking dream analysis; individual terms joined up into phono-semantic molecules that suggested traditional associations of people, place, region and cosmos. In one direction, associational threads led ever deeper into a dark forest of indeterminacy; in the other, every different track, wherever it led, demanded a tracker patient enough to study the detail. And occasionally, just occasionally, clearings emerged – as when, for example, one of Dawson’s two Gundidjmara informants cannot translate ‘Agrimony’ into his own language. His fellow Gundidjmara-speaking informant was not stumped, offering as the Indigenous name ‘Narrak wuurong’, which Dawson glosses ‘hairy lip’.92 Here is a puzzle. None of the mid- to late Victorian scientific floras identify a native Agrimony: we should assume what is usually the case in white settler nomenclature, that Dawson named a native plant by analogy – a simple description of the curved hook-shaped bristles found on the Common Agrimony’s flower cup might be ‘hairy lip’. So here at the outset we have an unknown plant serving as a talking point, a stimulus to finding a figure of speech that both parties recognise. Blake points out that Gnarra, a basic term for ‘hair’, is common to the Gundidjmara and Djab Wurrung dialects;93 therefore, the fact that one of the Gundidjmara speakers does not know the term ‘hairy lip’ shows that it is not the proper name of any plant – it is improvised, an interpretation confirmed when

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76 Translations Dawson’s Djab Wurrung informant calls the ‘Agrimony’ ‘Challarp’, the word also used for ‘freshwater mussel’ (Chaluup), presumably with reference to the byssus filaments fringing the shell – in edible mussels, the inedible byssus is commonly known as the ‘beard’. Let’s, for the sake of finding a track, presume this conversational history. What follows? The Dawsons ask the name of another plant, which they render in English as ‘red Forget-me-not’, another unidentified Indigenous flower. Now, all three informants agree to call it ‘Gnarra wuurong’ (Djab Wurrung) or ‘Gnarat wurong’ (Gundidjmara) – clearly variants of the same phrase that Dawson glosses as ‘hairy lip’.94 In this case, the Djab Wurrung speaker has renounced the mollusc metaphor and offered his translation of ‘hairy lip’. A new term has been stabilised for a class of flowering plant: it does not refer to anything known in either English or the Indigenous languages. It belongs to the botany of Babel, the flora of a fluency that owed much to the imperious injunction, only connect.

Notes 1 Paul Carter, The Native Informant, in Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 131–48, 134. 2 Carter, Amplifications, 137. 3 Carter, Amplifications, 177. 4 Walburga von Raffler-Engel, ‘The Native Speaker in his New Found Body’, in F. Coulmas (ed.), A Festschrift for Native Speaker, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980, 299. 5 Raffler-Engel, ‘The Native Speaker in his New Found Body’, 304. 6 F. Armstrong, ‘Manners and Habits of the Aborigines of Western Australia’, The Perth Gazette, Saturday, 12 November 1836, 797. 7 Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L. F. Fitzhardinge, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962, 269. 8 Edward M. Curr, The Australian Race, Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1886, 4 vols, vol. 1, 28. 9 Paul Cezanne, Letters, ed. J. Rewald, London: Cassirer, 1941, 262 (letter 193, 6 September 1906). 10 Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation, trans. P. Powseland London: Methuen, 1956, 100. 11 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1964, vol. XXIII.

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12 Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. N. Thomas di Giovanni, New York: Dutton, 1969. 13 Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces, Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990, ed. and trans., M. Kobialka, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 112. 14 Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces, 113. 15 Paul Carter, Lost Subjects, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1999, 178. 16 Carter, Amplifications, 4. 17 Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces, 113. 18 Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition Expedition into Tropical Australia; see also Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 132. 19 Watkin Tench tells a story that illustrates this point. The colonists knew that ‘The epithet “Wee-ree”’ signified ‘bad’. In order, therefore, to elicit the local word for ‘good’ they applied the term ‘Wee-ree’ to things which, they noticed, their Aboriginal informant liked – ‘in order to provoke him to tell us that it was good’. Arabanoo, taxed in this way, replied “beeal”, which we translated, and adopted for good’. It was only much later that the whites realised that ‘he meant no more than simply to deny our inference, and say, no – it is not bad’ (Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, 231). 20 Sneja Gunew, ‘Home and Away: Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing,’ in P. Foss (ed.), Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1988, 35–46, 36. 21 Efthimios Kondos, ‘Emigration: Outlet to Despair’, in G. Kanarakis (ed.), Greek Voices in Australia, Sydney: Australian National University Press, 1987, 262. 22 Yota Krili-Kevans, ‘Motherland’, in Kanarakis (ed.), Greek Voices in Australia, 386–387. 23 R.A. Baggio, The Shoe in my Cheese: An Immigrant Family Experience, Footscray, Vic.: Humanities Department, Footscray Institute of Technology, 1989, 22. 24 Hermann B. Ritz, ‘The Speech of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania for the Year 1909, Hobart, 1910, 45–81, 48. 25 Wendy Steiner, ‘Language as Process: Sergej Karcevskij’s Semiotics of Language’, in L. Matevja (ed.), Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976, 291–299, 291. 26 Steiner, ‘Language as Process: Sergej Karcevskij’s Semiotics of Language’, 295–296. 27 Michael Silverstein, ‘Goodbye Columbus’, Paper delivered to the Linguistic Circle of Canberra, 16 October 1972, 1–48.

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78 Translations 28 J. Franklin Jameson (ed.), Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, 128, quoting a comment made by the Dutch missionary Jonas Michaëlius in August 1628. 29 José María Valverde, lines quoted in Wikipedia entry. 30 P. Taylor, Karkarooc, A Mallee Shire History, 1896–1995, Warracknabeal: Yarriambiack Shire Council, 1996, 23. 31 ‘The Fellow in the Mist’, Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, 822. 32 ‘The Crane is My Neighbour’, Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, 1050. 33 Both discussed extensively in Amplifications. 34 Paul Carter, Memory as Desire, in Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 11–38, 34. 35 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lvi. 36 C.J. Ellis, A.M. Ellis, M. Tur and A. McCardell, ‘Classification of sounds in Pitjantjatjara-speaking Areas’, in L.R. Hiatt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Concepts, Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1978, pp. 67–80, 69. 37 Ellis, Ellis, Tur and McCardell, ‘Classification of Sounds in Pitjantjatjaraspeaking Areas’, 70. 38 Ellis, Ellis, Tur and McCardell, ‘Classification of Sounds in Pitjantjatjaraspeaking Areas’, 70. 39 Ritz, ‘The Speech of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, 52–54. 40 Ritz, ‘The Speech of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, 59–60. 41 I was quite persistent in trying to develop what I called ‘parrot language’ – see, for example, ‘Parrot Language: An Original Improvement’, in C. Marais, U.M. Bauer, M. Scwab and F. Domois (eds), Intellectual Birdhouse, Walther Koenig: Cologne, 2010, 267–273 – but such efforts merely demonstrated that not all art that aspires to the condition of music is necessarily better off as a result. 42 Mitchell, Three Expeditions, vol. 2, 277. 43 A note in red reads, ‘My tapes are my Native Informant: they collaborate with science to provide a scientific picture, only the picture is a mirror of the ethnographer’s interests’, a crude, early articulation of the main idea. 44 Paul Carter, Australian notebooks, A14, 281, c.30 April 1992. 45 Ian D. Clark, ‘The Northern Wathawurrung and Andrew Porteous, 1860–1877’, Aboriginal History, vol. 32, 2008, 97–108, 105. 46 Clark, ‘The Northern Wathawurrung and Andrew Porteous, 1860–1877’, 103. 47 Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Melbourne: Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, 1990, 91.

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48 Clark states that on the evidence available in 1990 Wada wurrung shared only 50 per cent of its vocabulary with Djab Wurrung and Djadja Wurrung (Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 276). 49 Also Kureet balug, defined by Clark as a sub-section of Burrumbeet bulluk. The meaning of the name is unknown (Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 319). 50 Camperdown Chronicle (Vic.), 21 April 1900, 3. 51 Critchett, ‘Introduction to the Facsimile edition’, unnumbered. 52 Raymond Madden, ‘James Dawson’s Scrapbook: Advocacy and Antipathy in Colonial Western Victoria’, The La Trobe Journal, 2010, no. 85, http:// latrobejournal.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-85/t1-g-t6.html. 53 Richard Eldridge, ‘The Cultural Interactions of Aborigines with Whales, Whalers and Whaling in southwest Victoria 1828–1850’, Master of Business (Research) thesis, Federation Business School, Federation University, Ballarat, 2015, chapter 1. 54 Ian D. Clark, Place Names and Land Tenure – Windows into Aboriginal Landscapes: Essays in Victorian Aboriginal History, Heritage Matters, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1998, 42. 55 Gary Presland (ed.), Journals of G.A. Robinson: May to August 1841, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey. Sydney, NSW, Australia, 9. 56 Eldridge, ‘The Cultural Interactions of Aborigines with Whales, Whalers and Whaling in southwest Victoria 1828–1850’, 20. 57 Eldridge, ‘The Cultural Interactions of Aborigines with Whales, Whalers and Whaling in southwest Victoria 1828–1850’, 20. 58 Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair, An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 10–11. 59 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, iv. 60 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxxxv. 61 Barry J. Blake, Dialects of Western Kulin, Western Victoria, Yartwatjali, Tjapwurrung, Djadjawurrung, La Trobe University, 2011, 22. Other deafspots were widespread: ‘It was not apparent to early linguists that virtually no Australian language distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stop and that it is a matter of arbitrary distinction whether one writes, p, t, k, or b, d, g. Threlkeld missed the “cerebrals” (backed r, t, n) altogether and also the certainly occurring “interdental” t (like English th) and the palatal t (rather like English ch or j).’ (D.C. Laycock, quoted without source in Neil Gunson (ed.), Australian Reminiscences & Papers of L.E. Thelkeld, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1974, 2 vols, vol. 1, 30). This observation also applies to the Dawsons, James and the main Aboriginal interlocutor, his daughter, Isabella.

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80 Translations 62 For example, how should we understand the relationship between Karnda (translated as the noun ‘Call, name of’ in their Djab Wurrung/Chaap Wuurong wordlist and Karndaa from the same wordlist glossed as ‘Scream’ and also ‘Yell’? Evidently, the same word is intended. Why is it spelt differently? In the orthography that Dawson invented to ‘represent the correct sounds of the Australasian languages’, ‘double vowels’ ‘express prolongation of the sound’. For example, English car is spelt kaar (‘Introductory Note’, unnumbered). But in the present example how is the letter cluster ar in karnda distinguished from the double aa in karndaa? 63 James Dawson’s worldview, his political, social and environmental activism were critically indebted to his Scottish heritage. See below. 64 If anything, they serve to multiply particulars rather than generate general terms. Examples are legion, take the semantic opportunity created by the attempt to hear two words ‘guurk’ and ‘kuurk’ where the Aboriginal speaker made no distinction between g and k. In Dawson’s interpretation, kuurk comes to signify ‘blood’ while ‘guurk’ acquires a more specialised sense of ‘married’. 65 The Dawsons list the meanings of English words in three local languages: Chaap wuurong, Kuurn kopan noot and Peek whurrong. However, it is clear that the almost identical wordlists for Kuurn kopan noot and Peek whurrong represent the same language, Dhauwurd Wurrung (Gundidjmara). See Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clan: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, 22. In other words, these two wordlists preserve idiolects and the minor differences between them represent individual idiosyncrasies of expression and pronunciation. 66 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, vi. 67 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxviii. 68 Paul Carter, Edmund Carter and Christopher Williams, catalogue entry for ‘Kelp’, Laminations exhibition, CDU Gallery, Charles Darwin University, Casuarina Campus, 15 October 2015, 7. 69 Were Dawson unfamiliar with the local languages, a misspelling of the word wuurn (dwelling) could be assumed. But, referring to a ‘Building of stones’ called Karm karm, Dawson explains, ‘Point of land below Wurrong House, where the aborigines formed their wuurns of stones’ (lxxx). 70 For further discussion of Dawson’s use of wuurong as the name of his homestead, see Paul Carter, ‘The Enigma of Access: James Dawson and the Question of Ownership in Translation’, Griffith Law Review, 2013, vol. 22(1), 8–27. 71 Charles Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert, Adelaide: Rigby, 1976, 222.

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72 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 99. 73 ‘The fine old chief of the Spring Creek tribe, Weeratt Kuyuut— “Eel spear”, occasionally called Morpor, after his tribe and country, and believed to have been upwards of eighty years of age—was both a messenger and a teacher’ (Australian Aborigines, 75). The listeners are ‘the very intelligent chiefess Yaruun Parpur Tarneen, whose knowledge greatly exceeded expectation’ and ‘Wombeet Tuulawarn, her husband, who assisted her [in the language work]’ (v). 74 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 108. The story is structurally similar to one told about the origin of Totyarguil, the double star Aquila (See Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 439). The story related here is a fragment of a much larger story about the deeds of the Bram-bram-bult brothers, appointed by Bunjil to ‘finish the task’ of creating the world. 75 John Shaw Neilson, ‘The Sundowner’, in Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, 606. 76 https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/learning/johnny-kangatong-making-sense-world. 77 https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/learning/johnny-kangatong-making-sense-world. 78 Jan Critchett, Untold Stories, Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1994, 124–125. 79 Critchett, ‘Introduction to the Facsimile Edition’, Dawson, Australian Aborigines. 80 Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with your Country, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007, 34. 81 Leigh Boucher, ‘The Emergence of “Protection” in Colonial Victoria’, in L. Boucher and L. Russell (eds), Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, 2015, Canberra: ANU Press, 63–94, 93. 82 Critchett, Untold Stories, Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris, 226–231. 83 ‘Wombeeth Puyuum’, Monument Australia at https://monumentaustralia. org.au/themes/people/indigenous/display/30611-wombeetch-puyuum-. 84 Louis Bayer, Muutchaka or The Last of His Tribe, libretto and music, Melbourne: Kemp and Boyce, 1888. First performed in Camperdown in 1887. The 1884 corroboree held at Dawson’s property Rennitown is mentioned in James Dawson, scrapbook, vol. 5, 167. Evidence of onomatopoeia is found in the annotations to the National Library of Australia copy of the libretto (SR N 080 PAM v.133, no. 2559). The Chaap wurrong word for ‘Take this’, ‘Muutchaka’ is in Dawson, Australian Aborigines, xli. 85 See Paul Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space: Imaginary Places in James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines (1881)’, in B. Richardson (ed.), Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links between Place and

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82 Translations Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 105–129; and, most recently, Carter, Decolonising Governance, 149–183 and ‘Vessels of Place: Auditory landscapes, Cross-Cultural Echoes in South-West Victoria’, in The Place of Silence, Architecture/Media/Philosophy, M. Dorrian and C. Kakalis (eds), London, Bloomsbury, 2020, 207–218. 86 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lxiv–lxxvii and 29. 87 Carter, ‘The Enigma of Access’, 11. 88 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, xliii. 89 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, xxxi, liii, xvi. 90 Paul Carter, ‘Emergency Languages: Echoes of Columbus in Discourses of Precarity’, in C. Gualtieri (ed.), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean. Shifting Cultures in Twenty-First-Century Europe, Bern: Peter Lang Publishers, 2018, 285–304, 298. 91 S. Ganassin and Holmes, P., ‘Multilingual Research Practices in Community Research: The Case of Migrant/Refugee Women in North East England’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 2013, 342–356. Discussed in Carter, ‘Emergency Languages’. 92 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, i. 93 Blake, Dialects of Western Kulin, 106. 94 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, xxviii for Chaluup; and xv.

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Lamenting the silencing of Lost Subjects, an ambitious sound installation designed for the upper floor of the (then) new Museum of Sydney (MOS), the senior curator wrote, ‘it is hard to fathom the intense resistance by Sydney museum-goers to these jaunting, chuckling, sniggering, bumptious conversations accompanying them on their meanders through the MOS’. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do people leave the city streets full of bustle and jostle and wish a museum to be a temple of silence? We really wanted the museum to be a meeting place, not a mausoleum.’ Instead: ‘We lost courage and shut the voices down and put Lost Subjects in our archive.’ 1 My recollection is that the reason for removing the (really vast) multichannel work from the wall that ran the entire length of the upper floor was technical rather than sociological: as I had predicted, the late commissioning of another soundscape that bled into the listening space of Lost Subjects created a level of auditory confusion that was painful. The issue was not ideological – sound versus silence – I had used the same polyvocal techniques in Named in the Margin, a convict history at the nearby Historic Houses Trust property, Hyde Park Barracks, and that work, meeting reasonable public acclaim, ran well beyond its use-by date for twenty years: it was a simpler matter – of poor sound design. Far from wanting silence, the public wanted to be able to hear the voices speak, and perhaps, accompanied by disembodied historical witnesses, to hear themselves responding. ‘1. On the road, on the road, you meet all kinds. 8. Jericho, gypsies, born-again briscos.’ 2 Besides becoming aware of files of people walking alongside, mysteriously doubling the living as they migrated inside the wall (like fish in an aquarium), visitors might feel themselves mirrored, no longer freeholders of the

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84 Translations historical spectacle but mysteriously turned into history’s secret sharers: ‘1. And now we must tip the double. 2. Depart. 3. Make tracks. 4. Apply to the good old translator who turns worn-out shoes into good ones. 1. And not to trot or trip / the ultramarine step / but on the universal staircase/ by cascades and valleys, / tumbling, trundling, to come / to the velvet department / where all our sins are forgot.’ 3 I doubt if this doubling was unbearably disturbing. The silencing of a bottom-up history whose voices have normally been marginalised, as E.P. Thompson might have said, was due to a technical miscalculation – in the museum, the reproduction of noise must be composed. Lost Subjects was written in 1994 and installed the following year. The idea of theatre as a procession, as a kind of cross between The Canterbury Tales and William Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, translated to early colonial Sydney naturally and mingled with (mirrored in) colonial transcriptions of local Aboriginal languages much on my mind in that time. Taking advantage of architectural commissions, the broad object was to invert the audience–actor relation. At Hyde Park Barracks climbing to the top floor of a building originally designed ‘as night lodging for convicts to labour on public works’, visitors entered a mocked-up dormitory, a sea of hammocks oddly reminiscent of shipwrecked rigging. Either side of the walkway, a corridor of loudspeakers had been installed whose programme the visitors triggered as they walked the building’s length. In a simple way the audience moved while the actors stayed in their places; in reality, a random access setting permitted scenes to migrate from one part of the dormitory to another, but the general principle remained. As in the street performances I witnessed as a child at Witney or St Giles’s Fair where a revived Mummers play or bout of Morris Dancing drifted through a drifting crowd, so here the enclosure of the proscenium arch was broken open and the mental drama, as Byron said of his poetic dramas written to be heard rather than seen, experienced as an accompaniment of walking. Any localised sound is at best a room or a doorway – my other Museum of Sydney soundscape, The Calling to Come, was located in an Entrance Cube – but the novelty of Lost Subjects was to animate the architecture as such, to create what we fondly referred to as ‘the whispering wall’, not without an awareness of its implications. Walking, doubling as a strolling player, the living subject of

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Lost Subjects found their own line of advance doubled, amplified and rendered strange in the admission of a host of repressed voices. The interior where Lost Subjects played had been designed as an exact replica of the original Government House: with or without my thematically instructive content, electro-acoustic sound awakened the ghosts of echoes. Aiming at inducing a kind of psycho-historical entrainment, the significant content of my script and its audio production invited visitors to imagine they walked in the tracks of those who had gone before: 1. 2. 1. 3. 1. 2. 8. 3. 1. 2. 3. 1. 2. 1. 2. 3. 2. 1. 3. 8. 1. 2. 1.

Come, damn me, that won’t do, that’s not Government step. Obscure paths. Slow down, slow down. C’mon. Lift your plates. But not too slow: steady Progress is what is needed. Become broad and level roads. La città dolente. Bang-ally. Says someone shoots them all, sir. Shackled him. Bang-ally. Sydney. Unconquerable dullness. Becomes a flourishing city. Pull de uver one! Or possibly, ben-gad-ee. Go along, you damned rascal! Where savages in bloody combat rolled. Go along, you damned scoundrel! La perduta gente. An intelligent population. The gadarene swine! Is in motion.4

The script of Lost Subjects was cobbled together from hundreds of sources assembled as part of the heritage evaluation of the Bridge Street site (behind Circular Quay); other material was supplied by reading done for The Road to Botany Bay. The method of composition, adumbrated in Mirror States, illustrated the principles of migrant collage, a growingly complex tourbillon of historical remembering evolving out of the simplest echoic mimetic fragments. Sometimes, as in the passage just quoted, the report, the imitative mechanisms

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86 Translations of doubling, ironic misunderstanding and syncopation harbouring dissidence was conveyed in the rhythm – one is to hear behind these lines the steady tramp of feet in single file. Rhythm as mobile discipline – the first line above quotes a report in the Sydney Herald (27 February 1834): ‘An eye witness relates the following circumstance as a fact – As he was going along Sussex-street, some day last week, he observed five convicts, three pulling, and two pushing a cart, containing some dirt. The three in front happened to go a little beyond their usual pace, when the other two immediately called out, “come, d— me, that won’t do; that’s not Government step”.’ Here in a nutshell is our drama: the differential twostep of the freely walking observer and the trammelled shuffling of the convicts. But it is noticeable that the rhythm of progress internalises that earlier shackling as even free motion will, like free speech, exercise a discreet self-censorship, the dullness of colonial life doubled in the dull tread. When Arabanoo of the local Eora people was kidnapped to serve as a native informant, translator and go-between, he lived, First Fleet chronicler John Hunter reports, for some time after his arrival at the governor’s house, ornamented with an iron shackle about his leg, to prevent his being able to effect his escape with ease; this he was taught to consider as bang-ally, which is the name given in their language to every decoration; and he might well believe it a compliment paid to him, because it was no uncommon thing to see several (of the most worthless of the convicts, who had merited punishment) everyday shackled like him; the cause of which he could not of course understand.5

Another First Fleet journalist, Watkin Tench, rebuts this intellectual racism: Arabanoo ‘called it [the handcuff] “Ben-gad-ee” (or ornament), but his delight changed to rage and hatred when he discovered its use’.6 In this burlesque Inferno, where Dante’s perduta gente have morphed into colonial lost subjects, correction applies equally to body and speech; concomitantly, to depart from proper grammar, its deference to established hierarchies, is physically to abscond, verbally to swear. The middle ground between discipline and punishment is marked out by accidents of mere phonic coincidence. After publishing his manifesto ‘The Unspeakability of Places’ (incidentally, in the year of my birth), Vincenzo Volentieri proposed a memorial to the explorer-surveyor Sir Thomas Mitchell called ‘The Moving Journey’: intended as a commemoration of the Third

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Expedition that had ‘opened up’ Victoria’s Western District to pastoral invasion. The work was not a retracing of the Major’s Line – ‘not a triumphal procession but a network of alternative routes.’ 7 The Moving Journey was a typical migrant stratagem, apparently a vulgar version of that ‘exploring’ whose ‘end’ ‘Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’ Yet this is precisely the satisfaction denied to the migrant. In fact, the fictional Vincenzo’s historicist parody asserts what T.S. Eliot enjoins in another less quoted line of ‘Little Gidding’, that ‘Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning.’ This, in effect, explains the ‘unspeakability of places’ as, at least from a migrant perspective, the genius of these voiceless zones, enclosed, airless, motionless is ‘the good old translator who turns worn-out shoes into good ones’, or Death. For what is given up in this pious reinscription of the colonial line is precisely the topography of possibility and a tradition of treading differently, to the ‘indecent dance-step’ known as ‘ultramarine’ or by means of ‘trundling and gymnastic performances, such as tumbling a across the stage on wheels and catching hold of hands and twirling about’, known, according to Mayhew, as ‘Cascades and valleys’.8 Arthur Schopenhauer, friend of flatness and pessimist of precipices, opined, ‘our walking is a continuously prevented falling; and in the same way the life of our body is a continuously prevented dying’.9 The solution, as some kind of forward motion is inevitable, is to make the path as smooth and solid as possible: ‘Depart’ but do not ‘trot or trip’. And, logically, avoid phrases and sentences that run together, chaining the subject to the future. But the quietism of government order comes at a price. Building the colony’s first roads was no joke: Joseph Cotsell (from Fermanagh, transported for stealing a watch), ‘50 lashes’ for ‘Breaking his leg irons and concealing himself from muster’, ‘50 lashes’ for ‘Refusing to take medicine and refusing to work’: ‘But still he would not tell. “You may as well hang me now,” he said, “for you never will get any Musick from me”.’ 10 It is one silence pitted against another. ‘Welcome to the Slang-tree, the stage, the trapeze’, a lost subject announces. In their Dictionary of Slang, Barrère and Leland gloss ‘Slang-tree as ‘the stage, the trapeze’, also ‘performance, a travelling show of any kind’. But not the show of the silent system where the punishment for stealing time is keeping time (‘Silent, so many automata’): the leg-irons worn by convicts were known as ‘the

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88 Translations slangs’, ‘The noise the chain makes in walking is evidently the origin of the expression.’ 11 Walking differently is talking differently, singing and dancing. The figure of migration, Elias Canetti wrote, was people walking in single file, but he also once described a life as ‘A labyrinth of all the paths one has taken’.12 If the first creative reaction to displacement (whether measured jurisdictionally or emotionally) is to take the line for a walk, the next is to determine its coordinates, its location and character in relation to a host of paths taken and untaken. No doubt certain scenes are carried over from one place to another – so that even the barest track is uncannily familiar – but for the migrant, at least, there is no going back over familiar ground. Even if the colonial grid renders the migrant’s existential drama supererogatory, there is still the problem of socialisation: even to fall in step presupposes a historical crowd, a shared ground of experience. ItaloAustralian poet Lino Concas defines his migration in existential terms, writing that the migrant is ‘an isolated human being, isolated in his movements and in his speech’. The migrant is one who says, ‘We are what we are not’, or ‘We are, and we are not.’ 13 A selfdoubling happens here that does not induce a sympathetic reaction in another. Or, as another migrant writer, Jeltje, puts it: ‘You walk around in circles, / trying not to walk around in circles.’ 14 Here is the labyrinth as agoraphobic involute. Among my first forays into sound design was recording and producing interviews for an exhibition called ‘Italians and Jews in Carlton’. Carlton is a suburb immediately to the north of Melbourne’s Central Business District (CBD). Some of our interviewees had been interviewed on previous occasions; some had been interviewed two, even three times, before. Although the context of my interview differed slightly from the rote enquiry into origins, motives, travails and ultimate reflective triumph (the classic tripartite migrant narrative), I was astonished to discover that in some cases the people I spoke to repeated word-for-word what they had said before. Evidently our new line of reflection occurred inside the labyrinth of paths taken before. It was as if a stance had been rehearsed, perhaps under the original pressure to find a plausible pretext for migration, and the speaker now associated their authentic identity with a capacity to recall their confession exactly, as if deviation or improvisation exposed them to the charge of identity fraud. Hence, in cases where the script

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was set aside and, in response to my questions, the interviewee was prepared to add to what had been said before (a kind of overwriting), the results were less banal than they might have appeared. For instance, Franco Forte’s apparently guileless ‘If you can’t find the right surroundings it doesn’t matter where you are’,15 was not a statement of the obvious but referred precisely to the problem of overcoming isolation in an authentic way. In her study of Italians (mainly) in Carlton, conducted in the early 1990s, Mariastella Pulvirenti grafted onto Doreen Massey’s anti-placist notion of place as a process (an ‘articulated moment in networks of social relations and understandings’ where ‘a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a much larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself’)16 the idea of ‘anchoring’: among first generation Italian immigrants, she found, home-ownership served to overcome a ‘migration process’ defined in terms of ‘departure and arrival’, introducing a third term, ‘an active process of anchoring to that which resists mobility. A mooring is enacted to experience a stability from which flows the right to be in the host country.’ Owning a house is equated with having a home in the provisional sense of developing ‘a territorialized sense of belonging, a sense of being in place, in the host nation, while negotiating nostalgic attachments to their country of origin’.17 There is no doubt that this negotiation is at the heart of migrant wellbeing. In my antifiction, Baroque Memories, I dramatised the unmooring that occurs when belonging is unresolved: Doctor Duende’s daughter, Nostalgia, cannot resist the pull of the old country; even though born in Australia, L— draws her back (‘In our photographs it looked as if it were built out of stone: its shadows were permanent; its clouds wore the aspect of marble’).18 But the sequel is disappointing: ‘I expected my arrival would shatter the surface and, putting an end to the past, grant me a future sans père, sans past. But the opposite is true. Instead of disappearing into the tunnels of History I feel only the gravity of my appearance.’ 19 Doctor Duende, who is a self-styled physician of the migrant condition proposes a far more radical solution to the problem of homecoming than home-ownership. ‘When he first came to this country, he had taken up residence opposite the white façade because it reminded him of home.’ 20 The reference is to my experience in arriving in the Melbourne suburb

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90 Translations of Brunswick in 1982: I was struck by the odd similarity of the scalloped, pedimented and scrolled facades up and down our gridded streets to the baroque urban entablature of the city of Lecce in the heel of Italy. Duende does not overcome his own nostalgia by any process of anchoring or negotiation. He finds himself at home when one day the doubling is absolute, and here and there represented by the white façade fuse into a presencing that is untied from any symbolic or emotional attachment: ‘All the while the façade went on glowing. There was nothing behind its luminous presence. It carried no message of comfort. It was not inclined to lean over and kiss his brow. It was not a breast. It was not his white-haired grandfather. It was not a photograph. It had nothing to do with him. It walked a mile with him out of sheer good will. For the first (and last) time in his life Duende knew what it meant to feel at home’.21 As forms of false memory, photographs preoccupied me just then. A family photograph album shot of my grandfather presiding over Festival of Britain celebrations in Faringdon’s marketplace was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark that his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, was the ‘victim of two recently discovered techniques: the art of photography and “the art of being a grandfather”’ – were these not really one and the same, I asked. ‘In attaining the statuesque inertia proper to grandfatherhood, what better training could have been contrived than the photographic discipline of freezing a gesture or holding a pose?’ 22 Looking back at that aborted autobiographical project (called incidentally ‘Enclosure Acts’) I detect a typical migrant vocation for making the most out of the least, extracting from the most ephemeral and casually encountered datum a hitherto unsuspected depth and significance – indeed the whole of Baroque Memories was improvised in this way out of a casual meeting of eyes at a bend in one of Lecce’s streets. A migrant poetics oscillates between the accumulation of debris, as if the sheer quantity of collected matter can defer any inductive risk-taking (how can the migrant ever be confident of finding a representative point of view?) and a stubborn determination to build the whole edifice of meaning from the immediately to hand – as if grounding is operationally what is found in the accidental landing place of arrival. The uncanny preservation of environmental detail in photographs suits this migrant because it suspends the challenge of sifting the

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relevant from the irrelevant; equally, the paradoxically unframed character of the amateur snapshot, its arbitrary cut in time and space, accords with the migrant’s sense of being born there and then in the instant of seeing/being seen for the first time. When exposure times contracted, a new way of posing had to be found: the statuesque persona proper to the photo-de-pose migrated to the double take, those pairs of photos taken of the same subject at different times. A photo essay called ‘Double Take’, published in 1997, juxtaposed photographs of street scenes in Lecce taken respectively in June 1983 and June 1990.23 This exercise was an odd demonstration of the fact-stranger-than-fiction principle as its brief arose out a passage in Baroque Memories: ‘As I began to retrace the photographic journeys of the master, I became aware of another mystery. Grazioni had recorded meeting places, this much was clear. Rather than reproduce what after all anyone could see for themselves, he had used the Camera Profonda to discover hidden connections.’ Yet one question was left ‘totally in the dark’: the choice of viewpoint – ‘Even a couple of paces further on … a more comprehensive arrangement of fragments was possible, a greater concentration of motifs.’ And our narrator, attempting to retrace the steps of the photographer, realises that ‘within the master’s vision of invisibility, a deeper invisibility lurked, one that even the camera could not record’.24 One expression of this ‘deeper invisibility’ was ‘the broad and level roads’ and the associated infrastructure of colonisation, notably walls (whose colonial original was the kind of wall replicated in the Museum of Sydney) and the architecture of surveillance including the proliferation of idealised viewpoints curated under the aegis of the picturesque.25 Pulvirenti’s first generation migrant ‘homes’ were and are located in urban and suburban grids extending from the original grid of colonial settlement. ‘Transforming the house into home’, anchoring mobile subjectivities in place, occurs on a plan distinguished by its neutralization of place attributes. A chequerboard drawn onto a tabula rasa sheet – another fiction that survey pegs and bulldozers turn into fact – engenders an antithetical desire of differentiation. The quarter-acre block and its onion rings of fetishised borders, verandahs, shelves and albums miniaturise in a series of protective layers the lost cosmos of community, as I wrote in ‘Migrant Carnival’,

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92 Translations where no two backyards or front lawns are really different because they are all different, where the emphasis is, tirelessly, on the novel, the quaint, the personal, such objects can never be representative; they can never conjure up a childhood inside whose ample bounds all things human and non-human were arranged. They remain depressively in the land of conscious intention, unnamed or but once named and nailed permanently to one, all too visible spot. They refuse to connect, to stretch out towards the enigma of a living space, to shadow paths and walls, streams and views.26

I would put this differently now, more personally and more precisely. Illustrated here is John Berger’s proposition ‘Migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another’; the migrant ‘appears to act autonomously, at times unexpectedly; but everything he does is permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware.’27 The spatial necessity of which the migrant is unaware is the prior rectilinear rationalisation of space and time, a deeper invisibility that eludes the camera lens. The historical necessity, the prehistory of displacement can, though, be visualised. As I say, I have no traditions of emigration, forced or unforced, on either side of my family, although the economic uncertainty of grain and wool production throughout the nineteenth century and the periodic poverty associated with it meant that emigration was (at least discursively) always in the wings. I have little doubt that with sufficient documentary diligence one or another emigrant forebear could be located, another patent of independence of the kind Australians embrace when they discover convict or Aboriginal heritage.28 But geography, not genealogy, is the point and locally choreography not ancestry. Post-Enclosure, my people were largely confined to the straight and narrow: ‘The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a labourer without land.’ 29 But what did that mean in practice? I am not talking about metaphysicalised sores but about the likelihood of physical tics, a new class of involuntary precautions and anticipations of violence. In the wake of the enclosures came the gamekeepers as well as the farmers and, as the first sweeping victory of the landowners produced in its poverty-stricken wake a new class of crime, the trespass of poaching, the arbitrary extension of the law over rights of way created a new kind of rural agoraphobia. One did not have to be

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found guilty of trespass: mere mobility might be enough. Joseph Arch gave a graphic example. Before the Poaching Prevention Act of 1862, ‘a working man trudged home at night in peace, carrying his little basket or bundle of perquisites’. After, ‘’Twas as if so many Jacks-in-the-Box had been set free to spring out on the labourer from the hedge or ditch or the copse or the field.’ 30 The lack of poise Richard Sennett detected in the modern city was anticipated in rural Berkshire, in the Great West Road out of Sydney, initially surveyed by Mitchell, and in Western Victoria where a Dja Dja Wurrung warrior used to dodging spears was shot dead. A new class of exposed persons divorced inner life from outer life – the Methodist manifestation is the translation of the road into a pilgrimage. Instead of ‘grace’ or ‘poise’, ‘This condition the Greeks called sophrosyne’, the ‘mental operations’ of people ‘without land’ risked inhabiting fantasies without external correlative – countries, in short, of the imagination. If going forward was to be anything different from going back, new movement forms would have to emerge: straight line space would need to inhabit the labyrinth again. Time, too, would have to become involuted, poised between before and after. If it’s true that we owe the invention of linear time to the Sehnsucht of Macedonian soldiers sick of campaigning far from home, who began calculating the weeks and months until they could go home, then travelling differently, with an attention to the track, represents a political vision as well as a poetic disposition. When, in The Road to Botany Bay, I reproduced ‘Native of Western Australia’, an engraving from Grey’s Expeditions in Western Australia, some interpreted this as residual colonial voyeurism but both the text and context were clear: about to cast the spearthrower forward and release the spear, the Nyungar man exemplified poise, the integration of mental and physical attitudes – ‘such a person keeping his or her balance in the world is “centred”’.31 I wanted to find out when Lost Subjects was written. I thought a chronology of projects would underwrite this account of an artistic trajectory, its evolving understanding of the relationship between colonialism and migration. Instead I found Lost Subjects was one path in a labyrinth of projects, all happening at the same time, all markedly different in explicit theme – and all tending to converge on the same enigma – the line and its rewriting. A16 is a notebook of creative activity in the second half of 1994. Already, the anthropologist

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94 Translations T.G.H. Strehlow and Adelaide’s first surveyor, William Light, were characters in my developing book The Lie of the Land; however, a family road trip to Strehlow country (Hermannsburg and Horseshoe Bend) in July 1994 and a visit to Adelaide in August to examine Light materials and to read transcripts of Strehlow’s 1932 field journals caused two sections of my treatise on migrant poetics to split off and commence an independent life as, respectively, Raft (eventually an ambitious collaboration with artist Ruark Lewis) and Light (an environmental artwork, sound installation and performance made with artists Chandrabhanu, Hossein Valamanesh and Andrew McLennan). Yet notebook entries for 27 June and 3 November show that throughout this time I was also putting together the script for Lost Subjects. A first draft had been completed by late June and I was reflecting on its technique of historical mime, the way burlesque trips up the steady tread of historical time; three months later, I am pondering how these voices will sound in the new museum – who, I ask, will understand the double nature of this sound exhibit, the new relationship between the settled and forgotten past evoked by my lines and the eternal present of the fictional representation. At Horseshoe Bend I had recorded my footsteps in different gradients and textures of sand and improvised lines that riffed on Strehlow’s memoir of his father’s last, gout-ridden journey (by improvised carriage – our raft): what I called then ‘Peripateia at Horseshoe Bend’ became part of Raft, so the idea of making something must have been incubating; but the first major entry that shows that this work was taking shape is dated 12 December; here, for the first time, Raft is defined as ‘a lattice of grammar’. But, as I say, imagination was involuted and labyrinthine pathways caused these different creative swirlings to interpenetrate. Drafts of a libretto reworking the Ulysses story (we imagined six return journeys, six transcriptions of the story), pages of draft lines for the other MOS soundscape, The Calling to Come, and notes for a new book called ‘Beyond Nostalgia’, which was perhaps the earliest layer of the book you are reading now, are other paths taken and not taken. But it is an allusion to migrant artist Victor Litherland, a list of paintings I planned to discuss in a catalogue essay,32 that pulls together these threads: I was impressed by the way his many views of the main road snaking through the little mid-Victorian town of Creswick (where he lived) seemed to frame a void; stuck

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on to the edges of his compositions were stamp-sized human figures, immobile, puppet-like; a solitary vehicle would seem to be arrested for all time at a bend in the street; otherwise, town hall and fronting shop verandahs, converging and diverging to different ends seemed to record incommensurable realities – evidence, I was convinced, of a symptomatically migrant sensation of tectonic displacement. Classically unheimlich (strangely familiar), they depicted the time of the single file, the doubled sensation of wanting to arrive, of fearing to arrive. Depressive Edens, where nostalgia is embedded in the statuesque loneliness of the parts, they illustrated with forensic detachment what Doctor Duende diagnosed as ‘the migrant condition’. Raft is about the suffering of translation (Figure 4). When it was first installed, in the Gallery of New South Wales in 1995, I wrote, ‘We might almost have launched Raft with another name, and called it “a craft of translation”.’ The hexaglot text inscribed on the three surfaces of the timbers comprising the physical installation commemorates the life of the Lutheran missionary, Carl Strehlow – a

Figure 4  Ruark Lewis and Paul Carter, Raft, 1995. Stencilled hexaglot text in pencil graphite on chalk gesso ground, inscribed on rafters with underframes (28 sets, each 120 cm square), silk drapes and audio soundtrack (duration 42′ 00″), dimensions variable.

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96 Translations scholar versed in New Testament Greek, in Vulgate Latin, not to mention the dialects of the Lutheran and King James bibles, who undertook to translate the same into both Diyari and Arrernte. The passages from Acts 27 and 28 narrate St Paul’s voyage from Caesarea to Rome, his wreckage in Malta where ‘a barbarous people shewed us no little kindness’. Repeated six times in the six languages of Carl’s life, they also allude to Strehlow’s last journey when, in urgent need of medical help, he set out from Hermannsburg Mission on an improvised ‘van’ or ‘raft’ to travel overland to the Adelaide-Alice Springs railroad – a distance of some 400 miles. He never made it, dying shipwrecked at an isolated cattle station further down the Finke River – an event elegiacally recalled by his son in his great prose poem, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. Experiencing a personal Calvary, Ted Strehlow thought his father might have said, with St Paul, ‘that he had finished his course and was now ready to be offered.’ 33 There was a sense in which, carried away from his Australian homeland, Carl Strehlow walked into the migrant condition. One kind of travelling, imperious, purposeful and justified became in its mirror a purgatorial traverse of shifting sound where the ground was not given but continually retreated, like the landscape viewed from a railway carriage. St Paul’s interpreter, Adolf Deissmann, explained the mission as follows: ‘Born in the borderland between the Hellenistic and the Semitic world, on one of the great international roads connecting the East and the West, Saul, the Semitic Hellenist who was also called Paul, felt a vast compelling impulse to traverse the world from its eastern to its western end.’ 34 Why, reversing the direction of Alexander the Great’s conquests, Paul linked being in-between to universal conquest remains to be seen. Here it is the schema established for missionaries that matters. In the seminary trainees were orphaned from their ordinary tribal attachments and fitted out with a new spiritual genealogy, one whose outcome was inevitable: unanchored from the homeland, the new home (of God) was located at the end of a journey into exile. But could progress really be made? The diaries of Australian missionaries are records of disappointment. At the end there is a sensation of having got nowhere, of marking time. Transposed to the agonising length (and pain) of the overland mercy mission to get his father medical help, T.G.H. Strehlow describes this feeling in Journey to Horseshoe Bend:

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And so the last miles were covered, chain by chain, yard by yard, step by step. Theo put down one bare foot in front of the other almost mechanically, sometimes wondering whether the long-expected station lights would ever come into view … Because of the darkness which blotted out all the more distant objects, such as the hills and the dunes, it often seemed as though neither the van nor the team was moving forward at all. In spite of all movement the travellers seemed to be marking time; and even the closer trees passed by them seemed to reappear again and again.35

This is also migrant time consciousness. Just seven years after Strehlow published his memoir, experimental video-artist, Dirk de Bruyn, made a 20-minute film called Running. Returning to it half a lifetime later de Bruyn recognised it as ‘articulating the stateless mobility of the migrant in a gutted catatonic form’: subjected to a Zenonian reduction, the illusion of movement comes to a stop: ‘My interest in flicker and optical effects that I bring to this project are to do with their capacity to shock, erase and immobilise rather than merely as a pure and essentialist form of cinema.’ 36 It is hard to believe that Strehlow and de Bruyn belong to the same worlds; de Bruyn mines the environmental unconscious of displacement that Strehlow seeks to redeem by narrating his father’s last journey not simply as a Pauline allegory but as new storyline woven into the landscape created by the totemic ancestors – when at Nine and Fifteen Mile Creeks the party comes near Ndapakiljara ‘the land where Death had first come into the world’,37 Carl Strehlow’s fate is foreshadowed, as is a resurrection where the ‘course’ turns out to be an eternal return to ‘the Land of Altjira, the Land of Eternity’: ‘Theo knew that this storied land would provide a far finer last resting place for his father than he could ever have found in some conventional cemetery in that distant country from where he had come.’ 38 It is this transcendence of the Christian telos that explains Strehlow’s extraordinary dedication to documenting Arrernte traditions, as if his perfectionism can wipe out the historical stain of colonisation and the blood of missionary self-sacrifice: atoning for the sins of the fathers, he will recover a pre-Babelic state of original heimlich speech.39 But the discourse of colonial anthropology was a fantasy the native informant did not share. Recalling this, we might substitute ‘translation’ for ‘migration’ in de Bruyn’s reflection: ‘Migration is a

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98 Translations humbling ordeal that does not deliver a privileged view. It delivers a practice of resistance, attrition, introspection and negation lodged in the gaps between things that matter. It is a journey that exacts its toll relentlessly in the thousand and one cuts and repeating small humiliations that become perceptually hard-wired into the body by everyday experience. It is a story that exacts a unique homelessness.’ 40 In contrast with the optimistic ‘anchoring’ described by Pulvirenti, Raft recast migration as heir to colonial shipwreck. Comprehending the three aspects of the journey under the migrant typology of voyage, shipwreck and salvation, it was either a supremely ambiguous object – with its 24,696 characters referencing Le Corbusier’s industrial typography used on packing cases and its shimmering graphite terraces of upper-case letters, six languages, ‘copy-perfect on three of four faces of 294 wooden beams’, Raft alluded to ‘the way Europeans have thrown a lattice of lines (grammatical paradigms as much as surveyors’ grids) over their adopted country in the interests of getting on, of smoothing the passage, translation, from one place to another. At the same time, in a contradictory fashion Raft commemorated the fragility, instability and ultimate unseaworthiness of such a project – again, as we noted, ‘Rafts are associated with wreckage; they are hastily improvised means of getting ashore and what they deposit on the beach is the scaffolding of empire, scattered, broken and mixed up.’ 41 Finally, it was something else, not ambiguous at all. The formal elegance and calm of Raft was disturbingly at odds with the history of destruction it recalled. In a simple, representational sense, a therapeutic return to Horseshoe Bend was being enacted, one that, in the spirit of Vincenzo, recovered a network of alternative migrations – the six translations of passages in Acts, chapters 27 and 28, where Saint Paul counselled shipwrecked sailors who could swim to ‘cast themselves first into the sea, and get to land’ and those who couldn’t ‘on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship’ to escape. Coming back to Horseshoe Bend differently, not simply retracing bygone steps but fanning out, reconnecting as one might say typography to topography, we could imagine scattering the font to the winds and the waters, reliving the storm, rewriting the story. But this was not the real story; or, rather, it was only the outside story. The inner story was where these theatrical paradoxes were resolved by the admission of a neglected dimension, the ground. Writing

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about Raft, the anthropologist Philip Jones astutely observed, ‘the principal first impression is not of a raft at all, but of a mysterious printer’.42 It was a machine for making an impression, for ground marking. I am sure we weren’t fully aware of the cultural significance of this – Christine Watson’s study Piercing the Ground came out in 2003 – but, down another path in the 1994 labyrinth, I was in touch with Geoffrey Bardon whose insistence on the haptic character of marks Pintupi artists made on boards acknowledged the origins of the impressions in body painting and sand drawing (bringing these together, Watson later added the critical dimension of the earth writing back: ‘Ancestral consciousness, that consciousness is believed to be witnessing the activity of the human beings marking it’).43 But what counts here, the inner story, is the image Raft presented of self-becoming at that place; its habitus was a history, a shell of inscriptions carried snail-like where it travelled.44 In a migrant revision of the colonial imprint, the first step, as it were, was to take responsibility for the mark made in passing. The second, in keeping with the point made earlier – that when the walking line is imagined bipedally it produces a different kind of track, a pattern of alternating steps and glides – was to re-imagine how the marks joined up so that, instead of extinguishing all that had gone before, the impressions already made carried over into the present stride where they were further developed, continuously exercising an influence over the character of the steps to come. There was a precedent for what was being proposed in the physical form of Raft and its scope for rearrangement in different venues, but to understand the migrant nuance of the printing metaphor, it is necessary to go back a step to the patron of our vehicle, Saint Paul, who liked to characterise himself as a living letter, the seal guaranteeing his own Letters: hence he addresses the Corinthians, ‘You are yourselves our letter … that anybody can see and read, and it is plain that you are a letter from Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God.’ According to this metaphor, God’s word is stamped on the convert through baptism. Paul often speaks of baptism as a form of writing or printing. To be baptised ‘into Christ’ is rendered as being ‘booked in the ledger of the account of Christ’.45 Conversion may be described as receiving an imprint or being sealed, again with connotations of slave branding. Converts, who were ‘slaves of sin’ are described as becoming ‘obedient to the

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100 Translations pattern [typon] of teaching to which you were handed over’. Typos means ‘visible impression (of a stroke or die), mark, copy, image; but it also means a ‘compendium’ or ‘terse presentation of some topic’.46 Perhaps this alludes to an abbreviated account of gospel doctrine used in baptismal instruction. Or perhaps it indicates the ellipsis of conversion, a sudden contraction in the steady tread of time. Whatever the case obedience, ownership and new coinage are the dominant metaphors. As Ephesians explains, ‘after you came to faith you, too, have been sealed with his seal, the promised Holy Spirit’.47 The association of printing with baptism adds another link to the metaphorical chain. Generally, baptism is understood as a little death, as a plunge into swirling waters equivalent to shipwreck from which the convert is saved and brought safely to land. In both Mark and Luke, Jesus himself ‘calls His impending passion a baptisthenai’. The association immersion-dying is further reinforced by the fact that ‘The externally visible process of baptism is the image of a burial.’ 48 James Hillman, who is critical of this association of salvation with victory over the ‘underworld’ (here the whole of Nature), quotes Paul’s ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’, and asks what kind of transformation is envisaged: ‘The word he chooses for this move is allagesometha, “translation”, which also has connotations of barter and exchange. It is not just moving from this place or condition to that; it is giving up or putting off this, so as to gain that.’ 49 I think that when I first contextualised our ‘craft of translation’ in this way, I approached the realm of biblical hermeneutics with a kind of anthropological detachment: the Gospels were my native informant and, by exposing their poetic assumptions, I was characterising our own work as an act of spiritual demystification. At the very least, by yoking the Pauline conception of translation to a metaphysics of environmental and multicultural rejection, we aimed to salvage a silenced relation and to wake up from the sense that missionaries so often project of sleepwalking through their human and natural surroundings. Now, I must say, I take a less detached view. In a period of renewed fundamentalisms, it is clear that puppetry of the Word is the preferred position of many faith communities. There is no desire to travel differently: the violence of conversion once completed, there is no appetite for interrogating the trauma,

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wondering whether it was a function of trespass. At that time, I tried to find in the writing of and around St Paul evidence of a redeeming self-doubt. His double identity as Saul/Paul, his marginal geographical position and even traditional associations of the saint with the pagan Dionysus hinted at a psychological complexity migrants recognise. There was the phenomenon of interpellation too, the sensation of being the host’s ventriloquial puppet, spoken through, rather than spoken to. I found out that when describing his experience on the road to Damascus, Paul quotes directly from Euripides’s The Bacchae. Also, as the original Aramaic in which this conversation presumably occurred is a translation of the Greek original, it is the further translation of this conversation back into Greek that secures its authenticity: in Luke the original is reproduced word for word.50 But what always stymied these efforts to save Paul from himself was the fact alluded to earlier, that, no sooner was Paul converted, than he ‘felt a vast compelling impulse to traverse the world from its eastern to its western end’. In his well-known ethnography of the Jungian Puer eternus figure, James Hillman ran into the same problem (in my view) when he tried to recruit Alexander the Great to a subtler sense of psychic translation and growth. Alexander’s biographers attribute to the great imperialist an unusual desire for geographical expansion: in contrast with the conventional pothos, aimed at something unreachable in the past, his pothos was focused on horizons. Drawing attention to the fact that the cult of Pothos was celebrated at Samothrace where it was associated with the cult centre of the Mighty Ones or Kabiroi, Hillman attributes to Alexander a capacity for psychic integration (which at least in his short and brutal life is hard to recognise). Hillman speculates that the Mighty Ones were a pair of unequal male figures which, he suggests, may have comprised a younger and an older man (puer and senex). Then, as I wrote in Meeting Place, ‘initiation on Samothrace did not mean leaving the puer behind, becoming a grown man: it meant recognising the doubleness of identity. Hillman’s Pothos is an Eros for sailors’.51 Not simply a kind of nostalgia for reunification with the mother-figure, nor the product of a primary splitting, it embodies an archetypal longing for the new; it is the impulse to travel; it is the erotic impulse to seek out the other – but in both cases its focus is on the quality of the passage rather than the Ithaca of arrival. To yield to the desire

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102 Translations to travel is to risk shipwreck. The conjunction on Samothrace of the Kabiroi and Pothos symbolises the necessity of initiating the pothos-driven youth into the mysteries of his own brotherly other, his own goal of self-fulfilment, if he is not to be wrecked along the way. The fruit of this initiation into the doubleness of identity is the psychological maturity ‘To become’, as Canetti puts it, ‘a city, a country, a continent, without conquering anything.’ 52 Now, in this latest retracing of footsteps, it appears obvious that it was myself I sought through this interpretative labyrinth, my thread the pure word magic of a shared name.53 Raft materialised translation; like a cairn placed as a landmark, it drew attention to the different paths that pass through any place. Although the letters were eminently legible, their glistening graphite figures stamping themselves on the retina and retained as an afterimage, the sculptural ensemble and soundscape singularly failed as an aid to missionisation. Paul is called to be a messenger. Apostolos, from the verb apostolein, ‘send’ means ‘someone/something sent’. In extra-biblical contexts the word has imperial connotations, being used variously to mean a naval ‘expedition’, a ‘colony to send out’, a ‘trade-vessel’ or ‘envoy, messenger, ambassador’.54 Clearly, ours was no letter to be posted; besides, as it toured to different venues, it was reconfigured – beams might be removed and leant against the wall and the remaining palette of lettered spars used to delineate a differently proportioned grid. Giving back the literal sense to post, Raft was scaffolding that bore the weight of the Word, that materialised translation in an act of ferrying or carrying over that took responsibility for its own burden. People were invited to walk around a shipwreck of parallel lines, eliding their reading with treading. It was hermeneutics as hypnosis since the congregation of letters in this way produced a swarming field of black and white, such as one might see on the verge of syncope. There was no beginning or ending, one passage simply linking to another continuously; and any stop or punctuation the viewer/reader attempted to impose on the letter field in an attempt to extract a definite message immediately lapsed back into the tumultuous flow of what, in another interpretation, was the metrication of turbulent waves with so many flakes of light and dark. As this description may suggest, Raft was also a passage for us, revealing an entirely new way of imagining the relationship between

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typography and topography. If, as argued in The Road to Botany Bay, colonisation proceeded by renaming the country – inside the colonial grid place names were printed on the skin of the earth as the seals of the new authority – then our radical disruption of translation suggested a new way of negotiating passage in unceded land. Shifting the meaning of the work from representation to enactment, insisting on the cumulative nature of understanding – as if self-becoming at that place was always relational because the other, however intimate always approached from the distance, we discovered a way of walking in single file that retained the possibility of other approaches. At the time I did not appreciate the curious parallel between the poetic technique towards which we were stumbling and the language of Arrernte song. I had noted that, in translating Aranda songs into English Strehlow tried to reproduce the capacity of the Aranda language to represent processes of transformation: in rendering movement, for example, Aranda did not linearise and segment actions but employed an agglutinative grammar to convey incremental changes. Lines like Kapikututai / Kapikututa tarir-tarirtnjina, tarir-tarirtnjina from the Kaporilja rain song (whose poetic feeling Strehlow tries to render in ‘Veils of rainy mist, – / Veils of rain-mist cast down their sweeping folds, cast down the sweep of their folds’)55 ignore the subject–object relations that dominate English and German. Instead of describing a beginning and an ending, they copy the fluid dynamics of flowing water, elastically expanding, forming and reforming.

But, looking back, I see that there was far more to it. The inside of Central Australian verse was a ‘measuring unit’ that, Strehlow explained, was ‘not the classical metrical foot, but the smallest musical phrase into which the rhythmic measure of the line can be subdivided’.56 The outside was the context in which Arrernte songs were composed and performed: as sub-divisions of song cycles their temporal and geographical outreach was enormous. Writing about the Native Cat Songs (tjilpa) that recite the tjilpa ancestor’s journeys from as far south as Port Augusta northwards into the Simpson desert, Catherine Ellis notes that the song cycles associated with this myth ‘would consist of approximately forty separate acts, each of which related an incident in the story of the Native Cat wanderings in the Simpson Desert area. Each cycle took approximately two months to perform in full, generally at the rate of one act a day …

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104 Translations There are approximately 300 couplets in the recorded verses, most of which would be repeated several times in the course of the cycle’.57 Bringing inside and outside together, Strehlow describes the formal consequences of designing songs as dance accompaniments. Quoting the first five couplets of the Ankota Song, Strehlow comments, ‘The structure of these couplets is of the utmost simplicity; and yet it is most effective. Instead of saying, in one couplet, that the ancestor, who is wearing a tjurunga on his head, is covered with red down, and is lying in a red hollow, the singer spreads out his impressions across five couplets, each of which carries the description a step further.’ 58 Strehlow offers a Western analogy, noting of the same couplets that one to three share their first line, while couplets three to five share their last line: ‘in these common lines we have something akin to the refrain, which is a familiar feature of much popular verse the world over’.59 Expressed bipedally, the repeated first line of the couplet is like the repeated footfall, regular, self-same, while the equally regular self-departure of the couplet’s second line (so that the description is advanced) signifies the fact that, in walking, one moves from one place to another. Expressed as a track, it is the glissando of advance that prevents the refrain from being a mere repetition on the spot (like a stuck record). This unit of sense (the first three couplets) is linked to the next unit of sense by the device of repeating the final evolution of the previous couplets, now adopting this as the refrain while the other foot, as it were, continues to advance the story. Over dozens of verse units constructed and linked in this way a kind of Chinese Whispers effect occurs as the narrative progressively self-modifies and grows without any decisive ‘leap’ from one state to another. The technique is analogous to the kind of conversation echoic mimicry produces, where a repetition generates (sometimes through mere phonic coincidence) a new phrase or understanding. In the migrant context of developing a poetics able to generate complexity out of the simplest sense units, Strehlow described a baroque mode of composition. The barocco leccese held an especial appeal for me because its exfoliating arabesques occurred entirely on the surface: the crowds of stone flowers, cherubs, grape-feeding birds and serpentine foliage crawled over and infiltrated facades and interiors whose essential proportions remained Romanesque. Copious improvisation was then curiously linked to abjection, an awareness that the innovation everywhere visible was superficial

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and did not affect the essential volumetrics of power. In an essay called ‘Baroque Identities: Migration and Mimicry’ published in 1992, I quoted Sacheverell Sitwell’s estimate of the Manueline architecture of Portugal: ‘almost every trace of the classical lines laid down by the Renaissance has gone, so far has it travelled from its centre, and it is difficult to see a pillar because it is so honeycombed with carving or to recognise an arch through the web of flowering lines with which it is overlaid’.60 In relation to a functional raft, or indeed a legible grid of any kind, Raft displayed the same ‘mad profusion of ornament’, its ‘flowering lines’ of six translations losing sight of ‘the classical lines’ laid down in the Bible. Projects like Lost Subjects or Raft were poetic ethnographies of the line. Accepting Canetti’s figure of migration as people walking in single file, they materialised the road as a braided track and proceeded to unbraid it to reform a movement form that was rhythmic, had amplitude and depth and transferred the work of arrival to the negotiation of passage. I liked to quote Paul Celan’s characterisation of his translation of Picasso’s play of wartime resistance Le desir attrapé par la queue as ‘a sort of ferry service’ – ‘so may I hope that for the payment of my work, not only the lines but also the oar-strokes will be counted’.61 But, after all, the singular line of flight compared to an act of conversion or translation is exceptional and its identification of migration with a single and singular viewpoint ignores the Brownian motion of commercial exchange integral to empire, and whose graphic outline might, according to de Quincey, look like ‘an undistinguishable blot’. The refusal of mestizage in Australia, and the associated myth of colonial autochthony, remain puzzling to most outsiders. The intertwining of empire and mobility explored in the dance theatre work Old Wives’ Tales evoked a contracted world in which genealogy was geography. In this celebration of dancer-choreographer Chandrabhanu’s ‘three grandmothers’, a mischievous trickster called Chee Chi Wi draws him into a journey. Confirming Berger’s insight, his descent from the headwaters of To’Timah (his Hokkien-speaking maternal grandmother who travelled from Fukien to Penang), Dadi (who migrated from Bengal) and Toh (his wet nurse’s mother who, it appears, once served as a midwife in Kelantan’s Royal Palace in Kota Bharu and perhaps spoke Thai as well as Kelantanese Malay) occurred inside a dream dreamt by another best imagined as the imperative of imperialism. As we warned

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106 Translations an Australian audience: ‘Do not mistake this for / a mistaken love of the Orient; / we were all pretty/ British/ Subjects, learning how to march.’ The dramatic function of Chee Chi Wee is to introduce a mocking counter-rhythm, one that ultimately helps Chandrabhanu find his feet as a dancer. The refrain that links the three stories, ‘over the water, down the river’, is the choral accompaniment of the Chee Chi Wi who (disguised as a floating bamboo pole) shadows the young man on his journey: ‘you touch it and you lose your bearings, / you are transformed into something else, / possessed by a double who takes you his way’.62 Three immense figures are silhouetted at the back of the stage. They represent (from left to right) To’Timah, Dadi and Toh, the three old wives. To’Timah is shaped like a seated Buddha; wears prominent ear-rings; inside her, in her lap, is seated a smaller replica of her; it is her daughter. A rickshaw leans against her. Dadi reclines on a bed, she leans on one elbow; she is richly adorned; in some way her flowing robes transform into the coils of the python. Toh is altogether a lighter figure or sculptural ensemble; various objects may be scattered about her base – watermelons, mannequin husbands, a crocodile, a spade.

Old Wives’ Tales was a modest popular success and I remember Geoffrey Goldie’s inspired stage sets and costumes, the Bharatam Dance Company’s valiant management of my script and their steps and, most of all, the Hogarthian serpentine line of Chandrabhanu as, reclaiming his lineage, he showed again how to transcend it – I remember all of this with great affection. The main relevance here of Old Wives’ Tales is, though, ethnographic. The basis of my script was a set of three recordings in which Chandrabhanu, as self-willed native informant, talked about his three grandmothers: as a trained anthropologist, he was able to hold in balance the different claims of autobiography, sociology, psychology and politics. We were putting together a serious fairytale. But the chief point was the ritualisation of the journey, a recognition that whatever free will they exercised, the three old wives were also historical marionettes. The evolution of the dance had, in this context, a political meaning; it signified a capacity to wrong-step lineage: to step, or sometimes (with Celan’s image in mind) to row, in the path of the ancestors was also, through the linkage afforded by the refrain, to find a belonging that could, step by step, be transported from one place to another. To dance this line was still to be interpellated – the free dance interpretations

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of my lines derived expressiveness from the dancers’ prior training in Bharatanatyam dance where improvised commentary on the text, sanchari-bhava (‘feelings produced while wandering, roaming about’), is part of the curriculum63 – but the balance of inner and outer natures (sophrosyne) was original. Behind the leggerezza of Old Wives’ Tales (produced in 1997) were the forming plans for Jadi Jadian, an ambitious sequel to Light (1996): following up our interest in William Light, we planned to track down his mother, or at least her spirit, at a site outside Georgetown, Penang, now occupied by the ruinous Suffolk House but formerly said to belong to our lost subject. Again, there was an autobiographical dimension as the ‘garden house’ recorded in Francis Light’s will as Martinha Rozells’s inheritance (supposed to have been displaced by Suffolk House) occupied a site only a mile or so upstream from the house where Chandrabhanu’s relatives lived, and we could suppose that as a child he had frequently visited the colonial ruins. Again, we were staging a double return. An account of the ‘secret ceremony’ that took place outside Suffolk House one night in July 1998 has been published, and there is no reason to repeat that material.64 In the context of a migrant ethnography of the line, the significant feature of Jadi Jadian was its channelling into performance of funerary practices associated with ritualised journeys. There is no pretension to write an amateur ethnography of mourning symbolism – the nine stages of the elaborate script I prepared for Jadi Jadian corresponded to the nine arches of Suffolk House’s main façade, and material was selected for and distributed across this theatrical backdrop. But, since the time of our performance, Suffolk House has undergone an elaborate restoration ‘to its former glory’ and the earlier traces of Martinha’s presence have been buried all over again. In returning Martinha’s spirit to Suffolk House, we had the impression that we had given the ruins a new life, signifying, paradoxically, that the decay of the House could now be allowed to happen and with its proper passing (which our ceremony had blessed) the land might revive and the banished place spirits come back. Instead, our shamanic ambition to act as a bridgehead between pre-colonial and post-colonial senses of place was seriously at odds with the neo-colonialist pieties of the new nation state. A new monumental simulacrum of the past has, again, settled the past as

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108 Translations past; and the place spirits, if they approached to see what we were doing, have retreated further than ever. Both Jadi Jadian and its predecessor, Light, were conceived as walking dramas. Culturally, they were kinds of Miracle Play. Conceptually, there were elements reminiscent of the genre of urban pageant whose best-known representative is the RamLila performed in the town of Ramnagar in the Nainatal district of Uttarakhand, India. Both were imagined as a sequence of pageants illustrating episodes from a life – in Adelaide William Light, in Georgetown William Light’s mother, Martinha Rozells. For Light Hossein Valamanesh created a half-buried house whose proportions exactly reproduced Light’s Theberton Cottage, whose destruction by fire in January 1839 (and associated loss of Light’s papers) precipitates Light’s plunge into illness and fever in which, séance-like, episodes of his life appear before him. The audience for Light was mobile, accompanying Chandrabhanu’s symbolic peripateia. A performance without theatrical boundaries, where spectators doubled as citizens and where temporary structures were inserted into the urban fabric, recalled the RamLila.65 While the script and staging for Light were disciplined responses to a definite commission and a prescribed site, the spirit journey proposed in Jadi Jadian was speculative, cinematic as well as dramatic: while the nine arches of Suffolk House were treated as narrative units in Martinha’s journey, most of the scenes suggested film. A multiplicity of viewpoints was called for, a variety of environments and a sequence of transformations. The translation of Martinha’s spirit was an educational pilgrimage realised through a series of metamorphoses. Events prescribed for the Second Arch capture the scope of this ‘mental theatre’: ‘picnickers’ glimpsed in the previous scene in front of Suffolk House return as travelling Malay actors; they construct a bamboo and sheet pavilion and proceed to enact a battle scene representing an episode in ‘the history of Burma-Siamese-Kedah territorial struggle’; Martinha asks her husband, Francis Light, if the pavilion is where she is to live; Francis explains that she no longer has a body, she is the breath ‘that moves mother and daughter’; beginning a journey, she must be born again; the pavilion turns into a lying-in chamber, a lullaby is sung and a story told, of tigers turning into men and men into tigers; in a magical sequence, the pavilion is repurposed as a travelling cage and a spell cast over

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Martinha’s spirit. Equipped with these theatrical ‘substitutes’, she can travel ‘over the bridge, across the water, to the underworld’. I think that when we began this we really did not know what form the work would take. In returning to Perlis and recruiting traditional court dancers and musicians, Chandrabhanu was reviving his earliest dance ethnography studies – with remarkable success as, at the time of writing, our ‘secret ceremony’ in which Terinai dancer and musicians collaborated, is now part of the national dance curriculum in Malaysia. As the chapter about Jadi Jadian published in Material Thinking underlines, Jadi Jadian was an ethnographic drama, a researched response to the highly syncretic religious landscape of Penang. In particular, as I noted, Three rituals performed in Penang – the Hindi Thaipusan festival, the Malay berhantu or ‘spirit-raising’ séance and the Chinese kong-tiek, a funerary rite – also illustrate the mobile personality of houses in a sacred context. The famous Thaipusan Festival commemorates the Hindu war god and divine lover, Murugan. Temporary pavilions of

Figure 5  Bharatam Dance Company, Jadi Jadian, The Malthouse, Melbourne, 25 September–4 October 1998. Choreography: Chandrabhanu. Video footage of rehearsals at Suffolk House, Georgetown, Penang, July 1998: Ettore Siracusa.

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wood or bamboo called thaneer pandal are built along the procession route and participate in the procession. The most elaborate are built with a second storey where one or two men may stand while they manipulate ropes causing a small doll to swing back and forth, passing over the crowd below.66

In the Malay berhantu, over whose three days there occurs ‘contact with the spirits, divination and the cure’, a shelter is constructed for the séance.67 Inside this syncretic dream, the complex religious legacy of imperialism, we looked for a way out of the labyrinth. Taking the script as a cue, our cinematographer and I respectively filmed and recorded material that conformed to the atmosphere we wanted to create. Now my memories of the entire experience are as much auditory as visual. I particularly remember the haunting gong-like notes of frogs recorded in the Gua Kelam caves, the koel at Suffolk House monotonously repeating ‘unreal, unreal’ and the ritual ringing of bells recorded at nearby Dandayuthapani or Waterfalls Temple, an early temple built by the Chettiar community, which Chandrabhanu recalls visiting as a child during the Thaipusam Festival.68 Certain calls, certain faces, certain gestures (like crossing over) are the red ribbons marking a personal path through the forest of perception; at the end they turn out to have been the true genealogy of the creative journey. In his autobiographical introduction to Ilios, the German excavator of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann, claimed that he had been digging for treasure ever since he was a child. Impressed by this Freud considered that ‘the man found happiness in finding Priam’s treasure because happiness comes only from the fulfilment of a childhood wish’.69 It appears that Schliemann was indulging in a childhood romance: like the treasure he later claimed to have found, his earlier claim was mainly fiction. At the same time, it was clear that part of the satisfaction that Chandrabhanu drew from works like Light, Old Wives’ Tales, Jadi Jadian and, later, our Anglo-Indian production, Alice, based on Lewis Carroll’s character, was the opportunity they afforded to go back to the world he had left behind when he migrated to Australia. Equally clear, though, was the consistent focus on crossing over, a translation experienced somatically as the mastery of movement forms that integrated left and right, forward and back to produce a repertoire of parts (shaman, spirit, Dionysus, Krishna) characterised by their power to cross over from one identity into



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another.70 Equally, the satisfaction that my co-artist Ruark Lewis derived from designing, inscribing and constructing Raft had roots in family history. Lewis came from a distinguished family of provedores who had at various times owned oyster beds near Sydney. This connection came back to him when he wrote about the inspirations for Raft: A building system composed of grids within grids, adaptable enough to bear the impress of colonial history; a creative matrix, something like the intertidal oyster beds at Georges River near Botany Bay, along whose embedded beams useful, unpredictable life grows in rows: the fertile grid inside which these experiences attached themselves oyster-like were the environmentally sustainable designs pioneered by Sydney architect, Bill Lucas – I remember my 1992 theatre project The Perfect House quoted his design for a glass and timber building (“Glasshouse”, 1957) built in native bushland on the northern shore of Sydney.71

Here an additional source may be mentioned: as James Paull reminds us, ‘What became The Silhouettes (previously Designs for Mirror States, then re-named the Yirrkala Drawings) were initially prototyes for an unrealized installation based on a radiophonic composition written by Carter. These 1990 sets are important because they reveal that what Lewis would eventually produce when sourcing the bark paintings was profoundly informed by his initial design setting of the drama that Mirror States stages in sound, specifically, the colonialist “nightmare of being trapped by one’s own image”.’ 72 Recollecting Hossein Valamanesh’s field installation Dwelling, I can see a pattern here, a shared desire to inhabit Australia differently. Valamanesh moved to Adelaide in 1974, a year after immigrating to Australia from Iran. In 1980 he ‘proposed and built Dwelling, a Middle Eastern-style house which appeared like an apparition amid the scattered trees of [Adelaide’s] East Parklands’.73 The memory of this mudbrick construction was one of the reasons I approached Hossein in 1994 about building a fragment of Theberton House as part of Light. It was an ‘ideal home’ (not in the magazine sense), created, Valamanesh said, deliberately without purpose, a place where one might imagine living but like a temple, where one was not permitted to sleep. Dwelling recalled an Iranian kharobot, a building that has been abandoned, where, because it is derelict and no one pays any attention to it, someone or a group of people might adopt as a temporary landing

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place, which they might repair and use, to think, to dance, temporarily to live differently. It is a ‘no place’, usually within a built-up area, where what is left out of lives can fit in.74

Transposed to the uninhabited parklands of Adelaide, I suggested, ‘it proposed true habitation as a condition of imaginable temporary occupation associated with abandonment, and habitation as a double habitation, where the building carries its own airy other on its shoulders, like a tramp with his swag. It carries its dreams with it, like a shadow falling before, an ephemeral architecture, subject to change and relocation elsewhere’.75 Like Lewis’s ‘building system’, Valamanesh’s four-square buildings planted in William Light’s Adelaide survey was ‘a grid within a grid’. Here and in the substitute Malay house made for Martinha, the rudiments of the colonial grid, its rectilinear scaffolding, were dis-assembled and re-assembled as vehicles of translation. Dwelling was intended to disappear: like the later Theberton House fragment, it was a ruin of the future. Mirror States also envisaged the same resolution of the colonialist prison house and, ironically, our ‘secret ceremony’ at Suffolk House also served this purpose as, in the future of its artificial restoration, its former existence as a living house gradually dying was best preserved in our performance. It may be no accident that, when Ettore Siracusa (who had filmed Jadi Jadian) proposed to turn my migrant fiction, Baroque Memories, into a film, he focused on the house of the main character, Doctor Duende.76 The decision to use the house where I lived with my family as a location was also symptomatic, as, shortly after that, I began to leave. Returning to the line, Relay, the typographic work Lewis and I designed for the terraces of Fig Tree Grove, Homebush Bay (commissioned by the Sydney 2000 Olympics public art programme) bore an obvious formal resemblance to Raft (Figures 6 and 7). Now, our lines were scaled up and distributed along the risers of sixteen terraces, but the exclusively upper-case lettering and the scriptio continua presentation of the letters were familiar; if Raft had been plunged into a rainbow and miraculously rejointed into rows, it might have looked a little like Relay. The story of Relay has been told in Dark Writing, the ambition it realised to integrate reading with treading and both into a dramaturgy of public space.77 Here I simply allude briefly to some metrical features of the inscriptions

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Figure 6  Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, concept sketches and text treatments. i. Paul Carter, ‘Starting Block’, concept sketch for Relay (September 1998). ii. Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay design, colour text treatment and collage, November 1998. 500 mm × 4000 mm (detail)

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Figure 7  Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, detail of blue tier – HOPENOWTHEORERACOMESROUND HUMANORACLESSHOWAWAY SUNONOURLIPS – Fig Grove, Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, New South Wales, 2000.

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I composed as they illustrate how a migrant poetics influenced the treatment of the line, innovations in lexicon, syntax and phrasing combining to produce a line that, to adapt Klee’s phrase, went for a walk, in the double sense of extending in a definite direction and apparently without ending. Relay’s writing transposed into a migrant dialect compositional techniques that Strehlow had identified in his account of rhythmic measures in Arrernte song. The most obvious of these was the overlapping of first and last letters in imitation of the baton that one relay runner hands over to the next. A phrase like STARTEAGAINNODISGRACE illustrates the diversity of readings this simple device can generate. The comparable device of anacrusis where the last syllables of one line are used at the beginning of the next line is also a feature of Arrernte verse78; adapted to my continuous lines, ‘it often obliterate[d] completely the ordinary divisions between the words of which a line has been composed’.79 Then, at the scale of a larger unit, the half-line or rhythmic measure, into which Arrernte song falls, there was another parallel: ‘As a general rule each couplet … falls into two halves: the second half either reiterates or restates, in slightly different words, a subject already expressed by the first half, or it introduces a new thought or statement, thereby advancing or completing the subject that has been expressed in the first half.’ 80 Here I felt on home ground. I recognised in this musical ethnography the organisation of the Scarlatti sonata, studied in relation to my radio work Scarlatti (1986).81 In Relay, the enjambement – the striding over from one line to the next which draws attention to the instant between two strides and which therefore, according to Kafka, opens up the whole of history – found its counterpart in the cascades of near repetition whose homophonic variations produced surprising leaps from one idea to the next – 1. Now the ore era. 2–4 EORERA! 1. Comes round. 4 Is there another air? 1. Must be. 4 Water? 1. Or way forward’. In Relay, Strehlow’s refrain had been contracted from a line or phrase to a single letter, a rule of my own making which I interpreted with some poetic licence. The flowering of words within words, locating ambiguity at the heart of sense-making, certainly reflects a common migrant experience. My treatment of the line within the line also resembled another feature of Arrernte verse: instead of dividing the line into feet (stresses) or quantities, and formally employing a caesura, I relied entirely on rhythmic phrases adjusted

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116 Translations to breath patterns. A very short and a very long phrase could have exactly the same duration, suspending the fall of the beat or bunching it towards an emphatic end. Hence the two half-lines ‘Under air’s ocean barely clothed’ and ‘Be athletes to our wandering eyes’ last the same length of time as the two following half-lines: ‘Stay time’ and ‘Dance spaces’. Strehlow similarly refers to catalectic measures, ‘when instead of a syllable or syllables uttered by the voice there is a pause of silence answering to them in duration’ 82 and to slithering gradients when ‘frequently syllables were inserted in order to stretch out words to the demands of the metre’.83 An ‘absolute rhythm’, to adapt Ezra Pound’s notion, was invoked here, a rhythmic structure of great flexibility inherent in the linked autonomic functions of breathing and walking. Ellis compares this patterning in Aboriginal music, ‘where duration of patterns frequently changes within fixed boundaries causing asymmetry’, to a capacity for ‘incorporation’ whose spatial manifestation might be the temporary infolding of boundaries in times of stress and which finds expression in kinship structures that accommodate ‘complex forms of extension and inclusion’.84 These devices allow the lines to be performed in many different ways, many lines of flight braided into a single succession of letters, and each requiring its own pacing, phrasing and space. I recall Eugenio Montale’s lines in the collection Satura: Non c’è un unico tempo: ci sono molti nastri Che paralleli slittano Spesso in senso contrario e raramente S’intersecano.

Given Montale’s ‘extraordinary obsession with history’ in this volume, the assertion of polychronicity is a radical protest against linearisation.85 Sometimes we only find the parts assigned to us afterwards, by retracing footsteps taken unconsciously at the time. Such elisions, where, in remembering time past, we see what the older gestures meant (where they tended towards) may be signs of friendship: creative collaborations, generally documented in terms of concepts, images and forms, must have a physical attraction behind them, an original sense of mutual recognition (made precious by the distance from which the approach occurs and the angular difference of origin). It is only now that I understand the personal signature written into

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Relay, the respectful imprint of my artist brother’s limp into the slur of Relay’s inscription: as a result of a motorbike accident, Ruark dragged one leg when he walked. As this brief example given above indicates, the text for Relay not only chained words together to form transformational series: it also embedded words inside words: DIS, RACE, ART are legible inside the lexical and syntactical drive to another sense. These secreted syllables have the effect of blurring the conventional association of reading with purposeful advance. Like slurred speech, they question the eloquence of the historical eyewitness. ‘Slurred speech has no place in the theatre’, Voice 6 comments in Lost Subjects: ‘But in the Museum it echoes’, Voice 7 replies.86 Public space is another venue that invites reflection on the medium of communication, that brings into question the confident injunctions designed to fix public memory to the exclusion of other, uncomfortable truths. Words within words act as a disturbing basso continuo; constantly shadowing the meaning, they introduce a disturbing asymmetry or syncopation. They imply a double, walking in the other direction, or a constitutional ambiguity, as if the words can bear witness against themselves. Later, Lewis incorporated the slur into limping artworks that fused treading and reading in a radical critique of neo-liberalist appropriations of public space. As Paull writes, with reference to works like Euphemisms for the Riotous Suburb (2007), ‘Lewis’s art underwent a development that saw it become a truly syncretic peripatetic poetry. The simple act of walking offers a memorable dramatic device: his shuffling, tottering gait, the result of a permanent physical disability, illuminating the precarious act Lewis takes in any single step. Lewis’s stories became Sisyphus-like in their embodied stoicism.’ 87 And Oedipus-like, too. In ‘Excessive Rain’, a poem written in 2015, I transposed the poetic structure of Journey to Horseshoe Bend to an imagined return to Relay at Homebush Bay; earlier histories walked with us (of Raft), and the entire journey fell within the ancestral landscape and action of Sophocles’s play Oedipus at Colonus – which opens, it will be recalled, with the figure of the exiled king, blinded, limping, groping his way towards the terraces of the sacred grove: Come with your swollen foot, where natural steps indicate a holy place, lay your wand.

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Take my hand and feel your way to the ledge, Sit crouching on the scarped edge: without the sand The snake would leave no trace. Run your fingers across the black granite, decipher its fiery essence.

After fire, rain: rain that is the memory of all footsteps ever taken gathered into the fold of the present, the image of stuttering motion in recollection beginning to flow. I remembered our scheme to drive Raft against the Red Cliffs at Horseshoe Bend: Then, a leaning for clouds with rain falling Could make redundant the future tense, Now, the philosopher of home drags a flag Along Bondi Beach, like a winged turtle, Engraving the sand with cuffs for the tides. Assaulting dark forces, you fell into the fire: Global warming and … Raft at Red Cliffs: A whitewashed scaffold rain tore away, A matchbox of sticks staining the scree: Marking the spot where escaping the thunder We fell into the lightning: the Odyssey’s Dry run, father and son tracking the distance That cannot be undone, friend; slurred footsteps Best mark the instant where ending begins.

Notes 1 Peter Emmett, ‘Foreword’, Lost Subjects, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1998, vi. 2 Paul Carter, Lost Subjects, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1998, Scene 29, 73. 3 Carter, Lost Subjects, Scene 80, 172. 4 Carter, Lost Subjects, Scene 14, 40. 5 John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, London: John Stockdale, 1793. 6 Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, 141. 7 Paul Carter, Living In A New Country, London: Faber & Faber, 1992, 151. 8 Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, London: Ballantyne Press, 1889, 2 vols, vol. 2, 293. 9 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover, 1966, 2 vols, vol. 2, 306.

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10 Paul Carter, Named In The Margin, scene 5. In author’s possession. 11 Barrère and Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, vol. 2, 250. 12 Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes, 1954–1971, trans. J. Jargraves, New York, 1998, 86. 13 Lino Concas, ‘The Silence of Poetry’, in Writing in Multicultural Australia 1984, 1984: an Overview, J. Delaruelle, A. Karakostas-Seda, A. Ward (eds), Sydney: Australia Council for the Literature Board, 1985, 103–106, 104. 14 Quoted by Janis Wilton, ‘From “Culotta” to Castro: The Migrant Presence in Australian Writing’, in Writing in Multicultural Australia 1984: an Overview, 24–33, 30–31. 15 Italian Historical Society of Carlton, Carlton, Victoria, Australia, Oral History Archive, tape copy 65 transcript. 16 Quoting Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, 154. 17 Mariastella Pulvirenti, ‘Anchoring Mobile Subjectivities: Home, Identity, and Belonging among Italian Australian Migrants’ in B. David and M. Wilson (eds), Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2002, 221. 18 Paul Carter, Baroque Memories, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1994, 179. 19 Carter, Baroque Memories, 179–180. 20 Carter, Baroque Memories, 33. 21 Carter, Baroque Memories, 51. 22 Paul Carter, ‘A Personal Memory: Autobiography and Photography’, Poetry Nation Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 25–30. 23 Paul Carter, ‘Double Take’, in S. Koop (ed.), A Small History of Photography, Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 1997, 28–33. 24 Carter, Baroque Memories, 55. 25 And historians have generally colluded. See Harry Hopkins, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars, 1760–1914, London, Macmillan, 1985, 12. 26 Paul Carter, ‘Migrant Carnival’, Agenda (Melbourne), Issue 22, March 1992, 5. 27 John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, 43. 28 Who, for example, is William Carter of Hinton Waldrist, born March 1833? ‘His emigration record of 1857 gives his native place as Berkshire and his marriage certificate states he was married in Hinton Waldrist, Berkshire to Elizabeth Edmonds on April 13, 1857. He sailed to Australia on 4 June 1857 as an agricultural labourer.’ No further record of him

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120 Translations exists. (See https://forum.familyhistory.uk.com/threads/william-carter. 29570/.) 29 Hammond and Hammond, The Village Labourer, 100. 30 Hopkins, The Long Affray, 239. 31 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, xi–xiii. 32 Later published as Paul Carter, ‘Beyond the Pale: Victor Litherland and Charles Aisen’, catalogue essay in Émigré: Victor Litherland and Charles Aisen, Migrant Naïve Artists, Ballarat: Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 1996, 1–6. 33 Paul Carter, ‘On Raft’, catalogue essay for Ruark Lewis and Paul Carter, Raft, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2 April–14 May 1995. 34 Adolf Deissmann, St Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, trans. L.R.M. Strachan, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912, 195. 35 T.G.H. Strehlow, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1969, 142. 36 Dirk de Bruyn in The Unwanted Land, Den Haag-Scheveningen: Uitgeverij Waanders B.V./ museum Beelden aan Zee & SculptuurInstituut, 2010, 118. 37 Strehlow, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, 133. 38 Strehlow, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, 218. 39 Strehlow’s Arrernte informants notoriously found his quest for correctness excessive. 40 Bruyn in The Unwanted Land, 119. 41 Carter, ‘On Raft’. 42 Philip Jones, ‘Foreword: a Raft of Allusions’, in Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft, Melbourne: NMA Publications, 1999. 43 Christine Watson, Piercing the Ground, Balgo Women’s Image Making and Relationship to Country, Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Press, 2003, 80. 44 At a higher level of integration this ambiguity, integral to the migrant condition, is an expression of simplicity. Writing about ‘plural ways of life’ in Indian society, Margaret Trawick wonders whether ‘intentional ambiguity is not interstitial ambiguity, marginal, liminal ambiguity characteristic of what is dismaying or strange to people, but ambiguity at the heart of things, openly embraced where it is found, emphasised where it is hard to perceive, and created where it could not otherwise exist’ (Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 42. See also her extended discussion of her own proposition: Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, 265–268). 45 J.A. Fitzmyer (trans and commentary), Romans, Anchor Yale Bible, New York, 1993, 433 with reference to Corinthians 3: 2–3.

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46 Fitzmyer, Romans, 432. 47 Ephesians, M. Barth (trans and commentary), Anchor Bible, New York: Doubleday & C., 1974, 1:13. 48 Günther Wagner, Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries, London: Oliver & Boyd,1967, 289–290. 49 James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 86. 50 See Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things, trans. P. Heinegg, San Francisco: Harper, 1994, 163. See also Carter and Lewis, Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft, 78. 51 James Hillman, ‘Pothos: The Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus’, in Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology, Dallas: Spring Publications, 1975. 52 Johann P. Árnarson and David Roberts, Elias Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society: Crowds, Power, Transformation, New York: Camden House, 2004, 120. 53 In The Lie of the Land, I applied Hillman’s thesis to T.G.H. Streh­low instead, arguing that motifs of twinning played a significant role in his sense of being at home in Hermannsburg: besides the important increase site of ‘The Twins’ (Ntarea), there was his relationship with the painter Albert Namatjira – together, I thought, ‘unequal male figures’ (The Lie of the Land, London: Faber & Faber, 1996, 38–42). 54 Fitzmyer, Romans, 232. 55 T.G.H. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, Sidney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, 456. 56 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 20. 57 Catherine Ellis, Aboriginal Music Making, A Study of Central Australian music, Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964, 51–53. But see also her wonderful book, Aboriginal Music: An Education for Living (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1985) and her account of the Pitjantjatjara musical system, especially the description of the interlock between musical features and extramusical events and the mediating function of rhythmic patterns (91–111). 58 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 110. 59 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 110. 60 Sacheverell Sitwell, Southern Baroque Art, London: Duckworth, 1931, 190–191. 61 John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, 94. 62 We were not aware of any references to a spirit like Chee Chi Wi in the ethnographic literature. However, Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir (in The Hikayat Abdullah, trans. A.H. Hill, Singapore: Oxford University

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122 Translations Press, 115–117) describes a ‘birth spirit’ who shares many of the Chee Chi Wi’s attributes. 63 ‘Accelerated Motion, Towards a New Dance Literacy’, Wesleyan University Press, Section 6, Technique. At www.oberlinlibstaff.com/ acceleratedmotion/dancehistory/bharatanatyam/section6.php 64 Paul Carter, Material Thinking, the Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004, 97–124. 65 Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, ‘The RamLila in Ramnagar’, Design Quarterly, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 2–24, 9, 13. 66 Elizabeth F. Collins, Pierced by Murugan’s Lance: Ritual, Power and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997, 67. 67 Carter, Material Thinking, 110. 68 Chandrabhanu, ‘Travels 2016’. (Author’s possession.) 69 See discussion in Material Thinking, 64ff. 70 Pers. comm., 10 October 2020. 71 Ruark Lewis, ‘Disguisement: The Construction of Raft’, in Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft, Melbourne: NMA Publications, 1999, 111. 72 James Paull, ‘Thoughtlines: The Art of Ruark Lewis’, in Thoughtlines: The Art of Ruark Lewis’ 1982–2014, Marrickville, NSW: SNO Publishings, 2016, 79. 73 Ian North, ‘Profiling Hossein: A Conversation with the Artist’, in Mary Knights and Ian North, Hossein Valamanesh: Out of Nothingness, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011, 7. 74 Paul Carter, Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 101. 75 Carter, Meeting Place, 111. 76 See Carter, Material Thinking, 125–151. 77 Carter, Dark Writing, chapter 7, passim. 78 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 60. 79 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 64. 80 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 112. 81 And discussed in Carter, Amplifications, 77. 82 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 93. 83 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 57. 84 See Ellis, Aboriginal Music Making: An Education for Living, 84–86. 85 Eugenio Montale, ‘Tempo e Tempi’, Satura, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1971. 86 Carter, Lost Subjects, 178. 87 Paull, ‘Thoughtlines: The Art of Ruark Lewis’, 172.

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Flow paths: topologies of coexistence

Rival Channels was a 58 square metre low relief in Kimberley sandstone designed for a public wall in Brisbane.1 The name referred to the turbulence where the fresh water flowing out of the Brisbane River meets the Pacific Ocean’s incoming tide. Thinking of the Italian riva, or bank, I also imagined the sculpting of the water’s edge or eddy viscosity caused by friction along the river banks. There was an engineering precedent. When the Brisbane River was being deepened in the 1860s, two rival proposals were entertained: one was to cut a straight channel through the bar at the mouth of the river; the other took account of the natural fluid dynamics of the river mouth. The Francis plan (which was adopted) followed the natural river channel and incorporated into the design ‘the current of the ebb tide set through it’.2 Allegorically, another maelstrom of meeting was going to be evoked, between early white settlers (convicts, soldiers and administrators) and the Kalperum-jaggin (‘Jaggera’) people. We had already imagined a great meeting forming as the analogue of waters overflowing, curling round and consolidating as a stable whirlpool. Here, inside the tight winding coils of the Brisbane River another model of communication might be entertained. The invitation to make this work arose from the client’s appreciation of the concrete poetry embedded in the Nearamnew design at Federation Square. Therefore, we always thought of Rival Channels as a field of letters, and following the Nearamnew precedent, proposed that the poetic text we composed would be a re-dedication that acknowledged the destructive impact of colonial settlement on the human and natural environment. However, a material matrix for this alphabetical apparition was necessary. I needed to find a graphic gesture that expressed the

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Figure 8  Material Thinking, Rival Channels, 420 × 1500 cms, Kimberley Sandstone sandblasted to three depths (9.00 mm, 4.5 mm, 0.5 mm), Brisbane 180, Ann Street, Brisbane, 2015.

vortical tangles produced where opposite flows meet: elementary turbulent flows are generated by obstacles placed in the flow path; in our case the obstacle was the other flow, and while in any realworld study a multitude of local variabilities would make pattern prediction at best a statistical probability, in our idealised case I could imagine a simplified homogeneous isotropic turbulence, in effect an ideal two-dimensional cut through the roiling topology of eddies, vortices, filaments and bubble chains that are the familiar face of chaotic cascades. I did some hand-drawn sketches, reproducing as best I could the after image of turbulent passages observed in local creeks – with the initial idea of setting the letters into the turbulent

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transport itself, perhaps like chains of bubbles folding in and out of the whirling troughs. But instead of animating the letter grid the confusion of writing with the water on which it was written produced an alignment that dissolved the difference I wanted to foreground. So the composition of Rival Channels was a process of pattern formation that materialised the logic of layering. If we think of migrant poetics in terms of manufactured meetings, the significance attributed to mere coincidences where some kind of homology (visual, auditory or even choreographic) establishes a provisional landing place or site of exchange, then the historical (and psychological) fact of resistance had to be factored in. In rhetoric the friction of irony serves to differentiate the migrant discourse but in pattern recognition how is irony displayed: the assimilation of letters to kelp-like tentacles of continuous writing merely distorted one representational convention (the letter grid) to represent the presence of another (rival flows). Besides, the neo-Baroque meanderings of turbulence nervature were all contained within the frame of the work as a whole, a rectangular field of over four hundred sandblasted tiles fitted together to produce a continuous pattern. The challenge here as elsewhere was to materialise the dynamics of an encounter in which a mutual transformation occurred. If a ‘wave is a newly formed third element at the surface of contact between water and wind’, then, analogously, our interest was in an event spontaneously generated and localised. As a movement form, the wave implies a rhythmic cut in time as well as space. The complexifying entanglements made out in the surface are traces of recent regional perturbations – for instance, ‘Whenever hollow spaces are formed, water is drawn into the hollows in a circular motion, and eddies and vortices arise.’ 3 This is a physical insight that I had long ago applied to the psychology of social encounter, whose simple ambiguity of ‘bumping into’ another is perfectly represented by the diagram of a vortex tree which now, in Brisbane, conjured up a familiar inhibition to smooth (colonial) relations. In contrast with the concentrated and territorially sensitive military-style arrangement of time and space attempted at the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Kurilpa (Place of rats aka South Brisbane, West End and Hill End) and indeed ‘the entire Brisbane Valley was a communal/neutral area used, shared and travelled through by all adjacent Moreton Bay region tribes, it was also used by people from as far away as Moreton Island and the Logan River. In fact, in the

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126 Translations annual inter-tribal gatherings and ceremonies held at what is now the Spring Hill, Normandy, and Petrie Terrace area, Kurilpa served as the hunting-gathering ground for all Logan River, Stradbroke and Moreton Island tribes’.4 A time lapse of military exercises, convict work parties and Aboriginal hunting and gathering routines would primarily map evasions. These earlier iterations of the problem of meeting could be said to provide the underlay of Rival Channels and it is probably no accident that the composition of this coincided with the publication of Turbulence, Climate Change and the Design of Complexity, a book which, inter alia, prints ten drawings that, as I explain, are graphic involutes. They translate into lines ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects,’ to borrow Thomas de Quincey’s definition. They represent ‘compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’. The involute is a recurring complex of ideas or as John Barrell puts it, ‘an intricately coiled or interwoven manifold’. Like the involuted shell (from which De Quincey borrowed his figure), it consists of overlays of later experience onto earlier experience. It describes a way of organizing experience that occurs repeatedly, a manifold to which successive associative clusters can be affixed.5

Imagined like this, remembering, then, is a balance of repetition and difference an act of displacement that doubles as replacement because successive associative clusters are recognizably transcriptions of an earlier experience. And, in relation to their social significance involutes ‘are movement forms, environments considered from the point of view of passages or journeys. The passages of different, juxtaposed surfaces are not part objects in search of a lost whole form. They desire to overlap, interpenetrate and yield to the influence of the neighbourhood.’ 6 And this has application to the dirty art of place-making: When it is understood that mythopoetic practices of place-making are involuted, relating and overlaying complexes whose origins are outside the individual in the symbolic ordering of time and space, it follows that the new designer must exercise this talent if it is to flourish. A new seriousness characterises the architect’s or the landscape architect’s site analysis and response to the brief. Going beyond the local historical associations, the immediate identity politics of different communities and the spurious differentiations of site based on minor geological or ecological variations, they cultivate certain seeds which



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are suitable or fitting because they are ready to undergo gradual additions or articulations or changes of place.7

The involution of experience described here involves feedback between observer and environment; in fact, a critical relationship exists that determines even the most random of interactions. The molluscan shell is not one among all possible permutations but the optimal resolution of ‘the ratio of internal volume to apertural area, or the ratio of internal volume to mass of calcareous material required, or the ration of internal volume to hydrodynamic drag’.8 And I suppose an optimal relationship can or should govern our own exchanges with the environment: as dancer and scholar Andrea Olsen argues, ‘We are part of, not separate from, the earth we inhabit. Our bones, breath, and blood are the minerals, air, and water around us – not separate but same. This isn’t a metaphor, as I once thought: it is a fact.’ 9 If ‘Ecosomatics can enrich the study of dance improvisation by providing a frame for exploring movement possibilities and kinaesthetic capacities by decentring the position of the human body and shifting attention to the improvisational dance of nature’,10 then the urban design equivalent of this, choreotopography, is equally the best possible line (or labyrinth) through all the possible paths of propinquity – for, in reality, however complicated it may seem, rival channels spontaneously improvise the new topologies needed to coexist. And here a talisman of the primary scene we wanted to evoke was the character of the stone we intended to carve. I had previously allegorised it: noting that political scientist Morton Grodzin had compared the distribution of power in a federal system to a cross-section through a marbled cake. I observed the formal parallels with Federation Square’s architectural language. His image of a political design – ‘in some places there are unexpected whirls and imperceptible mergings of colours’ – conjured up Lab’s architectural design, its interest in generating texture fields – ‘zones of anomalous differentiation such that a consistent (or apparently consistent) pattern within one part of an image begins to emerge as an area or zone of inconsistency, thereby establishing a distinct difference within the original pattern’. And I also noted that the ‘marble cake’ colouring of the Kimberley sandstone used in Nearamnew and the ground plane expressed the same idea of socio-political

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128 Translations economy.11 It seems odd in this context that Federation Square has not been recognised as a distinctively migrant project. But the aestheticisation of the stone, which produced a controversy over its geographical provenance and illegitimate seizure, while it produced a kind of conceptual involute, a materialisation of the turbulence designed into the stone, failed to address this materiality, its power to generate a new set of creative associations. Equally, it perpetuated an aerialist fantasy of creative activity analogous to the idealised viewpoint of the surveyor (optimal for the orthodox superimposition of patterns undertaken to find mere coincidences compelling enough to suggest a regional algorithm). Considering the spiritual damage done when stone from Mount Jowlaenga in Gija country was cut into blocks and sent south for sawing and cobbling, I wanted to use a local stone for Rival Channels, Brisbane Tuff – ‘Porphyry to use the trade name’ – ‘off-white, pink, purplish and green are all commonly occurring colours’.12 But, apart from the fact that its early popularity as a building stone had largely exhausted local quarries, Brisbane Tuff was laid down in air rather than water: in contrast with the marine deposition of Kimberley sandstone, Brisbane tuff is the compaction of volcanic ash, the coloration of both due to oxidation by iron and manganese. Here I had to admit to an ancestral bias. I had grown up in oolitic country, my dwelling place, the dry stone walls, the stones recycled for the old stone shed were fossiliferous, shells and Mollusca enclosed in the matrix-like eggs. And the same irregularities had attracted me to Kimberley sandstone, a ferruginous formation of the early Cretaceous whose composition demonstrates a ‘a near-shore deposit’ and whose lower part consists of ‘very fossiliferous beds’ in whose assemblage are found an extinct species of bivalve resembling a scallop, a similar species with an auricular shell, and a bivalve ‘which has not been re-described since its inception’ 13 – surely iconic objects in the context of first contact economies. These were slow water memories and the final position of any fossil due to the coagulation of turbulent flow. The geological history of Faringdon was rationalised as a sequence of marine depositions stretching from the Jurassic (around 155 million years ago) when the so-called Golden or Corallian Ridge, a band of honey coloured limestone that stretches from Wheatley, south of Oxford, to Highworth, was laid down, to a time in the Cretaceous

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period when a sandy rock called Greensand was deposited in two bands, Lower and Upper, dated respectively to 110 and 105 million years ago. The earlier sediments were deposited in a relatively shallow sea sufficiently warm to support the growth of coral reefs; the later deposits, celebrated as the Faringdon Sponge Gravels, consist of fossils or fossil fragments in a sandy matrix deposited in hollows in the sea floor, the result of erosion by marine currents – ‘the fossils seem to have been wafted in by the submarine currents which swept clean the dead debris off the surrounding sea bed’. N.J. Snelling writes: Faringdon’s fossils occur in an often friable rock which can sometimes be even crumbled in the hand with the fossils literally falling out intact. The deposit is particularly well known for the occurrence of fossil sponges which resemble cigarette ends, egg cups and tea cups, the larger specimens sometimes look as if they were badly fired and had started to sag. The sponge zooid is a unicellular creature, about 250 of which would form a queue about an inch long. They live in a colony and secrete a porous nestlike structure through which water can circulate essential nutrients. One group constructs their nest of fibres (I suppose protein fibres) and comprise the familiar bath sponge, another group have a siliceous nest of which usually only fragments are found. The third group are the calcareous sponges in which the nest is calcareous (made of lime) and this is the type found at Faringdon. The porous interior has long since been filled with secondary minerals (calcite) so the fossils are generally solid and robust. Other common fossils are beautifully preserved bivalve shellfish, sea urchins (usually fragmented) and their spines.14

The resulting geomorphology and soils defined my upbringing entirely. The abraided Corallian escarpment curved north-west along Highworth Road, while a tongue shaped mass of Lower Greensand ‘protrudes from beneath the Gault Clay between Uffington and Baulking and … extends to the north-west as far as the junction of Coxwell Rd. and Highworth Rd. south west of Faringdon’s town centre’.15 Beyond Highworth Road the Corallian limestone was overlain by a sandy clay loam, a later deposit that produced a stiff cold soil that my father thought better used for building than tilling. ‘The Land’ by contrast presented a light and warm soil ideally suited to market gardening.16 But the point here is that this environment was not experienced as a series of tranquil depositions but as a complex topography of snaking hillsides, multi-directional folds,

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130 Translations gradients, hollows and lips. The turbulence of creation had been faithfully preserved in the involuted character of the limestone matrix and in the compilation of debris, producing a variety of soils, sands, gravels and clays that created a jigsaw of hollows, quarries, hills, shallowly sloping fields and intervenient brooks, including the Ock whose Celtic name meaning ‘salmon’ preserved in toponymy the earliest recorded stratum of human occupation.17 My limestone was the antithesis of marmoreal. Our material of wall construction was irregular blocks of Corallian limestone which had the same compositional properties as the later Greensand deposits.18 Although harder, the coral rag was a conglomerate of shells that were held colloid-like in their lithic grave. While the general period of their deposition conformed to stratigraphic logic (although at a finer temporal grain chaotic arrangements of particles, turbulences, resistances and differential fluid dynamics must have affected their eventual position), internally, at the level of human handling and touch, they were solid sea beds or aquaria where gastropods, oysters and a range of hard-shelled animals were stuck in a sandy base. They looked moulded rather than deposited and like pastry drying out were inclined to crack; a consistent surface or angularity could not be imposed – to try was to have them progressively crumble back to sand; we held them together with cement or locked them in place with wooden lintels and brickwork quoins. They were a kind of noble debris, a rubbish repository of precious things; stone nests swarming with eggs. This geological medley disposes of any illusion that the migrant arrives without elemental dispositions and prejudices. But these are not laid down stratigraphically, existing instead as involutes or molecular suspensions. A non-stratigraphic topology of earliest experiences is already on the way to rethinking origins dynamically as a continuous organising pressure on consciousness. My object at least was not to consolidate and fix process but to dwell among the debris, finding erosional processes more fertile than marble statues. The allusion here is to the psychoanalytic significance Adrian Stokes attributed to marble, and to a period in my life when I mimicked his rhetorical violence without recognising what I feared in myself. His push for integration was, it turned out, antithetical to my desire to overflow, modestly to disintegrate in the first part of the Orphic cycle. The work of art, according to Stokes, ‘serves

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as a picture of the integrated ego, as a structural and often idealized picture’.19 It is the insight into structure that is critical and renders the artwork therapeutic. It also distances from the human body and its bodily juices: ‘a self-perception in regard to structure is best organized when it is an outer perception of the senses, possessing thus a degree of impersonality, since the reference is not primarily to the personality but to the skeleton, as it were, to a stable framework’.20 If the skeleton (the structure of the corporeal ego) is what overcomes ‘the feeling of chaos, of disintegration, of lacking emotions as the result of splitting’,21 then my environmental role models were remedies for unhappiness: nothing could be made of oolitic limestone. The limestone Stokes liked could be worked by Michelangelo or Agostino di Duccio; such stone possessed a ‘flesh-like glow and ‘The radiance or glow of the pure limestones and marbles causes them, in combination with the impressive fact of their solidity, to be the symbols of life concreted into static objects, of Time concreted as Space.’ 22 Evidently, Corallian rag defined integrity differently. For one thing it incorporated the memory of migration, materialising deposition as a rate of decay. It was continually eroding to recapture moisture. If the Freudian drive to stabilisation favoured the imagery of stratification and the satisfaction of archaeological excavation, essentially a carving back of superfluous matter to disclose the formal treasure, a migrant psychology favoured the imagery of moisture, overflow, osmosis, seepage, erosion and siltage. Instead of pursuing rarefaction, it practised liquefaction, which, as a creative practice, has as its object the image of form in water. With reference to the phenomenon of surface tension or of the colloidal matter that exploits it, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson wrote, its ‘softness partakes of fluidity, and enables the colloid to become a vehicle for liquid diffusion, like water itself’.23 Humble rags and friable greensands happily uphold the production of humus. As organic food historian Philip Conford observes, a history of humus as the genius of organic husbandry resolves into a contest between different evaluations of human dependence on his environment. Humus is not only soil in a dynamic state: it is a microcosm of the moist interactions that actually define our place in the biosphere. Humus is a medium of chemical and biological change; it is an aggregate of amorphous substances; it is composed of decomposed plants and animal residues; it consists of complexes

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132 Translations resulting from decomposition through processes of hydrolysis or oxidation; various compounds synthesised by micro-organisms form it; a natural body, it is distinct from other natural bodies, forming by interaction with inorganic constituents of the soil a complex colloidal system held together by surface forces, and reactive to moisture; humus facilitates mycorrhizal association; it acts as a conditioner, giving soil both cohesion and a crumbly texture; it causes soils to grow dark and warm. It was where art ended and a different mode of association was beginning. When I came to Australia, I became an advocate of sand. ‘It is just Water solidified that is this earth’, they chant in one of the oldest Upanishads. In contrast with Stokes’s concreted organic bodies, sparkling inside near crystalline marble, the great arenaceous sweeps of Australia’s estuaries, anastomosing inlands and relict seabeds retained the ultimate unity of wet and dry in their aeolian dunal formations, their marooned desert cliffs, their crumbling ferruginous screes and the perennial horizon its haze conjuring up inland seas. The reticular institch of wavelet hems, adjacent coralline graveyards sculpted into a dream collection of rain repositories, of dappled depressions, anatomically suggestive pipes and other favillae of friction gave to the resistance of movement an external habitus and creative expression. In favoured sites like Lake Mungo, ancient mandibles stuck out of the lunar surface; in the great serpentine tracked horizons north-west of Lake Eyre, the explorer Charles Sturt imagined the rushing tides rapidly sculpting an archipelago of argillaceous outcrops – he was only a few million years out of date but the evidence of vortical creation was striking, the tradition of turbulent formation written and rewritten in the characteristic environmental tracks in the surface.24 A Michelangelo of the South, improvising forms out of the endless drift of grains, might be like the fictional Vincenzo Volentieri, who made an art of cloud formations and reconceived the continent as an endless negotiation of coastlines, whose human expression was the always unfinished business of encounter and its new (social) forms produced by mutual exchange and rates of resistance. And if we were to invest in stone, let it be impure, pock-marked, inclined to participate in further mutation – producing figuratively in the Miocene ‘marble of the poor’, the pietra leccese of Baroque Memories, a new expression of migration. As M.E. Grazioni observes,

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looking into the face of the Contessa von Economico (‘which all the while was changing hue and growing ever more densely cobwebbed’): ‘I realized that that there was no end to the stories that might be found here. The skin’s mobile network represented a history of the environment. Her squint signified the slow deposit of sunlight over decades, the filigree of veins on her cheek, the strength of the prevailing wind. Her fissured brow, as minutely reticulated as a fisherman’s net, was a miniature city of directions contemplated and taken, contemplated and not taken.’ 25 Here, incidentally, was an aesthetics that, reversing Stokes’s dictum, concreted Space as Time, a process of repeated arrest and flow. A petrifying stream was a childhood destination, yielding travertine coated coins, twigs and other entombed everyday objects; I think this water originating in the nearby chalk escarpment flowed over dissolved Corallian rag, in any case sufficiently suffused with calcite to precipitate out on suitable surfaces: so what had been the mass accretion of marine exoskeletons became in this phase of the geologic cycle the sarcophagus of more recent organic matter, giving to soft tissues and other debris bric-a-brac a posthumous shell or skeleton. Later, the significance of this early water memory emerged in Paestum where, symptomatically I see now, a first sighting of the fresco known as il tuffatore [The Diver] had developed into a lifelong fascination. Here, as I noted, was an original response to the challenge of preserving the fleeting, capturing the overflow of the instant in permanent form. It transpired that a similar case could be made for the deity after whom Paestum (Greek Poseidonia) had been named. In contributions to a climate change exhibition there, I characterised Poseidon as ‘the traditional figure of turbulence’: ‘while he is the tormentor of Odysseus, he is also the guardian and steersman of vessels at sea – the original cybernaut, primarily involved in feedback loops of energy transfer that produce “complexly branching and interconnecting chains of causation”’.26 This dynamic ambiguity manifested itself materially in the evolution of Paestum’s urban form, in the construction of its monumental temples – and in its eventual inundation and abandonment. Poseidonia was distributed across an archipelago of travertine plateaux intersected by CaCo2 rich streams coming down from the Cilento ridges and flowing throughout the Sele Plain. Cycles of overflow laid down layers of gradually hardening travertine inside which the organic matter in

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134 Translations the flow path was caught and calcified. The travertine used in building the temples of Paestum is characteristically ‘spongy’ because it formed in swampy areas especially rich in vegetation: to look at any of the Doric columns is not only to make out the lithic equivalent of an ice core in which palaeo-botanical regimes and ancient Mollusca are preserved, it is to detect the intimate death throes of local turbulence: Amato et al. recognise the turbulence of at least three different flow regimes lithographically trapped in Paestum travertine. There is deposition that occurred along a slope, or at a waterfall or, more evenly, in ponds and shallow lakes, but the key point is that these palaeo-water flows are the trace of a continuously selftransforming system: ‘carbonate incrustations started on a gentle slope, with flowing water sheets, modifying its palaeo-morphology. The aggradational (upward growth) trend of these slopes originated a flat summit surface with swamps and/or very shallow lakes, while rapids and waterfalls were forming at their margins’.27 The poetic alignment of these geological processes and morphologies with the place-making sense and practice of the migrant alters the nature of self-becoming at that place: discovering shared matrices in the water body, locating ourselves collectively within environments that are the continually self-morphing expressions of Gaia, the living Earth, puts back the physics (and politics) of formation into the borders used to fix the power of division, including the politics of identity (with its ageless face). The locations of different art and writing projects were predominantly coastal because of the history of white settlement, but the cartography of empire served only as a testbed where the laminations of power could be peeled back. Further, the manifestation of water powers was correspondingly periodic, overflowing and lacework-like. The Poseidon of Central Australia, for example, is visible in ‘the anastomosing sand plumes, the cupped and sculpted river boulders, the transverse sand ridges’ 28 and I compared this formal translation between rain and sand, where the impression bears the imprint of a movement form to the non-representational modality of art referred to as methexis, or participation. But the Kaporilja spirit is also visible in the face of turbulence, in ‘waters that were foaming, curling, breaking, tossing, leaping and tearing with the eyeless fury of a primeval giant’.29 And the artist of this upselling, outflowing movement will, like Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, incise the brushstrokes in a way

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that ‘seemingly let them run in an emotional indeterminacy and force and unfinishedness’.30 And the presence of the creative spirit would not be a fountain like you find in Bologna where a Neptune on steroids presides over the enslaved water trained to pirouette and plunge but a standing wave, something perhaps like the arcing dragon or the Humber hager,31 and which, Strehlow states, was the place itself celebrating homecoming: ‘Thus, when the two Western Aranda ratapa twins first looked down upon the Ntarea waterhole from the top of the range four miles away, the waterhole is said to have suddenly come to life, showing its excitement by raising large waves on its surface. It was welcoming these twins, who were to dive into its depths forever.’ 32 Here is also a migrant allegory: in a cymatic stabilisation of the waves flowing out, rebounding and interfering with one another, rival channels (centrifugal, centripetal) could produce a stable set of concentric rings, a pluralisation of the standing wave; or, as appeared in the circular forms described by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, ‘If circular forms suggested the idealisation of place, the sense of energy in repose’ (as a hieroglyph in Bardon’s sense it might signify a waterhole, fire, hill, camp or vagina, as the context dictated),33 and travelling lines evidently suggested movement, then most interesting were signs that economically combined both, the half circles or oval shapes denoting men and women ‘moving between the principles of stillness and movement’, agents of the design whose country they simultaneously lived in and travelled through, producing it as they went. Concentric duplication implied ‘the dynamic origins of the circle’. In this sense, the circle was the completed line of the travelling principle. Finally, most poetically, if the circle could coil up the journey in a campsite, it could also originate travelling: the star sign, a circle surrounded by dots, suggested radiance in more than one sense: ‘The vortex of this radiating circle was a dynamic out movement of the travelling line from a place of rest.’ 34 As regards migrant psychology, the classical hydromancers were employed to see patterns in swirling water, to make out the stable form that emerged when rival channels were twinned and the opposite impulses synchronised and amplified. For methexis or participation was not a blind falling into line but the recognition of the syncopation possible in Poseidon’s midstride: in a methektic sense, birth is not the first displacement, expulsion and ruin but the primary emplacement, a

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136 Translations choreography of the ground that begins in a recognition of the duality of being and conceives communication as echoic, mimetic, a kind of oscillation. Returning to Rival Channels, on account of its involuted chromatic diversity Kimberley sandstone already bore the trace of turbulence. In contrast with its earlier deployment, we wanted to preserve and express this swirling constitution. At Federation Square, the abstract painterly appeal of the honed tiles was local and the fields of tiles laid together in pavements or steps, or cut and assembled jigsaw-like for the regional ground figures of Nearamnew, simply produced a vast open air pattern book. The global whorl pattern was the result of colour coding Kimberley sandstone cobbles and the colour bands forming the mighty gesture used the stone units instrumentally to create the pattern. There was no thought for any relationship they might have had in the physical matrix of Mount Jowlaenga quarry and in contrast with the butterfly-wing mirror symmetries of baroque wall tiling there was no aesthetic gain derived from displaying the two faces of cut stone adjacently. And, although I had in mind a relationship between the turbulent figure mosaicked in the global whorl pattern and the turba of the crowd, the stone did little more than provide the pigment of the design. At 180 Ann Street we wanted to respect the internal construction of the quarried stone; we stipulated that the 400 tiles (600 × 300 × 20 mm in dimension) should be cut from a single block and we undertook to articulate the turbulent character of the stone by regionalising the colours: no tile was a uniform colour but the largely cream-yellow tiles outnumbered the mainly porphyry-red ones; within these chromatic extremes intermediate tiles of blue-grey hues could be found – always with the proviso that in any single tile it was probable that traces of all the colours could be discerned, distributed in chromatically and physically unpredictable ways. Cutting the original matrix into hundreds of parallel tiles produced a progression of faces: arranged cinematically as an animation, the rapid progress from one tile face to the next would have revealed the morphogenesis of turbulent forms, a kind of reconstruction of ancient seepage, deposition and disturbance. But no natural alignment of the cut with the forming force lines was envisaged, the direction of the cut might as easily cut across the flowpaths and their naturally forming chromatic regions. Our approach was to engage in a kind of lithic archaeology:

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inspecting the tiles laid out on the floor of the shed where they were to be sandblasted, I arranged them into chromatic regions. Grouped into a broadly dumbbell-shaped central region, the ferruginous tiles seemed to ‘bleed through’ the paler surrounding matrix; one had the illusion of windows into rearranged time: dark bands of ferric oxide spread like bloodstained cloth through yellow fields. There were bland meadows of dusky plum and inside this squared-off and stacked wall of tiles endless anomalies recalling the macchie (blots) out of which Venetian painting builds. It was a chance to appreciate the differential hardness of this stone. Although classified as a sandstone, Kimberley sandstone is a semi-crystallised rock in certain parts as hard as granite, in other parts soft as argillaceous limestone and forming nodular, brain-like surfaces – a phenomenon that we interpreted at Federation Square as the material writing back and which there, as in the fictional universe of Baroque Memories, eroded to a new depth of sense in the surface. These were effects on the ground: on the wall a further stabilisation occurred. Amato makes the point that the formation of travertine depends on the presence of suitable surfaces where the calcite can precipitate out; in turn these surfaces provide the internal armature allowing the deposit to grow and consolidate. Classically, the internal girding of travertine is supplied by plant matter, hollow reeds, layered mosses, tree debris and roots. Although the formation of Kimberley sandstone is different, the serendipitous coincidence of flow paths documented in our turbulence design and sandblasted into the stone with the great passages of dark and light and, in places, the exact coincidence of serpentine grooves in the stone and plumes of porphyry wake combined to create an impression of reinforcement, as if the turbulence form was due to the persistent flow of the colours over millennia. There appeared to be an intelligent exchange between two channels of flow; while the rival channels had been conceived as flowing towards each other and intermingling from left and right, the compositional axis introduced into the scheme by the colour arrangement was predominantly vertical: the great multiply-striated serpentines now drawn as 9 mm cuts into the surface mainly flared diagonally upwards and downwards, suggesting laterally an undulant underlay periodically twisted and warped at the surface exposure. From the beginning Rival Channels had been planned as a poetic inscription. First of all, I thought of co-composing the phrases we

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138 Translations would use. Since 2006 I had been in intermittent contact with ‘Site/ Sight/Site’ project to develop a ‘Custodial Navigator’ for Brisbane, a collaboration involving Turrbal and Ningy Ningy custodians, artists and partners. An important guide was Elder Mary Graham’s Kumarra Conceptual Framework and its conviction that place care and human healing go together – places, we urged, ‘are not fixed, they are currents or flows between peoples, families and their environments’: ‘like rivers, communities that function well are not hierarchically divided but embrace difference as the key to the vitality’.35 These phrases may seem wooden, even tired, yet it must be remembered what waters they were cast upon: our public art commission was nested within a hierarchy of strategic goals set by the property developer Daisho; even these modest gestures towards autopoiesis were likely to be classified as issues of risk management. After all, the impulse to creative reorganisation that we advocated was partly external and to acknowledge its significance was also to admit, however remotely, responsibility for the increasingly unsustainable stress being placed on human resources. Even locally this was well documented. Veronica Strang, writing about the Brisbane River, noted that ‘One of the most important impacts of climate change will be its effects on the hydrological cycle and water management systems, and through these on socio-economic systems’; and she added, in one of those oddly self-unaware figures of speech that illustrate the poetic timelag in these matters, ‘conflicts about water, simmering for some time, have begun to heat up’.36 Well, perhaps we could reintegrate poetry, politics and the physics of fluid dynamics by casting our prophecies on the waters again, finding our fragmentary utterances magically whirled about and rearranged to form a turbulent truth. Such word magic would not have been out of place – as we wrote in our initial concept document, ‘The Kabi, Waka, Yuggera and Bundjalung peoples are experts in the water systems of their country. They understand the dynamics of flow and the tactics needed to fish in this water country. For them, the “Brisbane” River is a living body, flowing, twisting, pooling, surging, resting and growing. The place name “Woolloongabba” [roughly the Brisbane River bends in the vicinity of the artwork site and stretching south of the river] is usually translated “whirling waters”.’ 37 The first iteration of the poetic text attempted to reproduce the debris accumulated in the hollow of a river or sea bed – the condition

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leading to the production of the Faringdon Sponge Gravels, whose chromatic equivalent is the ‘marble cake’ sandstone and whose local counterpart are the numerous water holes, sinks and gullies sculpting the bed of the Brisbane River. I imagined the nested spirits of material time coiled in the dark depth as treasures laid down and secreted over time. I imagined a diver who was able to descry the depths in the surface, and who, trusting to his seer-like instinct, plunged into the swirling waters – returning to the surface with a rainbow in his hands. I feel that there must have been a local authorisation for this dream, a story channeled rather than made up but the source eludes me.38 The style of this first inscription was a further contraction of the already paratactically simplified deictic utterances found at Federation Square: look into the stone mirror white stones white bones the mouth of the bees nest and the bees continually going in and out water snakes are not supposed to be able to smile dark honey trout’s amber the rainbow’s root in the knuckle of time kangaroos stars leaves multiply you ask me where i come from what gifts i bring.39

It might be a classical hydromancer yielding to the train of associations triggered by the black–white marbling of the river’s flowing surface. But there is also a note of migrant anxiety: ‘you ask me where I come from, what gifts I bring’. Put another way, this was a summons to reconsider the artist’s subject position. The diver, however charismatic, plunges in and plunders: what of the abiding spirit of place, the flow that endures as a kind of environmental metabolic rate? Here I acknowledge a memory lapse, for between November 2014 and early March 2015, a significant change occurred. I had been unhappy about the turbulence pattern – as an unsupported graphic it lacked significant form (and we had yet to ‘anchor’ its gestures in the stone matrix) – and wanted to introduce a counter stress pattern, something like a mesh or raft thrown into the whirl, facilitating eidetic recognition. But how I found this motif in the sonogram of a little-known marsh bird, the Lewin’s rail, remains obscure: the eco-poetic rationale for this personification of place spirit was strong but the intermediate steps are forgotten. A fantasy throughout these works is saxa loquuntur and not only silently in the sense of ‘ancient hieroglyphics which record the

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140 Translations revolutions of the globe’,40 but soundingly, as if the hiss and gurgle accompaniment of the flow paths laid down in stone could also be preserved and played back if only the right instrument could be found for making the inscriptions audible again. A wall of patterned stone could, in this sense, be read as sound notation, as perhaps a kind of geological sonogram. In the event, wanting to take the pulse of the Brisbane River, to tune our auditory channels, as it were, to the breath pattern of the river, its tidal in- and out-breathing, I gave the position of ‘Custodial Navigator’ to a cryptic reed-haunting bird, almost always heard rather than seen – its calls include a loud “kek-kek-kek-kek” as well as strange grunts and growls – and singularly ill-fitted, it would seem, for any environmental education campaign.41 Noting that ‘Acoustics, particularly when coupled with other data, can yield rich insights into the environment and environmental change’, Mason et al. had based an acoustic environmental monitoring system used to monitor the impact of constructing a second runway at Brisbane airport on the rare Lewin’s rail and their imagery of acoustic event clusters and audio visualisations uncannily suggested the chromatic patterning of Kimberley sandstone and the vertical gridding and cross-banding that might furnish our ‘raft’.42 Out of the pooling of these centripetal items Lewin’s rail finds its voice in our wall work, as the spirit of the Brisbane River brooding over history as well as its on eggs: ‘I scry thunder / My cheeks are stripes of cloud / My fire hatches stars’, our gridded inscription says as the bird-shaman makes out what is writ in water. It is the water system’s state of health that is deciphered. As Lewin’s rail is a species of water-edge-dwelling bird whose presence is recognised as a sign of a healthy ecosystem, it is an auscultation of the water body that is performed.43 The name ‘rail’ is cognate with the tubercular ‘râle’ or rattle whose amplified sound environment formed the setting of Light, and, here as there, the smallest modification of the surface’s rise and fall may be a tipping point: ‘The strings of shadow creep / underneath where I keep my eggs the water laps / it is rising like the future under the present.’ Alternatively, as a feature of the intraand inter-annual variation in the hydrological regime, critical in sustaining the full native biodiversity and integrity of aquatic ecosystems, fluvial variability provides the living raft for dwellers adapted to living along the water edges.44

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I wrote to David Stewart, probably Australia’s foremost wildlife sound recordist, explaining our project and asking whether he could supply us with a recording of Lewin’s rail. David specialises in the birds of south-east Queensland and was not only able to provide recordings but a sonogram of the rail’s typical tuk-tuk-tuk call – a sound that reminded me of winding a pendulum clock45 – and Gibson adds the information that ‘Of the three types of Lewin’s rail calls, “kek kek’, “squeaky door” and “grunt”, the “kek kek” is understood to be the territorial call.’ 46 The sonogram of the ‘tuk’ or ‘kek’ unit is like a double ladder (three strong vertical striations, irregularly cross-banded, whose four left-hand rungs have slumped to a diagonal position and join the central rail in-between the thicker, shorter horizontal bars of the right-hand ladder. The figure resembles a simplified butterfly wing lattice or perhaps the cross-section of a badly damaged (fire bombed church steeple). I found it intriguing that a row of these sound glyphs suggested closely planted reeds, oddly crazed, broken and restored in the face of flowing water.47 Gibson found that ‘Sites where the Lewin’s Rails were present had, on average, more than double the percentage of vertical vegetation density at both 60 cm and 180 cms than the sites that had no Lewin’s Rails.’ 48 In some way, sound structure and habitat profile resembled each other. Years later, when I collected a number of my public space inscriptions into a book, a process that required a new transcription of the texts to make them legible on the page, we alluded to this call-habitat mimicry pictographically, arranging the phrases of Rival Channels as single letters descending from the top of the page in parallel rows. We now had all the components of the composition: our canvas was a landscape rectangle of 16 × 24 rectangular tiles (each 600 × 300 mms). We carved the turbulence pattern at 9 mm, the text at 4.5 mm and at 0.5 mm, as the lightest of surface abrasions, the faint fields of the sonogram. As I said, the sonogram suggested the essential brushstrokes of habitats, structures and reflections: when placed in the turbulence pattern it seemed to acquire another association. Its broken grids or rafts lodged in the flow paths suggested the lips of weirs, fields worn away by continuous overflow. The lines attributed to the avian spirit of place were documented in a san serif font, used only upper-case letters and were presented in scriptio continua, a style of public inscription traceable back to the

142 Translations

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gridded epitaph stelae of Archilochus and encouraging an Oulipian combinatorics – consonantal and vocalic clusters forming autonomous regional patterns that could be read conceptually as vestigial concrete poems or haptically as strokes drawn delicately into the flesh of stones, suggesting the primary appeal of finger drawing or moulding clay. As we informed the client, The text has been presented in lines that are alternately left and right justified. This uses a simple text arrangement technique to convey visually the idea of “rival channels”, as alternate lines begin their journey from different edges of the composition. Within the text the legibility of the inscription has been assured through the use of different font sizes. Each functional phrase is juxtaposed with phrases set in different font sizes. In this way the poetic structure and meaning of the text is clear. In addition, we have added an additional font size (largest) for certain key words (light, breath, rival, channel etc.) so that these words “shine out”, like windows of light on a flowing river.

In effect, the formalisation of the inscription as an internally consistent letter field filling the available space allowed the turbulence pattern to write back, for, wherever letters occurred in the 9.0 mm troughs of the swirls they stood proud from the matrix, their 4.5 mm cut ridges, sandbars or other forms giving the impression that we looked at a topographical (3D) map of some estuarine environment. In the discussion of Raft, we emphasised the role of transcription in a migrant poetics, the idea of going over the same ground repeatedly and always in a different way: found materials are no sooner formed (performed) than in the wake of passage they deform, wind-sifted, subject to new generations of tracks. Transcription materialises writing as passage, shifting attention from the representation of an idea (a story, an image) to an act of concomitant production whose ending is always provisional. The subject position in the midst of it all prohibits the kind of conceptual cartography characteristic of colonial cultures anxious to repress their origins. In this discussion of Rival Channels, a new feature characteristic of migrant production emerges: the movement for the works associated with Raft was bipedal, the midstride being represented in the agglutinative style of the composition but here, in Rival Channels, a double movement is foregrounded. The migrant stride becomes in the art of an artist like Hossein Valamanesh a mastery of the gap, yet there is another dimension to this aim of stepping lightly, which is the turbulent

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character of the ground. Whether wading in shallow water or sliding backwards as one climbs sandhills, a double movement is experienced not balanced and repeatable, which threatens to drag the traveller down into involuted quicksand. In short, just as the ground is not given, so is the surface in doubt and transcriptions that etch on air or idealised gravel are insubstantial. In her novel Walk a Barefoot Road Lolo Houbein describes the ‘shadowy place’ of the migrant in their new society in archetypal terms.49 There is, first of all, a metaphysical surface that presents an obstacle precisely because it cannot be materialised: ‘Life was so flat that every move she made to fill it up became like an obstacle to something she had been trying to reach all her life.’ 50 Flatness, the openness of all horizons, did not mean freedom: the lack of a frictional coefficient made progress in any direction impossible. This was also the period in which Houbein’s character, Riena, experiences the downside of echoic mimicry (‘the hilarious misunderstandings with the English language as she was spoke down under’).51 After surfaceless flatness comes floating: ‘For Riena, life had no patterns left. She floated in space, making habitual movements, like swinging her arms or smiling.’ 52 This Kleistian puppet had a certain freedom of movement; she found there was ‘more space for her to move though, aimlessly’,53 but an essential relation was missing: ‘Riena discovered that in the solitude of her house she had always behaved as if someone had been watching her.’ 54 And in the sequel it is this repressed double, hostile or friendly, that must come back to haunt her if she is to find a pattern. In the absence of the other, essential to the migrant’s disponibilité, a different interior landscape emerges: ‘There were people digging tunnels to her mind, mumbling things she didn’t want to hear. She heard them knocking and scraping away, sometimes from several angles, so that the only escape was upwards or underground, to the core of the earth, to the core of her own being.’ 55 Analysing the problem of migrant self-becoming at that place, Houbein finds that inscription, let alone the deepening and baroquely spreading pattern of transcription, is not simply a matter of finding provisionally shared ground, a mutual surface of coexistence. She has to take into account the dynamic manifold that the surface encloses, the turbulent flow of an incompressible medium. The practice of transcription floats on the surface of a body whose

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144 Translations topology is vortical rather than linear, and whose eddies, although chaotic, tend to pair off and produce all manner of crossovers (saddle points) and symmetries. But it is clear that the evolution of these patterns characterised by repeated bifurcations and woven out of feedback loops that produce a kind of amphisboena figure of selfduplicating difference, cannot be domesticated as migrant autobiography. Houbein is ambiguous about the origin of ‘the people digging tunnels to her mind’: they tunnel through an ‘earth’ that is also the material of her own ‘being’ – they resemble the return of the Freudian repressed; but they are trying to get in from outside, emotional refugees focused on homecoming. One can speak of an environmental unconscious whose subterranean currents tumultuously drive underneath the surface of waking life, and in this time of existential crisis break through the floor. This topological region is both inside and outside, the ground, as it were, of the surface we inhabit. In another register, Rival Channels struggles to accommodate this deeper turbulence within the language of transcription, to materialise a surface that is scarred with a history of hollowing out. While the human host may enter into the mimetic shadow play of migrants trying to find a place, the environment may remain theatrical, the orthogonals of near and far held in place and the ground (although not given) largely planar. But in this new dispensation the mise-enscène, both psychic and physical, is all at sea. Certain kinds of ground marking manage to hold the tension between inscription and involution in balance: ploughing that turns the soil over as it cuts a furrow. But even these attested cultivations of the ground are haunted by fears of waking the sleeping monster. As sublimated acts of treasure-hunting – etymologically, writing is associated with Reissen, to tear apart, the Old Saxon writan means to injure, cut – they lacerate the back of the Earth.56 In this context the spirit of place incarnated in the Lewin’s rail acquires a definite character. It may be said to represent the nonhuman encounter that the migrant will also have to navigate. The medium of this may be auditory. There is, let us guess, a connection between the railing of Lewin’s rail, its acoustic miscellany of clicks, squeaks and groans, and the mumbled things that Riena did not want to hear. Coming from another place outside music and speech, from a non-sonorous marsh of noises that seem to retain trapped

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and orphaned all the sounds of the world that could not be made to signify, the call of the rail interrupts any illusion of an auditory picturesque signature peculiar to the place. I don’t know whether a taste for these cryptic channels of communication is peculiarly migrant but it should be placed on record that, alongside the human mumbling and the arcana of imagined meanings projected into it, there is a distinctive non-human environment inhabited by the attuned migrant. It will not be a matter of learning to identify the leading voices in the local bush or wetlands (frogs, songsters) but of acknowledging without any irritable desire of resolution the endless accompaniment of insect stridulations, cryptic cries, vegetal whisperings, cracklings and barless hissings that, in a way, will never reach the surface of consciousness and give away their sources. Hence, the calls of the Water rail, whose sighting I first recorded in 1964, includes half groans, half squeals, contented chuckles, ‘a loud explosive yell, like the cry of an animal in mortal agony’ (this whether ‘startled by any loud noise and also, apparently, for the pleasure of making a noise’) as well as ‘a curious purring note and a wide variety of other sounds’.57 There is, indeed, a class of creeping, calling beings, rarely sighted in the thick mesh of reeds or bracken or other miscellaneous sedge, but which sit underneath the windows of our habitations or rustle along the bank edges or haunt the hedges. Under the radar of the migration authorities, skirting dark hemmed reaches and alighting in ambiguous shallows, they are the mobile cousins of the stone that lies down in the exercise yard too humble to be moved but easily stumbled over. It is possible that these creatures are only heard in retreat – in which case their calling to come has a particular poignancy. Unlike the anointed melodists of victory, these calls are heard as harsh, monotonous, destined by auditory natural selection to disappear. This is clearly an ideological position as Lillis Ó Laoire shows in his analysis of Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s poem, ‘Scrúdu Coinsiasa Roimh Dhul Chun Suain’ (‘Examination of Conscience before Going to Sleep’) where ‘The corncrake’s calling simultaneously heralds the summer season and the return of the Irish language’,58 and where, correlatively, the wanton murder of the corncrake related in the poem shows a double abandonment, of nature and language: ‘The poem demonstrates how Irish speakers deliberately abdicate responsibility for the safeguarding of their language in the same way that

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146 Translations they heedlessly kill the bird in the name of their allegiances to globalized hegemonies.’ 59 In this analysis it is important that the corncrake is not a melodious songster: in contrast with the avian life whose decline is lamented in the famous song ‘Cill Chais’, the corncrake’s monotonous crexcrex-crex suggests the spell of summer, a symphony of microtones made desirable by their pleasant associations.60 These calls and the marginal landscapes they inhabit are vulnerable to aesthetic enclosure acts; because they cannot be translated into an anthropomorphically plausible psychology – what can it mean to yell like a tortured animal simply for the pleasure of making a noise? – they are quarantined musically. Because they do not represent anything but themselves, in Kantor’s formulation, they signify only the passage of the sound, its coming and going. As a result, the atmosphere we breathe is fatally thinned. What we might call the ecology of affect is poisoned. Misunderstood to the end, migrants should make common cause with them. The link Ó Laoire makes – ‘humans will inevitably decline by means of their own toxic discourses in parallel with the bird’s waning fortunes’ 61 – is also expressed in Light where William Light’s tubercular ‘râle’ is linked to the call of the corncrake and both to industrialised agricultural practices producing illness in the social body and the impulse to emigration: DOUBLE: Mornin’ Master Light, and why be you a-crying? E: The small birds are singing so sweet. DOUBLE: ‘Cos you never knowed your own folk. Ain’t right, you know. MARY: What about the corncrake? MARIA: Why have you a fire-red nose? DOUBLE: Cinnamon and ginger, nutmeg and cloves, They gave me that jolly red nose. LIGHT: Hot, disagreeable weather. E: Crake-crake. DOUBLE: The death rattle of the vulgar. MARY: Ark-ark, ark-ark. MARIA: Crex-crex, crex-crex. LIGHT: Hot. DOUBLE: Like a wooden rattle. LIGHT: Very unwell. MARIA: Again the ruthless weapon sweeps the ground And the grey corn-craik trembles at the sound.62



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MARY: A natural ventriloquist. DOUBLE: Smash the machines, Mr Punch! ANOTHER: Captain, they are well smashed.63

The rails are messengers of a different kind: as Rival Channels says, in the persona of the rail, ‘Ear rivals eye looking where it treads; hearing haunts reason like sedge the road.’ In his discussion of the New Angel of Paul Klee, Massimo Cacciari points out that the angel does not pass, transmit, intercede, but is itself the passage, an icon of the in-stant. Then, as a messenger of the environment, the rail communicates differently, speaking perhaps from the human place that Cacciari identifies in this passage from the Second Duino Elegy: ‘If only we could discover a pure, contained / human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil / between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds us, / as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it, gazing / into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies / where, measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.’ For this smaller contentment – the subtle strip of land between stone and flowing water, which, as Cacciari puts it, in-sists between stone and current – a larger repose had to be renounced. But acknowledging our fall from angelic correspondence is therapeutic, even if the desire of transcendence remains; ‘a space of containment’ that is not an enclosure but simply ‘our place in the scheme of things’ is the first step towards the reintegration of psychic and physical worlds.64 To in-sist, that is, to stand in the way, is also to mark the interstitial or in-between. And I believe this could clarify the significance of the lettering in Rival Channels that insists in exactly this way, occupying the double riva of turbulence. For we have talked about hydromancy, but a far more powerful form of magic is reading, our seerlike power to make out a meaning in letters. As Giancarlo Susini writes, ‘The magical qualities ascribed to alphabet tables are well known, and to a large extent cryptographic and symbolic writing, so highly in favour with some pagan sects and with the Christian religion, have their distant origin in this primitive ritual respect for alphabetical symbols … in many parts of the ancient world writing on stone was introduced, or rather was spread, by the Romans, so that it came to appear as a characteristic instrument of the master race.’ 65 Hence part of our fantasy is to restore a habitat of communication in which the passage writes back, an effect achieved

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148 Translations when the letters become expressive. They do this when they renounce the transcendental temptation to imitate surfaceless forms – metaphysical stepping stones – and put down roots in the current. Returning to the rail, its emergence out of a prior meditation on the diver and the Rainbow Serpent is now explicable. As we have noted elsewhere, a feature of the voice of the Rainbow Serpent in all its different regional guises is its association with water. Typically, Waakyl, Ngalod66 or the bunyip sound like a waterfall or a gurgling creek after rain. Although it does not speak in so many words, the meaning of these calls is clear: Glossing a wanampi story told by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people in in the Western Desert, Klapproth observes, ‘The voice of the Rainbow Serpent [which emerges as a threatening roar from a hole in the ground] heard in this story is the voice of Tjukurrpa. It is this same voice, too, that admonishes people of the Ernabella region to keep their cultural values strong, to adhere to their traditional beliefs and social practices’. And, as Klapproth documents, the efficacy of the serpent’s voice is inseparable from its voicing, from its incorporation into storytelling.67 Predictably, the colonisers could not hear this message instantiated in environmental sounds. The Victorian Bunyip, for example, which, as we have previously noted, is a regional variant of the better known ‘Rainbow Serpent’, is mainly characterised by groanings and bellowings often heard at night on the margins of swamps.68 A related creation spirit, the Mulgewanke of the Ngarrindjeri people, seemed to the colonists to have a gift for mimicry – specialising in explosions of various kinds; however, the sound is ‘never near, always distant’ and one less starstruck settler thought that in most cases the noises were caused ‘by the movements in the water of the musk duck.’ 69 Whatever the case, the sounds recorded here are products of non-laminar or turbulent flow, produced where contrary currents meet or where overflowing water makes audible contact with other surfaces. They may, as I have noted, in coastal situations, resemble Keats’s quiring sea-nymphs heard in the ‘Cavern’s Mouth’. As Keats intuits, whispering of this kind lies outside a sound classification pitched between ‘uproar rude’ and ‘cloying melody’.70 Its essential attribute is not to die away but through continuous repercussion to persist softly. Its human counterpart is not the singer or the orator occupying a kind of centrum phonicum but a group of people talking among themselves, ideally around a

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campfire. At a more intimate scale it is the sound we hear holding a shell to the ear. In this vein, Walt Whitman describes how the ocean breaking on the sand ‘with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums’, evokes the echo of ‘half-caught voices’ and inspires his own ‘garrulous talk’.71 These are variations on Houbein’s people mumbling things she did not want to hear, on Lewin’s rail (and its congeners) chuckling, crying, grunting and growling. As the meeting place of contrary currents, turbulence is a figure of place as well as a curious and haunting undercurrent of ‘always distant’ sound. In the earliest notes for Rival Channels the wall was conceived as a physical blade or rudder installed in the river, the artwork essentially the turbulence pattern formed by the obstacle it created to the river’s smooth flow: on the analogy of Leonardo’s famous drawing of ‘An old man in profile, seated on a rocky ledge; with water studies and a note’, I imagined our work as the ‘energy body’, to use Viktor Schauberger’s terminology, regenerating the water through the production of turbulence caused by our blade. Critical to the maintenance of oxygen in the water were these ‘vortex-generators’ and Callum Coates’s book Living Energies illustrated a variety of longitudinal turbulence vortices.72 According to Schauberger, ‘reintroducing transverse and longitudinal vortices into rivers applied an automatic brake to the descending water’; otherwise ‘the heavy masses of water would over-accelerate, rupture the river banks and cause immense havoc’.73 This reminded me of ‘The divinity which is the science of painting’, described in Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, able to deposit ‘rivers that descend from high mountains with the impetus of great deluges, dragging along uprooted plants mixed with stones, roots, earth and foam, carrying away everything that opposes its own ruin’.74 One of my earliest scholarly acquisitions, made dear by its associations with Florence was Giuseppina Fumagalli’s Leonardo ‘Omo Sanza Lettere’, made doubly dear by Fumagalli’s own signature on the colophon. This thematic arrangement of Leonardo’s writings juxtaposed his wind and water descriptions with three evocations of a sea monster. The Deluge (where ‘the swollen waters should be coursing round the pool which confines them, and striking against various obstacles with whirling eddies, leaping up into the air in turbid foam, and then falling back and causing the water where

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150 Translations they strike to be dashed up into the air; and the circling waves which recede from the point of contact are impelled by their impetus right across the course of the other circling waves which move in an opposite direction to them, and after striking against these they leap up into the air without becoming detached from their base)75 might be anthropomorphised: ‘Neptune might be seen with his trident in the midst of the waters, and Eolus with his winds should be shown entangling the floating trees which had been uprooted and were mingled with the mighty waves.’ 76 The driving impulse, though, was not to humanise but to naturalise turbulence, to invest motion with emotion through the figuration of movement forms – in Fumagalli, the flood and tempest visions are juxtaposed with three evocations of a sea monster who ‘con setoluto e nero dosso, a guisa di montagnia’ makes his proud and serpentine way through the waves: ‘col superbo e grave moto gir volteggiando in fra le marine acque’.77 The figure of place conjured up here, tumultuous, serpentine, twisting, leaping up and falling back is a movement form that has haunted me as a figure of the migrant condition. It is the uneven bed on which any laminations and transcriptions lie. Leonardo had written: ‘Observe the motion of the surface of the water, which resembles that of hair, which has two motions, one of which depends on the weight of the hair, the other on the direction of the curls; thus the water forms turning eddies, one of which follows the impetus of the main course while the other follows that of incidence and reflection.’ Under a similar disturbing inspiration, Mirror States had figured the flowing waters of the Yarra as a woman’s hair. Voice 3 Don’t shake hands unless asked to. Voice 4 One signified a desire to be trimmed. Voice 1 Ya-na. Voice 3 Address them by their surname. Voice 2 ‘Hair’. Voice 3 Keep it short. Voice 4 I believe myself to be … Voice 1 Na-ya! Na-ya! Voice 3 Say your name clearly. Voice 1 Yarr-a: flow-ing. (And they say the White Woman of Gippsland was nothing more than my palomino’s long tail combed out when we waded McAllister’s Creek …)



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Voice Voice Voice Voice Voice

4 3 2 3 1

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The first that shaved an Aboriginal. Precisely. Afterwards they gave the same designation … You don’t want to be asked to repeat it, do you? Yeah! To a small fall on the Weari-bee.78

As I noted, ‘Gradually a consensus grew up among early writers that “yarra” was an Aboriginal word whose primary meaning was “hair” or “flowing hair”. In this context, one might ponder the symbolic meaning the local people attributed to having their hair cut … the word sound signified an alternative history in which time was not fixed cartographically or with the help of dams, but flowed.’ 79 This 1992 speculation later developed into the meditation on Dawson’s discourse of overflowing; a new kind of communication occurs where the laminar flow of imperial time is interrupted as along the irregular rim of a natural weir where the sound of words becomes audible.80 The creative principle of whirling water in Nyungar country in south-west Western Australia preserves this hairy connection as Aboriginal people refer informally to reeds as ‘Waakyl’s whiskers’.81 Waakyl or Waugal has familiar features. ‘Invariably described as feathered, finned, maned and or horny,’ he is ‘an aquatic monster … (which) inhabits most deep waters, salt or fresh, and almost every lake or pool is haunted by one or more such monsters.’ 82 According to playwright Jack Davis, Waugul announced his intent to create rivers, swamps and, lakes and waterholes ‘With a flash of fire and a thunder roar’.83 Beyond this not much seems to be known about the Waugal’s call. In a newspaper article called ‘Serpent Call of the Aborigines’, ethnographer Daisy Bates, who obtained considerable information at Maamba Reserve in south-east Perth around 1909, records a number of stories that identify the Waugul as the spirit associated with whirling hollows in river beds (where she nests or sleeps), but little is mentioned of their sounds. The people who visited her at Ooldea far to the east above the Great Australian Bight had a Rainbow Serpent of their own, ganba, and asserted that ‘The great blow-holes along the cliff’s edge echo to the thunderous “breathing” of the ganba.’ 84 When the raucous breathing of blowholes was heard emanating from pits in Pinky Flat, it was not only the tubercular state of William Light’s lungs that was imagined, amplified and environmentalised: we risked waking the sleeping dragon of

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152 Translations Kaurna country. In any case these ripples spreading out from the lip of Rival Channels at last throw some light on one of the most enigmatic entries in the Dawson wordlists: ‘Kurn kuyang … Cry of the Eel’.85 Given here as a proper name, Dawson elsewhere has ‘Kuyang’ eel and various forms of ‘kurn’ signifying ‘howl’, ‘cry’, yell’. Perhaps the attribution of voices to these eminently silent creatures is made less perplexing when the related entry ‘Kurnda’, rendered as ‘Whistle or cry of the snake’, is contextualised thus: the ‘Boa’ ‘When irritated, or when calling to its mate, it emits a sound like “kse, kse, kse”. It is the only snake that makes any sound.’ 86 Still, eels are not known to whistle. Is the call of the eel inaudible because we have suffocated the ground? It is noticeable that no one can give an explanation for the ‘beak’ or ‘lips’ of the Uffington White Horse. A silenced relation is registered. If so, what is it? A clue may be found in Blake’s Dialects of Western Kulin where ‘karnda’ is given as a widespread word meaning ‘to call’ or ‘to call out’. According to Dawson, the Kelp Lip word for ‘Call’ is ‘Kowaeae’ which, following Dawson’s pronunciation rules should sound like Co(ugh) + wai(n) or Co-wai, a word that surely brings us back into the phono-semantic labyrinth of Cooee Song: ‘Char 1. KOA. Jack 2. Actuality of purpose of being, design, in order to.’ 87 Even without appealing to the dubious theory of ‘essential powers’, the utterance represented by the ‘cooee’ signifies a calling to come, that is, a preliminary orientation characterised by a willingness to listen. The call to attend, whether it comes from the trees or the sea, from crickets or the murmur of the crowd, is, in this sense, the echo of a fundamental unheard melody, something the poets are attuned to. Neilson heard it when he says of the flowers – ‘they sing without lips’ and ‘still without speech they implore us’,88 when he is convinced that ‘there is some strange endowment of the trees … Deep – it is deep – but tells not anything.’ 89 This prelingual intuition of speech is rhythmic – premelodic as well, it is experienced as a sensation that the environment is alive, potent to communicate but held back, watchful (potentially hostile). To find the beat in the noise and then to give voice to the rhythm in a poetic figure: ‘because rhythm implies a relationship – a direction in space and a position in time – it is ethical’.90 Whichever way we consider it, the folding of the ground, the turbulence of topography, is the other relation always solicited when the migrant echoes what is said.



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Notes 1 The client called for a work that explored the connotations of the word ‘current’: in its final iteration our work interpreted ‘current’ through an electroacoustic allusion (the visualised sound), a hydrological pattern (the turbulence of counter flowing water) and a text (that captured the current condition of the Brisbane River, comparing it with its condition in earlier epochs). Finally, the text evoked present community interests in and concerns about the future of Brisbane’s biodiversity. 2 Roderick (G.R.C.), McLeod, ‘A Short History of the Dredging of the Brisbane River, 1860–1910’, J. Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 1978, 137–148 (especially section of article ‘Rival Channels’, 140–143). 3 Jay Kappraff, ‘The Spiral in Nature, Myth and Mathematics’, in Spiral Symmetry, I. Hargittai and C.A. Pickover (eds), Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2000, 1–46, 9. 4 Ray Kerkhove, ‘Brief Summary of the Early and Aboriginal History for the Highgate Hill – South Brisbane – Woolloongabba – West End Area’, 1985, 2, obtainable from Turnstyle Community Hub, Highgate Hill, Queensland, 4101. 5 Carter, Turbulence, 84. 6 Carter, Turbulence, 86. 7 Paul Carter, Places Made After Their Stories: Design and the Art of Choreotopography, Crawley WA, UWA Publishing, 2014, 426–427. 8 Michael Cortie, ‘The Form, Function, and Synthesis of the Molluscan Shell’, in I. Hargittai and C.A. Pickover (eds), Spiral Symmetry, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1992, 369–388, 380. 9 S. Schell, ‘Sense of Place: An Interview with Andrea Olsen’, A Moving Journal, 12(3), 2005, 3–8, 5. At http://amjpastissues.blogspot.com/ 10 Schell, ‘Sense of Place: An Interview with Andrea Olsen’. 11 Carter, Mythform, 11. 12 E.V. Robinson, ‘History in Granite and Sandstone: The Old Building Stones of Brisbane’, J. Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 8(1), 1966, 162–173, 165. 13 R.O. Brunnschweiler, ‘The Geology of the Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia’, Commonwealth of Australia, Dept. of National Development, Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics, Report No. 13, 1957, 7. 14 N.J. Snelling, ‘Rocks and Fossils’, 2002. At www.faringdon.org/uploads/ 1/4/7/6/14765418/faringdons_fossil___information_njsnelling.pdf. 15 Snelling, ‘Rocks and Fossils’.

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154 Translations 16 An archaeological survey conducted in 2010 on our field ‘Tollington’ and in two adjacent fields reported: ‘The solid geology of the study site comprises limestone of the Stanford Formation (a member of the Corallian series) in the south-west of the site. Mudstones of the Ampthill Clay formation overlie this in the north and east’, noting, ‘The site is in an area of significant Iron Age activity, located roughly between two Iron Age hill forts, Badbury hill fort (SAM OX257), located approximately 1.5 km to the west, and Little Coxwell Camp (SAM OX207), located 1.25 km to the south-east (Pugh 2010). Excavation by Thames Valley Archaeological Service (TVAS) directly north of the site revealed an early Iron Age settlement, and a second century or later Roman shrine or temple (Weaver and Ford 2004); a second excavation, located directly north of the TVAS site, was undertaken by OA, and revealed more evidence of early to middle Iron Age settlement, with a single pit of a late Iron Age date, and evidence of some Romano-British activity (Cook et al. 2004)’ (See Steve Leech, 2010, ‘Land off Coxwell Road, Faringdon, Archaeological Evaluation Report’, Oxford: Oxford Archaeological Unit, 2010. At https://library.thehumanjourney.net/479/1/ FAXR_10.pdfA.pdf.) 17 W.J. Arkell, ‘Place-Names and Topography in the Upper Thames Valley’, Oxoniensia, vol. VII, 1942, 1–21, 5. ‘The Ock had two Celtic names, Cern and Eog or Ehoc (cf. the Welsh and Cornish for salmon), of which only the latter survived, the Old English word for salmon being almost the same.’ Is this an early example of what Silverstein refers to as ‘the double illusion that allows communication’, where the ‘contact jargon’ is ‘relatable to both parties’ native languages’? (Silverstein, ‘Goodbye Columbus’, 14). 18 When the Faringdon Sponge Reefs formed during the Lower Cretaceous, the area was a sea bed and consisted predominantly of eroded Corallian sandstone and limestone beds (Oxfordian Stage) and Kimmeridge Clay (Kimmeridgian Stage). Corallian sediments provided a hard substrate, a suitable surface upon which the sponge reefs could grow. In Oxfordian times (159–154 Ma, Upper Jurassic), southern England was at about 42° N and resembled the Bahamas with warm seas, coral patch reefs and lagoons. (https://ougs.org/london/event-reports/572/ field-trip-fossil-sponge-reefs-and-jurassic-bahamas-in-oxfordshire/.) 19 Adrian Stokes, ‘Greek Culture and the Ego’, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, London: Tavistock Press, 1978, 3 vols, vol. 3, 96. 20 Stokes, ‘Greek Culture and the Ego’, 96. 21 Stokes, ‘Greek Culture and the Ego’, 97. 22 Adrian Stokes, ‘Stones of Rimini’, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, vol. 1, 202.

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23 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917, 2 vols, vol. 1, 346. 24 Charles Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, London: T. & W. Boone, 1849, vol. 1, 33. 25 Carter, Baroque Memories, 70. 26 Thompson, On Growth and Form, vol. 1, 405, quoted in Paul Carter, ‘Poseidon’s Return: Representing the Turbulence of Climate Change’, in G. Zuchtriegel, P. Carter and M.E. Oddo (eds), Poseidonia Water City: Archaeology and Climate Change, Paestum: Edizioni Pandemos, 2019 265–269, 268. 27 Vincenzo Amato et al., ‘Sedimentology and Depositional History of the Travertines Outcropping in the Poseidonia-Paestum Archaeological Area’, Rendiconti Lincei. Scienze Fisiche e Naturali, 23(1), 2012, 61–68. At www.researchgate.net/publication/272040025_Sedimentology_and_ depositional_history_of_the_travertines_outcropping_in_the_PoseidoniaPaestum_archaeological_area. 28 Carter, The Lie of the Land, 48. 29 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 446. 30 Geoffrey Bardon, ‘A Place Made After the Story: The Hieroglyphic Representations of the Western Desert Painters, and their Cultural and Stylistic Signifcances, at Papunya, 1971–1973’; typescript, 2001, 147–148. Quoted in Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 133. 31 The hager or aegir is a river wave that heads the incoming tide: the family reference is to a passage in Joseph Terry’s ‘Recollections’ where the story of Mirfield neighbour, Abe Hirst of ‘Warhager’ is told. Abe was at Selby on the Ouse when the solid wall of water suddenly appeared, approching quickly with ‘a warning kind of stifled roar’. Abe took to his heels and didn’t stop running until he reached Mirfield, forty miles away (Terry, ‘Recollections’, 7). 32 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 584. 33 As Bardon explained, ‘The hieroglyphs … were composites of smaller representations or haptic assurances of place; these composites were called by me archetypes and hieroglyphic formings acted within the interrelationship and self-enactment of these archetypes; a hieroglyph was a self-evident forming made after the immortal ideality of a story or place and sought to give a physical idea-comprehension of what that place or story was’ (in Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 133). 34 Carter, Dark Writing, 123. 35 Similarly, we noted that ‘Instead of narrating the river in terms of division, competition and self-interest, we revive the old, the original meaning of rival: originally a rival was someone using the same stream as another. It did not signify competition: simply difference. In other

156 Translations

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36

37

38

39 40

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words, to be a rival is to follow a different channel within the same river or stream’ (Material Thinking, ‘180 Brisbane, Rival Channels, Preliminary Design’, 12 May 2014, 1–14, 7. In author’s possession). Veronica Strang, Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water, New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 14. See also Veronica Strang, ‘Elusive Forms: Materiality and Cultural Diversity in the Ownership of Water’, in D. Grinlinton, and P. Taylor (eds), Property Rights and Sustainability: The Evolution of Property Rights to Meet Ecological Challenges, Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2011, 195–218, where she advocates alternative ‘ways of owning’: ‘In Aboriginal society, ownership may be acquired, for example, through the accumulation of knowledge, through creative processes of identity construction, and through the construction of aesthetic and emotional attachments to place’ – an approach that accords entirely with the creative trajectory described in these pages. Woolloongabba was a corruption of an original, local Aboriginal name for the place. It has been translated variously as ‘whirling waters’ (a reference to the manner the waterholes flowed into each other in flood); ‘whip-tail wallaby’ (a principal game food there); and ‘fighting place’ (a reference to a tribal fighting ground there) (Kerkhove, ‘Brief summary of the early and Aboriginal history for the Highgate Hill – South Brisbane – Woolloongabba – West End area, 3). Early white accounts of the Turrball people emphasise their skill in navigating turbulent reaches of the Brisbane River (see J.G. Steele, Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983, 121–139). Steele mentions ‘Dalaipi the rain maker’: ‘To make rain he would dive under the water with his tomahawk to sever the taggan (Rainbow Serpent) so that the rainbow could rise into the sky’ (Aboriginal Pathways, 131). Material Thinking, ‘Rival Channels, Developed Design’, 12 November 2014, 1–19, 6. John Playfair, ‘Life of Dr Hutton’, in James Hutton, Contributions to the History of Geology, vol. 5, ed. G.W. White, New York: Hafner Press, 1973, 186. ‘Cryptic rail with long, decurved bill. Adult has reddish-brown crown and nape, gray breast, and black-and-white barred belly. Darker juvenile very dull in comparison and lacks the reddish-brown crown. Buff-banded Rail has a chunkier bill and prominent pale eyebrow. This species is typically difficult to observe as it tends to hide in reed beds, where heard far more often than seen. Calls include a loud “kek-kek-kek-kek” as well as strange grunts and growls’ (https://ebird.org/species/lewrai1).

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42 Richard Mason, Paul Roe, Michael W. Towsey, Jinglan Zhang, Jennifer Gibson and Stuart Gage, ‘Towards an Acoustic Environmental Observatory’, in Proceedings of the IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience, 7–12 December 2008, University Place Conference Center & Hotel, Indianapolis, Indiana. See also Jennifer Gibson, ‘Habitat selection and calling activity of the Lewin’s Rail (Lewinia pectoralis pectoralis)’, Master by research thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2017. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/109466/2/Jennifer_Gibson_Thesis.pdf. 43 In a general discussion of threats to the Lewin’s rail population in the wetlands adjoining Brisbane airport, Gibson includes the impact of floods (‘Habitat selection and calling activity of the Lewin’s Rail (Lewinia pectoralis pectoralis)’, 109) although not foreseeing any immediate consequences from nearby runway construction. 44 http://dakibudtcha.com.au/Turrbal/index.php/environment/. 45 The Lewin’s rail has other calls including various ‘complaining’ notes, a kind of Geiger Counter ‘galloping’ refrain. See https://dibird.com/ species/lewins-rail/apid pul 46 Gibson, ‘Habitat selection and calling activity of the Lewin’s rail (Lewinia pectoralis pectoralis)’, 2. 47 See Gibson, ‘Habitat selection and calling activity of the Lewin’s rail (Lewinia pectoralis pectoralis)’, figure 3.4, 57. 48 Gibson, ‘Habitat selection and calling activity of the Lewin’s rail (Lewinia pectoralis pectoralis)’, 73. 49 Lolo Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1988, 138. 50 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 139. 51 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 140. 52 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 167. 53 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 167. 54 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 167. 55 Houbein, Walk a Barefoot Road, 168. 56 Theodore Thass-Thienemann, Symbolic Behavior, New York:Washington Square Press, 1968, 2 vols, vol. 1, 386. 57 T.A. Coward, Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs, ed. J.A.G. Barnes, London: Frederick Warne, 1969, 107. 58 Lillis Ó Laoire, ‘Murder in the Meadow: Environmental and Cultural Extinction in Cathal Searcaigh’s “Scrúdú Coinsiasa Roimh Dhul Chun Suain”’, in S.L. Müller and T.-K. Pusse (eds), From Ego to Eco: Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism, Leiden: Brill, 2018, 133. 59 Ó Laoire, ‘Murder in the Meadow’, 130. 60 Ó Laoire, ‘Murder in the Meadow’, 131–133. 61 Ó Laoire, ‘Murder in the Meadow’, 133.

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158 Translations 62 These lines come from a remarkable poetic essay in the auditory picturesque, Scenes of Infancy: Descriptive of Teviotdale by John Leyden (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1803, 47.) 63 Paul Carter, Light, a Séance Drama, draft script September 1995, 1–66, 21–22. Author’s possession. 64 See Daniel Joseph Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke, a Soul History, Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 2011, 530. 65 Giancarlo Susini, The Roman Stonecutter: An Introduction to Roman Epigraphy, trans. A.M. Dabrowski, Oxford: Blackwell, 1973, 54. 66 ‘Responsible for the plants that grow in and near the water, Ngalyod’s voice is heard in the roar of the waterfalls and her path is seen along riverbanks’ (Lena Yarinkura) www.mca.com.au/collection/work/2016.33/. 67 Danièle M. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004, 76. 68 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 435–438. 69 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 439. 70 John Keats, ‘On the Sea’, Poetical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 365. 71 Walt Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. E. Holloway, London: Nonesuch Press, 1967, 858–874, 874. 72 Callum Coats, Living Energies, An Exposition of Concepts Related to the Theories of Viktor Schauberger, Dublin: Gateway, 2001, chapter 13, ‘The Dynamics of Flow’. 73 Coats, Living Energies, 166. 74 Jane Roberts quotes this well-known passage in her introduction to the edition of the Codex Hammer published by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1981. Her translations once again bring home the brilliance of Leonardo’s water studies – ‘one third of its 360 drawings is made up of fascinating representations of water, currents, leaps and vortices’. (‘Catalogue’, in Leonardo da Vinci, The Codex Hammer formerly the Codex Leicester, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1981, 10.) 75 Edward McCurdey, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, New York: Empire State Book Company, 1923. ‘Of a Deluge’ 207 at https://archive.org/ stream/leonardodavincis007918mbp/leonardodavincis007918mbp_ djvu.txt. 76 McCurdey, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, ‘Of a Deluge’, 201. 77 Giuseppina Fumagalli, Leonardo “Omo Sanza Lettere”, Firenze: G.C. Sansoni Editore, 1938, 158. 78 Paul Carter, Mirror States, in The Sound In-Between, Voice, Space, Performance, Sydney: New Endeavour/University of NSW Press, 1992, 93–114, 100.

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79 Carter, Living In A New Country, 148. 80 See Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space’, 121. 81 Neville Collard, pers. comm. 82 Daisy Bates, Aboriginal Perth, Bibbulmun Biographies and Legends, ed. P.J. Bridge, Victoria Park, WA: Hesperian Press, 1992, 15. (Quoted on Kaartdijin Noongar – Noongar Knowledge website, at www.noongarculture.org.au/spirituality/.) 83 Len Collard, Sandra Harben and Rosemary van den Berg, Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonokurt Nyininy: A Nyungar Interpretive History of the Use of Boodjar (Country) in the Vicinity of Murdoch University, Perth: Murdoch University, 2004, 17. 84 Bates, Aboriginal Perth, Bibulmun Biographies and Legends, 41. 85 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 45. 86 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, lix. 87 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, vi. His pronunciation rules are in ‘Introductory Note’ (also numbered vi). See also Ritz, ‘The Speech of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, 53–54. 88 Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, 973. 89 Neilson, The Collected Verse, A Variorum Edition, 963. ‘In German there is a special term, lauschen. Lauschen means to open one’s ears, being attentive to anything that may be heard. Lauschen is listening to silence. Thus, if any sound arises, it will be heard as articulating background silence.’ Gernot Böhme, ‘Quiet places – silent space: towards a phenomenology of silence’, in M. Dorrian and C. Kakalis (eds), The Place of Silence: Architecture/Media/Philosophy, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 179–192, 188. 90 See Paul Carter, Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, Crawley, WA, UWA Publishing, 2010, 222.

5

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Dirty art: decolonising public space

‘My lines of 1906/1907 were my most personal possession’, Paul Klee wrote, ‘and yet I had to interrupt them, they are threatened by some kind of cramp, perhaps even by becoming ornamental.’ What is the threat of the ‘ornamental’? The trouble was, Klee wrote, he could not make his lines ‘come out’: ‘I could not see them around me, the accord between inside and outside was so hard to achieve.’ How much harder to achieve this ‘accord’ when the ‘inside’ has been annulled as foreign. Even Klee working in his cultural homelands felt the pressure of self-annulment, in the summer of 1907 undergoing a ‘changeover’ that was ‘complete’ and devoting himself ‘entirely to the appearance of nature’. But the devotion to the external did not last long: ‘No sooner have I mastered that stage than nature again bores me.’ There is probably a psychological link between this outer boredom and the earlier inner cramp. In both cases the essential line or movement form eludes him. What is the solution? ‘Should I now distort it [nature]?’; and, the fundamental question, ‘How shall I most freely cast a bridge between inside and outside?’ 1 If finding the ‘bridge’, which allows the artist ‘to say more than nature’ with fewer means,2 involves the subtlest feedback between formal study, eye–hand coordination and kinaesthetic memory and disposition, how is a migrant artist going to find that ‘bridge’: hollowed out, the somatic imprint of earlier landscapes dismissed as foreign and the character of the outer landscape utterly unfamiliar, is the figure of the ‘bridge’ even appropriate? Like the highly trained immigrant surgeon whose qualifications are rejected, the migrant artist has to take whatever employment he can find, humbling himself to the will of the host and dirtying his hands (to no bad effect) in whatever

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transaction he can solicit. Leaving aside the question of talent, the sullied situation in which some kind of ‘accord’ is sought is unlikely to produce the economical caprices of artistic Modernism. Instead, it will produce ‘dirty art’, forms of expression streaked and stained with the marks of external opportunity, constraint and adaptation. Any ‘bridge’ will be a two-way arc of imperfect translation, among whose defining properties will be a novel exchange between ethnography and art. My pathway into a variety of urban and landscape design and public art was a historical revisionism focused from the beginning on the poetics of colonisation. It is likely that the motivation of those books – to make sense of living in a new country for myself – shone through. While the scholarship was reasonable, the focus on framing colonialist discourses of place-making implied an alignment with creative phenomena not held to be typical of Australian colonial history and not even, in a certain sense, appropriate to historical enquiry. The parti pris was obvious: documenting and interpreting the different forms of non-communication preserved in colonial place names, in cartographic conventions, in the OuLiPo-like word games of the amateur ethnolinguistic wordlists, I was establishing a bridgehead for myself, where ‘beginning again’ was presented as an overdue collective responsibility whose object was to emancipate creativity: evidence of a multisensory, relational engagement with the inner and outer world manifested itself in echoic mimicry and in the transactional value attributed to ‘mere coincidence’. These readings appealed to architects and urbanists because they reintegrated discourse and gesture, locution and location, seeming to find a way to weave the objets trouvés of local history into the fabric of significant forms. They appealed to choreographers because they identified strong ties between the inside and the outside of the performance, between the passages carved out of air in performance and the pulsing, unsteady nervature of the meeting place. So, these early characterisations of discursive environments where physical relations and contracts were embedded in the way people talked and related to one another morphed into a form of site analysis that could be commissioned and that operated within an urban design frame as a translator between the figurative modes of expression essential to cultural production and the administrative language and forms found in the rhetoric of the project brief. In planning

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162 Translations speak, the ‘creative template’ prepared in 2014 for Yagan Square, Perth, ‘provides the common language which integrates architecture, landscape design, public art’, translates ‘between the cultural stories associated with the site and the site’s new urban functions’, and finds ‘common ground between Indigenous and white settler heritages’, using these ‘to generate new forms, symbols and stories’.3 Six years later the focus has altered, the ‘creative template’ for a major suburban hospital bid facing outwards (toward an imagined creative region) rather than inwards (towards project dramaturgy): again, in soft planning-speak, ‘While the “creative template” builds on significant cultural and environmental research, it is not a replicant heritage report. Its purpose is to identify the creative community DNA in Footscray’s people and places, past and present, that captures the community’s values, meanings and aspirations. The key difference between the “creative template” and cultural frameworks that set the parameters for public art, community engagement and other art forms such as music, dance, visual arts, drama, and creative writing is that the “creative template” is content rich.’ 4 Personally, I saw the templates as devices for making the inside come out. Invited to examine the social and environmental history of a physical site – a harbour redevelopment zone, a future hospital, a popular beach, a new civic centre and landscape, a repurposed heritage landscape or a nascent civic square – was an opportunity to sketch ideal landing places, future situations generative of new social forms and exchanges. The ‘creative templates’ were, from my point of view the groundwork of differently conducted and mediated social and political exchanges. Paying equal attention to the physical and documentary evidence of collective self-becoming at that place, the object was to see what in the past could be brought over into the future character of the site. A translation was prepared in which place-making gestures associated with the locality informed a new generation of functional interpretations and symbolic infrastructure. My self-appointed role in this spatio-psychoanalysis was therapeutic: a self-healing, the acquisition of a social identity through the projection of an imagined community where I could conceivably belong, was achieved in a release of mythopoetic energy recovered from the site’s creative history and its redirection towards future inventions. The ultimate model was Vichian, invention being a function of imagination in conjunction with memory. But the

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cultural and professional pressure to normalise the ‘creative template’ procedures as a generalisable method able in the abstract to fulfil the soft planning requirement to deliver ‘sense of place’ inhibited personal expression. Although received as a creative synthesis of historical materials – cultural and environmental heritage translated into symbolic forms (stories and patterns) that architects, designers and even planners could immediate recognise as valuable – the personality of the vision had to be downplayed. The objection, ‘Why this story (or set of symbols) rather than another?’ hovered in the political background, as if the authority of the vision derived from its comprehensiveness rather than its technique – when, in reality, to be ‘content rich’ was a way of avoiding the design-by-survey appeal to representativeness. ‘Creative templates’ imagined places dramaturgically as patterned relationships whose feedback served to stabilise an emergent identity or sense of place. Place was imagined regionally and organised archipelagically. The precedent for this had been set at Federation Square where, instead of ‘freestanding buildings’, Lab architecture studio designed ‘interconnected assemblages of associated programmatic entities,’ comparable to the interorganisational networking characteristic of federal systems of government. Substitute ‘buildings’ for ‘actors’ (in this context signifying executive and legislative ‘subsystem “wholes”’ within the federal system), and political scientist Ralph Chapman’s comment, that ‘The actors are continuously involved in mutual transfers creating thereby an additional set of structures and processes, extra-constitutional and, in many cases, extra-parliamentary’,5 applied with uncanny accuracy to Lab’s approach. Before the Yarra was banked and its adjoining swamplands drained, the local water economy had also been federal, local creeks regularly overflowing to form archipelagic water networks. No less importantly there was an ethnographic ‘mere coincidence’: the former political and social organisation of the Kulin peoples of central Victoria had been federal and I suppose that even at that time I was exploring the hypothesis that, in his account of Western Kulin cultures, James Dawson was redefining the Western District as a creative region. Solution, the roughly contemporary ‘public spaces strategy’ prepared for the redevelopment of Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour, used the metaphor of Brownian Motion to visualise the new meeting place:

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164 Translations As dispersed systems, whose stability depends on the constant intercommunication of parts across the entire system, colloid bodies redefine the idea of the meeting place. Instead of being a central place, the meeting place is redefined as a network of meetings, potentially occurring everywhere. Instead of being the site’s monumental focus, the meeting place is redefined as a network of nodes and connecting threads or pathways. As the locus of a continual gathering and dispersal of people, the dispersed meeting place meets Giacometti’s definition of the meeting place. Its structures, often of ‘incredible complexity,’ express the totality of this life as a mass communication, a constantly forming and transforming community, discovering and rediscovering itself kinetically through a network of nodes and interconnecting paths.6

Fast forward to 2014 and the evolution of the essential idea is obvious in these comments on the Yagan Square ‘creative template’ (Figure 9): ‘The word template is interpreted in the older, dynamic sense of tension, stretch, measure. The Sanskrit root may have the idea of stretching space or introducing time. Space imagined in this way is a string figure: A ‘creative template’ is a technique for holding things apart together: in an urban context it enables us to see the public space as immanent, self-organising. In terms of heritage, it isolates the through lines or principles of change that materialize at certain times and places. In Australian Aboriginal cultures string figures are widely documented: they are spatial mnemonics for fundamental relationship between sky and earth; they can model family relations. They translate social laws into a lasting physical gesture: the sinews of the body are transformed into the ‘tension’ that tunes the good society.7

These and similar design dramaturgies have been presented scientifically, as poetic approaches to place-making that have some heuristic value.8 Klee drew his appearances of nature onto glass, a way, theoretically, of overlaying the image onto the object so that the line disappears back into nature. A similar utopianism informed the reception of my place visions, with the important proviso that the ‘appearances’ I was representing had yet to materialise. My outlines were indicative and prophetic, a point reinforced in the sketches that usually formed part of my ‘research’, and which, in an effort to capture their hybrid nature, I called ‘Descriptions’: Our word sketch goes back to an older word meaning an extemporised poem. I like the idea that drawing should be connected with verbal improvisation. Most of

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Figure 9  i Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, 2015, figure 12, a composite overlay of ‘energy patterns’ derived from archival materials and field experiments; ii Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, figure 13, the translation of the ‘energy patterns’ into ‘movement forms’; iii Lyons Architects, IPH, Aspect, Yagan Square developed design, south-west aspect, 2015.

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166 Translations my sketches are imaginary conversations about places; some of them describe poetic aspects of places, their rhythm, their internal relationships and informal memories of passage. Our word plot also captures this double endowment: places are circumscribed areas, but they are also complex narratives. The hand that accompanies speech as it draws can sometimes be like musical notation, marking the rhythms and topical arrangements of what I am saying. When I am conjuring up the tangle of stories that create the cross-weave of place I use gestures expressively. I write the score of what I am saying. Sometimes there is a direct relationship between speaking and drawing: in this circumstance the sketches are not representations, they serve to draw out a line of association. ‘There is a relationship between the line as signifier (of direction, connection) and the line as mimetic trace, that goes for a walk and is exploratory. In this tension people recognise that a place is emerging that in its performance exists somewhere between mental and physical object and between the players in the room.’9 The language here betrays the continuing inspiration of Klee and it would be misleading to say that none of these sketches came out: an elaborate involuted structure evoking the energetic transfer between ocean and coast, drawn for a redevelopment project at a major Indian Ocean beach outside Perth, became, when explained to planners, surprisingly legible (Figure 10). It could never furnish a landscape design or an interpretation strategy but its warp and weft, its duplication of waterspouts, twisting ramparts, hollowed ranks and zoomorphic water spirits, suggested a place of chameleon-like formal transformation. ‘While nothing was represented, the energetic patterning of the beach was conveyed, a certain metabolic intensity or dynamic atmosphere that should be secured.’ 10 A small professional community wanted to make the ‘creative template’ part of their urban strategy. They urged me to explain the method. Ironically, they perceived a good imitation of nature (the turbulent ensemble of forces that produce an acceptable urban design intervention) and wanted to deploy it throughout their region of responsibility. But here was the rub: I could not get the line of thought to come out, I could not see how the poetic intuition, the wit, as Vico said, to see metaphorical and eidetic convergences tending to form a pattern, could be reduced to a set of rules. Ironically, the outcomes were remarkably consistent, a reconciliation of Aboriginal,

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Figure 10  Paul Carter, ‘Waullu’, Artline 200 red 0.4 mm, 200 × 300 mm, notebook A47, 96, April 2015. ‘The draft Master Plan defines the western boundary of the Redevelopment area as a line parallel to the beach. It is the responsibility of the “creative template” to transform this boundary into a hinge. The physical geography of Scarborough stops at the edge of the ocean; however, the edge is where Scarborough’s emotional geography begins.’

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168 Translations colonial and environmental marks producing an archipelagic figure able to produce a useful design dramaturgy, but the ‘bridge’ between inside and outside was hard to formalise. The similarity of the outcomes might have given pause for thought. Leaving aside the profound differences between the situations that my storybook conceptualised and navigated – in what way is a future hospital comparable to a surf beach, or either to the cultural programming of a new civic square and underground carpark? – the consistent poetic value discovered in the early ethnographic and environmental data, and in the colonial encounter with these cultures could hardly be attributed to any mystical ‘sense of place’, some algorithm or possible line joining up all the dots: it had to be a reflection of my interests, history and sensibility. In what is perhaps a typical migrant ploy, the innermost impulse to belong disguised itself as the outermost analysis of data tending to produce a desirable social topology. Curiously, the protection of this poetic intuition was more likely to produce the desired results – the predictability of ultimate outline and containment – than attempts to formalise and replicate it. Instead of building a bridge between internal constructions of place sense and socio-spatial projections of good public space, the ‘creative template’ materialised the challenge of crossing over. It represented the imagined landing place as a border or as a figure of encounters that will never be resolved into the silence of occupation but produce instead a new tradition of bifurcations and an associated socio-environmental etiquette of listening, reciprocating and caring. I thought the style of my sketches illustrated this: their lack of competent draughtmanship, their proliferation of networks patched with cross-hatching tending to produce an ensemble of related movement forms exhibited a fluidity of syntax that was, I thought, prelingual and comparable to the discourse of colonial encounter. Rather than think these drawings represent anything – certainly any form that could be built – ‘It would be better to compare these combinations of lines, the ad hoc patchwork of their patterning, to the contact jargons and proto-Creoles improvised along the margins of empire, where a system of chance homologies and fertile ambiguities sustains communication rather than the exchange of clearly defined and translatable concepts. The syntax of these pre-lingual languages is distinctively superficial: it does not well up from firm grammatical

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foundations but depends on a certain poetic disposition and performative brio, as the chance recognition of convergent interests dictates and mimetic hybridisation transforms one motif into another. What counts in these fluid situations is less the stability of the concept or image than its power to generate connections; here its primitive simplicity denotes a potential for combination, for fragmentation and reconstruction. Attention is drawn to the invisible forces of separation and reunion that underwrite the new order immanent in the apparent chaos.’ 11 This rather Orphic scenography presided over a practical issue of tactics. Putting the zigzag or hither and thither back into discourse might produce a different border culture but the negotiation of getting in remained tied to identity politics. Somewhere in this ‘fluid situation’ the outsider, the newcomer, the migrant, or those antlike files of refugees imagined by Canetti had to identify themselves: crossroads might be chiasmatic but approaching them from any direction led to a crossing-point. There was no way round the question, What is your name? Or was there? It was a feature of the living arrangements or meeting places conjured up in the ‘creative template’ that as yet they did not exist: as possible designs patched into the urban fabric, they stood as holes in the present grid of streets and buildings. And, logically, if their appearance was to make any difference to the culture of the city, they must possess a different culture of coming together: to cultivate an ‘immanent, self-organising’ public space was, implicitly or explicitly, to reject the masterplanned and Cartesian status quo of the inherited colonial grid whose genius is to optimise a kind of exchange tending towards self-sameness and to stigmatise as exceptional the involuted growth, associated with chance, cybernetic risk and local anomaly. Imaginary in the future, these projects might also be located at non-lieux in the past: Victoria Harbour, the subject of my 2002 report Solution was a case in point as the creation of dock facilities to the west of Melbourne’s CBD exploited swampland that had hitherto served as the city’s cesspit. I was able to show that it had entered the colonial economy as an engineer’s utopia: ‘As Melbourne grew in civic pride and self-consciousness, so the low land west of the old Batman’s Hill, and north to West Melbourne Swamp, dropped out of consciousness. It was a non-place, rubbish was dumped there; and polluting industry. The Victoria Harbour site had no place in conventional

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histories. In compensation, it was an area where dreams multiplied. These were mainly engineers’ dreams: from the earliest days of white settlement to the period of containerisation, imaginative engineers and surveyors have been drawing residential, commercial and marine utopias over the site.’ 12 From this fact I derived what I called the ‘Asterisk Principle’: if there can be negative theology, why not negative heritage? Or: Victoria Harbour is the place where dreams of other places have collected. This fact was reinforced when the swamp was transformed into Victoria Docks, becoming a port of national and global significance. The languages of the sailors, the starlore of ship’s captains, the gymnastics of the wharfies, the commercial intelligence and opportunism of Melbourne’s merchants: these secret knowledges are the intelligence of Victoria Harbour. Their stories form the site’s mythic identity. I call the commitment to recovering these neglected historical dimensions of the site the Asterisk Principle because, as an ancient scholar, writing about poetry, explained, “The Asterisk is placed against [verses] which have been omitted in order that what seems to be omitted may shine forth. For in the Greek language a star is called aster”. 13

Implicit in this critique was a desire to see the place in the round, to involute the planar topography and discover strange twists and turns in the foldings of the new time and space. It was to place the invisible in full view and to allow it to remain uncolonised. In contrast with a depositional model of historical progress and growth, in which the spread and settlement of the new inevitably buried what went before out of sight, a heritage of turbulent possibilities was being advocated with the idea that the bits and pieces whirling in its column, while they could never be accurately fixed in position collectively represented a stable suspension, a system of holes held together with strings. Perhaps surprisingly, the Asterisk Principle turned out to have plenty of practical applications. I have mentioned the collegiality of spirit linking the migrant and certain ‘orphaned’ Aboriginal figures in the ethnographic literature. In preparing Eloquent Forest, a ‘creative template’ for a new inner urban ‘meeting place’ in the Melbourne suburb of Prahran, I showed, I think, that figures without address or home, whose migratory trails criss-cross the historical terrain without leaving a monumental trace provided a genealogy of place-making quite unlike the received one based on the colonial survey.

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Picking up on rain metaphors used elsewhere, I compared these seasonal outflowings and temporary passages to the culture associated with Prahran’s remnant precolonial drainage system. I was able to connect the Kaurna woman Kalloongoo, the historical original of Charlotte in Cooee Song, to Hawksburn Creek (now called the Prahran Main Drain) that now runs underground between our site and the place on the Yarra River where the so-called Aboriginal Protector, George Augustus Robinson, had his headquarters (and where Kalloongoo most likely worked).14 I drew attention to an incident along Gardiners Creek to the north of our site where Bunurong and Woi wurrung communities jointly hosted a white excursion into the nearby Dandenong ranges.15 Incidentally, when I mentioned this story to Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung community leaders, they reported that it was unknown to them: in this case, a story had also been orphaned. These neglected historical dimensions placed the future on a new footing: they suggested that what was coming up from underground was immanent in the design of the future. A member of the illegal ‘cave community’ frequenting the Main Drain described the sounds down there: ‘When the concrete isn’t ringing with the echoes of engines, the still of the underground is punctuated by the regular chirping of crickets and constant dripping water. The walls are thick with spiderwebs, while cockroaches scuttle underfoot.’ 16 When we came to source, design and compose a soundscape for Prahran Square, we channelled these sounds into the upper air. Resurrection of a different kind was recommended in Hospitality, a ‘creative template’ for a new general hospital to be built in Footscray in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Local councillors were upset that four houses of architectural interest were to be demolished as part of the site preparation for the new buildings. Planning authorities approach heritage matters rather in the manner of real estate agents selling property: to keep the vendors happy (in this case the local council) they assure them that their asset is highly valued; to keep the investing consortium happy, they insist that all obstacles to development can easily be removed. Invariably, it is the architects who are expected to reconcile these conflicting pieces of advice, usually through the incorporation of fragments of the older infrastructure into the fabric of the new buildings or the ground plans of outdoor areas. This palimpsest of former occupation cannot help being cynical as its belated sentimentality overlooks the ruthlessness

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172 Translations of earlier site occupations: the four turn-of-the-twentieth-century houses in question were typical figure and ground property developments treating the land inside the property boundary as a tabula rasa – their patron is Walter Benjamin’s ‘destructive character’, the figure of the new urbanism said to have been based on Adolf Loos, and the same figure who haunts Martinha Rozells in Jadi Jadian. In any case, logically, respect for this inheritance is expressed in its total destruction: ‘What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.’ 17 Exactly, yet instead a sudden and anomalous local piety has to be displayed, an appearance of respect, if political unanimity is not to fragment. Our proposition was to host the loss, to offer the hospitality the new building extended to the community to its own kind. The four residences were at risk of becoming cultural orphans, abandoned unburied on the shore of the new empire, like Palinurus in Virgil’s epic. The Heritage Interpretation Strategy was, we proposed, stuck in the melancholic phase of mourning. Its unbelievably detailed inventory of building parts, floor tiles, verandah units, soffit styles, degrees of stained glass evidenced an incapacity to let go, as if by reproducing the physical fabric indexically in the mind, the four residences could be completely reproduced like Platonic forms. In short, the familiar heritage paradox: to secure the past for the future, change must be leached out of it. If, we wrote, achieving psychological and emotional wellbeing is a capacity to return to the past, to confront the pain of loss and through this confrontation to ‘let go’ and find one’s own path, then the role of the hospital was clear: if ‘letting go’ is like the therapeutic moment in mourning when the ‘mourning subject “welcomes” its own separation as the very condition of “hospitality, love or friendship”’,18 then the role of the hospital was to host this migration. I proposed suspending ghost outlines of the houses inside the hospital’s major light wells; a related proposal adapted a Kulin tradition connected the advent of the (white) disease with the collapsing of the four tree props holding up the sky, and I had proposed that the vertical logic of the interior design reference the growth pattern of a tree – in this the house memories would be aerial nests dedicated to the exhibition of local traditions of care. The comparison of place to a forest has a fairytale ring to it; as if from the beginning, the new place of meeting will be a story of temptation, enthralment and the finding of the path that can break

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the spell and lift the characters to a higher level of self-awareness, from ego- to eco-consciousness. As hospitals of emotional and social reparation, meeting places make sense of the journey, configuring the many paths through the forest as components of a plot (a patchwork of passages and clearings) that weave into the everyday a recognisable pattern. The forest is a composition of irregularly bifurcating directions: the emergence of complexity is a function of going deeper into it. The responsibility for finding meaning is gradually transferred from the outside authority (planner, architect) to the inside characters who find themselves in the labyrinth of illness. Recovery and discovery become twinned as, following the Salutogenesis thesis, the healing path is the sensation of coherence, the possibility that the path taken is self-determined: decision-making is neither removed nor deferred but exists in the mid-stride, as if the inside and the outside coexist as a movement form. To hand over sense-making to the patient is to repatriate metaphor-making, the act of bridge-making; the dramaturgical function of design is to curate this environment of potential relationships in a way that creates coherent pathways. What we might call the ‘set’ of these chances where coherence emerges was compared to the cross-woven product of the loom – I showed that many traditional weaving patterns used non-gridlike trapezoid frames and, more generally, that the production of holes and differential regions of open and closed knotting characterised handmade cloaks, nets and webs. Experienced as connectivity in the present act of passage, the patient pathway embodies separation and convergence. ‘The “path” taken’ by the single thread is functional in connecting every part of the net; in the same way the single patient pathway always already interacts with all the pathways through the hospital. The knots in weaving are functions of a balance between convergence and divergence. They are sites of exchange because they lead out into the paths in-between.’ The design that lends coherence to the field resembles a string figure whose internal coherence is a function of being tethered to anchors in the outside world. To mediate between individual and collective experience, a stitch is needed, a method of knotting and, as I noted, ‘A string figure is simply a knitted figure where the knots are used to keep the pattern open.’ 19 I compared the elastic properties of the figure, the healthy tension required to keep the figure from tearing apart or collapsing inwards

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174 Translations to the coiling and uncoiling shapeshifting Mindie, an Indigenous snake power associated with the bringing of illness but also with the life-renewing Rainbow Serpent. Mindie was in this context the form movement took. Knot types are interlocked structures, essentially three-dimensional and implying the fourth dimension of movement (or direction). In the context of expressing connectivity/separation through criss-crossing knots, the ‘holes’ bounded by their loops are as important as the pathways. The holes are evidence that the act of making a passage (stitching, threading, weaving) actually produces its own enclosures, rooms or places of gathering. An interesting feature of Mindie is that he ‘can extend or contract his dimensions’. The intersection of Mindie with other hospitality themes is evident in the fact that he ‘can ascend the highest trees, and hold on to a branch like a ring-tail possum, and stretch his body across a great forest a great length, so as to reach any tribe’.20 In a return to a theme that shows the inside coming out, I noted that the movement units, the psycho-kinetically imagined complex of patient paths, could be compared to involutes, ‘the complex shapes forming in the “holes”, or wake of passage. Where water pours through narrow lock gates or squeezes through a fish trap weir, it spreads out and becomes a mass of serpentine coils. These can reweave themselves into volumes with a distinct rotating shape. Other lines of foam converge on a point: a diamond or double chevron pattern is formed, turbulence reordered as complexity.’ The therapeutic function of this thought figure emerges in the context of mental distress (including the condition of melancholia). The healing pathway takes the patient back to weaving the weft into the warp of weaving, an act that is essential if any pattern (or meaning) is to emerge in the ideal linear structure of paths going forward. These speculations were not unsupported by outside authorities. Discussing ‘the insoluble paradox of the need for consistent, evidence based standards of care and the unique predicament, context, priorities, and choices of the individual patient’, Pisek and Greenhalgh invoked complexity theory: ‘interactions among the agents’, which comprehend every aspect of hospital dramaturgy, exhibit ‘the behaviour of a complex system’.21 But after all, the complex image of feedback, of anomaly within regularity, of singularities nurtured in the general web, is a description of wellbeing: turbulence is feedback between the inside of the system and the

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outside; in physiology it is the basis of homeostasis – if ‘There is often an overall pattern’ in complex systems, it is because they are, paradoxically, unpredictable.22 But then so is death. In Klee’s terms, the ‘creative template’ literature was certainly ‘getting out’, but it was ‘dirty’: remaining closely tied to ethnographic source materials, circulating in a professional milieu where creativity was professionally protected, the reports appeared to be, and were valued as, conforming almost entirely to nature, defined here as a representative synthesis of materials relating to the place’s environmental, cultural and social history. Anyone interested in detecting tell-tale signs of a distinctively migrant ethnography can find them – the border, the string figure, the positive role played by turbulence – but they are made to emerge inductively from a survey of the evidence – as if a review of all the stories relating to the formation of the place pointed inevitably to this origin in the migratory chaos of arrival and the ontological necessity, as we might say, of making bridgeheads which, relying on metaphor, integrate the political and the poetic. Yet the motivation of these exercises remains hidden: treated as technical reports, no inside has to be attributed to them. Yet they are templates for significant forms, imagined as creative regions with a distinctive dramaturgy or ‘sense of place’ signature. As opportunities to imagine different ways of living in a new country, they could be said to scale up those ‘perpetual landing sites’ proposed by Arakawa and Gins. Taking a temporal topography characterised by the value given to the mid-stride – ‘Something’s happening and it is happening in terms of two opposing actions at once’ – they imagine places in terms of cleavages, as systems of self-departing that weave the previous paths into the future pattern.23 The cybernetic, self-regulating or autopoietic constitution of the emerging complexity means that the pattern can never be completely described, and within the unreachable boundary of the string figure incubates an infinity of horizons – an existential geography of obvious appeal to anyone rendered exceptional by the present policing of places as enclosures. One way the most personal lines could come out was in the artwork: the logical conclusions reached in the ‘creative template’ sometimes pointed logically back to me. If ‘creative templates’ were exercises in applied material thinking, then the proof of their practical value lay in the materialisation of the stories and sketches as

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176 Translations translators between functional design and ‘sense of place’. And who better to demonstrate this than the author of the idea? Works like Golden Grove or Passenger fulfilled this function creating a constellation of works distributed across the site (respectively in the central landscape of the University of Sydney’s Darlington Campus and the architectural/landscape ensemble of Yagan Square, Perth).24 In both, the knots in the string figure were translated into dramaturgical fields; metaphorically, a forest was lent coherence as an arrangement of trees (sculptural events) and intervenient (frequently inscribed) pathways. ‘Overarching’ stories unified the federal distribution and self-organisation of parts – the ethnographic, local environmental and colonial associations of the constellation The Pleiades in Sydney and, in Perth, the story of Yoreel (Fanny Balbuk) whose resistance to the colonists building in her country took the form of a militant dérive, walking through and across the fences and walls placed in her way – but the axes of convergence and divergence were also underwritten as what was patterned in the ground plane was a meeting place of successive traces that persisted palimpsest-like through the layered history of the underground and had their counterpart in the accounts of ancestral figures whose journeys had made the country and who existed doubly, transfigured as constellations in the night sky.25 In any case, in translating themes found in the ‘creative template’ into concrete works or situations, a schema of joining tracks was as important as the destination objects. The arrangement was archipelagic and so was the logic.26 As a pattern of exchange where potentially incommensurable islands are brought into a relation, the archipelago is geography as metaphor and, as this formulation shows, it is also something else: ‘Politically … as an open-ended decision-making structure, a stochastic region where probabilities outweigh certainties and contradictory positions not only co-exist but are essential to the distribution of governance, the archipelago may turn out to be nothing else than the extraterritorial project of public space.’ 27 Here is more than a hint of the migrant’s parti pris. In a discussion of Enlightenment cartography, I characterised ‘Geography’s myth’ as the repression of movement. Although the information any map contains embodies a history of exploration, the underlay of journeys is nowhere to be seen: trajets have disappeared into territories. It is not only ‘a history of movement, both conceptual and kinetic,

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that is recovered when geography’s myth is exposed but a different kind of autobiography, one that associates identity formation with ‘wandering from place to place and making connections between things placed remotely in time and space’.28 In the study of change, I suggested that a Zenonian reduction was only avoided when a (usually repressed) poetic logic enabled the reflective scientist to overcome the step-by-step inductive method of extrapolation by making a leap, a process comparable to recasting the abyss as a gap or measurable interval. The leap is interesting (and not only etymologically as a navigation of the in-between) because it is a vector, embodying a definite direction (or decision). In reality, inductive reasoning drives poetically (or purposefully) towards some increasingly clear generalisation but, in principle, its reasoning is scalar, not predisposed in any direction. A hybrid form of reasoning, abductive inference, can be compared to a shoreline of rocks or an outflow of scree where the tracker has to become a leaper if the simplest and most likely path is to be found. In this latter case, the simplest route is not the most direct and the inevitable errancy involved in finding the way makes complexity methodologically efficient.29 The same logic applies to the human encounter where the simplest exchange depends on a group, situational choreography that is complex. In relation to a migrant ethnography, these meditations on method are allegorical: they transpose to the anonymous public domain of intellectual and environmental enquiry the personal problem of finding the line and making it come out. In the discussion of geography’s myth, I referred to Giambattista Vico’s theory of knowledge.30 Vico’s ingegno, the faculty that makes sense of disparate and diverse things, takes the data of memory and le contorna e pone in acconezza ed assettamento (encompasses them and connects and arranges them). In this topographical figure of speech, the poetic origins of the map in the organisation of a movement form are exposed – but so, to return to Paul Klee, is the method for casting a bridge between the inside and the outside. The verb contornare not only means to give a new turn, but also ‘to surround; to go round; to outline; to border’. A contorno can be an ‘outline’ or ‘ornamental border’; and, in the plural, ‘surroundings’ or ‘environment’.31 But the threat of the ornamental is what Klee wants to avoid. Then the conclusion is clear: the outside line that successfully, in Klee’s phrase, goes for a walk makes tracks through an environment

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178 Translations imagined like the region of the ‘creative template’ as an environment of tracks whose tracing, connecting and arranging defines the artist’s work. As nothing is represented except the movement form emerging from the act of drawing (drawing as drawing out), there is no danger of distortion. My involvement with Geoffrey Bardon, the art teacher whose encouragement of painting at the government mission of Papunya in 1971 and 1972 is widely documented, celebrated and, in some quarters, disputed, arose from a typical act of migrant solicitation: Bardon had approached me because something I had written resonated with him; we began talking and I quickly became impressed by the mimetic techniques he had used to provoke the Aboriginal children at the settlement to draw non-Western patterns, and the comparable pantomimicry he employed in urging a group of senior men from various language cultures and countries (Pintupi, Arrernte, Loritja) to excel in a new kind of art that transferred traditional designs usually executed in sand or on the body to the permanent (and flat) medium of acrylic on masonite board. In The Lie of the Land I examined a number of cross-cultural encounter moments where the unilateral seizure of land and extirpation of culture had been suspended, where, briefly, an alternative rapprochement was entertained. I found evidence of this in Strehlow’s hope that his study of Arrernte song could assist in the birth of a genuinely Australian, bicultural literary tradition. Characterising William Light as an insider/outsider in Britain’s colonial administration, I implied a connection between his parentage (of ‘brindled hue’) and his utopian planning scheme for Adelaide. Looking back, these preoccupations overflowed boundaries: the comprehensive translation Strehlow intended had its nascent counterpart in the language notebooks of William Dawes, and it is no accident that the installation of The Calling to Come occurred in the same months that I was characterising Strehlow’s English renderings as ‘reverent mimes’.32 Looking back, there is an irreverent parallel to be drawn between William Light – whose town plan, I suggested, owed much to the post-1693 restorations of Baroque towns in Sicily) and my fictional bicentennial genius Vincenzo Volentieri (‘a swarthy, almost Aboriginal complexion could not mask the finely chiselled Sicilian features’). In any case, Bardon’s methods at Papunya, the unusual combination of agency and self-abnegation appealed to me as proto-typical migrant tactics for ‘getting in’.

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I was shocked that Bardon’s accounts of what happened at Papunya were denounced by black and white activists alike. Finding no place for the outsider, the one who arrives later however well-intended, they risked producing a new subaltern who could not speak.33 My interest, though, was in the poetics – imagining that a truthful account of the emergence of new self- and place-representations must have a political flow-on effect. Bardon counted Paul Klee as one of his pedagogical inspirations and I noted that, in making the line come out (referring to the pantomimic techniques Bardon improvised to encourage and amplify artistic production), his criteria of artistic success uncannily anticipated my characterisation of the creative region as a plot or string figure, a cobweb of lines and knots where local events were transmitted and registered throughout the field – as a struggling fly causes the entire spider’s web to tremble. This was not some naive (and appropriative) assimilation of essential Western Desert Painting Movement motifs – the circle and line networks, for example – to some kind of allegorical purpose. The focus was on an embodied discourse of production. Noting how ‘simple and polyphonic motifs’ could be generated from a single dot mobilised as a line, Klee defined these as ‘components of a picture’: but a visual composition needed more – ‘a combination of several elements will be required to produce forms or objects or other compounds’.34 In Bardon’s version of this compositional aesthetic, the first, simple motifs were called ‘archetypes’, their successful combination producing ‘hieroglyphs’. The key point was that the emerging composition was a function of its performance, like the telling of a story, it was the complex trace or tracking of a journey or complex of journeys: As Bardon explained, ‘The hieroglyphs … were composites of smaller representations or haptic assurances of place; these composites were called by me archetypes and hieroglyphic formings acted within the interrelationship and self-enactment of these archetypes; a hieroglyph was a self-evident forming made after the immortal ideality of a story or place and sought to give a physical idea-comprehension of what that place or story was.’ 35 With all its Modernist biases, this remains an extraordinary translation of intent. The point was that ‘ideality’ was fulfilled in ‘self-enactment’ – a version of my self-becoming at that place. As regards the destiny of the line, it could throw off its linearity and

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180 Translations reconnect to the bipedal mode of dotting where the history is in the physical re-enactment of travelling, interpreted here as a materialisation of the surface: ‘The “dotting” when used by those painters working with me in 1971 and 1972, and later, was not symmetrically formed. The dots were most often of clusters stroked or hatched, and almost always allowed themselves to breathe on the board or canvas by their having spaces between each other … The dots or strokes at first followed a stroking of the surface by the painter. No one stroke resembled any other and the strokes often seemed to change their direction as clusters, from one section of the painting to the other, and these clusters faced away or toward a hieroglyphic form or forms.’ 36 And, perhaps in another nod to Klee, Bardon insisted that the composition emerging from this calligraphic suppleness achieved its meaning with singular economy: hence it was a cause for praise that Uta Uta Tjangala, for example, ‘worked intuitive rhythms and pattern without ornamentation, in transition from twig dotting sand painting, and assumed very readily, a mastery of brush method’.37 A migrant ethnography is not simply an account of personal taste, justified by a possibly fortuitous engagement with ethnographic materials. It should be an account of the sources of those tastes that hypothesises a forming cultural situation or socio-political prehistory favouring this development – the obscure, long-distance impact of a history of enclosure acts on contemporary experiences of displacement and in-betweenness belongs to this mode of enquiry, one that, as Canadian writer Shani Mootoo’s poem ‘Mantra for Migrants’ shows (‘Always becoming, will never be / Always arriving, must never land / Between back home and home unfathomable is me – / By definition: immigrant.’), is also publicly shared.38 However, in relation to the public, the hieroglyphic formings that Bardon theorised or the ‘creative templates’ with their comparably dynamic arrangements of multiple meeting places and converging and diverging tracks, forming together a coherent but complex ‘idea-comprehension of what the place or story’ might be are allegories: ‘Allegory – the word means to speak figuratively, or to speak in other terms, or to speak of other things in public, from the Greek allegorein, allos, other, plus agoreuein, to speak (in public), from agora, an assembly, but also the marketplace or customary place of assembly.’ So writes J. Hillis Miller, before posing the question: ‘If agoraphobia is a fear

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of open spaces, would allegoraphobia be the fear of that form of language which speaks otherwise?’ 39 Some background is needed to understand this question (or its importance). Its relevance is this: if a signature dramaturgy is discernible in objects as diverse as drawings, landscape designs, urban programmes, meeting arrangements, power-sharing agreements (federalism), cross-tracking Aboriginal story lines and anastomosing hydrologies, then it is reasonable to guess that it possesses a coherent style, comparable perhaps to the rules informing language. This would cast light on a collectivity and tradition of sense-making plausibly identified with the ‘immigrant’ and offer a basis for understanding a distinctively migrant ethnography. An ethnography of any kind is a description of habitual worldviews and their expression in cultural practices. Different circumstances produce reactions that are consistent with a larger framework of sense-making. Innovation in this context is mythopoetic; certain revolutions in worldview involve a reinvention of shared myths. There is an interruption but also an overflow; in geological terms there is layering but also the persistence of the marble cake effect. When I look at the circumstances of Repressed Spaces, I see a technical break with the preoccupations of the previous decade but also a persistence of certain thematic preoccupations. In the 1990s, the medium of reconceptualising relations had been language, the goal the development of a migrant poetics. While the entire drama of the native informant, the dramaturgy of the interview and its mimetic critique, defined the place of meeting performatively, it did not prescribe any spatial arrangements. The sudden and unexpected opportunity to create public space writing and ground patterning marked a radical technical break; yet the older thought complexes persisted. Repressed Spaces rethought the problem of ‘Always arriving, must never land’ in the context of the agoraphobia induced by Modernist public space design. In the new, ornament-free and symmetrically directionless public spaces of Europe’s late nineteenthcentury imperial cities, Paul Klee’s problem of getting the line inside to come out manifested itself as space panic, a sensation that where all paths were possible choosing one path rather than another was impossible: ‘The paradox of the straight line is that its universal grid is both everywhere and nowhere. Cancelling out difference, it cancels out the history of movement’ 40 and ‘Agoraphobia is an

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182 Translations anxiety about meeting places. Modern places of encounter, crossroads, cancel out the trajectories converging on them and passing through them.’ 41 Following Hillis Miller’s suggestion, the ‘other speak’ or public language of Modernist urban design would be very different from the rhetorical performances associated with the ancient Greek agora. In fact, we are perfectly familiar with it: it is the language of commercial power: ‘The main goal of this dominant discourse [of global capitalism] is to fashion the merciless logic of corporate profit-making and political power into a normal state of affairs, “that is the way things are”, in the process rendering rational resistance to these notions into something altogether and practically unrealistic, irrational, utopian.’ 42 Responding to Said’s analysis, and his recommendation that, despite the devaluation of the language of reason the public role of writers and intellectuals (but we might add other designers of the public sphere) was to speak eloquently and truthfully about the plight of the culturally different, I wondered how the language of resistance differentiated itself from the language of the State Department.43 The question is even more relevant now when the lies told by political leaders are indistinguishable from, and indeed seamlessly aligned with, the lies told by corporations. In other words, when allegory as the discourse of the democratic meeting place produces a feeling of illness, or allegoraphobia, the language of resistance must discourse differently. One way to speak differently is, indeed, to revive the allegorical dimension of communication – to recoup public space for mythopoetic invention or the circulation of new parables (in effect, the aspiration of the ‘creative template’). But here the difference that Hans-Georg Gadamer makes between allegory and symbol is important – while the former makes the reference explicit, the latter leaves it implicit: ‘In the case of allegory, the reference must be known in advance. In the case of the symbol … the particular represents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it.’ 44 Allegory, therefore, ‘is only possible for a poetry as long as there exists a secure common horizon of interpretation in which it can take place.’ 45 Evidently, in the multilingual, plurally ethnic cosmopolis, allegory fulfils Benjamin’s characterisation of it as the ruins of the real.46 Even the hopeful ambiguity of symbols belongs to the past: where the contract in which ‘Material sign, subjective emotion, and supernatural originating

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power come together in the symbol’ has long been broken, it may be my ‘mere coincidences’ that make more sense.47 But I digress.48 My point is that a personal style is essential if the line is to come out differently: in urban terms, the characteristic gestures of the ‘creative template’ will not seek to correct or ornament the bare forms of the newly delineated exterior and interior volumes or to populate their scenography with a newly obedient dramaturgy: if anything is to happen, something will have to be interrupted, the notion of things going on as before ironically mirrored when ‘Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time they will not be defeated.’ 49 The ‘personal style’ of the ‘creative template’ emerges in the attention paid to the border and to all aspects of ‘crossing over’, ‘getting in’ and passage (the design of sentiers whose hieroglyph of complex combination produces ‘sense of place’). Any border is by definition ambiguous: the site where crossing must be negotiated is also the place where entry can be refused. The guardian figure of this chiasmatic zone is Janus, precisely because, as Louise Holland argues in her book Janus and the Bridge, he takes notice of a third dimension, the physical character of the site, or genius loci, that the two-dimensional plan of border control ignores. Holland explains that in early Roman usage ‘the word Janus referred to a two-faced concept. It meant the crossing of the river both as a bridge over flowing water, and as water crossing over an inaugurated place.’ When Numa Pompilius, a legendary king of Rome, decreed that the Janus should be opened in time of war, he referred to the release of water – ‘the approaches were cut, and the god of the crossing poured his waters across the road to hinder the enemy’. Later, ‘when the Forum was consolidated, and the dominance of the Via Sacra over the Forum brook seemed to be assured, the original weaving of the place was forgotten, and the crosswise movement inhibited’.50 Holland’s interpretation is especially interesting in an Australian context where, in Aboriginal thinking, nodal places within the storyline web are invariably ‘increase sites’, hotspots within creative regions where the three-fold act of approach, event and onward passage are expressed in a single and singular place event.

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184 Translations When this conception of border as protocol, as the institution and dramaturgy of correct passing over, is forgotten, it is not surprising that the two faces of Janus are peeled apart and a binarist opposition installed. In the post-Hauptmann city a new paradox opened up: the great squares were the negative of the Janus space; ‘open’ in all directions, they were ‘closed’ (the agoraphobic sensation) in any one direction where a human sentier, path or line of encounter might come out. Kafka’s ironic commentary on this – ‘If one builds such large squares only out of arrogance, why not also build a stone railing that could lead through the square’ 51 – illustrates Borges’s fantasy as the ‘railing’, one of those ‘other shapes’, both grows out of the modern mirror-state urbanism and breaks through it. The railing is simultaneously bridge and barrier: installed in the marketplace, it insists that the setting of exchange rates is inseparable from the prospect of refugees navigating the abyss in single file. The ‘railing’ is a thread through the labyrinth that even the blind can follow: it joins up the faltering step by step – in terms of steppingzones, it represents the optimal route. Efficient in this sense, it remains anomalous within the theatre-set city. A simplification that cuts through self-sameness to introduce difference into the scene, it plants in the heart of the city a wall that connects because it relates the city back to its origins in the management of hospitality, the resolution of relations with the stranger who (in a strange reversal) may yet prove to be the host. At the opening of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, the blind Oedipus enters led by his daughter – Antigone is his ‘railing’ leading her father-in-exile to the sacred grove. At the ending of the play, Oedipus repays the hospitality of Theseus by showing him the place where hostility can be defeated – and then, via another place where the gods reside, he disappears, no longer blind to his fate, he becomes invisible to our eyes: ‘Nor was he carried off / by some momentary whirlwind rising / out of the sea’ 52 – surely an allegory about the true turbulence, which is not meteorological malevolence (‘It was no fiery lightning bolt from god / that took him away … No – some escort from the gods / came for him or else, in an act of kindness, / the rock-hard world of the dead split open/ so he would feel no pain.’)53 but the hole of opportunity in the fabric of fate, the right path that opens up when the path is grasped topologically as joined to the other side and the traveller realises that he is always doubled or escorted.

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What dialect, one wonders does the messenger of the opening speak. Perhaps, like Cacciari’s angel, he is the figure of the instant, the animation of the railing who, lightning-like, conducts Oedipus instantly down to the other place. Perhaps, like Yoreel, the Noongar rebel against colonial urbanisation, he breaks through. In Daisy Bates’s account, Yoreel (Fanny Balbuk), insisted on taking the ‘straight track that led to the place where she once gathered jilgies and vegetable food with the women’: ‘Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. Time and again she was arrested.’ 54 The hole that Yoreel repeatedly drove through the urban fabric had the same function as Kafka’s imaginary railing: recognising the land as her perennial host, Yoreel struck out through hostile territory. However, it is hard to imagine that Hades is entirely unlike the world above. It will have its Furies, its border posts and janitors who, unless a system of dumb trading operates there, will communicate in border babble. If the new world of continuous immigration is to be different from this one, and the border to retrieve its richer, chiasmatic sense, the dialect of the division must weave together (mimetically, echoically) the expressions of host and stranger. Looking back, the rudiments of the jargon of Janus was modelled in Columbus Echo, a multilingual (or prelingual) gallimaufry composed in 1992 for the new Genoa Aquarium. This was an ambitious exercise in poetic ethnography and if, as the ‘creative template’ suggests, the inside of the migrant imagination can come out and influence practical, political arrangements, then this work anticipated the question of communication across the meeting place. It also, incidentally, breached another border, translating between historical anthropology, poetic praxis and contemporary sociolinguistics. The corridor of voices composing Columbus Echo, imagined as Sirens assailing visitors on all sides as they entered the coastal aquarium, distracting them towards a different translation, is based on an imaginative amplification of the ‘emergency languages’ improvised along the shorelines of empire: pidgins, jargons and lingua francas were interwoven to form a ghost crowd whose echoic mimicry was intended to haunt or double the living crowd visiting the aquarium.55

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186 Translations In a contemporary essay I had made the now familiar claim that a distinctively migrant mode of communication exploited the ambiguity inherent in the device of echoic mimicry, a mode of mis/ communication that ‘refuses to lie down and become a semiotic system, a simulacrum of language, silently transporting meaning from one place to another’ – a mode, in short, that materialises the border as where the action is.56 But the more significant licence for this speculation was ‘Goodbye Columbus’, a now classic paper by distinguished linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein discussing North American jargons or contact languages: having established ‘the very great range of semantic ambiguity of jargon sentences vis-à-vis sentences of the primary languages of its speakers’,57 Silverstein found that ‘the essential “ambiguity” of the surface forms … lies in abandoning a search for a single grammar for Jargon, and recognizing that each speaker produces surface forms convergent with those of other speakers by use of a modified form of his (sic) own grammar’.58 This ethnolinguistic finding conformed to what I had intuited in my own migrant environment and I drew from it lessons for voice writing and audio production and post-production. Silverstein described performative utterances, to use J.L. Austin’s phrase, that produce, and are produced by, echoic mimicry; they conformed to Austin’s concept because their aim was not to communicate a stable, translatable intention into words but to bring into being a new situation; they performed communication as such, and it is reasonable to guess that in the precarious environment of imminent invasion or refused rights of access, often served to defer decision-making: ‘a dialogue cultivated in this way works if it produces nothing else than a tradition of such meetings’.59 The sociolinguistic analogues of the communicational tactics improvised in Columbus Echo not surprisingly implicated the native informant, in this case in the guise of the author. As noted earlier in this book, the recording studio offered a privileged laboratory for exploring the archipelagic cultural values championed by Édouard Glissant, where ‘creolisation’, the ‘genius’ of always being open’, ‘carries in itself the adventure of multilingualism along with the extraordinary explosion of cultures’. The result, according to Glissant, is an erotic intensification, not a dissipation of purpose – ‘this explosion does not mean their scattering nor their mutual dilution. It is the violent manifestation of their assented, free sharing.’ 60

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Certainly, examples of this jouissance can be found in situations of acute precarity. Relative competence across a range of languages, dialects and idioms has traditionally enjoyed prestige.61 It also reflects a language heritage that bears the trace of past colonisation and consequent creolisation. As the practical language of emergency, emerging out of a history of ethnic-religious diversity and oppression, its precarity expresses, paradoxically, a certain agency over, or resistance to, interpellation. In an Italian context, the classic instance of a mixed idiom that cannot be considered ‘authentic’ is Camfranglais, among whose contemporary functions Machetti and Siebetcheu identify ‘opposition to official languages’ and, following from this, freedom to ‘enhance linguistic creativity’.62 But the key to our ‘languaging’ experiments in the studio and a playful exploration of nonsense was the existence of a universal translator. Devising our artificial jargons in a linguistically and culturally super diverse community, English operated as a lingua franca. English was the universal translator, and as author or at least poetic provocateur of the piece, I had a privileged role. In the real world of immigrant community making, Ganassin and Holmes report a comparable experience in their study of multilingual women from ethnic minority migrant/refugee/asylum-seeking backgrounds living in the north-east of England. Experiences of displacement, where the women had ‘little, if any, linguistic knowledge or capital’ ‘exposed them to experiences of either being translated or translating for someone else’. In practice, an empathetic understanding of differential linguistic competence produced a new kind of translation, baroque, provisional, periphrastic. As in large parts of Columbus Echo, the problem of translating culture- or context-specific expressions became the topic itself, one whose elaboration had no other function than to keep the conversations fluid.63 Yet the status of the architect of these interlingual bridgeheads could not be ignored. Columbus Echo had a picaresque structure, consisting of a sequence of imaginary encounters along the littorals of Portuguese, Spanish, Genoese and English imperial expansion. It was a poetic rationalisation of a great variety of primary sources, phonically edited according to my own language limitations and poetic interests. I posed as the native informant, translating between mutually unintelligible tongues or, where the languages were close relatives, exploiting sound-alike ambiguities, but remained, at the

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188 Translations very least, the ventriloquist of a situation I had devised. Can the ethnographically informed poetry (or script) that emerges from this really be a dialogue? Citing James Clifford, Katrin Sieg notes in her study of writer-ethnographer Hubert Fichte’s polyvocal world ‘in which no authorial vision is empowered to impose a unifying vision and gloss over contradictions and counterhegemonic struggles’,64 that the dialogical presentation of material ‘risks eliding the fact (the labour and the control) of textualization through the evocation of unmediated speech’. Sharing textual space and authority with local informants (or, for that matter, a cast of multilingual actors) ‘obscures the author’s orchestration of such dialogues within the agenda and the parameters set by him’ 65 and, in the case of public soundscapes, the hosting institution. Fichte’s response is to refuse to grant the language of the victors victory, to keep ethnographic notes ‘of errors, false conclusions, rash actions’. If a ‘fundamentally different language existed’, ‘in which the movement of changing and contradicting opinions, the dilemma of sensitivity and conformity, despair and practice, could be made clear, I should use it’.66 It does not exist but, if it did, its sensitivity would, Klaus Neumann suggests, be ‘a state of being open to magic, and open, too, to the liberating propensities of language’.67 And yet perhaps this state does exist, albeit phantasmagorically, at the border post under the pressure of emergency and the precarity of the relationship that must be solicited. In this situation, the ‘emergencies’ on which governments and the media trade might yield to what Brian Massumi describes as ‘the supercharged prototerritory of emergence’, characterised by the ‘reiterative playing out of its formative forcing’. In this environment, unsettling or emergency is not a crisis but a provocation to negotiate; and renewal, through the constant unfolding of new situations, produces one emergency after another within the field of emergence, creating, Massumi suggests, ‘conditions for a plurality of extensive distinctions and their iterative regeneration’.68 Going back to the wall, it provided an important throughline, as it were, in my work, a thread that has followed the striations and contours of the marble cake matrix, the turbulent vortex of production, while also materialising in distinct chronological layers. From the day that the ‘mere coincidence’ was noted between the imagined mise-en-scène of What Is Your Name/Wie ist dein Name

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(WIYN) and the table and chairs of Karl Biedermann’s Kristallnacht memorial sculpture, Der Verlassene Raum, I had envisaged Koppenplatz in Mitte as a setting that did away with the artifice of the theatre. Equally compelling was the style of our scenography, including imagery of the Indigenous Dja Dja Wurrung ceremony, and contemporary graffiti throughout Berlin. As a fragment of urban ethnography furnishing a new dramaturgical concept, the following diary entry is a useful witness to the way different ‘lines’ of association could ‘knot’ to form new representational spaces: ‘18–23 May 2004. Over the last few days it has become clear to me that WIYN is a wall drama. This is both its connection to Berlin and to the broader question of the constitution of public space. Connections between the original stage sketches and graffiti designs in Berlin proliferate: the “line of power” derived from the 1860s staged corroboree photograph are formally similar to the Tacheles hunting party.’ 69 More profoundly, it was clear that the Berlin Wall was never simply a barrier, but always a writing place. Not ‘writing’ in the sense of paintings or even messages, but urban inscription in the profounder sense of creating a focal blindspot, a division or line that had to be read. In some way, this discovery illuminated the meaning of graffiti. The urge to scribble ‘over’ walls stems from a desire to materialise their existence. Hence the significance of the tag ‘Save the Wall, proposed as the name of this post-theatral project.’70 ‘The symbolic walls that physically isolate us yield to real walls that are places in their own right. As writing places, they are sites of secret performance (writing, reading, passing by). The wall has its thematics (the fantasy of the other side), but it also has its own eidetic reservoir. Graffiti unconsciously transgress the official ornamentation of the surface. They build up visual blocks of colour. They substitute giant letters for columns, doors and windows. They create reading prospects, which they render enigmatic. There is a fantasy of the man in the wall. One is to imagine the wall as the home of ghosts, puppets and doubles. The wall is also the edge of the tomb, the original locus of dramatic representation. I can imagine WIYN entirely reconceived as a wall drama, dispersed and located around the walls of any city. Via the meditation on graffiti, its migration from radio to a nontheatrical theatre work occurs.’ 71 At that time, I imagined ‘Save the Wall’ as a travelling event. I was working with Rachael Swain, Director of Stalker Theatre

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190 Translations Company, and her ambitious programmes had enlarged my own ambition. I described the new touring version of What Is Your Name as ‘Combining physical theatre skills, a highly gestural, poetic text, graffiti art, urban lighting design and interventions from the public’ to make ‘dramatically visible and palpable the hidden iceberg of multilingual, multicultural experiences that find no place in the “smooth” record of official history’. The idea was that ‘Save the Wall’ would bear the trace of its own history: ‘Save the Wall’ marks the urban setting where it is performed with a wall, a modular structure that acts not only as a graffiti surface but as a linear building, a meeting place where the public can engage with the work, adding the signs of their own repressed, unspeakable histories. These accumulating traces are also part of ‘Save the Wall’ and, as the work is designed to tour, potentially to cities such as Berlin (where What Is Your Name was performed in 2004), to Barcelona (where a vibrant graffiti art culture has already been approached to engage with this work) and to Liverpool (whose colonial and multicultural legacies strikingly parallel Melbourne’s), ‘Save the Wall’ will also be the vehicle of a new dialogue of remembering that is global in reach as well as poignantly local.72

This scheme cannot be faulted for lack of ambition; I explored various avenues for bringing ‘graffiti art, choreography and urban design into a new vehicle for remembering differently’, affiliation to ‘creative research’ agendas pursued by universities in Melbourne and Sydney, overtures to various arts funding agencies; perhaps needless to say, it remains an unfinished translation. Then, out of the blue, Swain made a counter-offer, to work with her on a Capital of Culture commission in Liverpool. The outcome of this collaboration was a street performance curated by Swain, ‘celebrating urban youth cultures and dance and music forms in the port cites of Liverpool and Marseille’. This work, which interpreted the festival director Robyn Archer’s theme ‘Cities on the Edge’ was, in Bacon’s terms, an offcut of infinity as our original concept consisted of up to six events linked by the theme of sugar: ‘We are calling our proposed work Sugar. Sugar masks what is bitter, but it also corrupts and undermines. Sugar is a metaphor of Liverpool, a culture of excess built on the massive exploitation of black labour. Sugar dissolves, present to the taste when invisible to the eye: so with the colonial past of this city – its scars are tangible everywhere but the

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source of them (the 15–50 million bodies transported from West Africa to the West Indies) are invisible.’ The five ‘events’ (a sixth was a multi-media presentation of the five ‘facets’ of the sugar ‘cube’) were collectively an ambitious exercise in urban dramaturgy: TrafficJam, an urban street performance curated in Liverpool and Marseille (‘Hip Hop musicians from the Toxteth community will collaborate with a Marseille-based Hip Hop musician with slavery songs to be translated into contemporary rap songs’); Radio5star, a 24-hour DJ/VJ event at a former club on the first floor of the Tobacco Building, Stanley Dock with live feeds from youth radio stations broadcasting from other European cities in the Cities on the Edge partnership (Gdansk, Istanbul, Naples and Marseille); Port Trait, a video installation, documenting ‘ephemeral and guerrilla occupations of public space’ and contextualising different ‘urban styles of breakdance, skateboarding, BMX and graffiti’ found in the different Edge Cities, shown on the BBC Big Screen in central Liverpool; Sugarloaf, a project website exploring ‘deep connections between the experiences of present-day creative youth communities, the narratives of the slave trade and the history, culture and language of sugar; a multimedia work, Sugar Rush, an audience-interactive re-presentation of five urban art forms and their events choreographed by Serge-Aimé Coulibaly, using the vast and empty interior of the Sugar Silo; and Sugarwave, a distributed public artwork comprising a ground pattern at Pier Head with calligraphy, morphing into functional urban infrastructure, emerging as a customised skateboarding ramp in Derby Square, the serpentine line ending at Old Docks, where it appears as terraced wave edges overlooking the proposed archaeological interpretation centre. Again, not short on ambition:73 Sugar’s significance here, though, is that it illustrates how an urban milieu can catalyse the relationship between social ethnography and creative practice. It also, incidentally, shows how a migrant poetics born in a particular personal circumstance and in a distinct cultural milieu generates techniques of analysis applicable broadly across the colonial (and decolonising) diaspora. Here, amid the extraordinary endowment of industrial architecture, aware of the enigmatic Williamson Tunnels riddling the underground and inevitably drawn to the urban plexus of St John’s Gardens, our primary orientation was to the edge, the zone roughly stretching north–south between Canada Dock and Brunswick Dock and bound

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192 Translations west–east by the River Mersey and internally by Derby Road running south into Victoria Road and Great Howard Street. The main sites of architectural interest were located in this port-bordering corridor: the Tate & Lyle Sugar Silo off Regent Road behind Huskisson Dock, the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse, Royal Liver Building and its immediately adjacent Canada Boulevard, Derby Square, connecting by way of James Street to Mann Island and the waterfront and, of course, Jesse Hartley’s (now Royal) Albert Dock. As an edge, this strip of land solved all the problems of bridge and river, and the ambiguity of passage, through its proliferation of infrastructural striations: the breached external walls of the docks, the internal system of bridges and locks, the snaking north–south parallel streets (Regent, Derby-Victoria and Commercial Road) with the east–west cross-fretting of minor lanes, the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, an economic serpent insinuating itself into the urban fabric, and the Liverpool Overhead Railway (undulating in its vertical axis and sewing together roads, canals). Together these invert the usual figure-ground conception of an essential terra criss-crossed by access points; here, instead, it is all crossings, the entire complex designed to resolve the twinned demands of exclusion and inclusion, movement and arrest, a vast arrangement of interests centred on the profit made from crossing borders. An invitation to wander the streets of a foreign city is every stranger’s fantasy. It signifies acceptance of the state of exception. It crossbreeds the office of the ancient theorioi charged with making anthropological observations on behalf of Athens and the vocation of the Situationists who, despite their claim that when, ‘La société s’est officiellement proclamée spectaculaire’, ‘Être connu en dehors des relations spectaculaires, cela equivaut dêja à être connu ennemi de la société’,74 were also society’s secret sharer – as Debord’s commentator, J.-J. Apostolidès, comments, ‘S’ils [the Situationists] denoncent le spectacle, c’est parce qu’ils en sont les meilleurs spectateurs’.75 Embodying observing in walking, the line of the dérive might, I thought, become more important than any socio-political commentary derived from it. At least this is what I felt. In a postSituationist political environment, the derivist is a dramaturg. The spectaculaire/anti-spectaculaire hold on thought relaxes its Medusagaze, and looking about, one notices (perhaps because one participates in) a continuous production of informal choreographies sustaining

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Figure 11  ‘The Line’: Sugar in rehearsal. Sugar was presented by Liverpool Culture Company in association with La Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille. Choreographer: Serge-Aimé Coulibaly, Music producer: Mark of All Trades; Graffiti: L’Artmada & Xenz, Performers: Frankie Tranchot, David Aing, Jameel Asije, Michelle Davis, Remarkable, Samir Menouar. First Performance 29 June 2007, Merseyside Caribbean Centre.

the endless appearance and disappearance of public space. The diary I kept during the time spent in Liverpool is an urban ethnographic sketchbook, but re-reading it I am surprised to find how many of the personal experiences it reports recapitulate the migrant experience in Australia. The myth of organic community, for example, which,

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194 Translations in the privacy of my diary, is robustly demolished (and in now familiar terms): ‘When and how did these ideally rooted and classdefined communities eclipse the immigrant, trading and coasting communities that also characterise Liverpool? What kind of “community” is a port city. It is for a start always a half or part-community whose counterparts are scattered Orpheus-like across the globe. As a centre of trade and exchange, its distinction is to negotiate rates of exchange. The effective unit of this society is the cross-over, the chiasmatic figure of insider-outsider jointedness, able to hold together twinned but unlike entities (languages, economies, territories).’ Or the outsider (another myth) as enemy: ‘Our practice, history and outlook, is not addressed to the ideally fixed, but to the doubles who, like us, live between places, cultures and languages. These doubles undermine an identity politics that is rooted in the sacredness of roots. The art of memory that corresponds to this historical experience proceeds analogously. The materials are the incidentals of the physical fabric; they are the “meta-community” of people who happened to be available, who crossed our paths, and who, through this, contributed to creating another place. The process is participatory, aligned to the flow of the group imagination, open to discontinuities, comings and goings.’ 76 These passages implicitly defend an art practice beyond representation, non-territorial, non-possessive, exhibiting an extreme faith in the capacity of the accidentally encountered to generate a pattern, a line of flight joining unlike things into what might be a purposeful migration or rearrangement, one plausibly located along the edge between dreams and waking and likely to wake monsters. An early intuition of this was the feeling that ‘slavery’ would reside in the volumes of the city, understood as the histories of suffering hidden inside the walls: ‘throughout this large-built Town every Brick is cemented to its fellow Brick by the blood and sweat of Negroes’, one Abolitionist had commented in 1786, but this was only the outside storey.77 Was it fantasy to imagine filling the thirteen-storey Tate & Lyle Sugar Silo with all the bodies of the slaves transported from West Africa to Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean? Engravings existed that showed ‘slaves being transported in the hold of a ship, in spaces three feet, three inches high, designed to accommodate molasses barrels of the same dimensions’.78 To complete the trading triangle, between Liverpool and West Africa



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the same ‘spaces’ held guns and munitions. In any case the hollows of Liverpool were the collective moulds of involuntary migration, great tumuli that in the tradition of capitalism effaced in full public view their origins. The psychoanalysis of collective bad conscience would proceed homeopathically: slaves were literally broken apart, the preliminary morcellement of being separated into ‘separate parcels’ for transportation being followed by something even worse: On Montserrat I have seen a negro-man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit … there was another master who was noted for cruelty; and I believe he had not a slave but what had been cut, and had pieces fairly taken out of his flesh: and after they had been punished thus, he used to make them get into a long wooden box or case he had for that purpose, in which he shut them up during pleasure.79

If this was the hidden foundation of power, then it was likely to return in Liverpool in the form of what could not be contained but paraded its labour pains in full view, unrecognised. Liberation would be the sensation of all the jagged, broken fragments liquefying and flowing, whether by way of sugar (cocaine, LSD, heroin), sugar block (crack), sugar cubes (LSD), sugar lumps (LSD) and sugar weed (marijuana) or via Sara Tavares, ‘Planeta Sukri’, a song that mingles Portuguese slang, Angolan slang, Cape Verdean Crioulo and English – ‘I am saying “Take me to a sugar planet, take me to a place where there is no sadness, no cries. And this place is inside of you and me and everyone”’, the line that would shatter these chains of dismal association would have to be joined right here.80 The artist of this line is the dramaturg of all the lines encountered, inhabited, drawn and drawn out through the zone of the edge. The line of the artwork is the line drawn through all of these lines. It does not stand outside them but like the lines of bubbles in an eddy inside, doubling, amplifying and, as the bird does when, having arrived felicitously at one lookout, it takes wing tracing a new arabesque. Such a line exists doubly, outside as a broken reflection of an inner trauma and inside as the agoraphobia-overcoming impulse of the mid-stride. The synthesis is a movement form that uncannily shadows the angles of walls and the corners of docks, describing curvilinear involutes, eddies and curls whose human choreographer

196 Translations

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is the expert of parcours. As I wrote after a session with local break dancers: it is necessary to introduce a new concept – the movement form. The city can be imagined as the crystallisation of the movement form, not perhaps in the literalistic way imagined by Vito Acconci in his unrealised San Juan skate park project, but as offering a manifold of passages, perches, parabolic linkages and the like. Skateboarders etc are practitioners and drifters in this environment. As for “static” forms: the graf artist is a muralist whose designs are as long as train journeys (except where the Liverpool City Council writes ‘vacancy’ over them!).81

The ownership, distribution and aesthetics of appearance are not theatrical in any official public space sense. For example, as another entry notes: we were told that many local skateboard practitioners had boycotted the annual graf-skateboarding extravaganza hosted by HUB (formerly at Pier Head but now, significantly, moved out of the centre) because it was curated as a spectacle. They preferred to explore the open horizon of the city’s manifold of surfaces, rather than becoming the representatives of a practice. Although it occurs in public, cultures of skateboarding (and this applies to other characteristic forms of creative youth expression) are anti-spectaculaire. The public space conjured up through these creative activities is not theatrical: it is a situation.82

I characterise this writing as creative ethnography. It tries to describe collective aesthetic and political preferences. Not all of it remained private. Some of it came out. Cases in point are two short reports, ‘Collaborations with Time’ and ‘The International with Walls’, discussing the relationship between festival themes, ‘city in transition’ and ‘cities on the edge’, and creative practices found across ‘youth communities’ in Liverpool and Marseille, but the message is consistent. ‘The cradle to be enslaved’, a tag left at Derby Square by one of the ‘Goths’ who gather there, succinctly, if enigmatically, expresses the meaning that slavery might have to those denied ‘cityzenship’. It defines slavery as the arc of a life trajectory, as a transition but also perhaps as a destiny. In this case, to tag the Queen Victoria monument is to reject this prescription, to insist on writing the future differently. An onerous monument becomes a subversive map. Slavery is conceived as transitional, as a historical

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passage to be written out. The youth community corresponding to this campaign does not exist as an organised force of resistance: like its art forms, its emancipation evolves around a choreography of appearance and disappearance. It materialises defiance as deviation, a strategy punningly captured in another tag I collected: ‘Guild of Defiants’. The practice of this excluded community, whose identity is topologically defined as the sum of all the passages through it, inverts Debord’s erring or deliberately deviating to uncover the ‘milieu geographique, consciemment amenagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus’,83 as its trajectories, both kinetic and affective, act back directly on the city. The milieu, or public space, is not, in this mobile conception, there in advance, its meanings plainly legible. The drifter writes as he reads; retracing the ways of those who have gone before, he hollows space out, recovering the city’s volumetric interior, a system of intangible arabesques, pervasive, insouciant, atmospheric. An old Paradise is outlined here, comparable to the myth of the English Commons or the Rastafarian’s Shashamene. Its cradling gestures dispute late history’s ideological enclosure acts. In ‘the International with Walls’, I took up a different theme. The title of the second report inverted a statement I had come across in an editorial in Journal de la Friche. Commenting on La Friche’s foundational commitment to engagement with international developments in the arts, Philippe Foulquié had claimed ‘l’international, c’est le local moins les murs [the international is the local without walls]’, as if this were axiomatic.84 I commended my own reformulation because, in the context of centralist EU policies affecting culture as well as trade, ‘it avoids falling into the trap of advocating a kind of retribalisation. The phrase does not endorse a neo-fascist, antiglobalist discourse. Predicated on an edginess that sets the exchange rates between the local and the international, it suggests how the local can trade on its own terms with other entrepôts (cultural as well as commercial); and how this trade can avoid the homogenization usually associated with internationalisation.’ Here an archipelagic sensibility peeped through, but so did another parti pris, the subject of this chapter, lines of power. Turning to Marseille’s distinctive graffiti culture, I argued, ‘In this act of defiance, the wall is both complicit in the oppression and the means of resisting it. As one tag put it, “La violence, c’est là [Violence, it is there].” Another

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198 Translations writes, “C’est quoi ce mur personne ne nous dit rien [It’s what this wall? No one told us anything].” But, if the wall represents the violence of the state, its disregard for ordinary liberties, it also bears witness to the other – “Nous sommes ici … existe toujours [We are here … still exist].”’ The report concluded, ‘These practices give a material meaning to the phrase “the international with walls”. Graffiti and stencil writing styles may be remarkably cosmopolitan, but their production depends on the availability of walls locally. Without walls to write on, these artists could not express their edginess; these moralists could not be muralists.’ 85 For these reasons, the primary site of production I identified in Liverpool was not one of the famous citadels funded by slaves and sugar; it was an ancillary or perhaps meta-structure designed to protect, regulate and facilitate the passage of goods between the Liverpool docks and the adjacent labyrinth of dockland back streets. I refer to the Hartley Wall, named for its main designer, Jesse Hartley, and in its contracted extent running north–south between Sandhills Lane and Collingwood Dock and persisting elsewhere in isolated and lowered sections – on the Strand side of Hartley’s Wapping Warehouse, for example. Eighteen feet high and built of large irregularly shaped blocks of granite in a style that combines sections bonded with cement and sections more reminiscent of dry-stone walling, this wall made visible the invisible divisions of power whose exchange rates were the source of wealth. Designed to prevent goods leaving the docks illegally or untaxed, the wall’s great gates, framed by massive gateposts and turrets, choreographed trade. The wall was, I felt, the infrastructural element in the city that I would have had to invent if it had not already existed; for it not only exposed the conditions of property-based power but inscribed them into the dramaturgy of everyday life. In a way the wall was the physical appearance of an invisible wall that ran throughout the city, defined by class, wealth and race divisions. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was so impressed by Hartley’s structure that he compared it to the Great Wall of China, but the full force of this comparison emerges in another writer’s imagination, I mean Kafka and his famous fable. The wall of this story can never be finished; it is defined by the endless breaches in it caused precisely by the collective ambition to complete it. Starting in different places with the ambition of joining up, the

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wall’s builders are the prisoners of a Zenonian paradox. The wall can only be completed by remaining uncompleted. A spin-off of this Gödel-like condition is that it is impossible to distinguish reliably inside from outside, stranger from friend. I had always been impressed by the likelihood that the famous Delphic injunctions had been chiselled into stone – as if the true ‘other speak’ of public space was the writing on the wall, ‘Know Thyself’ – but at the Hartley Wall it was another Delphic maxim that spoke most loudly: ‘A pledge is the next thing to ruin’ – a truth at the heart of Oedipus’s tragedy but also, allegorically, about the precarity of symbol-exchange and symbol-redemption in another’s country. As urban dramaturgy, the Hartley Wall was already an artwork. If the outcome of my creative ethnography was a ‘creative template’ for Sugar – an archipelagic arrangement, thematically, generically and physically in the urban space of five different events – then the sixth and framing event was the wall itself, interpreted as the place where the metaphysical edges running through the city materialised as a wall that wrote the border into place. Nothing had to be done: it was not necessary to project light graffiti onto the wall, it was not necessary to design artificial drift lanes that would induce the skateboarders to improvise glissandos around its ruins, it was not necessary to join it up. It represented the logical outcome of a migrant art practice that fails to distinguish between the situation and its representation, that finds the metaphor, or mechanism of bridging, in the city’s own movement forms. I spent a long time photographing the wall. The photographs captured an informal building style where more regularly shaped granite blocks (often triangular) were mixed with cloudlike, roughly angled stones, the gaps between them filleted with necklaces of cobble sometimes decreasing in size to little more than dust. Every eight or ten layers of stone and infill, the builders introduced a general course line, effectively dividing the wall into successive horizontal bands. Within these generalised horizons, the arrangement of the granite stones was chaotic in the sense of displaying non-selfsameness from one stone or stone constellation to the next. It was a system of fragments, a collection of irregular matter, quite possibly the salvaged debris of an earlier construction or, almost certainly, the destructive work of prison labour in the quarry. As I looked into its face, aestheticised in the rectangular frame of the photograph,

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200 Translations I started to see cramped limbs and awkward body parts, elbows, noses, vertebrae – bones – but also, more disturbingly, physiognomies, fractured expressions of pain. Most of all, what I saw were the gestures of labour, cooperation where one trapezoid boulder leant into another, serving simultaneously as foundation and lintel; the achievement of rest after exertion; the holiday excursion into tiny cleavages and the stacking of baby triangles; and strangest of all, I had the perception that what I was seeing was turning into writing, that I looked at a monumental cuneiform script liberated from the Sumerian line, whose letters were the stones themselves and whose writing constructed the wall and was the wall’s design.

Notes 1 Felix Klee (ed.), The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, trans. P.B. Schneider et al., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964, 228. 2 Klee (ed.), The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, 229. 3 Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, A Creative Template for Yagan Square’, 8 August 2014, 1–14, 2. 4 Material Thinking, ‘Hospitality, a Creative Template for the New Footscray Hospital’, June 2020, 1–66, 58. 5 R.J.K. Chapman, ‘Structure, Process and the Federal Factor: Complexity and Entanglement in Federations’, in M. Burgess and A-G. Gagnon (eds), Comparative Federalism and Federation, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, 69–93, 88. 6 Paul Carter, ‘Solution, a Public Spaces Strategy, Victoria Harbo*r’, July 2002, 1–30, 16. 7 Material Thinking, ‘Creative Template at Yagan Square, interim report’, 10 August 2014, 1–8, 2. See also Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 360. 8 The relevant publications are: ‘Solutions: Storyboarding a Humid Zone’, in Carter, Dark Writing, 173–202 and the critique of this model found in Carter, Meeting Place, 134–140; also, Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, Part 6, passim. 9 Ideas explored in Paul Carter, Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space, part 11, forthcoming. 10 Carter, Neglected Dimensions, part 11. 11 Carter, Neglected Dimensions, part 11. 12 Carter, ‘Solution, a Public Spaces Strategy, Victoria Harbo*r’, 7. 13 Carter, ‘Solution, a Public Spaces Strategy, Victoria Harbo*r’, 7.

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14 Ian D. Clark and Laura M. Koltanski, ‘An Indigenous History of Stonnington: A Report to the City of Stonnington’, School of Business, University of Ballarat, 30 June 2016, 1–214, 53ff. ‘A map of the first land sales of 1840 shows Lot 8 fronting the Yarra River and transecting Hawksburn Creek’ (53, footnote). 15 Daniel Bunce, ‘An Excursion to Western Port’, in Travels with Dr. Leichhardt in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979, 64–79. 16 Material Thinking, ‘Eloquent Forest: Patterning the Flow, Using Video and Sound Design to Create Sense of Place, Ramus and Material Thinking at Cato Square’, 2 February 2019, 1–12, 6. Source of quotation: www.exutopia.com/urban-exploration-anzac-drain-australia/. 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (trans), London: Verso, 1985, 159. 18 Tammy Clewell, ‘Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’, American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 52, 2004, issue 1, 43–67, 63. 19 Material Thinking, Hospitality, Cultural Engagement Strategy, 28 April 2014, 1–66, 54. 20 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 445. 21 Paul E. Pisek and Trisha Greenhalgh, ‘The Challenge of Complexity In Health Care’, BMJ, 323 (7313) 15 September 2001: 625–628. 22 Pisek and Greenhalgh, ‘The Challenge of Complexity in Health Care’. 23 Arakawa/Madeline Gins, Pour Ne Pas Mourir To Not To Die, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987, 46. 24 See Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, Part 3, ‘Golden Grove’; Part 5, ‘Passenger’. 25 As discussed in Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, see 149–210 (for ‘Golden Grove’) and 341–363 (for the environment of ‘Passenger’). Sky–earth analogies are integral to the conceptualisation of Nearamnew at Federation Square (see Carter, Mythform, 19–20 and 98) and to the spatial arrangements proposed at Victoria Harbour (see Carter, Dark Writing, 183–191). 26 See Carter, Decolonising Governance, 6–9 for this and other examples in my work. 27 Carter, Decolonising Governance, 23. 28 Carter, Dark Writing. 29 Approaching Glenisla Shelter in the Grampians/Gariwerd through a jumble of rock, I wrote at the beginning, ‘The jumper’s haphazard but graceful zig-zag does not repeat any known route taken by earlier visitors – and yet, it seems, the gathered rocks have already marked it

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202 Translations out. Rather it performs the physical body; or more exactly still articulates a human presence, a composite gesture signifying the reconciliation of eye and limb, here and there’ (Carter, The Sound In-Between, 136), a formulation that might describe the exact fit of the ancestral creator figures and the places they made. 30 As ably described by James R. Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. 31 Goetsch, Vico’s Axioms, 42–43. See also Carter, Dark Writing, 44. 32 Carter, The Lie of the Land. Strehlow’s call for a truly bicultural literature occurs in the final pages of Songs of Central Australia. 33 On the topic of ‘authenticity’, see Marcia Langton, ‘Dreaming Art’, in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Complex Entanglements, Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, London: Rivers Oram Publishers, 2003, 42–56. 34 Paul Klee, ‘Creative Credo (1920), in H.B. Chipp et al. (eds), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, 184. 35 Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, A Place Made After The Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Carlton, VIC: Miegunyah Press, 2004, 43. See also Carter, Dark Writing, 123. 36 Bardon and Bardon, A Place Made After The Story, 45. See also Carter, Dark Writing, 122. 37 Bardon and Bardon, A Place Made After The Story, 70. See also Carter, Dark Writing, 120. 38 Shani Mootoo, ‘Mantra for Migrants’, The Predicament of Or, Vancouver: Polestar, 2001, 81. 39 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Two Allegories’, in M.W. Bloomfield (ed.), Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, 567. 40 Carter, Repressed Spaces, 42. 41 Carter, Repressed Spaces, 184. 42 Edward Said, ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’, The Alfred Deakin Lectures: Ideas for the Future of a Civil Society, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001, 475. 43 Paul Carter, ‘Public Space and its Discourses: One Side of a Conversation with Edward Said’, The Alfred Deakin Lecture Series: Ideas for the Future of a Civil Society, Melbourne Federation Festival, 2001. 44 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 32. 45 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 70. 46 ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things’ and ‘The amount of meaning is in exact proportion to the presence of death and the power of decay.’ Quoted by Susan Sontag,

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Introduction, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street And Other Writings, London: Verso Books, 2021, 16, 21. 47 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. 48 Partly to illustrate conceptual sedimentation. Repressed Spaces, ‘When the People Take to the Streets: Ersatz Culture’s Contents and Discontents’ (in Complex Entanglements, 2003), ‘Other Speak, The Poetics of Cultural Difference’ (in Empires, Ruins and Networks, 2005) were all published in a small period and mark a distinct stratum or involute in the progression of thought. The implications of living together without shared symbolic horizons is discussed in the last of the writings listed here. 49 From Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, this passage served as an epigraph to writing about Mirror States published in 1992. If we conceptualise that first migrant period leading up to the early articulation of a migrant poetics as an involute, then the image of the line returns in 2005 in another involute: the second overlays and reproduces the arrangement of the earlier one, palimpsest-like, but the memory forms have been rearranged so that new significances emerge – rather as happens when one passes from one language to another and phonemes that are unmarked in one acquire critical value in another. This is not a repetition but a Vichian ricorso. 50 Carter, Repressed Spaces, 142, where the sudden plunge and disappearance of Mettius Curtius into an abyss opened up in the Forum is interpreted as a return of the environmental repressed. 51 Harald Salfellner, Franz Kafka and Prague, Pragu: Vitalis, 1998, 76. For discussion of this, see Carter, Repressed Spaces, pp. 76–80. 52 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, I. Johnston (trans), 2015, l. 1658. At http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/sophocles/oedipusatcolonushtml. html 53 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, l. 1657 and 1661–1663. 54 More fully treated in Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 351–353, where the irony of pitting one ‘straight’ line against another is discussed. 55 Carter, ‘Emergency Languages’. 56 Carter, Living In A New Country, 196. 57 M. Silverstein. ‘Goodbye Columbus’. Paper delivered to the Linguistic Circle of Canberra, 16 October 1972, 31–48, 3. 58 Silverstein, ‘Goodbye Columbus’, 46. 59 Paul Carter, Meeting Place, 104. 60 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. B. Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 34. 61 S. Machetti and R. Siebetcheu, ‘The Use of Camfranglais in the Italian Migration Context’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 55, May 2013,

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204 Translations 1–15, 3. www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/e7ea9523-b07f-4d72–911 6-cb6e625bc7e2_TPCS_55_Machetti-Siebetcheu.pdf (accessed 30 April 2017). 62 Machetti and Siebetcheu, ‘The Use of Camfranglais in the Italian Migration Context’, 3. 63 Ganassin and Holmes, ‘Multilingual Research Practices in Community Research: The Case of Migrant/Refugee Women in North East England’, 342–356. 64 K. Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009, 193. Fichte’s radiophonic works were part of the Neue Hörspiele movement and no doubt helped create a receptive environment for Eine Colombisches Phantasie. 65 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 193, note 7. 66 Hubert Fichte, Xango, quoted by Klaus Neumann, ‘Hubert Fichte as Ethnographer’, Cultural Anthropology, 6 (3), 1991, 263–284. 67 Neumann, ‘Hubert Fichte as Ethnographer’, 268. 68 Brian Massumi, ‘National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (6), 2009, 153–85, 164. 69 Paul Carter, ‘Save the Wall, a creative research in progress’, August 2004, 1–16, 10. The photograph, ‘Djadja Wurrung ceremony at Fernihurst’, dated late 1850s, is found in John Hunter Kerr, Glimpses of Life in Victoria by ‘A Resident’ (1872), Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 1996, 35, and I derived from their decorations an image of cyclone fencing associated with detention. The artist of what I called the ‘Black Bacchants’ at Tacheles is unknown (see Carter, Ground Truthing, caption to Figure 42) and when I went to look at the work in 2017 I discovered that the wall and the work had been demolished. 70 An elaborate performance archive was created for the Berlin production Wie ist dein name when I still imagined that the adequate realisation of the work lay in the future. From this archive I learn that I photographed this tag in Barcelona in July 2003, commenting, ‘The graffiti artist reveals what they [walls] conceal. But they conceal nothing in the sense that they do not enclose any sustainable space. Where no freedom exists, the wall is everywhere. The task is, as Van Gogh says, to undermine the wall in a way that ‘saves’ it: the function of art (not dynamite).’ (The reference is to a passage in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. M. Taormina, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003: ‘We have to undermine the wall’, Van Gogh wrote in a letter: ‘Except knocking down the wall is really difficult, and if you do it in a way that is too brutal, you knock yourself out,

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you fall down, you collapse. And Van Gogh added: “Just file away at it, slowly, patiently”.’ 71 See Paul Carter, ‘The Empty Space is a Wall: The Role of Theatrical Translation in the Public Reinscription of the Other’, Performance Research, 10, no. 2, 2005, 79–91. Fragments of this original ‘overflowing’ can be found moored (or marooned) in various subsequent publications, notably in Ground Truthing, 246–264 and Meeting Place, 171–184. 72 Paul Carter, ‘Save the Wall: A Creative Research Project in Progress’, August 2004, 1–16, 16. Author’s possession. 73 Or planning. Leading up to, during and after, our creative residency in Liverpool in spring 2006, we contacted (with the help of Culture Company and Associates) over twenty-five locally based Graf artists, stencil artists, Djs, VJs in the rap scene, individuals and groups in the Break Dance scene, skateboarders and their supporters. In addition, through La Friche we met one-to-one significant Marseille-based Hip Hop artists, tactical radio makers and sociologists. We got in touch with social historians locally and radio stations internationally; and we undertook a significant enquiry into the history of the sugar trade with a particular emphasis on its urban and architectural legacy. Conceived as serving a double purpose – providing an informal ‘creative template’ for Archer’s Cities on the Edge festival concept and the necessary background research and preparation for our own work (Sugar), much of the value of this creative community liaison dissolved, as it were, when Archer (for reasons that have still not been explained) resigned and the Liverpool Council abandoned her vision. 74 Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, 33. 75 Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord, Paris: ChampsFlammarion, 2006, 76. 76 For fuller discussion of the Liverpool diaries as creative ethnography, see Paul Carter, ‘Exposure: A Postcolonial Turn in Urban Ethnography’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 21, Issue 2, 2018, 131–153. 77 Rev. William Bagshaw Stevens, 1797, quoted by Joseph Sharples, Liverpool, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, 10. 78 Referred to without source by K. Von Meierk in an online chapter called ‘Sweetness and Delay’ that is rich in cultural references to sugar. (At www.csus.edu/indiv/v/vonmeierk/6–02swee.html sugar.) 79 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, London: printed for the author, 1789, 2 vols, vol. 1, 207, 211. 80 See artist profile at https://worldmusiccentral.org/2018/12/08/artistprofiles-sara-tavares/.

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206 Translations 81 As a footnote, in 2010 alone 35,000 square metres of graffiti were removed in Liverpool (Liverpool City Council, ‘Graffiti Management Strategy, 2012–2015’, adopted 6 February 2012, 1–20, 4). 82 Paul Carter, ‘Collaborations with Time’, 9. 83 Guy Debord, La Société de la Spectacle, Paris, 1967, 205. 84 As guests of La Friche, Rachael Swain and I had unusual access to a labyrinth of loosely federated cultural activities. The radio stations Radio Galère and Radio Grenouille were particularly interesting, the first for its invocation of the slave ship and the idea of a defiant/ deviant counter-culture, and both for the nice historical coincidence that at a festival of the arts in Marseille in 1946 Guy Debord had launched his projet theatral metagraphique (Apostolidès, Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord, 103), advocating a radio where ‘the voix is simply the wall – the medium of sense writing, and sense as graffiti (utterance, cry, exclamation) characterised by its tone [ibid., 102] – recovers its original potential, as the medium of time’ (Carter, Liverpool Diary 2, 25 March 2006). 85 Paul Carter, ‘The International with Walls’, 6.

6

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The prodigal son: parables of return

On my shelves are notebooks numbered from A1 forwards. The initial not only refers to a geographical shift but to a change of genre. Earlier notebooks kept in Italy or Spain are poetic or ecphrastic jottings, first-hand accounts of inner developments and external impressions. They typically juxtapose draft poems and prose passages that draw in recent reading, looking and walking, and draw out whatever aesthetic lessons reside there. There is a sustained diary from Venice but given the disproportion between the collective vision and its materialisation, doubled in the canal reflections, and an individual fantasy, the desire to get lost and be found again, its closely handwritten pages are remarkable for their lack of autobiographical interest. The hunger to eat up Venice stone by stone, no doubt a pre-migratory insurance against loss to come, leaves an impression of psychological emptiness. Whatever the case, from day one the dive into Australia was going to be different. Instead of rigid self-censorship, self-authorship would be permitted, not in the sudden possession of a new style or set of creative interests, but in the easy coexistence, or juxtaposition, of different topics. First, there was the carry-over from Venice, a manuscript I was working on that dignified departure as the discovery in the overflowing Lagoon of the psychological strength to leave – and therefore to return in a different way (without nostalgia). In what I regard as a typically pragmatic migrant mutation, this essential dialectic of departure and return, mediated by a turn that transforms the meaning of both terms, became the basis of The Road to Botany Bay, whose title refers to a reverse route of escape taken by convicts, of which (much to my satisfaction) no public trace exists. Next there was the immediate fascination with the enigma of the Victorian landscape,

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208 Translations the overwhelming sensation of entering a country that had been violently unnamed and resisted translation – as if the brief of any poetic newcomer was clear, to listen out for the names that once filled the air. Then, least predictably, notebooks A1–A10 exhibit a further layer, current or thread of enquiry, a miscellany of historical and familial jottings that are building blocks of another (unpublished) book project called ‘Enclosure Acts’. This was an unsolicited attack on autobiography and its premiss that the self could be reliably derived from a combination of parentage, place and cultural circumstance. Looking back, I was familiarising myself with historians, theorists of culture and philosophers that in my wandering years had passed me by. Yet the thesis, that the sources of the autobiographical narrative were empty cuirasses enclosing the creative spirit, inhibiting free metamorphosis and butterfly emergence, scarcely concealed its personal motivation: to justify going away and, normalising migration, to draft the terms of future returns. If the determination to forge an anti-autobiographical persona involved a kind of literary Oedipus complex, the cause may have been a lack of family stories. Methodists frowned upon personal anecdote; reborn into the ideal of service, they associated the satisfactions of reminiscence with sinful pride. Hence, I know next to nothing of the local history of my father’s family, any enquiry regarding this subject triggering a ‘We don’t talk about that’ response, not, I think, because of any ancestral skeletons in the cupboard but because (as I have confirmed talking to others out of that culture), the mission of the Methodists was conquest, both inner and outer. Inner conquest, as I have noted elsewhere, involved cultural self-cleansing, the rejection of pre-scientific country lore, folk song and custom, the internalisation of joy in silent prayer and its channelled expression in singing hymns. Whether through political activism, like Joseph Terry, or through the assumption of executive office in local government, like my grandfather, the goal was to break with whatever had inhibited social development in the past. The ultimate form this would take was inevitably less clear. While the aim of good Methodists was ‘To find the new Jerusalem’ (‘We have no abiding city here’),1 it dignified toil in the here and now. When we sang Bunyan’s lines, ‘Come wind, come weather; / There’s no discouragement / Shall make him once relent / His first avowed intent / To be a pilgrim’, I inwardly saw my father, firmly in the seat of the Massey Ferguson, sou’wester

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tilted against the driving rain, ploughing a straight furrow at Tollington. What was promised over the hill was good but we were not averse to what the valley of woe could produce when ‘The valleys stand so thick with corn / That even they are singing.’ 2 In the same spirit the Methodist mission at Buntingdale did not imagine that the ‘desert’ would bloom by itself; cultivation was essential ‘at first under the general charge of the Mission [later] by appropriating portions of land to the respective families enough for their cultivation and support’.3 Evolution, then, went hand in hand with devolution. To ban slavery was, for Joseph and many abolitionists, to restore ‘rights so long denied you’. The same principle applied at home; the emancipation of the ‘toiling millions’ was linked to the return of the land – but the language was familiar – you might ‘call it an Utopian dream’, Joseph apostrophised his imaginary reader, but ‘you never will surrender till your conquering work is done’.4 Yet the extent and the nature of the conquest remained in doubt. Praising the folkloric Robin Hood (‘They could not crush thy noble, freeborn mind … The stranger oft in thee a friend would find’)5 suggests that whatever the future state may be, our mob would stand with the outsiders. Publicly, Bible stories had replaced family lore; as my parents had renounced the Methodist Union before I was born, a double forfeiture was experienced (and a double patricide entertained). Perhaps typically, and certainly fatefully, the one exception to this double exclusion from self-authorship, achieved, according to David Carr, when ‘The actions and sufferings of life can be viewed as a process of telling ourselves stories, listening to those stories, acting them out, or living them through’, was the parable of ‘The Prodigal Son’.6 As a lay preacher on the Faringdon Circuit, my grandfather cycled (I suppose) throughout the neighbourhood and, as a boy, my father went with them, a regime calculated to instil an instinct for service (or not); so when one Sunday, as Fred commenced his address, my father audibly exclaimed, ‘Dad, not the Prodigal Son again’, it was considered noteworthy enough to recall fifty years later. Yet what did it mean? If it was a protest against his father’s voice, it acquired in retrospect a certain irony: sacked from his teaching position on account of his pacifism, Bill solicited his father’s forgiveness becoming thereafter a loyal labourer on the land. In the absence of any other stories, its casual repetition when I visited my parents

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210 Translations from Australia suggested both a genealogy and a reproof. It was hard to know but the diaries showed that the enigma of arrival in a new country was twinned with the resolution of my relationship with the old country. The proper way of going forward should equip me to return properly. In The Book of Epigrams, the Greek-Australian poet, Dimitris Tsaloumas, has three poems titled ‘Asotos/Prodigal’ where it appears the father abjures his son to reform. As a warning: ‘The other day Eros was seen in the marketplace / unrecognised in cast-off clothes, / grown old. Come of course if you insist, but / whatever you remember, now forget.’ 7 Asotos, which occurs uniquely in Luke 15:13 has the sense of ‘riotous’. Could I as a philosophical Eros, a migrant Socrates and self-absorbed agoraios (haunter of the marketplace) irrupt into that sweet especial rural scene I had left behind? Besides, there was a logical problem of the kind Anthony Wilden identified in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror state’: how, logically, Wilden asked, could the subject recognise its own idealisation, let alone alienation, when as yet it had no self-awareness: ‘What seems fairly clear is that the stade du miroir never “occurs” at all – any more than the genesis of the ego does.’ 8 The Sartrean alienation that Lacan proposes as coeval with the emergence of the subject9 is characteristic of bourgeois science. What Wilden calls ‘the fantasy of the university’ 10 is a function of the symmetrisation of power relationships consequent on a disregard for the context of the communication. Wilden refers to the self-sufficiency of systems theorybased descriptions of the real as types of ‘pseudoholism’.11 ‘The result of the dominance of the Imaginary relation in our present world is that … for everyone of us constrained by the structure of capitalism to offer the expression of our creativity as a commodity in the marketplace, the Imaginary becomes the Real’.12 My appreciation of Wilden’s far-reaching cybernetic critique of every form of exploitative violence in the system of communication and exchange we call “civilised” society’ 13 may have been inadequate and partial (to address this, shortly after the revised edition of System and Structure came out I joined a reading group dedicated to Wilden’s work) but this passage stood out. Evidently, creative individuals and communities occupied a perilous borderland constantly under threat of colonisation by Imaginary relationships unconstrained by their relations with the Real14; yet all was not lost – recognising the

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‘repeatedly renewed and reproduced subjugation of the Symbolic’ in alienating us from ‘the creativity that not simply makes us human, but equally human’,15 this, precisely because it asserted that a new politics was inseparable from a new poetics that understood metaphors ethically as corresponding to real exchange rates, presented a clear agenda. While it misrepresents the motivation and scope of Mirror States (1990) to suggest it consciously applied this critique to the reconceptualisation of colonial relations in the first two years of Melbourne’s foundations – God forbid that an uncommissioned, unperformed work of poetic ethnography should be assimilated to ‘the productions of the performance principle in our daily lives’ 16 – one object of that work was at least consistent with Wilden’s reinstatement of the role in meaning formation of environmental feedback. In Mirror States two mirror states were compared and contrasted. One was the reflection of the exchange values initiated through the so-called Batman Treaty (1835), allegedly authorising the purchase of 500,000 acres of land between Geelong and Melbourne in exchange for various trade objects, and the business of a new World Trade Centre being constructed at the time of Mirror States on the Yarra.17 The Centre’s development was regularly linked to the recently constructed Rialto Towers designed by architect Gerard de Preu – a convenient grouping as it licensed my speculation that the original ‘mirrors’ that Batman had handed over as part of the treaty arrangements had their precise physical (and numerical) equivalent in the iconic mirror glass walls of the Rialto Towers. Evidenced here in this historical refraction were ‘the structures of economic individualism’ that produce in the end ‘a mere aggregate or heap of (supposed) selfsufficiencies’.18 One manifestation of the original ‘misunderstanding’, the failure of the white colonists to realise that name exchange in Aboriginal society signified mutual obligation, also figured prominently in the advice given to Chinese business people hoping to do business at the World Trade Centre. The repeated reproduction of ‘individualistic anarchism’, one of ‘capitalism’s ideological mirrorimages’, appears in this scene: Voice 4 In coming to a new country for trading purposes, it is advisable to acquaint yourself with the customs and manners of the local people. Voice 2 ‘Dorta’ or ‘Dutta’: their name is uncertain.

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212 Translations Voice 4 Remember that, to them … Voice 3 Jaga! Voice 4 To them your language must seem as exotic … Voice 3 JAGA! Voice 4 Strange as theirs is to you. Voice 2 John Batman purchased the place where we stand for twenty pairs of blankets. Voice 4 It is advisable that executives walk around. Voice 2 I forget how many suits of clothes. Voice 4 Find out about the place. Voice 2 And thirty mirrors. Voice 4 Mr Carter, an expert on local history, will give us some of the background. Voice 2 Or looking-glasses as they used to be called.19

In contrast with the glassy self-sufficiency of these nested mirror systems, Mirror States drew attention to an alternative exchange economy represented by the Yarra river considered creatively as a boundary dispersing endless overflowing flecks of light produced in feedback with wind ripple and current momentum. The creative chaos of physically and conceptually interstitial spaces and their fluctuating half-objects was compared to the ‘second creation’ narrated by Kulin peoples, paraphrased in one of my Nearamnew inscriptions: ‘Why cut this way, that way, men, women, children, like worms writhing? Why let wind whirl their pieces like flakes of snow, dropping in such places as you please?’ The answer to these questions was in the final phrase: just as the chora in Plato’s Timaeus is the place where the elements can fly to their proper places, so Bunjil’s scattering fulfils an immanent arrangement (or good society) in the pieces themselves: a reverse morcellement is staged, one half of the double movement that becomes axiomatic in my poetic construction of the meeting place as an arrangement or archipelago of moving parts.20 As regards the Yarra of Mirror States, Wilden’s comment, ‘Boundaries, far from being barriers, are the locus of relations for open systems in reality’, was apt. The phenomenon of overflowing, the supplement of Eros that cannot be accounted for in translation, defines us in relation to our environment (and not the ideologically constructed absolute Other): ‘it is our relation to these boundaries, including our discovery of them and their discovery of us, which surely makes us what we become’.21 The unlicensed translation

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represented by the name exchange through which the first Aboriginal child born in the Yarra camp is christened ‘Susannah’, after the wife of the assistant Aboriginal Protector, William Thomas, succinctly illustrates Wilden’s definition of creativity as the production of ‘human relations, such as the loving of a child’.22 ‘The (communicational) “space” between the open systems we call people’ – ‘what we all must surely once have known as children’ was an overflow that could not be bridged and banked:23 it had to be navigated – wisdom cryptically inscribed into the surface of Yarra-neighbouring Federation Square, where the ‘straitjacketing’ of the Yarra (attributed to ‘the destructive character’) is regretted and a new, humid confederacy’ proposed, ‘of watery places, joined up, in, outflowing’.24 As regards the diplomacy of such relational loci, another of the Nearamnew ‘Visions’ recommends following the example of children playing hopscotch: ‘This is my land. You could join in. What is your name? We are two or three. Come over. This is my hand. In a step opens up the ground to play.’ 25 I was talking about the lack of story when Anthony Wilden distracted me. Yet I allowed this divagation – I hope it does not disorient readers – to illustrate my behaviour in this borderland where the desire of self-becoming at that place has yet to find the path that will cause past and future events to join up and form a pattern (the story). I found Freud’s description of the rural topography of the ‘preconscious’ apt, a terrain comprising a dense network of ‘paths’ or ‘unconscious wishes’. The beginning of the dream process, which occurs when the preconscious is ‘aroused’, is, Freud wrote, ‘no doubt a simultaneous exploring of one path and another, a swinging excitation now this way and now that, until at last [the dreamwish] accumulates in the direction that is most opportune’. These paths can lead by devious routes to the daylight of consciousness; they can also be back-tracked, retraced to the ‘unconscious sources of emotion’.26 In a dream psychology this terrain of indecision is prefatory, but in an ethnography of migration it invites lingering. Wilden was one of the many half-exposed relics in the Australian notebooks of that period. Re-reading them, I am struck by their promiscuity of association and the fluctuations of will they evince. What (to confine ourselves to A11 and pages spanning the four weeks of February 1990, during which Mirror States was finalised) is the logic informing the conjunctions and disjunctions of materials, drawn randomly as it seems from Naturphilosophen, amateur

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214 Translations ethnography, the Lincolnshire poems of Paul Verlaine, Mallarmé’s Thèmes anglaises, Malinowski’s Diary in the True Sense of the Term, Auerbach’s great essay on Dante, André Gorz’s The Traitor, luminously translated by Richard Howard, Francis Steegmuller’s biography of Jean Cocteau and Antheil’s Treatise on Harmony? Here, certainly, is a fertile dunghill but what will it fertilise? The Furies drive the keeper of this notebook: despair of recognition, a frank declaration of precarity (all at sea hoping like a second Columbus for nightingales), a drowning man’s clinging to whatever comes to hand – ‘Talibus in tenebris vitae tantisque periclis’, it is given to no mortal to light a torch capable of dispersing this obscurity’ 27 – these authors salvaged from the shipwreck of the Great Library were the planks and other parts of the ship – the improvised rafts – by means of which I, perhaps all migrants, might come ‘safely to land’. The point to make here is that at the level of representation, these notebooks are subterranean – one might mine them for biographical information about the context in which Mirror States was written. From an ethnographic point of view, they are, however, more like James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines, transcriptions of primary encounters, the prima materia of my own wayfinding, demonstrating the inadequacy of models of self-becoming based on linear progress or stratified succession. They were involuted, conscious designs for going deeper and getting lost. If they are the scriptural native informants, this book is their translation. I annotated Gorz’s book for resemblances between his existential ‘hell’ and the crisis of the Aboriginal Australian who, forced to speak, ‘recognises a will he has never actually produced, because, from the fact that this event happens to me, it becomes me’.28 But I also recognised myself in his traitor: ‘Because I belong nowhere, to no group, to no enterprise, because I am exiled from all groups and enterprises, there is only one alternative: either to be marginal in regard to society and history … or to raise myself in conscience to the absolute ….’ 29 Here, at least, I had an answer. I recognised in Gorz’s ambition another instance of ‘the quest for the absolute’, which in his much-admired master, Jean-Paul Sartre, took the form of backing an ‘absolute difference’, the definition of being in terms of self-loss.30 Now Wilden had colloquially framed that ‘quest’ and the ‘collective solipsism’ of a science ‘dominated by commoditised relations and alienated values’ by reference to the English Enclosure

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Acts, citing an eighteenth-century rhyme that condemns the irony of ‘The Law’ that condemns the theft of ‘the goose from off the common / But leaves the greater felon loose / Who steals the common from the goose’.31 In other words, the treacherous exile had, after all, a historical family, a genealogy of lesser felons, generally orphaned, bankrupted or otherwise repudiated by powers who denied that their interests were self-interested.32 I thought of Dawson, tireless (to judge from his Scrapbook) in asserting his legitimate Scottish identity and descent, Dawson, twice if not thrice bankrupted, who, driven by spiritual necessity to occupy the communicational spaces between people found himself living in the borderlands between his own and Aboriginal kin, a lone voice in the spiritual and moral wilderness, railing ineffectually, like the eighteenth-century rhyme, against the squatting interest that had enclosed the land and criminalised the Aborigine, denying they owed him anything. In my anti-autobiography, here was an anti-father figure. And there was another antithesis juxtaposed in my rubbish heap of materials, Auerbach’s assertion that Dante’s exile forced the man of action to become a poet because it showed that ‘history’ had no meaning – ‘For him the concepts of “history” and “development” would have no validity … he asked for a sign by which to interpret events and he found only chaos.’ 33 In future ‘action’ would be coeval with the justification of action: if there was no justice in history, he would have to write history differently. Hence, ‘His life with all its acts and strivings was poetic, because for him a poetic vision was the source and justification of action and practical reason.’ 34 Hence the proper way of finding home was through a different way of writing, anti-aesthetic, impersonal (collections of passages, sources, quotations, overheard conversations that ‘lose their reality the moment they are placed in non-real surroundings’).35 An autoethnographic awareness of the migrant project occurred when I recognised Dawson as part of my family; in the absence of story, he became the via regia to a cultural genealogy that made sense of my present condition. Attributing to idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of the wordlists a repressed desire of connection, a troubled wish to begin again – accepting Pascoe’s reproof that, whatever his good works, Dawson connived in the land theft – I set out through his redemption to find a place (and a story) of my own. The case for doubting that Dawson was a reliable ‘scientific’

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216 Translations ethnographer has already been set out. To this may be added the view that the colonial archive is not merely a site of knowledge collection but of knowledge production. Archives (but Australian Aborigines fits the case as well) are ‘cross-sections of contested knowledge’; scholars should pay close attention to ‘what subjects are cross-referenced what parts are re-written, what quotations are cited’ as they ‘not only tell about how decisions are rendered, but how colonial histories are written and remade’.36 As long ago as 1971, Roger Lawrence was making the judgement that ‘Collated texts’, like R. Brough Smyth’s compilation The Aborigines of Victoria, were of limited anthropological value because of the speed with which the material was collected and selective decisions made to include material considered interesting or useful.37 As Rachel Standfield argues, such works presented information out of context: the drawings of weapons reproduced in Brough Smyth are exquisite but information about their usage is either lacking or displaced elsewhere. Something similar can be said of the way Aboriginal languages were collected and displayed. The anonymous author of an 1876 article, ‘The Language and Customs of the Aborigines’, explains the decent burial function of colonial science: ‘in view of the speedy extermination of our natives, some measures should be taken to get all possible information respecting their languages, customs, traditions and religions’. Imagine, the correspondent writes, you are forwarding your findings to ‘Professor Max Müller …the great English specialist in language’, and organise the material ‘with the least possible trouble to himself’. ‘The chief points on which philologists would wish for accurate information are the following: Firstly, – A full list of all the common words in use, in any particular tribe, with their pronunciation appended. Dialogues should be added, and a portion of some simple and popular author rendered into the language of the tribe. It should also be satisfactorily proved that such version [sic] had succeeded in rendering itself intelligible to the average natives in question.’ 38 Except for rendering a popular author in the local language, this pretty much describes the Dawsons’ method. As an amateur ethnographer, Dawson did better. ‘When, in the 1970s the archaeologist Harry Lourandos overhauled the primitivist hunter-gatherer model of precolonial Aboriginal societies, he based his work partly on the evidence of complex economic patterns derivable from the excavation

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of particular sites, and partly on Dawson’s descriptions of the “great meetings”, where disputes were resolved, goods exchanged and treaties reaffirmed.’ And, in a comment that suggests I was waking from my own migrant reverie, I suggested an autoethnographic dimension: ‘Dawson unquestionably brought his own radically conservative biases to his description of Indigenous life – strategically, perhaps, assimilating it to a kind of preindustrial smallholder model.’ 39 While this derivation was speculative, another was indisputable: contemporary criticism of Dawson’s claim that local tribes recognised ‘chiefs’ failed to understand the specifically Scottish analogy in play. When, under the heading ‘Property’, Dawson explained that ‘The territory belonging to the tribe is divided among its members. Each family has the exclusive right by inheritance to a part of the tribal lands’ and the ‘chief’ does not have any claim on this land but can act as an intermediary to resolve conflicting land claims,40 he had in mind the Scottish clan system where, initially, the chief of a clan, who was ‘not the owner of the land occupied by the clan’, was a protector of the community, who had surrendered a part of their freedom to him in return for his help, a practice known as “commendation”.’ 41 The authority of the chief, ‘who is looked upon in the light of a father’, appears to be by consent, Dawson wrote, adding that upon the death of a chief the chiefs of the neighbouring tribes are responsible for choosing the next chief. E.M. Curr thought he had demolished Dawson’s claim when he quoted the observation of William Buckley, who had lived with the Wathaurong for thirty years: ‘They acknowledge no particular chief as being superior to the rest; but he who is most skillful and useful to the general community is looked upon with the greatest esteem, and is considered to be entitled to more wives than the others.’ 42 In fact, in terms of entitlement and rules of succession, this clan model fits the West Kulin situation to a tee.43 As a Scot in an English jurisdiction, Dawson regarded himself as an outsider.44 The Acts of Union (1706, 1707) had brought about a degree of political centralisation; they invited a new definition of Scottish identity. Drawn into the orbit of English commercial imperialism, Scotland experienced land enclosure (the ‘Clearances’) and industrialisation. Obviously, propertied interests in Scotland benefited from these twinned processes of modernisation, but nationalists at least could attribute their destructive consequences to foreign

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218 Translations influence. Richard Grove traces what he sees as the ‘pre-eminently Scottish phenomenon’ of ‘the critique of the environmental impact of settlement in the British colonial empire’ to ‘the accelerating rate of deforestation in much of Scotland after the Union, aided by deliberate military burning and the advent of the iron-smelting industry’.45 Like Brown in South Africa, Dawson in Western Victoria saw his environmental activism (instrumental in getting both Mount Rouse and Tower Hill gazetted for public amenity) oppositionally. In Brown the concept of a ‘moral landscape’ attached itself to ‘the state of land, forests and landscape’;46 the survival of trees was linked to a religious ‘promised land’ 47: in Dawson, aesthetics, ethics and politics joined as environmental stewardship was, for him, inextricably linked to regional literacy, and both to devolved local government.48 Any patriot revered Robert Burns but Dawson’s Scrapbook preserves proof of a personal connection: the grandfather of Isabella Dawson’s husband had painted the great poet’s portrait in 1786. The Dawson family had a distinguished record of public service in Linlithgow, both James’s father and brother holding the office of Provost, but when the freedom of Linlithgow was conferred on James in 1895,49 not only was the legitimacy of the prodigal son triumphantly reasserted: he entered a society honoured by ‘the National Poet’ who, as James’s Scrapbook recalls, ‘was enrolled an honorary burgess of Linlithgow’ in 1787. Such poetic piety linked to public service asserted a cultural identity that was also political; for, an interesting argument suggests that while the ‘traditional culture’ that Burns represented ‘worked to maintain the status quo’, it ‘was finally more flexible: as inherited, largely oral knowledge and art always adapting to fit the times, traditional culture was less rigid. It was diverse and it celebrated freedom.’ 50 Finally, and first, Dawson’s Scottish ancestry, combined with his religious beliefs, may have informed his sympathy for Aboriginal people. The Western Australian colonist, Robert Menli Lyon (aka Robert Milne), whose record of information given to him by Yagan has subsequently assumed enormous historical value, was explicit about this: protesting against ‘the colonist’s treatment of their Noongar neighbours’, ‘He drew on the memory of centuries of conflict between England and Scotland, and the historical mistreatment of Scotland by its larger southern neighbour.’ 51 It may even have

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informed Australian Aborigines: ‘Burns, like Scott, was also a collector and recorder of Scottish oral heritage, particularly the dialect of English that was spoken on the border region between Scotland and England. His work not only preserved a dialect that was in danger of extinction, it celebrated the unique culture associated with it.’ 52 Obviously, this prehistory of informing attitudes makes Dawson’s achievement less exceptional; on the other hand, in relation to a migrant autoethnography, it renders his synthesis of environmental, social, political and literary concerns more valuable personally; in relation to my own prehistory, occluded by the prohibition on story, he becomes my native informant. At almost every point of possible conjunction a connection exists between Dawson’s prehistory and the impersonal history that shaped my ancestral environment. Richard Jefferies’s remedy for the malaise of the Wiltshire agricultural labourer who, thrown out of his smallholding, existed on ‘a little desultory talk, a little desultory rambling about, a good deal of desultory drinking’ had its exact parallel in the social anomie Dawson observed at the Framlingham Church of England Mission Station.53 The malaise in and around Faringdon that can be deduced from the church prohibition on pub singing – ‘As our policeman said, “If you must sing, sing to yourself … Don’t let me hear you a-singing aloud”’ 54 – had its precise counterpart in ‘the depressing effect on the minds and health of the natives’ caused by the prohibition of corroborees.55 But a multiplication of parallels is unnecessary: when I bear in mind Dawson’s views on equal wages, the equitable distribution of resources and benefits – and the circumstance of this, the legally licensed land theft called ‘property rights’ – I see how closely his political and spiritual economy was aligned with that espoused by my own forebears. Largely forgotten now, Robert Blatchford would have been a feisty ideological (and intergenerational) go-between: basing his appeal on the principles of human justice, preaching socialism as a system of industrial cooperation for the common good, drawing his arguments from facts and experiences within the knowledge of the common people, he promised ‘a new life as full, sweet and noble as the world can give’,56 he could have triangulated between Dawson’s ‘humanity and common sense’, Joseph’s Chartist programme and dedication to the Cooperative movement and Fred’s integration of lay and spiritual governance with a return to the land. Robin Hood

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220 Translations was Blatchford’s hero, the same champion of natural justice who ‘has given birth to the ballad epic known by the name of its mythical hero, Robin Hood. Resistance to authority and contempt of the “Rights of Property” are the leading ideas in this rough but noble poetry.’ 57 Through Australian Aborigines a different English prehistory emerged; the present privatisation of the landscape leaving nowhere to stand, the disappearance of dialect and associated local knowledge and attachment, typified in the general indifference to the meaning and significance of the Uffington White Horse, and, what was even more potent in fostering political amnesia and poetic lassitude, the covering over of this historical forfeiture with Tory propaganda disguised as local histories (invariably a tour of the parish church and its notable tombs), and an ahistorical visual inventory of picturesque but oddly vacant villages where, in place of congregation and carnival, people stood in desultory groups, frozen, apprehensive and unemployed. This impression did not have to be uniquely localised: that a systemic alienation characterised the impact of the Enclosure Acts, one that the Border Country shared with my northwest Berkshire, was illustrated by Wordsworth’s poem ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ – as Helena Kelly notes, the tale told by the female vagrant ‘elides regional difference’. Now a wanderer on ‘Sarum’s Plain’, she was once ‘the prime of Keswick’s plain’, and her story centres on the tragedy of enclosure, her childhood home is a preenclosure idyll – garden and access to the common, supplemented by cottage labour; ‘she is an industrious cottage worker who keeps her spinning wheel, symbolic of productive rural womanhood, “humming” busily’.58 The ideal of the thrifty smallholder, shared by Joseph Terry (who called his 1848, Chartist-year collection ‘Cottage Poems’), advocated by Joseph Arch as the foundation and goal of agricultural reform, and practised by my grandfather in his acquisition and cultivation of ‘the Land’ was not the aestheticised and anaemic character of the long-running British radio drama, The Archers: when James Dawson opposed the sub-division of the big squatting runs under the Duffy Act (1862), an alternative programme of smallholdings drove him, where (with the surviving Aboriginal communities in mind), the large estates were managed either communally or feudally. It was the new world glimpsed in the mirror of nostalgia. Patrick

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Brontë, father of the famous writers, published his ‘Cottage Poems’ in 1811, imagining the future as the disclosure of what was hidden in the past. Christian faith manages this cyclic sleight of hand and, rather typically, staying at home is twinned with going to sea: ‘the poor cottager … Who travels the Zion-ward road, / He’s blest in his neat little cot, / He’s rich in the favour of God; / By faith he surmounts every wave / That rolls on this sea of distress: / Triumphant, he dives in the grave, / To rise on the ocean of bliss.’ 59 The hymn-like tedium and proselytising sentimentality of these Victorian poems suggested a sort of historical autism, as if the trauma of enclosure-driven exile, rationalised as a new kind of religious conformity, had left its mark in lexical contraction and a threshing-machine regularity of metre; it internalised the expulsion of the masters and mistresses of song and dance, the idiosyncrasies of foot and phrase, presumably found in a living community. Along these lines, Alfred Williams, another local writer like Richard Jefferies, whom I got to know better after migrating, was roundly criticised when he published Folksongs of the Upper Thames for his lack of ethnomusical literacy: ‘that he was so unmusical and so out of touch with what the man-in-the-street was singing and had sung in the recent past, that he had not the expertise necessary to know what to accept and what to reject, and gathered everything that came his way.’ 60 But that was the point. Williams detached his enquiry from nostalgia; his approach was sociological; recognising that ‘The songs themselves, as far as singing goes, are practically defunct. There is no need to revive them’, he recorded an historical disappearance (‘We live in a new age, almost in a new world’).61 Whether ‘standard songs of the country tradition’, negro spirituals, sailor shanties, broadsides, Scottish ballads and airs by Arne were equally authentic expressions of a local tradition was not his concern. Uninhibited by this abstraction, Williams’s songs bear witness to disappearances of their own: the poaching songs, the ploughing and shearing songs refer to activities politicised by enclosure.62 Williams may have neglected the music, but elsewhere he provided what early ethnomusicology neglected, the circumstances of performance. In a poignant retrospect to Round About the Upper Thames, Williams describes his last interview with one of his most informative native informants, Elijah Iles of Inglesham (near Lechlade). There had been rain, there was flood (‘The hills and downs were hidden with masses

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222 Translations of grey rolling clouds, and everything in the valley was blotted out. Adown the hills a hundred torrents ran splashing, shouting, and leaping in headlong haste’).63 Among other items, Elijah is ‘very anxious to recite to us the play of Robin Hood and Little John, as acted by the Mummers when he was a boy’.64 The soundscape for his performance is important: ‘With a sweet, low sound the Thames glided over the weir at St. John’s Bridge; the chow, chow of the iron wheel at Buscot could be heard a mile distant.’ 65 And Elijah proceeds to recite ‘such an activity you never saw before / Nor acted on a stage’ – the very activity, it seems to me, that is channelled in those peripatetic theatrical works, Light and Lost Subjects. Referring to the aerial raft or mobile house of Jadi Jadian, Chandrabhanu said that it triggered an early childhood memory of a traditional Malay house being transported to another place. His family recognised the description but assured him the event had occurred before he was born. Refusing to become a déclassé sociologist lamenting ‘the harsh realities of migrant life’, equally contemptuous of those who cultivate ‘the wastes of nostalgia and regret’, Tsaloumas speaks for the prodigal son when he writes, ‘it is only through distance that I can grasp the tragic condition of modern man.’ 66 Is there, as Chandrabhanu has hypothesised, a migrant memory that corrects the past, much as a landscape viewed from a distance brings together and composes elements formerly dispersed and lost? Lodged between memories of Campbell’s camouflaged industrial estate and Mirror States’s antipodean scattering of Edmund Spenser’s invocation, ‘Sweete Themmes, runne softlie, till I end my song’, this phantasmal incarnation of Robin Hood, advancing, singing, dancing in my main street, possesses an uncanny familiarity. Talking about the fatted calf, whose sacrifice was always a feature of those traditional Upper Thames feasts, how would the prodigal son come back? Interpreted as an existential drama, the two brothers are aspects of one subject and the father’s role can be construed as that of translator. In the archetypal trinity of St Luke’s parable, the older brother of the parable is a ‘senex’ type, the younger evidently a ‘puer’ type but the challenge of their integration is left to the father – the older brother obeys the loyal exactions of the law, filial, responsible, ultimately uncharitable, the younger brother ‘covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable’, and the lesson of individuation is left up to

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the father.67 The attractive subtlety of Hillman’s gloria duplex can hardly be attributed to him; yet his capacity to integrate habitual economy and exceptional ‘musick and dancing’ indicates a larger self-awareness – ‘Wherever one is, there is always an “other” by means of whom we reflect existence and because of whom we are always “more”, “other” and “beyond” what is here-and-now’ 68 – a riposte, incidentally, to Lacan’s identification of othering with alienation. But the parable raises another question, poetic (even logical) rather than psychological, for the paradox that the one who rushes in from outside should be greeted with greater enthusiasm than the one who stayed at home is, as Wilden would say, ideological, not logical.69 The elder brother’s rigidity exemplifies ‘positive feedback leading to the destruction of the ecosystem’. A master–servant economy depends on the very outside (the environment from which it derives its wealth) that it seeks to destroy.70 But, without pressing the analogy too far, one can reasonably ask: how will communication about this self-destructive system be phrased and framed? How does the prodigal son express a desire of return without falling into the trap of pre-enclosure nostalgia (whose other face is the picturesque of every property-owner’s environmental imaginary)? How, in informational terms, can one avoid contributing to the ‘negative feedback’ that, as it tends ‘towards constancy, stability, or steady state’,71 renders growth, including ‘random variation and chance events’, logically undesirable?72 The first poems I had written with any idea of publication owed much to Joseph Wright’s six-volume English Dialect Dictionary. Unlike the Australian notebooks that from day one solicited information from the environment that would assist getting in, the preAustralian sequence begins in wordlists, page after page of dialect terms organised alphabetically under different topics. If, as Freud thought, ‘happiness comes only from the fulfilment of a childhood wish’, the poetic inspiration I derived from Dawson’s Aboriginal vocabularies is explicable as a later involute of interests laid over an earlier one. But the publication record does not support this theory of satisfaction. I have often gone over older ground, as if a creative life might be the sum of all the mental trails drawn through it. After writing the radio work Scarlatti, I went back to it as unfinished; new approaches to the material were tried, including four poetic sequences published in my 2013 poetry collection,

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224 Translations Ecstacies and Elegies. One of the Scarlatti poems, ‘Shells’, revisits the physical and emotional landscape originally traversed in Scarlatti. The approach is not direct; it is housed inside a reworking of passages in Miguel Hernández’s Elegía a Ramón Sijé. My poem’s title alluded to the involuted snails of the second stanza73 but the juxtaposition with poppies was also important. I find secreted in the poem, like a fossilised shell in Faringdon oolite, the line ‘Tears of fire, copper rose, my love has gone’ – a fragment of a poem written all those years earlier when I lived for a season in country ancestrally enclosed under the direction of Wordsworth’s father – ‘lyrics for another century’, I comment, apologising for their excess, yet in this anamnesiac moment stumbled over like ancient bones rain exposes. The lesson of this Mandelbrot-like nesting of memory inside memory is that there is no going back except by repurposing what is past, not to locate a fixed or achieved destination but as the matter of a journey sifting to the end. In the year of my birth David Jones had published Anathemata, explaining that the ‘matter’ of Britain was his subject, the accumulated data of history, myth, geology, topography, belief, for there is, he says, ‘in the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matière, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product’.74 Jones frankly admits his nostalgia – those ‘deposits’ are in a state of crisis because they no longer speak – a breakdown in the ‘sign’ has occurred, which Jones refers to as ‘The Break’ and whose beginning he places in the mid-nineteenth century. But this only makes the poet’s office clearer – weaving a web of song to remake the broken matter and in an act of mythopoetic reinvention to secure its survival into our new age.75 And how is the story, the one that connects the individual to the collective, known? ‘There are the living, dying, or dead traditions in which one has oneself participated or heard of with one’s own ears from one’s own parents or near relatives or immediate forebears.’ 76 ‘These things received in childhood’ may be ‘fragments or concomitants only of the whole above mentioned complex’ (the “myth”) but as ‘the immediate channels’, they ‘condition all that passes through them’ and ‘condition also one’s subsequent attitude to all the rest’.77 But what if this intergenerational sedimentation never happened? What if there was a break in the story and the essential mythic connective tissue was missing?

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What if, even more radically, one came from somewhere else?78 The most perfect reproduction may be the most distant; the least reliable the closest. We owe the ideal reproduction of the Vale of the White Horse to an Australian, poet and model-maker, Roye England, who, arriving from Perth (Western Australia) and settling in Swindon in the 1920s, ‘fell in love with the landscape and buildings’ of the country where I was brought up and began modelling them. You can see the dioramic results at Pendon Museum in Long Wittenham on the Thames south of Oxford. Centred on a fictional village, ‘Pendon Parva’, Vale Scene was ‘initially intended to capture a landscape and way of life’ that England perceived to be under threat. But what has materialised is a recollection fuller than anything anyone ever remembered. Archaeology lecturer David Petts captures the curious fusion of fact and fiction, the ‘intriguing mix of an insistence on accuracy when it comes to the rolling stock and architectural detailing, but … all set in a fictional condensed countryside setting, which aims to represent all facets of the Vale, from the Downs with their hillforts and strip lynchets to the pasture and arable of the vale itself’. ‘Steeped in a love for a pre-lapsarian landscape and for the railways’, it is, of course, ‘set in late summer, with the crops ripe unto harvest and the chalk tracks at their dustiest’.79 Theoretically, this model preserves the childhood village more faithfully than any autobiographical fragment. Contrast this with an antithetical image of what John Shaw Neilson called ‘My countree’, the sequence of photoshopped images called Hinges (2006) in which I placed details of ground figures I had designed in Australia over details of the Uffington White Horse. Psychologists will be interested to know that I invited my son to collaborate, as if a lost relation could be handed over, epi-aesthetically, as it were from father to son. When I published some of this work, I focused on the possibility that something, some essential movement form lingering as a muscle memory from the days when I used to play on and around that figure, had carried over and unconsciously influenced my designs.80 But, what if the fit discovered when parts of Australian public artworks were superimposed on parts of the White Horse held a clue to techniques of going back? The details of the Prodigal Son’s career provided by St Luke could easily be transposed to colonial Australia: a colonist optimistically invests his father’s money in a start-up industry or in land, but the business

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226 Translations fails (it happened to James Dawson twice). Any leasehold cotter or agricultural labourer, dependent on a smallholding for their living, could interpret the ‘mighty famine in that land’, recognising correctly that its conjunction with impoverishment described the impact of the Enclosure Acts: reduced to a landless labourer, the Prodigal Son understood the cost of his father’s wealth. Feckless or not, he could see back further than his family into the shaping causes of a system that outlawed staying at home and made inevitable the very emigration that, paradoxically, the system so frowned upon – W.H.R. Curtler notes that ‘a rooted dislike among landlords of lease arrangements’ was especially prevalent in Berkshire. Deprived of access to the common, unable to afford to fence any remnant allotment, and forfeiting their leases, internally exiled smallholders had few options: ‘They sold their stock and went to the towns, emigrated or became day labourers.’ 81 Once closest, the Prodigal Son approaching from the greatest distance might, after all, have a message for those who stayed at home. The news from the colony was that, in so far as England and Australia remained in a colonial double-bind, they remained like the ‘Self’ and ‘other’, the ‘two terms of a self-perpetuating oscillating series in a schizophrenic system of communication’.82 In this psychic economy, where an ‘Imaginary Other’ has been substituted for being in the world and developing outside relationships with it, the ‘counter-adaptive antinomies of class, caste, race and sex’ perpetuate themselves to the point of self-extinction.83 It is a message of peculiar relevance to Britain’s withdrawal from Europe as it exposes unflinchingly the question of return: to what is the newly isolated island going back to? One of the great values of Dawson’s Aboriginal vocabularies was that they allowed the outside to bleed back in. Positioned as an insider-outsider, Dawson enjoyed a certain resistance to the binary logic of colonial relations; he could register the inrush of the outside, and his meticulous transcription of what he heard, which produces so many ultimately unresolvable inconsistencies across entries and idiolects, preserved an experience of continuous fusion and transfusion, open, endlessly complex, the product of ‘collective praxis’ rather than collusion between theoretical ethnographer and mystical informant.84 But how would a dissident discourse of this kind infiltrate the present socio-economic status quo? The Anathemata, also staging

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a return to origins, thought in terms of simultaneity: when the ‘sign’ is resacralised, as happens in the service of the Holy Mass – by analogy, the ‘specific task’ of the artist is ‘to lift up valid signs’ 85 – then the ‘Break’ is repaired and ‘Britain’, all her stories – Jones’s cultural inheritance as a ‘great confluity and dapple, pied, fragmented, twisted, lost: that is indeed the shape of things all over Britain’ 86 – all her ‘matter’, her ‘mess’, reordered by the poet-sacrament-maker.87 One manifestation of Britain’s ‘mess’ is her topography; then, in Jones’s poetic oreogenesis, the landscape is reordered, lost associations retrieved for the symbolic treasure hoard are, Wayland Smith-like, melted, smelted and their common ancestral hosting hammered out. My White Horse Hill is identified with the ‘mother of forts’, Hissarlik.88 But simultaneity, Britain’s res as palimpsest, and the poet of this, ‘the custodian, rememberer, embodier and voice of the mythus’, are a function of time travel. According to Jones, when ‘rulers seek to impose a new order’, the poets, ‘recalling something loved and as embodying an ethos inimical to the imposition of that new order’ represent a ‘possible danger’: ‘Poetry may be diagnosed as “dangerous” because it evokes and recalls, is a kind of anamnesis of, i.e. is an effective recalling of, something loved.’ 89 But, to fulfil the vocation of custodian, the poet-vates must first embrace exile and the double valency of any act of recollection: he must suffer the ‘Break’ and map the distance, recognising that the once living tradition is now a matter of hearsay, antiquarian scholarship and word magic – ‘I refer to those sources only to elucidate a background. As often as not I have no means of judging the relative accuracy of these data. I refer to them only as a traveller might, in making a song or story about a journey he had taken from his home through far places and back.’ 90 Emancipated from migrant reverie, Dawson resumes his double existence. Inviting him to the Vale of the White Horse, playing host to the stranger, there is the temptation to stage another historical seance, as if, through him – through the clues he has to the nature of pre-colonial cultures and landscapes – I can play Dawson to my own childhood village, laying claim retrospectively to an organic ‘matter’ that at the time lay on the other side of the ‘Break’. I do not rule out this scenario. What about the pre-enclosure commons and the freedom of the old tracks: isn’t ‘The whole of north Berkshire … still criss-crossed by a spider’s web of old roads which were once

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228 Translations vital lines of communication between neighbouring villages and the local towns?’ 91 And what if common ownership or tenancy of the land after the Aboriginal model is a myth? Herbert Spencer, who once thought land rights resided in the people and could be bought back from the landowners, gave up the idea: ‘My argument in “Social Statics” was based upon the untenable assumption that the existing English community had a moral right to the land. They never had anything of the kind. They were robbers all round: Normans robbed Danes and Saxons, Saxons robbed Celts, Celts robbed the aborigines, traces of whose earth-houses we find here and there. Let the English Land Restoration League find the descendants of these last, and restore the land to them. There never was any equity in the matter, and re-establishment of a supposed original equity is a dream.’ 92 Even a tradition of land theft surely has a distinctive culture, one even supportive of decolonising narratives. Alfred’s Wessex had originated in a Romano-British confederacy forged by Cealwin (c.560): ‘the Gewissian federation was clearly large and important, extending through Oxfordshire and north Berkshire into Wiltshire and the future west Saxon heartland’.93 However, in 628, Penda, the Anglian king of Mercia, defeated Wessex at Cirencester, and by 661, Mercia ‘owned all our land, right up to Ashdown, i.e. the Old British Ridge’.94 In 688 the king of Wessex brought the boundary back to the Thames and in 752 Wessex had advanced to Burford (Berry ford – hill fort, the earliest name) and fought a decisive battle there against Mercia. But in 756 when Offa came to the throne of Mercia ‘he threw Wessex back, defeating them at Dorchester and returning the boundary again to the British Ridge at Ashdown in Berkshire.’ 95 In this to-ing and fro-ing, Faringdon was a border region, the military limes, where the invaders might have heard ‘Waelisc-man lingo’ or ‘Britto-Romani gone diaboli’.96 As for Alfred, wasn’t he our senior law man: as Weeratt Kuyuut ‘taught the young people the name of the favourite planets and constellations’ and ‘the names of localities, mountain ranges, and lakes, and the directions of neighbouring tribes’ 97 so our king protected the faith and laid down the law. A statue in the main square of the town where I went to school – designed by Queen Victoria’s cousin, the sculptor Count Gleichen (Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg), and erected in 1877 – ‘shows King Alfred

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holding a battle-axe in one hand and a roll of parchment in the other, typifying the monarch’s two-fold character of warrior and lawgiver’.98 Alfred was Prospero to our local Caliban, Wayland Smith, the Norse Hephaestus for whom a Neolithic chambered tomb near White Horse Hill was named – Victorian depictions of him, shaggily bearded, an animal skin slung over his shoulder uncannily recall newspaper illustrations of William Buckley, escaped convict, Wathaurong associate and Melbourne’s first translator.99 Poets not bound by the relative accuracy of the data could take another leaf out of Dawson’s book, nurturing out of Alfred a national myth, one, it is true, that defended robbery but which, in compensation, gave our White Horse and its adjoining Dragon’s Hill a satisfactory Dreamtime explanation. The twists and turns of the patriotic propaganda machine that could bundle up ‘Gothic’ Alfred and ‘Celtic’ Arthur, which, in turn, linked the irredentist champion of the Britons, mingled with remnants of earlier peoples before forming a series of British or Welsh tribes known, respectively, as the North, and the West Welsh to the figure of St George, and both via the dragon association to the White Horse, now reimagined as Beli/St Michael/ St George, representing the Sun, slaying the Devil/Dragon, representing the Night, in order to rescue the beautiful maiden, representing the Earth; or perhaps, more likely, St Michael/St George defeating the Devil/Beli, as Christianity struggles to overcome the old religion – all of this goes beyond the scope of this chapter.100 Besides, it is not my story, not my ‘matter’. It pretends the ‘Break’ never happened; like the model of the Vale, it pretends the euhumeristic gods stayed at home. It is nice to imagine ‘an association between the constellation of Arcturus and a mortal man of our tradition of arms but of outstanding genius’.101 But we know that this is poetic licence, explicitly deplored by the Catholic community inside whose mythos Jones sets his entire poem. It makes a useful reality check to compare the layered Hisarlik produced by this poetic method – the White Horse as bear and dragon, compositely conquered by Arthur, George, Alfred and even in one version Beowulf and the sky–earth analogues, Epona/Llew Llaw as Perseus (another dragon-slayer) – with a passage in Australian Aborigines. Around the same year that Thomas Hughes was lamenting the lack of local lore relating to the White Horse,102 Dawson was hearing

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230 Translations about Pirnmeheeal, ‘a gigantic man, living above the clouds’, whose voice was ‘listened to with pleasure, as it does good to man and beast, by bringing rain, and making grass and roots grow for their benefit’. The ideological zealots made short work of that: ‘the aborigines say that the missionaries and government protectors have given them a dread of Pirnmeheeal; and they are sorry that the young people, and many of the old, are now afraid of a being who never did any harm to their forefathers’.103 When the Prodigal Son’s elder brother retired from business, he might well have become a local historian of this kind, driven by late piety to reconstruct the hill of time. Piling new speculation on old, spicing it with recent field archaeological finds, perhaps even new genomic data, and certainly keeping in play the evidence of cultural succession preserved in place names, well might he exclaim like Voice 2 in The Native Informant: 2. O nine-layered ground, grandfer’s rusted billhook lies o’er. 1. I ‘ool hev, I hev a-hed. 3. History that has paid the piper calls the tune! 2. The Saxon’s coulter and purse ring lies o’er, Roman Vulcan’s honing stone lies o’er. 1. 1 med hev, I had a-had, I med uv-ad. 3. Imperialism’s pious sentiment. 2. The Iron Age’s socketed hammer lies o’er. the bronze purse-ring, the bird figurines lies o’er. 3. Drowns out the HISS of history. 1. 1 med hev, I had a-had, I med uv-ad. 4. I’d rather have a young man with an apple in his hand. 2. The first struck flints and sherds of bone lies o’er limestone shellfragmental, oolitic with time. 1. Gie I a apple. Us waants what be ourri an’ thaay had bes’gi’t us. 3. The clamour of the native dead.104

But, as the script shows, this stratigraphic reverie lies over (and buries) other voices: the agricultural labourer who declines in a double sense, lamenting loss in an out-of-date dialect, the prodigal son’s ironic commentary, and Eros. Ours was a culture of breaks not bridges. As chairman of the Rural District Council, my grandfather might preside over Faringdon’s Festival of Britain celebrations – Herbert Morrison intended the Festival of Britain ‘to be a fun thing … he wanted the people to participate in it, he didn’t want it to be a

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“them” and “us” affair’.105 But the divisions remained, not simply of class or wealth or property – Humphrey Jenning’s documentary, Family Portrait, presented ‘British society as a family divided, not by class, but by a rift between the imaginative and practical sides of the national character’, nostalgic whimsy that Paul Addison has since dismissed as ‘guff’.106 But it was too late, as it had been too late for Graves, Aldington and Sassoon after the First World War: ‘It is the end of civilisation’, A.L. Rouse declared in the year of my birth, ‘Piper and Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Gerald Berners, Martyn Skinner, Jack Simons – all my friends are right. In the heroic days of 1940–45 I used to put up a resistance and argue that there was a future. Now I know that they are right. There is no point in resisting any longer. It is the decay of a civilisation I study.’ 107 It is the moment associated in Remember Me with The Mermaid Theatre’s 1951 production of Dido and Aeneas. But civilisation, like the village of childhood, had always been slipping away. Almost the first thing he remembered doing as a child, Jefferies writes, was ‘to draw a map of the hamlet with the ponds and lanes and paths … with each of the houses marked and the occupier’s name’. Thirty years later, ‘A map by Ptolemy would bear as much resemblance to the same country in a modern atlas as mine to the present state of that locality. It is all gone rubbed out.’ 108 The erasure is so complete that Jefferies is driven to wonder: ‘are you quite certain that such a village existed?’ 109 The author of Portrait of a Village (1937) could have answered him: ‘no village like it has ever existed outside my imagination … the people … are, equally, wholly imaginary … the names attached to them have been chosen from among those places, or dredged from deep memories of childhood’.110 Octavio Paz has noted an etymological (and semantic) sequence that links ‘stars’, ‘signs’ and ‘destinies’, where Latin signum means ‘a celestial sign, a constellation’ and the Spanish sino (a doublet of signo) means ‘fate’.111 Valuable information for the migrant, who perforce navigates by the stars, this also speaks to Jones’s belief that the true sign joins Heaven and Earth, integrating (poetically) the transcendental and the material. But in reality, the past was not a luminous star map (even our star names were foreign); it was a field of asterisks. In June 2011 I visited Faringdon with my son; we travelled to Mirfield to see whether we could find Coppin Hall where Joseph

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232 Translations Terry declared he had passed his happiest years, and where his first poems were written; next we drove north along the western flank of the Pennines, visiting the tiny hamlet where all those years before I had practised solitude in sheep country, in the lee of Old Meg and her Daughters creating my own Dawson dialect and observing the manners of the local tribes; then through the Border Country of Percy’s Reliques to Dawson’s country (Edinburgh). We concluded our tour in Newcastle-on-Tyne before flying to Nice to view the Maeght collection of Giacometti bronzes. Returning to Australia, we made Involutes, ‘an animation/video work that meditates on vortices in four contexts: 1 the rondo of Schwitters’s Ursonate (1922–23), 2 the imagery of the “involute” (found in Thomas de Quincey), 3 the “force” on the Swale at Richmond (Yorks), and 4 the historic shell collection of University Museum, Oxford’ (Figure 12). Thematically, ‘Involutes’ was itself involuted with other projects – ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ on the Thames (also referred to as ‘Maelstrom’) and ‘Save the Wall’, the idea threaded through projects as diverse as What Is Your Name/Wie ist dein Name (Berlin, 2004) and Sugar – but the main inspiration was Kurt Schwitters’s Elterwater

Figure 12  Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Involutes, animation built in Adobe Flash, duration: 3′ 28″. ‘Involutes offers “perplexed combinations” of “concrete objects” encountered in the course of a recent visit to England’.



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Merz Barn, reconstructed in the Hatton Gallery (University of Newcastle): This work can be described as a cut through the ‘Maelstrom’; in its puttied and agitated cement lie the flotsam and jetsam caught in the wall of the vortex. A wall printed onto a wall, it exemplifies the material vision behind the ‘Save the Wall’ project: imagine, for example, cementing found objects onto the walls of the Stony Rises. The Merz Barn is, aside from the turbulence of its organisation, the final snail dome that Schwitters constructed. It is a palimpsest, like the earlier palimpsests, of an Ego-histoire inscribed sculpturally and architecturally, and embodies De Quincey’s notion of the involute in its recollection and collision of previously random things – except that these things are by no means random: Schwitters’s wall is not, for example, a collage but a collection of ‘equipment’, of articles to hand that might link the artist to a larger craft of made works. The ‘non-art’ of the Merz is composed of informes that in this turbulent transformation turn out to capture the topology of creativity: the wall of the ‘Maelstrom’.112

My diary notes continued, Visiting the Swale with my son had written into it the memory of my mother chanting the names of Yorkshire’s ‘five rivers’: Wharfe, Calder, Nidd, Swale and Ouse; photographed ocelot skin foam patterns slowly involving, revolving, combing out and bunching again as they slide towards the force in full spate. Over the falls his extraordinary lens eye was able to freeze-frame individual bubbles in spawnlike dimpled nets, doing with technology what Leonardo did with his eye, discovering vortices all the way down. The force is turbulence in a steady state: fringes of upward climbing waves stand frothy and tiptoe below submarine rocks, in a longer time lapse the falls are stilts of white water as steady as calcite rods. While the water strives to move on, the stepped limestone flags cause it to leap and fall, to splash and spill into channels, then to recombine, infold and tress out like braided hair. Across the snakeskin of spreading wakes, fleets of bubbles and furious spates the wind inscribes transverse swarms of shivering ripples, catspaw prints as it parcours the black steep.113

I was remembering the opening image of Joseph Terry’s autobiographical recollection, his traumatic childhood memory of nearly drowning when the barge sank and (like a nightmare dreamt by Schliemann) their life’s savings sunk to the bottom of the Calder

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234 Translations never to be retrieved.114 And this, in turn, swirled into another concrete object (itself a kind of perplexed and perplexing recollection) – the passage in De Quincey where, in illustration of the sensation of simultaneity associated with mental involutes, he narrates the near drowning of a 9-year-old girl who, ‘by the side of a solitary brook … fell into one of its deepest pools’ and who rose to the surface ‘but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can have looked that had permission to return: At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her, phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eyeballs; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence’.115 And this description of dying to be born again, which is also the migrant experience, was itself constructed around the armature of an earlier memory whorl, the passages in the 1998 radio work, Underworlds of Jean du Chas, in which Jean plays Prodigal Son to Hollow and Didi (Father and Son), reporting what he beheld in the depths when, channelling the tale of Timarchus that Plutarch tells in his essay ‘On the Genius of Socrates’, he had the sensation he circled far above the earth when, below him, ‘islands passed through the surf [but] never came round to their starting point again or described a circle, but slightly varied the points of impact, describing a continuous spiral as they revolved’.116 In Schwitters’s Merzbau, Pierluigi Nicolin writes, ‘the act of assembling a multitude of plastic forms and materials, found objects, “spoils and relics” … were enclosed and partly walled up so that they could serve as records of previous states. Incomplete on principle, growing, changing constantly … The theme of assemblage has become a basic condition of the new globalized world … Lateral motion, three-dimensionality, fortuitousness … emphasizing horizontal structures … creating symbols of centrality rather than aiming at convergence at a point, the new Merz architecture emphasizes tangents, vanishing points, twists, and crossings.’ 117 Here the asterisk principle, an art that maps the repeated disappearance of things (relationships, countries, memories), produces an aesthetic of the hollow; it is a continuously turning, twisting tunnel whose walls are not interior (in relation to a fixed historical exterior) but burrow

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through a new world, one where, like Hubert Duprat’s caddisfly larvae carrying their decorative cases about with them, all spoils and relics coexist. The harmonious figure of this, the form of memory that conserves the growing echo of distance without expectation of substantial return is what Edgar Allan Poe (who else!) described in his guide to the shells of North America as the ‘involuted spire’ – ‘shells which have their whorls, or wreaths, concealed in the inside of the first whorl or body, as in some of the Nautili and Cyprae’.118 As they revolve outwards, they amplify the dimensions of the hollow while retaining its essential form; like Vico’s theory of historical ricorsi, they renew what is old through a style of revolution that buries the form of growth deeper inside. There are no layers, only holes; no returns, only turns. The ‘matter’ of this is not a ‘mess’ to be ordered but the material itself. After explaining what the aspirant ethnographer needed to send to Professor Müller, the Argus correspondent issued a warning: ‘the dialects of the natives … are perpetually changing’. One reason may be the absence of a written literature but more important is a ‘great talent for mimicry, [they] are much given to catch up words uttered in jest by one of their number, and to perpetuate these in their language. In fact, their languages would seem to be in a perpetual state of decay and reconstruction by an agency much resembling modern slang. How far is this true?’ 119 The ‘slang’ was in the inadequate ear of the beholder, as What Is Your Name makes plain, in the dissembling discourse of Lost Subjects or the endless littoral transformation of word sounds in Columbus Echo. In his poetic Dada, Schwitters put the hiss back into history: working in exile, on a farm not far from where I was later collecting fossilised dialect, his ‘slang’ laid the groundwork of a migrant poetics.

Notes 1 The Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes, 610. 2 The Methodist Hymn Book with Tunes, 863. 3 M. Cannon (ed.), Historical Records of Victoria, Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982, vol., 2A 125. Memorandum of the Wesleyan minister, the Rev. Joseph Rennard Orton, dated June 1839.

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236 Translations 4 Terry, Poems. 5 Terry, Poems. 6 David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory, 25(2) (May 1986), 117–131, 123. 7 Dimitris Tsaloumas, The Book of Epigrams, trans. Philip Grundy, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. 8 Anthony Wilden, ‘Lacan and the Discourse of the Other, in Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of language in Psychoanalysis (ed. and trans. A. Wilden), New York: Dell Publishing, 1968, 157–312, 174. 9 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, Essays in Communication and Exchange, London: Tavistock Publications, 1980, 487. 10 Wilden, System and Structure, liii. 11 Wilden, System and Structure, xxxix. 12 Wilden, System and Structure, lvii. 13 Wilden, System and Structure, lxii. 14 Wilden, System and Structure, xlv. 15 Wilden, System and Structure, lvi. 16 Wilden, System and Structure, lvi. 17 The interpretation of the Batman Treaty (in fact, there were two) continues to be controversial. In his book John Batman and the Aborigines (1987), Alastair Campbell concluded that ‘Without mutual understanding, a ceremony interpreted by the Aborigines as an occasion for the exchange of gifts may have been used cynically by Batman as evidence of an agreement to sell land’ (103). More recently, more nuanced interpretations have been offered. Referring to the Kulin tanderrum convention, Clark thinks that ‘Batman’s 1835 “treaties” with the leaders of clans, including the Yalukit-willam, near Melbourne are an example of how permission for temporary access was granted in a ritual exchange of gifts and formal presentation of tokens (soil, plants, water, food) symbolising the owners’ hospitality. Batman’s treaty overtures were probably perceived by the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung clan-heads as an amateurish attempt at initiating the required tanderrum (freedom of the bush) ritual’ (Clark and Koltanski, ‘An Indigenous History of Stonnington: A Report to the City of Stonnington’, 1–214, 74). 18 Wilden, System and Structure, xlii. 19 Batman referred to the land purchased as ‘Dutigallar’ and three of the signatories to the ‘treaty’ were identified as ‘Jagajaga’. Other passages quoted from Maria Bottomley’s Executive Image, The Essential Guide to Positive Presentation (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988) include advice for important meetings: ‘position yourself strategically … Seat yourself in the negative positions’, see Mirror States, scene

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18, in The Sound In-Between, 106. The original installation was conceived as an eight-storey tower, its corners located either side of the Yarra River, the scripted soundscape organised echoically back and forth across the river. Other notes about the work that illuminate the fundamental pun in ‘Dorta’ occur in Carter, Amplifications, 148–157. 20 See John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginnings in Plato’s Timaeus, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 128 and 128, note 2; Repressed Spaces, 145–150; and Meeting Place, 103–107. 21 For this and previous quotation, see Wilden, System and Structure, xliii. 22 Carter, Amplifications, 155; Wilden, System and Structure, lvi. 23 Wilden, System and Structure, xliv. 24 Paul Carter, Mythform, ‘The Ferryman’s Vision’. 25 Paul Carter, Mythform, 64. ‘Play’, as Wilden points out, is the creative capacity that cuts the Gordian Knot, Lacan’s either/or theory of ego splitting; it is the aspect of the Fort! Da! episode that Freud’s interpretation leaves out. Play is the modality of self-doubling that is not narcissistic because (precisely) it materialises space as communication. ‘The Fort! Da! is another form of the metacommunication “This is play”. A new behavioural frame has been constructed’ (Wilden, System and Structure, 151). 26 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 1960, 576. 27 Wilden, System and Structure, 237. 28 Wilden, System and Structure, 39. 29 André Gorz, The Traitor, trans. R. Howard, London, Verso, 1989, 39–40. 30 The references are respectively to Wilden, System and Structure, xxvii, 472 and 468. 31 Wilden, System and Structure, xxvi–xxvii. 32 Perhaps the primary trauma of enclosure was exile: Rosenman argues that ‘the Enclosure Acts undermined crucial dimensions of national identity. First, they destroyed the place-based sense of identity that was crucial to the construction of “the people.” Villagers had a sense of identity rooted in a specific area and embedded in a web of familial and neighbourly relations that had defined that place through generations. This association between identity and place is so intuitive, so prevalent in western culture that geographer Tim Cresswell terms it a “metaphysic.” With wage labour came enforced mobility as workers were compelled to travel to different villages, towns, and cities to eke out a living. The imbrication of “the people” and “the land” underlay the trauma of the Enclosure Acts, giving rise to a narrative of not only economic loss

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238 Translations but dispossession in which farmers saw themselves as refugees in their own land’ (Ellen Rosenman ‘On Enclosure Acts and the Commons’, www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=ellen-rosenman-on-enclosureacts-and-the-commons). Rosenman refers to Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, New York: Routledge, 2006. On enclosure patterns in the Vale of the White Horse, see Bethany Afton, ‘The Manmade Landscape: The Impact of Enclosure in the Wantage Area of Old Berkshire’ at http://berkshireenclosure.org.uk/ downloads/TheManmadeLandscape/TheManmadeLandscape.pdf. The reference is to ‘the elimination of the yeoman farmer and the cotter’ – ‘The latter mostly became landless paupers’. This period of ‘greatest degradation, misery and unemployment’ exactly overlapped with the first quarter-century of the British colonisation of Australia (see Frank Geary, Land Tenure and Unemployment, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925, 112). 33 Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. R. Manheim, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961, 66–67. 34 Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 54. The Commedia would allow him to ‘correct and overcome that disharmony of fate … by taking account of historical events, by mastering them and ordering them in his mind’. 35 Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 66–67. 36 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science 2, 2002: 87–109. 37 Roger Lawrence, ‘Habitat and Economy: A Historical Perspective’, in D.J. Mulvaney and J. Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1971, 252. 38 ‘Contributed’, The Argus, 21 October 1876. Who is the author of this article? Cut-and-pasted into Dawson’s Scrapbook, it joins many other anonymous pieces, some of which were evidently penned by Dawson. On the other hand, in Australian Aborigines, Dawson appears to question Müller’s authority (see lvi). 39 Harry Lourandos, ‘Aboriginal Spatial Organization and Population: South-Western Victoria Reconsidered’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, XII (1977) 202–225; Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space’, 111–112. 40 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 7. 41 Geary, Land Tenure and Unemployment, 21. 42 Curr, The Australian Race, vol. 1, 58. 43 Standfield gives a balanced view. Discussing the Thomas diagram of relative sitting positions at a great meeting, she notes that Brough Smyth

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derived from this the idea that traditional Aboriginal communities had been organised, structured and contained, and he made use of the term ‘nation’ to describe Aboriginal political organisation: ‘Large tracts, with well-marked natural boundaries, are peopled by “nations”, each composed of many separate tribes, differing amongst themselves but little in speech, in laws, and in modes of warfare.’ This came under attack from Curr but, as Diane Barwick notes, these chapters ‘came substantially’ from information provided by Thomas, as a result of the years he had spent living amongst Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung communities. She then quotes Dredge whose position amply confirms what Dawson claimed, ‘It does not appear that there are any persons amongst them which have Kingly authority over the rest. Yet each sub division of a tribe has one or more leading man or men. And in all important matters which require the assemblage of the whole tribe these influential men debate upon Public Matters, and decisions are come to by mutual consent. This kind of debating usually occurs in the evening … and sometimes long and animated speeches are delivered.’ Quoted in Rachel Standfield, ‘“Thus have been preserved numerous interesting facts that would otherwise have been lost”: ‘Colonisation, Protection and William Thomas’s Contribution to The Aborigines of Victoria’, in L. Boucher and L. Russell (eds), Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, Acton, ACT: ANU Press, 2015, 47–62. Respected archaeologist and ethnographer, Gary Presland, has written more recently, ‘Each Kulin clan was essentially independent, and was governed by one or two headmen. These individuals had authority to speak on behalf of clan members at the councils of such clan heads, but otherwise had no special authority outside their clan. (See www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00814b.htm.) 44 In their study of ‘collective expressions of Scots and Irish migrant selfhood in four small towns’ in Victoria and New South Wales (7), Proudfoot and Hall (Imperial Spaces) characterise Scottish and Irish pastoral settlement in the 1840s as ‘ambiguous’. They were ‘emplaced’ in the colonial landscape of the British Empire, with all its administrative (and agricultural) conventions and expectations, but also cultivated ‘place narratives’ that they ‘uniquely performed’ (134). Among other things, this outsider/insider status encouraged the self-conscious performance of one’s ethnicity (243–244). 45 Richard Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the Roots of Settler Environmentalism’, in T. Griffiths and L. Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998, 139–153, 144. 46 Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa’, 142.

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240 Translations 47 Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa’, 143. 48 See Carter, Decolonising Governance, 160–162. 49 During his only home visit in 1882–84, Dawson had shown his ‘great practical interest … in the welfare of his native town … by mortifying a considerable sum of money inherited from his good sister, the late Mrs Margaret Hutcheson, for the purchase of coals at Christmas yearly for distribution among poor persons resident in or natives of the Burgh and parish of Linlithgow’ (Camperdown Chronicle, 18 July 1895 and Dawson Scrapbook, vol. 5, 197). 50 www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-burns. 51 Alan James Thompson, ‘The Interpreter, the Legacy of Francis Fraser Armstrong’, BA thesis, Murdoch University, 2015. 52 Thompson, ‘The Interpreter, the Legacy of Francis Fraser Armstrong’, 22. 53 Carter, Decolonising Governance, 160. 54 Carter, The Native Informant, in Absolute Rhythm, 144. For discussion, see Carter, Amplifications, 19–21. 55 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 84; see also Critchett ‘Introduction’ for further Dawson references. 56 Adapted from the Wikipedia entry. 57 https://gesteofrobinhood.com/2020/08/18/remarks-on-robin-hood-byrobert-blatchford/ and William Morris. 58 Helena Kelly, ‘William Wordsworth and Enclosure, 1793–1803’, chapter 2 of The Politics of Space: Enclosure in English Literature, 1789–1815, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. At www.academia.edu/14327939/ William_Wordsworth_and_enclosure_1793–1803. 59 Patrick Bronte, ‘Cottage Poems’, P.K. Holden for the author, 1811. 60 Frank Purslow, ‘The Williams Manuscripts’, Folk Music Journal, 1(5), 1969, 301–315. 61 Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames. 62 Hence an older song runs: ‘Here’s success to the plough, the fleece and the flail, / May the landlord ever flourish and the tenant never fail’ (Williams, Round About the Upper Thames, 300). The point of this is that this arrangement excluded the labourer, as W.H. Hudson with reference to the Luddite/Swing riots of 1831: ‘the introduction of the thrashing machines was the last straw, the culminating act of the hideous system followed by landlords and their tenants – the former to get the highest possible rent for his land, the latter to get his labour at the lowest possible rate. It was a compact between landlord and tenant aimed against the labourer’ (A Shepherd’s Life, London: J.M. Dent, 1949, 160–161) See Marjorie Bloy, ‘The Peel Web’ for succinct summary. www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ruralife/swing.htm. Williams also discusses the rioting (Round About the Upper Thames, 143) and

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makes the additional point that poverty continued: see 137ff where ‘they took to poaching and stole a sheep now and then in order to satisfy the raging hunger within them’. As for the punishment (transportation), what was new? – ‘I thought of the right of these people, the right of the soil. Thought of the barbarity of my country; that for a few scrubby sheep, 2 valuable lives …’ (See Memory as Desire, in Absolute Rhythm, 23 quoting George Augustus Robinson, Journals, January – March 1840, ed. G. Presland, Melbourne: Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, 1977, no. 5, 30.) 63 Why is the advent of song, itself an escape for prosaically plodding history into another world, so often associated with meteorological apocalypse? Because an analogy is perceived between overflowing rain and an access of fluency that transcends language. See, for example, Strehlow’s powerful description of rain coming to Jay Creek, Songs of Central Australia, 445. 64 Williams, Round About the Upper Thames, 295. 65 Williams, Round About the Upper Thames, 296. 66 Dimitris Tsaloumas, ‘The Distant Present’, Displacements 2, Multicultural Storytellers, S. Gunew (ed.), Waurn Ponds: Deakin University Press, 1987, 127. 67 Luke 15: 11–32. See Frith Luton, ‘The Puer aeternus and the Trap of Freedom and Independence’. https://frithluton.com/articles/puer-aeternus/ 68 James Hillman, ‘Pothos’, in Loose Ends, Dallas, Texas, c.1975, 59. 69 Wilden, System and Structure, 123. 70 Wilden, System and Structure, 393. 71 Wilden, System and Structure, 361. 72 Wilden, System and Structure, 364–366. 73 ‘Alimentando lluvias, caracolas / y órganos mi dolor sin instrumento, / a las desalentadas amapolas // daré tu corazón por alimento.’ 74 David Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, London: Faber & Faber, 1951, 40. 75 Although the notes to The Anathemata are erudite in the extreme, Jones insists that their main point is to assist pronunciation (43). 76 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 40. 77 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 41. 78 Jones wondered what this writing was about; answering: it was about his ‘thing’, res. But seventy years on the answer is perhaps rather clearer as, from the perspective of decolonisation, that res has decidedly receded in importance; defined as ‘unavoidably part and parcel of the Western Christian res, as inherited by a person whose perceptions are totally conditioned and limited by and dependent upon his being indigenous to this island’ (‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 11). It can speak, if at all, for a greatly diminished imagined community. From the collective

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242 Translations experience of a post-immigration Britain, Jones’s ‘insularity’ is not only culturally and historically conditioned but politically and socially Brexit-ish. 79 https://valewhitehorse.blogspot.com/2016/. Who can doubt that surnames are fateful? Mr England (1906–95) was suitably eccentric: ‘He once spent six years making a lineside pub; it was thatched with human hair from a hairdresser’s in Swindon; the basis of the hollyhocks in the garden was cats’ whiskers’. (See www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2012/jan/27/hornby-tracks-of-our-tears.) 80 I explained that in the revelation of a ‘spatial Gestalt’ ‘two movement forms … blend or fuse, two attempts to represent graphically the eido-kinetic intuition that the neighbourhood of where we stand and walk is a labyrinth of potential meeting places, nodal points within a network composed of ‘possible paths of propinquity’ (Paul Carter, ‘Masters of the Gap: art, migration and eido-kinesis’, in C. Merewether and J. Potts (eds), After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 43–56, 52). 81 W.H.R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land, Oxford, 1920, 243. For clarity, this thought experiment is not an Oedipal exercise: nothing in my family experience directly parallels Luke’s parable; the direct parallel is with the topic of this book, the impersonal economic and environmental prehistory shaping all our life circumstances and choices. 82 Wilden, System and Structure, 108. 83 Wilden, System and Structure, 108. 84 Wilden, System and Structure, 109. 85 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 22. 86 David Jones, Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings, London: Faber & Faber, 1959, 46. 87 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 33. 88 Jones, The Anathemata, 57. 89 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 21. 90 Jones, ‘Preface’, The Anathemata, 42. 91 Hammond, Rural Life in the Vale of the White Horse, 102. 92 Herbert Spencer, London Daily Chronicle, 29 August 1894, 8–9, repudiating his earlier support for the goals of the Land Advancement League. 93 John Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, Oxford: Alan Sutton, 1994, 39. 94 Ernest Pocock, A History of Clanfield in Oxfordshire, Bampton, Oxon.: Cornerstone Publishing, 1999, 9. 95 Pocock, A History of Clanfield in Oxfordshire, 10.

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96 Jones, The Anathemata, 112. 97 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 75. 98 Margaret Prentice, ‘King Alfred’s Statue’, Vale and Downland Museum – Local History Series’, reproduced from The Blowing Stone, 1979. At https://silo.tips/download/king-alfred-s-statue-1877. 99 See, for example, www.berkshirehistory.com/legends/smithy01.html and www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/on-this-day/2013/11/ on-this-day-william-buckley/. 100 On the association of Alfred, Arthur, St George and St Michael, see M. Aurora Lestón Mayo, ‘Tracing the Dragon: A Study of the Origin and Evolution of the Dragon Myth in the History and Literature of the British Isles’, PhD thesis, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2014. On Celtic Sun deities and their christanisation, see David Nash Ford, ‘Royal St George, Folklore or Fact’, at www.berkshirehistory.com/ legends/george02.html. See also Joanne Parker, ‘A Tale of Two Kings: The “Celtic” Arthur and the “Gothic” Alfred’, in J. Parker (ed.), The Harp and the Constitution: Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin, Leiden: Brill, 2015, 97–118. 101 Arguing that ‘history returns in least expected guises … it is not outside the bounds of factual possibility that some dux [leader] or comes [commander], by chance accident of the Artorian gens but a family long rooted in Britain, should save this island for maybe half a century, and most certainly be thought of as the celestial Arcturus, and by a complex twist of etymology, be known as arctos, “the Bear”’ (David Jones, The Roman Quarry and other Sequences, ed. H. Grisewood and R. Hague, London: Agenda Editions, 1981, 67). 102 Writing around 1857 Thomas Hughes already lamented that ‘so little notice should have been taken of the White Horse by our antiquaries’ (The Scouring of the White Horse, Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1859, 216). Hughes transcribed some verses by a shepherd from Uffington called Job Cork, which relate the same stories about the Hill, St George and Wayland’s Cave that I picked up informally as a child (The Scouring of the White Horse 225–226). This suggests that between c.1800 and my own day such legends as had once circulated were by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution already petrified and attenuated. 103 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 49. 104 Carter, The Native Informant, Absolute Rhythm, 138. 105 Quoted in Keith Beattie, ‘An Ambiguous National Iconography: Family Portrait’, in Humphrey Jennings, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, at https://doi.org/10.7765/9781847792686.00012. Online publication date: 19 July 2013.

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244 Translations 106 Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945–51, London: BBC/Cape, 1985, 209. 107 A.L. Rowse, Times, Persons, Places, Essays in Literature, London: Macmillan, 1965, 3. 108 Richard Jefferies, ‘My Old Village’, in Field and Hedgerow, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 322. 109 Jefferies, ‘My Old Village’, 328. 110 Francis Brett Young, Portrait of a Village, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983, 1937, Author’s Note’. 111 Leticia Ilana Underwood, ‘Poetry as Spatial Art: “Topoemas” by Octavio Paz’, The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 7, issue 1/2, 1990, 125–143, 132. 112 Paul Carter, ‘Involutes’ catalogue entry for Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Involutes, Laminations, 12 fragile environments, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, October 2015. The Stony Rises are a Western District (Victoria) feature associated with the 1830s Gundidjmara campaign of resistance to pastoral invasion known as the the Eumeralla War; ‘Maelstrom’ was one of a number of names given to an environmental art project – also known as ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ proposed for the Thames (see Carter, Turbulence 33–65). 113 Carter, ‘Involutes’ catalogue entry. 114 Terry, ‘Recollections’, 1; Carter, ‘Involutes’ catalogue entry. 115 Carter, ‘Involutes’ catalogue entry. The reference is to Thomas De Quincey, ‘The palimpsest of the human brain’, 1845, Quotidiana, ed. P. Madden, http://essays.quotidiana.org/dequincey/palimpsest_of_the_human_brain/. 116 Paul Carter, Underworlds of Jean du Chas, in Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 207–236, 234–5. 117 Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adrian Notz (eds), Merz World: Processing the Complicated Order, Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2008, 22. 118 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Introduction’, The Conchologist’s First Book, Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington and Haswell, 1839, 17. 119 ‘Contributed’, The Argus, 21 October 1876.

7

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Story lines: creative belonging

Negotiating return to the old country is one thing, but the migrant’s immediate and abiding challenge is to find a place in the new country. The antinomies of old and new can be softened when the phenomenon of multiple migrations is acknowledged; and the obvious, but little remarked, fact that Australian Aboriginal creation stories invariably explain the present form of the environment in terms of journeys begun far elsewhere, is another consideration that brings into question the automatic identification of sovereignty with the identitarian trinity of priority, family and story. In this flexibly applied trinity, priority is not simply chronological but implies a power to sustain oneself at that place. The extension of hospitality assumes that power. Cross-culturally, it is a difficult concept to translate: when the British established their instant village at Sullivan Bay (near present-day Sorrento in Port Phillip Bay) in 1803,1 their object was to pre-empt any French claim on this part of the Australian mainland; respect for Indigenous sovereignty was no part of their agenda. It is likely that the equally instant bloodshed reflected a conflict of resources due to the season at which Collins arrived: Bunurong sovereignty assumed seasonal mobility and the right not to be there as well. The meaning of family appears to be equally untranslatable, Western genealogy having no counterpart in the moiety-based Australian system of social identification. While social scientists, psychologists and theorists of decolonisation uphold the obvious fact that ‘we cannot know ourselves “authentically” unless we are in the world, unless we know others, for our self has no meaning and no existence except in its relationship to Otherness’,2 the edification of the white colonial psyche has depended on the ruthless

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246 Translations suppression of mestizaje, métissage or any form of half-casteism. Finally, in this dismal list of incommensurable meaning alliances, the Bildungsroman romance of personal growth through experience, so easily applied to collective narratives of exploration and colonisation, has no counterpart in Australian Aboriginal storytelling, which, spreading out rhizomatically from the proper naming of relations, produces an operational cosmos organised like a cobweb. Although the colonisation of Australia exported practices of land privatisation and religious conformism (and reformism), invasion was also obviously metaphysical. Political and social fictions underwrote invasion and occupation. The political fiction was that the land was colonised by consensus when, in fact, it recapitulated the land theft of 1066. Referring to the ‘chartered monopolies’ produced by the Enclosure Acts and the legislation against vagrancy, Thomas Paine noted what we have recorded anecdotally in Berkshire: ‘a man coming from another part of the country is hunted from them as if he were a foreign enemy. An Englishman is not free in his own country; every one of those places presents a barrier in his way, and tells him he is not a freeman – that he has no rights.’ 3 Paine traced this state of affairs back to the Norman invasion: ‘The English Government is one of those which arose out of a conquest, and not out of society, and consequently it arose over the people’ 4, and he explained, ‘as by the conquest all the rights of the people or the Nation were absorbed into the hands of the Conqueror, and who added the title of king to that of Conqueror, those same matters which in France are now held as rights in the people, or in the Nation, are held in England as grants from what is called the Crown. The parliament in England, in both its branches, was erected by patents from the descendants of the Conqueror. The House of Commons did not originate as a matter of right in the people to delegate or elect, but as a grant or boon.’ 5 Australia, unilaterally claimed as Crown land, and selectively divided into land grants that could be privately owned, reproduced this model. For this reason, on Paine’s argument that ‘A Constitution is a thing antecedent to a Government’, the Australian Constitution is a legal fiction.6 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos put it more strongly when they describe Australia as ‘a hypothetical nation’ predicated on the myth that the land was originally without owners. This ‘as-ifology’ allows the white occupiers to ‘cover over the question

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“where do you come from?”’ 7 But the falseness of their situation, their ‘being without sovereignty’ haunts them, ‘because the original owners are not only still here but … refuse to act hypothetically’ – and also because of the troubling presence of migrants. Their arrival is disturbing because it reminds white occupiers of the repressed imperatives – ‘name yourself’, ‘come out of your hiding and present yourself’, ‘give a truthful account of your own story’ – proper to any meeting between strangers and hosts.8 On the other hand, by patronising the same migrants, by acting as their reluctant host, the same occupiers can preserve the illusion of legitimacy: unable to cede the land seized in 1788, white Australia ‘has become dependent upon ‘the perpetual-foreigners-within’, those migrants in relation to whom the so-called ‘old Australians’ assert their imagined difference. The assertion, which the authors characterise in terms of ‘a slave morality grounded in negative self-affirmation’ is: ‘you do not come from here. I am not like you, therefore I do belong’.9 The colonial counterpart of centralising labour to the factories was the industrialisation of the soul: missions were factories for conversion. The dissolution of domestic industry broke up the storytelling circles where ‘traditional culture’ thrived. In a well-known letter, dated 2 August 1787, Robert Burns offers a glimpse into what was lost, ‘In my infant and boyish days too, I owed much to an old Maid of my Mother’s, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition. – She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. – This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy.’ 10 The ambivalence Burns feels towards such ‘tales and songs’ is shared by Dawson: recognised as signatures of unceded sovereignty, they are both deplorable and (to the artist) desirable.11 Be that as it may, religious conversion was, like the idea of the colonial subject whose tabula rasa inner landscape had as its external counterpart the doctrine of terra nullius, ontological in the colonial situation. I suppose that for this reason it is not surprising that the argument for conversion can be found nowhere in the missionary literature: the right to convert is instead assumed, often in the same terms as territorial occupation. In the soul count, Aboriginal people counted for nothing until they could be pressed into spiritual service.

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248 Translations On this topic Christ’s advice is unequivocal: ‘His last command to his disciples was that they should preach the Gospel to the whole world.’ 12 Or as George Fox put it, ‘go through the world and be valiant for the Truth upon earth, tread and trample all that is contrary under ….’ 13 Christian evangelising is ontologically colonialist and binarist. ‘He that is not against us is for us’ (Mark 9.40) or ‘He that is not with me is against me’ (Matt. 12.30). As we know, within the Christian metaphysic there is no logical escape from submission to God’s will: everything flows from it and every phenomenon, physical or spiritual, can be assessed in terms of a falling away or an ascent towards. What is unthinkable is any kind of contentment with the present state. ‘The natural life’ that might be thought to enjoy a certain freedom (or sovereignty) becomes within Protestant logic ‘the form of life preserved by God for the fallen world and directed towards justification, redemption and renewal through Christ’.14 Similarly, just as ‘Jesus stands before God as the one who is both obedient and free’, any notion of human freedom (or sovereignty) without responsibility is fallacious: ‘Obedience without freedom is slavery; freedom without obedience is arbitrary self-will’, However, ‘In responsibility both obedience and freedom are realized.’ 15 After this any ‘ingenious theory’ can be entertained – this, for example, taken almost at random from the Presbyterian ‘missionary to the New Hebrides’, John Paton: ‘In Heathendom every true convert becomes at once a Missionary. The changed life, shining out amid the surrounding darkness, is a Gospel in largest Capitals that all can read.’ 16 And so on. So long as non-Indigenous Australians remain transfixed by their own image in the mirror, how can there be meeting? If ‘Being present essentially involves a meeting of wills as bearers of worlds who encounter one another’s presentation as the very pre-condition of their own possibility’, how can white Australia ever belong?17 As Yawuru lawyer and Aboriginal rights activist, Michael Dodson, puts it, ‘Indigenous peoples have rarely come into a genuine relationship with non-Indigenous peoples, because a relationship requires two, not just one and its mirror. Our subjectivities, our aspirations, our ways of seeing and our languages have largely been excluded from the equation, as the colonizing culture plays with itself. It is as if we have been ushered onto a stage to play a drama where the parts have already been written.’ 18 Whether or not you identify as migrant

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or colonist, the ‘as-ifology’ is the same, with the result that, as Australian academic, Indigenous feminist and woman of the Goenpup tribe (Quandamooka nation), Aileen Moreton-Robinson, asserts, the ‘difference between us and the non-Indigenous’ is ‘radical, indeed incommensurable’. And, picking up on the basis of this, that for Aboriginal people ‘the bond between a band and its traditional territory … was fundamentally a religious relation’, as Stanner puts it, ‘The Aborigines conceived it as a union of earth, sky and water on the one hand with spirit, body and personality on the other. A band did not “own” land in the European sense. It and territory were twain; the connection was inextinguishable, the territory inalienable.’19 Moreton-Robinson concludes that ‘This ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share, and which cannot be shared, with the postcolonial subject whose sense of belonging in this place is tied to migrancy’.20 And not only ‘migrancy’ but, as Bruce Pascoe wrote of James Dawson, ownership: as Pascoe laments, ‘If Dawson, one of the few to understand the complicated system of clan boundaries and land obligations, saw no flaw in the imperial principle of forced land usurpation then what hope was there for justice to survive, or even arrive?’ 21 In this context of incommensurable life worlds, Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos propose giving back to ‘migrancy’ a fuller meaning. White Australia’s property-based claim to sovereignty remains empty so long as the question ‘where do you come from’ remains unanswered.22 Without this acknowledgement any claim to be present is hollow. Unless the original emergence is integral to the negotiation of staying-rights, no exchange is possible: mutual recognition, and the associated institutions of acknowledgement of sovereignty, negotiation of passage rights and the acceptance of provisional arrangements are by-passed without the act of emergence. Proper meeting ‘places priority on the epistemic standpoint of recognising the sovereign being of the gathering-we’:23 in contrast with ‘colonial subjectivity’ which has already denied to itself the ‘all-encompassing solidarity of the indeterminate gathering’,24 truly sovereign being recognises being as a gift of the other. It flows, in this case, from the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, ‘an unconditional surrender to the sovereign Indigenous being, as a precondition of everything else, including the possibility of our own emergence as sovereign beings’, and while the terms of this new

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250 Translations political society are not described in detail, it can be assumed that they will have embedded in them critical historical reflection which, if it is to be effective, translates into new expressions of being in place that embark on the collective task of proper naming.25 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos call their philosophical historiography a ‘manifesto’: the constitutional incapacity of white Australia to acknowledge its origins in land (and one might add, soul) theft, and the state of suspended animation that inhibits the indeterminate gathering, demands political action and, as Bruce Pascoe emphasises, honest education about what happened. This is accepted but, if the newly ceded sovereignty is not to become a mirror image of the old, and the incommensurability not to be erased – which Pascoe renders as the irreducible ‘complexity’ that makes ‘the guiltless embrace of true love’ possible26 – what is the work that must be done both before and after a treaty that secures the new order? If ‘migrancy’ and a theory and praxis of appearance are embedded in the new constitution, it is unlikely that the business of reconciliation will ever be finished. Instead, the labour of living together will be recognised in concomitant acts of cultural productions; if the new polity is to be grounded poetically, these works are likely to be dirty, uncensored histories remembered in the relived experience of migration. One preliminary to becoming a journeyman in this joint labour is, in fact, to understand the import of the question: where do you come from? Elsewhere I have told the story of what happened when, in response to this question, and in order to sketch in some childhood landmarks, I mentioned the Uffington White Horse. Christine Peacock, a Torres Strait Islander woman with affiliations through marriage to the Turrbal people, whose country includes Brighton and Margate (suburbs of Brisbane), invited me to be involved in a project called ‘Margate to Margate’. Under the rubric supplied by T.S. Eliot, that ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’, she was proposing a creative research project involving, among others, the London Print Studio, the visual artist and Bigambul descendant, Leah King-Smith, and artists in the immigrant communities of Margate (England). She wanted to introduce me to Mary Graham, a Kombumerri Elder, who was developing the ‘Kummara Conceptual Framework’, a community-based research

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programme emphasising ‘the moral nature of physicality (especially land) and the need for relationality and interconnectedness with all life forces’ but also the ‘dissension’ usually caused ‘between community, clients, practitioners and experts’ when ‘experts from outside the community [seek to] provide the theoretical understanding to solve social problems’ 27 – in effect, a programme for epistemological sovereignty. Christine saw a connection between the place-making principles I had advocated in Alice Springs in the context of an invitation to co-create a new intercultural meeting place and Kumarra philosophy. When we all met, Christine introduced me to Graham by where I came from and I answered as above, whereupon the White Horse was identified as my ‘dreaming’. I was uneasy about this and Christine has suggested that my published account displayed an identification conflict: In asking about his birth place, in fact, I sought to geographically locate him, due to my acquaintance with his origins and in terms of our own connection to country; and noticed he seemed slightly disconcerted when I then proceeded to enquire about ‘pre-historical’ landmarks in that particular country. I surmise he became even a little embarrassed that I should seek to connect him personally to that place when he himself (at that time) had no conscious sense of such attachment. I didn’t pursue the matter, but my brief experience of his birthplace made me sorry that he should not value those special characteristics and essence. In retrospect I was left bewildered by what appeared a defensive response, having assumed he had somewhere a sense of care for his birth place, given his talk, place-making experiences and ideas of ‘the doubled or multiple identity of selves and places’ which he later elaborated in his paper Care at a Distance.28

I think she was right: I did not know how either to own the White Horse or to carry it over. One positive outcome, however, was a deepened understanding of what it might mean to identify with one’s ‘dreaming’. Writing about the processes by which Pintupi woman and visual artist, Tjungkaya Napaltjarri (Linda Syddick), acquires the right to tell her father’s dreaming stories, anthropologist Fred Myers explains, ‘Persons literally come “from” The Dreaming, from named places of ancestral potency; the relationship to these places is understood as central to a person’s identity.’29 Such places acquire their meaning through ritual and mythological practice – or

252 Translations

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active recollection. As Francesca Merlan puts it, ‘However absolute the ‘dreaming’ significance of places may seem, they were also always constituted … within and through the range of practices which linked people with places.’ 30 In claiming my birthright I had to understand it as the basis of going forward (emergence) rather than going back (withdrawal from the social encounter): We grow into it, are initiated into it. In principle, if not in cultural tradition, this place of ancestral potency could, for an explorer freed of T.S. Eliot’s nostalgia for home, be the world at large. That is, the preposition from – which is cognate with the word forward – evokes a to-and-fro, a process of education, or leading out. The power of ‘The Dreaming’ is not that it constantly draws you back to a place but that it gives you a place from which you can go out. You come ‘“from” The Dreaming’, but the emphasis is on the origin of movement’.31

Discussing the myriad of fantasy constructions that can be placed on the White Horse, I left the question of its mythopoetic reinvention in limbo: how does the Prodigal Son release the repressed ‘ancestral potency’ of that spot? The idea that the place is a springboard, a leaping-off place (precisely, in fact, the action that the hill figure, caught mid-stride and mid-flight, represents) offers a clue. When in the 1990s the Oxford Archaeological Unit pushed back the date of the White Horse’s creation to somewhere between 1400 and 600 bce, they also discovered something else: the extraordinary consistency of the form and its location across (possibly) 3,000 years. This could only be attributed to the figure’s periodic cleaning and weeding; while records of scouring only emerge in the eighteenth century, ‘The conclusion seems inescapable that the Horse has been scoured at least once every generation for almost three millennia, if not more.’ 32 Return is a circuit, punctuating a planetary orbit (whose course is irregular, turbulent, subject to incalculably complex local and regional gravitational pulls). The White Horse signifies travelling well, locating sovereignty in the mid-stride. As equipment for migrating, the White Horse also travels. An episode associated with Scarborough Edge, the ‘creative template’ I produced for the redevelopment of an iconic surf beach outside Perth illustrates this point. A New Body, the ‘creative template’ for Yagan Square in central Perth, was widely held to have been useful in finding common ground between Perth’s Aboriginal communities

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and the Western Australian government’s urban redevelopment programme.33 Recognising Noongar sovereignty over the site in question, as well as the implications of Yagan’s murder for future reconciliation procedures, it proposed a story dramaturgy and its symbolic expression that recognised that so long as statehood remained hypothetical, ‘meeting’ (and the ‘meeting place’), and ‘recognising the sovereign being of the gathering-we’, remained processes rather than destinations. Scarborough Edge was, like A New Body, an onion-ringed affair: it responded to a host of heritage and master planning documents and to an extraordinary diversity of community expectations and interests; it proposed a recognisably migrant methodology – ‘In all cultures, stories are associated with journeys: to tell a story is like making a track. A place becomes fully itself when it can tell the story of all the journeys that lead to it and depart from it. Some placemaking gestures are regional but assume new forms in specific places’;34 it incubated public artworks in which Noongar Elders, artists and I collaborated to reinterpret traditional knowledge invested in story. And, in the story I want to tell here, it addressed the challenge of memorialising a local tragedy: the loss that local residents, Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris, had suffered when their children and their children’s grandfather had been killed in the MH17 terrorist attack in the Ukraine in July 2014. As a preliminary to it, I should mention that during an early interview Anthony and Marite had entrusted us with a portfolio of drawings done by the three children, some of which, as I noted shortly after, ‘bore an uncanny resemblance to Waugal, as he is described by Noongar people. Other drawings are reminiscent of the Chinese New Year Dragon. These drawings have remarkable energy and successfully convey a powerful creative force.’ 35 One of the Nyitting or Dreamtime stories identified with the coastal plain north of the Swan River (on whose Indian Ocean edge Scarborough is located) concerns the journey of the Charnok people, ‘a tall spirit man (Waugul) and a tall spirit woman (Junda or Tjunta)’.36 Scarborough (more precisely, the escarpment behind Scarborough Beach) is one ‘episode’ in Tjunta’s journey. Tjunta was a collector of spirit children. She walked northwards across the Swan River, whose serpentine reaches Waugul (the Rainbow Serpent) had made and left her footprint in the form of the cliffs at Blackwall Reach, or Jenalup, ‘The Place Where Feet Make a Track’. Point

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254 Translations Walter nearby, a sandbar that extends over 1 km into the river, is said to be her white flowing hair.37 Collecting spirit children, she continued north where Waugal was creating lakes. Coming to the area known as Joondalup, ‘Place of Long Flowing White Hair’ or ‘Place of white sand’, she ‘realised that what she was doing was wrong; she had to replace the spirit children’. Alternatively: ‘She remembered the spirit man collecting the children and eating them. She had to stop him so she headed south where she last saw him.’ 38 In any case, in her new journey, wherever she scatters the children they turn into rocks; until, reaching Kartakitch (Wave Rock), nearly 350 km east of Perth, she jumped from it into the sky, ‘her hair forming the Milky Way and the spirit children forming the stars’. Aware of the Maslin tragedy, Wadjuk-Ballardong storyteller and elder, Neville Collard, wrote a story interpretation for the bereaved parents. In this story there is a happy family that lives on the boodja (land) not far from the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River). One day, however, the parents go hunting, leaving their three children at the camp: on their return, they find the children have disappeared. They fear one of the bad spirits has taken them; a search is organised but no trace of the children is found. So that night a corroboree (dance) was held: ‘the Nyungar Maarman (men) and Yorgas (women) danced up the good spirit of the coolungs, Tjunta, to help them find the coolungs’. After this, they knew that Tjunta had found the children, and they were safe: she tied them to her long white hair and put them into the Milky Way. Now the three (moe) children can be seen shining and twinkling at Kedalak (night) in the Miki Mikang (moonlight).’39 Now this story and its sequel, the creation of the Tjunta Trail, are documented elsewhere and need no repetition here.40 The story that matters here, in the context of local acts of mutual recognition that mark a creative migrancy, concerns dragons. Moved by Neville Collard’s words, and the gift gesture, the parents shared a story that Marite had written, and drawn, after the plane crash. In her short graphic novel, the state of Everyland is attacked by a Serpent or Snake that opens an underground crack in the earth and emerges from this crevasse to destroy the world. As an armed warrior queen, the writer strives to defend Everyland; but the force of the Snake is too great. In the sequel, the children’s spirits are turned into stars. Everyone was struck by the similarities between the Tjunta story

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and the Everyland story. Their elements and their sequence easily fit Vladimir Propp’s formalist account of the fairytale. If ‘The archetypes are the imperishable elements of the unconscious, but they change their shape continuously’, the transformation of the lost children into stars found in both stories speaks to ‘a fundamental need for synthesis in the psyche’.41 Archetypes might be visual as well as verbal. I had shown the parents the first sketches we had made for the Tjunta Trail. These included depictions of the lost children as stars in the Milky Way: in the Everyland story, the children’s afterlife as stars was drawn in the same way. And, in a further feedback loop, the cruciform symbol we used to symbolise the star was derived from one of the many children’s drawings that had been shared with us on a previous visit. In this particular drawing, three pirouetting figures stood in a line like three arrested spirals. But in storytelling, one story leads to another, often with the explicit purpose of sorting out inconsistencies. And this was where the White Horse came in. I was conscious that the characterisation of the Snake in Everyland was controversial: as Mr Collard pointed out during the meeting, the Snake that in Noongar ancestral time ‘opens an underground crack in the Earth’ is Waugul who not only ‘created the fresh waterways such as the bilya/beelier (river), pinjar (swamps, lakes) and ngamma (waterhole)’, but ‘dominates the earth and the sky and makes the koondarnangor (thunder), babanginy (lightning) and boroong (rain)’.42 Noongar people say, ‘Waakal gave us our knowledge about Nyungar and our relationships, responsibilities and obligations to one another. The Creator gave us our katitjin about the animals, plants, bush medicines, trees, rivers, waterholes, hills, gullies, the stars, moon, sun, rocks and seasons, and their interconnectedness in the web of life.’ 43 Neville felt that the Everyland Snake must be a case of mistaken identity. There is also an uncomfortable resemblance between it and Revelation’s ‘old serpent, called the Devil’.44 We contrasted the snake in Genesis with its Aesculapian counterpart. Then I remembered my story: The White Horse and, underneath it, The Dragon’s Hill. The late Bronze Age hill figure was surely a creator spirit, benevolent like Pirnmeheeal, but he had come, perhaps by toponymic association, to be identified with the Dragon that, according to local legend, St George had slain on the Dragon’s Hill. Our story, like the story in Revelation, concentrates on the dragon’s defeat at the hands of St

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256 Translations George. In a tenth-century charter, the hill is called Eccles Beorh, or ‘Church Barrow’, a name that suggests the christianisation of an older legend (the dragon almost invariably guards a treasure hoard).45 St George’s victory over the dragon was a local instance of the Olympian triumph over the chthonic Titans.46 The White Horse/ dragon was, I suggested, of Waugul’s family: Christian authorities demonised it because they feared its creative powers, an interpretation supported by the local belief that the grassless chalk patches and trails on Dragon’s Hill are where the dying monster’s blood was spilled.47 Perhaps the negative traits of Tjunta are similarly explained. In a less Manichean reading, this consort of Waugul would be a Kali figure.48 Perhaps the Snake in Everyland was susceptible to a similar interpretation: the verbal story of the destroyer was inconsistent with the cartoon representation of the Snake as a powerful elemental deity. Noting that in the story the Serpent emerges before the fatal plane crash (nowhere explicitly mentioned) and destroys the whole of Everyland, and not simply the children, I suggested that the Snake of the story was not personally malevolent but represented an archetypal telluric power whose destructiveness was a by-product of following its own ineluctable path. I pointed out how closely Marite’s Snake drawings resembled the ‘dragons’ or ‘snakes’ drawn by her son, which seemed to convey a turbulent, but positive, energy. Perhaps they were an allegory of danger, of the perilousness of modern existence in a world of irrational violence.49 By such means the inside and the outside of the story interfuse like the paradoxical surfaces of the Moëbius strip: the topology of ‘Everyland’ nests the miniature and the cosmic within travelling lines. Nor is this the end of the story. Commenting on my dragon story and its interpretation, Neville opened up a new line of enquiry. He asked where White Horse Hill and the associated Dragon’s Hill were located in relation to ‘Cheddar Gorge’, a limestone gorge in the Mendip Hills in the county of Somerset. He explained that his English (Collard) ancestors had mainly come to Western Australia from that part of the English West Country. He was curious to find out whether our ancestors were neighbours.50 Brought up in the Christian faith, Neville had an interesting anecdote: was I aware that the once popular hymn, ‘Rock of Ages’ had been composed

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in Cheddar Gorge? Was I aware of the story behind it – that the hymn’s author, Augustus Toplady, had sheltered in ‘the gorge of Burrington Combe’ during a storm (‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me / Let me hide myself in thee!’), and seeing the rain streaming down the rock face had thought of Christ’s suffering on the cross (‘Let the Water and the Blood / From thy riven Side which flow’d / Be of sin the double cure’)?51 Whatever the historical basis of this story, its wide belief suggests that, wherever the poetic seed was planted, tjukurita-like beliefs could grow, even in evangelical England.52 Stories that interpret split rocks or discoloured cliffs as the physical injury or suffering of ancestral beings occur throughout Aboriginal Australia.53 The point of the story was clear: a conception of spirit embodied in environmental dramaturgy – of the relationship between outer space and inner space – was not an exclusively Nyungar possession. It simply required a reorientation to story. In this reorientation, the story is not simply related (told): it implies a relation (the manifestation of energeia). The nature of this relation corresponds to what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the “tensional” character of metaphorical truth’.54 Building on a distinction ‘between two senses of the verb to be, the relational and the existential’, he finds in the ‘impossibility of the literal interpretation’ of ‘is’ concealed an ‘is not’.55 Or, ‘Being-as-means being and not being’.56 It is a conclusion consistent with Aboriginal ontology, where the essence is both resident in a place and able to migrate elsewhere,57 and, in the project of connecting emergence (coming from elsewhere) to co-presencing, integral to the constitutive doubleness of migrant being. According to Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, ‘Reflecting upon our past then does not just call for recognition that historical injustices warrant remedies, whether symbolic or calling for the return of lands, compensation for losses and other forms of redistribution of wealth. In the circumstances it requires an unconditional surrender to the sovereign Indigenous being, as a precondition of everything else, including the possibility of our own emergence as sovereign beings.’ 58 Our openness to encounter would address and reverse the ‘great act of kenosis or emptying out’ that has characterised our colonial being to date leading to a new plenitude where all can cooperate in creating a ‘collective destiny’.59 Is it a criticism of this manifesto to say that it lacks detail? Perhaps the poetics

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258 Translations of the new political order is regarded as a separate issue but, as I have argued, where colonially overlapped jurisdictions harbour incommensurable realities a translator is needed. However, translation cannot remain conceptualised in the Western way as a pragmatic setting of exchange rates in order to minimise the likelihood of significant differences hindering communication. Taking a leaf out of the ‘manifesto’, something deeper and more reflective is needed: ‘Delegation and education do not, however, decolonize governance: to embark on that requires a fundamental collective reorientation and self-examination. We need to map the collision of two culturally remote tectonic plates, two markedly different hyper-stories or poetic ontologies of exchange and value creation.’ 60 The language of exchange that can repair the double hollowing out of colonist and colonial subject is metaphor, the discourse of carrying over whose amalgamation into metaphoric chains produces story. Story is not carried on waves of sense: it is where sense comes from. Craig San Roque makes a similar point when, questioning the native informant-style of anthropological investigation, he wonders what kind of understanding would emerge if all attended not to ‘what this “black man says”, so much, and not what this “white man says” exactly, but what happens between “black and white” as they are speaking’. Such a listening is, he argues, the essence of Tjukurrpa, prescribing ‘perfect solutions to intractable problems.’ 61 An intuition conforming to this insight determines the themes and their treatments of such scripted works as What Is Your Name, Mirror States, Cooee Song and Columbus Echo: Jack 1. Listen to a primitive tale. Char 1. Of OU and EE. Jack 1. (I.e. YOU and ME). Char 1. Of self-sufficient sounds. Jack 1. Sounds as such. Char 1. Not music, not poetry; neither thoughts nor words. Jack 1. Beyond, before these. Char 2. Didst thou not say thou camest hither from beyond the sea? Char 1. Not ‘luminous details’, but the glittering intervals between.62

Progress is not sentimental, agreeably forging a new positivity: the phenomenon of echoic mimicry noticed when people listen to what happens between them allows certain repressed traumas to surface – in a pun profound incommensurabilities can be named:

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Voice 2 We made a hut … Voice 4 They made a hut … Voice 1 In form of a cupola with bark and sods over them. Voice 3 Built with turf. Voice 2 Which is the hair. Voice 4 With a doorway. Voice 1 Which is the orifice of life. Voice 3 They hung it with mirrors. Voice 2 We with skulls. Voice 4 Once over there I woke up in the night. I did not know where I was. I went out. I came back in. My companions said it was a black man’s house. A large one like a white man’s house … I couldn’t tell the difference. Voice 1 Our settlement consisted of … Voice 3 Thirty … Voice 2 Sixty … Voice 1 ‘Mira, miras’ – or so they called them.63

Yet, in the intervals, new arrangements, both physical and metaphysical, emerge, like the unpredicted strangers advancing from the edges of Borges’s mirror. False positions continue to multiply, but they are annotated and, I suppose, in building trust and an awareness of collective destiny, that is something: 2. Near. The sea, the sea. 1. Sang out, as if we had been far inland. 2. They talked much to each other about it. 1. Namuru. 2. To see the way. 1. Na moro. 2. And tomorrow? 1. A more expressive term cannot be found. 2. Namoro. 1. I am coming, you are coming, he, she, it is coming; we are all coming. 2. Goodbye, goodbye. 1. Mr Dawes. 2. North, South, East, West. 1. Where are you going? 2. Patye, goodbye. 1. Goodbye. 2. They have no word for it.64

The death of story associated with conversion to Christianity and its explicit expunging of Indigenous ontology – recall Eduardo

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260 Translations Galeano’s ironic description of colonisation’s nobodies, ‘Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers’ 65 – is the death of storytelling, not the replacement of one narrative repertoire by another but the suffocation of ‘words of power, or powers as words’. ‘No theory. No Tjukurrpa’ as San Roque’s interlocutor, Japaljarri Spencer might say, or, equally bluntly, ‘No place (in mind). No story (in mind). No way of empowering action.’ 66 The irony of Tjukurrpa is that, despite appearances to the contrary, it demands innovation rather than repressing it.67 Innovation is not thematic but performative, the repeated mediation of the story through participation in ceremony – which, in a secular context, approximates to the notion of the ‘indeterminate gathering’. Far from stifling ‘all creative impulse’, as Strehlow thought, ‘tradition’ in ‘the religious and cultural sphere’ was, as the word suggests, precisely the power of handing on what had been received.68 When San Roque notes, ‘Participation in ceremony is participation in the container of shared and developed thinking’,69 he refers to the institution that allows what approaches from the past and what beckons from the future to become co-present in the present, achieving through an act of endlessly renewed creation what Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos want for the community as a whole, ‘only within the unfolding of an anamnesis that has the strength to remember both the past and the future does presencing – “I am, we are” – become possible’. The Cambridge Modernist anthropologist Jane Harrison) associated Tjukurrpa enactments (her ‘totemistic ceremonies’) with daimon worship in ancient Greece. The ‘participation’, or sense of unity with the group life experienced in Intichiuma ceremonies70 corresponded to the Platonic concept of methexis manifested in the spring Dithyramb where the dancers ‘become emotionally one, a true congregation, not a collection of individuals’.71 When I discussed this nearly twenty-five years ago, I placed the emphasis on the choreography of the event; now I would focus on dramaturgy, the relationship between the inside of the performance and the outside – on what Kerényi refers to as ‘the myths of arrival’.72 In a migrant poetics, the migrant’s proper name is where he comes

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from; his story is not an Odyssey, it is the rhapsode’s performance of the story. In other words, the migrant is constituted by their appearance and to be a storyteller is to re-enact that original destiny. Similarly, in The Bacchae, Dionysus repeatedly appears: ‘Appear, appear whatso thy shape or name, / O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, / Lion of Burning Flame, / O God, Beast, Mystery, come!’ As Harrison comments, such shape-shifting is ‘not a power of transformation due to the mature omnipotence of the god; it is with the Dithyrambos from his birth; it is part of his essence as the Twice-Born’.73 Similar translations were at work in the Tjunta transformations. The acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty, reflected in the white recognition of the spiritual landscape inhabited and its power to generate stories able to make sense of suffering, served to recover the poetic reason informing an archetypal Western image (the snake). As a Jungian analyst, San Roque finds, not surprisingly, similarities between ‘Aboriginal and Caucasian/European/Middle Eastern foundation/creation stories’. The travelling hero, encounters with reptilian beings, ‘travels over ground, underground, in the sky’ and always ‘compassionate beings’ who advocate ‘the value of wisdom and care gained from experience’.74 But even without this hypothesis of convergent ‘cultural matrices’, which, as we know, also render Indigenous religions vulnerable to colonisation, often through a binarist inversion of moral values attributed to key figures (witness the demonisation of Pirnmeheeal), a comparable metaphoric intelligence may be allowed, one whose study is the place where new meanings emerge, whose ‘meeting place’ is precisely where different stories miraculously find one another and, in the comparison, common ground. Again, as the where-do-you-come from story illustrates, the matrix underlying the significance attributed to these missed as well as made encounters is the dramaturgy of meeting itself (‘Appear, appear’), storytelling in its own journey from proper naming, to dreaming, to image formation and storytelling (and their actualisation in co-presencing). Perhaps, in the psycho-social progression, the snake-dragon has a double role, as the fertile image of translation and as zoomorphic translator. San Roque hints at this when he characterises the psychic work done in the singing of a story line: ‘the “mountains as snakes” become “snakes as dream”, then “snakes” as dream images assume meanings for men and women, then thoughts,

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262 Translations then strings of thoughts and strings of songs, and then fragments of ceremonial action, which are dreams in action’.75 The enigma of meeting was the theme of Passenger, a public artwork I designed located at seven sites across Yagan Square in Perth (Figures 13 and 14). Originally called ‘G/host’, and inspired by a natural oxide staining I had come across in the Victorian Grampians (Gariwerd) that looked like a human figure, Passenger commemorated a story that ethnographer and social activist Daisy Bates told about her native informant, Fanny Balbuk or Yoreel: ‘Balbuk had been born on Huiroson Island at the Causeway, and from there a straight track had led to the place where once she gathered jilgies and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where the Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. Time and again she was arrested.’ 76 It was not the first time that this story had been told in public, but the novelty of the work was to apply the asterisk principle to Yoreel’s memorialisation, instead of representing her as a positive figure, actualising her passage as the hollow in space left behind so that her absence (and the significance of her appearance) would shine out more strongly. This was the force of the original (proper) name of the work, ‘G/host’, reluctantly given up because the client wanted to minimise any association of the new meeting place with haunting. The host who has been turned into a ghost is the Aboriginal people deprived of their sovereignty: the neutrally named Passenger flattens out the drama of encounter, sidestepping the collision of incommensurable realities. The irony was that, in contrast with earlier presentations of the story, one of the two axes along which the seven episodes of Passenger were oriented followed precisely (as far as we could tell) ‘the straight track to the end’ as Yagan Square, nestled into the western edge of the Perth Central Station stood on the lake edges of Goologoolup, the place where Yoreel once gathered food. In contrast with the western place, Noongar places appear and disappear. ‘For Nyungar, any one place may be called a number of different names by different people at different times of the year. For example, some Nyungar refer to Kings Park as Karra katta or the hill of the spiders, Yongariny

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Figure 13  Paul Carter, ‘Walking Crowd,’ sketch for Passenger. Artline 200 black 0.4 mm sketch 200 × 300 mm, notebook A46a, 108, September 2014.

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264 Translations

Figure 14  Material Thinking, Passenger, Yagan Square, 2017, collage of details. One text (about Noongar woman Fanny Balbuk/Yoreel’s resistance to colonisation) is distributed along two axes through the Yagan Square site. The text makes seven different appearances that articulate the outline of an Ur-figure (the passenger).

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or place for catching kangaroo, Geenunginy Bo or the place for looking a long way and Karlkarniny or by fire place sitting. All of these places are equally correct – it depends on the context in which they are being used, and by whom’.77 Hence ‘Goologoolup’ had multiple meanings. It referred to a time of the year when bulrushes could be harvested and to ‘the place children go where the red clay and the Waakal came down’.78 It alluded to the necklace of swamps and lakes running west–north-west from the Swan River and to the creation story of their formation.79 It signified a seasonal place of meeting and exchange.80 More broadly, as Collard et al. point out, ‘Western cartographic conventions reflect the importance of making boundaries to function as markers to exclude others and demonstrate individual ownership and control. For Nyungar, talking about one place as if it exists in isolation is akin to talking about people as if they exist in isolation from their community. The same place may have many names according to who is using it, for what purpose and at what time of the year. Women and men may have different uses for the same place, or several events may have occurred in a place, resulting in it having several names’.81 To gesture towards this multiplicity of appearances, Passenger respected the distances from which these places came, the journeys that converged there and departed, leaving in their wake the trace of passage in the outline of a passenger. The form of Passenger arose from a personal ‘Wandjina moment’. The reference is to a passage in Sir George Grey’s Expeditions in Western Australia. In March 1838, exploring what he named the Glenelg River in the Kimberley Region, Grey came across rock art galleries featuring what are now called Wandjina figures. The literature surrounding their interpretation is considerable.82 Here, though, the focus is not ethnographic but apparitional; it is the sensation that the stranger might have of being ‘g/hosted’. Grey, in my reading, had been called to account for his presence – summoned, that is, to say where he came from; but the moment passed and with it the chance of participation (approach) became frozen in the distance of representation. At first, ‘I suddenly saw … a most extraordinary figure peering down upon me.’ The sense of being in the presence of the gods was palpable: ‘I was certainly rather surprised at the moment that I first saw this gigantic head and upper part of a body bending over and staring grimly down at me.’ 83 But the moment,

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266 Translations both a solicitation and a warning, passed: breaking eye contact, he resisted the sovereignty of their gaze. Grey instructed his men to survey other caves where paintings might be found, began to sketch and record the images, and what might have been a new beginning dissolved into the picturesque: ‘I sat in the fading light, looking at the beautiful scenery around me … I wondered that so fair a land should only be the abode of savage men; and then I thought of the curious paintings we had this day seen … and wondered how long these things were to be.’ 84 My encounter with a natural figure, an iron oxide stain in the Grampians, was a re-enchantment that broke the spell of the picturesque. In imagining the ghost outline of Fanny Balbuk, I had thought of the great Buddha, carved in high relief into the cliffs behind Bamian in central Afghanistan; of photographs the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault had taken of veiled Moroccan women – but they were too close, too human. To capture the full stature of her defiant humanity she had to come from further away. For her to appear, she had to approach from an infinite distance: to mark this, her ‘face’ would be the shape hollowed out of space by the ‘crozier’ hook of the sculpture. Part of the Wandjina’s enigmatic appeal is that it is mouthless: then, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, the face of Yoreel disappears altogether. Here, in the face of absence, the encounter with the other is foreshadowed, and shown to mirror the stranger’s desire to break out of the isolation and find hospitality. ‘The face resists possession’, Heaton writes about the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, ‘It breaks through the form that would grasp it by inviting me to a relation incommensurable with an exercised power … The grace of the face’s radiance provokes the idea of infinity which is necessary for separation and the Other to break through.’ 85 In Repressed Spaces, I argued that the sculptor Alberto Giacometti had turned Levinas’s individual encounter into a group experience: his iconic compositions of stalking figures (any of the series called The City Square or The Forest) congregationalised the experience of approach from an infinite distance – where ‘people did not succumb to the tyranny of the vanishing point: they turned into gods’.86 Without any pretension to aesthetic equivalence, I can say that the distribution of the different appearances of Passenger across Yagan Square as a ground figure, as silhouettes perforating Corten

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steel cladding, as an anamorphic figure dragged across terraces, as a Wandjina-scale sculpture and as text shadows laminated into glass, had the same poetic pretension. The idea there, as it had been at Victoria Harbour, was to configure the meeting place and its dramaturgy plurally as a reticulation of passages. Paying homage to the predominantly female labour of net and bag weaving – labour that was also an occasion for weaving and reweaving a story87 – I compared the distribution of points to a string figure whose genius is to hold the pattern of propinquity in place by drawing its individual strands as far apart as possible. On this analogy, I emphasised the comparable elasticity and relationality of the ‘creative template’, comparing it to el templar, that instant of timeless stillness when the matador manoeuvres the bull to make the pass, when time, no longer linearised is a vibration extended between two subjects which, if it is to develop (not be broken), involves a subtle and continuous alteration and adjustment called in Spanish acoplamiento and signifying the double mastery of spacing and timing at the heart of any approach that cannot be imagined without the approach of another.88 It may be that this interlaced movement form is an interim discourse of sociability: in advance of the recognition of sovereignty, it traces out comparable cultural matrices; in the aftermath of legal and political recognition, it provides the map of appearances inside whose network co-presencing occurs. A current case in point is the proposal to write a Noongar rail history. The conversation with members of the Noongar community led to an invitation to assist the Western Australia Public Transport Authority in implementing its Aboriginal engagement strategy. Initially, the idea had been to collect ethnographic data for sites in the metropolitan and regional rail network designated for upgrade or new development. We and those participating in interviews quickly focused on the role that Noongar culture and labour had played in the development of the Western Australian Government Railway: the confinement of consultation to evidence of pre-colonial or peri-colonial lifestyles failed to recognise Noongar people as sovereign subjects; rather than perpetuate neo-colonialist stereotypes, they were keen to merge ethnography into sociology and both into storytelling opportunities leading to art. The entanglements are profound and far-reaching. It is the case that major arteries in the WAGR network follow older Noongar lines of communication: bidi or ‘veins’.89 The ‘European pattern of land use was based on

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268 Translations (and modified) the Aboriginal pattern’ by using the same network of water sources linked by tracks.90 Bidi have a particular relationship to the railway: major rail arteries follow older colonial roads, which themselves follow Noongar bidi. Bidi function differently from roads or rail tracks, as they are seasonal, directional and governed by protocols of passage; they are also story lines. To journey in these tracks is to recapitulate routes laid down in the Nyitting (Dreamtime); it is to actualise in human customary practices the spiritual body of the country.91 In this holistic or network sense of place it is logical that the Noongar word for ‘illness’ translates as ‘blocked path’.92 Equally, the impact of railways on Noongar culture has also been complex. Some 2019 respondents emphasised positive aspects of rail employment (regular wages, housing, escape from Department of Native Affairs surveillance, chances to reconnect to Country). Intriguingly, Douglas reported in the late 1960s that the provision of housing leading to semi-permanent dwelling along different sections of the railway helped conserve language: the ‘grandmothers and great-grandmothers’ consulted as ‘custodians of the older and distinctive forms’ all lived at places joined by the Western Australia Government Railways.93 On the other hand, across a number of dialectal regions, the same author reported, ‘Today the people travel in many directions seeking work, visiting relatives, attending funerals, and consciously or unconsciously searching for a community in which they may feel at home.’ 94 But the novelty of what we have agreed to pursue is its methodology: instead of writing a conventional labour history, we want to use the narrative logic of Noongar storytelling. This logic is reticular rather than linear, classifying events associationally not chronologically. In narrative terms, this means that no story is finished; instead, it is handed over or repeated; episodes function doubly, as passages and as synapses. In spatial terms, this means that no place is outside of its being told through story. The act of storytelling registers place as perpetually becoming, where subjects (bodies) are emplaced in relational terms, with and among each other and with Country. As Country is embodied, bodies are carrying and stretching Country as they move.95 This carrying is embodied both materially, in the sense of being carried through the materiality of bodies and their practices across time and space, and narratively – as story carries Country and relations with Country.

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Reticular or network narratives of Country are a recognised feature of traditional Australian Aboriginal philosophies of being in place. As long ago as 1983, Barbara Glowczewski was drawing attention to the reticular nature of Warlbiri historical space: ‘Aboriginal people’s perception of memory as a virtual space–time and the way they project knowledge on a geographical network, both physical and imaginary, was beginning to echo with the network and hyperlink programs of the first computers still in their infancy in those days.’ 96 Glowczewski notes that ‘Non-linear or reticular thinking mostly stresses the fact that there is no centrality to the whole but a multipolar view from each recomposed network within each singularity, a person, a place, a Dreaming, allowing the emergence of meanings and performances, encounters, creations as new original autonomous flows.’ 97 The focus is not on the optimisation of connectivity but on the temporalisation of space: ‘The number of trails between two places is infinite; there are as many itineraries as there are ways to travel’.98 While the philosophical implications of the rhizomatic nature of the world wide web have attracted growing interest, the application of the new ‘horizontality’ of thought (‘a-linear, multiple, spreading out’) to a regional labour history is, so far as we know, without precedent.99 As narrative pathways branch, loop back or cross other paths, one topic or ‘place’ in the narrative forms junctions with other episodes whose depth of meaning grows over time (return visits); progressively, the accumulation of pathways produces an areal or network narrative, one consistent with Country as an act of continuous symbolic re-enactment. The Project explicitly problematises what Rifkin diagnoses as the ‘organization of history around the coordinates of settler occupation’.100 Going back to Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos’s ‘manifesto’, we might ask how a ‘hypothetical nation’ manifests its ghost belonging. While politically and, these authors would say, ontologically, white Australia maintains the colonial status quo through systemic amnesia, what are the symbolic forms that support this alienation? How does the false construction of the collective self manifest itself in, for example, public space? (More radically, we could argue that the derivation of so-called public space from the Crown and the absence of what Paine calls a ‘constitution’, means that public space, too, is a mirage.) Yagan Square is a highly programmed space. It has a 360 degree columnar LED screen and additional LED fields

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270 Translations throughout a canopy located over the upper reaches of the site. It is not a question of inculpating digital screen technology in the perpetuation of colonialist attitudes; nevertheless, as new projections of the public imaginary, populating public space with a community of doubles, ghosts, views and solicitations (advertising), they curiously mirror a haunting that is historical, perhaps foundational. Freud used the term ‘screen memory’ to denote any memory which functions to hide (and to express derivatively) another, typically unconscious, mental content. Freud distinguished between three types of screen memory: those in which a recollection from childhood ‘screens’ or conceals some event contemporary with it, those in which a later recollection stands for a memory of a childhood event, and those in which a childhood recollection represents a later concern – this latter variety Freud termed ‘retrogressive screen memories’.101 It is not necessary to follow this classification in any detail to appreciate its application to public space. As a mechanism of repression, screen memories are an aid to forgetting. But forgetting, as Paul Ricoeur argues, is perhaps the activity closest to ‘public space’.102 This is because forgetting is active as well as passive: screen memories add ‘to the mere substitution of names in forgetting the actual production of false memories, which unbeknown to us, lead us astray’. False memories produce false narratives, and, Ricoeur argues, what happens in the private sphere leads out into the public sphere: ‘forgetting things, screen memories, failed actions take on gigantic proportions on the scale of collective memory, which history alone, and more precisely the history of memory, can bring to light’.103 Ricoeur has in mind the ‘wanting-not-to-know’ of post-Holocaust Europe, where memory worked actively to forget: ‘as a strategy of avoidance, of evasion, of flight, it is an ambiguous form of forgetting, active as much as passive’.104 In a new version of the ‘Vichy syndrome’, official memory deems the past to have been settled: in the manner described in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, it insists on a clarification that ignores the shadows. Obviously, the struggle between remembering and forgetting is greatly intensified when the psychopathological mechanism of the screen goes public. The construction of public memory becomes directly identified with a ‘flight’ from the materiality of the public domain. In this situation, a public artwork commissioned to remember ‘failed actions’ as Passenger was, has no option but to interrogate the

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medium of memory. If screens, physical as well as psychological, are implicated in a historical cover-up, this needs to be exposed. A suite of frames without screens might serve this purpose. An act of recollection mediated through a positive image projected unthinkingly onto a big screen would risk nullifying its effect. Screening the failure to arrive, and to host, it would inscribe forgetting once again into memory. More precisely, it would evade responsibility for having dispossessed the actors of their own story. For the particular function of ‘authorised, imposed, celebrated, commemorative history – of official history’ is ‘to strip the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves’.105

Notes 1 See the Nepean Historical Society narrative, which manages to make no mention whatsoever of the Bunurong people. (See https:// nepeanhistoricalsociety.asn.au/history/first-settlement-1803/.) 2 Wilden, System and Structure, 108. 3 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, London: J.M. Dent, 1941, 52. 4 Paine, Rights of Man, 49. 5 Paine, Rights of Man, 70. 6 Paine, Rights of Man, 48. Or, as Paine writes, ‘the country has never yet regenerated itself, and is therefore without a Constitution’ (49). 7 Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins, Prahran, Victoria: re.press, 2014, 31. 8 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 11. 9 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 14. 10 www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-burns. 11 See the discussion in Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space’, 116–121. 12 London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Christian Faith and Practice in the Experience of the Society of Friends, London: Headley Brothers, 1972, paragraph 381. 13 Christian Faith and Practice in the Experience of the Society of Friends, paragraph 376. 14 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, London: SCM Press Ethics, 1960, 103. 15 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 220–221.

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272 Translations 16 John Paton, John G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1891, 388. 17 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 103. 18 Michael Dodson, ‘The End in the Beginning: Re(de)fining Aboriginality’, in Michelle Grossman (ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003, pp. 25–42, 37. Quoted by Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 103. 19 W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, Melbourne: Black Ink Agenda, 2009, 88. 20 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonising Society’, in S. Ahmed, C. Castada, A.-M. Fortier and M. Sheller (eds), Uprootings/Regroupings: Questions of Postcoloniality, Home and Place, London and New York: Berg, 2003, pp. 23–40. Quoted by Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 7. 21 Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 34. 22 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 13–14. 23 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 36. 24 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 43. 25 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 104. 26 Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 258. 27 Mary Graham, ‘Introduction to Kummara Conceptual Framework: A Discourse on a Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology’, Stronger Indigenous Families Project, Kummara Association, 221 Boundary Street, West End, Qld 4101, 2006, 1–2. 28 Eve Christine Peacock, ‘The Dynamics of Ontological Representation’, PhD, Queensland University of Technology, 2014, 26. The paper she refers to was later published as ‘Care at a Distance: Affiliations to Country in a Global Context’, in M. Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret (eds), Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009: 1–12. The Alice Springs meeting place project is discussed in Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 101–145. 29 Fred Myers, ‘Linda Syddick on Longing’, in Aboriginal Religions in Australia, M. Charlesworth, F. Dussart, H. Morphy (eds), Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005, 171–184, 172.

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30 Cited in Myers, ‘Linda Syddick on Longing’, 172. 31 Carter, ‘Care at a Distance’, 28–29. 32 Philip Schwyzer, ‘The Scouring of the White Horse: Archaeology, Identity, and “Heritage”’, Representations 65, Winter 1999, 42–62, 42. Nowadays, the communal scouring of the Horse has been revived – see Emily Cleaver, ‘Against All Odds, England’s Massive Chalk Horse Has Survived 3,000 Years: Cleaning up the Uffington Horse is the neighborly thing to do’, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 July 2017. 33 When Yagan Square was announced as a winner of the 2020 Urban Land Institute Asia Pacific Awards for Excellence, part of the citation ran: ‘The project was also recognised for its unprecedented level of consultation and collaboration with the traditional landowners, the Whadjuk people, which set a new standard for indigenous consultation and led to a distinctive Creative Template to guide architecture, landscape design, and public art.’ 34 Material Thinking, ‘Scarborough Edge, A Creative Template for the Scarborough Redevelopment Area’, 2015, 1–30, 4. And not only migrant: the focus on Scarborough’s relationship to other places is, of course, integral to Noongar sense of place where ‘the ancestral figures who move across country progress on the site-and-track pattern of the mythical ancestors of traditional Dreaming stories … Nyungar stories are stories of arrivals and departures, of human travels that cover country to take it into walkabout embrace’ (Basil Sansom, ‘The Aboriginal Commonality’, in R.M. Berndt (ed.), Aboriginal Sites, Rights and Resource Development, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1982, 120–121). 35 Material Thinking, ‘Scarborough Creative Template Notes, 2014–2016’, 1–44, 44. Author’s possession. 36 ‘Joondalup, Mooro Boodjar, Indigenous Culture within Mooro Country’. (At www.joondalup.wa.gov.au/Files/Joondalup_Mooro_ Boodjar_Brochure.pdf.) 37 ‘Jenalup and Dyoondalup: Legends and Aboriginal History of Point Walter and Blackwall Reach’. (At www.westernaustraliatravellersguide.com/point-walter-aboriginal-history.html.) 38 ‘Joondalup, Mooro Boodjar, Indigenous Culture within Mooro Country’. ‘In the Victoria Plains district the female woggal was the totem of the families here, and there is a legend that shows her healing one of her human totem kin, and keeping the hostile male woggal from harming him’ (Daisy Bates, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1985, 219–220). This story displays Tjunta as a preserver/destroyer figure. It appears that a proper recognition of the shamanic powers exercised by women in Noongar culture is only just beginning. As noted elsewhere, in 2018, Passenger,

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274 Translations a major public artwork celebrating [Fanny] Balbuk/Yoreel was installed at Yagan Square, Perth. Balbuk was, according to Bates, ‘certainly yogga biderr [a strong or powerful woman]’, but even among the present Nyungar community her campaign against the loss of her country has not earned her the respect she surely deserves (Bates, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, 145–146). Kingsley Palmer’s otherwise well-informed Noongar People, Noongar Land: The Resilience of Aboriginal Culture in the South-West of Western Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016) makes no mention of Tjunta, although offering plentiful information about Wagarl (195–197). Likewise, Collard et al., Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonokurt Nyininy. 39 Neville Collard, ‘Tjunta, the Spirit Woman’, 19 January 2017, 1–3. Author’s possession. 40 Paul Carter, ‘The Tjunta Trail: Cross-Cultural Dramaturgy in Australian Place-Making,’ Dramaturgies of Interweaving: Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World, E. Fischer-Lichte, C. Weiler, T. Jost (eds), London: Routledge, 2021, 1–20. 41 Jane Catherine O’Connor, The Cultural Significance of the Child Star, London: Routledge, 2010, 113, quoting Jung. 42 Elder Joe Walley’s version at www.mandurahcommunitymuseum.org/ downloads%5CIndigenous%20Creation%20Story(1).pdf. 43 Collard et al., Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonookurt Nyininy, 57. 44 There is, of course, an even closer – one might almost say diabolical – resemblance between the serpent/dragon of the Apocalypse that ‘cast out of his mouth water as a flood’ (Rev: 12:15) and the beneficent Waakal. 45 David Nash Ford, ‘Dragon Hill, Archaeological or Natural?’ 2003. At www.berkshirehistory.com/archaeology/dragon_hill.html. 46 Jane Harrison, Themis, A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, London: Merlin Press, 1963, chapter 10 and especially ‘The Olympians Reject Snake-form’ (451). 47 See M. Aurora Lestón Mayo, ‘Tracing the Dragon: A Study of the Origin and Evolution of the Dragon Myth in the History and Literature of the British Isles’, PhD thesis, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2014, 24 and 182. Daisy Bates provides information about woggal (The Native Tribes of Western Australia, 219–221). Even so sympathetic a student of Nyungar culture as G.F. Moore characterises Waugal as an ‘evil spirit’ (Peter Bindon and Ross Chadwick, A Nyoongar Wordlist from the South-West of Western Australia, Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1992, 175). 48 See note 6. Bates notes that Waugul ‘watches over food and other laws, and punishes those who transgress them. The presiding woggal

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of the Bunbury district was blind, “but he could work evil just the same”’ (Bates, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, 219). In this sense Waugal is another preserver/destroyer, his destructive powers unleashed in the cause of preserving the good. 49 Perhaps it could be compared to the dragon that the Geat king Beowulf defeats at the conclusion of that poem, whose wrath, after all, was only aroused because ‘the barrow was plundered’, an allegory of the wages of long-term environmental despoliation. 50 Cheddar Gorge is approximately 110 km south-west of White Horse Hill. 51 The story is usually described as a ‘local legend’. 52 When the tjukurita or creation time finished, ‘The mythical animals had all died, yet everywhere they had lived, or performed any task, hills, creek-beds, water-holes, rocks, even trees and grass, now mark the place’ (Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert, 574). Mountford’s tjukurita corresponds to the Central Australian Tjukurrpa. Jungian analyst Craig San Roque identifies another source of bleeding: ‘Between the Tjukurrpa and the European dream’ there is ‘a region of psychic pain’ (Craig San Roque, ‘Coming to Terms with the Country: Some Incidents on First Meeting Aboriginal Locations and Aboriginal Thoughts’, in M.T. Savio Hooke and S. Akhtar (eds), The Geography of Meanings: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Place, Space, Land, and Dislocation, London: The International Pyschoanalytic Association, 2007, 99–134, 129). 53 See Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert for many illustrated examples. Tindale refers to ‘a red ochre deposit near Piltadi formed from the transformed blood that flowed from the wounds of Wati Pumpul’ (Mountford, Nomads of the Australian Desert, 166, note). Wati Pumpul is described as a creation figure who as he travelled ‘composed songs about any object or incident that attracted his attention’ (165). The geographical reference is to Piltadi Gorge in the Mann Ranges, not Piltadi waterhole in the Petermann Ranges (note 2). 54 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 302. 55 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 293. 56 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 362. 57 As Arrernte Elder and teacher Margaret Kemarre Turner explains, ‘Might be the Ancestors came through from other countries and stopped here on their journey. And they became another tree here, left part of his – what do you call it? – image there. A plant or tree became them as they walked past and became who they are. And then they changed into another one. They might have dropped seeds there and

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276 Translations other trees came out of those Ancestors before they travelled on’ (Iwenhe Tyerrtye, What it Means to be an Aboriginal Person, Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010, 154). 58 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 104. 59 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 32. 60 Carter, Decolonising Governance, 209. 61 San Roque, ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 151–152. Note 1 on page 169 summarises the history and orthography of Tjukurrpa. 62 Paul Carter, Cooee Song, in Absolute Rhythm: Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 56–74, 66. 63 Carter, Mirror States, in The Sound In-Between, 107. 64 Paul Carter, The Calling to Come, in Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 150–164, 164. 65 Eduardo Galeano, ‘Nobodies/1’, The Book of Embraces, trans. C. Belfrage, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. 66 San Roque, ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 165. I don’t want to decontextualise these aphorisms too much. They arise in a psychoanalytically nuanced response to the problem of alcohol sickness in Central Australian Aboriginal communities and the call to white people to identify the ‘Tjukurrpa’ in white culture that accounts for the creation of alcohol, and therefore its control. However, the recognition of the mutuality of story and place and of storytelling as place-making is more generally applicable. 67 The view that Strehlow expressed – ‘the thoroughness of their forefathers’ in commemorating in story and verse the features of the Central Australian landscape had left the present-day Aranda ‘not a single unoccupied scene which they could fill with the creatures of their own imagination’ – being decisively repudiated by the Aboriginal art movements emerging since the early 1970s. See Carter, The Lie of the Land, 103. 68 Strehlow, Aranda Traditions, 6. Strehlow persisted in this now highly unpopular view, see Songs of Central Australia, 704. 69 San Roque, ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 164. 70 Harrison, Themis, 124, 125. 71 Harrison, Themis, 45–46. Note that San Roque refers in his article to ‘The Sugarman Project’, ‘a series of intercultural community performance events’ that involved rewriting the Dionysus myth in

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a central desert context (‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 170, note 5). 72 Carl Kerényi, Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, 129–188. 73 Harrison, Themis, 129–130, quoting The Bacchae, ll. 1259–61 (trans. Gilbert Murray). The second or New Birth is the function of initiation and ‘It is against this rite of the New Birth that Pentheus blasphemes’, 38. 74 San Roque, ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 161. 75 San Roque, ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, 164. 76 Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, London: John Murray, 1957, 70. 77 Collard et al., Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonokurt Nyininy, 41. 78 ‘Goologoolup NAIDOC Screenings Perth Cultural Centre’, 4 July 2019. (At http://xpressmag.com.au/goologoolup-naidoc-screenings-perthcultural-centre/.) 79 ‘The mythology of Galup links it with Derbal Yerrigan (Swan River) mythology. The great serpent Waugal is said to have formed Galup by deviating from his route and rising from the ground at that point. On re-entering the ground, Waugul cut a subterranean tunnel from the Lake to Melville Water at Goonininup (west of Point Lewis) – an underground waterway which, according to tradition, still exists today’ (Len Collard, G. Revell, D. Palmer and L. Leonard, ‘Noongar Placenames Associated with the Goordandalup (Crawley Bay) Area of the Gabee Derbalor Derbal Yaragan Beloo (Swan River)’, at https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Monger). 80 ‘As regards Galup: … groups camped regularly near the lakes where fresh drinking water, and game such as wildfowl, fish, crayfish, turtles, frogs and edible reeds, were available. Kangaroos and other animals were hunted through the bushland. Contact was maintained between groups through the mandjar, or fair, held at Galup where people met to barter a wide range of goods’ (H. Bekle, ‘The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems’, Western Geographer, 5, nos 1 and 2, June 1981, 21). Goologoolup, known to the settlers as Lake Kingsford, was drained from 1833 when Samuel Kingsford built a gutter down the slope to the riverfront where he used the weight of the run-off to power his grain mill’ (Ciaran Lynch, ‘Mandurah and the Pinjarra Aborigines’, 10 January 2018. At www.theviewfrommountclarence.com/?p=33482). Len Collard and Tod Jones, 2014, This City is Wadjuk Country, Aboriginal Heritage in the City of Perth Before 1829, Perth, WA: City of Perth, 2014.

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278 Translations 81 Collard et al., Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonokurt Nyininy, 41. 82 See I.M. Crawford, The Art of the Wandjina, Aboriginal Cave Paintings in Kimberley, Western Australia, London: Oxford University Press, 1968; David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro, Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books, 2001; Kim Akerman, Wanjina, Notes on Some Iconic Ancestral Beings of the Northern Kimberley, Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press, 2016; also Carter, Amplifications, 184–185. 83 Sir George Grey, 1841. Journals of Two Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia, London: T. & W. Boone, 1841, 2 vols, vol. 2, 201–202. 84 Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions, 207. 85 John Heaton, ‘The Other and Psychotherapy’, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas, London: Routledge, 1988, 9. See also Carter, Repressed Spaces, 190. 86 Carter, Repressed Spaces, 197. 87 On the principle of not having art but handicrafts, Aunty Veronica Brodie, a Njarrinderjeri elder living at Largs Bay in Adelaide, recalled in 2002 watching her grandmother weave at Ralcan when she was a child. She said: ‘We could yarn with her while she wove but I didn’t learn from her. By the time I was ready to learn I couldn’t because the government was stopping our culture.’ (Kay Lawrence, ‘Encounter Lecture Series – Weaving an encounter between the Njarrinderjeri, the British and the French’, www.unisa.edu.au/connect/Hawke-Centre/ Relive-our-events/2002-Calendar/Encounters-cultural-and-scientificlegacies-and-visions/Encounter-lecture-series—Weaving-an-encounterbetween-the-Njarrinderjeri-the-British-and-the-French/.) 88 See Georges Didier-Hubermann, Le danseur des solitudes, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2006, 145, and Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 344–345. 89 George Fletcher Moore, Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia, and also a Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines. London: M. Walbrook. Facsimile edition published in 1978 by Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 8. 90 Debra Hughes-Hallett, Indigenous History of the Swan and Canning Rivers, a project with the Swan River Trust. At https://parks.dpaw.wa.gov.au/ sites/default/files/downloads/parks/Indigenous%20history%22of%20 the%20Swan%20and%20Canning%20rivers.pdf, 20; see also Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Hearth, Canberra: AIAS, 1979, 67–71; George Seddon, Sense of Place, Melbourne, Bloomings Books, 2004, 189. 91 Bates, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, 48.

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92 Bindon and Chadwick, A Nyoongar Wordlist from the South-West of Australia, 13. 93 Wilfrid H. Douglas, The Aboriginal Languages of the South-West of Australia, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976, 8. 94 Douglas, The Aboriginal Languages of the South-West of Australia, 7. 95 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction Locations of Engagement in the First World’, in A. Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Critical Indigenous Studies, University of Arizona Press, 2016, 5. 96 Barbara Glowczewski, Lines and Criss-crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives, 2019. (At: www.comitedufilmethnographique. com/barbara-glowczewski/.) 97 Glowczewski, Lines and Criss-crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives. 98 Barbara Glowczewski, Returning Indigenous Knowledge in Central Australia: ‘this CD-ROM brings everybody to the mind’. http:// eprints.jcu.edu.au/7621/. ISBN 0–85575–489–3. Papers from AIATSIS Indigenous Studies Conference, September 2001. In ‘The Power of Knowledge, the Resonance of Tradition’, 18–20 September, Canberra, ACT, Australia, 145. 99 Nasrullah Mambrol, ‘The Philosophical Concept of Rhizome’, Literary Theory & Criticism, 26 April 2017. At https://literariness.org/2017/04/26/ the-philosophical-concept-of-rhizome/. 100 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-determination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, 1. 101 David L. Smith, ‘The Mirror Image of the Present: Freud’s Theory of Retrogressive Screen Memories’, Psychoanalytische Perspecktieven, 2000, 39: 7–29. 102 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 447. 103 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 447–448. 104 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 449. 105 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 448.

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Silenced relations: migrant poetics

Having written a creative history in terms of ethnographic encounters, I realised that the experience that linked them, migration, had a poetic power of its own. The repeated discovery that aspects of the migrant condition had been anticipated in earlier colonial exchanges between white colonists and Aboriginal people was more than a matter of chance: it was a recognition that something occluded in those early encounters was happening again in public discourse; again, the phenomenon of arrival from outside was nowhere to be found in white Australia’s political theory and practice. In Hannah Arendt’s account of the human condition, the power to appear ‘precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organised’.1 Appearance happens twice over, generationally and socio-politically: first, by ‘natality’ or birth that has inherent in it ‘the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’,2 and, second, by ‘speech and action’ (‘With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth’).3 A feature of both first and second births is that they disturb the status quo: their actors break in and upset conventional expectations in unpredictable ways. Exhibiting the ‘character of startling unexpectedness’, it can be said of this ‘somebody who is unique … that nobody was there before’.4 Arendt identifies this outsider as the stranger: political activity involves ‘the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers’.5 It wouldn’t be hard to apply Arendt’s analysis to the migrant – except that in the Australia where I arrived in the 1980s neither the migrant nor Indigenous people (past or present) made a political appearance. If, as has already been noted, ‘Indigenous peoples have

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rarely come into a genuine relationship with non-Indigenous peoples, because a relationship requires two, not just one and its mirror. Our subjectivities, our aspirations, our ways of seeing and our languages have largely been excluded from the equation, as the colonizing culture plays with itself’, then Arendt’s optimistic formulation, ‘The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action’, may never have applied in colonised Australia.6 Parts of white Australia inhabited a mirror state, in which the image of the migrant was also refused self-actualisation. Another corollary of this alienation, associated with an atrophied space of appearance and ‘the withering of common sense’, is a fear of the stranger as alien. When Adorno complained that the former life of emigrants is annulled, he referred to the sensation of the migrant who, unable to enter the space of appearance, finds their original appearance erased: instead of somebody, nobody was born. By this route of reflections, I could see that the terms in which I had framed my enquiry existed chiasmatically and were entangled. To appear at all it was necessary to invent a host able to form a relationship; without this creative ethnography, the human encounter was, for the migrant, impossible. It is little wonder that I became interested in orphans, subjects without genealogies or proper names, whose stories could not lean on parentage or place of origin but had to be improvised on the spot, more than fulfilling William James’s dictum that ‘Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind’.7 But the corollory of this observation is equally true: there are as many ‘nobodies’ as there are individuals who fail to recognise us. When at the recently established Ramahyuck mission (on the shores of Lake Wellington, Gippsland, Victoria) the Moravian missionary, Friedrich August Hagenauer, asked his native informants about local Aboriginal groups, he learnt that they called the Bushy Park mob ‘nobodies or nothings’. Relating this, Sue Caroline Wesson explains, ‘The greatest insult that one Aboriginal person could bestow upon another (before being introduced to the English repertoire) was to call him or her an orphan. The ordinary word used for ‘orphan’ is Yetherun, but Baia-quung, which also has that meaning, is one of the most offensive terms which can be applied to a Kurnai, and in the old times would require to be expiated by spear-throwing, or

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282 Translations recourse to other weapons’.8 A nobody was one who had no country: ‘Therefore’, she adds, ‘those identifying themselves as nobodies can be imagined to have been experiencing dislocation, disorientation and deep grief.’ 9 There was, of course, another side to this story. Phillip Pepper, descendant of a famous Nathaniel Pepper, an early Christian convert of the Wotjobaluk people, wrote that when his people were forced to move down to Ramahyuck, ‘They kept their tribal names amongst themselves’. Further, there were names inside names: ‘when we was kids’, Pepper recalls, ‘we used to go up to listen to the old blokes … and they used their names to each other’, but, he adds, ‘They wouldn’t be their real tribal name ’cos they never told that – it was a secret.’ 10 A spectrum of social identities was in play, part of whose function was to baffle amalgamation and to keep open the possibility of repossession. Any naming under unequal power relations was a form of un-naming, and the sharpest line of resistance was an echoic mimicry infused with bitter irony. This is the force of the variations played on the word ‘Mac’ in Cooee Song – ‘Call him Mac … he’d call you “Mac”: d’you remember?’ 11 Concealed inside this reference to one of Jowley’s social performances is a play on the resemblance between the Scottish and Irish Gaelic prefix meaning ‘son of’ and a Kurnai word rendered as ‘Mack’ by the Lake Tyers missionary John Bulmer, whose meaning is vague but affirmative.12 But concealed inside this is a reference to ‘Mr Mac’ of ‘Bushy Park’, who established his pastoral station inland from Lake Wellington in the wake of a campaign he orchestrated to rid the district of its Indigenous inhabitants.13 Broaching the topic of lost subjects understandably offends those wedded to what Jennifer Rutherford calls ‘the national romance of Australia Fair’. As she notes, this fantasy of autochthonous, and unsullied, origins – which, I should say, can be traced back to an etymology claiming that the word island is cognate with the root meaning to inhabit, found in the preface to Arthur Phillip’s account of the first years of the colony – projects onto the migrant the colonist’s deep-rooted fear of illegitimacy. Recalling the exclusion of her Aboriginal Aunt Thursa from the family myth circulating in her 1960s Australian childhood, Rutherford links it to the production of nostalgia, asking: ‘is this nostalgia for an immaculate past that never was there, that always carried it with the signs of its imminent

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destruction, logically connected to the events that were there and that did happen?’ Rutherford refers here to the stolen generations – ‘a systematic nation-wide attempt at the dispersal and dissolution of the Aboriginal children of Australia – or what we might call today “ethnic cleansing”’. ‘Is this movement on my part’, she asks, ‘to create a hallowed space in which the family romance can be installed intact, any different from the greater tendency, the collective tendency of white Australia, to install intact the national romance of Australia Fair?’ Later, Rutherford finds that even the repressed memory was nostalgic, an act of forgetting: Aunt Thursa wasn’t Aboriginal but she did have an Aboriginal aunt – Aunty Myrtle, married to her favourite great uncle: ‘In a family whose stories speak of dislocation, the loss of the family farm and village, migration to Australia, resettlement in the non-descript northern coal-fields, and of lives spent “down-pit”, my uncle provided me with an idealised point of resistance … He was my “good”, an imaginary point of belonging that anchored me in history … Of his Aboriginal wife, I have no memory’. Why is this? Why does her uncle’s migrant experience of dismemberment and rememberment have to be forgotten? Reflecting on ‘the pervasiveness of the fantasy-structure of the Australian Good’, Rutherford argues that this fantasy ‘is inculcated in every generation of immigrants. It is the one unalterable, untouchable fragment of Australianness that multiculturalism must not sully’.14 Here is a genealogy likely to breed a new race of orphans. In Rutherford’s scenario, the migrant experiences a double nostalgia: if born-and-bred Australians already construct their pasts nostalgically by leaving out the events that did happen, then migrants, inducted into this nostalgia in which they never shared (because they were not here), can only experience it nostalgically, as the family romance they lacked. The migrant learns to mimic white settler nostalgia; at the same time, as the other of the Australian’s family romance, as the gauche intruder (to borrow Rutherford’s phrase) she or he threatens the whiteness of the myth. If the threat is internalised, it can be construed as justifying the implicit master–slave relationship: as ‘the perpetual foreigner within’, migrants, who are never white enough, serve to shore up the myth of an immaculately conceived but hospitable sovereign nation.15 And this has a curious corollary, fitting out Indigenous Australians with a future genealogy in denial

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284 Translations of the one that the law denies: ‘This means that Indigenous Australians must become Australian, like the immigrants. In claiming “we are one […] we are Australian” white Australia at once conflates the ontology of whiteness with knowledge of the question of origins – we know where we come from – and establishes the dependence of the conditions of Indigenous sovereign/Australian being on an epistemological formulation of the terms of access to whiteness’.16 As typical expressions of colonial state bad faith, the further intricacies of this mirror-state psychology need not be pursued here. The less travelled path concerns the way in which advocates of Aboriginal sovereignty recognition deploy the same racist tactics, with the result that within their own narratives of dispossession and repossession an entire class of ancestors fails to gain recognition. The figure of ‘Jowley’, who features extensively in my book Ground Truthing, is of this type,17 but a more recent case in point was a leading Indigenous opera singer’s response to my expression of interest in a figure whom James Dawson refers to as ‘the White Lady’: cutting me off, she remarked that, unless I could refer to her by her proper Aboriginal name, she had no interest in hearing more. Aside from invoking an anthropological myth (the proper name), I was struck by the ease with which an entire human heritage could, on the basis of a supposed mal-pronunciation, be wiped out. The reference here is to a passage in Australian Aborigines concerning a certain ‘clever old witch’: ‘The aborigines had among them sorcerers and doctors, whom they believed to possess supernatural powers. In the Kolor tribe there was a sorceress well known in the Western district under the name of White Lady, who was the widow of the chief, and whose supernatural influence was much dreaded by all.18 According to Dawson, ‘This cunning woman possessed such power over the minds of her tribe that anything she fancied was at once given to her.’ 19 Referring to her as ‘This clever old witch’, Dawson assimilates the White Lady to a curious class of nobodies, explaining: ‘Witches always appear in the form of an old woman and are called kuin’gnat yambateetch, meaning “solitary”, or “wandering by themselves”. No one knows where they come from or where they go to; and they are seldom seen unless at great meetings … They belong to no tribe and have no friends; and, as everyone runs away on their approach, they neither speak to anyone nor are spoken to.’ 20 I say ‘nobodies’ ironically: as I have noted,

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the cosmic powers attributed to the White Lady21 identify her as a member of the sisterhood that includes the Irish Cailleach Bhearra ‘whose powers and activities have resulted in the shapes of hills, the courses of rivers, the location of islands and the presence in the landscape of numerous natural features’.22 In classifying the White Lady as a wandering witch, Dawson unwittingly cast her adrift from her people as, from other information he supplies, she was clearly an honoured figure within the Kolor (or Mount Rouse) clan of the Djab Wurrung people.23 It seems likely that the White Lady was the widow of ‘Tuurap Warneen’, ‘chief of the Mount Kolor tribe’, – ‘so celebrated was he for his supernatural powers, and for the cure of diseases, that people of various tribes came from a great distance to consult him’.24 Dawson reports that the White Lady appeared ‘On occasions of ceremony’ attended by a pole bearer. The pole (which resembled a ‘vaulting-pole’) ‘was dressed up with feathers of various colours and surmounted by a bunch of the webs of the wing feathers of the white cockatoo’.25 It seems reasonable to connect this information with Dawson’s remark that at great meetings Tuurap Warneen distinguished himself from others ‘by having his face painted red, with white streaks under his eyes, and his brow-band adorned with a quill father of the turkey bustard, or with the crest of a white cockatoo’.26 This is surely remarkable detail, yet my amateur ethnographic browsings have yet to find any discussion of this figure, any claim on her memory, any acknowledgement, indeed, of her significance. But perhaps we should not be surprised: her domesticated equivalent is that class of native informants among whom we find, mainly unidentified, Mary Sheridan, Betsy Davidson and Ann Tye.27 Not the least remarkable aspect of the White Lady is her whiteness, a phenomenon that in our context evokes a distinctively colonial idea complex.28 Colonial writers widely reported the Aboriginal belief that the whites were revenants, ghosts of their own ancestors. Pale-faced, perhaps stricken by what they had witnessed on ‘the other side’, in any case, as wraiths without substance, they were mysteriously able to dissolve divisions. Priestly, robed in white, they discoursed with the unseen. Dawson’s White Lady oddly overlaps with the remarkably persistent ‘legend of the White Woman of Gipps Land’, which, as Julie Carr notes, drawing on Peter Gardner, may have had as its ‘end’ ‘the destruction of the Kurnai’:29 Angus

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286 Translations McMillan of Bushy Park was the originator of the rumour that Gippsland Aborigines were holding a white woman captive, and, in our time of ‘fake news’, it is hard not to see the story as creating the necessary Maiden whose salvation justified land theft and orchestrated murder.30 By association, the epithet of purity can be transferred to the aggressor; in a similar way St George, the dragonslayer, is elevated in his role by association with the White Horse. Carr rightly observes, ‘Like the rumoured fabulous beasts, bunyips, and apocryphal creatures reported in the Port Phillip papers in the early to mid-1840s, the White Woman figure was a manifestation of the fears and fantasies of emigrants coming to terms with life in an unfamiliar country’.31 An eco-feminist reading might take this much further. In line with the Cailleach’s identification in traditional cosmology with the personification, in divine female form, of the physical landscape within which human life is lived and also of the cosmic forces at work in that landscape’,32 isn’t the White Woman the same power that that the East Gippsland poet Nellie Clerk recognises in the Mountain Ashes: ‘How fair gleam at eve the white branches, / Smooth as round limbs of a maid’?33 As we have noted, the bunyip persists as a figure of enviable environmental fluency whose discourse remains foreign. So much of this group miasma, this misty investment of place with a haunting in advance of its inhabitation, suggests the séance drama played out in Light. Commenting on the belief of the Gippsland Kurnai, that their sorcerer or Birraark could communicate with ghosts, and that a man’s own ancestral ghosts visited him in dreams, William Howitt, reflected, ‘We should be loath to reproach him with superstition when we reflect upon the extraordinary resemblance between the proceedings of the Birraark and the proceedings even now taking place in the midst of our highest civilization at “spirit seances”.’ 34 Such proceedings persist, as transpires in Mirror States where the architect’s vision for Rialto’s twinned mirror towers coexists with newspaper reports that ‘More people than ever are seeing ghosts – especially the young and the jobless who try to look into the future.’ 35 Dirty art comes out of these prepersonal identifications, new families generically as well as genealogically. Thematically, figures like Jowley or the White Lady, or Patyegarang or Kalloongoo aka Charlotte form a kind of minimum visibile: approaching from the

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greatest distance, because of their near erasure from the white historical record, they loom up larger (cloud-like) than those located nearer in the migrant’s psycho-historical landscape. Their remoteness suggests the suspension of legitimate origins in favour of appearances and beginnings. As for the future predicated on their arrival, it is not another projection maintaining the hypothetical sovereignty of the present state (assimilation to the image of the stranger gratefully welcomed like the Prodigal Son) but involves an assumption of doubleness that is not, to borrow James Hillman’s distinction, duplicitous. Like the artist promoted by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, the new subject carries their landing places with them and in the mid-stride of encounter repeatedly hears in the call to come the hospitality of distance.36 In that migrant anti-novel, Baroque Memories, where the barest transcription of migrant stories told me interfolds with a personal experience of the minimum visibile – a street view in the southern Italian town of Lecce and the impression of a face in a doorway whose interrogative summons could not be refused – the character of Doctor Duende (physician of migrant nostalgia) discovers the entire history of the migrant condition in the changing significance of the white façade opposite the house in Brunswick (Melbourne) where he lives. Its neo-Baroque ornament recalls the public architectural detail of his home province – a strange and uncanny doubling. After projections as multiple and metamorphic as cloud shadows, he reaches a point of reconciliation, where image and substance fuse: ‘All the while the white façade went on glowing. There was nothing behind its luminous presence. It carried no message of comfort. It was not inclined to lean over and kiss his brow. It was not a breast. It was not his white-haired grandfather. It was not a photograph. It had nothing to do with him. It walked a mile with him out of sheer good will.’ Here is psychology as ethnography and both as a new historically self-conscious phenomenology – because the conclusion (‘For the first (and last) time in his life Doctor Duende knew what it meant to feel at home’) is not naive: it should be twinned with another episode where the student of the inventor of the camera profonda,37 M.E. Grazioni, describes attending a slide show. Instead of seeing the projected images, she sees the surface, the suspended sheet, where they are projected … ‘a crowsfoot of wrinkles and its mirror image perched equidistant to left and right of a valley. They looked

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288 Translations like hands pressed against a wall. Yet other parts resembled crumpled suits of clothes, as if hastily buried men and women were coming to light.’ 38 The creative practice associated with this congregation of dream figures is dirty, mingling practices, getting its hands soiled in the ghosting of places, through invention or rearrangement imposing the dramaturgy of dust on apparently orthogonal perspectives; here meeting retrieves its prehistory of encounter, the potential of missed opportunities in the gap that remains wherever recognition is withheld (or confused with assimilation). An illustration of these truths is The Pipes, an LED and audio-installation created for a new ‘meeting place’ in the suburb of Prahran (Melbourne), which opened to the public in December 2019.39 Physically, the new space resembles an elongated amphitheatre with entrances at the four corners; there is a mixture of formal and informal sloping landscapes and tiered seating and a focal point open for public events. At each of the entrances seven 11 metre poles are found, incorporated into them pencil-shaped LED screens and concealed loudspeakers. The symbolic associations of these Klein-blue slender columns were deliberately held back: I called them ‘groves’ and conceptualised the soundscapes and moving imagery as an ‘eloquent forest’ – but such comparisons hid an anthropomorphic resonance as I saw a resemblance between our brooding columns and the stalking figures Giacometti used to evoke the feeling of the meeting place, whose mise-en-scène he visualised in terms of a clearing in a pine forest (Figure 15), There was a secondary resemblance: I imagined our twenty-eight pipes, whose chamfered summits and tapered bases also suggested baroque organ pipes, facing each other across the square doubling the human crowd, their incessant sub-vocal, almost musical murmur, drifting between street and shore, avian and human calls, and the incessantly migrating, forming and reforming imagery subliminally recalling fragmentary details derived from the ephemera of the neighbourhood. These produced an echo in advance, as it were, of the live performances to come, an Ur-atmosphere, if you will, supporting identifications that were distinctively public, belonging to the group rather than any individual. But Translations is not a history of creative intentions; it is a creative ethnography attempting to map the unconscious ground of decisions made and meanings

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Figure 15  Ramus and Material Thinking, The Pipes, Prahran Square, Melbourne, 2020. View of the south-west ‘grove’. The original proposal for The Pipes described the creation of an ‘eloquent forest’. The word ‘forest’ means ‘the open’ and the word is connected to ‘forum’, the Roman place of oratory or public speaking.

found; and, in this context, the key association concerns the already mentioned figure of Kalloongoo, not in her representation but in her mocking refusal to appear. As far as I am aware, pretty much everything known about Kalloongoo (aka Sarah, Charlotte) is found in Rob Amery’s 1996 article, ‘Kaurna in Tasmania, a case of mistaken identity’.40 In 1990, when I wrote Cooee Song, in which the figure of ‘Charlotte’ appears, I relied on the account of her life recorded by George Augustus Robinson in his Flinders Island (Bass Strait) journals.41 Charlotte

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290 Translations had been ‘forcibly taken from her country by a sealer’,42 physically and sexually abused on Kangaroo island, kidnapped again, taken to another island, abandoned, one of her children stolen from her – all this by the time she was twenty years old. In 1839, Robinson was appointed to a new Aboriginal Protector position in the recently founded Port Phillip settlement (Melbourne) across Bass Strait. Kalloongoo, together with a number of Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors of what had become in effect a death camp, sailed with him. It is likely that she continued to perform domestic duties at Robinson’s new establishment on the Yarra River43: ‘She was last seen with the famous Truganini at Point Nepean, on Port Phillip Bay, in Victoria in 1842.’ 44 The names ‘Charlotte’ and ‘Sarah’, while applied generically, travelled, once adopted in family lines. However, the way these and other common English names populate the cross-cultural world of Bass Straits suggests a different way of constellating time and place and rationalising irrational violence.45 For example, in The Aborigines of Victoria, Brough Smyth reproduced a story about ‘a lubra called Charlotte, who had been taken away off the coast when a girl by a party of sealers, and was living with a man named Manson on an island called St Peter’s, about fifty miles from Coffin’s Bay’. To a migrant ear these strangely poetic names suggested an alternative constellation of sense-making or, perhaps, the Chinese Whispers habit of hearsay to license the plausible invention of new stories, families and journeys. In any case, on another Odyssean occasion this Charlotte was ‘proceeding in a boat on a sailing expedition to another island, with her man, her two children, and another white man named Jackson, when the boat was upset by a sudden squall, and sank’.46 And this incident, and its sequel, became the central episode of Cooee Song.47 When I came to consider the acoustic environment that might be created at Cato (later renamed Prahran) Square, I remembered Cooee Song. The call, ‘cooee’, which provides a kind of choral accompaniment to the Charlotte/Jackson story, and which, in a different form, shapes the dialogue between Dawes and Patyegarang in The Calling to Come, exemplified a kind of prelingual or apostrophic vocalisation that captured the primary experience of appearance; as the prequel to mutual encounter, soliciting hospitality in a hostile environment, it gave the vocal measure of public space. I imagined ‘cooees’ arcing

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like criss-crossing fusillades of spears across the new agora; the geometry of ‘the celestial creole’ invoked in the final lines of Cooee Song would be identical with ‘the body of the atmosphere … full of infinite pyramids’, where the organ of sense was not the eye but the ear. The ‘creative template’ developed for Cato Square confirmed the foundational importance of the word-sound in this part of Melbourne, subsequently rationalised under the local government jurisdiction of the City of Stonnington.48 Mapped by creeks, our site, anciently a seasonal wetland (and more anciently a maritime littoral), drained by major and minor creeks into the Yarra at the spot where Robinson had built his house, where the original Aboriginal Mission Reserve had been sited and where Charlotte presumably lived and worked. By water lines these colonial callings to come (and to listen again) were producing echolocations within the positivist urbanscape. There were side effects. I have mentioned lost subjects but there are also lost places. One of these was Gardiners Creek, forming the northern boundary of our local government unit. Around 1840 self-styled botanist and ethnolinguist Daniel Bunce was taken by leading Wurundjeri and Bunurong Elders on an ‘excursion’ to the Dandenongs; they travelled via Gardiners Creek because this riverine corridor was shared country; later the journey intended bending south-east towards the present suburb of Springvale. During this trip, Bunce claimed to have collected an extensive Aboriginal wordlist.49 Publication of the shocking reactions I experienced when I tabled Bunce’s narrative (hitherto unknown to the parties in question) will have to be postponed to politically less volatile times. Suffice it to say that Gardiners Creek is located in country claimed by rival Kulin affiliated communities. In this context, Bunce’s narrative and its evidence of a jointly sponsored tanderrum or safe passage has considerable diplomatic importance. I do not exculpate government functionaries from self-interested censorship who, in a parallel project I undertook at that time in Springvale, actively undermined the reconciliation process I initiated using this account. ‘As a small boy will not forgive his mother if she abandons him to search for his father, the Mexican people have not forgiven La Malinche for her betrayal’: so Octavio Paz, and what applies to people may also apply to places: like ‘the debatable land’ said to exist between ours and the spirit word, they become no-go zones.50 La Malinche became ‘the intermediary, the messenger,

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292 Translations between disinherited man and the unknown, inscrutable power: the Strange’.51 So with Gardiners Creek, as a go-between place it risked being squeezed into nothingness. I digress but perhaps digression is the point, to follow dendritically all sorts of cultural crossovers and bifurcations and by the shallowest associative pathways to alight on strange coincidences and relict acts of possible mimicry. So it certainly was with the evolution of the sound design at Cato Square, as it was then, while considering the scope for introducing elements of Cooee Song into the texture of our soundscape, that I came across Amery’s fascinating article, discovering that the first Kaurna give-away word Amery identified was ‘Cow.we’, the Kaurna word for ‘water’ (‘No other Tasmanian words for water were remotely similar’). From this single, orphaned word – rendered by Teichelmann and Schürmann as kauwe52 – Amery was able to reconstruct an entire history of translation in the multiple senses of violently enforced removal and involuntary migration, miscommunication in a foreign, pidginised language setting, absorption into and, penultimately, passage into archival inhumation. I was struck by the ‘mere coincidence’ that Kalloongoo’s word for ‘water’ was (orthographically at least) identical with versions of ‘cooee’ in Cooee Song. The disappearance of Kalloongoo after 1842 (equally, the disappearance of her ‘man son’), the transformation of a great site of gathering and food sourcing into an exclusion zone, perhaps the general ‘drying out’ of this part of Melbourne as a place of renegotiated welcome: all of this was radioactive in those syllables. To be quite clear, no ethnolinguistic datum is proposed here, no missed etymology, solely a site of acoustic over-determination, even of colonialist reverie, where the babble of possible senses can be imagined as the flight of charged particles between opposite poles, looking for the right lines of attraction. And, like Grazioni’s student, seeing the white historically as a topography of folds, so with Cooee Song where different poetico-symbolic filters are laid over ‘cooee’ and strange ideas entertained – ‘Within every sound is a secret space: K is a cliff where a voice came flying and was echoed’, as Velimir Khlebnikov might say.53 The magnetisation of miscellaneous sources and words without wings is the artwork, the sound composition and its programming of a public space. In another mere coincidence, the opportunity to produce Cooee Song for the first time (almost thirty years after the script’s original publication) created the ideal

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circumstances in which to conjoin my interest in orphaned subjects, orphaned sounds and orphaned places. In the end, the appearance of ‘cooee’ in the Prahran Square soundscape was singular, taking the form of an occasional auditory rainbow stretching diagonally in two arcs across the square. I heard in sound artist Christopher Williams’s 20-second electroacoustic rising and falling chorus an acoustic image of spears launched from opposite corners and streaming through each other above the crowd – a secret space where a host of voices came flying and were echoed. In general, public art is expected to represent something. Symbolising what is absent with sentimental brio, it serves as the acceptable face of redevelopment. The Pipes might be conceived in opposition to this, with a different view of public space and its appearance in mind; nevertheless, its sculptural dramaturgy, its subliminal sound signatures and elementally analysed visual imagery had been scrupulously prepared and possessed a clear poetic logic. They might reproduce nothing, but it is reasonable to ask what impression the ensemble was intended to produce. In a way, The Pipes, like Sugar or Rival Channels, or Raft, or Passenger, set the stage for the appearance of a future different from the one that is planned. The difference imagined is radical as the different future is not ‘in the future’: like a past that is not settled, it is felt in the present as ghosts that cannot be hosted. At issue is a healthy doubling or a toxic self-isolation. Historian Marie Hansen Fels suggests that the period 1836–39 was a honeymoon period in black–white relations across the Yarra. Aboriginal people had continued to camp in their traditional places and great meetings were periodically held where groups could be identified by compass direction as they sat relative to one another with their backs to the Country whence they came, a custom alluded to in the ground patterns at Federation Square. After Governor La Trobe’s arrival in 1839, all changed; a mirror state was installed. ‘It is fundamentally true to say that they died because they lost their land. Official policy from the first was to get them out of Melbourne where up until La Trobe’s arrival they had been camping in their usual spots … they were refused their rights to live and congregate in Melbourne … they recognised they had lost their rights to country.’ ‘It is frightening’, Fels writes’, to read in the records how quickly they moved from the position of freedom to move about their

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294 Translations country, to regret and protest, and prediction that they would all die out.’ 54 Described here is not the disappearance of a people but the removal of the spatial layer in which encounter and meeting were possible. With the elimination of anywhere to stand, the possibility of a public domain also evaporated: in this context, to speak of a ‘public’ artwork is either prophetic or prematurely optimistic. The substitution of planar space, with its proliferation of functional sightlines and boundaries – surely fetishised as ‘liminal zones’ because a prior movement form, the choreography of walking that legitimised trespass in the mid-stride, has been forgotten – relegated the topological figure of meeting to the realm of acrobatics. In this sense, the public had yet to appear; or, to put it another way, we, individually and collectively, had yet to appear in public. The phenomenon of the ‘cooee’ belonged to the phase of pre-appearance: imagined as a call projected across a clearing and soliciting an answering echo, it materialised the primary mechanism of sociality. It also embodied exactly the echoic mimicry at the heart of a migrant poetics. While idealised, this model of social space is not detached from historical circumstance: recognition of the call to come presupposes orientation and a culture of civility used to meeting and incorporating the stranger. Eros directs the answering call not Narcissus. The multiplication of these call-and-response dyads – as a unit of interaction, the dyad is primary – certainly produces a group appearance, some kind of innovative choreography as vocalisation and gesture fuse into mimetically refined movement forms; but it is doubtful if this meeting place can ever be represented. Incorporating its own doubles into the performance of appearance, its sense of place is entirely absorbed into the endless weaving and reweaving of passage. From a migrant perspective, arrival is defined by the architecture of opportunity. In algebraic topology, ‘some crowd movements are much more naturally described in terms of holes than of crowd members – holes can split, can merge, can move through a crowd, can disappear on reaching the boundary. Holes could themselves be regions within the outermost boundary of the crowd, and holes might not be completely empty of bodies, just relatively sparsely occupied, suggesting that holes are one end of a spectrum of density of occupation.’ 55 The phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes the existence of what he calls ‘the flesh of



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the world’: ‘the primordial relationship between myself and my speech’ that resembles an ‘anonymous corporeality which we share with other organisms’.56 In this case, the function of the migrant artwork is to mobilise this primordial relationship, like the spider speculatively casting filaments into the air, simultaneously weaving a labyrinth and threading it.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 199. 2 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. 3 Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 178. 5 Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. 6 Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 7 William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover Publications, 1950, 294. Again, a case of Western science catching up with Indigenous practice: ‘The [first] name thus given is not permanent. Other names are taken subsequently – as, for instance, on arriving at manhood; and if the name chosen happens to be similar to that of a member of the tribe who dies, it is again changed’ (Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 56). 8 Sue Caroline Wesson, ‘The Aborigines of Eastern and Far South-Eastern New South Wales, 1830 to 1910, An Historical Geography’, Melbourne University dissertation, 2002 186, citing W.W.H. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia’, London: Macmillan, 1904, 346. 9 Wesson, ‘The Aborigines of Eastern and Far South-Eastern New South Wales’, 186. 10 Phillip Pepper, You Are What You Make Yourself To Be, Melbourne: Hyland House, 1980, 20. 11 Carter, Cooee Song, in Absolute Rhythm, 64. It should be remembered that the application of patronising nicknames went both ways. Cahir, who gives a number of examples of the ubiquitous application of ‘Jacky Jacky’ to Aboriginal men, also records a colonist ‘Glendinning, Urquhart’s overseer near Mt Emu, “better known as Jacky Jacky, the nickname given him by the blacks’ (David Cahir, ‘The Wathawurrung People’s Encounters with Outside Forces 1797–1849: A History of Conciliation and Conflict’, MA thesis, School of Behavioural and Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Ballarat, 2001, 96.) Further on name swapping see Cahir, 108.

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296 Translations 12 See Rev. John Bulmer, ‘Language of the Natives’, in Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 2, 25–39, 27. Bulmer also served at the Yalta mission on the Murray where his efforts to get the local languages led him to assert, ‘One thing I have observed with regard to the language – it is a double language. They have two words for everything’ (35). 13 See Peter Gardner, Through Foreign Eyes, Ensay, Vic.: Ngarak Press, 1984, 42–44, whose conclusions have not been seriously rebutted by massacre denialists. In his Gippsland diary, George Augustus Robinson refers to McMillan as ‘Mr. Mac’ (Gardner, Through Foreign Eyes, 43), Interestingly, in another part of Australia, the Scottish word became synonymous with ‘poison’ (See Carter, Ground Truthing, 66–68). But for the entangled race relations (and military alliances) in 1840s–1850s Gippsland, see also the remarkable testimony of ‘Bunda-wal, otherwise Bobby Brown’, relating specifically ‘the last great battle of the Gippsland clans, which occurred at Bushy Park, near Stratford, about the years 1856–7’ (A.W. Howitt, ‘The Kurnai Tribe’, in Lorimer Fison and A.W. Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Melbourne: George Robertson, 1880, 217–218). 14 Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder, Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2000. 15 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 96. If anyone doubts that post-war immigrants provided white Australia with slave labour, they should consult the oral histories collected in Wendy Lowenstein and Morag Loh, The Immigrants, Melbourne: Hyland House, 1977. 16 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, 78. 17 See Carter, Ground Truthing, 115. There is better evidence for Jowley’s ‘legitimacy’ than exists for current claimants. In 1904 a swaggie discovers the skeleton of an Aboriginal male near the Hopetoun showgrounds. ‘Found also were a large pocket knife and the pieces of a mirror. Jowley pronounced the remains as those of his father who was buried in this site when Jowley was a boy. The skull showed signs of being injured in a ‘skirmish or two during life’. In 1911 it was reported that both his grandfather and father were buried at Lake Corrong Station (Carter, Ground Truthing, 194). 18 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 55. 19 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 56. 20 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 52. 21 ‘On another occasion, having left the camp for a while on a moonlight night, she pretended, on her return, that she had been to the moon’ (Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 55).

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22 Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, Stories of the WiseWoman Healer, Cork: Cork University Press, 2003, 29. For discussion of this parallel, see Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space’, 116–120. 23 As the mourning rituals following her death make clear: her head and portions of her limbs ‘were buried in a cave near Mount Kolor, where she was born’ (Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 56). 24 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 58. 25 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 55. I have found no discussion of this ‘pole ceremony’, maraenae ja (normalised by Blake as maRini tjaa), or any analogous descriptions from elsewhere in Victoria. Dawson translates marrinae (maRini) in combination with the word for woman or man as ‘handsome’ (see Blake, Dialects of Western Kulin, Western Victoria, Yartwatjali, Tjapwurrung, Djadjawurrung, 108). Dawson’s word for ‘handsome’ as a freestanding adjective, is ‘Tulkuuk’, a word used to render various senses of ‘good’. 26 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 58. As Clark notes, the Djab Wurrung were divided into matrilineal moieties, and clans (and individuals) were either Gamadj (black cockatoo) or Grugudj (white cockatoo) (Ian D. Clark, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995, 57). Dawson’s seemingly eyewitness account raises questions: Tuurap Warneen was murdered by shepherds in April 1842 (see Clark, Scars in the Landscape, 61–63) and Dawson did not move to the Western District until 1844. 27 Respectively, Lady Gregory’s main informant; Robert Burns’s ‘old Maid’ (‘The widow of a cousin of Burns’s mother, who frequently stayed with the family helping with the household chores’ (See www.robertburns.org/ encyclopedia/DavidsonBetty.274.shtml) and ‘the faithful servant’ of Major Lowsley (See https://limerickslife.com/military-cemetery/). 28 White Ladies were a staple of Victorian folklore and I suspect Dawson’s name referred to a human genre not a physical appearance. 29 Julie Carr, ‘In search of the White Woman of Gippsland’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Vol 1, No 1 (1995), 41–50, 45. 30 Carr, ‘In search of the White Woman of Gippsland’, 41. 31 Julie Carr, The Captive White Woman of Gipps Land, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2001, 23. And Carr points out that the destruction of the Kurnai was not as comprehensive as Gardner sometimes implies (197). 32 Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 10. 33 Quoted in Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 266–267. 34 Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 256. Similarly, popular writers like Andrew Lang assumed a continuity between “savage spiritualism”, “ancient spiritualism” and contemporary psychic research. See

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298 Translations Paul Carter, ‘Turning the tables – or, grounding post-colonialism, in K. Darian-Smith and S. Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space, London: Routledge, 1996, 23–35. 35 Carter, The Sound In-Between, 102. 36 Christina Makris, ‘The Mapping of Meaning in Madeline Gins’ and Arakawa’s Architectural Body’, www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/ archive/online_archive/v2_3_2005/current/in_conference/makris.htm, 2005. 37 ‘It was as if, unaware of the future’s positivist preoccupations, a mechanism had been invented for seeing nothing, for investing the surface of air with depth’ (Carter, Baroque Memories, 64). 38 Carter, Baroque Memories, 67. 39 Originally called the Cato Street Car Park Redevelopment Project, and covering an 8,985 m2 site bounded by Cato Street, Izett Street, Wattle Street and Chatham Street, the creative team comprised Lyons Architects, Aspect Landscape Architects, Ramus and Material Thinking. 40 Rob Amery, ‘Kaurna in Tasmania: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Aboriginal History, 20, 24–50. His article also summarises the historical context of Kalloongoo’s abduction and enslavement. 41 Published in N.J.B. Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence, A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, Sandy Bay, Tasmania: Blubber Head Press, 1986, 444–446. Also Amery’s main source: his contribution is to discover embedded in another of Plomley’s publications (A Word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages, 1976) a Kaurna wordlist, which, Amery shows, was obtained from Kalloongoo during her Flinders Island residency (1 June 1837–25 February 1839) by Robinson’s son, Charles Robinson. 42 As Amery notes, Kalloongoo’s ‘country’ was not Port Lincoln, as Robinson supposed, but south of Adelaide: her mention of Yankalilla, a place name that also appears in Light, suggests that her home was in the tracks William Light made in surveying the site of the future Adelaide (Amery, ‘Kaurna in Tasmania: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, 42). 43 Her son, ‘little Johnny Franklin’ was ‘engaged under work agreements which included housing, board, clothing and monthly cash’ (Marie Hansen Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’: The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, 1839–1840, Canberra: ANU Epress and Aboriginal History Incorporated, 2011, 181, footnote 34). 44 According to Katrina Tipu Power-Smith. See www.adelaide.edu.au/kwp/ resources/radio/201307/201307_04-kitchentable.html where no indication of her family is offered. A notable example of her exclusion from Aboriginal history is Clare Land, Tunnminnerwait and Maulboyheener:

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The Involvement of Aboriginal People from Tasmania in Key Events in Early Melbourne, (Melbourne: City of Melbourne, 2014), where she and her son are scarcely mentioned. Equally, she is missing from Clark and Kostanski, ‘An Indigenous History of Stonnington’. Under the name ‘Charlotte’, Fels gives a chronological record of her activities derived from primary records (Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’, 154–156). From this it is clear that Charlotte and Truganini/Trucaninni were close friends. See also The Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication, 60, citing Vivienne Rae Ellis, Trucanini: Queen or Traitor? Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981, 97–99, for statement that Kalloongoo remained in Port Phillip when others, disillusioned with their treatment in Port Phillip, elected to return to Tasmania. 45 The fusion of colonial identity and colonial geography is nowhere clearer than in the naming of ships: the Charlotte, for example, was a notable sealing vessel (See Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’, 379). 46 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 2, 320–321. The source of this story is John Moore Davis whose ‘Notes Relating to the Aborigines of Australia’ forms Appendix E, 310–322. Coffin Bay is due west of Port Lincoln on the Eyre Peninsula, so not Kaurna country. 47 See Carter, Cooee Song, in Absolute Rhythm, 56–74. 48 ‘Another feature of Melbourne [in 1839] was the blacks, who constantly wandered about in large numbers, half-naked, and armed with spears in the usual way. To hear them cooeeying and shouting to one another, in shrill voices and strange tongues, in the streets had a strange effect’ (E.M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Melbourne: George Robertson, 1883, 20). A decisive interruption to this haunting colonial counterpoint occurred when Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung and other affiliated Kulin peoples were banned from entering the city, an act that further retarded any chance of renegotiated sovereign relations and which, as appears in Mirror States bred the paranoia of internal invasion and the reign of ghosts: Voice 1, The first altercation took place this month. Voice 3, I have not had a black thought. Voice 1, I began to get very weary of these songs of the forest. Voice 3, I have had a black thought. Voice 1, They would try to cheat me by going from one mira to another.’ And so on (Carter, The Sound In-Between, 110). 49 In fact, presumably assembled across ten years. Professional ethnolinguists ignore Bunce’s wordlists because (unlike me) they are not interested in the ‘mirror state’ colonial projections recorded in language. The line in the 1986 script, What Is Your Name, ‘Repeat what we say with a soft Italian accent’, quotes Bunce’s reassuring advice: ‘By speaking this language with a soft Italian accent, the reader will have little trouble in making himself understood by the natives.’ (Daniel Bunce, Language

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300 Translations of the Aborigines of the Colony of Victoria, Geelong: Thomas Brown, 1859, 1.) Bunce’s advice is also found in Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 2, 133, where his vocabulary is also largely reproduced (133–153). 50 The reference is to Robert Dale Owen, The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next (1870) but also to ‘debatable land’ found in colonial maps (See Carter, ‘Turning the Tables, 25–26). 51 Octavio Paz, The Sons of La Malinche, The Labyrinth of Solitude, New York: Grove Press, 1994, 25–26. 52 C.G. Teichelmann and C.W. Schürmann, Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary and Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia, Spoken by the Natives in and for some distance from Adelaide, Adelaide: Published by the Authors, 1840, 11. 53 Carter, Amplifications, 30 and Cooee Song, in Absolute Rhythm, 68. 54 Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’, 27. 55 John Stell, School of Computing, University of Leeds, pers. comm., 17 January 2017. 56 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 140.

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Postlude: human symbols, doubled identities

Every individual is a fragment or symbolon tou anthropou. Hans-Georg Gadamer, quoting Aristophanes1

Vincenzo continues to keep me company. Over the years, his disponibilité has transformed itself into a practice of dissipation, which, he insists, is a positive development. At intervals he has returned to his native Italy – born in Melbourne, he confronted his parents’ experience when he travelled to where they had come from. Different from the colonial avatars and the Australian migrant artists of my generation, his view of my story renders it curiously nebulous – as if the ‘toxic relationship’, to adapt Marcia Langton’s phrase for the non-relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, which locks the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ country in a mutual basilisk stare could be shattered simply by moving a foot to the left or right. He reminds me that I would give the wrong impression if readers of Translations imagined that my migrant poetics was either an entirely anglophone affair or exclusively concerned with the longed-for triangulation Strehlow envisaged when he predicted that ‘the strong web of future Australian verse’ would contain ‘poetic threads spun on the Stone Age hair-spindles of Central Australia’.2 Other kinds of Underworld are implicated here, and if the prodigal son can return to the homeland unashamed of his dissipation, then the latter-day Oedipus can find dwelling and inspiration in yet another country. This happened to me: the Italy inside Australia drew me to dive into that other cultural Unconscious, the classical world, to find there (as if for the first time) premonitions of my own destiny. First there was Ulysses and the possibility that the true inner migrant was his wife. In my draft libretto for the noted Italian composer, Luciano Berio, Penelope reflects, ‘Again it is coming to an ending,

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302 Translations / So to say once again beginning. / Every little advance into the distance / Must be measured by music, if this time / The ground is not to slip from under our feet. / To stay where we are more or less, / The signals of approaching land / Warping past us near the speed of light, / We need the rat-a-tat of soothing songs:/ Otherwise we will surely be killed.’ 3 Then there was the famous fresco of the Diver, a Greek-Lucanian tomb painting dated around 480–470 bc, discovered at the southern Italian classical site of Paestum in 1968, which depicted, I thought, yet another species of migrant, whose ‘becoming’ consists of ‘being’ in the instant, a metabolic personality, who, although never the same, keeps his identity exactly ‘by not keeping the same matter’.4 Around the inner walls of the tomb on whose ceiling the Diver is found are frescoes representing a symposium, that is, a more or less philosophical love feast. One thing leads to another, and after I wrote Metabolism, I was invited to a symposium about the symposium.5 But what could I say to professional archaeologists? Parasites have their place at the table, as the late classical writer Alciphron tells us: their disgusting table manners are tolerated because of their gift for anecdote (strictly, stories that have not been censored); slavish flatterers, they are also ventriloquists who channel the unspeakable.6 Cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis imagines a more dignified arrangement where ‘the disruptive relationship between different cultures and the multiplicity of perspectives from which judgement proceeds’ build a new moral order. Translated to a scene of collective endeavour like our symposium, he suggests that such ‘invisible gatherings’ lack a fixed identity: instead, they hold ‘a number of differences together’ and arrange them ‘in multidirectional and fluid orders’. He likens this to ‘a form of hospitality which does not presume that the guest must be assimilable’.7 Perhaps I could tell them about the migrant: how, like the practising diver, migration is imagined before it is enacted – the dive is never for the first time, only the fall. How, out of step with the historical conversation, migrants break in and break out, like the unprecedented diver, always too late (or early), in someone else’s sphere of influence, they disturb, stimulating discussion and disrupting convention – but in their own mid-stride the falling is perfect. Migrants – and here at last I got on the track of an idea (a persona) that they might recognise – bring the marketplace into the conversation, like Socrates arriving late

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at Plato’s Symposium. And, addressing the academic symposium, I represented myself as Socrates’s scarcely-known spirit brother, Aristodemus.8 In the account Apollodorus gives, second-hand and delivered at least fifteen years after the famous discussion of Love recounted in Plato’s Symposium, Aristodemus, the stranger at the feast, meets Socrates on his way to Agathon’s house; assured that, although uninvited, he will be welcome to join the party, Aristodemus reaches the venue only to discover that Socrates is not with him. Nevertheless, Agathon greets him cordially because his arrival serves as a signal for the feast to begin. Like John the Baptist foreshadowing Christ, Aristodemus foreshadows Socrates: one ‘inrush’, the essential attribute of Eros, rehearses another. As partial reporter of the dialogues that follow, Aristodemus’s sole value is to initiate a discourse that, except for their late arrival, would never have taken place. A migrant poet laments: ‘Except for what memory recalls / there is nothing to commemorate our arrival – / no plaques, no names carved on trees, / nothing officially recorded / of parents and children that lived beside / the dome-shaped, khaki-coloured hills / and the red-dust road that ran between Parkes and Sydney.’ 9 Likewise Aristodemus: except for what Apollodorus remembers, little trace of his passage remains.10 His role, though, remains important. He introduces distance into the debate: substituting for Socrates, covering for ‘the fit of abstraction’ that caused Socrates to linger in the marketplace, he made Socrates’ lateness acceptable. More, he inspirited the gap in time and the distance from which the master had come with a new erotic valency, the love of truth. And while this role goes unrecognised, its benefit at least is clear: when, halfway through the feast, Socrates belatedly joins the symposiasts, Agathon invites him to sit next to him so that he may touch him and ‘have the benefit of that wise thought which came into your mind in the portico and is now in your possession’.11 Among the symposiasts is the writer of comedies, Aristophanes, whose theory of love Shelley must have had in mind when, in his notes on the classical statuary housed in the Uffizi, he singles out for praise those statues or pairs of statues which by their poses seem to him to capture the doubleness of desire. The figures of Bacchus and Ampelus, for example, ‘are walking as it were with a sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, and this is

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304 Translations expressed in the motions of their delicate and flowing forms’. I had written about Shelley’s Uffizi years before Australia was in my mind; but, looking back, was there not in my impersonal interest the welling-up of an unconscious motive? Bacchus rests an arm across the shoulders of Ampelus, as he steps turning sideways to gaze into the boy’s eyes. The expression in Bacchus’s face is at one with the ‘gentle motion’ that continues to the extremity of his limbs. The ensemble of planes, the complexly resolved pose is ‘Like some fine strain of harmony which flows round the soul and enfolds it, and leaves it in the soft astonishment of a satisfaction, like the pleasure of love with one whom we most love, which having taken away desire, leaves pleasure, sweet pleasure.’ 12 And yet, whatever the sexual orientation, I reflected, with Shelley’s poem ‘Episychidion’ in mind, the price of ghosting, doubling and of finding ‘our home in life’, where ‘Those spheres … become the same’ is always exile to another part of the archipelago.13 In any case, originally spherical human beings cut in two on account of their misbehaviour, and thereafter spending their lives looking for their other halves – Aristophanes’s parable about the origin of love – captures exactly the scope of Translations, which is not so much a migrant’s personal history, or a narrative of ‘symbolic gestures’ but the ethnography of those who, self-divided, live a life of experimental recombination.14 The ethnographic encounter in Translations is outward, engaged with the colonial archive and the political and ethical question of sovereignty, but also inward: a recognition that the migrant at least is constitutionally a symbol, a part standing in for the whole. Originally, Gadamer explains, the symbol ‘was a technical term in Greek for a token of remembrance. The host presented his guest with the so-called tessera hospitalis by breaking some object in two. He kept one half for himself and gave the other half to his guest. If, in thirty or fifty years’ time, a descendant of the guest should ever enter the house, the two pieces could be fitted together to form a whole in an act of recognition.’ 15 Gadamer’s timespan is suggestive as it implies that the symbol comes to stand in for, or symbolise, host and guest, in this curious way participating in its own production, but it is not mandatory – as ‘a reminder of xenia or ritualised friendship’ 16 the tallying up of the pieces could obviously fall within the lifetime of those who had entered into this bond of trust – one identification leading, as

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it were, to another. Now the migrant artist, poet, designer, dramaturg or composer is not simply a wielder of symbols and symbolic forms, a practitioner of aesthesis: they are living symbols, fragmentary individuals whose migration defines them as perpetually in search of a host. As Gadamer implies, recognition may be achieved posthumously (through the gesture of the artwork) but this is an aesthetic solution and does not express the ethical challenge every migrant faces of appearing properly, or negotiating arrival. In this perilous state of perennial translation, there is no assurance of recognition: in the classic mode of any erotic desire, the migrant moulding his actions to those of the imagined other is inevitably at risk of becoming imprisoned in his own mirror image. As for the would-be hosts they remain inscrutable, not least because in the colonial environment a heritage of non-recognition disables them from playing the role of host. What might be called the ethnographic turn in my work is a response to this blocked path to reunion; it breaks out of the migrant solipsism or isolation twinned with nostalgia to consider the situation we find ourselves in historically, as the recapitulation of an older (and also abiding) history of failed recognition, eloquently preserved in the literature of Aboriginal colonisation, whose inventories of Indigenous words, fancifully derived and applied names, perverse cultural and religious fantasies and underlying hypocrisy of censored theft add up to a collective literature like no other – a record of (unethical) praxis that far outstrips in forensic power anything that the novelist’s fictions could produce. Symbols are usually discussed in the context of the theory of signs; with Aristophanes’s metaphor in mind, it is interesting to consider them as human beings, as guests, we could say, in search of a host – to look ahead, the result of synthesising insights from semiotics and psychology might be a new ethnography of the migrant subject. Charles Sanders Peirce regarded symbols as the least intuitive of signs, their meaning most bound by a prior knowledge of the conventional rule linking the signans and the signatum.17 Paul Ricoeur takes a more generous position, rather than insisting on Peirce’s sharp distinctions between the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic, making the case for a discourse of resemblance governed by metaphor. Part of the fascination of Ricoeur’s argument is that he makes a subtler point. First, through the trope of resemblance, the metaphor

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306 Translations implies affect through emphasis: ‘In symbolising one situation by means of another, metaphor “infuses” the feelings attached to the symbolizing situation into the heart of the situation that is being symbolised’.18 But, second, following an insight of Odile Le Guern, Ricoeur considers that it is a meaningful disjunction (not resemblance) between concepts that is the revolutionary achievement of metaphor. Two formerly unrelated semantic worlds are compared in a way that produces something new: the inrush of a foreign element, its semantic incompatibility, produces an image.19 The image is like the fire produced by the friction between two surfaces. As regards poetry or drama, it may manifest itself in a more sideways fashion as pervasive parallelism where ‘equivalent entities confront one another in equivalent positions’.20 In the human encounter – again to look ahead – parallelism will manifest itself as echoic mimicry infused with a greater or lesser degree of irony (or feeling) depending on the extent to which the rules of interpretation are known and shared. Irony arises when, in a situation where mimicry substitutes for any shared framework of reference (without shared conventions of equivalence), there develops what James Lockhart, in a historical ethnographic context, calls ‘double mistaken identity’.21 Again, looking ahead to one of the ‘symbolic gestures’ touched on in Translations, the scripted sound installation, Mirror States, these communicational dynamics are played out with primordial simplicity in the Aboriginal convention of host-guest name-exchange: ‘Voice 1. Among the wounded was one Gellibrand who called himself my brother. Voice 3. I used to part my hair on the left. Voice 1. This appeared to me at that time as magic. Voice 3. Now I part it on the right. Voice 1. Better to be seen for what you are! Voice 2. Or your image will suffer. Voice 3. My name is Gellibrand. What is yours?’ 22 To go back to our own symbolic situation, where the migrant can be compared to a symbolon or symbol, a metaphor of himself representing nothing – writing about ‘Parallel Lines’ in Hebrew poetry, one Robert Lowth identified three kinds: ‘Parallels Synonymous, Parallels Antithetic, and Parallels Synthetic’.23 A migrant poetics is, in my experience, the ironic deployment of these three modes in order to stage the enigma of communication where, characteristically, form and content fail to parallel each other. Examples abound in work I have produced in Australia. A passage

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from What Is Your Name illustrates all three kinds of ‘correspondence’ designated by Lowth: ‘2. Don’t mind us if we eat. 1. Eat. 3. Don’t mind us if we drink. 1. Drink. Hungry I. 2. Hungry you? 3. What sort of a name is that? 1. Give me some bread. 2. I will not. 1. Give me bread, I am hungry. 2. I will give you stick. 1. This is hand of mine. 3. We will stick to you give not. 1. Nothing? What have I done to you? 2. I have what done to you?’ 24 The grandiloquent rhetoric Lowth found in Isaiah is not here; it is, instead, the pidginised discourse of despair, extracted with surprising ease from the colonial ethnographic archive and arranged into, respectively, synonymous exchanges (eat/Eat), antithetical exchanges (Give me bread/I will give you stick) and synthetic exchanges (What have I done to you/I have what done to you’). In this environment of attenuated eloquence, where the signans (the echoic, mimetic structuring of the dialogue) mainly serves to signify the absence of an agreed signatum, what is represented is not an historical scene but the ever-present precarity of the symbolon-migrant who, in channelling an older tradition of semantic incompatibility, produces an intensification of feeling reflective of their own situation. The ‘image’ in the passage just quoted is the passage taken as a whole and in my view its referent is both internal to the text’s mise-en-scène (a fictionalised, or archetypal scene of interrogation) and external to it, in the way the reader recognises in its mingling of found ethnographic sources, pidginised lexicon and intensified (almost pathological) repetition a fusion of differences into a new, provisional identity. Ricoeur writes that ‘Metaphor, a figure of speech, presents in an open fashion, by means of a conflict between identity and difference, the process that, in a covert manner, generates semantic grids by fusion of differences into identity.’ 25 And he suggests that ‘in the realm of the instance of discourse’, which, as we know, however repetitious never reproduces itself but produces something new, metaphor (in his generous sense of symbolising what is not yet) is perhaps ‘the genetic phenomenon par excellence’.26 Recognised as a symbolon, as a half in search of its other half, the migrant owns a precarity that in a culture whose collective psychology remains colonialist proves dissident and emancipatory. Sovereignty, imagined geometrically as a sphere, can never be the goal: self-possession will occur, psychologically as well as poetically, through the image that rises up in the confrontation with another, in

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308 Translations the recognition of projections that meet and stage a gift exchange. After all, the meaning attributed to the symbolon is not entirely arbitrary – or, in ethnographic terms, the speech allowed to the subaltern is not, and never can be, synonymous with that spoken by the coloniser – in reality, even when the double mistaken identity is only partially applied, the master–slave discourse is primarily designed to deceive. The emergence in the 1860s and 1870s of the idea that language was a ‘system of arbitrary and conventional signs’ was critical to the emergence of an algebraically conceived science of semiotics; among its corollories should have been translations where nothing was lost. However, at a minimum, ‘only for a detached, alien onlooker is the bond between signans and signatum a mere contingence … for the native user of the same language this relation is a necessity’.27 It is a relation established not only conventionally but, as Peirce might say, iconically and indexically when words are deployed onomatopoeically, echoically, exhibiting what Jakobson calls ‘sound symbolism’. The same applies in an ethnographic context where the foundation of any cross-cultural communication (discursive, gestural, or both) is the phenomenon of ‘mere coincidence’. While puns and ‘annoying ambiguities’ of all kinds threaten to fragment the ideally spherical identity of the sovereign self, they supply the symbolon hemispherical migrant with the discourse of half signs appropriate to his position. Again, colonial exchanges in nineteenth-century Australia were similarly improvised, and Translations has many examples of ‘symbolic gestures’ where the situation symbolised (an idealised historical crowd) fuses with the ‘symbolising situation’ itself (the migrant artwork). In this situation, the basis of a new identity is the noncommensurability of origins and the impossibility (even undesirability) of translation. Shortly after arriving in Australia, I began collecting migrant anecdotes. I was struck by their droll dramatisation of non-connection, the transference of meaning from representation to the staging of non-appearance. They fulfilled Fredric Jameson’s definition of pastiche: ‘like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without the still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being

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imitated is rather comic.’ 28 Books like my anti-novel, Baroque Memories, with its counterpoised characters Doctor Duende and Nostalgia and its patron of migration, M.E. Grazioni, are of this kind: they illustrate the truth of Fernando Pessoa’s apostrophe, ‘Wonderful memory, you remember what has not been’ (it serves as Baroque Memories’s epigraph, quoted, naturally, in a Spanish translation).29 The following migrant anecdote, recorded in my diary for 6 November 1987, is typical. The son of Ukrainian immigrants tells me that ‘when his family meet, they often play a game, telling jokes. Their jokes consist in telling English stories in Ukrainian, that is, translating English words literally into Ukrainian. The humour lies in seeing the strange meanings and errors that result from the literalism’. This is migrant humour, it integrates ‘mere contingence’ and ‘necessity’. No shared normative horizon of historical irony exists that can be invoked; it has to be produced, improvised, from mere coincidences that are meaningful because they are meaningless. The image of solidarity is the telling, the making, of a joke. The genre is Parallels Antithetic. The symbolon, sentient and semiotic, displays a disposition to relate: like Aristophanes’s lover looking for their other half, the migrant, constituted by the host–guest contingency of his existence is on the lookout for resemblances, a metaphoric creature by vocation. The sign is similarly motivated to make sense, to congregate, to multiply echoically, to creolise. Taking Gadamer’s account of the tessera symbolon broken in two rather literally, the migrant wears a mask that is the mould of the other, not only possessing a face but wearing the impression the other has made. It is a doubling that is definitely not duplicitous, and its expression survives only so long as integration is not confused with reintegration (where sovereignty repairs an original self-splitting). Logically, the migrant qua migrant turns away from this psychic enclosure act; masks are not disguises but tokens of possible recognition. Typically, then, to judge from what I have found, a migrant poetics is prophetic, sketching a possible meeting place falling out from a different encounter. It is no accident that two of my sound compositions feature the word-sound ‘cooee’: as the signans of being lost and desiring to be found and of the impulse to recognise and welcome, it contracts to a single expression the migrant condition, the suspension between guest and host.

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310 Translations I recognise in the phonemes composing the word-sound not Saussure’s arbitrary combination but two phonic tesserae seeking reunion, whose integration defines selfhood dyadically as the recognition of difference. Rejected here is the predication of selfhood on self-splitting and its repair and, what follows from this, the ever-present temptation to demonise the other as hostile (not host). As John Cash argues, developing insights of Ashis Nandy, the famously decentred subject of psychoanalysis wants to cling to power in exactly the same way that the colonial authorities seek to govern the colonised; common to both is ‘sovereignty’s presumed indivisibility’.30 The route to subject formation looks emancipatory but is ultimately narcissistic. It has to be because ‘Our apparent sovereignty’ depends on ‘the repudiation of aspects of self and others’, ‘the splitting of the subject’. This is far from the splitting involved in breaking the tessera hospitalis, where ‘The symbol represented something like a sort of pass … in and through which we recognise someone already known.’ 31 What has been split off remains as ‘part of my psychic organisation – a repressed part – and they insist on some kind of representation. Typically, they are recognised as other than me: as strangers or enemies.’ 32 Evidently, the imagined constitution of the migrant or symbolon self is different: carrying the token of the other as essential equipment for travelling, emancipated from (even severed from nostalgia for) a self ‘entirely autonomous, self-identical and centred’, it should be in a stronger position to imagine ‘a beyond of sovereignty’ 33 in which ‘sovereignty is transformed through an acceptance of its internal division, an acceptance that contains rather than splits ambivalence’.34 After the symposium, I co-curated an exhibition at Paestum about the water history of the place – Paestum’s Greek name, Poseidonia, invokes the classical deity of ocean and tempest. I cast Poseidon as an exile called home by turbulent forces; the authorities, forewarned, intercept him at the border; they suspect a prior plan but, having no possessions, limitless and local, Poseidon needs to conceal nothing: ‘Identity is the environment’s reflection, / Widening circles of related change where, / plunging in, the Diver becomes Many again.’ As for the question of sovereignty and the distribution of powers: ‘What is the purpose of your visit? To stir up Unrest? To distribute leaflets to the crowd,



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Casting doubt on our weather predictions?’ ‘I am visiting my power’s brother, The Diver, Whose desire, like mine, is to live in transit.’ ‘To corrupt our children by reviving old gods?’ ‘To navigate the turbulence of change.’ ‘To undermine our trust in technology?’ ‘In the mid-stride of history knowing nothing To marry our flight to the will of the Earth.’35

Notes 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, N. Walker (trans), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 32. 2 Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, 729. 3 Paul Carter, ‘Outis’, unrealised libretto, c.1992. 4 Paul Carter, Metabolism, the Exhibition of the Unseen, Melbourne: Lyon Housemuseum, 2015, 2. 5 ‘La tomba del Tuffatore: rito, arte e poesia a Paestum e nel Mediterraneo d’epoca tardo-arcaica’, 4–6 October, 2018, held on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of ‘The Diver’ (il tuffatore). 6 Alciphron, ‘Letters of Parasites’, in The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian and Philostratus, trans. A.R. Benner and F.H. Fobes, London: William Heinemann, 1949. The Online Etymological Dictionary advises: ‘anecdote, “secret or private stories” … from Greek anekdota “things unpublished”’ (https://www.etymonline.com/word/anecdote). 7 Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, Globalisation, Deterritorialization and Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, 209–211. 8 Paul Carter, ‘Interpreting the Distance: the Future of Memory’, in La tomba del Tuffatore: rito, arte e poesia a Paestum e nel Mediterraneo d’epoca tardo-arcaica (Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Paestum, 4–6 October 2018), A. Meriani and G. Zuchtriegel (eds), Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2021, 501–513. 9 Peter Skrzynecki, ‘Migrant Centre Site, Orange Road, Parkes’, in Displacements 2, Multicultural Storytellers, S. Gunew (ed.), Waurn Ponds: Deakin University Press, 1987, 118. 10 But see Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. A.L. Bonnette, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 22. 11 Plato, Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, New York: Modern Library, 1996. 12 P.B. Shelley, The Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W.E. Peck, London: Ernest Benn, 1965, 10 volumes, vol. 6, pp. 319–320. Also, Paul Carter, ‘Shelley at the Uffizi’, Art and Artists, June 1978, 1–15, 8.

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312 Translations 13 With reference to the lines 536 and 576 (Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 423–424). 14 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 126: the ‘work of art’ ‘is not encountered in its own right but stands for something else. Just as a symbolic gesture is not just itself but expresses something else through itself.’ 15 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 31. 16 Robert J. Hopper and Paul C. Millett, 2016. Symbolon. At https:// oxfordre.com/classics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/ acrefore-9780199381135-e-6166. 17 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, 415. 18 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin and S.J. Costello, London: Routledge, 2003, 224. 19 Riceour, The Rule of Metaphor, 220. 20 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 173. 21 James Lockhart, Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 98–119. 22 Carter, Mirror States, in The Sound In-Between, 110. The immediate historical reference is to an affray in which ‘Two natives speared or hurt. Gellibrand and Jack’ (Journal of Rev. William Waterfield, 24 March 1839 in Historical Records of Victoria, vol. 3, 553). The wider reference is to the disappearance of the Hobart lawyer, Joseph Gellibrand, on a journey between Melbourne and Geelong, in February 1837 (Historical Records of Victoria, vol. 2B, 271ff). As I have noted, Aboriginal men with white settler names (Gellibrand, Billy ‘[William] Lonsdale, [George Augustus] Robinson etc.) frequented early Melbourne: ‘the psychological effect of their doubling-up, with its obviously ironic potential, on a fledgling colony hasn’t been explored’ (Carter, Ground Truthing, 60). But doubles multiplied, ambiguities of identity and action likewise: another Gellibrand (John Thomas) was a member of the vigilante group that murdered up to ten Wathawurrung people in July 1836 (See Historical Records of Victoria, vol. 2A, 46–47, and for the cycle of revenge killings, Cahir, The Wathawurrung People’s Encounters with Outside Forces 1797–1849, 137). See also Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 5–10. 23 Quoted by Jakobson, Language in Literature, 146. 24 Paul Carter, What Is Your Name, in Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 39–54, 45. 25 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 234.

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26 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 235. 27 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 416–417. 28 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London, 1985, 114. 29 Roberta Trapè, ‘Paul Carter’s “Translation” of Italy in Baroque Memories (1994): Layering and Multiplicity in the Construction of the Migrant’, Il Confronto Letterario, 69, June 2018, 155–173, 164–165. 30 John Cash, ‘Sovereignty in Crisis’, in W. Anderson, D. Jenson and R.C. Keller, Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 21–42, 29. 31 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 31. 32 Cash, ‘Sovereignty in Crisis’, 33. 33 Cash, ‘Sovereignty in Crisis’, 35. 34 Cash, ‘Sovereignty in Crisis’, 37. 35 Paul Carter, ‘Poseidon’s Return’ (poem), in G. Zuchtriegel, P. Carter and M.E. Oddo (eds), Poseidonia, Water City: Archaeology and Climate Change, Edizioni Pandemos: Paestum, Italy, 2019, 270–271.

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Works discussed

Radio and sound art What Is Your Name, 1986. Reference: Paul Carter, Absolute Rhythm: Works for Minor Radio, Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Publications, 2020, 39–54. Scarlatti, 1986. Reference: Carter, Absolute Rhythm, 75–92. Remember Me, 1988. Reference: Carter, Absolute Rhythm, 93–108. Mirror States, 1989, unrealised site-specific installation, 1989. Reference: Paul Carter, The Sound In-Between, Voice, Space, Performance, Sydney: UNSW Press/New Endeavour Press, 1992, 93–114. Radio feature, 1989. First broadcast: ‘Surface Tension’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, FM-Radio, 9 October 1989. The Native Informant, 1993. Reference: Carter, Absolute Rhythm, 131–148. Underworlds of Jean du Chas, 1998. Reference: Carter, Absolute Rhythm, 207–236. Cooee Song (with Christopher Williams), 2020. Exhibition: Site & Sound: Sonic Art as Ecological Practice, McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia, 2 December 2020–2 May 2021. Reference: Carter, Absolute Rhythm, 55–74. Sound installation Named in the Margin (with Sound Design Studio, Melbourne), 1990. Location: Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, New South Wales. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Performing History: the Hyde Park Barracks Voice Collages’, Transition, nos 36/37, 1992, 5–11. Columbus Echo (with Australian Broadcasting Corporation & Sound Design Studio), 1992. Proposed location: Acquario di Genova/Genoa Aquarium, Genoa, Italy. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Emergency Languages: echoes of Columbus in discourses of precarity’, in C. Gualtieri (ed.), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean. Shifting Cultures in Twenty-First-Century Europe, Peter Lang Publishers, 285–304, 2018 (in ‘Race and Resistance Across Borders, the Long Twentieth Century’ series).



Works discussed

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Lost Subjects (with Australian Broadcasting Corporation & Sound Design Studio), 1995. Location: Museum of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales. Reference: Paul Carter, Lost Subjects, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1999. The Calling to Come (with Australian Broadcasting Corporation & Sound Design Studio), 1995). Location: Museum of Sydney. Reference: Paul Carter, The Calling to Come, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1996. Art installation Raft (with Ruark Lewis). Location: Art Gallery of New South Wales, exhibition, 1995; permanent collection, 2008 (see www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ collection/works/75.2008/). Reference: Paul Carter, Ruark Lewis, Depth of Translation: The Book of Raft, Melbourne: New Music Articles, 1999. Kelp (with Edmund Carter, Christopher Williams). Exhibition: Hidden Histories, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria, April 2014. Involutes (with Edmund Carter) 2011). Exhibition: Laminations, Multimedia Room, Charles Darwin University, Casuarina Campus, 15 October 2015. Graphic art Hinges (with Edmund Carter), 2006. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Masters of the Gap: art, migration and eido-kinesis’, in C. Merewether and J. Potts (eds), After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 43–56. Public art Relay (with Ruark Lewis) 2000. Location: Sydney Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, Sydney, New South Wales. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Trace: A Running Commentary on Relay’, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design. Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 2008, 203–227. Nearamnew, 2002. Location: Federation Square, Melbourne. Reference: Paul Carter, Mythform: The Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square, Melbourne, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2005. Golden Grove (with Taylor, Cullity, Lethlean), 2007/2008. Location: Darlington Campus, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales. Reference: Paul Carter, Places Made After Their Stories: Design and the Art of Choreotopography, Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015, 149–212. Rival Channels, 2015. Location: 180 Brisbane, 180 Ann Street, Brisbane, Queensland. Tjunta Trail (with Neville Collard and Richard Walley), 2017. Location: Scarborough Foreshore Redevelopment, Western Australia. Reference:

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316

Works discussed

Paul Carter, ‘The Tjunta Trail: cross-cultural dramaturgy in Australian place-making’, in C. Weiler, E. Fischer-Lichte, T. Jost (eds), Shifting Dramaturgies: Composing Experiences of Interweaving Performance Cultures, London: Routledge, 2021, 1–20. Passenger, 2018. Location: Yagan Square, Perth, Western Australia. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Ghosting: Putting the Volume into Screen Memory’, in D. Marshall, G. D’Cruz, S. Macdonald and K. Lee (eds), Contemporary Publics, London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2016, 61–76. The Pipes (with Ramus), 2020. Location: Prahran Square, City of Stonnington, Victoria, Australia. Script and co-direction Light, a séance drama (with Chandrabhanu, Hossein Valamanesh, Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 1996. Performance: Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Reference: Paul Carter, Amplifications, Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory, New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, 82–87. Old Wives’ Tales (with Chandrabhanu and the Bharatam Dance Company), 1997. Performance: CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, 25 September–4 October. Jadi Jadian (with Chandrabhanu, members of the Bharatam Dance Company and Gedang Terinai Orchestra of Perlis), 1998. Performance, Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Reference: Paul Carter, Material Thinking, the Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004, 97–124. Wie ist dein Name/What Is Your Name (with Prompt Theatre Company, Frei Universität, Berlin), 2004. Performance: Theaterdiscounter (Mitte), Berlin, 1–3 June. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘The Empty Space is a Wall: the role of theatrical translation in the public reinscription of the other’, Performance Research, 2005, On Form issue, 79–91. Dramaturgy Sugar (with Rachael Swain), 2007. Performance: Merseyside Caribbean Centre, 29 June. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Exposure: a postcolonial turn in urban ethnography’, Postcolonial Studies, 21, Issue 2, 2018, 131–153. Professional reports ‘Solution, public spaces strategy, Victoria Harbour, Melbourne’, 2002. Client: Lendlease Group. Reference: Carter, Dark Writing, 173–202. ‘A New Body, a creative template for Yagan Square, Perth’, 2014. Client: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority. Reference: Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 341–363.



Works discussed

317

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‘Scarborough Edge, a creative template for the Scarborough Redevelopment Area’, 2015. Client: Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority. Reference: Paul Carter, ‘Shadowing passage: cultural memory as movement form’, in N. Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts and A. Longley (eds), Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping: Activating Imaginaries and Means of Knowing, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019, 46–62. ‘Hospitality, a creative template for the New Footscray Hospital, Melbourne, 2020. Client: John Holland Group.

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page; page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Acconci, Vito 196 Adorno, Theodor 270, 281 Afton, Bethany 237n.32 Alciphron 302 Alighieri, Dante 86, 214, 215 Amery, Rob 289, 292, 298n.41, 298n.42 Apostolidès, Jean-Marie 192, 206n.84 Arabanoo 50, 77n.19, 86 Arakawa/ Madeline Gins 175, 287 Aranda see Arrernte Arch, Joseph 19, 22, 25, 28, 41, 42, 93, 220 Archilochus 142 Arendt, Hannah 280–281 Aristophanes 301, 303, 304, 305, 309 Armstrong, Francis 52 Arrernte people and language 4, 96, 97, 103, 115–116, 135, 178, 275n.57, 276n.67 Ashby, A.K. 30–31 Ashby (of Tysoe), Joseph see Ashby, A.K. Auerbach, Erich 214, 215 Austin, J.L. 186 Baggio, R.A. 57, 62 Balbuk, Fanny see Yoreel

Banks, Sir Joseph 43 Bardon, Geoffrey 99, 135, 178–180 Barrère Albert and Charles G. Leland 87–88 Bates, Daisy 151, 185, 262 Bayer, Louis 72 Benjamin, Walter 37, 172, 182–183 Berger, John 92, 105 Berio, Luciano 301 Biedermann, Karl 189 Blake, Barry 73, 75, 152 Blatchford, Robert 219 Böhme, Gernot 159n.89 Boonwurrung see Bunurong Borges, Jorge Luis 54, 184, 259 Boucher, Leigh 71–72 Brodie, Aunty Veronica 278n.87 Brontë, Patrick 221 Brough Smyth, Robert 216, 290 Buckley, William 217, 229 Bulmer, John 282 Bunce, Daniel 291, 299n.49 Bunjil 7, 8, 212 Bunurong people 171, 236n.17, 239n.43, 245, 291 Bunyan, John 208 Burns, Robert 218, 219, 247 Buscot Estate 16, 38–42, 222

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Index 319 Cacciari, Massimo 147, 185 Campbell, Robert ‘Tertius’ 40–42, 48n.65, 222 Canetti, Elias 88, 102, 105, 169 Carr, David 209 Carr, Julie 285–286 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 110 Carter, Frederick 209, 219, 230 Carter, Paul 8 Amplifications 34, 50 A New Body 252 Baroque Memories 89–90, 91, 112, 132–132, 137, 287– 288, 309 Columbus Echo 55, 74, 185–188, 235, 258, 314 Cooee Song 55, 62, 152, 171, 258, 282, 289, 290–291, 292–293, 314 ‘creative template’ 6, 8, 162–176, 164, 167, 178, 180, 182–183, 185, 199, 252, 267, 291 Dark Writing 34, 112 Ecstacies and Elegies 224 Golden Grove 176, 315 Ground Truthing 8, 58–59, 284 Hospitality 171–175 Jadi Jadian 107–110, 109, 110, 112, 172, 222, 316 Kelp 67–69, 68, 315 Light 4, 94, 108, 110, 146, 222, 316 Lost Subjects 50, 53–55, 58, 83–88, 94, 105, 117, 222, 235, 315 Material Thinking 109 Memory as Desire 59–61, 314 Metabolism 302 Mirror States 55, 62, 85, 111, 112, 150–151, 211–213, 214, 222, 236n.19, 258, 259, 286, 299n.48, 306, 314

Named in the Margin 83–84, 87, 314 Nearamnew 123, 127–128, 136, 137, 138, 212, 213, 315 Old Wives Tales 105–107, 110, 316 Passenger 2, 176, 262–266, 263, 264, 270, 273n.38, 293, 316 Remember Me 55, 231, 314 Repressed Spaces 181–182, 266 Rival Channels 123–126, 124, 128, 136–143, 144, 147, 149, 152, 293, 315 Scarborough Edge 167, 251–253, 317 Scarlatti 115, 223, 314 Solution 163, 169–170, 316 Sugar 190–200, 193, 205n.73, 232, 293, 316 The Calling to Come 2, 84, 94, 178, 259, 315 The Lie of the Land 178 The Native Informant 3, 24, 50, 52, 55, 63, 230, 314 The Pipes 288, 289, 293, 316 The Road to Botany Bay 8, 85, 93, 103, 207 The Sound In-Between 8 Tjunta Trail 6, 253–255, 273n.38, 315 Turbulence 37, 126–127 Underworlds of Jean du Chas 234, 314 What Is Your Name/Wie ist dein Name 8, 50, 55, 58–59, 188–190, 204n.69, 204n.70, 232, 235, 258, 306–307, 314 Carter, William Charles Martin 209 Carter, Paul and Edmund Carter Hinges 34, 36, 225, 315 Involutes 232, 232–235

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320 Index Carter, Paul and Ruark Lewis 4, 111, 117 Raft 4, 94–105, 95, 111, 117–118, 142, 293 Relay 53, 112–117, 113, 114, 315 Cash, John 310 Celan, Paul 105 Chandrabhanu 105–110, 222 Chapman, Ralph 163 Clerk, Nellie 286 Clifford, James 188 Coates, Callum 149 Cobbett, William 18 Collard, Len 265 Collard, Neville 254–257 Conford, Philip 131 Cook, James 54 Crosbie, Simon 18 Concas, Lino 88 Critchett, Jan 64, 71 Curr, Edward Micklethwaite 54, 217, 299n.48 Curtler, W.H.R. 226 Dante see Alighieri, Dante Da Vinci, Leonardo 14, 35, 149–150, 233 Davis, Jack 151 Dawes, William 178, 290 Dawson, Isabella 65, 71, 73, 218 Dawson, James 4, 20, 60, 63–76, 151–152, 163, 214, 215– 220, 226, 227, 229–230, 238n.43, 240n.49, 249, 284–285, 297n.25, 297n.26 Debord, Guy 192, 197, 206n.84 De Bruyn, Dirk 97 De Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian 266 Deissmann, Adolf 96 De Quincey, Thomas 34–36, 74, 105, 126, 232, 233, 234 Dhauwurd Wurrung see Gundidjmara Diyari people and language 60, 96

Djab Wurrung people and language 4, 20, 21, 63, 65, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76 Dja Dja Wurrung people 21, 93, 189, 204n.69 Djargurd Wurrung see Djab Wurrung Dodson, Michael 248 Eldridge, Richard 65 Eliot, T.S. 250, 252 Ellis, Catherine 60, 103, 116 Enclosure Acts, the 3, 17–18, 22–26, 30–31, 41, 42, 92, 180, 209, 214–215, 217– 218, 220–221, 224, 226, 237n.32, 246 England, Roye 225 Euripides, The Bacchae 101, 261 Faringdon 16, 18, 25, 38–39, 63, 128–132, 139, 154n.16, 154n.18, 209, 219, 228, 230–231 Farley, Anne 23 Fels, Marie Hansen 293–294, 298n.44 Fichte, Hubert 188 Forte, Franco 89 Foulquié, Philippe 197 Fox, George 248 Freud, Sigmund 67, 213, 270 Fumagalli, Giuseppina 149, 150 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 182, 301, 304–305, 309 Galeano, Eduardo 259–260 Ganai/Gunai see Kurnai Ganassim, S. and P. Holmes 187 Gardner, Peter 285 Giacometti, Alberto 266, 288 Gibson, Jennifer 141 Gija people 128 Gins, Madeline see Arakawa Glissant Édouard 186 Glowczewski, Barbara 269

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Index 321 Gorz, André 214 Gosse, Edmund 19 Graham, Mary 138, 250–251 Gray, Robert 12–13, 14, 23, 29, 36, 38 Greenhalgh see Pisek Grey, Sir George 93, 265–266 Grodzin, Morton 127 Grove, Richard 218 Gundidjmara/Gunditjmara people and language 4, 20, 21, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72–73, 75–76 Gunew, Sneja 56 Hagenauer, Friedrich, August 281 Hammond, J.L. and Barbara Hammond 18 Hammond, Nigel 47n.62 Harrison, Jane 268 Hartley, Jesse 198–200 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 198 Hayden, Eleanor 44n.8 Heaton, John 266 Hernández, Miguel 224 Hillman, James 100, 101–102, 223, 287 Holland, Louise 183 Horkheimer, Max 270 Houbein, Lolo 143–144, 149 Howlett, John 30 Howitt, William 286 Hudson, W.H. 240n.62 Hughes, Thomas 229 Hunter, John 86 industrialisation 3, 26, 40, 42, 45n.25, 45n.26, 146, 217 Jakobson, Roman 62, 308 James, William 281 Jameson, Fredric 308 Japaljarri, Spencer 260 Jefferies, Richard 25, 42, 219, 221, 231 Jeltje 88 Jennings, Humphrey 231

Jones, David 3, 224, 226–227, 229, 231, 241n.78 Jones, Philip 99 Kaawirn Kuunawarn 66, 71, 72 Kafka, Franz 115, 184, 185, 198–199 Kalloongoo (Kaurna people), also Charlotte 5, 171, 286, 289–290, 292 Kalperum-jaggin (‘Jaggera’) people 123, 125–126, 138, 156n.37 Kantor, Tadeusz 55, 146 Karcevskij, Sergej 57 Kaurna people 5, 152, 171, 292 Keats, John 148 Kelly, Helena 220 Kerényi, Carl 260 King Alfred 3, 228–229 King Arthur 3, 229 King-Smith, Leah 250 Klapproth, Danièle M. 148 Klee, Paul 35, 115, 147, 160, 164, 166, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181 Kondos, Efthimios 56 Krili-Kevans, Yota 56–57 Kulin peoples 7, 63, 152, 163, 172–174, 212, 217, 236n.17, 238n.43 Kumarra Conceptual Framework see Graham, Mary Kurnai people 281–282, 285–286 Lacan, Jacques 210, 223 Langton, Marcia 301 La Trobe, Charles Joseph 293 Lawrence, Roger 216 Le Guern, Odile 306 Levinas, Emmanuel 266 Lewis, Ruark see Carter, Paul and Ruark Lewis Light, William 4, 94, 107–108, 112, 146, 151, 178 Litherland, Victor 94

322 Index

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Lourandos, Harry 216–217 Lowth, Robert 306 Lyon, Robert Menli 218 Machetti, S. and R. Siebetcheu 187 McMillan, Angus 285 Madden, Raymond 64 Marquand, David 23 Mason, Richard 140 Massumi, Brian 188 Material Thinking (design studio) 124, 165, 264, 289 Merlan, Francesca 252 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 294–295 Methodism 25–29, 208–210 Miller, J. Hillis 180–181 Mindie 174 Mitchell, Sir Thomas Livingston 8, 22, 25, 39, 40, 42, 62, 86, 93 Montale, Eugenio 116 Mootoo, Shani 180 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 249 Morrison, Herbert 230–231 Mountford, Charles 70, 148 Müller, Max 216, 235 Muutchaka, The Last of His Tribe see Bayer, Louis Myers, Fred 251 Nandy, Ashis 310 Napaltjarri, Tjungkaya (Linda Syddick) 251 Neilson, John Shaw 23, 59, 70, 152, 225 Nicolacopoulos, Toula and George Vassilacopoulos 246–247, 249–250, 257, 260, 269 Nicolin, Pierluigi 234 Noongar/ Nyungar people 6, 51–52, 93, 185, 218, 253, 255, 262, 267–268, 273n.34 Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg] 37

Obeyesekere, Gananath 65 Oedipus 7, 9–10, 117, 184, 185, 199, 301 Ó Laoire, Lillis 145–146 Olsen, Andrea 127 Ó Searcaigh, Cathal 145 Paestum 133–134 Paine, Thomas 246, 269 Papastergiadis, Nikos 302 Pascoe, Bruce 71, 215, 249, 250 Paton, John 248 Patyegarang 286, 290 Paull, James 111, 117 Paz, Octavio 231, 291 Peacock, Christine 250–251 Peirce, Charles Sanders 305, 308 Pepper, Phillip 282 Petts, David 225 Pintupi people 99, 178, 251 Pirnmeheeal 230, 261 Pisek, Paul E. and Trisha Greenhalgh 174 Pitjantjatjara people 60, 61, 148 Plato, The Symposium 302–304 Plutarch 234 Poe, Edgar Allan 235 Presland, Gary 65, 239n.43 Propp, Vladimir 255 Proudfoot, Lindsay and Dianne Hall 239n.44 Pulvirenti, Mariella 89, 91, 98 Pye, Henry James 19 Rainbow Serpent 6, 70, 148, 151, 174, 253 Ricoeur, Paul 257, 270, 305–307 Rifkin, Adrian 277 Ritz, Hermann 57, 60, 61 Robin Hood 29, 209, 219–220, 222 Robinson, George Augustus 171, 240n.62, 290, 291 Rolls, Eric 42 Rosenman, Ellen 237n.32 Rouse, A.L. 231

Index 323

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Rozells, Martinha 107, 108, 172 Rutherford, Jennifer 1, 282–284 Said, Edward 182 Saint George 3, 229, 255–256, 286 Saint Paul 96, 98, 99–101, 102 San Roque, Craig 258, 260, 261–262 Sappho 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul 90 Schauberger, Viktor 149 Schliemann, Heinrich 110, 233, 234 Schwitters, Kurt 232, 234, 235 Sennett, Richard 93 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 7, 39, 303–304 Sieg, Katrin 188 Silverstein, Michael 186 Sinclair, Sir John 22 Sitwell, Sacheverell 105 Smyth, Robert Brough see Brough Smyth Snelling, N.J. 129 Sophocles 7; Oedipus at Colonus 117–118, 184 Spencer, Herbert 228 Spenser, Edmund 222 Standfield, Rachel 216, 238n.43 Stewart, David 141 Stokes, Adrian 130–131, 132, 133 Strehlow, Carl 94–96, 97 Strehlow, T.G.H. 4, 94, 96–97, 103, 104, 115–116, 135, 178, 260, 301 Sturt, Charles 59, 132 Sturt, George 25 Susini, Giancarlo 147 Swain, Rachael 189–190 Teichelmann, C.G. and C.W. Schürmann 292 Tench, Watkin 54, 77n.19, 86 Terry, Joseph 26–33, 43, 44n.25, 26, 27, 155n.31, 208, 219, 220, 231–232, 233

‘The Diver’ (Il tuffatore) 302, 310 ‘The Prodigal Son’ (parable) 222, 225–226 Thomas, William 213, 238n.43 Thompson, d’Arcy Wentworth 131 Tjangala, Uta Uta 180 Tjapwurrung see Djab Wurrung Tjupurrula, Johnny Warangkula 134, 135 Tsaloumas, Dimitris 210, 222 Turner, Margaret Kemarre 275–276n.57 Tuurap Warneen 285 Tyrwhitt, Gerald (Lord Berners) 19 Uffington White Horse 3, 34, 152, 220, 225, 227, 229, 250, 252, 255–256 Valamanesh, Hossein 111–112, 142 Valverde, José María 58 Vico, Giambattista 166, 177, 235 Volentieri, Vincenzo 1, 2, 5, 86–87, 98, 132, 178, 301 Von Raffler-Engel, Walburga 50, 52, 65 Wada Wurrung see Wathaurong Warlbiri people 269 Wathaurong people 21, 63, 71, 217, 219 Wathawurrung see Wathaurong Waugul, also Waakal, Woggal 151, 253–254, 265, 273n.38, 275n.48, 277n.79 Watson, Christine 99 Weeratt Kuyuut 81n.73, 228 Wesson, Sue Caroline 281 Whitman, Walt 149 Wilden, Anthony 210–211, 212, 213, 214, 223 Williams, Alfred 19, 41, 221–222, 240n.62

324 Index

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Williams, Christopher 69, 293 Woi wurrung see Wurundjeri Wombeetch Puyuun 20, 72 Wordsworth, William 32, 220, 224 Wotjobaluk people 59, 282 Wright, Joseph 223

Wurgurd Wurrung see Gundidjmara Wurundjeri people 21, 171, 291 Yankunytjatjara people 148 Yaruun Parpur Tarneen 73 Yoreel 176, 185, 262, 264, 266, 273n.38