‘You cunts can do as you like’: the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas

ABSTRACT

In the same year that Adam Goodes quit the game of AFL, soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham refused to sing the Australian National Anthem at the AFL Grand Final because she could not bear to sing the words ‘for we are young and free’. In this article, we examine why the act of singing about being ‘free’ would be both absurd and obscene for Blackfullas in Australia. Engaging with the songs of Black people, locally and globally, we reveal the fiction of free speech and freedom for all and the interests those fictions serve.

Abbreviations: AFL: Australian Football League; AO: Officer of the Order of Australia; CMC: Crime and Misconduct Commission; RCIADIC: The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal
• Deborah Cheetham
• freedom
• free speech
• racial contract
• Racial Discrimination Act

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘song woman’ is surprisingly difficult to explain. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples use the term ‘song woman’ to refer to one engaged in more than performance, testimony, narration, or composition. We also note the relationship observed by Mackinlay (2000, 84) between ‘Grandmother’s Law’ and a-nguyulnguyul performance, where ‘the word a-nguyulnguyul is used by Yanyuwa to refer to a … clever song or person’.

2. In this article, we use ‘Blackfullas’ to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are the First Peoples of Australia. Blackfulla is an Aboriginal English word typically used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

3. Chelsea Bond is an Aboriginal Australian Senior Lecturer and researcher in Public Health and Critical Indigenous Studies; Bryan Mukandi is an African Australian Philosopher and Health Policy and Systems researcher; Shane Coghill is an Aboriginal Elder and PhD candidate.

4. We use the term ‘Black folk’ deliberately, invoking Du Bois (1976) study. In so doing, we point to the prominence Du Bois gives to the songs of Black Folk. We also point to Du Bois’ assembly of African Americans and Native Americans, for instance when he notes that ‘[w]e the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed … the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African’ (22). In referring to Blackfullas and Black folk, we affirm something of that assembly, without subsuming First Nations peoples, and the prior and specific relationship that Blackfullas have to country (Moreton-Robinson 2015), within the broader category of ‘black peoples’.

5. Christopher Kelen (2003) offers a masterful reading of Advance Australia Fair, which replaced God Save the Queen as Australia’s national anthem in 1984. Kelen interrogates the ‘we’ of the second line, and finds that ‘[w]e want to have always been here […] This consciousness of an identity of pretended eternal rights is only achieved by multiple erasure […] It is achieved by means of the terra nullius myth, the myth of a land empty prior to our coming’ (169). He goes on to note that ‘Aborigines are given no specific role in this song … it is not their country or nationality being described here; rather the advance of fair Australia, an advance which takes place at the expense of an unmentionable non-polity’ (170, emphasis in original).

6. Derrida (2009, 34) juxtaposes the violence undergirding the sovereign’s power with power over (the ability to ordain) speech. He suggests a fabular grounding to political authority, where ‘a fable is always and before all else speech […] a fiction that claims to teach us something, a fiction supposed to give something to be known, a fiction supposed to make known [faire savoir], make so as to know (emphasis and parentheses in original).

7. Derrida (2002, xvi), again helpful here, notes that ‘although “alibi” means literally an alleged “elsewhere” in space, it extends beyond either topology or geography … As an allegation, an alibi can defer/differ in time … it can save itself by invoking another time’ (emphasis in original). The fabrication of a young Australia provides an elsewhere – it displaces Blackfullas and overlays this time and place of colonial violence and dispossession with a fabled one in which white Australia is free to rejoice.

8. The commemoration as ‘Australia Day’ of the landing of the ‘First Fleet’ reinscribes annually the myth of this moment as the birth of Australia, prior to which the land, not spoken for by Europeans, is taken to have been ‘empty’, save for flora and fauna. Australia Day was first officially commemorated as ‘Australia Day’ in 1935. In 1936, William Cooper established the Australian Aborigines’ League in Victoria; while Patten, Ferguson and Gibbs formed the Aborigines’ Progressive Association in New South Wales in 1937. In 1938, these leaders declared Australia Day, a day of mourning.

9. Helen Ngo (2016), an Asian Australian philosopher, notes the following regarding holding a stance:

[W]hen one holds a stance […] this is an active endeavour […] But while a horse stance can be held for the sake of training, it is also more: in the context of a form or routine, the stance serves as a foundation for transition, preparing and positioning the body for the next movement or strike. It is significant that in Chinese the word for stance, 步, can also be translated into English as ‘step’. Holding is not only active, it also enables and prepares us for action and movement.

Ngo’s work suggests that there are in Cheetham’s stance lessons to be learnt, not only about the dispositions of Blackfullas, but also the forces to which Blackfullas are subjected and must respond on an habitual basis. Césaire’s (1995) seminal Notebook can also be read as an articulation of the stance that he chooses to hold.

10. Despite the deployment of Judeo-Christian beliefs and narratives in the justification of the colonial project, particularly the invocation of that Judeo-Christian heritage by European settlers, the parallels between the author of Psalm 137 and Blackfullas is striking:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ (Psalm 137:1–3).

11. ‘One day, a good white master, who exercised a lot of influence, said to his friends: ‘Let’s be kind to the niggers.’

So the white masters grudgingly decided to raise the animal-machine man to the supreme rank of man, although it wasn’t so easy […] The black man was acted upon’ (Fanon 2008, 194, emphasis in original).

12. See Davis (1999) Blues Legacies and Black Feminism for a thorough exploration of the relationship between freedom and movement or travel, particularly as regards the spirituals, the blues and jazz in African American life.

13. From the perspective of Blackfullas, as peoples subjected to colonial settlement, this fiction can be read in ways similar to Edward Said’s (1986) ‘Canaanite Reading’ of Judeo(-Christian) expansion narratives:

Canaanites on the outside will resist and try to penetrate the walls banning them from the goods of what is, after all, partly their world too. The strength of the Canaanite […] is that being defeated and ‘outside’, you can perhaps more easily feel compassion, more easily call injustice ‘injustice’, more easily speak directly and plainly of all oppression, and with less difficulty try to understand (rather than mystify or occlude) history and equality.

14. Mills (1997) understands the ‘Racial Contract’ as

That set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements […] between members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) ‘racial’ (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria […] as ‘white,’ and coextensive with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as ‘nonwhite’ and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities […] the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it (11, emphasis in original).

15. There is something troubling about reducing a proclamation by the nation’s Attorney General in favour of the right to bigotry, to a mere ‘sad irony’. Perhaps it speaks to the unfortunate but unavoidable tolerance for violence developed by Blackfullas and Black folk. It is also worth bearing in mind that ‘[t]he “scene” of irony involves relations of power based in relations of communication’ (Hutcheon 1995, 2). Perhaps therefore, what is troubling is not our recognition of irony, but the relations of power and relations of communication at the heart of Australia.

16. Who Let The Dogs Out is the title of a song released by Bahamian group Baha Men on 26 July 2000 which performed well in the music charts in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

17. In observance of Aboriginal custom, we use the name Mulrunji that is the traditional name of the deceased.

18. Established in 1914, Palm Island is a former government-run Aboriginal reserve, which operated as a prison camp for troublesome Aboriginal people from various parts of Queensland. Under the Restriction of the Sale of Opium and Protection of Aborigines Act (1897) representatives from over 40 different tribes were exiled on Palm Island.

19. Hooper (2009, 87) attributes this description to a community member who witnessed Mulrunji’s arrest.

20. The lyrics to the song ‘Warrior in Chains’ were originally written by a Canadian Aboriginal man, Daniel Beattie. Mr Beattie was incarcerated in a Canadian prison which Roger Knox and others had performed in during the 1980s and during this tour, he gifted him two songs, one of which was ‘Warrior in Chains’. The lyrics today have been amended slightly, but the song of freedom shared between two Aboriginal men in two different countries ultimately is unchanged.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chelsea Bond

Chelsea Bond is a Senior Research Fellow at the Poche Centre for Indigenous Health at the University of Queensland. A Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, her work focuses on interpreting and privileging Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in relation to health, race, culture and identity. She has published a number of papers in relation to strength-based health promotion practice, Indigenous social capital, and the conceptualization of Aboriginality within public health.

Bryan Mukandi

Bryan Mukandi is currently a lecturer in Medical Ethics at the University of Queensland. His background is in medicine, public health, and philosophy; and his teaching and research revolve around the health and well-being of those described by Frantz Fanon as ‘the damned of the earth’. Bryan has published work philosophy and health publications, and he is currently working on a monograph on ‘Black Consciousness’.

Shane Coghill

Shane Coghill is a Goenpul man from Quandamooka with a background in anthropology and archaeology. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Queensland within the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry.