Against Native Title: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia - Softcover

Vincent, Eve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1925302083 ISBN 13: 9781925302080

Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Pr, 2017

Synopsis

‘Against native title’ is about one group’s lived experience of a divisive native title claim in the outback town of Ceduna, where the native title claims process has thoroughly reorganized local Aboriginal identities over the course of the past decade. The central character in this story is senior Aboriginal woman Sue Haseldine, a self-styled charismatic rebel and master storyteller. This is a vivacious and very human story, which makes a vital contribution to national debates around issues of Aboriginal futures in remote and regional areas.

About this title

About the Author

Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. She is the co-editor of Unstable Relations: Indigenous people and environmentalism in contemporary Australia (UWAP, 2016) and History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (UTS E-Press, 2014). Eve’s writing has appeared in scholarly journals as well as outlets such as Griffith Review, Overland, Sydney Review of Books and Meanjin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

'Against Native Title'

Conflict and creativity in outback Australia

By Eve Vincent

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2017 Eve Vincent
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-925302-08-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Map of Ceduna and surrounds, 
Introduction, 
1 Heading 'out the back', 
2 'Rockholes all over the place', 
3 The making of 'mission mob', 
4 Spectres of 'Welfare', 
5 Memories of the 'old ways', 
6 'We know who we are': the impact of native title on local identities, 
7 Engaging the historical record, 
8 Fighting about native title, 
9 Tending to rockholes, 
10 Making assertions, 
11 Where dingoes howl, 
12 Where dogs reign, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Heading 'out the back'

Grip of a fighter

'The wind is my hairdresser,' says Aunty Sue, stepping out into her dusty yard and letting the hot north wind rush through tangled thick black hair. A wire clothesline stretches across the dirt yard, tractors and car carcasses rust away in a nearby paddock, dogs run out madly to greet approaching cars, and in the middle of this scene Sue stands with a cigarette in a curled hand. Sue lives on a wheat farm with her whitefella husband, Gary, near the small, isolated town of Ceduna. From her yard a strip of flat, grey-blue sea can be glimpsed to the south. North of the chip-dry paddocks, 'out the back', lies a vast stretch of bush; stunted mallee scrublands roll away on sandy waves.

The task of the hairdresser is to subdue and shape hair, human hands and tools bringing this naturally occurring stuff under their control. Sue styles herself in conscious opposition to this, subverting the human will/natural forces hierarchy. She is drawn to images of wildness and rebellion, joyfully submitting to the wind, which here represents the unpredictable and powerful forces of the natural world with its capacity to overpower human designs and desires.

The philosopher Richard Klein understands smoking as 'a wordless but eloquent form of expression'. Sue pinches her cigarettes between her thumb and first finger in a smoking style that is distinctly edgy. This is the grip of the fighter: the knuckles are bared. Sue embodies a kind of refusal to have her passions tamed, and a disregard for others' expectations. She is 'against native title', despite the fact that native title legislation is designed to recognise Indigenous connections to land, and subsequent rights and interests in it. She is 'against mining' too, even if it promises the economic salvation of remote and regional Aboriginal worlds such as hers. Her experience of these complexly entangled issues will emerge in time. For now I add that for all her toughness, Sue both refuses and embraces. While she is locally well known for the things she is against, in this moment she also meets the wind, playfully embracing a certain wildness she believes is in us all.

That 'outlaw one', Aunty Sue

Aunty Sue spent her childhood on the Koonibba Lutheran Mission, located approximately 45 kilometres west of Ceduna. As a young woman she met Gary, whose family has farmed in this wheat-growing district since the early years of the twentieth century; in the late 1960s they danced together to the jukebox in a Greek café in the adjacent port town of Thevenard. Sue raised her own six children (one deceased), as well as 'growing up' a host of other kids, and is now a grandmother and great-grandmother. My focus is firmly on her most recent phase of life, and her public identity as activist, 'rebel', or, as she puts it, 'outlaw one'.

Sue has a brown, sun-beaten face creased with deep smile lines; spindly stars radiate from the edges of her eyes. She also has the gift of the gab. Her warmth and humour, as well as her ability to craft a narrative and to generate insights out of ordinary occurrences, have made a lasting impression on me, as well as on many people around her.

Aunty Sue wears tracksuit pants and floppy tee-shirts. In 2007, she was awarded the inaugural South Australian Premier's Award for 'excellence in Indigenous leadership in natural resource management' and in 2013 she was recipient of the South Australian Landcare award in the Indigenous Land Management category. Sue donned 'glad rags' at the ceremony for the first award, but kept on her beloved 'trackies' beneath her skirt. She would cheerfully accept a prize for fighting against the aggressively pro-mineral extraction policies of the very state government whose representative shook her hand, but she would not give up being herself in the moment she did so. Two favourite tee-shirts give further insight into her cheek, both given to her as presents from environmentalists. One features armed Native American Indians and says, 'Homeland Security. Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.' The other declares, 'Black by popular demand.'

Born on the mission

Storytelling is a vital human imperative. In telling a story, distance between the storyteller and the events concerned is established. In the process, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes, a 'degree of agency is recovered', and 'a balance re-established between our need to determine the world to the same extent that it is felt to determine us'. One of the narratives that Sue has most masterfully shaped is the story of her own life. Born on Koonibba Mission in 1951, Sue frequently says that she has 'always been a rebel'. Her siblings remember her as a 'tomboy' growing up. Aunty Sue told me:

I used to go with all the men, which was pretty much unheard of. There'd be one little girl who'd travel everywhere with the men coz all the other girls had to learn basket weaving and stuff, but I learned on the land, our culture. So I was really lucky in that respect.

Sue travelled out bush in a two-wheel sulky, drawn by a horse. 'Our people have been walking that country for years so having a horse and sulky was a little bonus,' she says.

She was the particular favourite of one of her mother's younger brothers: he spoilt her 'something rotten' and gave in to her demands to go everywhere with the men. With her uncles and grandfathers, Sue went bush for days at a time. 'They took me right out the back there.'

Sue now thinks that she was taken bush for a reason:

Old grandfathers used to look after me, take me places — I think they took me there just [because] I had memory, coz I can remember things. That's why I'm fighting now. I think they already knew that 'this one here is an outlaw'. Coz I was always called outlaw. 'Outlaw one will get a back up later on in life.'

Sue traces her current willingness to fight 'government' on the issue of mining to her childhood experiences. Her grandfathers entrusted cultural knowledge to her about particular rockhole sites, permanent water sources scattered in the scrub 'out the back there', believing she would be inclined to get her 'back up' and be willing to 'stick up for the land'. Moreover, as she explained to oral historian Sue Anderson and archeologist Keryn Walshe in 1996, her dogged 'hatred for government' stems from the fact that she harbours 'a fair bit of hatred for the system that took the brother away'. This is a reference to her experience of 'Welfare' and the splitting up of her family after the end of the mission in 1963.

Sue and Gary's farmhouse, built in the 1950s, has thick crumbling stone walls, which keep it cool in the scorching summers. The couple is usually to be found sitting around their kitchen table, its laminex surface cluttered with condiments, foodstuffs and stacks of paper — Aunty Sue's 'piling cabinet'. The kitchen walls overflow with family photos, and the cupboards with collections of jars. There is always some kind of activity underway: fish soak in the sink before being gutted; bargain-price nectarines are stoned and stewed before being frozen; a crossword is being filled out.

Gary is a retired wheat farmer who left school at the age of fourteen and started his working life 'lumping' or loading wheat bags onto boats down on the wharves at Thevenard, the small port town adjoining Ceduna. He met Sue when he was about 20:

I thought, 'Geez, she's a beautiful girl.' And we sort of went together for a couple of years and then I married her, then we had six kids, and we're still together.

'Never had one fight,' he joked. 'We've had lots of them.' Gary remembered that when he and Sue married:

There wasn't very many people who married dark girls; at work people used to look down on the dark people and I could never work out why but it was just the way it was ... [M]y parents were a little angry to start with, but then they fell in love with my wife just the same as I did, and they loved her.

Certainly there might have been local talk about his marriage to Aunty Sue, concedes Gary, and about their 'brown-skinned babies'. But of those who talked, he told me, 'I don't give two shits about them!'

His spirited defiance suggests that judgments were commonplace and psychic energy was required to overcome them. Another Ceduna whitefella of the same generation, who also married an Aboriginal woman in the late 1960s, boasted that he had settled the same matter among local whites with his fists.

Walking through the paddocks one day, Aunty Sue and I looked up to see a bunch of crows chasing an eagle through the sky. The eagle ducked and weaved, and the crows came at it from every side, pecking and harassing it. 'Go Crows!' Aunty Sue called out, in her husky smokers' voice.

Sue barracks for the Adelaide Crows football club, a stirrer in a Port Adelaide stronghold. But she also identifies herself with the sharp-eyed, observant crow, and refers to herself sometimes as 'an old crow cackling'.

She has a strong singing voice that is both rough and sweet. I thought she was skilled in the Situationist art of 'detournement'. The Situationists were radical French artists and thinkers of the 1960s. In Mackenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street he explains that detournement 'treats all of culture as common property to begin with, and openly declares its rights'. Aunty Sue delights in such acts of 'unauthorized appropriation', which produce subversive meanings. She alters selected fragments of country and western lyrics so that they become irreverent ballads about local Ceduna characters — one featuring white farmers ready with a shotgun. She taught me an amended lullaby that I sung to my own babies: I see the moon and the moon sees me / Smiling through the leaves of the old gum tree / I hope that moon that shines on me / Shines on the one that I love.

Native title on the West Coast

Out bush one day Sue mulled over the fact that 'government' named the railway line that runs from Adelaide to Darwin, 'the Ghan'. And yet, she said, the government 'was locking up all those Afghans in Baxter [Immigration Detention Centre]'. 'Hang on,' Sue continued, 'why am I surprised by that?' She paused for effect. 'That's what they do to us.'

According to numerous theorists, the liberal multicultural nation state sometimes reaches out to acknowledge, celebrate and even incorporate Aboriginality into its self-understanding, desiring to respect cultural difference. But late liberal states also move to manage, contain and cordon off the perceived threat of difference, often in violent ways. In the case of the Ghan, Australia gestures retrospectively to honour and incorporate the experiences of a dominated people previously subject to racial prejudice and violence. Yet, as the sheer brutality of Australia's asylum seeker system demonstrates, the federal government also retains the power to manage the national space, excluding others in the present. Native title is an exemplary case of a late liberal settler colonial state grappling with the 'recognition' of Indigenous difference, as native title rights arise from Indigenous peoples' distinctive cultural traditions. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has brought to light the conditions imposed on the state's embrace: difference is seemingly valued but the multicultural state recoils from too much difference, or 'radical alterity', revealing its intolerance. Since the 2002 publication of Povinelli's groundbreaking Cunning of Recognition, the nation-state's limited romance with Indigenous cultural difference has waned. Indeed, as political theorist Elizabeth Strakosch writes, 'The progressive multicultural state that recognizes and dispenses entitlements ... already seems like a figure of nostalgia'.

In the policy era ushered in by the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response ('the Intervention'), extensions and evolutions of both sovereign and disciplinary forms of state power have meant possibilities for being culturally 'otherwise' are ever shrinking, argues Povinelli. Put more simply, the current moment insists on the integration of Indigenous individuals into the mainstream capitalist economy, justifying coercive interventions into the lives of those Indigenous people who are deemed to lack the capacity to work.

These complex developments are beyond the scope of this work. Here I note simply that no epoch neatly supplants another. In one sense, native title might seem like a creature properly belonging to a more optimistic time — a period in which it was hoped that Mabo might come to mark a rupture in Australia's colonial history, and form part of a movement towards collective redress. In fact, as anthropologist David Martin has perceptively shown, the Native Title Act simultaneously evokes indigeneity in two different guises. The claims process asks Indigenous people to present their identities in a 'singular and traditionalist' mode, in order to secure native title rights. At this stage of the process Indigeneity is desired in a familiar sense, as 'authentic' and shared cultural difference. Yet the agreement making provisions of the same act are predicated on Indigenous people partaking in interest-based negotiations with third parties. Native title claimants and holders typically seek to secure employment commitments from resource companies, business development opportunities and so on. In this moment, Indigenous people's active engagement with the capitalist economy rather than collective attachments to country is centred: indigeneity is refigured as best served by incorporation into the contemporary state and employment market.

In response to recognition's 'cunning' or its 'trick', Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson shows that Indigenous peoples might instead 'refuse' that which they have been offered. For Simpson, 'there is a political alternative to "recognition," the much sought-after and presumed "good" of multicultural politics'. The alternative is refusal, which Simpson says, involves 'a willfull distancing from state-driven forms of recognition and sociability in favor of others'. Rather than making themselves recognisable by enacting the kinds of 'contortions' involved in becoming an ethnologically legible Indigenous cultural subject, that is to say the right kind of Indigenous person on whom recognition might be bestowed, many Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke direct their political energies into assertions of nationhood and questions of membership. The energies of Aunty Sue Mob are more diffused, and the scope of their modest actions more local in scale, but Simpson's argument clearly applies.

These are my questions: What are some of the unintended consequences and unpredictable social forces unleashed by involvement in native title claims? What kinds of Aboriginal life experiences and identity formations are rewarded within the native title process? And what kinds of Aboriginal experiences of the colonial encounter — of movement, disjunction, dislocation and discontinuity — jeopardise the basis of an efficacious claim to traditional owner status? Where the answers to these questions lead to disillusionment, what does the resulting politics of refusal look like?

To return to more concrete details: the late-2013 Federal Court decision on the West Coast resolved the largest native title claim in South Australia. The claim joined together the claims of the following cultural groups: Mirning Peoples, Wirangu Peoples, Kokatha Peoples, the descendants of Edward Roberts, Yalata Peoples and Maralinga Tjarutja (Oak Valley) Peoples. Aunty Sue Mob are 'proud Kokatha people' but they did not participate in the latter stages of the claim. Why not?

The backstory to this complex claim, and their eventual rejection of its terms, runs something like this: since the mid-1990s, the rightful ownership of this country became the subject of a bitter local contest. The turn to the colonial archive, which research for native title claims invariably involves, has seen the re-emergence over the past two decades of a near-forgotten 'tribal' category. A group of people in Ceduna have now come to identify as Wirangu. I am at pains to acknowledge that many Wirangu-identifying people are excited by the revelatory and empowering opportunities for self-discovery that native title has underwritten. Those people who understand themselves as Wirangu now assert that they are the traditional owners of the coast; Kokatha people are increasingly 'properly' understood in the anthropological literature as Western Desert 'migrants', whose traditional estates — those lands over which they can claim rights of traditional ownership — lie in the arid north, far beyond their well-known world. Those termed 'migrants' live less than 50 kilometres from the birthplace of their grandparents.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from 'Against Native Title' by Eve Vincent. Copyright © 2017 Eve Vincent. Excerpted by permission of Aboriginal Studies Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Pr
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1925302083
• ISBN 13: 9781925302080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 243