Modelo curricular.

Hemming situated the white need to place Southeastern indigenous people in an historical context with attempts to: “resurrect the pioneer myth and shore up the myth of the

“settled Southeast” as the foundation of white Australia. For Hemming (2003, pp. 3-4) the idea of the settled Southeast was the “heartland” of an Australian “narrative of nation … It is the normalized, mainstream, Australian space, that sits at the centre of the

Australian state’s contemporary engagement with Indigenous people.” To this end:

Major public events celebrate the history of the conquering of the Australian landscape, the river systems, the ingenuity and adventurousness of the early settlers. Public re-enactments of the pioneer legend reinforce the history of the modernization of Australia – change is inevitable in a modernizing space. This story of modernity necessarily marginalizes indigenous people. It produces a set

the jetty, the marina. They all represent the power of technology to overwrite the ‘natural landscape’, and assume that the indigenous place has been erased or covered over by layers of progress. Time and progress are represented by built environs and the layering of the landscape, archeology contributes to this story by adding its reading of the progress of time, civilizations, and development

(Hemming, 2003, p. 8).

Hemming (2003, p.8) went on to argue that contemporary Aboriginal (Ngarrindjeri) people, some of whose ancestors were in the “black box”, continued to struggle against being “boxed in” to preconceptions about their place in modern Australia, so that “Indigenous people are being transformed into tourism objects, objects of heritage interest, or ‘relic’ populations with connections to an archeological past – a substrata of settlement.” As with all “forms of life”, such views become active at a subliminal level, and do not need to be openly stated to have their effect.

One consequence of the continued representation of Aboriginal people and culture within the frame of “stone-age man” has been that contemporary Aboriginal people in

Southeastern Australia have been rendered invisible in the public imagination outside of the museum context. The current strong debate about who “owns” the relics (artifacts and human remains) held by institutions1 has highlighted the schism between representations of Aboriginal people as legitimate objects of historical research, and the position of

1 _{In 2004, a group of indigenous people removed bark paintings from Victoria’s State Museum in protest}

that social events held in close proximity to where the paintings were displayed was disrespectful to their ancestors (Trioli, 2004, July 31, The Age, p. 2). Similarly, the documentary film Cracks in the mask traced the unsuccessful efforts of a Torres Strait Islander man to repatriate human remains of his ancestors and

contemporary Aboriginal people – often the direct descendents of the original source of the relics – who confront white Australians with the statement “We’re still here.”

When I was growing up in Victoria, the “real” Aborigines were conceptualized as belonging somewhere else – “Up North”, or in “The Centre”. In Victorian homes, Aboriginal designs and portraits of indigenous people appeared as decoration on tea- towels and dinner plates, along with graphic reproductions of Australian flora and fauna. The perennial image was of the Aboriginal man in a red lap-lap, standing on one leg and leaning on his spear, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he stared into the distance. Women and their cherubic children, usually naked, were often depicted in groups or pairs, sitting cross-legged on the ground.

When the romantic sculptor, William Ricketts, wanted models for his highly idealized sculptures of Aboriginal people, he traveled from his studio in Mt Dandenong2 _{all the}

way to Arnhem Land to find them. Ricketts, described as an eccentric who held strong views about the power of Aboriginal “spirituality” to heal the land, saw no contradiction in looking for the containers of that spirit in a faraway place, despite the fact that the traditional custodians of the place where he lived and worked still lived in Victoria. The appropriation of Aboriginal motifs and the romanticized depiction of tribal peoples by white film directors, artists and designers could be regarded as paradoxical, given that the popularity of these cultural products coincided with a period in which Aboriginal people themselves were often treated very poorly and relegated a social position that could, at best, be described as marginal.

For more than 200 years, the cultural differences between Aborigines and whites in Australia have been interpreted according to the perceptions of the white majority, which has constructed Aboriginality as either the exotic or the abject Other. In the current era, the representation of Aboriginal people remains fairly stereotypical. Despite the recent advent of a spate of films that have sensitively portrayed Aboriginal themes3_{, indigenous}

representation in the entertainment industry has tended to present Aboriginal people in stereotypical roles oriented towards an historical approach. At the time of writing, only three indigenous entertainers (the actors Deborah Mailman and Aaron Pederson and television presenter Ernie Dingo) were seen regularly on television or in films in contemporary urban roles that did not depend on the fact that they were Aboriginal.

The main premise of the current thesis is that cultural differences exist between Aboriginal and white Australians, differences which have contributed to

misunderstanding and miscommunication between the two groups at the cultural

interface. As long ago as the 1930s, William Cooper (Attwood & Markus, 2004) asserted that white Australians needed to learn to “think black”, in order to truly understand the country itself and our place in it. Before we can attempt to think black, however, white Australians first need to recognize and accept the ways that the cultural frames which hold our individual identities in place have been based on “thinking white”.

My central argument here is that, before white Australians can enter into a dialogue of reciprocal relations with indigenous Australians, they/we need to come to an

understanding of the ways that the cultural frame of whiteness has led to Australian identities being imagined and represented in particular ways, and that these “white” frames have acted to exclude or marginalize the Aboriginal presence in Australia.