Anthony Redmond

Captain Cook meets General Macarthur in the Northern Kimberley: Humour and ritual in an Indigenous Australian life-world

Freud argued that what is common to all comic techniques is ‘the fact that in each of them something familiar is rediscovered, where we might instead have expected something new. This rediscovery of what is familiar is pleasurable’ (1960 [1923], 120). In the analysis offered in his 1905 work, Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious (1963a), the further apart the two conceptual entities that are brought together in an innovative use of words or gestures, the greater is the pleasure in the short-circuit created between them. The joke, then, can be understood as instance of the more general category of the innovative metaphor, that is to say, the transfer of meaning across domains, which, while holding onto the original referent of a symbol, simultaneously creates a new relation that extends the original meaning. The strength of this innovative spark across conceptual poles is correlative to the tension that marks their difference. This short-circuit may produce a revelatory and/or comic effect. In this paper I explore an Australian Aboriginal corroboree of the Ngarinyin people from north-western Australia, in which this kind of innovatory spark is used to make new sense of racial power and violence.

Identifying the Relevant Level of a Society in Australian Native Title Claims

Many of the outstanding native title claims across Australia were originally conceptualised in terms of the level at which rights and interests in land were exercised by groupings of claimants at a range of scales, rather than the level at which the body of law and custom legitimating those rights and interests was held and reproduced. Claimants, Native Title Representative Bodies (NTRBs) and respondent parties have continued to struggle with reconciling the various levels at which Aboriginal groups coalesce and become differentiated from one another. Since the Yorta Yorta High Court decision in 2002, Indigenous Australians claiming native title under the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) have had to demonstrate that their current ‘society’ is the same society as that which existed at the time of colonisation. Since the rights and interests in land and waters that can be recognised under the Native Title Act are said to stem from the ‘laws and customs’ of the society that was in existence at sovereignty, much hinges on how ‘society’ is understood. What emerges strongly from the ethnographic record is that traditional Aboriginal societies contracted and expanded in different contexts. In this paper, I argue that defining native title societies in a way that adequately acknowledges this fact does not seem to be precluded by the Native Title Act or by subsequent case law judgments on this question. 1