Walking, Frontier and Nation: Re/tracing the Songlines in Central Australian Literature

ABSTRACT

Central Australia is widely characterised as a frontier, a familiar trope in literary constructions of Australian identity that divides black from white, ancient from modern. However, recent anthropological and literary evidence from the Red Centre defies such a clear-cut representation, suggesting more nuanced ‘lifeworlds’ than a frontier binary can afford may better represent the region. Using walking narratives to mark a meeting point between Aboriginal and settler Australian practices of placemaking, this paper summarises and updates literary research by the author (2011–2015), which reads six recounted walks of the region for representations of frontier and home. Methods of textual analyses are described and results appraised for changes to the storied representation of Central Australia from the precolonial era onward. The research speaks to a ‘porosity’ of intercultural boundaries, explores literary instances of intercultural exchange; nuances settler Australian terms for place, including home, Nature and wilderness; and argues for new place metaphors to supersede ‘frontier’. Further, it suggests a recent surge in the recognition of Aboriginal songlines may be reshaping the nation’s key stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• frontier
• central Australia
• literature
• Aboriginal songlines
• place and space
• palimpsest

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Glenn Morrison is a sessional lecturer in writing at Charles Darwin University, Alice Springs, and completed his PhD at Macquarie University. He is the author of Writing Home: Walking, Literature and Belonging in Australia’s Red Centre (MUP Academic 2017), and Songlines and Fault Lines: Epic Walks of the Red Centre (MUP 2017).

Notes

1. Labels such as ‘Outback’ and ‘the Bush’ pertain to Australia’s more sparsely populated regions of the inland and North that have been pivotal in shaping national identities, with Central Australia seen as core to the mythology (See McGrath 1991).

2. In the Australian context, the ‘frontier’ is taken to mean the colonial frontier and sites of colonial conflict, or, more broadly, a cultural and ontological divide between settler and Indigenous Australians (Morrison 2015). Ideas of frontier were important to Australian intellectual thought of the late nineteenth century (White 1981), aiding the sketching of a ‘genuine Australian character’, a nomadic bushman born on the frontier (Ward 1958). Russel Ward located his national character where Culture met Nature in the fashion of US historian Frederick Turner’s ‘new American’ (1893). By similar metamorphoses, an Australian was remade by their encounter with Nature and ‘the primitive’ (MacIntyre 2002: 10). A discourse of frontier has before and since remained implicit in constructions of Australian bush mythology and nation (Dewar 1996, 1997; Rowley 1996).

3. Raymond Williams (1972) describes Nature as ‘perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language’, with meanings ranging from a primitive condition before human society to the essential essence of a thing, or Mother Nature, a mystical force seemingly at odds with a monotheistic God. Val Plumwood (2009) emphasises the dualistic and reductionist trends dominating Western thinking about Nature (see also Nature/Culture divide below), and questions why creativity and agency might not infuse the non-human world around us. Such ideas underpin a decolonising approach to defining Nature, which proposes that one might transcend the colonialist split of Nature from Culture (Plumwood 2002: 8). A dualistic conceptualising of Nature leaves it open to exploitation as an inert object, important by contrast to the Indigenous notion of Country (see also below), which sees no divide between Nature and Culture, in a living land that ‘listens, sorrows, knows its own’ (Mathews 2002: 3).

4. Jones (2009) defines the Nature/Culture divide as the separation of Nature and Culture, in ontological and epistemological terms, that underpins modern knowledge. In this sense the human (Culture) is separated from the non-human (Nature), with ‘primitive’ peoples considered part of Nature, provoking a widespread denial of commonalities (Plummer 2002). Such Cartesian thinking has encouraged a characteristic dualism in Western readings of the world, one now thought to be responsible for a host of problems facing the globe (Jones 2009). Consequently, the concept has undergone considerable review, but remains problematic as contrary to an Aboriginal worldview, where there is no distinction between Human and Nature.

5. Human communities – even those at the frontier – can exist as imagined communities in the way Benedict Anderson describes for nations (Anderson 1991: 5–6). The imagined dimensions of the Centre play a crucial and increasingly significant role in its representation (Bishop 2011: 27).

6. The exact period of a colonial frontier in Central Australia is a vexed matter. It might be defined as starting at first contact in 1860 when John McDouall Stuart reached the Centre and finishing after the Coniston Massacre in 1928 (Rubuntja and Green 2002). Rolf Gerritsen (2010) nominates starting a few years after the explorers and ending around the time of World War One, the ‘closing’ of the frontier sparked by transfer of ownership of the Northern Territory from South Australia to the Commonwealth in 1911. Central Australian historian Dick Kimber (1990) nominates the period of worst violence –‘the bad old days’ − starting with the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line in 1871 and ending around 1894. Others argue frontier conditions prevail in Central Australia today.

7. The Assimilation Era (1930s–1960s) in Australia is the period when a policy of assimilation operated to transform Aboriginal people and new migrants into Australian citizens, often defined from the 1950s until the 1970s (Haebich 2008). However, as early as 1937 a conference called by the Federal Government had adopted assimilation for some Aboriginal people as official policy (Australian Museum n.d.) Others put the beginning even earlier, based on a forced suppression of language use. Smolicz and Secombe (2003: 6) argue, for example, that by 1901, ‘when the states came together to form the Federation of Australia, a climate favouring cultural and linguistic monism had emerged.’ In addition to an assimilation era, two other matters are of historic significance. First, the Stolen Generations, which refers to the systematic removal of ‘mixed-race’ and Indigenous children from their families from the late nineteenth century to the late 1960s (Australia and Wilkie 1997; Manne 1998; Haebich 2011). The second is the Reconciliation movement, the roots of which may be traced back to at least 1979 and the start of a concerted campaign for a treaty between Aboriginal people and Australia’s government (Short 2003). Unlike USA, Canada and New Zealand, a formal settlement or treaty regarding the colonisation of Australia was never struck between invaders and invaded. As Short (2003) describes, a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991 emerged from the treaty campaign, prefacing a movement toward reconciliation, which was later criticised as a one-sided effort with no option for Indigenous refusal.

8. For an up-to-date report on Indigenous publications in Central Australia I would refer the reader to IAD Press Alice Springs, and the Northern Territory Writers Centre.

9. Walkabout is a pejorative used by settler Australians, often in the context of the Northern cattle industry and characterised by the phrase ‘gone walkabout’. The word describes when an Aboriginal worker suddenly and unexpectedly leaves a place or situation, implying they are lazy or unreliable (Young and Doohan 1989), or lost and lacking purpose and direction (Perkins 2001). In another context, however, the word may also mean a form of settler travel for the young or carefree.

10. Suggested reading/viewing might include Nicholson 2007; James and Tregenza 2014; Kelly 2016; Morrison 2017b; Neale 2017, and in other mediums Songlines on Screen 2015, First Footprints 2015, Songlines: the Indigenous Memory Code 2016, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters 2017.

11. The North is defined by the Brisbane Line so called because soon after the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces in 1942, those living north of Brisbane became convinced a latitudinal line had been drawn through the city and across the nation, leaving them in an area not to be defended (Shultz 2005: 8).

12. Australian historical and contemporary culture is shaped by colonialism, but there is some controversy over use of the term postcolonial. In this paper, ‘postcolonial’ means the period after colonial invasion or settlement, and covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2).

13. Space may be considered as the three-dimensional geometry around us, ‘the encompassing void in which things (including human beings) are positioned’ (Casey 2001: 683). Place, on the other hand, is ‘space humanised’ (Buell 1995: 253), or ‘space that is important to someone’ (Vanclay 2008: 3). Put simply, when space becomes known, it is place.

14. Country is an Indigenous and distinctly non-Western conceptualising of place that does not recognise a split between Nature and Culture. Instead it sees the land as a living entity, such that Aboriginals are ‘from’ and ‘of’ the land (Wilson & Ellender 2002: 56). Aboriginal people may have a connectedness to a particular location, which may be ascribed through ‘family ties or because of responsibility for the management and ceremonial rights of a particular place’ (Wilson & Ellender 2002: 57). Country implies also an awareness that is ‘beyond the purely human frame’, of a country ‘alive with Aboriginal consciousness’ (Cameron & San Roque 2002: 77).

15. For more on the metaphor ‘palimpsest’ used widely since its inauguration by Thomas de Quincey in 1845, see Dillon (2005). Another way to think of the multi-layered place of Central Australia is as space that is ‘overwritten with stories and histories’ of the people who have lived there (Saglia 2002: 124), or following the work of Doreen Massey (2005: 9), as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.

16. In western traditions, wilderness is thought of as ‘a place where humans have not yet set foot’ (Brower 1978:7), a land thereby ‘untamed and wild’ (Short 1991:5). Such thinking arguably has roots in transcendentalist philosophies, well characterised in Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking (1862). The emphasis is on the emptiness (from humans) of the landscape (Holmes 1935). For the transcendentalists to commune with Nature in this way is redemptive, but wilderness may also be considered punitive, as in the case of the colonial explorers. To call Australia wilderness is, however, to imply no human influence shaped its development, which is incorrect (Gammage 2011; Head 1993). Indigenous critic Marcia Langton argues there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ landscape (Langton 1996: 11) and condemns descriptions of Aboriginal lands as wilderness as ‘a travesty of justice’ (Langton 2013b: 39; see also Langton 2013a).

17. For example, construction of the Overland Telegraph Line (1870–1872) sparked a frontier period across the Centre in which as many as 1000 Aboriginal people were shot and numerous whites speared (Kimber 1990: 16).

18. For a noteworthy exception, see Kerwin (2012).

19. As Coughlan (1991: vii) has noted, Aboriginal fringe camps were ‘a feature of the town before it was gazetted’, and persist today, continuing to delimit zones of exclusion and disadvantage. Conversely, the Northern Territory Land Rights Act of 1976 and subsequent Native Title legislation during the 1990s ‘significantly altered property relationships in the town’, whereby beyond the camps there has emerged an Aboriginal middle class (Finnane & Finnane 2011: 262).

20. Representations were identified from the literature review and/or the author’s 20 years of lived experience.

21. First coined by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) to embrace an immediate lived experience of the world, the term ‘lifeworld’ was further developed by Arthur Schutz (1899–1959) as the ‘common-sense reality of the social world’, and again by Jürgen Habermas as ‘the world of everyday communicative interaction’: The term lifeworld may be taken here to mean the world as shaped by and within the immediate experience of each person (Harrington 2006: 2–3).

22. For more on this and for a discussion of the Central Australia context specifically, see Cameron and San Roque (2002).