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[the young man [dropped] [threw down] his spears but soon picked them up again]

Yesterday we were at Kurnell. As an exercise in the collectivity of the State, it’s instructive. The Aboriginal presence is slowly being inserted: a new ‘jetty’ to remind us that there was once a ferry to LaPa (La Perouse). Various ‘Auntys’ say things: ‘We came here, we had picnics, if we missed the ferry back we walked to Cronulla and caught the train back.’ It’s a long way around, it’s a short way across. I wonder why the ferry doesn’t still run. Inside the new Visitor Centre, there’s execrable art — but even if it was good one wonders what it would serve. It’s like any Visitor’s Centre anywhere. White triumphalism is not far away: ‘8 Days that …’ (FN8)
8 days is a long time to be anywhere. It’s not just a casual visit. You can learn a lot in 8 days.

The contradictions are everywhere. If Cook’s instructions were to take possession but only with the consent of ‘the natives’, how come that the obvious and candidly acknowledged resistance counted for nothing? How come the moment of ‘possession’ did not occur until the end of the ‘northern itinerary’, as I shall call it, on Possession Island?

At another level I wonder if anybody ever tried to discover the identities of the two men armed with spears on the shore. After all it is not such a great gap in time between 1770 and 1788. If their identities were never discovered, why not? And if they were discovered why did they not enter common parlance?

If the nation is still metallurgically conceived – we still encounter the curious notion that the nation was ‘forged’ here – it’s a curiously wan story (FN9). The only dramatic moment is the encounter on the rock –the shaking of spears, the firing of shots. What was achieved? It is hard to know.

As a kid I was impressed by Bank's Chair: the gravitas of granite. Now it all looks a little tragic. The gloss of the granite offers nothing more glamorous or ‘stately’ than the Bank of New South Wales in another of my old home towns, Lismore. I’m not going to track back through the records to establish what, as I recall, was a dramatic divergence of judgment between these two ‘great men.’ Between Cook and Banks, I mean. At the end of the day it will be the assiduous aristocrat who will prevail over the assiduous navigator. Class. Yes, it is class that prevails.

How might it have been different? What might have been negotiated? Of course from this point of view — the view of negotiability — it was all a tremendous failure. It is this that might be considered in any historical reckoning – or should we say re-reckoning?
The encounter of anthropology assumes nothing. There can be no predetermined values or good or ways of doing things. Everything is up for grabs. Perhaps we need stronger notions than negotiation to address this encounter. The anthropologist is meant to reside beyond the parochial — a true modernist position. In reality all social actors are parochial to a greater or lesser degree, and anthropologists are not exempt from their ‘little ways’, the things they consider ‘natural’, the taken-for-granted of themselves. The important thing that anthropology offered was a consciousness of this dilemma — even if the hermeneutics of self and of disciplinary practice were in my view little advanced.  Experience tells me that all societies produce the curious and the incurious, the cruel, the bold and the timorous, the gullible and the ‘disbeliever’, the perceptive and the ‘unaware’. Cook may have found his ‘Man Friday’ on the shore, or someone less abject; and we suspect that Banks’s ‘blood brother’ may have been a different kettle of fish altogether. As for the unknown men on the rock how shall we know their natures except that the older was bold, audacious; and the younger, though a-feared, quick to recover his nerve and in any case willing to lend himself, we presume, to the task of defiant defiance.
The fact is Australia became Crusoe’s Other Island at that very moment. Defoe had written the history in advance. Thereafter it was all enactment. Defiance was not on the agenda; all that could be conceived was an ultimate compliance, despite the evidence. This is at the heart of the imperial attitude. And the casually assumed compliance even now far from complete or ‘achieved’.  
The task of anthropology — if it is to disassociate itself from that scientistic view of its practice that allows ‘business as usual’ (if we were numbering our strategies of exoneration this would have to be one of them)  — is to explore the possibility of encounter and sustainable long-term relationship. Not abstractly but in active practice. Anthropology has conventionally thought of itself as ‘limiting the contamination’, which translates as claiming a sort of ’hands off’ and, at one and the same time, a privileged insider status. (FN10)
Anthropology has historically favoured a relationship between the anthropologist (fieldworker) and a ‘key’ informant. In reality this can take the form of an intensely productive collaboration involving a high level of mutual regard between the two participants. Not that they can be expected to have the same end in mind and the divergences so great that we are invited to consider the existence of something like a collaboration at cross purposes. Indeed it may seem that the purpose of the relationship exists somewhat outside the relationship itself. What if this state of affairs were to be inverted, so that the principle purpose of the relationship is the relationship itself, and the aim of any activity conducted within the framework of the relationship, the intensification or furtherance of the relationship itself?

There is, of course, no need to specify the nature of that activity. Potentially any activity would do.

In centralising the production of art as an area of social action the current exhibition is intended to draw attention to something new in the anthropologist - ‘informant’ relationship in which the ‘contamination’ of the anthropologist may be welcomed as a provisioning of skills or, as I prefer to say, ’little ideas’. Those little ideas can take the form of knowledges acquired in the context of this ‘new social’ (they represent in a significant way the extent of the assimilation of the researcher into the life world they have entered and the development of practical knowledges: that is, knowledges that can be brought to bear) and an awareness of the nature of external sites (or scenes) of consumption. The ‘informant’ is re-conceptualised as a social agent with intentions of their own, either to valorise some existing social practice or orientation or to ‘persuade’ or instruct the external. Through the mediation of the ‘object’ — the thing (p6) produced — something new may be created, something unexpected, something ‘rich and strange’. This is not an easy task and the real creativity of it is to get beyond a situation best described, perhaps, as a ‘compromise in divergence’ and to come up with something truly untoward. The object itself becomes the sign and the exemplar of a new order.

Art is a privileged terrain for it appears to endorse within itself inventiveness and innovation. Of course we risk overestimating this aspect of it. And it would be clearly wrong to fetishize ‘change’ as a ‘good’ in itself. I am not talking about that; I am talking about the unfolding, the realisation of possibilities unleashed from out of actual social relations. Yes, out of and marking a movement towards new socialities. This is not to discount the power or real force of existing social expectations; these are not to be simply brushed under the carpet or to be dismissed as simply old hat or ‘fuddy-duddy’. The real success is to engage the possibilities without simply over-riding the legitimate concerns of the societies thus engaged — or allowing oneself simply to be dissuaded by the apparently implacable forces arrayed against one. These are in reality the fires in which negotiated being are to be tested.

The odd thing is this: the more parochial the social, the less capable it will prove in achieving the social forms necessary for its long-term survival. My fear at the present conjuncture is that the State has become over-consolidated; and the official — the State’s official face — represents the most parochial of all parochial orders. The market offers no safeguard; it does not free. It merely trivialises the real social issues and contestations at stake.

John von Sturmer, October 2009

Footnotes:

FN1: The expression is adapted from the writer, Richard Flanagan. The reference is to Peter Dombrovskis’s images of the Franklin River in Tasmania, notably that of Rock Island Bend. Of the latter it has been said that it swayed a Federal election (Hawke’s victory in 1983).

FN2: Julie Bishop has a ‘suitable’ mantra, all about ‘people smugglers’, as if they are indeed at the heart of the world refugee problem. Such mantras are a crucial component of what I shall call ‘strategies of exoneration.’ You remove the problem by reducing it to the simplest possible formula: not boat people but people smugglers. Do you get it?  People smugglers.  Now let me say it again:  It’s the people smugglers. Now, in case you missed that, let me tell you where the real problem lies: it’s people smugglers. Such mantras are the substitution of pseudo-thought for the possibility of active thought. We know this as the ‘party line.’ In general terms such pseudo- thought makes real thought impossible.
In case I am accused of political favouritism, let me note that two days later Julia Gillard was providing examples of her own. In response to claims that there was a crisis of teacher availability in the schools she slipped with great insistence into the mantra mode: ‘We have initiated an education revolution. My government has initiated an education revolution’. The reporter tries to pin her down: ‘But there is a shortage of teachers. What is the government doing about that? Does this mean larger classes? Are teachers required to teach outside their areas of competence?’ To which she replies: ‘As I was saying my government, the Rudd government, has initiated an education revolution’. Pushed further, she retreats to mantra 2: ‘The previous government, the Howard Government, allowed our education system to run down. There were 10 years of neglect.’ At which point she can return to mantra 1: ‘This is why my government has initiated an education revolution.’ Absent from any thought or consideration is that there may well be an education revolution going on before our very eyes, one of the signs of which is the difficulty of recruiting or retaining trained teachers … One but not the only sign.

It seems we live in a post-Orwell Age, in which things proceed as if Orwell never existed.

FN3: I have written elsewhere about McNaught Ngallametta and his ‘teasing’ use of kin terms with me. I was close to almost the entire Ngallametta family but it was almost as if we refused to ‘stabilize’ these relationships in kin terms. McNaught (and Joe)’s mother was ‘Z+’ to Peret and this would have been the most obvious route to track (or trace) through. However, despite the extreme closeness of our relationship, Peret and I never thought of each other in such an idiom. And this despite his youngest son’s decision to call me grandfather — but in this case tracking through his mother.

McNaught was always the one for clever manoeuvering and ironic commentaries on, for example, the ‘gap’ between the ‘official’ language (English) and the various Wik languages (including his own:  Kugu-uwanh), and more generally the blackfella and whitefella conditions (estates!) — struck upon the ‘solution’ of calling me pama thep ngathunge. The pama thep is routine, formulaic: ‘old man’. Ngathunge is a rather obscure and rarely used grandparental term. He shortened this to thung or thunge.  It took a while for me to realise it was a play on my name: John!

FN4: No, not Rudd’s unfortunate sauce bottle!           

FN5: The issue of gay marriage is interesting from this respect.  ‘Gayness’ might have been conceived as representing an entirely ‘other’ conception not only of sexuality but indeed of social existing. By seeking to ‘adhere’ or to attach itself to the ‘normalcy’ of heterosexual matrimonial relations it seeks to dissolve its otherness in ‘straight’ terms. This aligns it precisely with the ‘movement’ of the State — and the terms of the ‘Social Contract’ which appears incapable of imagining conditions of social being outside the terms it offers.

FN6: Is this an example of the behavioural patterns Professor Sutton [GET REFERENCE] seeks to institute, ‘orderliness’ versus ‘chaos’, sitting on a chair versus sitting on the ground, compulsory order (uniformitarianism) versus individual choice /assertion/‘willingness’— as if the only principle at work in the Aboriginal life world is the catastrophic? Of course such binarisms are insistent in Western thought (as they are elsewhere) and its preferencing of the ‘uniform’ over the ‘catastrophic’ reveals a deep desire to predict, plan, order, manage, regulate as opposed to other values (and necessities) congregated around issues of experience, responsiveness, availability, and a privileging of the opportunity and the opportunistic ... Not to say that ‘Aboriginality’ employs such a framework of thought (I mean, uniformitarianism versus the catastrophic).

In the West this has become the fable of the flippant, careless grasshopper versus the cagey, prudent, prudential ant. Even at infant school I thought it was a horrible, mean and joyless story and I wrote my own anti-account …

FN7: How are we to account for such wilful and apparently erratic proliferations? And the stripping of local obligations and responsibilities away from those most directly involved in favour of external agencies? It might be noted that even the former teacher’s aides occupied a position, even in their former roles, midway between local responsibility (self-determination) and the external (assimilation). It is not surprising that they should look somewhat lost and that their participation had something of the ritualistic to it. A going-through-the-motions except they were virtually inert. (It is here that the ‘blakfellas’ become ‘impresent’, stripped of personality and agency, and begin to ‘abstain’.) The terms liminal and marginal are inadequate to describe this positioning. The ‘white’ functionary was, by comparison, in full ritual mode  —performing even excessively the role she had been assigned. We might call this ‘presence-in-impresence’.

FN8: Yes, the ‘Eight Days that Changed the World’, an odd echo of John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook the World, his famous account of the Bolshevik Revolution. The ‘frame’ has now been appropriated by economists and other writers to refer to the recent economic ‘crisis’, the 8 days in September 2008.

FN9: They might of course mean ‘improperly or fraudulently confected’ — but I don’t think so!