While Aboriginal politics is invested in the mythic Aboriginality, Aboriginal adults are integrated in the life of the wider society and live socially, culturally and subjectively heterogeneous Aboriginalities. Their participation in face-to-face social interaction in family, neighbourhood, school, work and play, as well as mediated interaction, produces an ‗infinite array of intercultural experiences‘ (see Langton 1993: 33-5). They live, identify with and form their selves in intimate everyday contact with people (including kin) who do not identify as Aborigines, and they constantly move between only notionally distinct Aboriginal and other worlds of meaning. As the politics makes evident, they internalise in the interaction liberal humanist notions of the foundational sovereign self, modernist nostalgia for lost origins (see Spivak 1988: 291) and progressive notions of Aboriginal culture and self. Their ‗native‘ familiarity with the beliefs, anxieties and desires of the West, and capacity to manipulate them, is evidence of the intimacy of the relationship.
The relationship is a consequence of the colonial encounter and the antagonism, resistance, complicity and desire (see Fanon 1967; Said 1993; Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1996) involved in living interdependent lives over the ensuing period. It does not mean that Aboriginal Tasmanians are less Aboriginal but does mean that there is little cultural substance or social or political structure from the aboriginal past to be rehabilitated, that the Aboriginality proclaimed is not an exclusively Aboriginal entity and that contemporary individuals would be uncomfortable strangers in pre-colonial aboriginal or colonial Aboriginal company. It means that the three foundational communities and different individuals are highly internally heterogeneous.
It is this particular mix, not absolute difference, that constitutes Aboriginal Tasmanian cultural distinctiveness (see Hall 1990). Constructed in intra-, inter- and extra-communal interaction, Tasmanian Aboriginalities are so radically interpenetrated with white and other subjects that, other than discursively, they are
not ‗One nor the Other but something else besides‘ (Bhabha 1994: 219; see also 102-22), not one of two poles, caught between or straddling two worlds, cultures or identities. Indeed, the interpenetration is built on a foundationally mixed Aboriginal past. The founding generations of the three communities descended from the women of the north-east,11 were all of mixed race12 and enunciated from their ‗liminal‘ or ‗interstitial‘ positioning (to use Bhabha‘s terms) a social, cultural, and religious reconciliation of their Aboriginal and other traditions and histories. Agentic negotiation began at Wybalenna (Birmingham 1992a, 1992b) and continued with the Bass Strait Islanders‘ integration in the wider economy, as a group of the male heads of the leading families (cited in TAC/ALCT 2004: 9-10 said in a letter to the Launceston Examiner of May 1883:
We work as hard for our bread as any man. Admitted that our working season is of short duration, but while it lasts we work hard and for long hours, otherwise the price we get for our produce would never pay. Whenever we can get remunerative employment we are only too glad to avail ourselves of the opportunity to earn a pound.
They and other Aboriginal Tasmanians also fought in both world wars (Felton 1991: 23, 33).
Yet since the 1970s the politics has been dedicated to the creative imagining- into-being of the thus far ‗firm ground‘ (Spivak 1996: 211) provided by a mythological schema (Barthes 2000) of Aboriginality. The politics has sought, following multicultural policy, to establish an ‗incommensurably‘ different culture (Bhabha 1990b: 208-09) and a unified revolutionary native self (Fanon 1967) as the innocent victim of colonial dispossession and on-going institutional discrimination. As Kevin Gilbert (1977: 1) saw of Aborigines nationally, in Tasmania they ‗embrace and propagate … about themselves‘ the notions that they ‗share freely; … have a strong feeling of community; … don‘t care about money and lack the materialism of white society; … care more deeply for their children than do white parents; and so on‘.
The politics constitutes and naturalises an Aboriginal ‗stubborn chunk‘ (Bhabha 1994:219), and demands as of right the liberation of the Aboriginal self
11Pakana News52, August 2002. 12 See Ryan 1996: 222-38.
from state domination into an edenic sovereign present that is identical to an imagined past. The political interest is to ‗loosen the repressive locks‘ of unidirectional domination by a monolithic ‗them‘ ‗so that [Aboriginal] man can be reconciled with himself, once again find his nature or renew contact with his roots and restore a full and positive relationship with himself‘ (see Foucault 1987: 2).
For anti-colonial activists and theorists of postcoloniality, such essentialist strategy is a legitimate response to the colonial dislocation, in that it provides the necessary break with the colonial past and the solid ground on which to recover a culture, society and consciousness. Spivak (1996: 214-15, original emphasis) for example, has praised historians of the Indian subaltern for their ‗strategic use of positivistic essentialism‘. Aboriginal Tasmanian political agitation has used the strategy to renounce the creative reconciliation achieved by their forebears and ‗recover‘ a monolithic Aboriginal selfhood. The strategy has been critical in gaining the political achievements of the last thirty years, including state recognition, acknowledgement of dispossession, return of lands, apology for the removal of children, provision of more ‗culturally-appropriate‘ services, control of cultural heritage13 and a measure of self-determination. It has however, been retained since the emergence of a less coercive progressive state, the growing influence of wider national and global circumstances, the Aboriginal constituency‘s voluntary integration and the relative failure of reforms to produce continuing improvements in socio-economic circumstances.
As a result, the politics has become deeply obfuscatory. While the overt goals include the liberty to be truly Aboriginal and equal as citizens, covertly the political elite have established a ‗complicitous [or] folded together‘ (Spivak 1999: 361) political relationship with the state in which the core plus is recognised as the authentic Aboriginal community and the TAC the pre-eminent authority. The mythic Aboriginality grounds the strategy, as in the following statement by Mansell (1989: 50-1):
Are we Aboriginal Australians or are we in fact Australian Aborigines? The former suggests that our lot is chucked in with the lot of Australians. We are Australian citizens, albeit we happen to be Aboriginal, therefore our rights are determined by the rights which
13 See notes 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the introductory chapter of this thesis.
accrue to Australians except for some special consideration because we happen to be Aboriginal. However, if we are Australian Aborigines, the emphasis is upon us being Aboriginal people who happen to live in this country called Australia and our indigenous rights flow from that separate and different description of us. A whole range of political considerations also flow from [it]. ... Are we Aboriginal Australians? If we are, then our whole aim is to get the best deal we can for our people within the Australian society. But if we are Australian Aborigines, we are aiming to get the best possible deal from the world, which includes the nation of Australia, to which we are not subordinate.
That Aboriginality must be considered sufficiently credible for the state to accede to claims in its name and so the core constituency must be mobilised. The chimeras of a ‗free‘ and politically sovereign Aboriginality and an oppressive state are used to raise consciousness, incite desire and energise the movement. The politics fabricates the mythic Aboriginality by co-opting multiple cultures and pasts and re-packaging them as Tasmanian. It legitimates the goal of liberation by constituting the state as repressive and Aborigines as its victims. But the tensions inherent in this politics demand further work. Since the Aboriginality must be essential, dehistoricised and natural, its contructedness must be obscured. Since the subject must be unitary, any discrepancies between it and the actuality of decentredness and multiplicity must also be obscured. And since the Aboriginality is oppositional, so the elite must hide its real relationship with the state behind oppositional rhetoric.
Thus the politics comes to be more dedicated to the achievement of a stable Aboriginal-state relationship, and through its dependence on the performance of the mythic Aboriginality, less to individual emancipation, in fact largely insofar as it works as a motivator. Actual progress towards that emancipation, in the form of educational success, social equality or material well-being is problematic since it compromises the appearance of the passive victim. In Tasmania this means for example, that the politics is invested in representing schooling as inappropriate and repressive and in equating interest and success in schooling with whiteness. It takes resistance and failure in schooling as evidence of real Aboriginality, and
success as evidence of a dubious Aboriginality. That is, it invests in a failure, recalcitrance and unruliness that is useful in political bargaining but contrary to individuals‘ capacity to achieve social equality.
This form of subaltern agency, which neither undermines colonialist dominance nor liberates lived heterogeneity (and in fact contains it for political purposes), is not unique to Tasmania. Mervyn Gibson (Gibson and Pearson 1987) describes a parallel situation in Hope Vale, where the drinkers mobilise a mythic Aboriginal culture and tradition to exploit other sectors of the community in its own particular interests. They make drinking ‗an expression of identity and culture ... to drink alcohol is to be an Aborigine‘ and associate ‗[h]ealth, hygiene and care about nutrition and economic welfare ... with a white identity. There is this assumption amongst Aborigines that achievement and social responsibility is the preserve of white people‘ (Gibson and Pearson 1987: 2, 4-5, original emphases). The mobilisation of kinship ties and cultural obligations pushes individuals to accede to the drinking to the detriment of their own family‘s health and education. Those who reject the appeal to culture are compromised on the basis of their diminished Aboriginality.
Aboriginal Tasmanians are embedded in this myth. It is possible, as Foucault (1979a: 36-49) might suggest, that the Aboriginal elite has been seduced by liberal power into comporting itself appropriately, and that they are naively caught in the ‗miraculating‘ liberatory cause (see Spivak 1989: 131). The evidence presented below suggests though, that they lead the politics in some measure cynically in regard to its human costs. The vigour with which it has been pursued by the same leaders for many years, in the absence of formal social or cultural repression, suggests this interpretation. Many other Aborigines routinely fear that their communal integrity, cultural particularity and self identity are under threat. Memories of earlier denial, repression and discrimination and their own less than edifying responses, linger and dominate their lives, as one Bass Strait Island man (AA4, 16/8/02) revealed:
You have got no idea of what we‘ve had to let go of and the shame that we felt growing up, and then trying to recover that, and live with our shame because we can‘t apologise to [relatives who we avoided on the street] ... It‘s a very difficult thing to work through, because almost
half your life you‘re ashamed of who you are, and your family, all your relatives and all your bloody friends. A majority of the Aboriginal community will live and die with big grudges ... chips on their shoulders.
In the publication We Who Are Not Here (Friend 1992), members of the Fanny Cochrane-Smith (FC-S) community express their near-invisibility. Many people mourn the loss of cultural particularity and cohesive and secure communal lives (see Felton 1991; Direen 1994). They feel that in living and working in the cities they are inexorably divorced from their culture. In the context of earlier social pressure which made it ‗not safe‘ to express their Aboriginality the man above for example, ‗always wanted to be more Aboriginal‘:
I wasn‘t going mutton-birding any more, I wasn‘t doing any of the things we did growing up, all that was gone, so it was just a name tag. I wanted more, but ―How would you become more Aboriginal?‖ Do you get fatter? See, I didn‘t know. But I desperately needed it, I wanted something which was invisible. I couldn‘t see it but I needed it. I was seeking it but didn‘t know where to look.
These fears and desires are in part the product of the history of denial suffered at the hands of colonial and later governments, but also of the political strategy that pushes those of the core community plus to exceed what they are and become ‗more Aboriginal‘ Aborigines. That strategy is to create, on the basis of vestiges, new and more Aboriginal Aboriginal traditions with which to develop a sense of continuous connection, an epic past for which to feel responsible and a heightened grievance against settler-Australia and its institutions as a focus of identity formation. While each of these imaginings has some basis in reality, each is made hyper-real for political effect.
Boundary work
Official categorisation formalises social, cultural and political boundaries between Aboriginal and other Tasmanians that may otherwise remain nebulous. The spinning of particular Aboriginal ‗webs of significance‘ (Geertz 1973: 5) by the
politics begins by exploiting14 the possibilities opened up by that categorisation. The politics adopts the positive stereotypes of the liberal ideal type, such as those which grant Aborigines an attractively stable, integrated, non-conflictual and supportive kinship-based pre-colonial order. It adopts national representations of Aborigines as ‗the true owners of Australia, innate conservationists, highly spiritual and peace loving, group and consensus oriented [and as having] ... a special relationship with the land‘ (Thiele 1991b: 180). It uses the positive imagery to reverse some aspects of the colonial hierarchy, adopting and transforming stereotypes that have previously ‗spoiled‘ (Goffman 1968a) Aboriginality. Instead of being close to nature as primitive savages, Aborigines become ‗―the most highly civilized‖‘ (Thiele 1991b: 181) spiritual beings, instead of small-scale traditional community being claustrophobic it becomes richly rewarding and mutually-supportive, and instead of being child-like and limiting, Aboriginal learning styles are whole and affective.
This reversal is accomplished in part by a negative stereotyping of whiteness. The encompassing society is represented as dominated by capitalist greed, private ownership, partial relationships, loneliness and egoistic anomie. White settlers ‗stole the land they now occupy; ... are guilty of colonial domination and are responsible for its consequences; and they are inherently individualistic, barbaric and coldly rational‘ (Thiele 1991b: 180). They were depraved sexual predators without ‗spiritual and cultural links to the land‘ (Lehman 1990: 8-9). The politics exaggerates the stigma with which Aborigines have been marked. The white world—the word ‗white‘ often being used as ‗a moment of compressed and magically adequate expression‘ (Spivak 1989: 124) which captures all these meanings—discriminates against, subjugates and marginalises, and is responsible for Aboriginal alienation and dysfunction. White antagonism means that, for example, ‗[w]e are the only race of people that I know of on earth, the Tasmanian Aborigines, who have to daily justify our existence‘ (Mansell cited in Ryan 1996: 260, note 2).
Two cases illustrate this boundary work. One, a cultural safety program (UTas 2004), was delivered by members of the core community to university academic
14 This is not to suggest a linear relationship between state categorisation and Aboriginal myth- making. For example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political activism to achieve citizenship and minority rights contributed to the development of the category.
and general staff. The other, a piece of policy research (Jacobs and Walter, n.d.), was conducted in part by an Aboriginal Tasmanian researcher. Both were supported by mainstream institutions15 and participants in the program were told that it was ‗approved by local Aboriginal people‘ (fieldnotes 4/11/2004). Both were attempts, predicated on social justice and affirmative action principles, to improve Aboriginal social circumstances. The explicit intent of the cultural safety program was to provide a safer work environment for Aboriginal students and staff, and that of the policy research to ‗provide an evidence base that can assist Aboriginal Housing Services Tasmania to prepare future housing policies‘ (Jacobs and Walter n.d.: 1).
At the level of connotation (Barthes 1968: 89-94), both contributed to the construction of the mythic Aboriginal culture, community and self as taken-for- granted reality. The training program facilitators introduced the program by telling participants how skin names and avoidance relationships worked in pre-colonial clan society, then quickly moved on (blurring the boundary between then and now) to say that Aboriginal Tasmanians are not from Western culture and, unlike Westerners, are not verbal and often consider it a sign of respect to avoid eye contact. In Aboriginal society, kinship is ‗extremely strong‘, for instance:
Each of us [Aboriginal facilitators] in this room know where each of the others fits in our kinship. It goes beyond cousins; it is extremely complex and handed down, ... most of our knowledge is passed on orally through our elders (fieldnotes 4/11/2004).
The presenters said that there are significant cultural norms, strict rules and sanctions, a system of reciprocal obligations and taboos for men and women, all of which are respected. Elders, those who have achieved a certain rite of passage in terms of knowledge, take a major role in decision-making. To them, ‗the land is sacred‘. In communicating with Aborigines at the university, one needed to respect a certain protocol, be very responsive to body language and gestures and
15 The program was based on curriculum developed by Phil Kelly in the Tasmanian Department of Education (TDoE 2001b). It was offered with the support of the university‘s Vice Chancellor, ‗identified as an important component of the Aboriginal Employment Strategy‘, delivered by Equal Employment Opportunity staff, and funded partly by the Commonwealth Department of
Employment and Workplace Relations and partly by a Teaching and Learning Grant. The policy research was commissioned by Aboriginal Housing Services Tasmania and conducted by academic staff of the university.
different attitudes to eye contact, and ‗ask‘ rather than tell. One should be introduced, ‗engage an advocate so communication is quite clear‘ and get permission to access lands (UTas 2004: 4-6; fieldnotes 4/11/2004).
The policy research (Jabobs and Walter n.d.: vii, 12, 13, 23) proposes similar notions. It refers to communal ties, supportive kin networks, extended family, ‗inappropriate design and location‘, ‗[f]amily and community obligations [which] mean that many Aboriginal people will offer support and accommodation to others in need‘, and ‗the expectation of reciprocity within the community‘.
Both training program and policy research use official statistics to present disadvantage in politically-useful light. The former deals exclusively with national Aboriginal health, which is skewed by the situation in remote Australia, and ignores the less pronounced gap in the Aboriginal Tasmanian health profile. The latter makes comprehensive use of state level data to establish ‗stark differences‘ in demography and housing circumstances between Aboriginal and other Tasmanians. It parallels that with the implication (pp. 3-6) that this disadvantage is consistent with that suffered by other Aboriginal Australians, thus obscuring the less pronounced gap between national and state demographic profile and socio- economic and housing status. This in turn leaves it to readers to make