Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
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(although see McGrath 1987 for an important qualification to this view). Indeed, pastoralists rapidly replaced indigenous labor with technologies; as well, they began to employ indigenous workers casually.4
The nonindigenous people of Katherine had made little or no provision for the fringe-dwelling Aborigines, and, with few exceptions, they repudiated the fringe dwellers for being who they were and for the squalor of their conditions. Many indigenous people in the postwar settlements built to contain them had nevertheless begun to orient more regularly toward towns as sources of supply and because of the increasing Aboriginal social intensity there. Administrative moves began to gain tenure for camps and to give the residents basic services. Their increasing access to cash (wages and the monetization of welfare) and the removal of controls on their access to alcohol in 1964 had contributed to their becoming a troubling presence in town. Legal purchase of alcohol had been symbolically coded by some Aborigines as achieved “citizenship” (see Sansom 1980), but alcohol undoubtedly became an enormous medical and social burden on Aboriginal people and communities, and it has remained so.5 The nonindigenous town’s negative image of Aborigines as fringe dwellers contrasted with more romantic and traditional imagery prevalent in urban Australia. Northern white Australians, on the other hand, felt their understanding of northern conditions to be far superior to that of nescient southerners.6 The prospect of “traditional ownership” of the beautiful Katherine Gorge national park, as far as most townspeople were concerned, was incompatible with the region’s developed tourism. Aboriginal ownership would only impede tourism, and their presence would spoil town amenity.
As I spent most of my time with Aboriginal people living around the town, camping in fringe locations, I noticed many things that have stayed with me ever since. Most obvious was the woefulness of their fringe-camp living conditions. Indigenous people were vulnerable to exploitation. Shortly after I arrived, a woman limped into a fringe camp where I had become a regular visitor and part-time resident some kilometers out of town. She needed to recuperate from having been abducted (evidently lured with alcohol), driven away, and raped by several white workers who were haunting Aboriginal camps for just such purposes. The woman was concerned with recovering and with the rage and retaliation (against herself) that she feared from her husband. I notified a recently appointed community affairs officer in Canberra to try to bring about an investigation of this event and others like it. The victim declared that she did not want police involvement, but I soon received a letter stating that investigation would require certain kinds of evidence and witnesses and asking if we could provide them. Alcohol consumption in almost all cases like this contributed to a general moral alarm in such towns and supplied a reason for blaming the victims.
Further, an Aboriginal family living in town7 with whom I spent a great deal of time ducked their heads, or otherwise took evasive measures, at the sight of police, no matter whether we were sitting in the open outside their house as they frequently preferred to do or just walking or driving around in my car, doing nothing at all that would normally be considered suspicious. “Yinyigben, yinyigben” (police, police), the older people would hiss to others in Wardaman, the language of this kindred, and everyone knew that meant: Duck! A long, remembered history of interaction was reflected in their behavior. There was little sense among them that the police might be helpful, although that feeling has changed to some extent since then.
As my involvement developed in conveying information about land claims to indigenous people, or attending while it was being conveyed, I saw that there was an enormous gulf of incomprehension between information givers and supposed receivers (see Thiele 1982; Merlan 1995; Cowlishaw 1999). None of the institutions or motives involved in the process was initially at all familiar to most Aboriginal people. It was not (simply) a matter of language but a mutual lack of institutional familiarity and a dearth of meanings that could be exchanged between people who had limited fluency with each other’s everyday and imaginative worlds. The situation was paradoxical: while older Aboriginal people were among those most likely to know something about land areas that might be claimed in terms contained in the Land Rights Act, they were the least likely to understand why representatives of the Land Council and others were now coming to talk to them about these things. Many had never spoken to outsiders about the kind of mythological and sociological information that was required to pursue claims; they even regarded some of it as not to be widely disseminated (Michaels 1985), and they were understandably nonplussed by, and sometimes mistrustful of, outsiders’ intentions. They also had, at first, little sense of what kind of information would help them in their claims. How could they intuit what had been consolidated as expert understanding and was now required as proof of relationships to land they might claim? They often said things that would be decidedly unhelpful, and some were concerned that with proof of their ownership they would be made to go back to where they came from. In addition, many had only limited knowledge of the places under claim. Such information was not evenly distributed among them (Chapter 7).
Some of the Aboriginal people, especially around town, wished to claim areas where they were now living, so that they could carry on with their lives as they were. Yet the Northern Land Council was encouraging them to make much wider claims.8 The wishes that such people expressed were negatively evaluated, dismissed, or subordinated by the Northern Land Council’s grander sense of the opportunities.
It has taken some time for me to comprehend that scene. I first felt satisfaction that this transition, from complete dispossession to the possibility of repossession, had occurred. But then I noticed that the Northern Land Council had little feel for the actual effects, on people’s current outlooks, of the violent and dislocating histories that many had experienced either directly or as survivor generations of earlier colonization. The Land Council expected these dispossessed people to be involved in making the claims that the legislation and the Land Council were now enabling, but the process to which the dispossessed were being brought was unfamiliar, and the wider national negotiations over indigenous-nonindigenous relationships were unknown to most of the former.
I subsequently reflected on these mismatches between the authorities pursuing land rights and the people that they were established to help. The topics of these papers ranged from increasing indigenous awareness and use of money in the context of generalized kin relatedness (Merlan 1991b) to the question of their participation in land claims (Merlan 1995). My 1998 book Caging the Rainbow suggested that the entire land claims process might be best interpreted as attempted governmental mimicry of what had become understood, through legal precedents and anthropological involvement, as “traditional” forms of indigenous relationship to land. Aborigines were then expected to reproduce evidence of these forms of relationship in order, belatedly, to reclaim country from which their forebears had been dispossessed. Claimants could win cases if they could demonstrate their traditionality, thus both benefiting from policy and reinforcing their distinct status; while those who could not meet criteria of traditionality could neither win cases nor change the disadvantaged and prejudicial condition in which they lived.
In particular, I have been vexed that the indigenous people with the longest-term attachment to the area of Katherine town were considered by relevant authorities, legal representatives, and others to be a liability to the land claim because they no longer lived their relationship to the town in the expected traditional modalities of myth and dreaming9 and associated embodied relationship to places. History was not supposed to have occurred in order for claims under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act to be successful. Guided by the statutory requirements, my land claim research showed that these were people who had formerly been of the Katherine area in terms of long-term connection and validating mythic identity. Their attachment, though changing in character over time, was why they were still there. However, the impact of settler appropriation was that they were largely unaware of many of the elements of their past that would have allowed them to be identified as its long-standing occupants. Written records and stories serendipitously recorded from their elder relatives by a locally residing agronomist and by a passing anthropologist (Arndt 1962; Reay n.d.) attested their longstanding occupation of the Katherine town area. However, circumstances had changed their collective memory and store of information, and they had become townspeople of a (marginalized, disadvantaged, racialized) sort. They did not match expectations of the new land claims dispensation, despite