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INTRODUCTION

Persistent Difference

This book is about relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous people in Australia engaging with one another across major disparities of knowledge, cultural orientation, and power since the first arrival of Europeans. It is about how they engage with each other in ways that define and redefine the understood meanings and implications of these differences.

Writing about Australian indigenous social orders has emphasized continuity of difference (with variable emphasis on colonizing assaults on it); race and racialization as defining of indigenous-nonindigenous relations; and the power of the state, the state culture of bureaucracy, and its self-preserving circularity.¹ In Australia any portrayal of indigenous lives is written in knowledge of the intensity of public debate about indigenous issues. I think this is, in fact, particularly so in Australia: as historian Patrick Wolfe (2016) recently repeated, indigenous issues reverberate in the public sphere well beyond indigenous proportion in the population. Indigenous issues in Australia are topics of almost daily front-page news and debate, differing in this way in degree from Fourth World (Native American) matters in the public sphere of the United States.

Recent ethnographic, anthropological, and historical works concerned with Australian indigenous people have had at their conceptual core incommensurability of indigenous and nonindigenous social orders (Povinelli 2001, 2002; Clendinnen 2005), the experiential specificities of the collisions between these orders (Austin-Broos 2009), as well as the relation between anthropology and history (Wolfe 1999, 2016) and the importance of mutually supportive partnership between these two disciplines. The colonization of Australia and its aftermath shaped broadly similar, continent-wide structural patterns of domination, expropriation, and subsequent state interventions (Wolfe 1999, 2016). Ethnographers have persistently observed patterns of colonialism viewed as “structures,”² remarking on the histories, in different parts of the continent, that have given rise to specific forms of experience (Macdonald 2000; Austin-Broos 2009). Through all these generalizations and specificities, indigenous-nonindigenous difference is clearly seen as neither eliminated nor fully transformed despite the intensity and enormity of colonial and postcolonial events.

As I stated in the Preface, I take “difference” to denote identifiable forms of being in common, together with some sense of commonly shared values, that contrast with other forms similarly held in common by “others.” What reflexive senses of these differences those involved may have is a matter for discovery and interpretation. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (2001, 2002), her work ethnographically grounded in a neighboring region of the Northern Territory to the one I write about, has for some time proposed a view of differences as evidence of incommensurability between indigenous and nonindigenous ontologies: ways of being that are irreconcilably different, which nonindigenous institutions and agents seek to police and make commensurate with their own terms.³ Her concerns first focused on what she represented as European heterosexualization of indigenous experience, against evidence of indigenous diversity of modalities of attachment to land and persons (Povinelli 1993). She also traced scientific and other colonial sanitizing efforts that purged indigenous lives of their “repugnant” aspects, sexual and other. This book aims to identify some of the dynamics of difference in indigenous-nonindigenous relations. In it I draw on both historical and ethnographic materials from my research to illustrate and interpret dimensions of difference that emerge in different times and situations of encounter. All of the chapters explore what I take to be persistent dimensions of difference that continue to play a significant role in indigenous lives and in indigenous-nonindigenous encounter.

Chapter 1 treats the earliest recorded arrival of Captain James Cook in Botany Bay; it relates how Aborigines apparently refused to “see” the arriving outsiders despite their physical proximity. It presents evidence of two modes in which indigenous people attempted to shape early colonial encounter: one, surprisingly, by refusing to react; and the second, by recognizing arriving colonials, not only as spirits of the dead⁴ but as specific relatives. This encounter could be called an instance of indigenous “nonrecognition,” argued to have cultural specificity but also ubiquitous in human interaction. The book goes on to examine somewhat different questions of seeing, knowing, recognizing, at different points in time. Chapter 2 addresses an often-raised issue of the imitative behavior of indigenous peoples in encounter, aiming to reinterpret its social significance in this circumstance. Chapter 3 examines great disparities between indigenous and nonindigenous attitudes to “things.” Chapters 4 and 5 contrast nonindigenous and indigenous ways of stereotyping the actions of the “other”: colonial generalization of indigenous character as “treacherous,” the indigenous retrospective evaluation of nonindigenous action as “cruel.” This contrast opens out into consideration of indigenous modes of recognition with their avenues for incorporation of even unbiddable outsiders, prompting reflection on how this has sometimes made them vulnerable to different, powerful others. Chapter 6 brings in questions of state and nation in shaping exclusion, inclusion, and changing emphases on difference as a matter of race; the chapter discusses recent governmental liberalization of definitions of “Aboriginal.” The book ends by turning to the current Recognise initiative in 2016. The material in this book gives us insight into social and bodily affective and recognitional modes shaped over a long term. I do not suggest unqualified continuity but point to the historical and social embeddedness of the modalities involved, no doubt affected but perhaps in some ways intensified in encounter with outsiders.

The Present Moment: “Recognise”?

As I write this Introduction, Australia continues to contemplate, hesitantly, a referendum that would write into the constitution the recognition of indigenous Australians.⁵ The Australian constitution does not mention indigenous Australians, and the Australian government has not yet proposed the terms in which the constitution could refer to and thus recognize them. “Recognise” (as the initiative is called) is being debated and urged by supporters as an appropriate and necessary step in repairing and renewing relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people at the national level. Opinions on it differ. Some argue it should happen; others oppose it as marking out a special place for indigenous people in a way that is divisive. Still others argue that this move is a distraction—“useless”—and that other measures to adjust this relationship would be of far greater value. Increasingly, the latter are indigenous spokespeople, who seek something they can see as realizing their demand for a meaningful and rightful indigenous place in Australia today.

The Recognise initiative reveals Australia as attempting, and wanting to be seen to attempt, to engage with its indigenous population in a new way and accord it some kind of official commendation at a new institutional level. Collective acknowledgment is now sometimes said by people of varying political and social persuasions to be necessary to Australia’s national “completion.” This is phrased on the Recognise website in various registers. An indigenous man from Cape York, Harold Ludwick, is quoted as saying: “If the Constitution was the birth certificate of Australia, we’re missing half the family.” This places the “birth” of “Australia” at the time of federation, 1901, occluding the temporal dimension of what is often acknowledged as thousands of years of indigenous presence on the continent. Another part of the website urges: once we write in “this missing first chapter of our national story, it will formally become part of the shared story of every Australian.” In other words, the indigenous story will no longer be a thing apart but will be included on the terms of the nation-state as a whole.⁶

At the same time, Recognise marks out the fact that the “indigenous” is felt by many nonindigenous Australians to represent “difference” that remains problematically unassimilated. Indigenous people and presence, though valued in some ways, remain to be reconciled with national being or more fully included. With one exception—a finding of native title in a High Court case discussed below—indigenous Australians are, however, not attributed legal forms of recognition deriving from their having been the original people of the continent. Would the present initiative amount to this kind of recognition or not? That is the underlying tension, the elephant in the room, of Recognise, a seemingly celebratory proposal. If it were to be originary status that is recognized, what would be the consequences? And if not, what then?

Not far below the surface of the Recognise initiative is a question about the terms of Australian sovereignty that was raised but not resolved to everyone’s satisfaction in the famous Mabo case (1992). In judgment of a claim to possessory title of the island of Mer in the Torres Strait by virtue of longstanding possession, advanced by Eddie Mabo and other islanders, the High Court found that native title exists, and it may survive colonization. On the other hand, the High Court made clear that native title may not survive if it is deemed to have been lawfully extinguished by governmental action. That is, despite its foundational-sounding name, native title is residual and relative, a bundle of rights that remains and is recognizable at common law only insofar as these rights do not conflict with other forms of legal title to the land in question. Thus the court confirmed received doctrine on sovereignty, putting that matter beyond the reach of review in domestic Australian courts.⁷ The Mabo judgment thus upholds a conventional view of sovereignty as completed and unassailable, resulting from originary colonization. But there are many lurking legal and other potential issues. For example, if native title may in principle persist at common law and does persist in particular cases, does sovereignty (in some meaning of the term) persist with it (Patton 1996; Reynolds 1996)? Is the finding of persistence of native title consistent with a notion of Australia as a colony of settlement, as is usually assumed, or of invasion? And what, in broader terms presupposed by these questions, if sovereignty were regarded not as a juridico-political absolute but as what many take it to have been, a practice of colonial domination and governance (Muldoon 2008:63; Biolsi 2005)?

These issues suggest the likely limitations of the Recognise initiative. Maintenance of a discourse of finished sovereignty limits and frames those uncertainties; but refusal to address the issue may appear to many to be, as Ari Kelman (2013:5) puts it regarding a North American indigenous context of commemoration, a “hollow offer of painless healing.”

In two senses, Australia has never decolonized. It grew out of British colonies that federated as a constitutional monarchy in 1901. Still today the queen remains the head of state and is technically designated queen of Australia (though in practice, an appointed governor general carries out all the functions usually performed by a head of state, without reference to the queen).⁸ Second, no treaties or other negotiations were ever held with indigenous people/s that might be considered a moment of formal recognition. Despite a lengthy history of governmental management of indigenous affairs, there has never been a formal moment of decolonization: colonization was not marked by formality, so how can a moment of decolonization be marked? Yet that is what is clearly being sought in Recognise: an act of recognition that will make a decisive difference. There has been, in theory at least, such a moment in many other former colonies. In the extractive colony of South Africa, where colonists were always a minority and went about seeking resources and subordinating local people as labor, decolonization took place and Nelson Mandela became president.

Terra Australis: The Great, Late, Southern Liberal Settler Continent

Australia was a late settler colony in comparative global terms. While Columbus’s first voyages led to lasting European contact with the Americas from 1492, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon only made the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, on the western shore of Cape York in present north Queensland, in February 1606. Though there were a few brief contacts in between, the next portentous European arrival came a full 164 years after Janszoon in 1770, when English navigator Captain James Cook sailed into what is now Botany Bay at Sydney, naming eastern Australia “New South Wales” on 22 August 1770 at what has been henceforth most widely known as Possession Island, a small island in the Torres Strait Islands group off the coast of far north Queensland (which includes Mer, the subject of the Mabo case referred to above).⁹ Cook’s favorable reports on the prospects led to British settlement from 1788, beginning with the arrival of the “First Fleet” of eleven ships. Commodore Arthur Phillip, transporting on this first trip of settlement 759 convicts, their marine guards and families, and a few civil officers, came with instructions authorizing him to make regulations and land grants in the colony.

British colonization proceeded apace; competition with the French, who had also launched expeditions of exploration, ebbed in the early nineteenth century. British colonists came to settle, explore, expand their reach, and develop the continent economically as they might find possible. Officially they were instructed to conciliate the natives to the extent necessary to form penal settlements, replacing the American colonies as a convict destination. However, New South Wales soon also became a colony of free settlement: the first immigrant free settlers arrived in 1793. Notables of the colony began to argue for abolition of convict transportation and for the establishment of representative government. The colony began to grow rapidly as free settlers arrived and pressed on, well ahead of government regulation, into new lands to farm and, soon after, establish sheep and cattle pastoralism. Despite the long and arduous sea voyage, settlers were attracted by the prospect of making a new life on virtually free Crown land.¹⁰ This was accomplished by widespread indigenous dispossession and little conciliation.

Mobility was an expression and an instance of emergent power.¹¹ Colonists had crossed the ocean and meant to establish a social order, the character of which changed but the intended longevity of which was not in doubt. The nature and implications of settler colonialism have been more fully shaped in a relatively recent literature (Wolfe 1999, 2016; Veracini 2007a, b, 2010), as has the ongoing historical entwinement of settler colonialism and forms of liberalism (Humpage 2005; Povinelli 2002, 2005; Strakosch 2015; Watson 2004).

Australian writer and historian Patrick Wolfe (1999, 2016) characterized colonial settlement as a structure, not an event. By this he meant that certain lasting structures subtend and channel settler colonialism. The intent to stay, expand, and take over the land has meant replacement, not conciliation, of encountered peoples. It is one thing to colonize and intend to rely on newly subject peoples as a source of labor. It is another to arrive and rapidly begin to render the indigenous people physically, civically, and morally superfluous. Replacement involves the latter: what Wolfe calls a logic of elimination. The term “logic” is perhaps too rigid, or at least does not of itself make allowance for situational variability. But the drive to dispossession and elimination was certainly evident. Wolfe sees the logic enduring into present times in changing terms. The way and extent to which underlying structures have changed is a question we may ask concerning settler colonies like Australia. Kinds of change that have occurred are especially addressed in Chapters 5–8; the historical trajectory of settler colonialism becomes manifest and is in fact evoked in initiatives like Recognise. They are a moment of reckoning that calls forth competing perspectives on past, present, and future.

Anthropology and Difference

Anthropology in general was subject to searing postcolonial critiques in the 1980s. One critique said that anthropologists created their “object,” the “Other,” through an “allochronic discourse” of “other men in another Time,” as Africanist anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983:143) put it. Thus, I feel obliged first to reflect on changes of focus in anthropology and on related questions about the ethics of anthropological research.

Anthropology’s othering was paradoxical, Fabian argued, in that ethnographic research is inherently communicative and intersubjective: people in the same time and place, talking to each other, produces much of the empirical material of fieldwork. Anthropologist and subjects typically occupied very different social positions, however. The conditions of the growth of anthropology were colonialist-imperialist expansion and the spread of forms of capitalism, taking over space—the homelands of anthropology’s initial subjects. This brought with it what Fabian called one-way “chronopolitics,” contemporary research that excluded the subjects from colonial time and located them in their own time.

Much Australianist writing has been in terms of evolutionary and structural-functional paradigms, treating indigenous subject matter in isolation from its contemporary real-world colonial context. The theorization of early work typically involved intellectual partnerships of field-workers and scholars, as in the cases of missionary Lorimer Fison and exploreradministrator Alfred William Howitt, biologist W. Baldwin Spencer and postmaster F. J. Gillen in Central Australia. However, we still can learn from the storehouse of early field ethnography, as much of it does not “distance” indigenous people and social orders. William Lloyd Warner’s A Black Civilization (1937), concerning the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, was deliberately titled to signal a significant departure from earlier stadial and primitivizing views of human societies: “civilization” was a call to evaluation of Aboriginal societies in terms of their social/moral worth. Much of what Warner (1937:10) discusses, for example, as the “primary articulation of Murngin [northeastern Arnhem Land] society with its natural environment” that is discernible in the relation between the Murngin ceremonial cycle and the environmental contrast between wet and dry seasons, resonates with many contemporary positive views of indigenous particularity and ethical environmental concern (Rose 2004, 2011). Mervyn Meggitt’s Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (1962, from fieldwork of 1953–55) featured a fulsome structural account of kinship, social and ceremonial organization, the first lifelike depictions of indigenous people’s contemporary lives in a remote settlement, in the process showing some of their continuing self-assertive style. Meggitt said little about settler impacts on their lives, nor much about their location in a settlement. Anthropologist, administrator, and public intellectual W. E. H. Stanner’s positive, recuperative take on aboriginal religion (1966) and subsequent Boyer Lectures (1968)¹² helped to create a climate of opinion more favorable to Aboriginal interests, particularly to land rights, from the 1960s.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, and true to anthropology’s beginnings, anthropologists have undoubtedly tended to conduct research with bearers of the most distinctively indigenous ways of life: “othering” has taken the form of seeking out the “most other” indigenous difference. Much Australianist field research and writing from the 1960s onward originally pivoted on themes concerning ecology and human adaptation to the harsh environmental conditions here, a particular materially based form of interest in difference. But the concern of these researchers expanded in many different directions once they had established themselves with indigenous people and communities. One may without prejudice include here Fred Myers, best known for Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (1986), who, from initial interests in the social organization of human mobility and aggregation in the desert environment, came to frame the most lasting account of emotions, autonomy, and relatedness among desert people and later came to study the rendering of landscape in aboriginal art. He also wrote on the relation of Pintupi to the welfare state and the awkward relationship between their political culture of “nurturance” and the government policy of self-determination. Elizabeth Povinelli’s original research interests related squarely to hunting and gathering. However, her questions about the characterization of “labor” and her involvement with indigenous people caught up in the land claims process led her to a critique of “late liberalism” and to the question of survival of alternative ways of being, the “otherwise” (Povinelli 2002).

Anthropological research work was largely done by men in remote Australia, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Englishwoman Phyllis Kaberry and Catherine Berndt in partnership with her husband Ronald), until quite recently. This was evidently quite deliberate. According to Jeremy Beckett (pers. comm.), Sydney University doyen of anthropology Professor A. P. Elkin (1933–56) urged young women students to work in “settled” Australia. Thus Aborigines in urban contexts attracted the attention of (mostly female) sociologists and geographers (e.g., Fay Gale, Ellen Biddle, Judy Inglis). The urban literature featured global analytical concepts of “adaptation,” “assimilation,” “acculturation,” “integration,” some of which were (also) policy terms (see Langton’s 1981 critique); while the anthropological work in remote communities, studying “kinship” and “traditional” social organization, was short on ways of treating the indigenous-nonindigenous encounter. This work had a foundational thematic: the Other. But it was becoming clear that this thematic was seriously flawed, or at least that it made far-reaching exclusions that were morally intolerable.

From the mid-1960s, in a decolonizing climate that regularly cited “self-determination” as desirable internationally (McGregor 2011:58–59), another postwar change filtered into Australianist work. Efforts began, largely on the part of historians, to break what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his Boyer lecture of 1968 called the “Great Australian Silence.” Stanner diagnosed a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale” that had resulted in scant attention to indigenous history or presence in Australia and denied adequate representation of indigenous conditions. Stanner’s awareness had been shaped in part by a large research project initiated in 1964 by an Australian scholar, teacher, Pacific administrator, and Aboriginal rights advocate: Charles Dunford Rowley. Accepting a three-year appointment to the Social Science Research Council of Australia, Rowley studied (and commissioned others to study) the situation of Aborigines in Australian society. He wrote the first three volumes of a series, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970), Outcasts in White Australia (1971a), and The Remote Aborigines (1971b). The books conveyed a hitherto little-known history of the encounters between Aborigines and non-Aborigines and a masterly survey of present relations that helped to determine the agenda of the Whitlam Labor government (1972–75). In a final work (Recovery: The Politics of Aboriginal Reform, published posthumously in 1986) Rowley remained hopeful, suggesting possibilities for forms of Aboriginal autonomy in a continent whose white people, unlike those of Papua New Guinea where he had worked, would not go away and whose indigenous people still had “some business together which is not the business of other citizens” (Inglis 2012).

This was followed by work of a growing number of Australian historians, some of whom began to attempt representation, as Henry Reynolds (1981) put it, from “the other side of the frontier.”¹³ “Resistance” became one of the signature themes not only in history but also in anthropology (Scott 1985; Ortner 1995) as authors sought to cast historical materials in more relational, sociological, and ethically inflected terms that attributed agency to indigenous people. There began to emerge in Australia a new picture of the colonial past, with previously little or unknown Aboriginal heroes and stories of resistance (Willmott 1987; Pedersen and Woorunmurra 1995), which could be celebratory only up to a point because of their tragic subject matter. Such research has placed the character of Australian nationhood in question with unprecedented intensity, provoking “history wars” between conservative defenders of a benign view of Australia as a colony of settlement and vigorous and confrontational reinterpretations of the colonial past as violent and dispossessory (see, e.g., Windschuttle 2002; Macintyre and Clark 2004; Manne 2003, 2009; Attwood 2005).¹⁴

While many research projects arose from indigenous difference, those researchers also registered profound impact and influence on indigenous lives that was not always easy to specify or analyze, partly because of the fraught political field into which any such representation enters. In recent decades, there have been some analyses using the terms and tools of colonial studies (Tonkinson 1978; Trigger 1992, applied to mission contexts), the effects of bureaucracy and administration on everyday indigenous life (Collman 1979a, b, 1988), Foucauldian theorization of the disciplining state and of resistance (Morris 1989), and research conducted in a variety of locations (outback towns, remote-area camps, cities) under the principal rubric of race and racism (Cowlishaw 1988, 1999, 2004). Among newer emphases have been ethically inflected approaches to history, social relations, and ecology (Rose 1992, 2012, 2015), and the concept of “ontological shift” through which Diane Austin-Broos (2009) reads two signal moments of change in Central Australia: Arrernte dislocation from their land, and their subsequent incorporation into an expanding welfare state.

Exposure of indigenous people to the state in northern Australia in the land claims processes (Merlan 1998; Povinelli 2002), as Austin-Broos has argued (2011), deflected Australianist anthropology into reexamining traditional indigenous relationships to land. Presenting collectivities as possible “traditional owners,” as required by claims processes, was remote in many ways from the way Aboriginal people now live. Increasingly over the last decade (but see earlier Thiele 1982; Cowlishaw 1999), anthropology and other social sciences have turned to examine and critique liberal and neoliberal bureaucratic and policy processes focused on indigenous people (see also Strakosch 2015).

As some following chapters will show, some of the people I have worked with in the north came from families that were survivors of the violence of settlement. They have narrated some of this past as they experienced it, leaving me with little doubt about where I stand in the history wars. I have more doubts about how to assess the nature of continuity in colonizing and dispossessory practice, especially in the ways that representations of difference play in relations of indigenous people with bureaucracy and in policy processes. Some historians and anthropologists have considered it more ethical to withdraw from any representation of indigenous people and to focus on the settler colonial state and society. Anthropologists have examined the evidently non-benign, circular, and remedialist character of the social democratic and neoliberal state, trained on shaping and domesticating indigenous difference (Lea 2008a, b; see also Strakosch 2015). As well, anthropologists have studied Australian state and bureaucracy, its whiteness (and especially its antiracist dimension, the fear of being oppressive), which shapes bureaucratic approaches to indigenous people and communities in the guise of help (Kowal 2015). In anthropological, historical, and other related settler colony literatures (especially those of North America) there are critiques of (usually) state-framed concepts of “recognition” (Coulthard 2007; A. Simpson 2014), and there are many statements of preference for “refusal” by indigenous scholars: claims to the right to unknowability of indigenous people and communities. There are many policy- and practice-related critiques of recognition as well (e.g., for Australia, see Pearson 2014): that “recognition” does not really accept the possibility of an autonomous indigenous position, but is always seeking to subordinate and subsume it. As I earlier indicated and will return to discuss in Chapter 8, that is exactly the elephant in the Recognise room.

Arguing for an “anthropology of anthropology,” historian Patrick Wolfe (1999:3, 214) has sought to write, not “the agency of the colonized, but the total context of inscription.” He takes the further step of saying that one can ethically examine anthropological constructions and discourses but not indigenous ones. For indigenous people, Wolfe says, survival is the issue; survival is a matter of not being assimilated. Any claims to authority over indigenous discourse made from within the settler-colonial academy necessarily participate in the continuing usurpation of indigenous space; there are “no innocent discourses” regarding Aborigines (Wolfe 1999:4). To refer to indigenous discourse is inherently invasive, he avers; invasion continues in new forms. I do not agree that the study of indigenous discourse necessarily claims “authority over indigenous discourse.” Indeed, I dispute that we can neatly separate indigenous from nonindigenous discourse. This book tells a story of indigenous action, but in ways that could not be told simply with reference to settler or indigenous arrangements as if these were separate. I believe that we need ethnographically grounded accounts of the indigenous experience of change in their relationships with others.

Material in this book draws on my experience with indigenous people and communities. It is grounded in features of problematic relationships that are not over yet, as well as in largely positive relationships that I developed with people that allowed me to participate in their lives. I present indigenous positions that I came to know, and which would otherwise not be heard, as important.

Recent works critical of liberal and neoliberal governance acknowledge the significance of understanding indigenous action, orientation, and practice. In her examination of recent (2000–2006) indigenous policy in Australia, political analyst Elizabeth Strakosch (2015:180) argues that there is intimate entwinement between formations of settler colonialism and neoliberalism, which “thrives in the gap between liberalism’s promise of full inclusion and its practice of sifting actual claims to inclusion based on the ‘capacity’ of the claimant.” Older frameworks of capacity assessment, framed by sovereignty, she concludes, need to be transcended as the exhaustive site of political order. This “opens up the possibility of redress between different orders rather than within the liberal state framework” (186). The state is only one kind of political institution, she points out, urging us, “as settlers, to understand and encounter the other forms of political life that already exist” (ibid.). Yet, notably, Strakosch says little about what those other forms may be.

Similarly, Tess Lea’s (2008a) ethnographic study of health bureaucracy and its remedialist practitioners convincingly shows how projections of indigenous “neediness” are produced and along with it an institutional, bureaucratic, magical “real” replete with incantations such as “involve young people,” “provide funding,” and so on. The work describes a hegemonic logic that “cannot imagine betterment without some form of government intervention” (Lea 2008a:233), and which reproduces rationales for such intervention. Lea asks how someone like herself, both bureaucrat and anthropologist, can comprehend bureaucratic cultural habits and not reproduce them: “I say simply: forget the agony of trying to be pure; concentrate instead on being as technically proficient as you possibly can. Dare to draw upon evidence to inform your interventions…. The field does not need more good-willed generalists mouthing safe platitudes; it needs people who are competent at their profession and dignified in their analysis” (ibid., 235).

As I understand Strakosch and Lea, each points to looming aporias if one tries to understand history, action, and difference as if from the settler side only. There are too few ethnographically grounded accounts of the indigenous experience of change and its relational aspects.

The story of indigenous action cannot be told simply with reference to settler or indigenous arrangements as if these were separate. I have gotten to know people on both sides of that divide. My field experience in northern Australia has imbued me with a sense of indigenous views about what their forebears had lived through and of how they relate that to their own experience. The views of indigenous people tend to be less known, less accessible. At least, some of the most impressive indigenous people I knew were unlikely to articulate their views in ways that reach nonindigenous publics, partly for lack of opportunity, but not only for that reason. Some older people were shaped by particular local circumstances, at particular times, and some of those circumstances have changed or will change, making them less likely to address nonindigenous publics than their descendants who are the products of different times.

Relationship, Mediation, and Power

The first chapters in this book concern encounters of explorers, colonists, and indigenous people, and depict meetings that certainly had a stark, even shocking, face-to-face dimension: some of them involved people coming into each other’s presence with little or no prior warning, producing visceral reactions, shouts, embrace, tremblings, evasions, and so on, none of which could have been premeditated or enacted in conventional ways. But there was an entire repertoire wielded by explorers, as we will see, a range of ways of thinking about and dealing with “Indians,” “natives,” “savages” that sprang from forms of organization and the systematization of understandings about what kinds of reactions might be encountered and how to steer them in particular directions. Likewise, indigenous people had a store of ideas about the strange, uncanny, and unknown that they brought to bear on these meetings to some extent and clearly also proceeded on occasion to further engage outsiders more fully.

Later chapters reflect on encounters that retain a dimension of the face-to-face, but in which indigenous-nonindigenous relations are mediated by “things,” material objects that explorers and settlers pressed upon indigenous people and today are often a main basis for evaluations of indigenous difference. Here too there is obvious contrast and a great deal of incomprehension in how materiality figures in encounter, early and later. Further chapters reflect on the changing nature of indigenous-nonindigenous relations when a much more clearly demarcated, geographical set of frontier spaces bounded by hostility had been established and there was an ever larger number of settlers who consider themselves to be on one side of it, wherever they may be geographically. In this circumstance settlers produced and circulated widely among themselves understandings of indigenous persons, behavior, and character, while an ever smaller proportion of the former had any significant face-to-face interaction with indigenous people. Several later chapters deal with what I have experienced as indigenous responses to these frontier events and to intensifying conversion of social spaces and persons into ones infiltrated by and linked to settler institutions. This includes the emergence of persons of mixed race, what indigenous and nonindigenous people made of it, and state efforts to control it.

The final chapters consider the nature of relationships in recent years when Australian governments had changed their modes of dealing with indigenous people to the point of consulting them with respect to resource development projects. Power becomes stretched across a more complex set of linking relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people and institutions; and indigenous people deal on a personal level with those who come close to them but also increasingly apprehend the difference among levels and people as representing them rather than as authoritative or powerful in their own personal right. Through an analysis of a particular prominent “sacred sites” dispute, Chapter 7 shows, mutatis mutandis, how persons as highly placed as the prime minister of Australia have interpreted aspects of disputatious situations in terms that they took to be reflective and respectful of indigenous action and belief very foreign in character, in that case with decisive political consequences. There as in other cases there was a chain of mediated links across a complex set of relations.

In all forms of action it is often the case that the interacting parties are unequally resourced, endowed with forms of technological and other material, as well as ideological and social backing, sources of inequality between them. We regularly talk of differences in power. What do we mean by this? Power, though a notoriously contested notion, is often referred to by Max Weber’s (1947:152) formulation: “the probability that one actor within a social relation will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.” Despite undefined notions of “will” and “resistance,” this statement usefully points to the issue of unequal capacity. In the encounters studied in this book, such unequal capacity shaped thinking and acting, but it did so in different ways at different times.

As noted above, mobility—global and local—on the part of outsiders was a first key indicator of power differential. Explorers and settlers were able to arrive on the continent with a “pre-accumulation” (Wolfe 2016) of ideas, preconceptions about who the natives might be and how to deal with them, technical expertise, and plans. None of this would have been evident to indigenous people for some considerable time. Settlers were able to make use of it in order to press on with exploration and expansion even under the direst of circumstances, which indigenous people obviously sometimes misjudged as likely to extinguish their efforts. Never was that the general outcome, although individual explorations were occasionally disastrous. Also locally mobile wherever they went, explorers were able to co-opt people to assist them, but in specific and sometimes ambiguous, evasive, and duplicitous terms, as Chapter 4 illustrates. Settlers were able to move, resettle, and introduce large numbers of animals whose presence put indigenous-nonindigenous relationships on a collision course (Roberts 1969; Reid 1990: chap. 4; Barta 2008:524–26).

There are instances of direct, physical effects of power upon indigenous people, obviously in the form of physical violence but also, more subtly, in the ideas and ingenuity by which outsiders attempted to engage them and win their compliance. There were accumulations of power in the relationships that growing settler numbers and institutions were able to actualize among themselves and from which indigenous people were excluded. In episodes of the recent past and present, structural conditions enabled government officialdom to determine the separation of children from families based on categorizations of human types and associated ideas of education and improvement; indigenous people were and are variously allocated and reallocated outside and inside bureaucratic and administrative schemes of management. Late in the piece, in the final decades of the twentieth century, indigenous people come to be “recognized” as meriting a role in processes that channel the exploration of natural resources, ostensibly in the name of community consultation.

Sometimes, outsiders’ forms of power become structuring conditions of indigenous people’s lives, without their necessarily focusing on how that has come about and without these conditions being directly taken account of in their forms of action. However, when indigenous families seek to avoid the police or regularly occupy town spaces so as to minimize interaction with whites and with other indigenous people, we see people dealing knowingly with structures of power. It is more difficult, but important, to render account of how forms of power and influence operate when social landscapes, sound-scapes, money transactions, and many other kinds of events and actions penetrate people’s lives in new ways.

We need a general term for a form of life that persists in difference, having and recognizing qualities of its own, while it is lived in the shadow of potentially dominant power and hegemonic cultural influences, whether the latter come in the form of foods, labor, music, visual culture and technology, welfare, or churches. Neither “autonomy” nor “subordination” describes this form of life. I have sometimes referred to this general condition as “intercultural” (Merlan 1998, 2005) with reference to relations between indigenous people and communities and wider Australian society, but that deliberately leaves such a space open to be specified more closely. To do so is difficult. It is important to recognize forms of indigenous difference, both continuous and innovative, in people’s lives, but without resorting to holistic concepts of continuous cultural logics that fail to account for change and conditions.

Difference is partly an effect of power. While the history of indigenous-nonindigenous relations includes some encounters with the potential for equality at the personal, often corporeal level, these moments were fragile before the larger forces in play. In longer-term colonization, zones and boundaries of difference are demarcated in a power-laden regulatory way that indigenous people were to observe as persons and collectivities. We see indigenous people responding in a variety of ways that bespeak some fragmentation as they become entangled, if not encapsulated, within the fields of value that these practices subserve.

Today we continue to witness an ongoing struggle over the nature of indigenous difference. There is competition between ideas of the timeless difference of traditional “Aboriginal culture,” which can be highly valued, both by indigenous and nonindigenous people; and the unruly differences of many everyday indigenous settings—including conditions of people, houses, the use of things and money, the nature of relationships to people and institutions—which administrators and many others typically read wholly as consequence of “disadvantage” requiring remedy and reformation (Strakosch 2015:139–43, 157–58). This has policy implications, creating spaces for further state involvement (Lea 2008a, b; Strakosch 2015). I take to heart Povinelli’s concerns about suppressive power. This book, like her work, is concerned in many places with realities that persist beyond the pressures to commensurate and that are discernible and expressed in indigenous people’s own reactions to and musings on nonindigenous difference. As will be demonstrated in this book, incommensurability often appears not as classically “cultural” but at a mundane level, carried in the structures and practices of socioeconomic and racialized inequalities that are so much the medium of indigenous-nonindigenous relationship today.