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Australian Aboriginality as Race

  
 
Cat Chant
09:38 / 06.07.05
This is something I really don't know much about, so this is a request (1) for information, resources, book/website recommendations, etc and (2) for critique and expansion of my understanding of the issues around cultural continuity and 'race memory' in Australian Aboriginal cultures, as set out herein. (All this is mostly stuff I've got from talking to various white Australians and/or reading the amazing novels of Melissa Lucashenko). I started getting interested in the idea of Aboriginality in two ways, and my understanding of the crossing of race/culture in theories of Aboriginality is still probably marked by that. The first way was when Tangent was talking about the difficulties of writing Australian children's fantasy - because Australian chlit is very much in the English tradition, and English children's fantasy is very much about the English landscape and the magical traditions associated with a particular geographical territory and the relatively unbroken (though not, of course, homogeneous) cultural transmission of a relationship to that territory. And a settler nation marked by the genocide of indigenous peoples is obviously in a very different situation - also, when I was working on my PhD (among other things, about the territorialization of political space - the invention of a relationship between a State and a physical landscape) people kept mentioning Australian Aboriginal cultures to me: they're sort of a cliche for an Other [non-European] relationship to space and land. So that interested me. And then also I was reading Lucashenko's novels alongside a lot of gay coming-out novels, and I was interested in the idea of coming out as Aboriginal.

One more caveat is that I noticed while I was writing this post how hard I found it to find non-offensive words for things like 'miscegenation' (which I've used in scare quotes). Please do critique my terminology - I'd appreciate that, because I really am coming from a position of ignorance - but I hope you can see that I'm making an effort here, and sticking my neck out a bit before I have a fully polished understanding and vocabulary, so, um, I'd be pleased if you'd keep the criticism constructive. Also, I've switched back and forth between using the terms race and 'race'. Saying 'race' (in quotes) is something some theorists do in an attempt to talk about what is constructed as race without signalling agreement with the idea that there really is a biological bundle of characteristics which is congruent with that construction. So mostly I mean 'race' in quotes, but then on the other hand the relationship between 'race' and genetic descent is part of what I'm trying to put into question here, so I've got in a muddle in a few places.

So here's what I've gathered so far. I think the problem is that I don't really have the right conceptual framework/set of theories to make sense of all of this, so any recommendations or theorizations would be much appreciated. The context that I'm coming from is the context of British racism (um, I mean that I'm more familiar with the forms of British racism, not that I'm a British racist), where the rhetoric/theory of 'race' has shifted over the last few decades, so that where once black people were deemed inferior because of their inherent, racial/biological characteristics, now the idea is more that 'Their Culture' (which is, in this discourse, as fixed and innate a quality as biology once was) is incompatible with 'Our Culture' and, in the name of respect for cultural difference (and, increasingly, as the BNP and others appropriate the language of indigenous struggle, in the name of the "rights" of "indigenous" British whites), black people should be deported etc.

Okay. So, that was the context. This is what I'm asking about:

The genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia took two main forms: (1) the deliberate destruction of cultural continuity, as Aboriginal children were stolen from their birth families to be raised by white families, and (2) forcible or quasi-forcible or enforced 'miscegenation' (an attempt to sort of "breed out" Aboriginality). Hence, a lot of people of Aboriginal descent (a) look white and (b) have no familial or early-transmitted link to Aboriginal culture(s) - it's often people like this that Lucashenko writes about.

What I'm interested in, I guess, is how you understand what it is to "be" Aboriginal in this case (since, as far as I understand, there is massive resistance to hierarchizing Aboriginality, so that either looking blacker or being raised in an Aboriginal culture makes you a "proper" Aboriginal - this can be seen as colluding with the genocidal tactic of erasing Aboriginality through erasing its physical characteristics and interrupting the continuity of its cultural transmissions). Because this genocidal tactic has left behind a double-bind, at least as far as I can see - or at least, Aboriginality has to involve a rethinking of the relationship between racial descent and cultural transmission in a way that is beyond me at the moment. Because of the particular nature of the genocide, there's a break between racial descent and cultural transmission - people who discover that they are of Aboriginal descent, but have been raised in a different culture, have to (if they choose to do so) enter Aboriginal culture late and learn "their" ways from scratch, just as someone of non-Aboriginal descent would. But if Aboriginality consists of an adult, conscious choice to take on a culture, does it necessarily have any 'racial' or pre-conscious or pre-subjective element at all? But then, if you subtract the element of 'race', you're sort of colluding with the other element of the genocide - saying that the "weak" Aboriginal genes have indeed been truly conquered by the "stronger" white genes (at least, this is what I understand was the discourse around forcible 'miscegenation').

In Lucashenko's novels, it has to be quasi-racialized, I think - for example, she has one character (in Hard Yards) who gets on better with Aboriginal people than with whitefellas - ends up living with an Aboriginal family and identifies with (if not as) Aboriginal, because he thinks he's white - the reader finds out in the course of the novel that his mother was actually Aboriginal, but the character never knows...

All this makes me think that there is a very complex positing of the relationship between 'race' and culture in Aboriginal experience (one does not determine or guarantee the other, but at the same time it's not the case that someone of any 'race' can freely choose a 'culture') and I wonder how it challenges other contemporary (postcolonial?) theories of a race/culture intersection? I'd also be interested to think about other (non-genocidal) instances of cross-racial adoption and other contexts where 'race' and culture don't signify each other unproblematically. And also, I suppose, about identity politics: being Aboriginal - bodily and culturally - is clearly a resistive tactic in the face of a very recent attempt to annihilate Aboriginal cultural and genetic material - what kind of struggle can be based on being?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
12:50 / 10.07.05
Hoo boy, big questions there Dr Deva. I really like Melissa Lucashenko, haven't read enough of her fiction but what I have, I've really dug.

My first response to the question about identifying what Aboriginality is involves talking about the history of regulatory regimes of identification categorised Aboriginality in Australia throughout colnisation. I don't think it's possible to think Aboriginality outside or without first being aware of that history, where people were labelled 'half-caste', 'quadroon', 'octoroon' etc. And this isn't a situation specific to Australia (doesn't it have parallels to American slavery?) This is also contemporary: in the Census, and on every bureaucratic form you fill out -- at the dole office, at Medicare, university enrolment forms, etc -- you're asked if you're Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Defining yourself as that thing, ticking the box, means you are subject to very particular institutionalised forms of welfare, health care, education, housing, etc.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there might not be an Aboriginality as an immanent state of being; there's always a being for, under different circumstances and different relations of power. There are a lot of different opinions about what Aboriginality consists of, within indigenous communities and without.

This is totally not enough to say on its own and apologies for not really engaging -- I have an essay to work on. But more later.
 
 
Lord Morgue
13:47 / 13.07.05
The attempted genocide also took the form of actually trying to kill them all, with the usual poisonings, shootings, and using one tribe to help wipe out another. Similar situation in many ways to Native Americans (and if you want to be completely P.C., many Native Australians prefer the word "Koori" to "Aborigine", strictly speaking, it's only a word for one tribe out of one language, but at least it's one of their words...)
And, at least in Tasmania, this was partly a successful genocide. There are no full-blooded Tasmanian natives left, they were hunted down to the last man, woman and child.
The remaining natives have a hard road fighting for their rights when our history books still record their extinction...
BLACK WAR: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TASMANIAN ABORIGINES
(I know this has little to do with the question of racial/cultural identity, but I don't think the crimes of my people should ever be minimalised as a "destruction of cultural continuity".)
 
 
Cat Chant
16:17 / 13.07.05
Thanks, both of you - good points both. Of course I'm neither trying to identify a single immanent way of being Aboriginal/Koori* or to deny that the genocide also involved a lot of killing (not that either of you have responded as if I were, but I just wanted to say it clearly). I am just particularly fascinated and puzzled atm by the ways that "culture" inheres in bodies - cf Blair's insistence that the London bombings were an attack on "our way of life". How did "our way of life" get into the bodies of the people targeted? Are humans being conceptualized as simply the biological material on which their culture is transmitted - and if so, how does that culture get in there? The idea of being-for and the tick-boxes seems like a potential way in to thinking about that, Mr Disco, thanks...

*am always confused about the word Koori - doesn't it have a regional specificity?
 
 
grant
17:06 / 13.07.05
I don't know anything about Aboriginal history, really, but...

I don't think it's possible to think Aboriginality outside or without first being aware of that history, where people were labelled 'half-caste', 'quadroon', 'octoroon' etc. And this isn't a situation specific to Australia (doesn't it have parallels to American slavery?)

Yes, in the American south well past the days of slavery, you could find references to maroons, quadroons, octoroons, etc. More common (according to what I've read) were descriptions based on color rather than descent -- high yeller, etc. Passing was a matter of looking the part.

And in South Africa, the labelling eventually took on a legal status which was based on descent -- so in order to pass, you'd have to have the right papers.

There's also the interesting South African example of the Capeys or Cape Coloureds -- the only survivors of what once were the Hottentots or Khoi-khoi ("Khoi-San" is a grouping that includes the closely related group of San, or Bushmen). Miscegenation, again.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
01:52 / 14.07.05
am always confused about the word Koori - doesn't it have a regional specificity?

From here:

koori

The word koori is now well established in Australian English, but it continues to cause confusion and misunderstanding.

Many Aborigines dislike the terms 'Aborigine' and 'Aboriginal' since these terms have been foisted on them, and they carry a lot of negative cultural baggage. Not surprisingly, they have looked for alternative words, and instead of `Aborigine' they prefer to use the word for a 'person' from a local language.

In order to understand the history of the word koori we need to bear in mind the fact that when the Europeans arrived here there were about 250 languages spoken in Australia. Way back in the past, they were no doubt related, but most of them were as different from one another as English is different from Italian or Hindi.

Some languages of south-east Australia (parts of New South Wales and Victoria) had a word - coorie, kory, kuri, kooli, koole - which meant 'person' or 'people'. In the 1960s, in the form koori, it came to be used by Aborigines of these areas to mean 'Aboriginal people' or 'Aboriginal person'. It was a means of identification. But because of the wide variety of Aboriginal languages and cultures, koori has not gained Australia-wide acceptance, being confined to most of New South Wales and to Victoria.

Other terms are preferred in other regions: Murri over most of south and central Queensland, Bama in north Queensland, Nunga in southern South Australia, Nyoongah around Perth, Mulba in the Pilbara region, Wongi in the Kalgoorlie region, Yamitji in the Murchison River region, Yolngu in Arnhem Land, Anangu in central Australia, and Yuin on the south coast of New South Wales. For a while people of Tasmanian Aborigines called themselves koories, and then Tasmanian koories to distinguish themselves from the mainland koories. Recently, we have gathered evidence for the term muttonbird koories, a reference to the importance of mutton-birding to their traditional way of life, especially on the islands off the Tasmanian coast. More recently, the tribal or language term Palawa is increasingly being used.
 
 
grant
17:45 / 15.07.05
This is another parallel thing, and I'm coming at it from a position totally outside and ignorant of the whole thing, AND I realize that, like these are two whole different countries where people talk differently and have different histories, BUT...

New Zealand -- the Maori are a whole different "race," yeah? But they're still aboriginal, in the small "a" sense.

Were they ever big-"A" Aborigines? I mean, as far as the colonial powers were concerned. Were they ever lumped together as one race? It seems like they'd have to have been linked in identity somehow, but I really don't know.

----------

Looking at the abstract, it might be worth mentioning that this bit: What theories of Australian Aboriginality exist which can account for the complicated position of someone from a culture/race which has been subjected to attempted genocide?

That seems like it would equally apply to any of the Native American nations... and I know there's theory surrounding that position. Here, Google gives me Arnold Krupat's Red Matters.

Haven't read it, but I have read a few of the books on this list.


--------

Oddly, if I puts the "australian aboriginal identity" into scholar.google.com, most of what comes back is medical research and linguistics, or else it's unlinkable (meaning it was just cited elsewhere).

This ethnology paper might be worth something, as might this psychology paper, one of many focusing on the concept of/politics of "reconciliation."

It took me three pages to find a paper that addresses the multiplicity of Aboriginal cultures & identities as one of its main themes.
 
 
Cat Chant
17:50 / 15.07.05
Were they ever big-"A" Aborigines? I mean, as far as the colonial powers were concerned. Were they ever lumped together as one race? It seems like they'd have to have been linked in identity somehow, but I really don't know.

I've heard that the major difference between the Maori peoples and the Koori/Murri/etc peoples is that the Maori were not nomadic, so that the colonizers recognized their property rights to the land, whereas Australia was declared terra nullius - nobody's property - and therefore the Aboriginal peoples there had no property-owning (and therefore, pretty much, no human) status in law. Like Mr Disco said, recognition according to the categories of power (by the way, Mr D, I've been hitting myself over the head repeatedly for the past few days shouting regulated by regimes of power! and must read more Foucault! Too much deconstruction, not enough discourse analysis, that's my trouble).

I think in general the colonial histories of Australia and New Zealand are surprisingly different. (Not to say that the relationship between Maoris and white settlers has been a model of cross-cultural coexistence and respect. But I don't think New Zealand has been convicted of genocide, either.)
 
 
Disco is My Class War
07:00 / 18.07.05
No time to enter more discussion just now, but Deva, this book might be useful:

Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Michele Grossman, Melbourne University Press, 2003.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:50 / 24.07.05
Thanks for the links and book recommendations - I'll start looking into those. (grant, I'm also interested in other indigenous experiences/theories - especially those of North American peoples - but haven't even got far enough to formulate questions/thoughts there yet...)
 
 
grant
15:56 / 25.07.05
One experience that I ran into when pursuing lit from Native Americans & South Africans is the idea of differences -- the colonizers want all the natives to be one thing, while texts by the colonized almost always bring up ethnic differences within. (Now that I think of it, you even run into that in Invisible Man, with the country/city divisions, to a degree -- the sweet potato moment, if you've read that.)

That "koori" discussion is the same thing, so I'm not adding much here.
 
 
Loomis
09:17 / 26.10.05
Great thread Deva. As an Australian it’s a subject I’m very interested in but to my shame don’t know much about.

I recently finished a book you might find useful. Black Chicks Talking by Leah Purcell . She interviews a series of aboriginal women and asks them about their upbringing and how it relates to how they see the world as an adult and also about how they see modern aboriginality. Quite an interesting read.

as far as I understand, there is massive resistance to hierarchizing Aboriginality, so that either looking blacker or being raised in an Aboriginal culture makes you a "proper" Aboriginal - this can be seen as colluding with the genocidal tactic of erasing Aboriginality through erasing its physical characteristics and interrupting the continuity of its cultural transmissions

The women interviewed in the book all back this up and in particular one interviewee who iirc says that she is 1/16 aboriginal and when they all meet up at the end the others encourage her not to view her heritage in those terms.

Also, as regards terminology, though most of the women in the book use koori/murri/etc. when referring to themselves, they also seem perfectly comfortable using "aboriginal", particularly when speaking about more general issues.
 
 
Charlus
11:39 / 26.10.05
Dear Deva,
Do you think that it is fair to say, as it has been said in the past in regards to women, that "one is not merely born an Aboriginal, but becomes one?"

The best answer you might find, is in the works by the following artists (if you haven't heard of them)
Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Richard Bell and Gordon Bennett.

Regards,
Sophist23
 
 
Cat Chant
13:15 / 26.10.05
Could you unpack the references to the artists a little? I'll have a look for them, but I'm in the UK at the moment and am not sure how easily findable their work will be (or how legible its "answers" will be to me, since, as I said, I'm speaking from a position of near-total ignorance on this topic).

Thanks for the book recommendation, loomis - and it's payday today! Yayy!
 
 
David Batty
13:57 / 26.10.05
If I remember rightly Bennett discovered his aboriginal heritage when he was a teenager but it wasn't until he went to art school that he really began to explore his racial identity. I think Moffat was adopted under the policy of forcibly removing light skinned aborigines from their birth families. Tate Liverpool has a collection of Moffatt's work. Bennett's is harder to track down, but he had a solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 1995.

There are several websites on them. The University of the Arts, London (Camberwell, Chelsea & St Martin's art colleges) has a few good books on them in its libraries. Or you could request copies via your local library.
 
 
Charlus
11:11 / 27.10.05
Dear Deva,
The question that you are posing is one that is routinely explored in art practice.
What is interesting about these artists, and why I have included them, is that they ask the very question of being aboriginal, of exploring their identity. Some more than others I dare say.
It could be said that these artists have "irrational identities". Growing up in Western society and being distanced from there heritiage, but kowing of it. Whilst these artists parents (who were mainly anglo) aknowledged their childs heritage, and didn't discourage them from exploring and understanding it, these artists have all articulated the difficulties in 'positing' (to borrow a word from yourself) in society. In Western society they are seen as Aboriginal, and in Aboriginal society they are no doubt seen as 'white'. This is why I have used the term "irrational identity". Their work reflects this. And all of them, it should be noted, studied art in a Western environment, and this is also evident within their work.

Somehow I don't think that this answered your original question, but it does provide some interesting light on the definition of 'being' Aborginal in a progressive society. However I feel that you should research these artists in your own time, and come up with your own understanding. I do also feel however that it would help you to understand this question you are posing. Secondly, I don't believe I can give you an adequate answer without writing a 2000 word document. The topic is that intense.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:05 / 27.10.05
Thanks for the background, sophist23, that was helpful - and useful to me (since I have a tendency to reach for written texts) to be reminded about art practice as one of the places all of this is being worked out and thought about. I've seen some work by Lin Onus (including the gorgeous Hill's Hoist with flying foxes pictured on the page linked to) and a woman whose name I can't remember, who has two amazingly powerful pieces in an art gallery in Federation Square in Melbourne (one is a set of "soaps-on-a-rope" in the shape of racist caricatures of Aboriginal faces, one was a response to an early settler painting and consisted of sticks and red rags hung from the ceiling of the gallery in the space in front of the painting... if anyone knows who I'm talking about I'd be very grateful if they'd tell me.) But that's as far as my knowledge of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art goes.

(Oh, and just as an aside:

I don't believe I can give you an adequate answer without writing a 2000 word document.

Well, that wouldn't be unheard of on Barbelith! But of course I appreciate that the time you would spend on writing a 2000-word post to this thread might well have to be spent elsewhere.)
 
 
Disco is My Class War
19:30 / 27.10.05
Moffatt, one of my very favourite photographers:

http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs/moffatt/project/

Also Deva, you might look up any writing by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Can't cite references offhand, but she's excellent.

(It's 6am so I am not going to join the yay! discussion about Gordon Bennett right now.)
 
  
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