Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

After they sat, the women were all vivacity, talking, laughing, gesticulating, twisting and turning—when “M. Bellefin began to sing, accompanying himself with very lively, very animated movements. The women were immediately quiet, watching M. Bellefin’s gestures as closely as they appeared to listen to his songs. At the end of each verse, some applauded with shouts, others burst out laughing, while the young girls (undoubtedly more timid) remained silent, showing nevertheless, by their motions and facial expressions, their surprise and satisfaction” (Péron 2006:199). After M. Bellefin finished, the most confident of the women “began to mimic his gestures and tone of voice in an extremely original and very droll manner, which greatly amused her friends. Then she, herself, started to sing in so rapid a fashion, that it would have been hard to relate such music to the ordinary principles of ours” (Péron 2006:199–200).

      Here the woman’s action is clearly recognized as imitative of what the Frenchman did; but Péron seems to imply that she does it as much or more for her companions’ amusement as to amuse or engender any sort of commonality with the French. We may interpret this as a targeted mimicking for the benefit of the other women.

      Here a participant (Bellefin) is the apparent focus of comment rather than (only) of intended communicative engagement. Where the person copied is an interlocutor like Bellefin rather than a nonparticipant in the interaction and copying is addressed to another intended audience, imitation often becomes a form of mockery and ironic comment rather than a bridge between those seemingly in direct interaction. The effect is to make an ostensible participant an outsider and to make those who receive the message the actual nearer (“in the know”) interlocutors. This episode seems to suggest a certain confidence on the woman’s part in drawing the distinction she did between insiders and the French outsiders.

      Indeed, it may be that Bellefin’s attempt to engage the attention of the indigenous women had misfired or gone slightly astray. As we will see (Chapter 3), European venturers thought about how to engage the “natives,” whether by offering them various kinds of material items or by other forms of interaction. Often, imitations by indigenous people were of bodily actions that Europeans themselves deliberately deployed as part of a certain received and continually evolving set of ideas that these were the things that would captivate native audiences and serve as a way of evaluating their dispositions, a matter to which the visitors, as we shall see, paid considerable attention. This might be termed one kind of “framing” of imitative action, clearly arising from European preconceptions.

      At this point, though, the woman does build a bridge more directly and materially with the French:

      taking some pieces of charcoal from a reed bag, she crushed them in her hand and prepared to apply a coat of this dark paint to my face. I lent myself willingly to this well-meant whim. M. Heirisson was equally obliging and was given a similar mask. We then appeared to be a great object of admiration for these women: they seemed to look at us with gentle satisfaction and to congratulate us upon the fresh charms that we had just acquired. Thus, therefore, that European whiteness, of which our race is so proud, is nothing more than an actual deficiency, a kind of deformity that must, in these distant regions, yield to the colour of charcoal and to the dark red of ochre or clay. (Péron 2006:200)

      On this occasion, then, having imitated the song in a way that seemed more directed toward her companions—though certainly provoked by and also directed to the French—the woman explicitly created a ground of commonality between herself and the Frenchman by acting on him, almost certainly with the general aim of making his skin more like hers. This identification—perhaps also partly addressed to her Aboriginal audience and almost certainly in a spirit of fun—was seemingly her intention, and Péron clearly took this, in any event, as an effort to cancel his unusual whiteness. It is more typical in these journals to read of the natives imitating the Europeans; but here we read of the natives taking the initiative to make the Europeans more like themselves, without the French having authored the exchange but with their amused acquiescence.

      Further to the episode involving charcoal, above, it is notable that difference of skin color was an object of wonder for indigenous people all over the Australian continent, and they often sought to investigate it (along with some other properties of the visitors, such as sex; see Chapter 3). Indigenous people often at first apparently entertained the question whether light skin color of the Europeans was permanent or temporary, deep or superficial (and also, as in Chapter 1, whether it meant that these beings were ancestors or ghosts). We see in the woman’s gesture a play upon an issue that we might term one of relationality: what might arise interactionally from changing that color?

       What Is Mimesis in These Encounters?

      Imitation, in the above examples, typically involves a visible and/or audible, if small-scale and fleeting, behavioral icon of an act that thereby becomes shared. This production seems particularly significant in situations where the parties have little in common, relative to the commonalities they share with much more familiar others. The episodes reported also yield some sense of the complexity and embeddedness of imitation in larger flows of interaction. Imitation works within an emotional and affective economy of uncertainty, lability, volatility, and apparent continuous attention on the part of both outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. The visitors’ inferences of indigenous emotions are sensitive to preconceptions that they held—such as that indigenous people were coming to get “presents,” that they would react in certain ways, want particular things. The boundary between engaging and not engaging is unstable, and the journalists are unsure about what is menacing and what is peaceable. We form a picture of a moving border zone of mutual awareness between parties in which one form of action was often rapidly transformed into another and in many of which violence was either clearly feared or actually ensued.

      This volatility can continue to appear, or reappear, to the extent that encounter is not stabilized, or becomes destabilized, even after a period of time. It is a zone in which action on the part of the natives may relate but is not subordinated to outsiders’ guidelines or framing ideas for the organization of interaction. These guidelines include elements of the outsiders’ evaluative and moral framework and notions based on their growing experience of the range of native behavior: what works, what is risky, how to entice and reward, and how to guard against unwelcome developments. Outsiders were constantly bringing to their assessment of indigenous action their ideas of temperament, intelligence, and of moral qualities such as generosity, cruelty, kindness. Though uncertainty can be discerned often enough in early moments of encounter, it can recur after periods in which natives and outsiders have had a certain amount, sometimes even a lot, to do with each other. Uncertainty resulted from a lack of regularization of interaction, of shared affect and understanding of intentions between parties. Initially compliant-seeming or unremarkable behavior on the part of the natives could turn into hostility.

      Uncertainty and fear lie behind the journalists’ frequent relieved descriptions of indigenous “joy” and “pleasure” at the presence and presents of the visitors. For example:

      As soon as the boat came, we invited some of them to go on board. After taking a long while to decide about it, three of them consented to get into the boat; but they got out again in great haste as we prepared to push off from the shore. We then saw them walk quietly along by the sea, looking towards us from time to time, and uttering cries of joy. The next day we returned in a large party. Some of the natives soon came to meet us, expressing by their cries the pleasure they felt at seeing us again. A lively joy was depicted on all their features when they saw us drawing near. (Péron, quoted in Roth 1899:28)

      What emotions were these people experiencing and expressing? A mother in the group had to cover her infant’s eyes in order to calm him. Also, some of the natives in this group were concerned to prevent the French from moving in certain directions, so much so that they were entreated not to go in certain directions, with women uttering cries to alert others. Can this have been unalloyed joy? Yet it was so interpreted.

      Imitative behaviors in early encounter are best understood as thoroughly relational, built