Friday, November 27, 2009

Other Eyes: The half-caste in Luhrmann's Australia

 

The AIS team is heading off to Canberra in a fortnight. The National Museum of Australia is convening an interdisciplinary conference addressing Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and we’re all presenting papers Films like Australia can be easy targets for academics and I hope I can temper my discussion with some acknowledgement of where the film suceeds.

The expansiveness of Luhrmann's vision of Australia and his understanding of a mass-viewing audience goes without saying.  However Australia aspires to be more than popular entertainment and accordingly warrants consideration and critique.  Though set in the 1940s, in northern Australia, the film invites the Australian viewer to interpret it in a larger framework, resonant with contemporary Aboriginal-Settler concerns. From this perspective we are obliged to note some of the film’s shortcomings. For instance, the issue of sovereignty is never addressed and Lady Sarah Ashley’s tenure of Faraway Downs is unproblematised.

In my conference paper I will address another major shortcoming - the manner in which it attempts to resolve the ‘half-caste problem’ as embodied in the figure of Nullah.  At the conclusion of the film Nullah goes off with his ‘full-blood’ grandfather to be initiated and to become not only a proper Aboriginal but also a human being. Underlying this is the racialist belief that the ‘half-caste’ is a being, in a sense, without a caste. This 'romantic pessimism' is still present in some popular conceptions of the relation between Aboriginals and traditional culture.  

Monday, November 9, 2009

Co-optation or Survival?

2009 has been one of the most productive years ever for Australian Indigenous Studies in the Faculty of Arts. Last week we had the inaugural Narrm Oration and the launch of the Murrup Barak Institute for Indigenous Development. Professor Ian Anderson has been a key figure in conceiving, and guiding these initiatives to completion.


As part of the Oration there was an academic procession of Aboriginal staff. I knew immediately I received the invitation that I should accept but remained ambivalent about the academic procession and Indigenous co-optation into the resulting pomp and circumstance. Henry Louis Gates' description of ‘official marginality’ and universities still has a certain measure of truth: 


once scorned now exalted. You think of Sally Field’s [1985] address to the Motion Picture Academy when she received her Oscar, ‘You like me! You really like me!” we authorised others shriek into the microphone,  exultation momentarily breaking our dour countenances.’


Actually the Oration was a profound and satisfying event. The Oration by Professor Mason Durie, a Maori, and Deputy Vice Chancellor of Massey University, New Zealand, was wise reflection on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and universities.  Arriving a few minutes late I was struck by the gowned figures of my colleagues: Aboriginal  academic and professional staff, and Aboriginal students, waiting quietly in the order they would enter the theatre. As sometimes happens in moments of intensity I had the experience of being both participant and observer. My final thoughts?  'We're gonna shout to the top...'



Sally Field's Oscar acceptance speech