Lisa Slater

My Island Home is Waiting for me: the Dreaming Festival and Archipelago Australia

It’s raining in sunny Queensland. Rain wasn’t on my mind when I left wintry Sydney, then I was wondering: why so many Indigenous festivals now? what are they doing? where did they come from? to what effect? Having fled a chilly Sydney mid-morning, I arrive Friday afternoon (Day 1 of the Dreaming Festival): after an easy one-hour flight to Brisbane, a clean and surprisingly on time train to Caboolture, a local school bus to Woodford, I share Woodford’s only taxi to the festival grounds. My companions are a motley crew, only later do I appreciate that they are somewhat representative of the festivalgoer. John from Nambour, taciturn to the point of almost mute, is meeting up with his young family; Eddie is an engaging, well-traveled Brisbane based, Ethiopian born, security guard working at the festival; 20-year-old Sebastian, who spreads warmth and acceptance like a northern Queensland winter sun and looks like a suntanned angel, is working as a volunteer. Everyone is impressed that I’ve come from Sydney, bestowing upon me the valued status of the most traveled. Kate, the taxi driver, is like one of

The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya to Hear and Feel Across Difference

Slater’s focus is settler Australia’s inability to hear Aboriginal people on their own terms. The chapter explores a five-day cultural immersion and knowledge programme—run at the KALACC festival, Kimberley, Western Australia—in which government and non-government agencies were invited to ‘listen in’ to how traditional owners envision the ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ to pressing issues in their lives, and how the grant-makers might support community-driven solutions. The festival is an untranslatable space—an anti-festival—in which the Kimberley Aboriginal world is not readily accessible and understandable to non-Indigenous people. She examines the event as an invitation for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise their crisis of hearing and listen across difference. Ethical listening, and thus transforming the foundations of settler colonialism, requires creating spaces for respectful non-comprehension.

A Meditation on Discomfort

ABSTRACT To borrow from Irene Watson, this is a meditation on discomfort (2007). I begin at a cultural tourism site in northeast Arnhem Land, where Yolηu women were teaching Napaki (non-Indigenous) women about their kinship systems and responsibilities. The tourists were eager to learn: at times insistent and demanding. There was something too familiar about the scene: the settler women’s clawing desire for ‘Aboriginal culture’, only just keeping at bay the anxiety evoked by Aboriginal autonomy and political will. My concern is that in this historical moment there is a retreat, a wariness to disclose what it feels like to be the beneficiaries of living in a colonised country. It is shaming to discuss these awkward, if not ugly, emotions, and much easier to dismiss these as personal failings, sweep them aside, or to hide behind empathy for so-called vulnerable people or an enthusiasm for ‘culture’. Consequently those committed to social justice could fail to understand contemporary Australia, and also disregard an alternative feminist political practice. In this article, I reflect upon what might enable ‘good white people’ to stay in places of discomfort and be responsive and answerable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people [Watson, Irene. 2007. “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities.” In Our Patch, edited by Suvendrini Perera, 23–44. Curtin, WA: Network Books].

Saltwater cowboys: life in a time of death and destruction

This paper begins at the Derby (western Kimberley, WA) bull rides, where young Aboriginal men compete to be champion bull riders – with the prize of a social status akin to that of an AFL football star. The abundance of life performed in this arena lies in stark contrast to the too often rehearsed appalling health and social statistics, which has produced policies such as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, Shared Responsibility Agreements and ‘Closing the Gap’. Too many Indigenous Australians are in a state of grinding poverty, ill health and social distress. What do these forms of account say about how (or what) life is valued in Australia? Achille Mbembe argues that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die – the creation of death worlds.1 Notably, above the Tropic of Capricorn, 90% of the prison population is Indigenous, leading some to contend that we are in a state of war. The ‘wounded’ Indigenous body is represented as an aberration – outside of the healthy civic body – and in need of mainstreaming. In the political moment there is a focus upon the war on terror, but what of the war at home? War upon Australian soil has seemingly been consigned to history. Yet government agencies have responded to the current ‘crisis’ in Indigenous Australia largely by reinforcing mainstream values and experiences, which fosters particular life worlds at the expense of others.

Introduction: Cultural reorientations and comparative colonialities special issue

This special edition of Continuum draws from papers delivered at the 2011 CSAA annual conference, hosted by The International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding (the MnM Centre), University of South Australia, Adelaide. The theme – Cultural Reorientations and Comparative Colonialities – was a provocation to reconsider Australasian cultural studies’ continued orientation towards the northern hemisphere for intellectual sustenance, which serves to reinforce the notion of Australia and, arguably to a lesser extent, New Zealand as ‘Norths in the South’ and the ‘Wests in the East’. These concerns and critiques have a long history in Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoa cultural studies. Notably, within the academy, Indigenous knowledges have grown in influence and size in terms of the body of research, development of teaching programmes and increase in postgraduates. There is no doubt that the call for a reorientation is insistent and robust, yet Euro-American knowledge production still dominates. Conference delegates were asked to remember and draw inspiration from Australian and New Zealand cultural studies intellectual and political history, whilst pursuing, and reinvigorating, new alliances. Reorientating cultural studies requires a (re)commitment to non-western cultures as intellectual sources for critiquing, questioning, inspiring and repoliticising cultural studies. Some of the many questions and incitements arising from the conference included: do orientalism and colonialism continue to structure cultural studies? What might a postorientalism cultural studies look like? How might cultural research on Australian coloniality, post-coloniality and ethics communities benefit from a wider comparative framework with Latin America, Africa and Asia? How is culture being reorientated to respond to recent financial, security and environmental crises? The collection opens with Chris Prentice’s scene-setting paper: ‘Re-Orienting Culture for Decolonisation’, which exemplifies the kinds of challenges and reorientations the conference call sought to elicit. Here a valuable antidote is offered to the all too frequent (itself colonializing) dominance of Australian, as distinct from Aotearoa New Zealand voices, in Australasian cultural studies via an examination of the risks of seeking out cultural inclusion as a disciplinary agenda. Employing the Aotearoa New Zealand

The Locals: Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond

terrorism, while acknowledging the agency displayed by the Chinese in countering these attacks. In his study of Queensland’s Native Police, Jonathan Richards argues that Indigenous men played an invaluable role in European colonisation, participating in both ‘‘dispersal’’ practices and sexual violence towards Aboriginal women and girls. Similarly, Murray Johnson makes a point of examining non-white, non-male bushrangers, as well as the class politics behind the practice, while Yorick Smaal fills a gap in existing literature on sexual politics during the Second World War by scrutinising the concerns generated by homosexual offences during this moral panic. Most of the essays also work hard to situate their Australian content within an international framework. Paul Wilson examines the impact on the national consciousness of international terrorism events and how Australian experiences of terrorism across the past two centuries have differed from that of other countries. Likewise, Shirleene Robinson devotes considerable detail to how the evolution of criminological ideas regarding young offenders in Britain eventually influenced Australian treatment of Indigenous children. Russell G. Smith’s review of the shifting motivations and perpetrators behind technologically-based crimes actually tends to privilege overseas examples as he charts the use of telegraphs and telephones by nineteenth-century fraudsters and 1920s’ mafia bosses through to online hacking and paedophile rings. Smith’s essay highlights one of the most intriguing aspects of the collection, which is its positioning of contemporary concerns within a historical continuum. Comparing the mental health care scandals and investigations of the early 1990s to earlier royal commissions into colonial facilities, Emily Wilson thus concludes that the charges and recommendations levelled at the industry have remained largely unchanged since the late nineteenth century. Tim Prenzler offers a more positivist perspective in his analysis of the challenges that have affected the Australian police force since its inception, reflecting, in particular, on the reforms that have been implemented since the 1960s. Editors Robyn Lincoln and Shirleene Robinson continue this engagement with contemporary history by pondering the gradual abolition of capital punishment in Australia in the context of recent calls by the public for its reinstatement. The edition consequently contains many worthy contributions that will be of interest to academics concerned with their particular subject matter, though as a whole, the work never really transcends the sum of its parts. It does, however, prove the value to be derived from an integrated approach to criminology and history, a challenge it is to be hoped more academics and collections will take up.