^[1]A ghost is haunting Australian politics, the ghost of Aboriginal power. Perhaps in the way that Marxism has been a ‘critical factor’ in the articulation of world politics, Aboriginal power has been a spectre in white Australian history. And despite all the struggles, the regular announcements of victory, assimilation, ‘reform’ or ten point plans, Aboriginal power persists. Marxism, too, continues to haunt the languages we use to analyse politics and history.^[2] How does one explain the persistence, even the growth of Aboriginal power; the power it uses to unravel those often-held certainties of politics and history?

In order to attempt to answer this I shall have to avoid that language which seems to aim towards certainty and closure (history and politics) and stray into philosophy, a mode of activity that rarely engages with Aboriginal knowledges (or is indeed rarely seen as a kind of Aboriginal knowledge; you have religion, but not philosophy, why is this?^[3] ).

My discussion will centre around a famous Kalkatungu man, who lived with the Duracks in the East Kimberley when they started their pastoral empire. ‘And on the more benign stations,’ says Tony Swain, ‘there was room for the creative philosophic thought of people like Boxer.’^[4] What kind of philosopher was he? Mary Durack also mentions philosophy, in a book talking a lot about Boxer, All-about, 1935, in which the dedication, the most significant encapsulation of the book, ends by saying: ‘Yours is the gift of laughter and human kindliness and true philosophy. Were you ever savages?’^[5] .

‘Were you ever savages?’ is the question picked up by Tim Rowse for his significant article, his historical and political analysis of the turn-of-the century frontier in the East Kimberley, ‘“Were you ever savages?” Aboriginal Insiders and Pastoralists’ Patronage’. Why this interrogation about savages, from Durack in 1935 and then Rowse 50 years later, when the thrust of the question is that you can no longer be considered savages? We know this from the change of tense in Durack: ‘Yours is the gift of laughter ...’ becomes ‘Were you ever ...’ But 50 years later Tim still asks the same question, and I will ask why again later.

Now I want to ask about that gift that precondition for not being savages. ‘Yours is the gift of laughter and human kindliness and true philosophy.’ Unlike Tim I want to begin with what Durack asserts in that present of 1935; true philosophy (and laughter, not many jokes in historical and political analysis, these are no laughing matter); and kindliness, which is of course about kinship – knowledge and kinship, kith and kin, go together in the philosophies I am speaking about. Laughter, human kindliness and true philosophy are of course the opposite of savagery, as Durack implies, questioning the assumptions of her readers (just as Bruno Latour was to do in 1993, telling his European readers, ‘We Have Never Been Modern’^[6] ), so my interrogation of the analysis of certainty might just have to pop the question, might your analysis not be getting a little bit savage, or at least a bit blunt, to the extent that it does not incorporate laughter, human kindliness and true philosophy?

So I am going to tell the story of the philosophy of Boxer, an ‘insider black’, a ‘magic’, a maban, and how his work made Aboriginal power persist. I am going to re-read the available texts, which give us just about all we know about Boxer. I am going to make these texts work a little bit harder – this is deconstructive method – find the words in them which have given up and, it seems, can go no further on the road to truth. Exhausted words which fall back on our old assumptions.^[7] Tim Rowse, for instance, knows that the arrival of the Europeans on the Kimberley frontier was a massive disruption of the old way of life: ‘a world in such ferment’ ^[8] and, ‘the unprecedented nature of the phenomena confronting Aborigines’^[9] are phrases he uses. And before too long he divides the frontier between ‘insider’ station people and ‘outsider’ wild blackfellas – which is pretty convincing – yet he uses too quickly, for my liking, the word ‘order’ to describe station life: ‘... the universe of Kimberley Aborigines came to be divided between the pastoral order and its dangerous exterior’^[10] , and, ‘to be lost, as in Jack Bohemia’s police tracker stories, is ‘to be in a state of moral disorder’’.^[11] The crucial question is, whose life was more ordered? Whose law is wilder, the cattle spearers or the blackfella-shooters (and there is evidence that the Duracks as well as their insider blacks like Boxer, were among the shooters, though almost surely not the worst of them). Old Bulla (from Kununurra) puts the same question, talking about magic: ‘Who’s the powerful? Who’s the strongest? The white man or the blackfeller, see, out of those two?’^[12]

Now, having posed those questions, I am not going to be in a position to answer them here and it is not my place to do so. I have simply woken up a sleepy word, ‘order’, which was happy to go along with the assumption that the whitefella world was taking over on this frontier, that this would be the new world order, so to speak, what Rowse calls the Pax Durackia, and others have called the ‘golden age’ in Northern frontier history:

After many thousands of years of Aboriginal reign in the Kimberley, we have a picture of a ‘lasting’ new peace, a ‘timeless’ and classical ideology installed at Argyle under the benevolent patronage of the Duracks. But what happened? Charlie Court had grander plans for the Kimberley, and in 1971 the lands around Argyle were submerged by the waters of the Ord, a veritable biblical flood. This new order hadn’t lasted too long, on the scale of Kimberley history.

But yet it lives. The Duracks transformed this pastoral order into books, and All-about is a fine pastoral classic. Boxer, for his part, transformed it into a new cult, Djanba, the ceremonial boards of which are disintegrating along with the remains of the station (the homestead itself was relocated) under all that water. Whose magic is the more powerful? I can only keep asking that question, but I am an outsider critic, a group Rowse perceptively included. Who were the enemies of the Duracks’ order?

The critic with the pen is wild in the sense of being out of line. What would those city folk know? For instance, there is a profound accord, a loving trust, which makes Mary Durack able to write in the following way about the housekeeper who comes up from the camp to wake up the people in the homestead each morning:

Do a bit more work on the text. There are two sorts of hands; ‘firm black’ ones and ‘half-dazed’ [white] ones. Each day her coming ‘marks the beginning’. Who is running this show? And already on the previous page we have met Boxer for the first time, as a young boy, insisting that a boab tree be planted in the garden against the wishes of the gardener who found them

Where did this powerful boy come from, who could boss around the white gardener? Mary Durack tells us that he was

This boy grew up to be so trusted by the Duracks that he virtually ran the cattle camp, as did Jack Sullivan who followed in his footsteps and left his oral history with Bruce Shaw. As a Queenslander, raised by another Queenslander (Pumpkin), he had some conflict with the locals, but at the same time learned the local languages and mediated strongly between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: ‘Boxer was a man who flowed around like the wind,’ said Bulla.^[18] He was always turning up just as he was needed, the whitefella and blackfella testimonies agree on this.

Most importantly, for my argument, he was a cultural innovator. Was he happy with the ‘order’ the Duracks had installed, or rather the order that his peoples’ cooperative effort had installed with the Duracks, which was only to last a little more than his lifetime? There was obviously such a huge disparity between these two ways of life that he could not help but have his intelligence challenged in making sense of it all. Not totally unlike Mary Durack writing All-about to make sense of it all, from her point of view. But while Mary Durack’s text was sent off to the Bulletin to be published far away from its source (‘You will never read this, for to learning you have no pretensions ...’ she says in her dedication to her ‘all-about’ mob, ‘You cannot sue us for libel’), what Boxer did was performative: he created a new cult, called Djanba, which would have been quite opaque to the Duracks (they too, had no pretensions to learning):^[19] This Djanba, that Boxer created, really took off:

Tim Rowse quotes the full text from Lommel, who observed the cult in the 1930s:

Now Tony Swain has written about this cult, and others like it, in interesting ways. Swain’s habit, when citing these Aboriginal innovations is to talk of the ‘cosmic marriage’ of two laws: ‘… having of necessity allowed White Law to impose itself on them, they have sought their salvation partially by employing its representations, but pre-eminently by conjoining it with the law of the lands and their spirits.’ ^[22]

To which one has to ask, is ‘salvation’ what cultural innovators, even philosophers, seek? Are these two laws ‘conjoined’, ‘married’? All of these metaphors suggest closure, the pious end of the story. But Djanba, like Boxer knows how to flow around, and put himself inside every ceremony: As Swain says:

Swain makes a strong case for power coming from the East, not only the colonisation by the Durack mob, but also a tradition of new cults emerging from Arnhem land. Coming on that wave Boxer seemed to have brought, from his own country around Mt Isa, a way of thinking which coupled fierce loyalty to the whites with a culture, which according to Swain, was ‘more subtle and dangerous’ than the millennial cult of Mulunga, born about the same time as Boxer, in the late 1880s, and spreading right down through the centre to South Australia. This was a millennial cult, with a compelling reason for people to participate in it. If you didn’t, you would die, along with all the white people. It thus proposes a magical solution to white power, and a possible return to the way things were before. Swain argues for its historical source in the famous Kalkatungu battle of 1884 where 600 warriors died. Boxer would have been about three at the time, though we don’t know if he was anywhere near there.

Now, unlike Mulungu, the argument goes, Djanba, Boxer’s cult, does not promise as its outcome a return to homelands free of whites. It does three rather new things. It articulates Aboriginal power with white objects like cars and aeroplanes, giving it speed of transmission. The second is insider work, ‘he puts himself in every corroboree; just fits himself in’. The third innovation opens up time by proposing a future; personal immortality in the form of stories about Boxer’s resurrection after death, the introduction of the subsection system (by Boxer) and Moon stories which involve recycling of individual bodies rather than places, and possibly also the promise of equal co-existence with whites. Swain is assertive (‘Time is central to the innovations of Boxer ...’^[24] ), but not entirely convincing on these questions, he lacks evidence.

Now let me consider these with a deconstructive attitude which is attentive to the persistence of Aboriginal power in the face of the opposing power of white philosophies. Take an innovative object for instance, as described by Tonkinson in Swain:

Swain concludes:

This innovation, which articulates Aboriginal power with white objects of power, speed and travel, has a poetic resonance in the very shape of the propeller boards and the sound they make. But we all know those guys must be quite wrong to think that is what gives these machines power, it is of course the engines, the petrol ... unless we make one little shift, which is to humanise the object, not fetishise its technology. The plane articulates with the bodies which use it, the seats and controls are made for bodies to occupy, it cannot function without them. The object has emerged out of human invention, out of bird-dreams, and how far is it from them in the ways we enjoy it? The power is ultimately human. Whether the humanism is relevant or not, understanding the plane from this perspective makes the Aboriginal version no longer primitive. It sees it from what we might call Aboriginal connectivist (relation-based) thinking, rather than thinking in terms of discrete objects and beings. We can ask once again, with Bulla: ‘Who’s the powerful? Who’s the strongest?’ – not to decide that contest, but to deconstruct notions of strength, and explain the paradoxical power of weakness.

Tim Rowse supports his history of the stability of insider station life, opposed to the ‘landscape of terror’^[26] on the outside, with narratives in the ‘police tracker genre’, as documented by Bill McGregor. In these narratives, understandably because told by a police tracker, there is no safe return for outlaws, people would generally die out there.

But there is another genre which contradicts this one, one which suggests to me that people like Boxer who had no terror of the outside,^[28] might just have soon been inside on the outside, so to speak, flowing around, getting in with the locals. So when Boxer is put in gaol, he can escape at will with his magic:

This escape narrative has exactly the same structure as Paddy Roe’s ‘Mirdinan’, even down to the three-part structure.^[30] Mirdinan goes further afield, down to Fremantle, to dramatically escape from the noose as he is hanged, transforming into an eaglehawk and flying back to his country. Boxer’s magic persona shares some of these features of freedom of movement; self transformation (changing into an emu, also in Paddy Roe’s stories); letting his guts spill out and putting them back; creating songs and stories, all in explicit assertion of blackfella power.^[31] This, I would argue is inside work on the representations of both black and white culture. It is less the mediation of the clever man, creating a syncretic culture by going backwards and forwards, and it is certainly not the culture of a radical outside, as in the Mulunga cult (or Pigeon’s guerilla warfare in the central Kimberley) which would bring whitefella rule to an end and take things back to the old ways.

Boxer’s infiltration and conceptual change of both laws is open-ended. As Swain says, it incorporates time, perhaps for the first time, in a significant way in Kimberley cultures. We don’t know what happened to Boxer in the end. Unlike Paddy Roe’s Mirdinan, who was defeated by a whitefella power, alcohol, and dumped in the deep water off Broome (another source of ceremonial power according to Swain), Boxer, in a way, still lives. One source says he was ‘in our cemetery down at Argyle.’^[32] Jack Sullivan says he was buried in Darwin, but then years later seen in a pub in Hughenden, North Queensland, by a white station manager, who returned to Darwin to find his grave split open.^[33] ‘I don’t think magic people die,’ concludes Bulla.^[34]

And it’s my turn to conclude. In my experiment of inflecting deconstructive method with the changing stories of Aboriginal power, leading up to the radical challenge to historiography posed by Boxer, I am left with further questions: What is the most appropriate method for understanding that frontier history? As Tim Rowse says, ‘The most difficult part of frontier history for Europeans is the history of Aboriginal understanding: how did they make sense of the invaders … ?’^[35]

My feeling is that we have to go further than the opposition of inside and outside, that the method will also involve simultaneous inquiry of how the invaders understood the Aborigines. I also think that it is not just a question of getting the words right, for if the Boxer story has taught us anything, it is about the importance of performance. The stations and the country of the East Kimberley were the theatre of his life as ‘a magic’. I haven’t been able to reproduce any of that drama in my poor performance today (maybe I should make an excuse, like old Bulla: ‘I could dance it but my knee’s buggered’^[36] ). But that is the question: what forces does history writing mobilise which reach truths other than, or as well as, the factual? What will be their poetry, their magic?

And in deconstructing the insider/outsider opposition, let me recall that spectre of communism with which I began. Tim Rowse, quite rightly warns against ‘city’ outsiders, who are too quick to condemn exploitation on the stations, armed as they are with a Marxist theory insensitive to the more ‘human’ relations of affection on the Durack stations which enabled survival and cultural innovation for the station Aborigines, pretty much on their own terms, running the stations almost as much as they were run by them. Now what is curious is that Swain’s book concludes with another infiltration of that Marxist philosophy, but one which works its way up from the Pilbara, becomes known as Don McLeod law, infiltrates ceremonies like Djuluru, and perhaps culminates at Wave Hill with the revival of the lands rights campaigns. This is the law of the ‘fair go’, of the historical, future-oriented promise of equality and moral rights. Was it Boxer, perhaps the first Aboriginal modernist, who paved the way along this frontier for the passage of these ideas?

How can it be, that communism, now dead as a social system (capitalism is triumphant on the world stage) came both inappropriately from the city as European theory, and from the bush as insider knowledge, to produce, in conjunction with local cultures which I have been unable to expand upon, a radical transformative cult which still lives in the name of Boxer. Boxer’s story has the power that is often attributed to European theories, stories with the power to change our understandings of things. Boxer is dead, we are pretty sure^[37] (maybe we should check that grave again), but as the Algerian-French philosopher says ‘the dead can often be more powerful than the living.’^[38]