Shocking News

Shocking news this morning of the sudden passing of Ruby Hunter. Ruby was gold, tried and proven by the fire of racism, and probably unaware of the number of people she inspired.

It's almost twenty years since I saw Ruby for the first time, on commercial television. I was living in Sydney when the video of 'Down City Streets' was broadcast by a Sydney television station. The combination of the song and the spiritual presence of Ruby and her partner Archie Roach had an immediate impact.

Neither of them were ever the sort of people commercial television gave much space to. As I watched and listened, I couldn't help but wonder at how both of them had emerged intact from the experience that gave meaning to the song, and turned it into art.

Ruby's personal dress style (both regal and whimsical), and her numerous performances, were moments of reassurance, manifestations of a profound and deep Aboriginality which reached back to a distant past.

Listen to Archie's, 'From Paradise'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhCy8iur_8o&feature=related

Aboriginal Guest Lecturers

In 1983 Stephen Muecke (currently Professor of Writing at the University of NSW) problematised the ethics of Aboriginal-Settler collaboration when he and the late Nyigina elder Paddy Roe published Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley. Prior to this, Aboriginal narratives and texts were often edited without reference to their authors, and Aboriginal knowledges used without permission, recompense, or acknowledgement. In Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, a 1984 publication with Paddy Roe and Krim Bentarrak, Muecke noted that the only bibliographic references for Paddy Roe in the National Library of Australia were for Gularabulu - although generations of academics from a range of disciplines had sought out and benefited from Paddy Roe’s knowledge and circulated it under their own names.

In spite of the impact of Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, the ethics of Settler academics relying on Aboriginal guest lecturers to deliver Aboriginal content remain largely unexamined. What does it mean when a non-Aboriginal lecturer with access to the relative security and perks of the tenured academic teaches an Aboriginal studies subject where over 50% of the lectures are delivered by Aboriginal guest lecturers? Is a guest lecturer’s fee a fair exchange? It might be a non-issue if the guest lecturers were all Aboriginal professionals of equivalent salary, job security, career prospects, and social status. And what about the impact on students? Do they come to believe that the only person with a right to speak on Aboriginal issues is an Aboriginal?

I know one Settler scholar teaching in Aboriginal studies who, after years of using Aboriginal guest lecturers, decided to take responsibility for the lectures himself and to supplement them with relevant audiovisual material. An extreme response, but at least one that registers the problem.

Boot Camp for Teachers

I’m not directly affected by the release of the school league tables and it's not an area I claim any expertise in but as someone who respects teachers who work in the public school system it’s hard not to be annoyed when they are presented as the problem. Federal Minister for Education Julia Gillard is skitching parents on to teachers who are apparently not delivering; underperforming school principals are to be mentored; the reality show ’Boot Camp for Teachers’ is probably in pre-production.

Not having any school age children I thought I’d check the league table results for my old primary school. XYZ Public School is situated in Northern New South Wales. Many of the families of students are transients; 34% of students identify as Indigenous, and many of the school’s students come from single parent families. The school’s performance in literacy and numeracy, as represented by the National Assessment Program, isn’t very good and it’s outperformed by Cherbourg State School. Cherbourg State School is the school Aboriginal educationist Chris Sarra had such a profound impact on and it has become in a sense a ‘show school’ for the new regime in education. Comparisons with XYZ Primary School are revealing. XYZ Public School has a student population of 216 while Cherbourg State School has 199 with 99 % of the school’s students being Indigenous. Students at Cherbourg State School were intensively coached for the National Assessment Program tests and its website showcases an extensive range of programs for students. It’s the disparity in staffing levels that is most confronting. Cherbourg State School has a teaching staff of 19.2 and a non-teaching staff of 13.6. In comparison, XYZ Public School has a teaching staff of 15.8 and a non-teaching staff of 4.6. I assume that these figures are also a pretty good indicator of the relative level of resources available to both schools. Because it is so poorly resourced there doesn’t seem much of a chance at XYZ Public School that a child with learning difficulties will get the intensive support they need. The Cherbourg State School results are to be applauded: I’d also be applauding if comparable resources and attention were being directed to XYZ Public School.

Finally for my old teachers at XYZ Public School – one or two you were doozies but you’re remembered with affection and gratitude. You were my first point of contact with White Australia and the greater world. Something worked…

The job gets done...

2010 starts for the Australian Indigenous Studies program tomorrow.  I’m feeling primed and ready to roll but deadlines are already pressing. We’re developing teaching materials for new subjects as well as reviewing previously taught subjects. Everything has got to be ready for the coming semester. As well as that we’ve got to finalise our Honours program for 2011 - that has to be completed  by the end of January.  I’d have liked to have been further advanced with these tasks but this is the time frame we’ve got. Add up various other deadlines and commitments and it’s a combination of optimism and fatalism that will see us through.  As for fatalism, one of my former bosses, an ex-army officer, used to say, ‘The job gets done; it might be done differently; it might be done worse, but it gets done.’ Aboriginal affairs generally is bedevilled by short-term goals, and short-sighted, sometimes cynical,  strategies; thankfully  that’s not the case with the Australian Indigenous Studies program. The optimistic vision is that the completion of each of January’s tasks lays the foundations of a unique program.

Thoughts on Returning from a Conference

Guest blog: Odette Kelada

 

Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Reviewed: An interdisciplinary conference on history, film and popular culture, 7 Dec – 8 Dec.

 

Thoughts on returning from a conference on the film ‘Australia’ by Baz Luhrmann -  Two days to pour in detail over the sprawling colourful ‘epic’ that attempts to meld a ‘Gone with The Wind’ romantic exuberance with a larrikanesque knock about aussie adventure tale. I embarked with the AIS team to Canberra rather unsure of what might await and with a few questions in mind. I’m no big fan of the film as I read it as a highly troubling and current day colonial fantasy, but was there a chance that all the brilliant minds at this forum may persuade me otherwise? Could it be that in the mire of critical race reading, I had lost the ability to enjoy a generous entertainment spectacle when it came bounding in all its red dust kangaroo embossed technicolor glory? And was that catchy slogan – something about going walkabout to find oneself, really capitalist white tourist induced appropriation or eerily insightful observation on the modern day concrete oppressed office worker?

 

Standout keynote speech by Prof. Meaghan Morris launched the conference with a wonderful nuanced reading of the complexities in the responses to this film, an original take on cliché and a great description of Nullah’s magic weaving gestures as ‘oogabooga’ that looked more kungfu claw (taught by the cook perhaps) than anything identifiably Indigenous . Morris’s observations traveled with me over the next two days as I listened to various presentations and attempted to emulate the spirit of openness and dialogue fitting such an auspicious start. In the first session, Ann Genovese gave one of the most interesting papers from a cross-disciplinary perspective, as she connected the film’s narrative around the Stolen Generation with legal cases brought by Indigenous litigants fighting for recognition of the illegality of their removal. Her paper offered a fascinating reflection on myths in law and how these sit alongside the mythmaking around the story of Nullah in the film. Philip Morrissey in his thoughtful presentation on the film offered much to ponder but it was his shocking and yet uncannily persuasive suggestion that given Nullah’s propensity to pop up  in inappropriate places (including the bedroom), interrupting any ‘wrong side’ business that was afoot, and his strange long haired allure as he ‘sings’ Lady Ashley, that Nullah was possibly going to come back and marry Lady Ashley, which drew an illicit gasp from the audience. ‘Australia’ as Oedipal fantasy certainly broadened the implications of the film’s narrative arc. Johanna Simmons, project coordinator of AIS, gave a compelling insight into the spectacularistion of history that has been repressed, drawing attention to Luhrmann’s representations of the Stolen Generation and the Darwin Bombing as two such histories. Simmons sophisticated exploration of how the film may be read as an attempt to counter this repression and the effect of melodrama as genre on this endeavor, was  enhanced by the presentation of images illustrating various cinematic devices employed by Luhrmann. The visual impact of seeing the poster for ‘Australia’ juxtaposed with the poster for the American film ‘Pearl Harbor’ left little doubt that in the almost identical imagery, Luhrmann was reaching self-consciously beyond intertextual referencing to overt mimicry. ‘Redeeming Aboriginal masculinity’ by Shino Konisho was another paper that stood out as she gave a unique reading of the film, opposing Germaine Greer’s condemnation of King George as ‘a tasteless joke’ by suggesting that he was on the contrary, a positive example of paternal love. The range of presentations varied in substance and clarity over the duration of the conference but overall most had something of interest to say, be it on landscape, aural semiotics or international reception.

 

Apparently the enthusiasm by academics to attend a conference on ‘Australia’ outweighed the expectations of the conference conveners, Konisho and Maria Nugent, who did an excellent job of providing a cohesive program from the many threads. Indeed by the end, rather than assuaging the appetite for this film, the participants appeared well able to continue the discussion ad infinitum. After the two days, while I found myself adhering to my initial concerns and sense of disturbance, there’s certainly a great deal more to the film than I had appreciated. There’s no doubt from all the multi-disciplinary approaches that Luhrmann created a fertile landscape for debate, controversy and analysis on diverse fronts. Witnessing some of the fervent affection by a number of participants for the film, I swayed between a sense of oversaturation with all things ‘Australia’ and starting to wish that I too had been able to be swept away with the Drover and the Wizard of Oz, to some far far away place. But no, we were still in Canberra, the locus of many a flawed fantasy, and soon to be in the airport lounge.

 

 

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.  

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