century, indigenous people come to be “recognized” as meriting a role in processes that channel the exploration of natural resources, ostensibly in the name of community consultation.
Sometimes, outsiders’ forms of power become structuring conditions of indigenous people’s lives, without their necessarily focusing on how that has come about and without these conditions being directly taken account of in their forms of action. However, when indigenous families seek to avoid the police or regularly occupy town spaces so as to minimize interaction with whites and with other indigenous people, we see people dealing knowingly with structures of power. It is more difficult, but important, to render account of how forms of power and influence operate when social landscapes, sound-scapes, money transactions, and many other kinds of events and actions penetrate people’s lives in new ways.
We need a general term for a form of life that persists in difference, having and recognizing qualities of its own, while it is lived in the shadow of potentially dominant power and hegemonic cultural influences, whether the latter come in the form of foods, labor, music, visual culture and technology, welfare, or churches. Neither “autonomy” nor “subordination” describes this form of life. I have sometimes referred to this general condition as “intercultural” (Merlan 1998, 2005) with reference to relations between indigenous people and communities and wider Australian society, but that deliberately leaves such a space open to be specified more closely. To do so is difficult. It is important to recognize forms of indigenous difference, both continuous and innovative, in people’s lives, but without resorting to holistic concepts of continuous cultural logics that fail to account for change and conditions.
Difference is partly an effect of power. While the history of indigenous-nonindigenous relations includes some encounters with the potential for equality at the personal, often corporeal level, these moments were fragile before the larger forces in play. In longer-term colonization, zones and boundaries of difference are demarcated in a power-laden regulatory way that indigenous people were to observe as persons and collectivities. We see indigenous people responding in a variety of ways that bespeak some fragmentation as they become entangled, if not encapsulated, within the fields of value that these practices subserve.
Today we continue to witness an ongoing struggle over the nature of indigenous difference. There is competition between ideas of the timeless difference of traditional “Aboriginal culture,” which can be highly valued, both by indigenous and nonindigenous people; and the unruly differences of many everyday indigenous settings—including conditions of people, houses, the use of things and money, the nature of relationships to people and institutions—which administrators and many others typically read wholly as consequence of “disadvantage” requiring remedy and reformation (Strakosch 2015:139–43, 157–58). This has policy implications, creating spaces for further state involvement (Lea 2008a, b; Strakosch 2015). I take to heart Povinelli’s concerns about suppressive power. This book, like her work, is concerned in many places with realities that persist beyond the pressures to commensurate and that are discernible and expressed in indigenous people’s own reactions to and musings on nonindigenous difference. As will be demonstrated in this book, incommensurability often appears not as classically “cultural” but at a mundane level, carried in the structures and practices of socioeconomic and racialized inequalities that are so much the medium of indigenous-nonindigenous relationship today.
CHAPTER 1
Nobodies and Relatives
Nonrecognition and Identification in Social Process
This chapter examines two modalities of indigenous-nonindigenous engagement in early encounter. One was their complete refusal to engage. The second was identification by indigenous people of Europeans as spirits of the dead. The Europeans were at an advantage. They had some general reports concerning Australia’s natives and some reported knowledge and experience of other Pacific peoples. Aborigines probably had variable experiences and ideas about degrees of otherness on the part of people outside their immediate region and within the range of their own form of life,1 but they had no inkling of the existence, cultural repertoire, and mind-set of these strangers. Thus the outsiders had enormously greater power to control the terms of engagement between themselves and the Aborigines. I will argue that nonengagement is a major modality of social orientation, fundamental to building and maintaining social boundaries. Nonengagement is arguably part of a family of practices, a spectrum of involvement. In the historical context examined here, the nonengagement, or deliberate indigenous refusal of engagement, was a first-response tactic, before some other kind of response became imperative. The identification of people with spirits, I will argue, was often relationally specific: Europeans were identified as specific personalities or attributed particular social characters. Though deeply embedded in indigenous practices concerning people’s identification with others, the identification of Europeans with spirits could be rapidly questioned in this new context, as we will see.
They “Scarce Lifted Their Eyes”
Joseph Banks, the botanist accompanying Captain James Cook’s first great voyage (1768–71), observed parties of indigenous people in what came to be called Botany Bay, an area only a few kilometers south of what is now Sydney’s central business district. From the ship Endeavour, Banks saw the natives fishing from small boats within easy sight of the English. Despite that proximity the Aborigines paid no attention to them. Banks (1962: vol. 2, p. 54) observed that they “scarce lifted their eyes” as the Endeavour passed “within a quarter mile of them” (Banks 1962: vol. 2, p. 54).2
There were other sightings of indigenous groups by the English. Yet twice in his journal entry for 28 April 1770, Banks mentions the ship being within close proximity of “Indians” who appeared “totaly unmovd at us.” A few days later, Banks describes how twenty or so natives, seen walking along a beach, “pursued their way in all appearance intirely unmovd by the neighbourhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one” (ibid., 63).
Perhaps the strangeness of a ship, a watercraft of an entirely unfamiliar kind, allowed this “remarkable object” to be unseen. While a ship would have been unfamiliar, we cannot leap to the conclusion that the natives did not physically see it. The diary does tell us that the “Indians” made different responses to the English over the period of several days, including these nonresponses. The entry of the same day, 28 April 1770, makes it clear that the ship had indeed been noticed by some “Indians” gathered about a fire. That they had seen it was inferred by Banks from the fact that they retired to an eminence from which they could watch it. Earlier in the day, the sailors were also waved at, invited to land, and menaced by men brandishing “pikes and swords.” It was only later, when the ship entered an inlet, that it was completely ignored by people within easy eyesight. That vision was good at the mentioned distance of a quarter mile is shown by an entry of 8 June in which things went quite differently at a location on the ship’s northward travel along the coast: “Still sailing between the Main and Islands; the former rocky and high lookd rather less barren than usual and by the number of fires seemd to be better peopled. In the morn we passd within ¼ of a mile of a small Islet or rock on which we saw with our glasses about 30 men women and children standing all together and looking attentively at us, the first people we have seen shew any signs of curiosity at the sight of the ship” (ibid., 76). Thus, “not seeing” was only one kind of early event among others.
There are other recorded instances of indigenous people’s refusal on early encounter to make sensory contact, even on occasions when outsiders, men of ordinary stature, were physically copresent or in close proximity with them.
In 1844, India-born Charles Napier Sturt (1795–1869), soldier, pastoralist, then explorer, set out from Adelaide northward on his third and final Australian expedition. Notwithstanding the seven decades’ difference between his incursion and Cook’s, he was moving into uncharted parts of the continent.3
