Table of Contents
This chapter is an invitation to journey along a tangle of tracks. The first track is a brief excursion across some of the analytic terrain. The analysis I present is founded in a theory and practice of dialogue. There are two main precepts for structuring ethical dialogue.[1] The first is that dialogue begins where one is, and thus is always situated; the second is that dialogue is open, and thus that the outcome is not known in advance. Openness produces reflexivity, so that one’s own ground becomes destabilised. My concern here is with the first precept: to engage in dialogue as ethical practice one must understand one’s own situatedness. One practical consequence of this precept is that our gestures toward others must not exclude analysis of our own histories, geographies, and cultures. I have been particularly attentive to our cultures of violence because their effect is to foreclose on dialogue before we even properly begin. The purpose in analysing violence is to understand where it is located and how it is embedded in our cultural work, and the end goal is to uncover paths that may lead toward reparative action in the world.
In a series of essays devoted to analysis of the frontier in Australian society, I have sought to interrogate violence in many of its contemporary forms.[2] I have argued that the frontier is a matrix of modernity, a time and place where modern culture simultaneously reveals its capacity for destruction and re-invents its own myth of creation. The conventional view of the frontier is that it is sequential: it is an historical moment of encounter that will be overcome by civilisation. This linear view obscures many things: the violence of civilisation, the coevalness of the frontier, the formative interactions of destruction and creation. To put it another way, the sequential theory of the frontier treats a tension-laden and interactive relationship as if it were a linear progression in which violence is always about to be overcome. In contrast, I contend that the frontier is a key site for reflexive critique of contemporary society.
The tension between presence and absence is integral to ‘New World’ frontier mythology. On the one hand the conquerors imagine themselves in the midst of savage people and wild places; on the other hand, the savage person and the wild place are defined by the absence of civilised man (the coloniser), and thus as living absences: tabula rasa (in respect of the people) and terra nullius (in respect of the land). Terra nullius is a particularly interesting concept for the way it combines presence – terra, with absence – nullius. The two are packed together in this one concept, and thus the one concept actually references relationship, interaction, and tension.
My purpose here is to examine frontier violence when the conquerors set out not to destroy but to redeem. As Richard Slotkin says, ‘the fable of redemption through immersion in the wilderness … lies at the heart of the Myth of the Frontier.’[3] The American myth offers redemption through violence very explicitly. In contrast, Liz Furniss draws an excellent comparison with the Canadian frontier, arguing that it is not violence but rather paternalistic benevolence that is the key to Canadian frontier mythology.[4]
In the Australian context we can locate a powerful stream of thinking that offers redemption through the landscape itself.[5] Redemption through landscape suggests that this place – this continent – has a power that can act on people, provided that civilisation does not interfere. The foundational concept of terra nullius thus has the potential to say so much more than we might have thought. Our attention has been on the nullius part of the term, on this absence of ownership whose unmasking threw the nation into crisis. But we need to think also about the terra part of the term – this continent, and how settler Australians have imagined an elemental power of place.
My argument is that the desire for exclusive presence is itself an act of violence. I will follow one man’s flight to the frontier where I have encountered a site at which is visible much of what I am discussing: the conqueror’s knowledge of his own loss, his own experience of absence as emptiness, his own recoil at the implications of his morally conflicted presence. That is one of the journeys of the paper, as it tracks the life and work of the artist Ainslie Roberts.
I began by discussing dialogue. The conqueror’s story is not the only story, and if I were to present the conqueror as if he stood alone I would perpetuate the violence I am seeking to work against. For that reason, I will begin with a track that aims toward decolonisation.
In 1997 I worked as the consulting anthropologist to the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Justice Gray, when he went to Central Mt Wedge station, northwest of Alice Springs, to hear a claim to Aboriginal traditional ownership of the relinquished pastoral lease. Central Mt Wedge, in Central Australia, is located between the Aboriginal communities of Yuendemu and Papunya. This is an extremely arid part of Australia, and the Mt Wedge area consists of hills and plains, with no rivers at all. There are few soakages, and only two rockholes of substantial size where the water has been regarded as permanent (although it has been known to fail). The station consists of 3245 square kilometers; it was taken up in 1947, much later than most of the stations in the Northern Territory.[6]
Some of the Aboriginal people for this country had fled into the area after the Coniston massacre in 1928, and had been adopted into the local groups. These groups moved in and out of neighbouring stations, alternating between life in the bush and station life. Some of them had been caught up in the brutal regime of Mt Doreen station where the station owner used them as slaves.
In 1947 Bill Waudby gained the grazing license over Central Mt Wedge. Waudby was not an experienced pastoralist at the time, and he relied on Aboriginal workers:
I was a pretty new chum at all this. As I say, I had a good team of Aboriginals who knew what the game was about, and we managed to get along quite well, and we got the cattle home.[7]
Waudby had little difficulty recruiting Aboriginal labour: conditions on a number of the neighbouring stations were unbelievably bad, and Waudby was a decent bloke. When he took up the station, and proved to be a fair and reasonable man to work for, Aborigines who belonged there came to stay. Waudby kept the station running with Aboriginal labour until the mid-60s when drought and award wages altered the situation. Many of the Aboriginal workers then cleared out. Internationally acclaimed artists such as Daisy Jugudai Napaljarri, and Paddy Carroll Jungarrayi are Central Mt Wedge people who were introduced to commercial art in Aboriginal communities such as Papunya.
During this period of exile, people became committed to returning to their own country. In 1984 they started registering sacred sites on the station, and one of the senior men set up an outstation on the station. In 1987 they incorporated and were granted a community living area. The Aboriginal Benefits Trust Fund purchased the station in 1995. In 1997 the claim was heard; in 1998 the Aboriginal Land Commissioner made the finding that the claimants were traditional owners within the terms of the Act, and the title was handed over to the Aboriginal traditional owners in 1999.
In the course of the claim, the traditional owners took us to a particularly spectacular site called Palka-karrinya, translated as ‘Behold karrinya’. It is a monolith in a narrow gorge. Several Dreamings are located here, and the site is connected with a number of the Dreaming tracks of major significance in Central Australia, as well as having its own local significance. Along with these Dreaming connections, the monolith at Palka-karrinya was identified with the grandfather of a number of members of the group. Creation and the present moment were connected through a known human ancestor. On our approach some of the people communicated to him.
The site is not only a place of past action, but of present action; not only a source of life but also a repository for life. It is a mutually interactive place where encounters contribute to the lives of all the parties. Stephen Muecke gets into the thick of interactive relationships in his discussion of the signs he saw in his northern travels: these signs announced a ‘site of significance’. Muecke takes a more subtle and action-oriented view:
Significance is the wrong word, these sites are not full of meanings, cluttered with signs like a library. Ask the locals: something there they will say…. You have to ask yourself, what has that site been doing over the years, getting people to do things, or producing meanings?[8]
Action toward a site is intended to be nurturant, and to elicit more life from the site. At Palka-karrinya women sang the bush plum Dreaming. The song is part of the work people do to keep the country productive or nurturant, and it is a communicative event as well. It tells the place that the people are here, and that they are doing the work that keeps the place engaged with everyday life and time.
In the context of the hearing women sang before the Judge as part of the evidence of their ownership. The song had the potential to influence legal proceedings as well as bush plums. Other demonstrations of ownership were presented in the form of art and ritual. Over the course of a day women of two groups made ground paintings, and danced and sang; a select portion of their actions were witnessed by the Judge and other men of the legal parties.
In sum, the traditional owners of Central Mt Wedge experienced the frontier under a number of historical positions: they experienced massacres, near slavery, starvation, chains, and floggings; they experienced the pastoral industry as valued workers; they removed into Aboriginal settlements such as Papunya, and gained national and international fame as artists. They launched a successful claim to land, and have regained a portion of their land under Aboriginal Freehold Title. Some of the oldest claimants experienced all of this in their own lifetimes. And in their extraordinary lives they learned and carried the knowledge that enabled them to engage reflexively in their own country – to act toward sites, and to be acted upon by sites.
Carment, D., R. Maynard, & A. Powell 1990, Northern Territory Dictionary Of Biography, Volume 1, Northern Territory University Press, Casuarina, NT.
Deloria, Philip 1998, Playing Indian, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.
Dorst, John 1999, Looking West, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Everdell, William 1997, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Fackenheim, Emil L. 1994 [1982], To Mend the World, Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Furniss, Elizabeth 1999, The Burden of History; Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community. UBC Press, Vancouver.
Gray, Justice 1998, Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Central Mount Wedge Land Claim No. 154, Report and Recommendations of the Former Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
Harney, Bill 1980 [1963], Life Among the Aborigines, Rigby Ltd., Adelaide.
Haynes, Roslyn 1998, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
Hulley, Charles 1988, Ainslie Roberts and the Dreamtime, J. M. Dent, Melbourne.
Mathews, Freya 2005, Reinhabiting Reality. SUNY Press, Albany.
Muecke, Stephen 1997, No Road: Bitumen All the Way, Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Roberts, Ainslie & Charles Mountford 1965, The Dreamtime, Rigby Ltd., Adelaide.
— 1969, The Dawn of Time, Rigby, Ltd. Adelaide.
Rose, Deborah 2004, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney
— 1999, ‘Hard Times, An Australian Study’ in K. Neumann, N. Thomas, & H. Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, pp. 2–19, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
— 1997, ‘Dark times and excluded bodies in the colonisation of Australia,’ in G. Gray and C. Winter (eds), The Resurgence of Racism: Hanson, Howard and the Race Debate, pp. 97–116, Monash Publications in History, Monash University, Melbourne.
Said, Edward 1979, ‘The Text, the World, and the Critic’ in J. Harari, (ed), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, pp. 161–88, Methuen, London, 1979.
Schaffer, Kay 1995, In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Slotkin, Richard 1992, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Atheneum, New York.
Thomas, Nicholas 1997, ‘Home décor and dance: the abstraction of Aboriginality’ in Rebecca Coates and Howard Morphy (eds) In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia, pp. 24-28, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Vaarzon-Morel, P. & L. Sackett 1997, Central Mount Wedge Land Claim, Anthropologists’ Report, Prepared on behalf of the claimants for the Central Land Council, Alice Springs, NT.