Let’s play a game; yes, piggy-in-the-middle’: notes towards a performance, and Towards an Anthropology of Horror in Interventions – experiments between art and ethnography, Macquarie University, Sydney, (December 2009)

Grief will descend like a wave. Grief will descend like a great pall of dust. Grief will skitter across the bare terrain like a piece of blown cardboard.

Now tell me, what is your excuse, what is your strategy of self-exoneration? Come come, you’re out, you’re off scot-free, while others are in it up to their eyeballs, immersed. Ah yes, the whole body treatment, baptism of fire. So how come these others are in free escape mode? And yes, know it all. There is one problem, you will notice, and it is never them.

In the land of the great white scream …

1

The missionary stands in the middle of an empty stage. Yes, the stage is empty. Low and empty, without adornment of any kind or distraction. He looks from side to side, appears to see nothing, drifts away.
The missionary stands in the middle of the stage. The stage is low and empty. She wears a cotton print dress. A voice whispers ‘Pretty flowers, pretty flowers’.

2

Is there a single image that can tell us how it is, that can ‘strip the cataracts from our eyes’? (FN1) They see only the mayhem where we see life, sordidness where we encounter grace and caring, brutality where we meet the full delicacy of human concern. They only see what they see for the encounter is beyond them, an impossible Everest of the soul. ‘Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane’, bringing all the good little boys and girls their Christmas gifts neatly encased in niceness and viscose wrapping and cheery goodwill, as if each day brings a new salvation, a new dawn, a new promise, a new distraction. ‘Give us each day our daily deliverance.’
Toys litter the sand. ‘Look,’ says the mother to her pal, ‘all the toys will be smashed by lunchtime. They’re vicious little beasts really, it’s a miracle anything endures. Jealous business, got to smash or grab, possess or destroy. They wheel out the super-new, super- wide white screen, all reality brought instant to the living room. The people depart, drift off. One old lady carries a blackened billycan as if in memory of former times or out of sheerest habit. She veers slightly as she walks. The dress hangs straight down. It might have been a petticoat once, in some earlier incarnation. Maybe it was white once. Maybe it was always black.

3

Is there a word, an expression, something that can reach to the heart of the matter? Massacre? Too remote, too impersonal. Genocide? No, not people, societies, whole ways of being, whole swathes of them reduced to nothing, torn from their histories, scattered like handkerchiefs on the equally abandoned terrain, over-run, disregarded, treated with disdain. Indifference? There is that, a casual superiority that assigns the future to everyone and all peoples except themselves. For they are exempt. History is on their side for somehow God will look after them. History will not strike them for they are outside it. Strange paradox. ‘She’ll be right,’ they say, ‘we’ll figure something out. After all we’ve survived so far.’ Ah, the triumphalism of those who have survived. Survived only without any sense of the cost, terrifying themselves at spectres of their own making, believing naively, that science is science, that there is truth somewhere, justice even, and not merely in what comes to pass unless of course you can construct yourself as somehow the beneficiary of things. Let us not praise the ancestors for they may betray us at any moment. What they bequeathed they bequeathed and it may seem something. That’s when a society still has a history and the whiff of agency is in the air, even if it is tentative and lacking in precise shape. But remove agency and you remove purpose, remove the capacity to act in the broader scheme of things and you will be in-directed into your own body, left with that as the last playground. You too can become a spectacle, isn’t that nice! When the sense of indebtedness becomes too great, when the self no longer feels that it can participate in the production of things in the making of its own world for itself, then deny the past entirely, cast the debt from ourselves, make ourselves ‘the one-and-only,’ the one and only thing, just half a step away from becoming just another toy thrown on the sand, squandered; and demeaned by the gift that comes for no reason, merely pro forma, a matter of form, a matter of entitlement which is in fact no entitlement, an administered gift that puts all the burden on the recipient — a burden which at the end of the day we should not be surprised to find refused. ‘We demand, you give, we refuse.’ For somehow in this suddenly, in the most shadowy but also most imperious fashion, there comes the quick fleeting understanding that the giver does not care, that the giver does not intend to care, it is merely what you do, what is done, so many houses this calendar year and no expectation, no expectation but the worst expectation, that soon it will be wreckage all around  — and the cycle of demand made – demand acceded to –gift finally dismissed or renounced endlessly put in play. ‘In any case’, say the most cynical of the bureaucrats and the most cynical of the politicians, ‘it’s the flow-on effects...’ It’s all ‘stimulation’ and ‘flow’ and the appearance of delivery...’ This is what we did’, they can say but in reality they don’t know what they’re doing for there is no understanding, none at all, of consequences. At each stage there is an adjustment movement: ‘Well, housing failed. Now let’s let them own their own’ as if somehow that will create ‘the remedy’. Of what? No one has yet specified the problem. Might as well say ‘Let’s have a Filipino maid in every household’ or ‘Let the boat people work off their passages. Let them be assimilated.’ Surely someone will come up with a suitable mantra … (FN2)

4

Mantras. Housing, education, employment.

Mantras. Employment, education, training. The whole of the Aboriginal lifeworld is enveloped in mantras. It’s a holy field of mantras, untouchable, unimpeachable, self-evident. Mantras are a crucial part of the new reality. Emblazoned on every chest they might now be set forth on banners stretched from tree to tree: HEALTH HEALTH HEALTH. The State has its banners, commerce has its banners, the church has its banners. Signs saying Tidy Towns are scattered in the grass. Aboriginality has become a matter of décor. Ah, here is the courthouse covered in Aboriginal designs. I suppose that makes it sacred; I suppose that makes it culturally relevant. Too bad the artist isn’t a local. Yes, they fly him in, two thousand kilometres plus, nice fat fee, two weeks all expenses paid, stays in the guest house (the place with all the signs, one reading PLEASE READ THIS SIGN), all meals provided, compound locked after 6pm. (‘No, it’s a good idea not to be out after dark.’)

Ah, the hand of friendship comes in many forms.