5

Life does not provide entitlements. It does not come with a bundle of rights. Life is merely. Anyone who thinks that rights and entitlements constitute a supplement to life might wish to think again. How can it be that life is or should be available for supplementation? This one’s ‘right to life’ is someone else’s impediment, a block in the road, a hindrance or curtailment. What we might seek after is a life as full as it might be. Fullness fares badly in the face of any demand for security. Where does it thrive, how does it thrive? Fullness is an experience — an experience of life as full. Such experiences are easily specified, easily called to mind. Make your own list. Almost all my own ‘fullest’ moments have been in the company of Aboriginal people. Let me start with the ocean liner in which I first travelled overseas, how it pitched and was borne shuddering backwards in a fierce gale in mid-Pacific. That was memorable, that was full. There was no food for the galley could not be operated. It was probably dangerous. I don’t remember that, I remember the prodigiousness of it.

I wasn’t sick.

But I was sick crossing the Bay of Biscay, the terrible rolling swells of the northern Atlantic, the false peristalsis that took over from my own. (Yes, all substitution, all substitute realities, may be a source of distress.)
When I first saw the Cézannes in the Jeu de Paume just down the block from where I was living in Paris, my first understanding that art could be intelligent, not merely pictorial.

But then Peret’s dancing yuk awum in the main street of Aurukun, about 1971, and Duncan Holroyd (from Edward River, as it then was) leaping into the dance out of sheer emotion, yet continuing to sing, great tears running down his cheeks: undoubtedly the most powerful performative moment I have ever witnessed and the memory of which still shatters me as it did then.
Or the young men throwing themselves into minh ponjtjath (frill-necked lizard), again at Aurukun.
Or the first time I witnessed that most brilliant of dance constructions, the peerless minh pangku (wallaby), again at Aurukun, with Peret and Bob enacting the kaha-‘ngken brothers, and Stingaree Barney breaking the spear-handle which marks the end of hostilities and the start of the dance proper: minh pangk kunjtju minh kalk iy kalk iy ....

Or Old Man Norman being dragged through the Crippled Man dance (kunalum) at Edward River, shortly before his death.
Or walking the familiar paths of Byron Bay, my home town, the headland, the ancient worn track between The Pass and Wattego’s Beach, with the ‘ghost’ of my big uncle, Tiger Kumuppa (kamap) at my shoulder, and attentive to every nuance of Aboriginal presence.

Or my daughter Eeinjin rolling cigarettes for me (I was too clumsy myself).
Or driving through Merluna Station late one afternoon with antelopine wallabies in droves occupying the track and Peret suddenly taking it upon himself to explain, in the clearest possible terms, the difference between coastal and inland systems of totemic organization …

Or the extreme delicacy of young Abiu’s gestures as he offered me the fresh sheets which were my due at my granddaughter’s funeral.
And countless more.

For never elsewhere have I encountered such vivid embodiment of personhood, in which each individual seemed to be possessed of some inner moral force (it’s what I take the French to mean by vertu), and at the same time, to encapsulate, in concrete corporeal form, history itself. They were not accidents, they were not accidental beings. They were not substitutable for each other. They were being ontologically realised. By comparison whitefellas seemed faded, impresent, lacking force — and to a significant degree interchangeable.

It was a world that never demanded explanations nor justification. People were evaluated, assessed — but not by and large from a moral perspective. After all morality serves little purpose if the lifeworld itself requires commitment to the real.
It is when life escapes the fierce imperium of necessity that things can begin to fall apart or become awry. If ‘humbug’ begins to assert itself on the one side, little wonder if there is the countervailing movement towards something exhibiting some of the ineaments, we might say, of irony. Central to this is a sort of sly knowingness. It doesn’t confront the problem but it does announce that it does know what is going on. It’s a refusal to be contaminated, sort of. It sits to one side. It handles the moral difficulties involved — ‘No, I do not really approve of that person’ — by a sort of self-absenting. In the extremes of that space, at the height of one’s self-abstention, one might, traditionally, have withdrawn into the world of fabrication (making spears or woomeras or baskets, preparing food) — and now art production, which, despite tendencies towards communalism, is an oddly ‘private’ activity, for the most part. Yes, people can work on painting together — just as if there were a large number of geese to pluck, everyone might pitch in. And in ceremonial contexts. Yet even there it is the activity of the solitary or singular artist/fabricator which is likely to be at the fore.

6

I’m not so sure I’d want Captain Cook as a relation. Not as an uncle, certainly, nor as a brother, let alone a grandfather. I don’t see him as father material either, for that matter. ‘Where’s daddy? ’ ‘Oh, he’s off circumnavigating  somewhere.’

Going round the world meant something once. Having a family also. I’m not sure about that now. Having an Aboriginal family helped cure me of family altogether. Not that I had anything against my Aboriginal ‘relations’ but in reality they come to me, as it were, one by one and unburdened by any notion of ‘family’. Unless that is conceived in the broadest of terms as a circle of interested — maybe super-interested —parties. And even then there were people who remained aloof, apparently indifferent.

The trick was, I think, to make a claim. And that claim could be ‘tizzed’ up in all sorts of ways. If children’s use of kin terms was unexceptional and attracted little more than amused commentary, the apparently ‘sincere’ use of kin terms by adults always had something of the phoney about it. No, I was connected, often powerfully, to particular people — and the more powerful and immediate the connexion the less and the more vague the kin specification. (FN3)

Once the claim was made you were ‘in’: you were owned, virtually as a piece of property. It is at this point that ‘jealous business’ could erupt. It was dangerous terrain.

You were not, we might even say, owned as kin. Kinship was in fact a modality that allowed a certain degree of separation from the world of claims; but not from the world of entitlements. In other words, a system of intimacy exists which takes precedence over kinship — and displaces the latter more or less to a position of abstract relations. In this respect kinship begins to take on some of the ‘abstractedness’ of the State — and something of the impersonality of its forms of ‘selectedness’. Kinship then begins to appear under an administrative guise …

7

The government official stands on the airstrip. There’s no one in sight. It’s hard to tell whether his plane has already left or whether it is yet to arrive. He carries a battered brown briefcase: one of the old school. He wears long beige-green socks and a floppy hat made of blue towelling. Those who know him know he’s a person you should not cross. Otherwise he looks inoffensive enough. He reaches into the battered bag and pulls out a mobile phone.  Where should he ring, Darwin or the local shire clerk? He tries both numbers. Neither answers. He checks the phone. Yes, it’s still powered up. 

8

Whatever is enacted has to compete with the street. I can hear him from here, the powerful voice. He’s got the local Bob Dylan bailed up – and the songster’s new girlfriend. I know she’s new because I haven’t seen her before. ‘Bob’ is silent. His interlocutor is screaming: ‘I BELIEVE IN GOD’, he announces in capital letters. The boy is in trouble; the girl cowers.
I come back and the shirtless psycho is still at it. ‘WHY DO YOU SING AMERICAN’, he screams. Then, appeasingly, ‘You have a really good voice, you know that, a really good voice.’ There is a short pause. ‘I’m going to let you sing.’

Immediately he softens, immediately he switches back to the scream. Threat, intimidation. I’ve seen this many times before, this alternation. Rodney, for one. One minute it’s all ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God’; the next moment it’s ‘I’ll break their fucking bones …’ He clenches his fist. It’s wrapped in invisible bandages. Where the Holy Mother bit comes from I have no idea. Not from the Reverend Bill, that’s for sure. Aurukun was a Catholic-free zone.

Two guys saunter over. Crims, ex–crims. They know their way round the scene. ‘Hey, bud, he’s our mate. Can’t you ease up a little, fair crack o’ the whip.’ (FN4)
That does little to appease him: ‘Fuck youse, who do you think you are? Don’t tell me what to do? I’m no dog. I’m no D-O-G.’ He spells the word out. He screams and screams, like a woman screaming. ‘Ring the T-R-U, ring the T-R-U.’ I have no idea what the T-R-U is, but he soon elucidates:  ‘Ring the Tactical Response Unit. Ring the Tactical Response Unit’. The two guys, the singer and his girlfriend make their escape. Captain Psycho picks up something and throws it after them. ‘FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU,’ he screams. It might be the guitar case. It’s as if everything has to be said in pairs or threes.

I’m not sorry to hear our Dylan Clone make his departure. He’s been around long enough, time to move on. It’s as if there’s a sort of ecology at work, an ecology of the street that at the end of the day self-regulates. Each street person displaces another street person. Some businessman will complain: ‘Hey, officer, they’re not good for business,’ as if business is the whole main thing. The cops come in a mob, move them on, the latest dero, the latest psycho, the latest crim or down-and-out off his medication. The paddy wagon drives off. The drinkers return to their drinks.
The whole episode is soon forgotten.