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Abstract
Since Prime Minister Howard's declaration in 2007 that child sex abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities was Australia's ‘own Hurricane Katrina’, the trope of natural disaster has been a regular feature of print and television media coverage of Indigenous affairs in Australia. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is to separate what happens to Aboriginal people from the fabric of ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural and political life; to render it alien and unconnected to the relative privilege enjoyed by other Australians. This strategy also produces peculiar temporal effects by erecting a cordon sanitaire around Australian history and the national identity that it supports. Howard's comparison of Aboriginal disadvantage with Katrina, if read alongside his politicization of the teaching of Australian history, demonstrates an unwillingness to incorporate systemic injustice toward Indigenous people within the composition of that history. This article interrogates the relationships between the manifold understandings of Aboriginal disadvantage and attempts to commemorate its violent history, as these aspects of Australian life are both integrated and refused by national identity narratives. Specifically, the paper reinterprets the trope of natural disaster as a means of comprehending Indigenous disadvantage and Australian identity by drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Benjamin's understanding of activism as a constructive retrieval of the past will be developed to reconnect catastrophe to history, and to enable an exploration of responsibility for that history as an integral condition of contemporary Australian identity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Joanne Faulkner is a DECRA fellow in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of NSW. She is the author of The Importance of Being Innocent (Cambridge UP, 2011) and Dead Letters to Nietzsche (Ohio UP, 2010), and Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy.
Notes
1. There is a tension between (at least) three senses of ‘state of nature’ that operate in the text of Howard's speech to produce multiple and co-constitutive meanings: (1) the Hobbesian sense that he cites, more or less deliberately, to a mythical, pre-political natural state of humanity; (2) simply, social disorderliness; and (3) in Agamben's sense, a condition that is produced politically, of having been abandoned by law, and in which life itself comes to be the site of power relations (biopower). My contention would be that there is a slippage between these meanings in Howard's usage of that phrase, regardless of what he took himself to mean by it, and that while these different senses are, in turn, emphasized and de-emphasized, together they over-determine the meaning of Aboriginality as a state of nature (all at once pre-political/disordered/abandoned). Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this.
2. The NTER was triggered by an interview on the national broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, who sensationally claimed that men in remote Aboriginal communities were sexually abusing children unchecked. See http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1639127.htm (accessed 29 July 2013).
3. ‘Many Australians, myself included, looked aghast at the failure of the American federal system of government to cope adequately with Hurricane Katrina and the human misery and lawlessness that engulfed New Orleans in 2005. We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still’ (Howard).
4. Engineers remarked that the infrastructure in the Mississippi was so degraded and poorly planned that a disaster like this was not only foreseen, but also inevitable (American Society of Civil Engineers [ASCE], Citation2007). The sociological dimensions of the disaster – in particular the disproportionate distribution of suffering according to race and class – have also been studied (Dynes & Rodriguez, Citation2010).
5. What is commonly known as the ‘NT Intervention’ was enacted in Parliament as the ‘NTER’, and was supported by both major political parties. The ‘Emergency Response’ deployed army personnel, doctors, health workers, police and social workers, much as any natural disaster would. However, by suspending the Racial Discrimination Act, this legislation also authorized a raft of interventions by the state, including: the prohibition of alcohol and pornography; quarantining (for welfare recipients) of 50% of their benefit, which could then only be spent at particular stores, sometimes hundreds of miles from where people lived; removal of the permit system whereby Aboriginal people controlled who could access their land; abolition of the government-funded Community Development Employment Projects; mandatory schooling in English rather than their own language for Aboriginal children; compulsory acquisition of land, and the requirement that communities lease land to the government in exchange for basic services; the subjection of Aboriginal children to mandatory health check, without consultation with parents.
6. I am conscious that the resort to an ‘us’ and ‘them’ configuration here risks effectively erasing differences between Indigenous cultures as well as the diverse migrant populations that constitute the contemporary Australian Nation. My intention is to reflect a division that operates ontologically to entrench disadvantage, inherent to the settler-colonial mindset. There is a vague antipathy for ‘them’ because they are not supposed to exist, according to that Weltanschauung. The movement beyond that structure is therefore necessary for there to be any semblance of reconciliation in Australia.
7. Simon Lumsden argues against a simplistic interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history in Hegel, Habit, and World History (Citation2014). Here, he argues that Hegel's philosophy of history describes how cultural processes are embodied through the flow and atrophy of particular ‘shapes of life’, being fundamentally concerned with how these ‘shapes of life’ collapse and transition into new ‘shapes of life’. Such a process, far from being linear and teleological, is intimately connected to a specific cultural context. Notwithstanding these refinements of understanding Hegel, the misinterpretation of his philosophy of history as teleological has been extremely influential, and encapsulates well the settler-colonial mindset.
8. ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past. Former revolutions required historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach its issue’ (Marx, Citation1905, p. 7).
9. The personal responsibility approach to Aboriginal affairs has been co-sponsored by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson and John Howard, who both advocate home ownership and a Western understanding of rights and responsibilities as a pathway out of welfare dependency. See Noel Pearson (Citation2000). There has been a great deal of critique of the implicit individualism of this approach, however. See Foley (Citation2007), Cronin (Citation2007), and Maddison (Citation2009). On theorizing sites of Aboriginal resistance and agency, see Nakata (Citation2003) and Birch (Citation2003).
10. See also Bell (Citation2003).