Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

growing number of Australian historians, some of whom began to attempt representation, as Henry Reynolds (1981) put it, from “the other side of the frontier.”¹³ “Resistance” became one of the signature themes not only in history but also in anthropology (Scott 1985; Ortner 1995) as authors sought to cast historical materials in more relational, sociological, and ethically inflected terms that attributed agency to indigenous people. There began to emerge in Australia a new picture of the colonial past, with previously little or unknown Aboriginal heroes and stories of resistance (Willmott 1987; Pedersen and Woorunmurra 1995), which could be celebratory only up to a point because of their tragic subject matter. Such research has placed the character of Australian nationhood in question with unprecedented intensity, provoking “history wars” between conservative defenders of a benign view of Australia as a colony of settlement and vigorous and confrontational reinterpretations of the colonial past as violent and dispossessory (see, e.g., Windschuttle 2002; Macintyre and Clark 2004; Manne 2003, 2009; Attwood 2005).¹⁴

      While many research projects arose from indigenous difference, those researchers also registered profound impact and influence on indigenous lives that was not always easy to specify or analyze, partly because of the fraught political field into which any such representation enters. In recent decades, there have been some analyses using the terms and tools of colonial studies (Tonkinson 1978; Trigger 1992, applied to mission contexts), the effects of bureaucracy and administration on everyday indigenous life (Collman 1979a, b, 1988), Foucauldian theorization of the disciplining state and of resistance (Morris 1989), and research conducted in a variety of locations (outback towns, remote-area camps, cities) under the principal rubric of race and racism (Cowlishaw 1988, 1999, 2004). Among newer emphases have been ethically inflected approaches to history, social relations, and ecology (Rose 1992, 2012, 2015), and the concept of “ontological shift” through which Diane Austin-Broos (2009) reads two signal moments of change in Central Australia: Arrernte dislocation from their land, and their subsequent incorporation into an expanding welfare state.

      Exposure of indigenous people to the state in northern Australia in the land claims processes (Merlan 1998; Povinelli 2002), as Austin-Broos has argued (2011), deflected Australianist anthropology into reexamining traditional indigenous relationships to land. Presenting collectivities as possible “traditional owners,” as required by claims processes, was remote in many ways from the way Aboriginal people now live. Increasingly over the last decade (but see earlier Thiele 1982; Cowlishaw 1999), anthropology and other social sciences have turned to examine and critique liberal and neoliberal bureaucratic and policy processes focused on indigenous people (see also Strakosch 2015).

      As some following chapters will show, some of the people I have worked with in the north came from families that were survivors of the violence of settlement. They have narrated some of this past as they experienced it, leaving me with little doubt about where I stand in the history wars. I have more doubts about how to assess the nature of continuity in colonizing and dispossessory practice, especially in the ways that representations of difference play in relations of indigenous people with bureaucracy and in policy processes. Some historians and anthropologists have considered it more ethical to withdraw from any representation of indigenous people and to focus on the settler colonial state and society. Anthropologists have examined the evidently non-benign, circular, and remedialist character of the social democratic and neoliberal state, trained on shaping and domesticating indigenous difference (Lea 2008a, b; see also Strakosch 2015). As well, anthropologists have studied Australian state and bureaucracy, its whiteness (and especially its antiracist dimension, the fear of being oppressive), which shapes bureaucratic approaches to indigenous people and communities in the guise of help (Kowal 2015). In anthropological, historical, and other related settler colony literatures (especially those of North America) there are critiques of (usually) state-framed concepts of “recognition” (Coulthard 2007; A. Simpson 2014), and there are many statements of preference for “refusal” by indigenous scholars: claims to the right to unknowability of indigenous people and communities. There are many policy- and practice-related critiques of recognition as well (e.g., for Australia, see Pearson 2014): that “recognition” does not really accept the possibility of an autonomous indigenous position, but is always seeking to subordinate and subsume it. As I earlier indicated and will return to discuss in Chapter 8, that is exactly the elephant in the Recognise room.

      Arguing for an “anthropology of anthropology,” historian Patrick Wolfe (1999:3, 214) has sought to write, not “the agency of the colonized, but the total context of inscription.” He takes the further step of saying that one can ethically examine anthropological constructions and discourses but not indigenous ones. For indigenous people, Wolfe says, survival is the issue; survival is a matter of not being assimilated. Any claims to authority over indigenous discourse made from within the settler-colonial academy necessarily participate in the continuing usurpation of indigenous space; there are “no innocent discourses” regarding Aborigines (Wolfe 1999:4). To refer to indigenous discourse is inherently invasive, he avers; invasion continues in new forms. I do not agree that the study of indigenous discourse necessarily claims “authority over indigenous discourse.” Indeed, I dispute that we can neatly separate indigenous from nonindigenous discourse. This book tells a story of indigenous action, but in ways that could not be told simply with reference to settler or indigenous arrangements as if these were separate. I believe that we need ethnographically grounded accounts of the indigenous experience of change in their relationships with others.

      Material in this book draws on my experience with indigenous people and communities. It is grounded in features of problematic relationships that are not over yet, as well as in largely positive relationships that I developed with people that allowed me to participate in their lives. I present indigenous positions that I came to know, and which would otherwise not be heard, as important.

      Recent works critical of liberal and neoliberal governance acknowledge the significance of understanding indigenous action, orientation, and practice. In her examination of recent (2000–2006) indigenous policy in Australia, political analyst Elizabeth Strakosch (2015:180) argues that there is intimate entwinement between formations of settler colonialism and neoliberalism, which “thrives in the gap between liberalism’s promise of full inclusion and its practice of sifting actual claims to inclusion based on the ‘capacity’ of the claimant.” Older frameworks of capacity assessment, framed by sovereignty, she concludes, need to be transcended as the exhaustive site of political order. This “opens up the possibility of redress between different orders rather than within the liberal state framework” (186). The state is only one kind of political institution, she points out, urging us, “as settlers, to understand and encounter the other forms of political life that already exist” (ibid.). Yet, notably, Strakosch says little about what those other forms may be.

      Similarly, Tess Lea’s (2008a) ethnographic study of health bureaucracy and its remedialist practitioners convincingly shows how projections of indigenous “neediness” are produced and along with it an institutional, bureaucratic, magical “real” replete with incantations such as “involve young people,” “provide funding,” and so on. The work describes a hegemonic logic that “cannot imagine betterment without some form of government intervention” (Lea 2008a:233), and which reproduces rationales for such intervention. Lea asks how someone like herself, both bureaucrat and anthropologist, can comprehend bureaucratic cultural habits and not reproduce them: “I say simply: forget the agony of trying to be pure; concentrate instead on being as technically proficient as you possibly can. Dare to draw upon evidence to inform your interventions…. The field does not need more good-willed generalists mouthing safe platitudes; it needs people who are competent at their profession and dignified in their analysis” (ibid., 235).

      As I understand Strakosch and Lea, each points to looming aporias if one tries to understand history, action, and difference as if from the settler side only. There are too few ethnographically grounded accounts of the indigenous experience of change and its relational aspects.

      The story of indigenous action cannot be told simply with reference to settler or indigenous arrangements as if these were separate. I have gotten to know people on both sides of that divide. My field experience in northern Australia has imbued me with a sense of indigenous