Australia Then, Apocalypse Now

The resounding success of the Sapphires seems a significant moment in Australian culture. The film has not only been a popular hit with mainstream audiences, it has also received the top AACTA awards in the industry, winning best film, director and female actor. This energetic comic tale is seen as a ‘positive indigenous story’, by contrast to the hard truths of films such as Samson & Delilah. I certainly enjoyed the powerful Deborah Mailman, the enlivening Irish manager, the pumping soul music and even the inventive editing. As the writer Tony Briggs said, 'I wanted this film to be more about fun and entertainment than anything else'. Enough said?

But reality is hard to hide. The premise was about a group of Aboriginal singers going to Vietnam to entertain US troops. Despite the now conventional view that this war was a heroic struggle of independence by a small nation against a more powerful aggressor, The Sapphires sidesteps the moral context of the war. In terms of the narrative, the only issue at stake is the capacity to put on a good show for the invading army. The reality was quite different. In the real story, only two Sapphires went to Vietnam. The others stayed at home because they were part of the Australian anti-War movement. Why has this been deliberately overlooked in the film version?

As a comic film, it’s understandable that it uses simplifications in order to heighten emotions: all white Australians are prim racists and US popular culture promises liberation from prejudice. But the appeal of these stereotypes is limited to local audiences. The Sapphires had only a five week run in the UK, was called ‘le flop’ in France and received tepid US reviews. Why do Australian audiences enjoy this story so?

Maybe it's an essentially provincial story. It reflects an innocent and isolated settler colony nostalgic for the world once made familiar by a dominant Western power. This nostalgia emerges at a time of a quite profound political realignment of Indigenous and conservative voices.

Some Aboriginal voices now distance themselves from the liberal left. Marcia Langton’s Boyer Lectures have set the interests of the emerging Aboriginal middle class directly against the patronising southerners—‘leftists’—associated with the wilderness movement and social justice.

This divergence has been growing in recent times, in much less partisan ways, as Aboriginal interests engage with established power rather than be boxed into the radical margins. Figures like Tracey Moffatt embrace the global art scene in defiance of the perception that she should be earnestly depicting the plight of her people. Indigenous scholars such as Christian Thompson make the pilgrimage to Oxford. And in the academy, Indigenous Studies aspires to value of the sandstone university rather than identify with declining critical studies.

The trajectory of emancipation thus seems to lead away from the values of solidarity that set it in train. Isn't it the ultimate form of empowerment for an Aboriginal artist not to make work about Aboriginality? It's hard to question this form of success. Besides, the days of a non-indigenous person questioning Aboriginal choices has long gone.

So where does this place the southerner, who once saw solidarity in defending indigenous culture against the ravages of historic colonialism and mainstream capitalism. Is this just another sign of the liberal left’s growing irrelevance? Just as Western Sydney has deserted the ALP, and developing nations go for economic growth before environmental sustainability, are the ideals of the educated classes revealed as self-absorbed fantasies, designed more for ideological fashions than real action? Like Graham Greene’s deluded romantic heroes, are the champions of global change now lost in the real world of nations, each scrambling over each other to climb the ladder?

What do you say to someone from a 'developing' nation who baulks at energy limits, saying why should we have to pay for your mistakes? Why shouldn't we enjoy the same privileges as you take for granted?

Certainly, one path is to accept the seeming inevitable. I remember talking a white academic in South Africa about the fellow travellers who has been part of the freedom struggle, yet were completely ignored by the incoming ANC government. Those at odds with the government, like Coetzee, were seen as unable to accept that collective victory may come at a personal cost. It seemed an important part of the story of solidarity that even its heroes had to learn to step aside so that black empowerment could develop. As the professor said, ‘It’s what we all fought for after all.’

But while resentment should be avoided, does it follow that the original ideals must also be abandoned? To do so implies that the values originally espoused were dependent on validation from elsewhere—that ideals were upheld in the name of the other, not in their own right.

In the previous Arena, Boris Frankel wrote ‘Indigenous people can’t suddenly become mainstream and yet be exempted from the same obligations of non-Indigenous people to prevent dangerous climate change.’ Yes, but rather than couch this in moralistic terms, it seems more appropriate to place the onus on the settler position: non-indigenous should not lower their expectations of ethics dependent on indigeneity. Despite acknowledging the individual benefits of working in the mining industry, we should still expect Marcia Langton to mention the greater challenge of climate change.

There are significant Aboriginal voices that seek to articulate a common good. Christine Black's book of indigenous legal theory, The Land is the Source of the Law, offers a particularly strong Aboriginal context for environmental concerns in the thinking of Senior Law Men.

Across the Pacific, the buen vivir movement in Bolivia and Ecuador shows how a successful indigenous movement can emerge and still contest the mainstream. Even if such values do seem increasingly marginal, particularly with a three-term Liberal national government looming, they shouldn’t be abandoned. The historical commitment of Aboriginal leaders and communities to maintain an Indigenous culture, despite its status as ‘backward’, should be the very example that inspires an ethical stance today.

Marcia Langton’s Boyer lectures are a wakeup call. Arena demonstrates its relevance by offering a rare forum for debate on this issue, aided now by the Project Space which showed the paintings by Garawa man, Jacky Green, testifying to the destruction of sacred land by mining.

However, from Langton’s position, we ‘leftists’ reading Arena are in danger of being seen as just like those prim white Shepparton settlers in The Sapphires. Perhaps we are more likely to be cast in this role by rejecting mining outright, despite its obvious benefits for a large community of Australians. Sure, the obese extractocrats make it easy to pillory these ventures. But should Langton be the only outside interest at their table? Without being beholden to the mining industry for research funding, it should be possible to advocate for environmentally responsible practices.

So while it’s possible to enjoy the Sapphires, it’s also reasonable to feel that this leaves a story untold. Good morning Vietnam, g'day Ho Chi Minh City.

Thanks to Christine Black, Deborah Jordon, Damien Wright and Esther Lowe for feedback.  A better version may end up in Arena Magazine.

Being Watjala

While I live today as a Gubba, in Koorie land, and my most intense contact with Indigenous Australia has been as a Balanda, up north, I am originally a Watjala, a whitefella from Perth.

As a suburban boy, my contact with the world of Noongahs was largely speculative. In our neighbourhood, the roof of a bottle shop was adorned with a ‘Jackie’ sculpture of bearded aboriginal man with spear resting his foot on his knee. His silhouette defined our eastern sky. But the figure had as much to do with my childhood world as a Masonic Lodge.

But since I’ve been coming back to WA, I’ve gradually become more acquainted with the Noongah world. Through Nalda Searles I was able to meet the spirited women artists down south-west, in Narrogin, who made us Seven Sisters dolls.

Back for another visit last week, I became much more aware of the Noongah presence in the city of Perth. On Friday night, I was walking up Barrack Street behind a lithe young man with a beat box on his shoulder playing disco music. I was really admiring his footwork, a mixture of Travolta and traditional dance. I felt in touch with Perth as a city, with the energy of its different people’s gathered together.

But it was short-lived. Six policemen came out of nowhere and surrounded the young man. Compared to the dancer, these men were ox-like. One of them got out the blue plastic gloves and they started interrogating him.

Dennis at first tried to be cheeky with them. He was a little out of it, but sharp. The moustached officer who was leading the group maintained a completely impassive face. Eventually, Dennis succumbed and took a submissive position, calling him ‘boss’. I heard them talking about something that had been picked up on a city security camera.

Pedestrians walked around the scene with as much impassiveness as the policeman. But I stood still, about five metres from the group, and kept my gaze fixed at the policeman. He turned to me and asked, ‘You got any questions’. I shook my head but stayed. I was curious to see what happened, but also wanted to be some kind of witness, at least to have some acknowledgment of what was happening.

Eventually, Dennis started being cheeky again. I think he was just getting restless. The policeman’s face seemed to soften. He was a long way from smiling, but it seemed a little more relaxed. They eventually let Dennis go.

I walked away with Dennis and told him I liked the way he danced. He laughed at me and asked for $3. We turned the corner and ran into a small group of Noongah men and women staggering around. They were talking about booze and glue. Dennis bumped into a young woman and she asked him if he wanted a ‘push’.

I doubt the police would admit to being racist. But they don’t need to be. There are racists enough in Perth, eager to get the baseball bat out on a drunken Noongah lad. The police are there just to clean up the mess, and make sure the semblance of public order is maintained.

That Dennis could really dance.

The mighty Murtoa stick shed

Many year ago, when I was working for Museums Australia, I wrote about one of the wonders of Victoria, the Murtoa Stick Shed.

I was very pleased to see recently that Leigh Hammerton has hoisted a website in honour of this ‘found cathedral’. Let’s hope it helps gain a new life as a cultural centre of the Wimmera.

Getting to know wortabokarra

There are several days in summer when Melbourne is whipped by scorching northerly winds. They come in across the great deserts of the centre and bake this southerly city. They often bring with them the top soil of the Wimmera, and sometimes even ash from nearby bushfires.

Despite living with the curse – and dread – of this wind, we haven’t yet given it a name. While one-off cyclones are personified, this regular visitor remains anonymous. It’s as thought we haven’t yet settled into the land enough yet to have developed the acquaintance.

In Crikey, an Adelaide vertebrate palaeontologist Jim McNamara nominates the Kaurna word wortabokarra:

In 1840, Teichelmann and Schurmann, recorded its meaning as: "north-west wind; tempestuous weather". They also have bokarra: "northwesterly wind, which is very hot during summer and indicates a storm".

This is more like it.

What are the word's roots?

I am not a linguist, but the same book (available as a copy from Google) tells me that worta means "behind" and karra is the redgum tree with other meanings of high, sky and heaven.

Perhaps one response to the tragedy of Black Saturday would be a finally give this wind a name. If anything, it is likely to become a more regular visitor. It’s time we got onto speaking terms with it.

Is this your Australian dreaming?

I spend most of my during Australia trying to counter my instinct to deconstruct its mythification. It seemed too easy to criticise the way it glossed over reality. Australia is, after all, an entertainment constructed to enchant the great southern land for a new generation. But there were two moments that left me feeling quite uneasy about the Australia that it constructed, particularly for a non-indigenous audience.

The plot of the film revolved largely around the plight of a young half-caste boy, Nulla. To a large degree, this was was the exclusive point of engagement with Aboriginal Australia. As such, it was a profoundly unequal relationship. While Nulla has a little magic at his disposal, he still needed the heroism of the Drover to save his life. The only reciprocal adult relationship was between the Drover and his ex-wife's brother, who taunted him that he didn't belong in this land. But the brother-in-law was removed from the plot, killed while valiantly defending the mission boys.

If I was a Freudian looking for an uncanny moment around while the film unravelled, then I would probably look to the scene when the Drover took charge of his promised stead, Capricornia. This horse differed from others primarily by its colour - jet black. The scene depicts the Drover manfully taming the wild energy of the horse, bringing it under his control and making it part of the business of the farm. It seems emblematic of what the film as a whole does, in subjugating the politically difficult indigenous cultures of Australia into a directorial spectacle. Why such a black horse? Why the absence of black men in the Australia that remained?

The second scene was at the very end. At first, I was relieved that Nulla was allowed to go walkabout with his grandfather. But the final words -- as I can remember them -- were along the lines of 'we are part of the same country, but you have your dreaming and I have mine.' So what did the film suggest was 'our' dreaming?

The overt non-indigenous myth in the film was the Wizard of Oz, which Nulla cleverly was able to elicit as a source of dreaming in the stiff English aristocrat. This choice of film was partly word play - on 'Oz' as the land of Australia and 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' as a reference to the rainbow serpent dreaming. But the Oz story itself reflected American cinema as a factory of dreams. As a product of this factory, Australia seemed more closely modelled on the American western than the tradition of local cinema. It had none of the eccentricity of the great Australian films of the 1970s. It was great to see an actor like Bruce Spence again, but he was left with a thinly stereotyped role, especially compared to the captivating appearance in Mad Max.

Apart from Hollywood as our dreamtime, the other major non-indigenous story was about the cattle industry. Surely at a time when we are more aware of the serious environmental degradation due to beef production, this seems hardly a pursuit on which to model Australia.

Maybe Australia is the last fruit of our spectacle culture. As financial realities knock down the economic house of cards, perhaps a new cinema will emerge to explore the cracks in the façade. After all, that's closer to home.

'From out part of the world...'

In Kevin Rudd's friendly chat about what's been happening at the G20 Summit, note how he opens his address, talking about the nations that were present. He talks about the 'US, other major economies around the world, and a lot from our part of the world as well...'

How refreshing to hear Australia linked to its neighbours. Is a subtle move away from the old idea of 'deputy sheriff', being the proxy for the more powerful countries in the distant north.

Two sides of the Pacific

Offered for exclusive tastes in Santiago is high class Australian meat cuisine.

Meanwhile, Melbourne artist Peter Burke is filling Altona billboards with the real drama on the streets of this southern city.

Gubbaworld

At Melbourne's Platform gallery is a curious exhibition for us commuters to reflect on our lack of belonging to the land.

Here's how Sharon West explains Gubbaworld:

Presenting colonial pseudo-histories and other follies
Gubbaworld is derived from the Koori name for white people. This exhibition parodies the notion of the museum diorama cabinet, offering pseudo narratives of Victorian settler history and draws reference on the Indigenous dioramas of Melbourne Museum and the Great Colonial Exhibitions of the late 1800s. The work themes also focus on settler and Indigenous contact, exploring parables and inversions that satirise the ideas of the great Southern land, the Noble Savage and white colonisation.

It's a humorous take on the naïve settler romance about native peoples. There's some reversals, as in the piece below, which put Koori's in the place of cultural tourists.

The effect of this exhibition is for us to laugh at the outmoded colonial movements, such as Jindyworabaks, who essentialised Indigenous cultures. But it does raise the question of where this places us today. Is the now official acknowledgement of Indigenous custodianship enough? Where do non-Indigenous now place themselves in this scene today?

A new Jerusalem
An attempt in the transplantation of British culture onto the Indigenous landscape. The Koori campsite is remodelled into a pleasant English village

We're in, they're out

The Occidental is, primarily, the place of hegemonic epistemology rather than a geographical sector on the map. Samuel Huntington demonstrated as much when he placed Australia in the First World and in the West while leaving Latin America out.

Walter Mignolo The Idea of Latin America Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 37

Two leaders of the South

Recently two leaders of southern nations have delivered lectures at the London School of Economics. Though both coming from ex-colonised on the other side of the world, and representing fresh democratic energies, they had very different stories to tell.

The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd started his address on 7 April with jokes about the Australian superiority in cricket. His 'colonial strut' reflected a young boisterous nation goading its slow-moving but beloved parent. The speech was an opportunity to outline Britain's relation to the aspiration that Australia be the 'most Asia-literate nation in the collective West.' He made an emphatic point that:

Today I want to argue that, in a rapidly changing world, Australia and the United Kingdom have a lot to gain from working with each other to shape the emerging global order – particularly given Britain’s strength in Europe and Australia’s standing in Asia.

So here is the arrangement of the two close Anglo nations within the collective West. Britain looks after Europe, and Australia looks after Asia. The assumption is that the collective West is the principle actor on the world stage, steering history on a safe course. No doubt this assumption will be seriously challenged in future years.

Three days before, the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet addressed the LSE about the situation in her country. It began as a very serious talk, emphasising issues of statecraft and the role of the government in transcending competing interests between different groups. While a little dry, she had some interesting things to say about the challenge to confront the culture of political belligerence and create a civic discourse in which opposing points of view can debate calmly. Towards the end, she started to make some jokes in a way far more spontaneous than Rudd. There was no reference to Britain whatsoever in her talk.

As she left he podium, Bachelet was presented with a cup similar to that given to Nelson Mandela. As another leader of the South, was Rudd given a similar gift?

Our Other Hemisphere

Below is the original of a slightly edited article for The Age:

Kevin Rudd has spent the last week heralding an Asian century. Now he has returned back to Australian soil, it’s timely to open up Rudd’s narrative to scrutiny. There are some big questions yet to be asked.

Rudd claims that ‘Australia has to make itself the most Asia-literate country in the collective West'. Debate so far has focused on becoming more engaged with the Asian region. But this misses the wood for the trees. There’s a larger assumption in Rudd’s statement that has so far escaped our attention.

‘Collective West’?

Curious, isn’t it, for a country in the South-East end of the world to be part of the West. It’s more politics than geography. The ‘collective West’ is a natural complement to the earlier grouping, the ‘Global South’, which includes countries in the geographical North such as China and India. Our position inside this ‘collective West’, yet located South, should prompt more discussion than it does.

The 'collective West' is conjured today in a number of ways. Positively, it is the bastion of liberal values, promoting democracy, religious tolerance and individual freedom. Defensively, it is the target of resentment by those on its fringes, such as Islamic fundamentalists and ex-communists. Conservative commentator Victor Hansen describes the ‘collective West’ as a ‘wandering Odysseus’ encountering monsters at every turn. It is an epic of progress that we share with the first rank of nations.

But the phrase has a particular meaning to Kevin Rudd. In his 2005 address to University of New South Wales, Rudd described how Christianity has been displaced from its once privileged position at the centre of the 'collective West' to its current status as a marginal faith, returning to its origins.

This concept of a minority belief sets up Australia’s position as a marginal but friendly force within the wider Asian context. Rudd used his Indonesian visit to call for an interfaith dialogue to explore common values of Christian and Muslim societies. Rudd’s ‘collective West’ is no crusading power, seeking to bring the world under its dominion. It can be a key player in someone else’s game.

So why should one of its lesser powers, Australia, be granted this privileged position in Asia? Geographic location seems an obvious advantage, but it is quicker to fly to Beijing from London than Sydney. More likely it is our shared time zones and—as a younger nation—our capacity to adapt to Asian values.

And why should we want this position? For a politician, Asia brings home the bacon. We hope to ride the Asian tiger, feeding its hunger for development with our minerals and degrees. But what does this say about our identity as a nation? Are we anything more than regional opportunists?

The ‘collective West’ ennobles our ambitions. It is heartening to be part of a bigger team. In colonial times, Australia was the 'last outpost of the British empire'. During the war on terror, we proudly wore the badge of ‘Deputy Sheriff’.

Australia lost the first position when Britain joined the European Union. Our position of deputy is now endangered by the emergence of a new Sheriff, China. Rather than continue to be left out of the main game, Rudd offers the hope that we can be at the centre of our own regional grouping, an Asia Pacific Union.

But it’s only one side of the story. Rudd talks about the need for a spirit of cooperation in ‘our hemisphere’. Let’s not forget our other hemisphere. That mysterious title ‘Great Southern Land’ has traditionally identified Australia with the antipodes. Despite these romantic images, we maintain a blinkered vision, only looking north.

We tend to see ourselves alone in the South. Our common boast is to possess the 'biggest in the Southern Hemisphere,’ which can apply to anything from Highland Gatherings to car parks. This South is a kind of B League where we can excel, knowing we would be thrashed in the Premiership Division.

But Australia is not alone in this aspiration. When you look on the Internet, you find that Brazil, the China of the South, has twice as many claims to this distinction as Australia. Our ‘big pond’ mentality blinds us to those across our own latitude.

What about the view to our east, with the emerging economies and creative talents of Latin America? Or to our west, with the trade in our other ‘big pond’, the Indian Ocean? With strengthening democracy and economic growth averaging 5%, the South is a region waiting for our attention.

We have more in common that we realise. It’s with the South that we share the irony of a summer Christmas, imagining we’re in the North Pole while it’s 40 degrees outside. Australia is just one of many Southern countries increasingly dependent on China’s hunger for our resources. And we share the challenge of talent drain, as our best and brightest are lured to the prizes of the North. Aspirationalism alone doesn’t change that fundamental global asymmetry. We need to re-imagine what it means to live in the South.

Regardless of continental shift and rising water levels, we’re likely to remain in the South. We will continue to dwell in that half of the world which the West once chose as its collective mine, farm and prison. We share with other countries in this region a common legacy of repression and similar hopes of reconciliation.

There’s no doubt that our main bets will be placed with Asia, at least for economic reasons. However, we need to complement this northern push with an increased engagement across our South. Finding a place among our southern cousins is just as much part of our journey as doing business in Asia.

As Nelson Mandela says, ‘True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.’ Nor should progress consist in forgetting where you are now.

The Empire Fights Back at the Empire Writes Back

Tonight a voice of the new confident India emerged out of the ashes of postcolonialism. The Centre for Postcolonial Writing at Monash University hosted a forum at the State Library with a keynote address by Professor Harish Trivedi on the subject 'An Alternative Postcolonial: Language, Location and Culture'.

His address seemed aimed squarely at one of the panelists, Bill Ashcroft, who thirty years ago is credited with inventing the term 'postcolonial' in the seminal publication The Empire Writes Back. Trivedi's point was the colonialism was a mere 'blip' in India's history and postcolonialism is an anglo-centric discourse which ignores the rich precolonial and contemporary literature in languages like Hindi. He claimed that the field ignores the critical difference between white settler societies like Australia and brown cultures like India.

As an address, it was tendentious and arrogant. But Trivedi did expose an issue within the framework of postcolonial. His insistence points to the need for an academic discourse that can encompass what is loosely called 'world literature', which includes but goes beyond the colonial experience.

The challenge he is to find the critical language to analyse this corpus. For Trivedi, this seemed about the tensions between nationalities and globalisation.

It was wonderful to find a forum where a voice like Trivedi's could be expressed, though how Australian academic institutions respond to this challenge remains to be seen.

A beautiful sorry morning

On a cool summer morning, someone said 'sorry'. He spoke of 'non-indigenous' Australians as 'them'. He attributed total responsibility to government. It's an inspiring beginning, but where will we go from here?

Given the emotion of the day, what seemed most powerful about Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was respectful silence that accompanied it. Despite the personal traumas experienced directly and witness associated with the policy of racial assimilation, there seemed little display of emotion in the actual presentation of the apology. Rudd’s faltering delivery was workmanlike. Bob Hawke would certainly have been in tears. For today, emotions can wait. Let’s get the business over first.

It’s a defining moment in the ‘new chapter’ of Australia. In laying blame for the Stolen Generation, Rudd was careful to exempt those who carried out the policies. Instead, he attributed responsibility to the parliament who framed the legislation. He ended by inviting the leader of the opposition to join him in a commission that would ‘change the way Australians think about themselves.’ While today is critical in the unfinished story of reconciliation, it is also a day for asserting the authority of government. Is this good for the culture of a nation? Should government be the only conduit for change?

One very reassuring aspect of Rudd’s speech is the way he addressed ‘non-indigenous Australians’. He spoke of ‘them’ in the third person, just as he had the ‘Indigenous Australians’. This was critical. If he has spoken of ‘us’, then it would have been another post-colonial confession admitting past wrongs but maintaining the dominant position. There was a relatively equal place in Rudd’s language for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Of course, this does not reflect the inequalities between the two—the economic superiority of whitefellas and the cultural richness of Indigenous Australians. But we can begin to think of them as in dialogue with each other.

In terms of Australia’s recent history, there was a sense of historic justice in the focus on the white Australian practice of stealing children from their families. In recent years, we’ve experienced a number of xenophobic scandals associated with acts like Tampa that have focused on disregard for children as the ultimate sign of being ‘unAustralian’. Yet here, at the core of Australian history, is an official practice of breaking apart families.

‘Turning the page together’ on a ‘new chapter’ in Australia’s history, it’s a wonderful morning for us all. It’s a good moment to start thinking anew about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identity.

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Melbourne Forecast
Issued at 4:50 am EDT on Wednesday 13 February 2008
Fine apart from a brief shower or two this morning. Partly cloudy with a moderate to occasionally fresh southerly wind.
Precis:       Clearing shower or two.            
City:         Max 20