hat are the benefits of Caring for Country for Aboriginal people? In your answer provide at least one case study to support your argument
Syllabus 14 template 1 Student names ABOR1110 Talking Circle 15 marks criteria HD 35 & above DN 30-34 CR PP NN In your submission: In your submission: In your submission: In your submission: In your submission: criterion 1 presenter skills Weighting: 25% /5 marks The presentation is highly visually appealing and easily accessible for participants The presenter speaks very clearly and has an outstanding manner to engage participants The presentation is very visually appealing and accessible for participants Minor improvements would benefit the presentation. The presenter speaks clearly and has a very pleasing manner to engage participants The presentation is visually appealing and accessible for participants. Some improvements would benefit the presentation. The presenters speaking needs revision They have a pleasing manner to engage participants The presentation is visually acceptable and accessible for participants. Substantial improvements would benefit the presentation. The presenters speaking needs significant revision. They engage participants adequately The presentation is not visually acceptable or accessible for participants. Substantial improvements are needed in the presentation The presenters speaking needs major revision. They did not engage participants adequately criterion 2 structure and content Weighting 75% /10 marks The Presentation is outstanding in its structure. The Talking Circle shows an excellent depth of knowledge of the topic. The Presentation is advanced in its structure. The Talking Circle shows a good depth of knowledge of the topic. The Presentation is very competent in its structure. The Talking Circle shows an adequate depth of knowledge of the topic. The Presentation is satisfactory in its structure. The Talking Circle shows an adequate depth of knowledge of the topic. The Presentation is not satisfactory in its structure. The Talking Circle shows superficial knowledge of the topic. Comments Grade /15 2 Irene Watson Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country, and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples The real land and law business has not been done. What I would like to point out to you is that in terms of our land and our law it needs to be understood, as my mother said, that we are custodians of this land. And when people say, “oh we lost this land or we lost that land,” we didn’t lose it anywhere. The land is still here and we still have the responsibility of being custo- dians of that land. The problem is that we haven’t been given the power in the non-Aboriginal legal system to fulfill that custodial right. Until our Elders in Council decide on these matters through their customary laws and until that consent, which Captain Cook was sup- posed to get, is properly given, then we still live under bad laws. —Dennis Walker, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, April 9, 1995 In this essay I reflect on Aboriginal worldviews and practices and the challenges posed to their survival by what Dennis Walker names bad laws. While different Aboriginal peoples belong to dif- ferent places, or ruwi, and Aboriginal worldviews are diverse,1 here I consider the possibility of decolonizing a space outside an Australian mono- culture that could become a home to Aboriginal worldviews. South Atlantic Quarterly 108:1, Winter 2009 doi 10.1215/00382876-2008-021 © 2008 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/108/1/27/470189/SAQ108-01-02WatsonFpp.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE user on 17 August 2018 28 Irene Watson Aboriginal worldviews struggle under an Australian colonialism that his- torically denied an Aboriginal presence and went on to build the Australian state’s foundation.2 Although that foundation is based on the myth of terra nullius,3 Aboriginal peoples were and still are present, carrying laws and cultures that governed every space of Australia. In the landmark native title case Mabo v. The State of Queensland,4 six of the seven judges held that the doctrine of terra nullius as applied to Australia was a fiction and should hold no continuing place in the common law of Australia. However, the histori- cal negation of an Aboriginal presence based on terra nullius continues, in spite of Mabo, while the illusion of an Aboriginal space being held by the “settled native” is allowed by the state.5 Australian law seems to have incor- porated and accommodated the settled native as “British subject” from the time of the invasion of Australia,6 but in reality Aboriginal peoples were treated as enemies and objects of British law. This, nevertheless, provoked questions about the efficacy of native title law: can it provide a real home for the sovereign Aboriginal subject? Who is the native subject, and what is its status, outside native title recognition? The untitled native? The “unsettled native,” left to unsettle the settled spaces of empire? The intention here is not to construct a stereotype by naming the unsettled native, but it is an attempt to communicate the ongoing Aboriginal resistance to con- form and fit into mainstream Australian culture, while unsettled natives occupy diminishing spaces on the fringes of empire. Those fringe spaces provide only a temporary home for Aboriginality, because the presence of the unsettled native is itself challenging the fiction of lawful foundation. Aboriginal resistance, which has no “legitimate” space for countering the power of the state, is given articulation only in illegitimate spaces such as by the prisons, the mental institutions, and the parklands of the state. Accommodating and Incorporating the Native By the 1930s, the Australian state and commonwealth governments were becoming aware that the social Darwinist expectations of the extinction of the natives were not being realized, and so they determined a path of assimilation for “their natives.”7 Ultimately, the aim was the same: assimi- lation was just as much a final solution as starvation and disease. However, an underlying irony existed. While in law Aboriginal peoples were consid- ered “British subjects” of a settled colony, colonial policies contained and separated Aboriginal peoples under the powers of the Aborigines acts from Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/108/1/27/470189/SAQ108-01-02WatsonFpp.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE user on 17 August 2018 Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country 29 mainstream Australian life. Prior to 1967, jurisdiction over the “Aboriginal race” was excluded from the Australian Commonwealth head of power.8 The states and the Northern Territory held jurisdiction over Aboriginal affairs until the 1967 amendments. From the earliest colonial period of Austra- lian history, the Aboriginal presence was met with a violence intended to remove peoples from their traditional lands. It was a time referred to by High Court of Australia justices Sir William Deane and Mary Gaudron in Mabo (No. 2) as “a national legacy of unutterable shame.”9 “Protectionist” policies and the Aborigines acts of the states and territory sanctioned the control of all aspects of Aboriginal life: the removal and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples from their lands, the further removal from Aboriginal reserve lands, the care and custody of Aboriginal children, discipline on the reserves, imprisonment, prohibition of the use of traditional languages, and prohibition of cultural and law practices.10 Nungas11 became institutionalized wards of the state, living under the direction of the Aboriginal protector.12 Our ancestors were known as “protected persons” rather than as Aboriginal peoples belonging to ruwi. In Australian law we were deemed “British subjects,” but in practice we were made invisible, doomed to annihilation and absorption. The colonies established reserves, and the roundup and placement of nungas into these institutions served to provide enclaves of cheap labor for the local agri- cultural industries. All movement of Aboriginal peoples onto and off of reserves was controlled, as our ruwi was increasingly invaded by pastoral- ists and farmers. At a time when slavery was no longer practiced within the boundaries of “law,” the Aborigines acts provided a labor force at the cost of subsistence rations, which replaced food sources formerly available to hunter-gatherer peoples. Nungas were placed on Aboriginal reserves without consideration being given to clan identity or language group; they were often removed from ruwi and relocated to other regions hun- dreds of kilometers away from traditional homelands. Under the Aborigi- nes acts, the separation of fair-skinned nungas from dark-skinned, divid- ing “half-castes” from “pure-blood” or “full-blood” natives, became policy. This policy intended to assimilate “half-castes” into white society, aiming at keeping groups separate, preferably unmixed and ranked hierarchically according to color; that is, those Aboriginal people who looked more white than others were assessed as being more easily assimilated into white Aus- tralia. “Half-caste” children were separated from their parents. Policies of child removal have since been referred to as acts of “genocide,”13 and the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/108/1/27/470189/SAQ108-01-02WatsonFpp.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE user on 17 August 2018 �0 Irene Watson Australian government respectively apologized, saying “sorry” on February 12, 2008. While Australian law and policy variously pursued the extinction, segre- gation, protection, and assimilation of the settled native, the unsettled native continued to inhabit fringe spaces that the state would not recognize. This continues. The unsettled native is constantly occupying and reoccupying these sites. Aboriginal traditional homelands are one example; another is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, occupied by Aboriginal peoples since the 1970s as a space in which the dispossession of land rights and sov- ereignty are spoken back to the state. Similar Aboriginal sites of resistance have arisen across Australia at different times. Camp Sovereignty came into existence during the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, creating a space to speak on Aboriginal sovereignty and to demonstrate the long history of subjugation.14 The state denies the voices of the unsettled native because these voices put a lie to ideas of “white supremacy” and the illusion of the free, informed, and consenting native’s participation in the colonial project. This illusion has Aboriginal people positioned as participants of a process that would have our native histories and connections to home erased. In Mabo (No. 2), the High