The strange magic of “indigeneity”
The late Les Murray was an unlikely-seeming poet. None of the floppy hair, black skivvy, tortured mannerisms stuff. He grew up in rural poverty on his grandparents’ farm. Big, burly, blokey Murray looked as if he would be more at home rounding up sheep than words. Even worse, he was an open conservative.
At 18, sitting by the banks of the Manning River at Taree, he decided to be a poet.
In fact, he became such a renowned poet that in 2007 no less than The New Yorker wrote that he was “now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets”. The Guardian touted him as a possible Nobel Prize winner. For his own part, Murray wrote that “It’s my mission to irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people, by being a paradox that their categories can’t assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems”.
My favourite Murray poem is ‘The Suspension of Knock’. It’s a poem I’ve read and re-read more often as the shrill debate about an “Indigenous Voice to Parliament” ramps up. (I call it a debate: in reality, it’s just one side hogging the podium and bellowing “Racist!” at any one who dares disagree with them.)
Where will we hold Australia,
we who have no other country?
Not Indigenous, merely born here
“Indigeneity”, mired in race, is at the heart of the entire “Voice” proposal. But what does “indigenous” even mean?
The standard reference, Oxford, defines “indigenous” as “originating in and characterising a particular region or country”. The National Geographic Society (NGS) defines “indigenous” as “an individual from a group that has lived in a particular location for thousands of years”.
As should be immediately obvious, the varying definitions of “indigenous” throw up a number of questions and challenges.
If an indigenous person originates in and characterises a particular region or country, how are white Australians of at least several generations provenance not indigenous? After all, they originated in Australia, and they have, over the past few centuries, developed a culture that characterises the country.
On the other hand, Maori have occupied New Zealand for a bare 700 years. By the NGS definition, they are not indigenous. Similarly, white Australians are nowhere near to being indigenous, per National Geographic Society, while Aboriginal Australians are very, very indigenous.
Yet, as NGS also admits, humans as a species did not originate in Australia.
“Humans emerged first in a single location in Africa. About 70,000 to 80,000 years ago, some groups of humans left Africa and migrated around the world. They then established settlements in these new locations. People began to settle more permanently. Most people were born, raised, and died in the same location.”
Hence, the NGS emphasis on living in a location for “thousands of years”. This in itself brings up the question of just when does a group cease to be “exotic” and become indigenous. At what point in the last 60,000 years, did the newcomers from the millennia-long African diaspora, who crossed the Wallace Line and arrived in Australia, become indigenous, rather than exotic?
Prominent Aboriginal Australian Noel Pearson conceded that indigeneity is indeed a process, when he wrote that “The essence of indigeneity… is that people have a connection with their ancestors whose bones are in the soil. Whose dust is part of the sand.” With that in mind, Pearson could not avoid what he admits is “the somewhat uncomfortable conclusion” that conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, a first generation Australian, “was becoming Indigenous because the bones of his ancestors are now becoming part of the territory”.
What, then, of those of us who are not, supposedly, “indigenous”, yet who have five, six or more generations of ancestors “whose bones are in the soil”, as Pearson says?
When we are made fully nothing
by our own, at home and abroad,
where will we hold Australia?
In his book, The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery describes how the Polynesians, between 3,500 and 1,000 years ago, “set out on their great voyages of colonisation”, crossing the Pacific, from island to island in their waka. “They were nomads of the wind, who settled on remote tropical islands, and lived there until food resources were exhausted. Then they packed up their waka and moved on, navigating by the stars.” Eventually, they reached a pair of islands like no others they would have encountered: a relatively cool mini-continent. They were, Flannery says, “the first colonisers” of New Zealand.
At almost the same time as the ancestors of the Maori set out on their final voyage, on the other side of the world, another group of colonisers were navigating their own waka, from the other direction. Eventually – a mere 300-400 years later – they, too, made landfall on the two great islands of New Zealand.
So, why is one group of colonisers considered indigenous, the other not? If by the process of “indigenisation”, burying generations of ancestors in the soil, then the Maori colonisers are a mere four or five generations ahead of the European colonisers. If those five generations were enough to make the Maori fully indigenous, why have five more generations not been sufficient for descendants of those first generations of British to become indigenous?
It might be argued that the Maori developed a distinctive culture in that time. Which is true enough – although at the same time, Maori culture is identifiably Polynesian, with a great store of language and myth in common with other Polynesian peoples. By the same token, European Australians have likewise developed a distinctive culture which is also identifiable with its European roots.
Aboriginal Australians will rightly point out that both the 250 years of European and 700 years of Maori settlement pale beside the 60,000 years of Aboriginal settlement. This is so, but it raises the question of why Aboriginal Australians regard Maori as fellow “indigenes” and European Australians, not.
It is fashionable to talk of a “special connection to the land” that Aboriginal Australians supposedly enjoy, which others do not. What is the nature of this “connection”? No less an authority than a High Court justice described it as a “powerful spiritual” connection. In other words, let’s be blunt: “magic”. How is such a claim any different than the notion of “Manifest Destiny”: the idea that “the whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation”? How different is it, too, to the blut und boden ideology of the Nazis?
Where do we draw the line on magical thinking? The law paid short shrift to a fringe Christian group in Tasmania who refused to pay council rates because, they said, “the land belongs to God”. If Christian “spiritual connections” are illegitimate when it comes to matters of law, then why are Aboriginal “spiritual connections” somehow protected?
Our experience
and presence, unlike theirs, are fictive
ideological constructions.
I can certainly sympathise with the notion that persistence of ancestry deepens ties to the land – I feel it myself. It must be pointed out, too, that such a notion directly contradicts the other ruling conceit of the Australian left: that the immigrant just off the boat is “100% Aussie”. So, if I and Muhammad born in Kabul are both “100% Aussie”, what does that make an Aboriginal Australian? 150% Aussie? 200% Aussie? Clearly, such a notion is impossible.
But how long, exactly, does it take for the magic of “indigeneity” to work its spell? If Muhammad is not indigenous, are his children? If I am not indigenous, are my children? Or their children? Or my descendants, five generations hence?
shall we be Australian in Paraguay
again, or on a Dublin street corner?
Some of them like us in Dublin.
Or are we indigenes of the lands whose soil absorbed the bones of our ancestors for tens of thousands of years before any their descendants jumped in their waka and set sail across the oceans? Genetically and to some extent culturally, after all, I can legitimately claim to be as Irish as Lidia Thorpe is Aboriginal (almost certainly, even more so). Yet were I to front up to the Dail and claim ancestral privileges, I’d be rightly laughed out of the place. Because it would not only be almost as fake as Bruce Pascoe’s claims to Aboriginality, but I would know it to be false. The generations since, as an elderly relative once said, my Australian-born ancestors were “as Irish as Paddy’s pigs” might have left their stamp, but they have also been altered by the land whose soil has accepted their bones.
I am Australian and nothing else. Am I not indigenous?
A Devil's Curmudgeon 