Think of a small town in rural Australia. Here are a few streets of attractive and comfortable houses, a large park, some hotels a beautiful place with a strong tourist trade. Each Saturday there is an open market, where local people bring things they have grown or made. When the tourists are there, the market is busy: piles of fruit and vegetables, home-made pies and cakes, crafts, and Aboriginal art. Everything seems real and personal: old-fashioned and charming.
The first time I went to this market, I bought a painting made by an Aboriginal woman. It was an illustration of a myth of the region; she gave me a print-out of the myth to go with the picture. I also bought some groceries, and noticed a stall piled high with jams and pickles. They were remarkable for their range and originality. Three kinds of just about everything, arranged according to degrees of sweet and hot. And some unusual combinations: mango and pear, rhubarb and tomato, orange and apricot. An elderly man was at the stall; he was eager to talk. Made them all myself, was his opening line; been doing it for years and years.
So we got talking about different pickles and jams, and which ones he was most proud of. He was a man with great sparkle and, it turned out, with a passion for history. He had been in the merchant navy, an adventurer all over the world, and had been writing a personal history to show, as he put it, what life had been like for men like him.
As he talked, without any prompting from me, and with no idea of my interest in the subject (he had not asked a single question), he suddenly said: Those Aborigines never had any of this. I was not sure what he meant, and supposed he was referring to the array of things on his stall. Pickles and jams? I asked. No, any kind of proper food. They had bugger all. Bloody nothing. We brought it all over for them fruit, vegetables, everything. They were starving here, dying out. We saved them.
I hear this view of the colonial encounter often. Other Australians have explained to me, with some force, that Aboriginal life had been collapsing, and that the land just could not support them until Europeans introduced their kind of resources and economy.
This image of destitute primitives, scraping something less than a living from an impossible landscape, sits well, of course, with the need to justify colonialism in Australia as much as in southern Africa. It also helps deal with subliminal and lurking awareness that the colonial story is a matter of shame rather than pride. There are psychoanalytic as well as material dimensions to colonial accounts of conquest. But in Australia, the myth of Aboriginal irrelevance was built into a legal principle.
Colonial power and its justification
Australian law asserted that no title to land existed prior to European settlement because the land had been terra nullius (empty land) a legal if not actual void. This meant that Aboriginal use and occupation of territories had no standing, did not need to be respected and could not constitute a resource Aboriginal communities could rely upon. Rather, anywhere that had not been taken into direct and immediate ownership by Europeans was Crown Land, belonging to the King of England and managed on behalf of the King by the government of the colony.
The theory of terra nullius was not unique to Australia; some version of it lurked behind colonial relations in much of North America, as well as parts of British India. But in Australia, another body of law further dispossessed and disenfranchised indigenous populations. From 1886 onwards (and continuing until about 1960), laws were enacted that gave the states the right to take and keep Aboriginal children from birth to the age of 21.
These were applied for the next seventy years with varying degrees of aggression, and, in due course, directed with special and appalling enthusiasm at the children of mixed Aboriginal white parentage. Institutions were set up all over the country (some forty in western Australia alone) to house these children that the state had decided to take into care and civilise. The policy was ruthless: children were taken at very young ages; many never saw their parents or families again.
The recent and compelling Australian film, Rabbit-proof Fence, is a story that comes from these Australian laws about or against Aboriginal societies. Eschewing both sentimental and sadistic images, this is a film that understates the cruelty of the legal system that Australia put in place, and kept in place for much of its history. A system that mirrored ideas of primitive destitution, and endorsed a notion that the only real opportunities for Aboriginal people lay with the colonial frontier: by becoming Christian labourers and servants for white settlers, they could develop.
Memory and myth at the colonial frontier
On a recent trip to western Australia, I found myself thinking about the concept of opportunity the idea that something lies, perhaps right at hand, perhaps somewhat concealed, that you can do or get and thereby be much better off.
Frontiers are celebrated for the opportunities they offer to settlers and adventurers (there are resources here: land, forests, gold, diamonds, oil and the freedom to make them your own). And the development of these by and for newcomers has been hailed, by government as well as the settlers themselves, as the source and basis of opportunities for indigenous peoples whose lands and resources, if not children and even lives, the frontier takes, dominates and transforms.
On frontiers, opportunities speak to the future, to what can be done that is new and forward-looking. Opportunities come along, and must be seized. Perhaps risks have to be taken, old ways abandoned, homes and families left behind; tradition needs to be ignored or defied in favour of something fresh and different.
For indigenous communities, opportunities at the frontier therefore seem to depend on a collaboration with the colonists, or at least a participation in colonial projects. And a valuable condition for being able and willing to collaborate and participate lies in a negative view of the past. The old days should not be too alluring, too touched with idealism, or they will be an anchor that holds back the ship of opportunity. Better to see traditional life as limited, limiting and impoverished. Either have a memory of the past that insists on its failures; or abandon memory altogether.
Land claims, and assertions of indigenous rights to territory and heritage, tend to defy this hostility to tradition, and to contest amnesia. Critics of these campaigns insist that the memories of the past that are being offered to support indigenous rights and claims are romantic exaggerations at best, and absurd myths at worst.
The challenge to indigenous peoples movements and protests can come from developers who are determined to be blind to any rival ideas about the use of frontier resources, governments that seek to ensure that control of the land remains theirs and intellectuals who do their best to deconstruct indigenous political discourse to show that it is mythic at all levels.
The most common complaint levelled against Aboriginal populations, therefore, is that they misrepresent their own past, and believe in an original or ancient well-being when, in reality, there was all kinds of poverty. A theory of terra nullius and the historical account given by the pickles maker at the rural market combine, in this denigration of indigenous history and memory, with the assessments of would-be scholars.
I say would-be scholars, because the deconstruction of indigenous history and memory is not authentic scholarship so much as a priori speculation and assertion. The poverty of the indigenous past is often allied to another assertion about indigenous people or their supporters and advocates: they are deemed to clutch onto absurd ideas about returning to some ancient and long-dead way of life. These are mere assertions; they are not based on what the people themselves say, either about the past or about what they want to do now.
I spoke of this in my last column in relation to the politics of southern African Bushmen; the alliance of right-wing settler opinion with government and deconstructionism is no less evident in Australia. There, two myths about Aboriginals coincide: on the one hand, they are said to have lived in a land without resources; on the other hand, they are condemned for seeking to go back to some idealised past in which they thrived on those resources. This is the rhetoric of the opponents of Aboriginal rights.
In fact, opportunities for indigenous people at colonial frontiers lie in a mixture of holding onto the past, insisting upon memory, and drawing from the new developments of the present. No indigenous person hopes to slip back into subsistence living; and the struggle to retain control and ownership of territories lies not in a vision of a former utopia that can thereby be recovered, so much as a need to balance development with memory in a way that gives both their chance.
In this sense, memory, as well as lands or jobs or European kinds of education, constitutes an opportunity. Memory that is centred on origins, migrations, stories and language. Memory that builds strength because it holds in place confidence. And memory that is vital because it repudiates destructive and self-serving colonial myths about aboriginal history myths like terra nullius, aboriginal destitution and romantic Garden of Edenism.
Mabo, and the land claims process
On 3 June 1992 the Australian courts came down with a new judgment that defined Aboriginal rights. This case, known as the Mabo decision, rejected the doctrine of terra nullius. It insisted instead that Aboriginal title to traditional lands and resources preceded, and had not been automatically extinguished by, European settlement and jurisdiction.
Mabo did not undermine colonial ownership of land that had been granted as freehold; but it did challenge any claim by leaseholders that their interest in the land excluded or erased antecedent Aboriginal rights and heritage.
Mabo was hailed as a vital breakthrough in relations between whites and Aboriginals. It was welcomed on many sides as a chance to rethink colonial history and rebuild Aboriginal standing in the nation as a whole. For some, it meant a chance to initiate land claims; for others, it was an opportunity for reconciliation between European and Aboriginal interests, beliefs and points of view.
Since Mabo, Australia has embarked on both a land claims process and a backlash against any such Aboriginal claims or rights. The government has set up a department that works with Aboriginal claimants and the white families who feel vulnerable, seeking to put in place out of court, mediated deals.
At the same time, leaseholders who comprise the core of the white pastoral interest have established through the courts that Aboriginal use and occupation of the land is subordinate to the needs and interests of ranching and mining.
In the past year, the courts have handed down decisions that make it more, rather than less difficult for Aboriginal communities to establish that they have enduring interests in the land. It may be that those Aboriginal groups that live in the remotest areas, right at or a little beyond the ranching and mining frontiers, can still benefit from Mabo. Experience in the courts and at the hands of conservative governments has caused others to be less hopeful.
You have to have a story
Over the past months, I have spent some time in western Australia. I was taken out onto the land, and told stories, by some of the Wangkatha living in the Goldfields region. One man, Edward Johnson, wanted to show me the land where he had spent much of his time as a young man. He took me to an area, some miles from any real road, where a limestone outcrop creates a series of ridges among the bush. A series of rock holes mark the flat, higher areas of the ridges; these have been important places to find water in a land that is brutally dry.
Edward explained that these are part of a particular dreamtime story, and showed me how one of the rock holes was a birds nest the rock was worn into a smooth oval, where the bird had created the place to lay her eggs. Dreamtime stories are not told in full or detail in such a casual setting, to such a stranger. But Edward told me enough to make sure I understood some of the power and mystery of the place. He was giving me a hint of memories of a resource from the past, for it is a guide to finding water; and a resource in the present, because it gives Edward a link to his land and his parents and ancestors, and a chance to take pride in his Aboriginal heritage.
As we stood on the ridge, beside the dreamtime nest, Edward looked out at the mix of trees, scrub and desert stretching far in every direction. As he looked he said: Every place you walk, you have to have a story. So you know where you come from; and know where you are; and see where you are going. He also spoke about the life he had led when he was living on this land: he had been a worker on sheep and cattle stations.
He did not reminisce about some pre-contact, subsistence life; he was not setting up some idea of pristine Aboriginal life. Rather, he was recalling, with great pleasure, a mix of activities, a blend of cultures. This mix was his opportunity; and the loss of either the modern (as it would have been then) or the Aboriginal (in the forms it had carried into the modern) would have been a loss of opportunity.
On another trip, some weeks later in another part of the land, in an area where he had not lived and worked Edward spoke about land claims and the future. He said he did not see where the claim might lead, and did not know what it could mean for him.
He has no real job; his wife and children have moved to another part of the country; he lives with relatives, in poverty. He worries about the future for his people rather than for himself. He says how important the stories are, and how few elders there are who tell them.
The stories are important, because within them sits a set of opportunities: to make links with the past, and to know and have the land. Without the stories, without that kind of memory, there is an additional destitution.