Whiteness studies and the memory of dispossession

Review of 'Unmasking Whiteness : Race Relations and Reconciliation.' By Belinda McKay, ed. Brisbane: Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, 1999.

Fear, trust and Aborigines : The historical experience of state institutions and current encounters in the health system

Troubled dynamics between residents of an Aboriginal town in Queensland and the local health system were established during colonisation and consolidated during those periods of Australian history where the policies of 'protection' (segregation), integration and then assimilation held sway. The status of Aboriginal health is, in part, related to interactions between the residents' current and historical experiences of the health and criminal justice systems as together these agencies used medical and moral policing to legitimate dispossession, marginalisation, institutionalisation and control of the residents. The punitive regulations and ethnocentric strategies used by these institutions are within the living memory of many of the residents or in the published accounts of preceding generations. This paper explores current residents' memories and experiences.

Decolonising the concept of knowledge

Controlling the definition of what was essentially a subjugated culture, the colonisers reserve the power to distinguish authentic aspects of the living traditions of the colonised. If the colonised argue political demands by reference to their culture, the colonisers are quick to adjudicate what is genuine in such claims. (Fannon, 1967) Since colonial invasions, Australia’s Indigenous people have weathered rapid change. While the origins of Australia’s Indigenous peoples continues to be an archaeological interest for many, how Indigenous cultures have survived, transformed and retained a sense of ‘difference’ is fundamental to understanding the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures within this continent as both contemporaneous and historical. It is important that teachers, students and researchers within Indigenous studies remind themselves that much of the literature on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can be ideologically traced back to the emergence of ‘knowledge’ about native peoples in the context of European imperialism and expansion from the fifteenth century. Care must therefore be taken in not conveying ‘scientific’ rational knowledge as perhaps the hidden agenda or notion of assumptions of European ‘superiority’ and non-European inferiority. The recognition by the High Court of Australia (1992) abandoned the legal myth of terra nullius which based the dispossession of Indigenous land on the basis of it being considered an empty land. It could also be argued that this decision recognised that distinct customs and traditions continue to exist within the social and cultural ‘knowledge’ of Indigenous peoples of Australia. General issues and concerns relating to research design, methodology and articulation within QUT are not just confined to this university and the research project presented as a case study but are important in dealing with how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and academics participate or are employed within the university. We feel that the design and methodology of research that either covertly or overtly focuses on Indigenous Australians can no longer presume that all research will naturally follow protocols that are culturally appropriate as this appropriateness is usually defined by the institution. By no means do we feel that research should be debilitated as a result of raising these issues, but that collaborative approaches within the ‘process’ of research will address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities as much as the intended outcomes of research itself.

Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous representation

With its focus on Australia, Whitening Race engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia.

Southern theory and its dynamics for postcolonial education

This paper discusses how the exploration of social texts and historical contexts from the global 'South', as put forward in Raewyn Connell's study 'Southern Theory' (2007), can improve the theoretical tools used in postcolonial education analysis. Connell analyses a selection of excellent and compelling social theory texts written by scholars in Africa, India, Iran, Latin America and Australia to show how they challenge and counter the silences, distortions and plain lies of dominant Western social theory. These texts of the global South do not mince words in laying bare the role of the institutions and elites of the West in the destruction, dispossession, and bloodshed involved in creating the world in which we live, and in perpetuating its catastrophes. The texts also reveal intense debates between scholars over their conceptualisations of local, national and global society. My paper argues that this kind of work is of vital importance to postcolonial studies in education. It helps education scholars to uncover the problematic assumptions and distortions of dominant education thought, and understand different ways of seeing. Postcolonial educators could use this to help both students and teacher unlearn many of our taught perceptions of the world, whether in the global North or the global South. Developing a countervailing social theory in education would sharpen our questioning of the structures of schooling as they relate to society, and tease out new dimensions of postcolonial leadership for education.

Cherbourg State School in historical context.

Cherbourg State School is some 300 kilometres northwest of Brisbane. It is situated in an Aboriginal community at Cherbourg with approximately 250 students, all of whom are Indigenous Australian children. Cherbourg State School aims to generate good academic outcomes for its students from kindergarten to Year 7 and nurture a strong and positive sense of what it means to be Aboriginal in today's society. In a context where the community continues to grapple with many social issues born of the historical processes of dispossession and disempowerment, Cherbourg State School is determined that its children can and will learn to become 'Strong and Smart'. It is a journey that has been charted by Chris Sarra, the school's first Aboriginal principal, in his paper Young and Black and Deadly: Strategies for Improving Outcomes for Indigenous Students, which describes how pride and expectations were engendered in the school over a four-year period from 1998. In this article the author discusses the historical context of the school and its impact on the Indigenous people of Cherbourg. The aim is to consider the historical, political, social and cultural context around the creation of Cherbourg State School. The author critically examines the historical records of the role of the State Government and the white settlers in the setting up and creation of the Aboriginal Reserve and later the primary school. Throughout the author addresses an absence � a voice missing from history � the voice of the Aboriginal people. This exercise in collective memory was designed to provide an opportunity for those who have seldom been given the opportunity to tell their story. Instead of the official view of Cherbourg School it provides a narrative which restores the victims of history to a place of dignity and indeed humanity.

Reempowering ourselves: Australian Aboriginal women

The arrival of the colonists, the invasion of Aboriginal lands and the subsequent colonization of Australia had a disastrous effect on Aboriginal women, including on-going dispossession and disempowerment. Aboriginal women’s lives and gendered realities were forever changed in most communities. The system of colonization deprived Aboriginal women of land and personal autonomy and restricted the economic, political, social, spiritual and ceremonial domains that had existed prior to colonization. It also involved the implementation of overriding patriarchal systems. This is why Aboriginal women may find understanding within the women’s movement and why feminism might offer them a source of analysis. There are some connections in the various forms of social oppression, which give women connection and a sharing on some issues. However, imperialism and colonialism are also part of the women’s movement and feminism. This essay demonstrates why attempts to engage with feminism and to be included in women-centred activities might result in the denial and sidelining of Aboriginal sovereignty and further oppression and marginalisation of Aboriginal women. Moreover, strategies employed by non-Indigenous feminists can result in the maintenance of white women’s values and privileges within the dominant patriarchal white society. By engaging in these strategies feminists can also act in direct opposition to Aboriginal sovereignty and Aboriginal women. This essay states clearly that women who do not express positions or opinions in outright support of these activities still benefit from their position by proxy and contribute to the cultural dominance of non-Indigenous women. I argue that Aboriginal women need to define what empowerment might mean to themselves, and I suggest re-empowerment as an act of Aboriginal women’s healing and resistance to the on-going processes and impacts of colonization.

How Australia’s Indigenous people are positioned within health service sites by our presence and by our absence

De Certeau (1984) constructs the notion of belonging as a sentiment which develops over time through the everyday activities. He explains that simple everyday activities are part of the process of appropriation and territorialisation and suggests that over time belonging and attachment are established and built on memory, knowledge and the experiences of everyday activities. Based on the work of de Certeau, non-Indigenous Australians have developed attachment and belonging to places based on the dispossession of Aboriginal people and on their everyday practices over the past two hundred years. During this time non-Indigenous people have marked their appropriation and territorialisation with signs, symbols, representations and images. In marking their attachment, they also define how they position Australia’s Indigenous people by both our presence and our absence. This paper will explore signs and symbols within spaces and places in health services and showcase how they reflect the historical, political, cultural, social and economic values, and power relations of broader society. It will draw on the voices of Aboriginal women to demonstrate their everyday experiences of such sites. It will conclude by highlighting how Aboriginal people assert their identities and un-ceded sovereignty within such health sites and actively resist on-going white epistemological notions of us and the logic of patriarchal white sovereignty.

Empowerment as a framework for Indigenous workforce development and organisational change

Relative powerlessness resulting from colonial dispossession and associated passive welfare policies has long been recognised as a critical factor influencing the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians, yet it is hard to find well-evaluated health and social interventions that take an explicit empowerment approach. This paper presents the findings of a Family Wellbeing Empowerment programme pilot delivered to Cairns Region Department of Families Indigenous youth workers and family and community workers in 2003/2004. The aim of the pilot was to build the capacity of these workers to address personal and professional issues as a basis for providing better support for their clients. The pilot demonstrated the effectiveness of the programme as a tool for worker empowerment and, to a lesser degree, organisational change.

Abduction : the writing of a historical novel

This is a practice-led project consisting of a historical novel Abduction and related exegesis. The novel is a third person intimate narrative set in the mid-nineteenth century and is based on actual events and persons caught up in, or furthering, the mass dispossession of small farmers in Scotland known as the ‘Clearances’. The narrative focuses on the situation in the Outer Hebrides and northern Scotland. It is based on documented facts leading up to a controversial trial in 1850 that arose because a twenty year old woman of the period (the central protagonist, Jess Mackenzie) eloped with a young farmer to escape her parent’s pressure to marry a rival suitor, himself a powerful lawyer and ‘factor’ at the centre of many of the Clearances. The young woman’s independent ideas were ahead of her time, and the decisions she made under great pressure were crucial in some dramatic events that unfolded in Scotland and later in the colony of Victoria, to which she and her new husband emigrated soon after the trial. The exegesis is composed of two unequal parts. It briefly considers the development of the literary historical fiction genre in the nineteenth century with Walter Scott in particular, a genre found useful in representing women’s issues of the Victorian era by Victorian and contemporary authors. The exegesis also briefly considers the appropriateness of the fiction genre (as opposed to creative nonfiction) in creating the lived experience in a fact-based work. The major part of the exegesis is a detailed, reflective analysis of the problem-solving process involved in writing the novel, structured by reference to Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River – a work of metawriting that explains her creative process in researching and writing historical fiction based on fact.

Indigenous as ’not-Indigenous' as ’Us'?: A dissident insider's views on pushing the bounds for what constitutes 'our mob'

In australia, 'Aboriginality' is often defined by people in constrictive ways that are heavily influenced by the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. An essential component of this is a 'racial' categorisation of peoples that marks sameness and difference, thereby influencing insider and outsider status. In one sense, this categorisation of people acts to exclude non-aboriginal 'others' from participation in preinvasion indigenous ontologies, ways of living that may not have contained such restrictive identity categories and were thereby highly inclusive of outsiders. One of the effects of this is that aboriginal peoples' efforts for 'advancement' - either out of 'disadvantage' and/or towards political independence (ie, sovereignty) - become confined and restricted by what is deemed possible within the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. This is so much so that aboriginal people are at risk of only reinforcing and upholding the very systems that resulted in their original and continuing dispossession.

Divergencies of Perception : The Possibilities of Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology in Analyses of Contemporary Art

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has been known as the philosopher of painting. His interest in the theory of perception intertwined with the questions concerning the artist s perception, the experience of an artwork and the possible interpretations of the artwork. For him, aesthetics was not a sub-field of philosophy, and art was not simply a subject matter for the aesthetic experience, but a form of thinking. This study proposes an opening for a dialogue between Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and contemporary art. The thesis examines his phenomenology through certain works of contemporary art and presents readings of these artworks through his phenomenology. The thesis both shows the potentiality of a method, but also engages in the critical task of finding the possible limitations of his approach. The first part lays out the methodological and conceptual points of departure of Merleau-Ponty s phenomenological approach to perception as well as the features that determined his discussion on encountering art. Merleau-Ponty referred to the experience of perceiving art using the notion of seeing with (voir selon). He stressed a correlative reciprocity described in Eye and Mind (1961) as the switching of the roles of the visible and the painter. The choice of artworks is motivated by certain restrictions in the phenomenological readings of visual arts. The examined works include paintings by Tiina Mielonen, a photographic work by Christian Mayer, a film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, and an installation by Monika Sosnowska. These works resonate with, and challenge, his phenomenological approach. The chapters with case studies take up different themes that are central to Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology: space, movement, time, and touch. All of the themes are interlinked with the examined artworks. There are also topics that reappear in the thesis, such as the notion of écart and the question of encountering the other. As Merleau-Ponty argued, the sphere of art has a particular capability to address our being in the world. The thesis presents an interpretation that emphasises the notion of écart, which refers to an experience of divergence or dispossession. The sudden dissociation, surprise or rupture that is needed in order for a meeting between the spectator and the artwork, or between two persons, to be possible. Further, the thesis suggests that through artworks it is possible to take into consideration the écart, the divergence, that defines our subjectivity.