Against Native Title: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia - Softcover

Vincent, Eve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1925302083 ISBN 13: 9781925302080

Verlag: Aboriginal Studies Pr, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

‘Against native title’ is about one group’s lived experience of a divisive native title claim in the outback town of Ceduna, where the native title claims process has thoroughly reorganized local Aboriginal identities over the course of the past decade. The central character in this story is senior Aboriginal woman Sue Haseldine, a self-styled charismatic rebel and master storyteller. This is a vivacious and very human story, which makes a vital contribution to national debates around issues of Aboriginal futures in remote and regional areas.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. She is the co-editor of Unstable Relations: Indigenous people and environmentalism in contemporary Australia (UWAP, 2016) and History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (UTS E-Press, 2014). Eve’s writing has appeared in scholarly journals as well as outlets such as Griffith Review, Overland, Sydney Review of Books and Meanjin.

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'Against Native Title'

Conflict and creativity in outback Australia

By Eve Vincent

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2017 Eve Vincent
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-925302-08-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Map of Ceduna and surrounds, 
Introduction, 
1 Heading 'out the back', 
2 'Rockholes all over the place', 
3 The making of 'mission mob', 
4 Spectres of 'Welfare', 
5 Memories of the 'old ways', 
6 'We know who we are': the impact of native title on local identities, 
7 Engaging the historical record, 
8 Fighting about native title, 
9 Tending to rockholes, 
10 Making assertions, 
11 Where dingoes howl, 
12 Where dogs reign, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Heading 'out the back'

Grip of a fighter

'The wind is my hairdresser,' says Aunty Sue, stepping out into her dusty yard and letting the hot north wind rush through tangled thick black hair. A wire clothesline stretches across the dirt yard, tractors and car carcasses rust away in a nearby paddock, dogs run out madly to greet approaching cars, and in the middle of this scene Sue stands with a cigarette in a curled hand. Sue lives on a wheat farm with her whitefella husband, Gary, near the small, isolated town of Ceduna. From her yard a strip of flat, grey-blue sea can be glimpsed to the south. North of the chip-dry paddocks, 'out the back', lies a vast stretch of bush; stunted mallee scrublands roll away on sandy waves.

The task of the hairdresser is to subdue and shape hair, human hands and tools bringing this naturally occurring stuff under their control. Sue styles herself in conscious opposition to this, subverting the human will/natural forces hierarchy. She is drawn to images of wildness and rebellion, joyfully submitting to the wind, which here represents the unpredictable and powerful forces of the natural world with its capacity to overpower human designs and desires.

The philosopher Richard Klein understands smoking as 'a wordless but eloquent form of expression'. Sue pinches her cigarettes between her thumb and first finger in a smoking style that is distinctly edgy. This is the grip of the fighter: the knuckles are bared. Sue embodies a kind of refusal to have her passions tamed, and a disregard for others' expectations. She is 'against native title', despite the fact that native title legislation is designed to recognise Indigenous connections to land, and subsequent rights and interests in it. She is 'against mining' too, even if it promises the economic salvation of remote and regional Aboriginal worlds such as hers. Her experience of these complexly entangled issues will emerge in time. For now I add that for all her toughness, Sue both refuses and embraces. While she is locally well known for the things she is against, in this moment she also meets the wind, playfully embracing a certain wildness she believes is in us all.

That 'outlaw one', Aunty Sue

Aunty Sue spent her childhood on the Koonibba Lutheran Mission, located approximately 45 kilometres west of Ceduna. As a young woman she met Gary, whose family has farmed in this wheat-growing district since the early years of the twentieth century; in the late 1960s they danced together to the jukebox in a Greek café in the adjacent port town of Thevenard. Sue raised her own six children (one deceased), as well as 'growing up' a host of other kids, and is now a grandmother and great-grandmother. My focus is firmly on her most recent phase of life, and her public identity as activist, 'rebel', or, as she puts it, 'outlaw one'.

Sue has a brown, sun-beaten face creased with deep smile lines; spindly stars radiate from the edges of her eyes. She also has the gift of the gab. Her warmth and humour, as well as her ability to craft a narrative and to generate insights out of ordinary occurrences, have made a lasting impression on me, as well as on many people around her.

Aunty Sue wears tracksuit pants and floppy tee-shirts. In 2007, she was awarded the inaugural South Australian Premier's Award for 'excellence in Indigenous leadership in natural resource management' and in 2013 she was recipient of the South Australian Landcare award in the Indigenous Land Management category. Sue donned 'glad rags' at the ceremony for the first award, but kept on her beloved 'trackies' beneath her skirt. She would cheerfully accept a prize for fighting against the aggressively pro-mineral extraction policies of the very state government whose representative shook her hand, but she would not give up being herself in the moment she did so. Two favourite tee-shirts give further insight into her cheek, both given to her as presents from environmentalists. One features armed Native American Indians and says, 'Homeland Security. Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.' The other declares, 'Black by popular demand.'

Born on the mission

Storytelling is a vital human imperative. In telling a story, distance between the storyteller and the events concerned is established. In the process, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes, a 'degree of agency is recovered', and 'a balance re-established between our need to determine the world to the same extent that it is felt to determine us'. One of the narratives that Sue has most masterfully shaped is the story of her own life. Born on Koonibba Mission in 1951, Sue frequently says that she has 'always been a rebel'. Her siblings remember her as a 'tomboy' growing up. Aunty Sue told me:

I used to go with all the men, which was pretty much unheard of. There'd be one little girl who'd travel everywhere with the men coz all the other girls had to learn basket weaving and stuff, but I learned on the land, our culture. So I was really lucky in that respect.

Sue travelled out bush in a two-wheel sulky, drawn by a horse. 'Our people have been walking that country for years so having a horse and sulky was a little bonus,' she says.

She was the particular favourite of one of her mother's younger brothers: he spoilt her 'something rotten' and gave in to her demands to go everywhere with the men. With her uncles and grandfathers, Sue went bush for days at a time. 'They took me right out the back there.'

Sue now thinks that she was taken bush for a reason:

Old grandfathers used to look after me, take me places — I think they took me there just [because] I had memory, coz I can remember things. That's why I'm fighting now. I think they already knew that 'this one here is an outlaw'. Coz I was always called outlaw. 'Outlaw one will get a back up later on in life.'

Sue traces her current willingness to fight 'government' on the issue of mining to her childhood experiences. Her grandfathers entrusted cultural knowledge to her about particular rockhole sites, permanent water sources scattered in the scrub 'out the back there', believing she would be inclined to get her 'back up' and be willing to 'stick up for the land'. Moreover, as she explained to oral historian Sue Anderson and archeologist Keryn Walshe in 1996, her dogged 'hatred for government' stems from the fact that she harbours 'a fair bit of hatred for the system that took the brother away'. This is a reference to her experience of 'Welfare' and the splitting up of her family after the end of the mission in 1963.

Sue and Gary's farmhouse, built in the 1950s, has thick crumbling stone walls, which keep it cool in the scorching summers. The couple is usually to be found sitting around their kitchen table,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Aboriginal Studies Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1925302083
• ISBN 13: 9781925302080
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 243
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar