Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

the fields of value that these practices subserve.

      Today we continue to witness an ongoing struggle over the nature of indigenous difference. There is competition between ideas of the timeless difference of traditional “Aboriginal culture,” which can be highly valued, both by indigenous and nonindigenous people; and the unruly differences of many everyday indigenous settings—including conditions of people, houses, the use of things and money, the nature of relationships to people and institutions—which administrators and many others typically read wholly as consequence of “disadvantage” requiring remedy and reformation (Strakosch 2015:139–43, 157–58). This has policy implications, creating spaces for further state involvement (Lea 2008a, b; Strakosch 2015). I take to heart Povinelli’s concerns about suppressive power. This book, like her work, is concerned in many places with realities that persist beyond the pressures to commensurate and that are discernible and expressed in indigenous people’s own reactions to and musings on nonindigenous difference. As will be demonstrated in this book, incommensurability often appears not as classically “cultural” but at a mundane level, carried in the structures and practices of socioeconomic and racialized inequalities that are so much the medium of indigenous-nonindigenous relationship today.

      CHAPTER 1

      Nobodies and Relatives

      Nonrecognition and Identification in Social Process

      This chapter examines two modalities of indigenous-nonindigenous engagement in early encounter. One was their complete refusal to engage. The second was identification by indigenous people of Europeans as spirits of the dead. The Europeans were at an advantage. They had some general reports concerning Australia’s natives and some reported knowledge and experience of other Pacific peoples. Aborigines probably had variable experiences and ideas about degrees of otherness on the part of people outside their immediate region and within the range of their own form of life,¹ but they had no inkling of the existence, cultural repertoire, and mind-set of these strangers. Thus the outsiders had enormously greater power to control the terms of engagement between themselves and the Aborigines. I will argue that nonengagement is a major modality of social orientation, fundamental to building and maintaining social boundaries. Nonengagement is arguably part of a family of practices, a spectrum of involvement. In the historical context examined here, the nonengagement, or deliberate indigenous refusal of engagement, was a first-response tactic, before some other kind of response became imperative. The identification of people with spirits, I will argue, was often relationally specific: Europeans were identified as specific personalities or attributed particular social characters. Though deeply embedded in indigenous practices concerning people’s identification with others, the identification of Europeans with spirits could be rapidly questioned in this new context, as we will see.

       They “Scarce Lifted Their Eyes”

      Joseph Banks, the botanist accompanying Captain James Cook’s first great voyage (1768–71), observed parties of indigenous people in what came to be called Botany Bay, an area only a few kilometers south of what is now Sydney’s central business district. From the ship Endeavour, Banks saw the natives fishing from small boats within easy sight of the English. Despite that proximity the Aborigines paid no attention to them. Banks (1962: vol. 2, p. 54) observed that they “scarce lifted their eyes” as the Endeavour passed “within a quarter mile of them” (Banks 1962: vol. 2, p. 54).²

      There were other sightings of indigenous groups by the English. Yet twice in his journal entry for 28 April 1770, Banks mentions the ship being within close proximity of “Indians” who appeared “totaly unmovd at us.” A few days later, Banks describes how twenty or so natives, seen walking along a beach, “pursued their way in all appearance intirely unmovd by the neighbourhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one” (ibid., 63).

      Perhaps the strangeness of a ship, a watercraft of an entirely unfamiliar kind, allowed this “remarkable object” to be unseen. While a ship would have been unfamiliar, we cannot leap to the conclusion that the natives did not physically see it. The diary does tell us that the “Indians” made different responses to the English over the period of several days, including these nonresponses. The entry of the same day, 28 April 1770, makes it clear that the ship had indeed been noticed by some “Indians” gathered about a fire. That they had seen it was inferred by Banks from the fact that they retired to an eminence from which they could watch it. Earlier in the day, the sailors were also waved at, invited to land, and menaced by men brandishing “pikes and swords.” It was only later, when the ship entered an inlet, that it was completely ignored by people within easy eyesight. That vision was good at the mentioned distance of a quarter mile is shown by an entry of 8 June in which things went quite differently at a location on the ship’s northward travel along the coast: “Still sailing between the Main and Islands; the former rocky and high lookd rather less barren than usual and by the number of fires seemd to be better peopled. In the morn we passd within ¼ of a mile of a small Islet or rock on which we saw with our glasses about 30 men women and children standing all together and looking attentively at us, the first people we have seen shew any signs of curiosity at the sight of the ship” (ibid., 76). Thus, “not seeing” was only one kind of early event among others.

      There are other recorded instances of indigenous people’s refusal on early encounter to make sensory contact, even on occasions when outsiders, men of ordinary stature, were physically copresent or in close proximity with them.

      In 1844, India-born Charles Napier Sturt (1795–1869), soldier, pastoralist, then explorer, set out from Adelaide northward on his third and final Australian expedition. Notwithstanding the seven decades’ difference between his incursion and Cook’s, he was moving into uncharted parts of the continent.³ His party frequently encountered Aborigines who had not seen Europeans before; and it seems likely that many had not yet received reports of them. On one such occasion the explorers ascertained that “some natives were encamped at a little distance above us; but although we went to them, and endeavoured by signs and other means to obtain information, we could not succeed; they either did not or would not understand us; neither, although our manner must have allayed any fear of personal injury to themselves, did they evince the slightest curiosity, or move, or even look up when we left” (Sturt 1849: vol. 1, p. 414).

      Sturt’s party tried to engage the Aborigines face-to-face, but evoked little reaction. This lack of reaction, we are entitled to assume, must have been deliberate. Perhaps even more surprising, when the party abandoned those efforts and were leaving, the Aborigines seemed to take no notice of them at all. They appear to have been looking down, not up or at them.

      This null reaction is recorded often enough, in different parts of the continent. We immediately suspect studied avoidance, but what is to be made of that as a form of relation?

      Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962:361) wrote that “the refusal to communicate is still a form of communication” and that recognition is a sociocultural practice, effected through habituated bodily practices, and embedded in social convention and experience. By refusing to look, Aborigines were denying the others a subject status and refusing to engage with what they might be doing. The reciprocity inherent in exchanging visual recognition was being blocked from the outset. To meet the gaze of another, as Merleau-Ponty (1968:142) puts it, is to see oneself from without, that is, to acknowledge an external perspective on oneself.⁴ Thus not to see is also to defer being seen and the redefinition that occurs when one places oneself in the gaze of another. Though in near face-to-face contact, Aborigines were constituting the other as outside the sphere of what social theorist Alfred Schutz (1967:164–72) calls a “We-relationship.” Avoidance here apparently involves attending but presenting to the avoided other as if not doing so.

      A relation constituted by nonrecognition is usually asymmetrical and power-laden, involving incipient or established dimensions of power, perhaps also awe and fear. In this case there is a politics of withholding on one side (the Aboriginal one), and (typically) what was an eager attentiveness to the possibility of direct interaction, if not invasiveness, on the other. Nonrecognition is a denial of the other as encounterable, of commonality or (in a broad sense) common objects