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ABSTRACT
Noongar West Australian dramaturg Jack Davis’s plays present an Indigenous Australian perspective on rationing that identifies it as a punitive form of subjugation. Davis’s Kullark and No Sugar show how rationing produces an Indigenous population subject to colonial administration while limiting Indigenous access to an equitable share of commonwealth resources. The impoverishing diet of introduced foods that is imposed on Indigenous people induces ill health, family dysfunction, and criminality. This essay extends Tim Rowse’s reading of rationing as a form of biopolitical administration by showing how Davis’s plays record the way it produces a raced and subaltern form of life in order to enhance the non-Indigenous Australian population’s health, wealth, and wellbeing.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Woollarawarre Bennelong was a Wangal-Eora man captured in November 1789 on the orders of Arthur Phillip, first governor of the convict colony of New South Wales, who sought an intermediary between the English invaders and the local Indigenous people (see Smith Citation2001).
2. The 1967 Referendum endorsed changes to the Australian constitution that allowed the Commonwealth Government to assume authority for making laws that applied to Indigenous Australians. It also required Indigenous people to be counted as part of the population in the national census. The referendum, widely perceived by non-Indigenous society as affirming an end to racial discrimination, led to Indigenous people nominally becoming entitled to the same wages and government benefits as non-Indigenous people.
3. See Barwick (Citation1998, 71–78) for details of the various clans and peoples that came to live at Coranderrk, including members of the Taungerong, Boonwurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wathaurong, Yorta Yorta, Kurnai, and Burapper.
4. Only the aged and infirmed were entitled to meat in their ration. Working aged men were expected to purchase meat, using wages they earned laboring in the mission’s hop gardens, from the local butcher (Broome Citation2011, 43.8). Women were not paid wages; however, at the 1877 Royal Commission, the inmate Martin Simpson asserted that women received 6 lbs of meat each week, the same as working men (Royal Commission on the Aborigines Citation1877, 30).
5. A study such as Nettelbeck and Foster’s (Citation2012), for instance, makes no allowance for Indigenous ration recipients’ agency and frames rationing entirely in terms of coercion and conciliation by the dominant class and culture. The authors permit themselves to propose “an Aboriginal point of view” on rationing, comprising a single sentence, without supporting citation (Nettelbeck and Foster Citation2012, 31).
6. In later years, Davis discovered that his father was born in Roeburn (Citation1991, 145).
7. Atwood (Citation1992, i) defines Aboriginalism as “as a mode of discourse which, like Edward Said’s Orientialism (1978), produces authoritative and essentialist ‘truths’ about indigenes, and which is characterised by a mutually supporting relationship between power and knowledge”. He argues that Aboriginalism can “be seen to have produced the reality it has imagined by influencing government policies and practices which have, in turn, determined Aborigines terms of existence – racializing the aboriginal social body and so making Aborigines of the indigenous population” (Atwood Citation1992, ii–iii).
8. White man is mad.
9. Auber Octavius Neville was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 until 1936. As Chief Protector, he was afforded enormous power over Indigenous people, including “direct control over Aboriginal peoples” sexual relations, social relations, marriage, geographical mobility, residence, employment, income, property ownership and management, education, custody of children – even over where they could camp’ (O’Malley Citation1994, 48).
10. The sergeant later invokes the authority gained from his proximity and familiarity that providing sustenance has afforded him: “[t]ake it from me, I been dealin” with “em for years … I know exactly what they’re like” he tells another non-Indigenous character (Davis Citation1986, 18).
11. The Sergeant may have good reason for suggesting flour is preferred to hand-milled native seeds. Scott Cane’s research in the Western desert suggests that although seeds are easy to collect, the process of preparing them for consumption is extremely labor intensive: grinding 200 grams of seeds requires approximately one hour of arduous work (Cane Citation1987, 401). Zeanah et al.’s (Citation2015) contemporary research on Martu hunting and gathering in Western Australia finds that flour continues to be preferred over seeds for use in making damper, even when other traditional food gathering practices are being practiced despite commercially supplied alternatives being available.
12. A number of scholars have observed that increased Indigenous population density around ration stations resulted in over-harvesting and consequent depleting of bush tucker (O’Brien Citation2015, 114). Others go further, alleging sources of food outside the colonial distribution system were deliberately destroyed to increase dependency on rations and reduce labor time lost to hunting and gathering expeditions (McGrath Citation1987, 141). Norbert Finzsch (Citation2017) has suggested that ecological damage was generated through a combination of ignorance and negligence, desire to maximize the land’s profitability, and the intent to reduce Indigenous survival and occupation.
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Steven Farry
Steven Farry recently completed his PhD, which read food as a technology of biopower in the work of Indigenous Australian storytellers, at the University of Melbourne.