that would invite aggression. Language encodes invasive direct gaze in a term of opprobrium that indigenous people translate as “lookin’-at bugger,” that is, one who causes a feeling of disquiet and makes one ill at ease by looking too directly. Anybody who has spent time in communities of (remote?) Australia will recognize the demand for appropriate behavior in the “growl”:18 “No more lookin’ at!” (i.e., don’t look, stare).19
In many places in the continent, particular relationships are constituted through norms of circumspection and avoidance. Some of these are also highly normative and ideologically salient. In southern Arnhem Land, women are to avoid their brothers, not speak directly to them, nor give them anything except through intermediaries (W. L. Warner 1937; Hiatt 1966; Burbank 1985; Merlan 2016a). Women who fail to live up to norms are threatened with violence. Stages of life—initiation into adulthood, as well as bereavement—were also marked by circumspection, avoidance, retreat into silence, and deliberate blockage of the visual and other senses.
Older sources on greeting behavior among local groups or persons coming into contact after a period of time report typical forms of spatial and bodily circumspection that suggest the constitutive and channeling quality of this dimension on forms of practice. An ethnographic report on the Edward River in Cape York in the early twentieth century renders the muted tenor of encounter:
Three men, each carrying a bundle of spears, spear-thrower and fire stick, appeared out of the scrub to the north of the camp. Although their approach was at once observed, causing an under-current of excitement in camp, no apparent notice whatever was taken of the men, who approached slowly to within about 40 feet of the northern fringe of the camp, where each squatted on the ground a few feet apart, placing his weapons in front of him. Not a word was spoken, and apparently no notice whatever was taken of their presence for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then a “big” man left the camp unarmed and strolled casually towards the man on the left, scraped a shallow depression in the ground close to him with his foot, as a native does before sitting down, and then squatted on the ground about a yard away from the visitor. Still not a word was spoken. They did not even look at one another, but kept their eyes downcast. After a few minutes had elapsed the old man of the camp spoke a few words in a low tone—inaudible to me where I stood a few yards away—and the other replied in the same casual way. Still neither looked up—lest he might betray to the watching camp the slightest interest or emotion. At length the old man called the single word Bat (fire) and a boy brought out a small piece of smouldering wood which he handed to the old man from the camp. This fire the old man then placed on the ground between himself and the visitor to whom he had spoken. In former times this no doubt concluded the ceremony, but on this occasion a tobacco pipe was lighted and handed to the visitor. A second man now left the camp, strolled casually over and spoke to the man at the other end of the line, making a present, which was reciprocated. A little later all entered the camp, to be followed in the evening by a larger party of which they were the forerunners. (Thomson 1932:163–64)
From Central Australia, based on observations of the late nineteenth century, we learn that visits to people with whom interaction was sporadic or irregular were characterized by the visitors first making smoke so that their intention to approach was made clear; then by placing themselves within sight of the camp. The visitor
does not at first go close up to it, but sits down in silence. Apparently no one takes the slightest notice of him, and etiquette forbids him from moving without being invited to do so. After perhaps an hour or two one of the older men will walk over to him and quietly sit down on the ground beside the stranger. If the latter be the bearer of any message, or of any credentials, he will hand these over, and then perhaps the old man will embrace him and invite him to come into the camp…. Very likely he may be provided with a temporary wife during his visit, who will, of course, belong to the special group with which it is lawful for him to have marital relations. (Spencer and Gillen 1927: vol. 2, p. 505)20
These examples from different regions indicate that bodily and orientational circumspection, including silence, downcast gaze, and the damping down of sensory availability in close proximity of others, was a highly developed dimension of the conduct of relationships and of special events in which the question of ongoing or resumed relationship was sensitive (Stanner 1937). This may be called “cultural.” In contemporary settings that have undergone much change, such behavior is evident. In camps and settlements that I have visited indigenous people consider it intrusive to directly enter an indigenous camp or housing area where one is not a regular resident or otherwise well known. This is especially so for a white person, but this etiquette is observed and demarcates boundaries of greater and lesser familiarity among indigenous people themselves. Preferred protocol involves sitting or standing some distance away to await recognition; or a circumspect and very visible, slow approach while remaining at some distance. One’s gaze is best indirect or averted (Burbank 1994:84). Yasmine Musharbash (2016) describes a contemporary Central Australian community, Yuendumu, in which improved opportunities for Aboriginal people to access housing now sometimes result in their living next door to white service personnel. But in her experience of twenty years’ observation in the community, Warlpiri do not attend to nonindigenous neighbors visually or in any other way, nor do they talk about them, she reports, in their own daily conversations.
One of the most widely remarked emotions associated with indigenous social life is that of “shame” (Myers 1986; Harkins 1990; Burbank 1994), and this seems relevant. Shame is often manifest as a bodily enacted shyness (involving aversion of gaze, withdrawn demeanor) and sometimes explained by indigenous people as what comes from uncertainty, public exposure, a feeling of inadequacy or wrongdoing. To be guided by shame, to be withdrawn in these ways, removes from others the opportunity and reason, as indigenous people might say, for “lookin’ at.”
Nowadays, physical and sensory circumspection is an aspect of indigenous behavior that is often judged to require modification by schoolteachers (Harkins 1990) and others seeking to make indigenous children conform to valued models of attentive and productive behavior. This has helped to make it a subject of conscious awareness and a dimension of what indigenous people see as proper behavior, informing their explicit understanding of themselves. They often contrast circumspection with the outgoing behavior of nonindigenous others who “got no shame.” As indigenous people, over a long period, have been made to feel inadequate and subordinate, circumspection may have been amplified or taken on special salience in relations with nonindigenous people.
Circumspection in all forms is very much part of what is abandoned by indigenous people under the influence of excessive alcohol: drunken behavior often seems to flaut the usual norms of deportment by deliberate intrusiveness and provocation (and is also often marked by complaints of social abandonment by others; Merlan 1998:198).
Indigenous forms of life have been radically altered in all parts of the continent, varying somewhat with the extent of colonial-era and later disruption and relocation of indigenous people, their conversion into semisedentary workforces, their institutionalization in missions, schools, and so on. However, it seems plausible to claim that sensibilities concerning bodily practices based upon the modulation of gaze, proximity, and other forms of bodily orientation continue to be significant through (and to some extent as a result of) some of these quite dramatic changes. They have acquired contrastive significance and value for indigenous people as specifically “blackfella” behavior.
Summing Up
Meeting aliens, indigenous people had to shortly adapt and adopt practices, change what they did, and perhaps explicitly change their minds. In the first instance, they sometimes refused perceptual contact and may have thought that these apparitions would go away. But of course they did not. We have posed questions about nonrecognition: Was it deliberate? Was it concerted? In what sense was it cultural? In relation to identification of whites as spirits of the dead, we have more specific guidance from the accounts. It often seems to have been very explicit and specific; and it was certainly based on quite explicit prior conceptions and categories. We noted also,
