April 7.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
No empty places
It is impossible to conceive of any place that is not embedded with Indigenous story. There are no empty places in Australia.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, From the Edge: Australia's Lost Histories, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2017, p. xviii.
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...a blindness about both the violence of dispossession and the stories of survival...
Australians tend to have an uneasy relationship with the history of this continent. Of the three strands of our national story – the Indigenous, settler and multicultural pasts – it is the first that we most struggle to comprehend and accommodate. This is partly because Indigenous culture remained for so long outside the national gaze, creating a blindness about both the violence of dispossession and the stories of survival; it is partly because the depth and diversity of Indigenous history has only recently been recognised by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and linguists; and it is partly because the magnitude of that history – the sheer antiquity of humanity in Australia – is difficult to fathom. 'The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time', American writer John McPhee reflects. 'It may only be able to measure it”. [1]
John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 90.
Acknowledgment: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming, pp. 2, 305 n.3.
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Misunderstandings of Indigenous women’s experience
Review of Liz Conor’s book on Aboriginal women – ‘skin deep’
…At the heart of [Liz Conor’s] study is the role that the print media played, first in setting down racial distortions, and then by the widely repeated reproduction of them in Australian colonial media. After the introduction of the telegraph, these descriptions and graphic images were projected to a global readership. In her pursuit of the origin (and truth) of the observations concerning Indigenous women in settler print media, Conor found that most accounts could not be verified and that only a few were from ‘first-hand’ informers. Some of these drew accusations against Indigenous mothers. From her intellectual probing, Connor posits that the secret nature of women’s customary rites or rituals led to misunderstanding and therefore to misinterpretation. One area of trenchant inquiry was into a native mother’s role in childbirth and childrearing. She offers arguments to suggest that certain clan meanings of actions hid the truth from the eyes of male (and some female) settlers. Among settler women, only those who had borne children themselves were allowed inclusive authority to this knowledge…
‘Bride capture’ was another recurring trope that became entrenched in settler interpretations of Indigenous culture, and their social and gender relations. This racialised depiction of brutal enslavement circulated the idea of Aboriginal violence against their women. Conor explores and dissects the hearsay and cites contradictory textual reports that refute a generalised reading. As with rituals to do with childcare and the death of a child, the intricacies of marriage rites were unknown, and could therefore be misinterpreted by settler onlookers. Some informants confirmed that elopement, for example, was known to occur – a happening that may have become confused with ‘bride capture’. Conor argues that these racist generalisations and judgements, which supported an ongoing argument that Indigenous people were inferior, encouraged governments to introduce child removal and condoned the appropriation of Indigenous lands. It compounded the popular perception of Aborigines as a doomed and ‘dying race’ – an idea expedient to the aims of the pastoral imperialists. Connor states that this false notion about Aboriginal women’s so-called inferior position in Aboriginal society ‘enabled settlers to [literally] get away with murder’ (p. 96).
Acknowledgment: Review by Barbara Dawson of Liz Conor’s book skin deep: settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women, UWA Publishing, Crawley, 2016, in Aboriginal History, (Vol. 40) 2016, p.350