COUNCIL FOR ABORIGINAL RECONCILIATION
VALUING CULTURES
Recognising Indigenous Cultures as a Valued Part of Australian Heritage
Primary author: Marcia Langton, Research Officer, Cape York Land Council.
Other Colin Anderson, Aboriginal Liaison Officer, National
authors, in Office, Greening Australia; Ali Garnett, Kaleen,
alphabetical Canberra, specialist in community environmental
order: education programs; Johanna Sutherland, Department of International Relations, Australian National University and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS); Nick Thieberger, AIATSIS; Sarah Titchen, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University.
Project Officer Johanna Sutherland.
and Editor:
The section "Settled' and 'remote': individuals and communities' has been reproduced from pp.11-13 of Marcia Langton's 'Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television ...' with the permission of the Australian Film Commission.
INTRODUCTION
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation has as its object:
to promote a process of reconciliation between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the wider Australian community, based on an appreciation by the Australian community as a whole of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders' cultures and achievements and of the unique position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the indigenous peoples of Australia, and by means that include the fostering of an ongoing national commitment to cooperate to address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage.
Contributing to the Council's object, this Key Issue Paper examines how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' cultures can be better valued and recognised as an important part of Australia's heritage and future.
The paper has been written by indigenous and non-indigenous contributors. Marcia Langton has described the urban and rural context of indigenous cultures, and has reflected on national symbols and wildlife iconography. She has also shared her thoughts on cultural industries, the dilemmas of involvement in the marketplace, and cultural tourism. Nick Thieberger has written the section on indigenous languages. Sarah Titchen has explored the potential for the World Heritage Convention to be a vehicle for reconciliation. Colin Anderson and Ali Garnett have called for a better recognition of the commercial potential of Australia's indigenous flora. Colin Anderson's position with the Aboriginal Liaison Program at Greening Australia is funded through the Contract Employment Program for Aboriginals in Natural and Cultural Resource Management (CEPANCRM). Johanna Sutherland wrote the introductory comments on definitions of culture, parts of the cultural tourism section, and those sections of the chapter on cultural landscapes which do not address the World Heritage Convention. Each of the authors contributed to the conclusions.
The paper is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of current issues in indigenous and non-indigenous cultures, but to focus on a few which have the potential to contribute to the reconciliation process.
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation has not formed any final views on any of the issues raised in this paper. It invites readers to respond with written submissions.
Asking ourselves a few questions:
· How can Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures be maintained as a valued part of Australian heritage in order to contribute to lasting reconciliation in Australia by 2001?
· How can we ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' cultural heritage benefits the Australian community as a whole, in the long term?
· what are possible options for valuing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as a valued part of Australian heritage in a document or documents of reconciliation?
Comments on any or all of the issues raised in this paper will be welcomed.
The Assistant Secretary
Aboriginal Reconciliation Branch
Locked Bag 14
Queen Victoria Terrace
Parkes ACT 2600
Telephone (06) 271 5120
Facsimile (06) 271 5168
WHAT IS CULTURE?
'Cultures' are elusive, complex and contested practices and attributes which defy simple definitions. Academics take very different starting points when defining what constitutes 'culture'. To Edward Said, author of the bestseller Culture and Imperialism (1994), for example:
'[C]ulture' means two things in particular. First of all it means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure...
Second, and almost imperceptibly, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought, as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s. Arnold believed that culture palliates, if it does not altogether neutralise, the ravages of a modern, aggressive, mercantile, and brutalising urban existence ... Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one at that, as we see in recent 'returns' to culture and tradition ...
In this second sense culture is a sort of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another ...
I have found it a challenge not to see culture in this way -- that is, antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliations -- but as an extraordinarily varied field of endeavour.
Cole (1990) prefers a more pragmatic, economistic definition of culture:
Most definitions of culture refer to the things particular populations think, do, or make ... In an economic perspective this includes, for example, attitudes towards material growth and its distribution, styles of consumption, work habits, and the organisation of production and exchange. Cultures comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed by the way a population lives -- its knowledge and behaviour in the context of its technological and natural environment.
Walker (1990) prefers an aspirational definition:
To speak of 'culture' is to invoke the creative capacities of human beings, to point, for example, to the constitutive role of values and visions, to the power of language and aesthetic expression, to communities great and small engaged in reconstructing normative aspirations and reshaping the possibilities for a decent way of life.
These definitions are illuminative. They demonstrate that what constitutes 'culture' is diverse, and that 'cultures' are extraordinarily hybrid and change over time; that they are heterogeneous and differentiated. What 'culture' is depends on the viewpoint of the observer, for cultures are not objective 'things' able to be described by a 'neutral and objective' observer.
Australia is a post-colonial society with continuing but dynamic indigenous cultures co-existing and sometimes conflicting with non-indigenous cultures.
Cultures are understood through engaging in inter-cultural dialogue, either in personal contact or through representations and signs. For example, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities would not accept descriptions of their culture as 'Aboriginal', for that term was invented by colonists. They may see their ways of doing things as 'Yolngu', 'Walpiri' or 'Waka Waka'. As Marcia Langton (1993) explains:
'Aboriginality' only has meaning when understood in terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal are subjects, not objects ...
Textual analysis of the racist stereotypes and mythologies which inform Australian understanding of Aboriginal people is revealing. The most dense relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists.
'SETTLED' AND 'REMOTE': INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES
Indigenous communities are extremely diverse and pluralistic. There is no one kind of indigenous Australian or community which has an 'indigenous culture'. But there are regions which can be characterised by reference to their histories, politics, cultures and demographies. The first region is 'settled' Australia, stretching south from Cairns around to Perth in a broad arc. This area is where most provincial towns and all major cities and institutions are located, and where a myriad of small indigenous communities and populations reside with a range of histories and cultures. The impact of the particular frontiers in this arc and the outcomes are complex and diverse.
The second region is 'remote' Australia where most of the tradition-oriented indigenous cultures are located. They likewise have responded to particular frontiers and now contend with various types of Australian settlement.
In a very general sense, the cultural practices and production by indigenous Australians in these two regions are quite different. They are grounded in different cultural bases, histories and socio-political conditions.
The historical effect of the policies and administration of indigenous affairs in these two regions has also been quite different. British colonisation began in 1788 in Sydney, but the frontier had not reached parts of northern Australia till the 1930s. Consequently, the policies of control, including 'protection' and 'assimilation', were administered for a longer period, more intensively, and with more destructive results in settled Australia.
One of the effects of these policies, and one of the intentions, was the targeting of the indigenous individual. In settled Australia, social-engineering thinking, which underpinned the 'assimilation' policy, sought to shape a new sanitised indigenous Australian according to certain Anglo-Australian cultural and political dictates.
In contrast, the notion of community arose out of the administration of indigenous peoples in remote and rural areas. The 'transitional' policies of segregation and incarceration which pre-dated and survived the 'assimilation' policies, were directed at communities. These were institutions, rather like the hamlets in the military resettlement scheme during the Vietnam War, where people were sent to be 'pacified'.
In settled Australia today, indigenous communities are discrete residential villages such as Jerrinjah, south of Sydney, whereas in remote Australia, indigenous communities such as Yuendumu are more than residential areas. These remote communities are also administrative centres for dispersed indigenous groups residing in homeland centres, and for highly mobile populations. Many originated as missions and government settlements and have been redesigned by indigenous communities since the 1970s to maintain culture and possession of land. The aim is to survive as distinctive social and cultural entities.
CULTURAL IMAGES AND CONSTRUCTS
RE-INVENTING NATIONAL SYMBOLS
Australia is extremely urbanised, with more than 80 per cent of the population living in six coastal capital cities, on less than 100,000 square kilometres within a land mass of over 7.5 million square kilometres. Ironically, a common self-image of what it is to be Australian, especially for Anglo-Australians, is that of a confident male conqueror of a vast wild land. Peter Spearitt, in the The Lie of the Land (1992), places land at:
the centre of Australian consciousness. Australia first emerged in European consciousness as the world's only island continent, starting its imaginary and then cartographic life as the great south land and becoming by the time of European exploration, Terra Australis Incognita. The world's only island continent has also been, at least for the last 50,000 years, the least populated continent. This was the case in 1492, in 1788 and in 1992, 500 years after Christopher Columbus.
The notion of Australian 'nation-ness' was depicted in a white male metaphor at the turn of the century - an urban myth of origin about 'the little boy from Bondi', a cartoon character representing the infant nation at the time of the federation of the colonial States in 1901. In the spirit of that myth, the Australian nation today is a maturing sexual adult which has undergone his post-oedipal separation from Mother England. Interestingly, in the popular imagination, the little boy from Bondi has grown up into a full-blooded surfer boy, who apparently has never left Bondi Beach. As Stephen (1992) suggests, the mature Australian nation has been characterised as a sexually curved anthropomorphic landscape, such as Max Dupain's Sunbather, the now famous image of the shapely male shoulders of a European man lying on Bondi Beach. But as Stephen writes, the hedonistic image of the Australian sunbather is also being 'overshadowed by environmental pollution and health hazards. The idyllic deserted beach of cigarette advertising now has to compete with images of oil-slicked animals and syringes in the sand'.
At this historical conjuncture, also, particularly in relation to moves toward a Republic of Australia, the nation-state thesis is being contested by marginalised indigenous Australians who are redefining themselves at the centre of a post-colonial Australia, and towards significantly revised governing constitutions and administration.
WILDLIFE ICONOGRAPHY
In sharp contrast to the 'typical Australian' as a blue-eyed surfie, popular images of indigenous Australians tend to be negative, but also essentialised. These negative stereotypes are based on a belief that there are ineluctable features of 'Aboriginality' based on the tradition of 'primitivism'.
Torgovnick (1990), defines this fascination in the following terms:
To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces -- libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the 'lowest cultural levels'; we occupy the 'highest', in the metaphors of stratification and hierarchy commonly used by Malinowski and others like him [in] a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other ... The real secret of the primitive in this century has often been the same secret as always: ... It tells us what we want it to tell us. (emphasis added)
The present array of Australian coins produced by the Australian Mint displays an interesting collection of icons which can be read, amongst other possible readings, as the colonial positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as 'primitives' and wildlife -- a species of fauna along with the kangaroo and emu, the echidna, the lyrebird and the platypus. On all Australian coins, as would be expected, the 'head' side depicts the Queen, while on the 'tail' side all the coins exhibit fauna. Except that is, the two dollar coin, which carries a commemorative image of an indigenous Australian male, which was intended to celebrate the bicentenary of Australia's 'settlement'.
Wildlife as icons in currency signify the taming of the 'natural order'. The power of the iconic pattern of the coins lies in the subliminal way in which the message works: coins pass through our hands every day, and while a symbol on an individual coin might register in one's consciousness, the total pattern does not.
A new set of Australian coins could be designed to replace the present set which can be 'read' as suggesting that indigenous Australians evolved from frill-necked lizards, or that indigenous Australians are the highest form of animal life on the Australian continent. A new version could have instead of the royal personage on the 'head' side, a series of images of Australia as an island, vast and remote, cared for by its indigenous custodians for tens of thousands of years without interruption. Alternative designs would be of whales, stingrays, manta rays, sharks, dolphins, dugong, turtles and barramundi, instead of the royal personage. On the 'tail' side could be a surfie with dreadlocks riding the perfect wave, Kaye Cottee, the Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club, Donald Thomson's Lamalama man in a canoe, and post-war immigrants coming down the planks of ships.