Other Contact Zones

Outskirts: feminisms along the edge

Growing up in the small River Murray town of Wellington, South Australia as the twentieth century turned, Henrietta (Ruth) Sabina Heathcock (nee Rayney) enjoyed a childhood shaped as much by Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal friends and elders, as by her close-knit Anglo-Irish family. The Rayney family lived on the eastern, Aboriginal, side of town, where Ngarrindjeri had lived for millennia, and where, in the 1880s, a group of Ngarrindjeri families from nearby Point McLeay Mission had been granted hard-won title to farm the land and raise their families (Jenkin 1979, 229-231). Wellington, indeed, was one of a number of pockets across colonial Australia where lived processes of negotiation and exchange between Aboriginal peoples and newcomers blurred social boundaries and mapped dynamic inter-cultural terrains on the frontier (see for example Hughes 2012, Balint 2012, Ryan 2011, Landon and Tonkin 1999, Yu 1994). Reflecting on her childhood friendships forged at Wellington in the first two decades of the 1900s, Ruth Heathcock recalled, ‘I went to school with Aboriginal children. Skin colour? It was all the same to me. I didn’t even know it existed’ (Hughes 1986). In the following article I explore continuities in the nature of cross-cultural intimacy over time by examining the friendships that Ruth Heathcock sustained with Aboriginal people at Wellington, and later across a range of other sites. These played out against a backdrop of restrictive race-based legislation that attempted to foreclose possibilities for such connectivity in early and mid-twentieth century Australia.

What does it mean, to be Australian? Tracing his complex family history, the author interrogates the conventional narratives of identity in 'multicultural' Australia and asks who he has displaced, as a white male, to claim belonging. He ought to feel he belongs but his loyalty to a distant 'Royal Family' is weak and his 'deviant' sexual identity places him beyond the bounds of family, religion and even the law. He feels like a stranger in a strange land. And he has no aboriginal ancestry to reconcile him with country. What does a society lose by sacrificing diversity through the coercive normative processes of homogenisation? The hostility towards people who don't fit the Anglo-Celtic profile was enshrined for years in the scandalous White Australia Policy and exploited long after the official demise of that xenophobic policy by Pauline Hanson's 'One Nation' push (which has recently re-emerged).

Proceedings of ARCRNSISS Methodology, Tools and Techniques and Spatial Theory Paradigm Forums Workshop, At University of Newcastle, Volume: pp 217-228., 2005

This paper looks to the geographies of Australia’s northern borderlands to theorise borders as relational spaces through which identities are (re)created and performed. Dominant Australian perspectives on borders are influenced by a legacy of exclusion and fear including the concept of terra nullius. This fear has been reinforced through the Australian government’s response to asylum seekers in the form of the Pacific Solution. Alternative perspectives of borderlands as sites of coexistence, complexity and situated engagement challenge this dominant conception of borderlands. Seeing borderlands as relational spaces allows for an understanding of borders as having the potential for inclusion or exclusion, as flexible and rigid, as based on fear or respect, depending on the relationships of power at work. We draw upon post-colonial and indigenous studies literature with a case study of the Tiwi Islands to argue interconnected issues of power and identity are central to reimagining borders and borderlands.

In Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, Edited by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw; Affrica Taylor, 04/2015: chapter 3: pages 63-77; Routledge., ISBN: ISBN10 1138779369 ISBN13 9781138779365 In this chapter we examine how fences in Australian colonial and post-colonial spaces come to literally and symbolically signify a regulatory framework through which self/other relations are constituted. We draw on collaborative research with Aboriginal people, and a recent research study “My Learning Place” in Frankston North, an outer suburb of Melbourne in Victoria to investigate the meaning of the fence in post-colonial childhood in contemporary Australia. The fence has long been a key technology in the colonization of Australian land and its Aboriginal peoples. As Aboriginal people were progressively excluded from their Lands by the fences of white settlement, and fenced into missions and reserves, “Stolen Generations” of children were created by forcible removal from their parents. In Frankston North we examine the marked predominance of fences around both formal and informal learning places and ask how is the fence operating as a mechanism of exclusion and inclusion and with what effects? Of particular note were the high, opaque fences constructed around the two early childhood centers, which represent extreme versions of fences around many Victorian early childhood centers today. As specific examples of places of learning we ask: what does this mean for the women and children who work and learn there, and what subjectivities are being formed in early years learning places in (post-)colonial Australia?

Sydney Studies in Religion, 2017

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The founding of the Commonwealth—literally, the common good or well-being—of Australia in 1901 officially fixed the new nation’s self-definition in British-derived terms, and reduced the Indigenous contribution to Australianness to what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called “the great Australian silence”. Sally Morgan’s auto/biography My Place played an important but contested role in recovering the Indigenous heritage for the national self-definition at Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988, an emblematic moment of mainstream celebration which glorified the start of the continent’s British colonisation in 1788. My Place is strategically placed at a cultural and historical crossroads that has raised praise as well as criticism for its particular engagement with mainstream readership. Much Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic debate has been dedicated to the ways in which Morgan’s novel reaches out to mainstream readers in order to display the plight of the Stolen Generations, and whether, by facilitating mainstream identification with its not-so-White protagonist, it works towards an assimilative conception of White reconciliation with an unacknowledged past of Indigenous genocide. Two decades after its publication, these legitimate worries born out of the text’s hybrid nature may perhaps be put at rest. A sophisticated merger of Indigenous and non-Indigenous genres of story-telling boosting a deceptive transparency, My Place inscribes Morgan’s Aboriginality performatively as part of a long-standing, more complex commitment to a re(dis)covered identity. On the final count, My Place’s engaging first-person focalisation hides a subtle political message: it contributes to the notion that viable inscriptions of Australia may only be achieved when catering for Indigenous understandings of their place. Poised on the uncanny interface of very different cultures, Morgan’s novel points towards the discursive space where a true commonwealth of Australia lies—within Indigenising definitions of Australianness. (284 words)

Australia's Ambivalence towards Asia is a searching, energetic and expansive book. It stands out amongst the many descriptive narratives documenting identity, racism and difference in postcolonial Australia as attempting to do much more. Drawing upon a novel methodological framework positing a psycho-cultural continuum from more concrete to more abstract ways of life, the book attempts to explain the patterns of insecurity, fear and superiority of mainstream Australia.

Journal de la Société des océanistes, 2009

In the Australian contact zone, visual art has for a long time been represented as colonial property and contemporary Indigenous art has often been studied as an appropriation or worse a stealing of this property. According to this study, the alienable nature of visual technologies has been largely denied by neo-colonial discourses because it implies a relation with other users. The recognition of Indigenous contemporary visual art as legitimate and authentic would be an admittance of co-habitation and hybridity that needs to be erased so that the myth of terra nullius can take place (Goldie, 1989: 148-169). This article hopes to demonstrate that the study of the digital photographic art of Brenda L. Croft reveals that neo-colonial claims of property of contemporary visual technologies are based on the desire of creating a mythical distance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian peoples. Therefore, the study of Indigenous artistic practices can further our understanding of Australian Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations because they act as practices of proximity which interrupt non-Indigenous claims of sovereignty and the denial of Indigenous/non-Indigenous cohabitation.

2010

As Stuart Hall, following both Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, has explained, identity is deeply imbricated with colonialism both for the coloniser and the colonised. Their cultures meet in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the contact zone. Inevitably, this meeting is in circumstances of great inequality. Nevertheless, the identities of both coloniser and colonised are shaped through their interactions, and this shaping continues in the postcolonial experience. In this issue of Borderlands the essays all share a common concern with identity. Moreover, in diverse ways all the essays are founded in issues of marginalisation, power and (post)colonialism.

Global Journal of Community Psychology, 2012

Analysis

In this paper I employ Freud’s concept of the uncanny in order to examine the ways in which white belonging in Australia is founded upon the repression of ongoing histories of colonisation. I suggest that the unsettling that these histories produce are managed through recourse to the spatialisation of white identities, the result being that the white nation can lay claim to a sense of belonging through ownership. In order to challenge this understanding, I outline an approach to understanding location itself as an inherently exclusionary practice, founded as it is upon the epistemic violence of white ways of knowing. I propose that what is needed is the ongoing problematisation of white belonging, and a focus on the privilege of location that masks the uncanniness of our assumptions of place.

Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, 2013

In this paper, I want to argue that postcolonial settler-invader autobiography is a textual negotiation of-and-on an ambivalent site of utterance. That ambivalent space is a physical and discursive space between indigeneity and empire. In order to make this argument. I need to mobilise a number of different theoretical arguments, so I am going to do this in an abbreviated fonn, trying briefly to mark out the positions through which I need to move. The main argument of this paper is that postcolonial space is both a physical and discursive space; and that it enables the production of a particular type of subject. or rather it provokes the articulation of a seemingly different subject position. Autobiography, I will argue, is a genre in which postcolonial strategies of representation are particularly evident, and those strategies of representation are invoked not only through the subject of autobiography, but also in and through the fonns of its coming into textualisation. This paper will