Tom Clark

On the responsibility to engage: non-Indigenous peoples in settler states

Many non-Indigenous peoples in settler societies describe themselves as concerned with the legacies of colonialism and wish to become more engaged with that history and with Indigenous peoples. Paradoxically, however, many do not understand what that engagement might entail, how they could do it or whether, indeed, it is their place to do so. In this research, we survey findings from three sets of focus groups with non-Indigenous peoples in Canada conducted over a two-year period and intersecting with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process that has nearly concluded there. The goal was to see what ‘emergent’ discourses of reconciliation are at play in reflective conversations between non-Aboriginal Canadians. Some strong but complex themes arise from this research, in particular a mode of ‘delegation’ and another, of ‘embodiment’. These are expressed in different rhetorical styles and speak to variations in the geography, history and identity of the participants and their communities. A broad but tentative conclusion is that for reconciliation the politics of the local matter. We explore this finding with one eye toward policy innovations and as part of a broad comparative inquiry into non-Indigenous peoples ideas of engagement and responsibility in settler colonial states.

‘I guess it scares us’ – Teachers discuss the teaching of poetry in senior secondary English

Abstract This article reports on a participant‐centred research project with English teachers in a senior secondary college in Melbourne, Australia. It builds on previous research (Weaven and Clark 2009, 2011), which showed a low take‐up of the opportunities to teach poetry in Victorias senior secondary English curriculum. This study explores the reasons why teachers of English are unwilling to use poetry texts in their senior classes. The teachers who participated in this study discussed and documented their attitudes towards the teaching of poetry and explored with each other the pedagogical challenges associated with teaching poetry. Their discussions – an analysis of which forms the empirical core of this article – reveal a range of explanations for teachers reservations about offering poetry to their students. Importantly, these teachers were able to use professional discussion as a means to consider what changes in teaching practice could be successfully developed to facilitate more time spent on the teaching of poetry in senior secondary classes.

Evolution and Contingency: Poetry, Curriculum and Culture in Victoria, Australia

This article explores the changing place of poetry studies in the broader English curriculum of Victoria, Australia. Its focus is on how students learning to become English teachers engage with poetry studies. Setting this problem within the context of pedagogical theory and evidence about the evolving Victorian curriculum, we have interviewed six first‐year students to explore their perspectives on the study of poetry. A clear finding is that exposure to the study of poetry is very limited in Australia’s secondary school system. A more surprising finding is that students do not clearly recognize their exposure to poetry studies as such.

The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation

This book investigates whether and how reconciliation in Australia and other settler colonial societies might connect to the attitudes of non-Indigenous people in ways that promote a deeper engagement with Indigenous needs and aspirations.

An Undeclared Schism: Higher and Secondary Learning about Poetry

Abstract This article discusses findings from two qualitative studies in which the authors explored attitudes towards poetry. One was a participant-centred research project with senior secondary English teachers at a state school in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The other was an interview-based study involving undergraduate students of education specializing in literary studies. Compared, the two studies reveal great disparity between an ongoing structural decline in secondary poetry studies and its ongoing prominence in higher education.

Anxieties of Influence: Recursion and Occlusion in Noel Pearson’s ‘Eulogy’ for Gough Whitlam

ABSTRACT Harold Bloom’s 1973 essay The Anxiety of Influence posits a poetics of ‘great poets’ who use and deny the prototype-poets and prototype-texts that influence them. Bloom’s understandings of poetic composition and reception offer a strikingly sympathetic account of much political discourse. This article focuses on the ‘Eulogy’ that Noel Pearson delivered at the funeral for Gough Whitlam in 2014, whose poetics were conspicuously informed by motives of emulation and of competitive distancing. That makes Pearson’s eulogy a particularly helpful case for testing the applicability of Bloom’s poetics in the political sphere. It also casts new light on the interrelationship between production and reception in the field of rhetoric – and, in so doing, on the importance of further research into rhetorical reception.

Non-Indigenous Australians and the ‘Responsibility to Engage’?

ABSTRACT National projects of reconciliation in settler colonial countries such as Australia are predicated on assumptions about non-Indigenous willingness to engage with the cultures and histories of Indigenous peoples. However, empirical research consistently finds such attitudes are far from universal. This article reports findings from focus groups with non-Indigenous peoples conducted at four locations around Australia during 2014. The goal was to see what ‘emergent’ discourses of reconciliation lay in the quotidian lives of non-Indigenous Australians. As with a comparable study conducted in Canada, this research used a poetics-rich approach to critical discourse analysis of the focus group discussions. It surfaced strong but complex themes, in particular a mode of ‘delegation’ and another of ‘embodiment’. We explore these themes with one eye towards Australia’s coming referendum on a constitutional amendment that would recognise the precolonial presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The Poetics of Non-Indigenous Reflexive Self-awareness: Strategies of Embodiment and Delegation in Focus Group Discussions in Australia

This chapter will explore how research into non-Indigenous attitudes and identities surfaces certain forms of reflexive self-awareness in the course of Australian conversations about Australia’s history and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. Emerging research from Canada and Australia highlights the ideational and connotative significance of non-Indigenous people’s discourse styles for their self-understanding ‘as non-Indigenous’. Recent focus group research in Canada (de Costa and Clark 2015) suggests that we may characterise variations in non-Indigenous attitudes to settler-colonial history and to Indigenous people and cultures in terms of ‘delegation’ and ‘embodiment’. This chapter will examine in close detail eight recent focus groups conducted at locations around Australia to ask what stylistic and semantic paradigms of reflexive self-awareness may characterise non-Indigenous discourses in Australia.

Non-Indigenous People and the Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation

This chapter sets the context for this volume’s concern with the conceptual, attitudinal, and political limits to policies and practices of reconciliation in settler colonial societies. It explains the complex and interconnected focuses of the book as a whole and sets the notion of a non-Indigenous ‘responsibility to engage’ in a broader context of theory and research, Australian, Canadian, and globally. The chapter maps the continuities and contestations evident among the book’s following 15 chapters, and outlines an overall contribution to an operational understanding of reconciliation as an historically critical problem.

Testimonial Textures: Examining the Poetics of Non-Indigenous Stories about Reconciliation

This paper arises from a collaborative project of research, exploring non-indigenous attitudes towards national agendas of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples (Clark et al.; de Costa and Clark). To date the research has focused on Australia and Canada, two countries where Aboriginal reconciliation is posited as a central organizing principle for national policy frameworks aimed at redressing entrenched indigenous disadvantage. Australia and Canada are also two countries whose federal parliaments endorsed resolutions of apology during 2008, apologizing to their indigenous populations for large-scale policies of forcible family separation. The purpose of this project is to gauge the strategic prospects for the national reconciliation projects in both countries, by exploring actual and potential ways in which non-indigenous settler populations — what we might call ‘second peoples’ or ‘subsequent peoples’ — identify with, against, or even without reference to the reconciliation agendas pursued by their respective governments and on their respective behalves. Here we argue that such identifications are highly amenable to a research approach that focuses on the stylistic ways that people share the stories that underpin their experiences and beliefs.