A continuing theme in white poets’ approaches to describing landscape has been their attempts to incorporate themes and images taken from Aboriginal cultural traditions. Hodge and Mishra, amongst others, have termed this “Aboriginalism”. It has rarely, if ever, been a successful venture.
Aboriginalism, like many cultural perceptions and even official policies regarding Aboriginal people, was founded in ignorance of the realities of Aboriginal lives and society. Its proponents would generally lay claim to only the most noble of motives, but their pursuit of ill-founded and sometimes preposterous notions can be seen to have had significant long-term cultural and political effects.
I would suggest that Aboriginalism is still a force in non-Aboriginal society, seen at its most extreme in the New Age attempts to harness ‘Aboriginal spirituality’ within a fuzzy but lucrative ideology. There are several ways in which non-Aboriginals have attempted to benefit (financially or otherwise) from a claimed affinity or connection with an Aboriginal community or a vaguely defined culture: from T-shirt manufacturers using recognisable motifs; to well-regarded overseas-based writers (the most famous being Bruce Chatwin) or authors of self-discovery books claiming deep understanding or close connections with communities they only briefly visited; to the celebrated cases of local writers and artists such as B Wongar presenting themselves as Aboriginal.
In its broadest sense, Aboriginalism can be a pre-conceived appreciation, rather than an informed understanding, of Aboriginal people or cultures. It can also include, however, archaeological and anthropological studies, and arguably the academic field of Aboriginal Studies.
In his Introduction to the collection Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, Bain Attwood argues that it is now possible to work in some of these areas, with the benefit of Foucauldian hindsight, in a “post-Aboriginalist” context. Attwood is, however, extremely critical of the dominance of Aboriginalism within anthropology and literature:
Aboriginalism exists in at least three interdependent forms: first, as ‘Aboriginal Studies’ — the teaching, research or display of scholarly knowledge about indigenes by European scholars who claim that the indigenous peoples cannot represent themselves and must therefore be represented by experts who know more about Aborigines than they know about themselves; second, as a style of thought which is based upon an epistemological and ontological distinction between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ — in this form Europeans imagine ‘the Aborigines’ as their ‘Other’, as being radically different from themselves; third, as a corporate institution for exercising authority over Aborigines by making statements about them, authorising views of them, and ruling over them (1992: i)
In its literary forms, Aboriginalism may be, as in the case of the Jindyworobak poets, a claimed affinity with a society and cultures unknown or imagined. It is generally paternalistic, and usually involves appropriation of cultural icons, concepts or language (or those perceived or imagined). For some poets, Aboriginalism has been a very broad attempt to understand the Australian landscape and its inhabitants; for others it is a complex metaphor drawn from a largely unexperienced “Other”; for still others, such as Billy Marshall-Stoneking (see 4.2.4), it arises directly from his experiences living and working with Aboriginal people in Central Australia.
However, Hodge and Mishra claim that it is a two-edged sword:
Aboriginalism and notions of the primitive Aboriginal mentality have played an equivocal role in Australian history and in the political significance of representations of Aborigines in literature and in art. Although Aboriginalism has the effect of silencing actual Aborigines and negating their right to speak on their own behalf, it has also been mobilised positively for and by Aboriginal people. (1991: 28)
These writers further claim that Aboriginalism denies Aboriginal people the right to their own self-expression, and also “disables” the non-Aboriginal reader, preventing them from ever being able to have access to a genuine Aboriginal cultural discourse. It could be suggested, though, that a familiarity with an ersatz Aboriginal culture that was popularly fostered in the 1930s and again in the 1950s (best symbolised by the glossy ceramic ashtray emblazoned with painted boomerangs and figures) did lend itself to a later development of real appreciation of the work of modern Aboriginal artists and writers. At any rate, the ashtrays have become kitsch collector’s items in the 1990s.
It is my contention, however, that twentieth century Aboriginalism is a tradition which simply extends the discourse first of the Enlightenment and the idea of the Noble Savage, and then of Social Darwinism, and reflects the same sort of nostalgic regret about dispossession of the Aboriginal people which has marked a great deal of liberal discourse since colonisation.
Poet Lee Cataldi (see 4.4.1) claims that the phenomenon arises in part from a fear that white languages and cultures are insufficient to inform our responses to our own history, and to the land. But, in identifying white writers in Australia as colonists, she also rejects both Aboriginalism and the so-called cultural cringe that creates the need to appropriate:
It would be a mistake for colonist writers to consider ourselves culturally impoverished just because we happen to be invaders. This kind of knee-jerk reaction to the problems history places on us leads to the new-age misapprehension of both histories, an idealisation of Aboriginal product which does nothing to mitigate the continuing dispossession of Aboriginal people, and an anti-intellectualism which seeks to neutralise the criticism of contemporary Australian behaviour by Australian writers. In learning to recognise the two histories [genocide and colonisation] in our present situation we must keep firmly in mind what our history is, both following 1788, and before.
(Cataldi, 1994)
In stating her critique of Aboriginalism, Cataldi is also attempting to place her own poetry outside it. Other poets, since colonisation and up to the 1990s, have either consciously or unconsciously identified with it, or used it as a means by which they can extrapolate their own responses to a real or imagined Australian landscape.