Tim Rowse

Transforming the notion of the urban aborigine

Abstract The ‘urban Aborigine’ has been a problematic figure in Australian social policy, because of the tension between his/her cultural status (apparently assimilated) and his/her politicised cultural identity (defiantly resistant to assimilation). This paper focuses on a moment in Australian history when a reformist intelligentsia was compelled to make better sense of the ‘urban Aborigine’, and on two intellectuals in particular: H. C. Coombs and Fay Gale. It then turns to the cultural practice of a particular sector of this intelligentsia ‐ the urban Aboriginal painter ‐ and shows how urban Aboriginal artists have sometimes addressed the problematic category ‘urban Aborigine’ by richly referencing icons of the ‘traditional’ in their paintings.

THE ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS OF ‘CLOSING THE GAPS’

In Australia and New Zealand, the realization of the knowledge object ‘national population’ makes it necessary to involve Indigenous Australians and Māori in the Census. Both Indigenous peoples have engaged in the Census and have made use of the resulting official statistics in their self-representation as peoples not yet accorded social justice. This paper considers two of the issues of representing Indigenous peoples as populations: where to draw the distinction that makes the non-Indigenous/Indigenous population binary; and how to prevent the quantitative representation (‘population’) from subverting the qualitative representation (‘people’). That ‘population’ might trump ‘people’ is arguably an effect of the nation-state being a kind of ‘method assemblage’ in which people are arrayed as social entities that are knowable in certain terms. Drawing on the terms of recent liberal political theory, the paper poses the question of the ‘civicity’ of Indigenous Australians and Māori, concluding that there are ways that Indigenous intellectuals might use population data to substantiate their claims to people-hood.

The Colonial Emergence of a Statistical Imaginary

Intellectual networks linking humanitarians in Britain, Western Australia, and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s operationalized the concept of native “protection” by arguing contra demographic pessimists that native peoples could survive if their adaptation was thoughtfully managed. While the population-measurement capacities of the colonial governments of Western Australia and New Zealand were still weak, missionaries pioneered the gathering of the data that enabled humanitarians to objectify natives as populations. This paper focuses on Francis Dart Fenton (in New Zealand), Florence Nightingale (in Britain), and Rosendo Salvado (in Western Australia) in the 1850s and 1860s. Their belief in the necessity of population statistics manifests the practical convergence of colonial humanitarianism with public health perspectives and with “the statistical movement” that had become influential in Britain in the 1830s. We draw attention to the materialism and environmentalism of these three quantifiers of natives, and to how native peoples were represented as governable through knowledge of their physical needs and vulnerabilities.

Coombs the Keynesian

AbstractIt is a commonplace that Coombs was among the first enthusiastic Australian Keynesians. Groenewegen and McFarlane, in their biographical sketch, call Coombs a leading figure in the implementation of the “Keynesian Revolution” in economic policy’ (Groenewegen and McFarlane, 1990, p. 214). I would not dispute this, but 1 do not find it very helpful either, partly because in none of the thirteen references which Groenewegen and McFarlane make to the ‘Keynesian revolution’ do they tell you what that ‘revolution’ consisted of. To label Coombs a ‘Keynesian’ is only the beginning of an effort to understand him as an intellectual.

THE INDIGENOUS REDEMPTION OF LIBERAL UNIVERSALISM

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.

Population Knowledge and the Practice of Guardianship

In the United States of America, as in other regions of the New World, the colonists imagined that the native peoples were “dying out.” Recent critical studies of this popular and robust narrative neglect to account for its demise. This paper describes the emergence, by the 1870s, of a critique of the “Dying Indian” story that rested on a growing store of population knowledge generated by the United States government. This paper narrates the increasing demographic capacity of colonial authority, starting with Jedediah Morse in the 1820s and noting the use of population data by the Cherokee and by Lewis Cass in the debate about Indian removal in the 1830s. This paper then links the work of Henry Schoolcraft in the 1840s and 1850s to the rise of a reservation system and President Grants “Peace Policy” in the 1860s, arguing that “statistics” enabled humanitarian policy intellectuals to argue “unsentimentally” for a “civilizing” program. The surveillance capacity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) enabled the critique of the “Dying Indian” thesis made by Francis Walker, Selden Clark, and Garrick Mallery in the 1870s which, in turn, contributed to the political success of Senator Dawess “allotment” policy in the 1880s. This paper concludes by placing the work of these early critics of the “Dying Indian” story in the context of two histories: of U.S. colonial sovereignty and of the discipline of historical demography.

The politics of ‘Aboriginal society’

Intellectuals who engage in the making and critique of public policy may mobilise historical narrative in their policy discourse. Historiographical issues are therefore sometimes politicised. For both policy makers and historians concerned with Indigenous matters, the notion ‘Aboriginal society’ became relevant in the 1960s. The question of how to address it in policy has been entangled with the question of how to write its history. I illustrate this nexus by briefly examining commentaries by six policy intellectuals — Coombs, Stanner, Hasluck, Langton, Pearson and Sutton — whose thoughts on the Indigenous policy innovations of 1966–77 have included relating those events to underlying historical structures of settler colonial history. In particular I draw attention to historiographical features of two policy revisionists: Noel Pearson’s emphasis on economic history, and Peter Sutton’s concept of ‘liberal consensus’. This article has been peer-reviewed

Debating the Categories of Remote Indigenous Sociality

In The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology (1973), Barry Hindess distinguished between two critical approaches to official statistics: technical and theoretical. In this article I will elucidate Barry’s distinction and then apply it to a recent body of research by social scientists at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Research. In Making Sense of the Census (2002) and Agency, Contingency and the Census Process (2007), the CAEPR authors give a critical account of the enumeration of remote-living Indigenous Australians. I will offer a reading of these two publications that is faithful to Barry’s distinction between “technical” and “theoretical” critique.

Knowing and not knowing: The Ngarrindjeri dilemma

Doreen Kartinyeri (1935–2007) was an Aboriginal historian, in particular, a genealogist of several regions and lineages in South Australia. In her posthumously published autobiography she evokes the tensions between two orders of knowledge that were mobilised when she wrote things down. Written genealogy, drawing on oral, scientific and bureaucratic sources, was sometimes in tension with Indigenous strategies of forgetting and silence. And her inscription of secret/sacred Law—a tactic intended to mobilise the states defence of ‘Aboriginal heritage’—was intensely controversial among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In this reading of Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling, I highlight the authors attempts at resolving these tensions—metaphorically (her body) and ethically (her conception of the interests of future generations).

‘The Responsive Public Servant’: Coombs the Man, Coombs the Report

In the light of the Coombs Royal Commission’s failure to establish a central proposition, and subsequent contradictory attempts by academics to find one, Rowse offers the tension between the public servant and the public intellectual, manifest in Coombs’ career, as a possible prototype of the ‘responsive public servant’.