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- Chapter
Four -
Aboriginal fringe
dwellers in Darwin:
cultural persistence or culture of resistance? |
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Chapter 4 4.1 Introduction Basil Sansom's ethnography, The camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin (Sansom 1980a) portrays the everyday concerns and activities of Aboriginal people living in tents and rough shelters in bushland beside the Stuart Highway on the outskirts of Darwin in the mid-1970s (1) Sansom (1995:283) describes his text as 'the definitive book about fringe dwellers in Darwin'. The book, and many subsequent articles have 'systematically generated a processual approach' to the analysis of Aboriginal social structure (Moore and Dyck 1995:158), by arguing that 'Aborigines of the Australian North' (Sansom 1981a:279) order their everyday lives through flexible and changing social processes which are uniquely Aboriginal. Sansom presents his work as corrective to the 'negativism [in the literature] that makes people of labile social groupings sociological have-nots' and 'deviants of comparative sociology' (2) (Sansom 1981a:278). Others agree that many anthropologists viewed fringe dwellers as 'marginal ethnographic subjects' (Merlan 1995:162) until Sansom's realistic, lively and sometimes moving descriptions demonstrated that Aborigines in the camps are a rule-bound community (Langton et al 1998:28), and not stereotypical demoralised fringe dwellers who have 'lost their culture'. Clendinnen (1999:90) describes the camp at Wallaby Cross as 'an example of modern Aboriginal culture in creative action, and [a] social and political tour-de-force: the maintenance of effective group autonomy in the face of deeply hostile circumstances'. (3) |
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Although Sansom successfully locates fringe dwellers in the centre of debates on Aboriginal social structure (see Shapiro 1997:208), Merlan (1995:166) suggests that he retains a view 'that the form of life worthy of ethnographic treatment is that which remains in essence unchanged by our own'. Sansom (1988b:159, 1987:10) claims that the people at Wallaby Cross maintain cultural continuities which 'belonged to the hunter-gatherer forebears of the fringe dwellers of today. Handed down through generations [as] a heritage preserved intact'. Not surprisingly, Merlan (1995:176) notes, 'his work is much more a literature of persistence than resistance'. In this chapter I suggest that the persistence of the Wallaby Cross community was intertwined with resistance as the mob struggled for space on the outskirts of Darwin in the 1970s. In the next section of this chapter, I use empirical evidence and my experience of over thirty years of engagement with the people at ‘Wallaby Cross’ to suggest that the concentration on an ‘internal dialect’ within ‘a segregated social field’ (Sansom 1980a:265; 1981a:275) has marginalised the wider political, social and economic interests of the fringe campers. (4) Secondly, I emphasise the role of kinship and religion amongst fringe dwellers, supported by evidence of their importance in Sansom’s texts. Thirdly, I give evidence of the commitment, aspirations and attachment to place shown by a group who continue to maintain an Aboriginal presence on contested land in a hostile social environment. This appears to contrast with Sansom’s (1980a:137, 258) insistence that a labile fringe dweller society in Darwin is a ‘synthetic realisation’ of indeterminate futures. Finally, a detailed analysis provides alternative readings of Sansom’s ‘definitive’ texts. As I will describe,
‘Wallaby Cross’ was, and remains, a fringe camp which is very
different to the camps where I conducted my fieldwork between
1996 and 2001. At Fish Camp, English is not the main language
used in everyday communications and the form of Kriol that Sansom
describes is used even less. At most times, Fish Camp is not a
mixed community like Wallaby Cross. With rare exceptions, those
who use the camp speak the same languages, are relatives and come
from the same area of central Arnhem Land or nearby regions. In
the 1990s, unlike the 1970s, most Aboriginal people in the camps
have an independent income of either a pension or unemployment
benefit and none of the Fish Camp people have experience of working
on cattle stations. However, as I describe in the next section,
the people at Fish Camp and other fringe camps in Darwin in the
1990s shared with the people at ‘Wallaby Cross’, as I knew them,
a preparedness to defend their rights for space in the City of
Darwin.
The camp that Sansom calls ‘Wallaby Cross’ takes its name from a chain of small seasonal lakes near the site that the fringe dwellers chose for their camp. They are people from a hinterland of cattle stations and reserves to the south of Darwin, across to the Daly and Moil Rivers to the southwest (see Sansom 1980a:iii) who speak Kriol, English and tribal languages and have ‘whitefella names’ as well as less-publicly used Aboriginal names. For the remainder of this chapter I use the ‘whitefella names’ of sites and people, where they are known to me, instead of Sansom’s pseudonyms. This is in keeping with my argument and follows the publication by Sansom (1995:308) of a key name that unlocks ‘the code’ to unravelling the textual representations of his interlocutors, as I explain at the end of this chapter. |
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4.2 The Knuckeys
Lagoon mob: 1971-1997
When I first met the fringe dwellers who Sansom calls the ‘Wallaby Cross’ mob, they were living in abandoned sheds and self-built humpies along the Stuart Highway, twelve kilometres from the city centre, near the Berrimah crossroads (Map 2). I was introduced by one of their kin as a ‘union man’(Day 1994:28), in recognition of the leading role of unionists in the campaign for citizenship, of which many of the mob were veterans. Members of the group began building shelters on an area of vacant Crown land at Knuckeys Lagoon that was first claimed by them in 1971 (see Bunji January 1972; Day 1972, 1994:14). This signalled the beginning of the protracted campaign, already discussed, by Darwin fringe camps at Nightcliff (Kulaluk), Railway Dam (in the inner city), and Knuckeys Lagoon. In October 1971 the Knuckeys Lagoon
mob joined other fringe dwellers sitting across Bagot Road, blocking
commuter traffic; they were pictured with other fringe dwellers
blocking traffic again in November; on December 13, 1971 the Knuckeys
Lagoon mob gathered beside the nearby railway tracks to stop a
goods train but were restrained by police; on May 1, 1972 they
were pictured in a sizeable contingent of what the papers described
as ‘the best May Day march for years’; various members of the
mob - men, women and children - were photographed with placards
along the route of the visiting Prime Minister; marching in protest
on National Aborigines Day; camping overnight outside Government
House in protest during the visit by Princess Margaret ‘with equal
numbers of police’; blocking the iron ore loading equipment at
the wharf ‘closely watched by an ever growing number of
police’; picketing the Darwin prison; ‘invading’ the army barracks;
and camping outside the Supreme Court in February and August 1974.
(5) The newspaper also reported
that the group planned to start a pet food business (NT News April
16, 1973).
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Members known to me signed petitions
for a treaty (Wright 1985:15-16; Buchanan 1974:11) and distributed
the newsletter Bunji in hotels and in the streets. Eight men from
the camp who signed a letter threatening to cut the overland telegraph
lines were taken to the police station for questioning (Bunji
January 1972; Buchanan 1974:5). Most of these actions and others,
including the meeting of fringe dwellers with Judge Woodward in
June 1973, were televised locally. (6)
In the face of hostile public and police reaction, the three-year
commitment by the Aboriginal fringe dwellers suggests more than
‘notions of futures which are indeterminate [in] the Darwin hinterland’
(Sansom 1978b:107, 1980a:258). It was a further eight years before
their aspirations for title to their land claim were realised.
(7)
Following the election of the Federal
Labor Government in December 1972, the newly-incorporated GDA
received a grant of $10,350 from the Aboriginal Benefit Trust
Fund (see Buchanan 1974:25). The grant was used to purchase a
work vehicle, pay casual labour and commence a building program
at the three camps using salvaged materials (NT News October 30,
1973). At Knuckeys Lagoon, the GDA began a rubbish collection
service and built a yard for a horse to be used by the campers.
Additional huts, an ablution block and a shed for ritual use were
also built and a pipe was connected to the nearby water main to
provide the first reliable water supply for the camp.
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In 1973 the group decided to bring
sacred objects from the hinterland, to be wrapped and stored at
the camp for showing to male initiates after their period of isolation
in a fenced-off area of the claim hidden by the thick eucalyptus,
pandanus and cycad forest. I was involved in negotiations with
the NT Museum, which was anxious to store the rare objects safely.
However, the Knuckeys Lagoon leaders refused to entrust their
objects to the museum. In 1973 I was present when young men in
their twenties were shown the objects before being brought out
of seclusion and led in a ceremonial procession to women waiting
at the camp. Considering the age of the men, I suspect I was witnessing
a revival of interest in ceremony. Sansom (1980a:200) also notes
that fourteen young men were initiated at Knuckeys Lagoon in January
1976 and four more in 1977.
In April 1974 the Knuckeys Lagoon
mob attended a meeting of the GDA at Railway Dam to discuss the
lengthy delays in welfare funerals and the recent welfare burial
of a loved member of the mob without notifying his family. One
man who had died had been in the morgue for months. I reported
in Bunji (March and April 1974):
On April 26th the Brothers and
Sisters from Knuckeys Lagoon drove to the hospital with John Crosby
[a GDA member]. They were looking for the body of [the deceased
man]. When they came to the funeral directors, there were twenty
police around the building. Even when we are dead we are wards
of the state. Let the Gwalwa Daraniki bury their own dead, our
way’ (see also a report in the NT News April 13, 1974).
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I stayed behind at the meeting
point, but I later heard from the morgue attendant that a note
left on the locked door by the Aboriginal delegation had alarmed
him. After the confrontation, the funeral director came down to
address the meeting. I include detail of this protest because
of its similarities to the story of a visit to the undertaker
during Sansom’s fieldwork (Sansom 1995:276). When Sansom drove
seventeen of the mob to the funeral parlour to forcefully lodge
a complaint concerning the funeral of Ol Luke, the undertaker
‘flanked by two muscled mutes’ threatened to call the police (p.276).
This is a rare portrayal in Sansom’s texts of the militancy of
the mob as I knew it. In contrast to my analysis, Sansom uses
Aboriginal militancy at the funeral parlour as an example of cultural
continuity involving the choice of a coffin to suit allegedly
uniquely Aboriginal aesthetics.
Following the incident at the morgue
in 1974, and the release of the positive Woodward Report (1974),
I flew to Indonesia for a holiday. On my return, I visited the
mob at their regular ‘pitch’, or daytime ‘sit down camp’. Major
Bangun, the camp leader in Sansom’s texts and during my involvement
until I left Darwin, told me that representatives from the fringe
camp had attended a meeting at ‘an office’ in Darwin while I was
overseas and had been warned that I was ‘trying to start a war’.
Major apparently seriously claimed that my visit to Indonesia
was to organise bombing raids on Darwin. Taking the advice they
had been given, the group had decided not to work with me or the
GDA in the future.
The group made a pragmatic decision
to switch allegiances to the Aboriginal Development Foundation
(ADF), which was funded to assist town camps. Although the relationship
was responsible for the building program that followed and therefore
proved beneficial for the mob, I was disappointed that they would
dismiss me on the basis of such an outlandish story. The ‘performative
relationships’ formed by acts of ‘helpin out’ that Sansom (1988b:167-8)
discusses in his essay, ‘A grammar of exchange’ did not affect
my abrupt dismissal, after years of closely working with the campers.
In contrast, Sansom (p.168) become ‘linked in special and particular
association’ to a man called Paulie, after assisting him in a
medical emergency.
Duncan (1975:66) offers an explanation
in his analysis of factionalism in Aboriginal protest movements.
He suggests that there is ‘a constant need for innovation, for
new strategies or new emphases’. Within these groups ‘the skills
of a particular individual may offer the necessary leadership
to meet a given situation but not be appropriate in other circumstances’
(Duncan 1975:67). As a result of the split, I had little to do
with the mob at the time of Sansom’s fieldwork; however, ‘Tommy
Atkins’ and others from the camp were pictured leading a protest
against uranium mining in 1978 (Bunji April 1978) and residents
of Knuckeys Lagoon joined protests in 1997 and 2001.
At the beginning of the wet season
of 1974/75 the three main Darwin fringe camps were relatively
secure on the land that they had claimed, with the moral backing
of the final report of the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission (see
NT News May 13, 1974). As the monsoons approached, I reported
in the newsletter, Bunji:
Bernie Valadian and the ADF are
helping the Nine Mile mob with their land claim. Bernie is talking
about a fifty-year plan! Lucky for Major and his big family, stage
one is a house before the wet season! (Bunji October 1974)
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4.3 Cyclone Tracy,
the mob and Sansom
Basil Sansom began his fieldwork in 1975 in the months following Cyclone Tracy that devastated the City of Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974. The events would have endangered Sansom’s fieldwork plans before he began his research in April 1975. (8) Despite the effects of the cyclone on the scene at Knuckeys Lagoon, including evacuations, travel bans and the loss of all the structures and much of the vegetation (see Bunji January and April 1975), there are only brief passing references to the event in The camp at Wallaby Cross (Sansom 1980a:191, 222, 236). For example, there is no explanation that the tents the people were using (Sansom 1980a:87, 111, 221) were post-cyclone emergency accommodation. None of the fringe camps were prepared
for the cyclone, which was not unusual - I had relayed warnings to them
in the past. At Knuckeys Lagoon, Major’s father was killed by a falling
tree and was incorrectly listed amongst the casualties as ‘Major Bangun’
in the first reports. In a tape-recorded interview, the Darwin Aboriginal
activist and welfare worker, Vai Stanton, told Kevin Gilbert (1977:24)
some of the immediate concerns in early 1975:
[The man was] the only man I know called
Major and he was on the death list and funnily enough he was the leader
of the [Knuckeys Lagoon] community there and myself and others had been
very involved at that time with the fringe-dwellers because we were
trying to get them tarpaulins for the wet season because we were expecting
a very wet ‘Wet’, you know. The tarps were an interim thing before they
got houses. They’d been building shacks you see. (9)
After the cyclone the GDA vehicle, which
had been at a local service station, was stripped of wheels and parts
by looters. The camp areas were bare and the people scattered (Bunji
January 1975). At Railway Dam, the people had moved into two old classrooms
behind the Cavenagh Street Woolworths store. The bare concrete rooms
were unserviced but drier than any of the pre-cyclone shelters in the
camps. It was at a meeting of homeless Aborigines held outside the classrooms
that I first saw Basil Sansom with the Knuckeys Lagoon mob. I reported
in the newsletter Bunji (May 1975) that ‘Sixty-five brothers and sisters
were there’ to express concern that no Aboriginal representatives were
on the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Reconstruction Commission.
The meeting nominated Major Bangun, from Knuckeys Lagoon, and Bernie
Valadian, the executive secretary of the ADF, as two of the proposed
representatives (Bunji, May 1975).
After Cyclone Tracy, consultants were employed by the Darwin Reconstruction Commission (DRC) to plan for Aboriginal housing on land it was presumed would soon be granted to the three camps. The Aboriginal people in the camps who had experienced the cyclone now had a wariness of using loose corrugated iron for self-made humpies and of building under trees. Tents at Knuckeys Lagoon were an interim measure indicating the undecided status of the land. In answer to complaints from the GDA about the living conditions in the camps, the DRC replied in September 1975: ‘You will appreciate that the construction of permanent works on the site [at Railway Dam] has to await the deliberations of the judicial body that is examining the title to this portion of land’ (Bunji September 1975). In contrast, contracts had been let for 1,600 new houses in the suburbs of Darwin by this time (Bauer 1977:31). The Gwalwa Daraniki Association began
its own appeal for emergency funds: ‘We hope no Bunji readers gave money
to the Cyclone Relief Appeal’, stated the organisation’s newsletter,
‘That money will not be helping many blacks’ (Bunji April 1975). A donation
of $40,000 from the Papua New Guinea Government which the Minister for
Northern Australia was pictured presenting to Bernie Valadian, ‘for
a shelter for Aborigines at Knuckeys Lagoon’ (NT News September 4, 1975),
joined other funds for fringe dweller reconstruction and emergency relief
which were frozen by a bureaucracy worried about a lack of legal
title. In addition, there were to be no grants of leases for Aboriginal
town camps while the future plans for Darwin were being debated (Henderson
1984:27).
The evacuations and destruction also
caused severe dislocation to the camps. Checkpoints were set up on the
highway at Noonamah, sixteen kilometres beyond Knuckeys Lagoon, to prevent
anyone returning without a permit and guarantees that they had accommodation
(Bunji April 1975). A study later found ‘those who were evacuated suffered
more severely than those who remained in familiar surroundings’ (Cole
1977:132). At the very least, there was uncertainty as the pre-cyclone
fringe dweller communities were broken up. In 1975 Kevin Gilbert (1977:25)
asked Vai Stanton, ‘Do you think they will use the excuse of the cyclone
to exclude Aborigines from the Darwin area?’ Vai’s reply expressed some
of the anxiety of the time: ‘If they can change the people, send them
away from Bagot or Kulaluk or Fishcamp or the Brinken sit-down area
[of Knuckeys Lagoon], the people will be further displaced’ (p.25).
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4.4 The Interim Aboriginal Land
Commission
When the Interim Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Judge Ward, began his hearings in mid-1975 it became crucial to prepare claims for the fringe camps, to take full advantage of Federal Government goodwill and the recommendations of the first and second Woodward Reports (1973, 1974). Sansom states that in 1975 he gave evidence ‘at a court hearing in Darwin where supplication was made to gain tenured right to land for fringe dwellers’ (Sansom 1980a:266). He also explains that he was ‘recruited to prepare a statement of claim on behalf of Aborigines associated with Humpty Doo [on the outskirts of Darwin]’ (Sansom 1985:77; see also Sansom 1980c) and that in May 1975 he ‘sat in a Darwin courtroom and watched lawyers press a claim to the town land of Kulaluk’ (Sansom 1984a:38). The Humpty Doo claim failed to reach a court hearing (Sansom 1985:77), presumably after the sudden dismissal of the Federal Government in November 1975. Events were already moving fast in Canberra when I wrote to the NT News (August 7, 1975): The Australian Government set up the
Interim Land Rights Commission in May so that Aboriginal land claims
could be heard without delay until the Act of Parliament is passed establishing
a Commission and procedures for returning land to Aborigines.
It is scandalous that, in three months,
the Interim Commission has only had five claims presented to it. All
these claims were fully prepared by the Gwalwa Daraniki Association
According to Campbell et al (1979:93):
In November 1975, reports on four Land
Claims heard by Judge Ward were tabled in Parliament. Due to the double
dissolution of Parliament on that day no action was taken. The claims
were for Kulaluk and Railway Dam (town claims which could not subsequently
be heard by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr Justice Toohey), Goondal
at Emery Point [inside the Army Barracks in Darwin] and Supplejack Downs.
(10)
After November 11, 1975 the Aboriginal
Land Rights (NT) Bill lapsed with the change of government, the Federal
Minister who had taken a personal interest in the town claims was replaced
and ‘the momentum was lost’ (Henderson 1984:33). The struggle then shifted
to preserving the ‘needs claims’ provisions of the Land Rights Act that
faced an uncertain future. Despite protests and lobbying by NT Aboriginal
groups throughout 1976 (Eames 1983), when the Act was ratified in January
1977 there was no provision for needs claims and land within town boundaries
could not be claimed (Rowley 1981:77; Sansom 1985:77; Merlan 1994:15).
The Knuckeys Lagoon mob continued to
agitate for a decision on their land claim. In mid-1978, they were pictured
amongst a group of up to forty Aboriginal fringe dwellers occupying
the corridors of the Darwin branch of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs
in a sit-in lasting three days and two nights, broken only briefly by
a bomb scare (Bunji June 1978; see also NT News May 17, 1978, p.1).
Amongst other demands, ‘Major Bangun wanted an answer about the land
at Knuckeys Lagoon (they have been waiting for five years)’ (Bunji June
1978).
This followed a picket of the office of the Chief Town Planner by fringe dwellers in March (NT News March 29, 1978; Bunji April 1978). (11) At the March protest, the executive officer of the Aboriginal Development Foundation told the NT News (March 29, 1978) that the $40,000 for cyclone relief donated by the Papua-New Guinea Government in 1975 for a ‘brick and mortar building’ had yet to be used because fringe dwellers did not own land on which to build permanent structures. |
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4.5 The Aboriginal
Development Foundation (ADF) and fringe dwellers
Before Sansom arrived in 1975, the Knuckeys Lagoon mob was involved in the ADF building program and remained confident of achieving a 20.56-hectare lease over the vacant Crown land they had chosen in 1971. The daily life of the camp at ‘the pitches’ and elsewhere continued as before, as experienced by Sansom, but a process was beginning of increased involvement with government-sponsored agencies and the ADF. Sansom mentions the growing relationship between the fringe camp and the ADF only in obscure and brief references to ‘the increasing help and attention from a welfare agency’ (Sansom 1980a:110, 248). I maintain that the description is misleading, because prior to 1979 it was my impression that the Knuckeys Lagoon mob believed themselves to be equal partners of the ADF, rather than recipients of welfare. Woodward had left open the question of
who was to hold the title to the town leases. He believed the GDA, which
represented all the camps in 1974, was too small and ‘its dependency
on its white adviser too great’ to be the land-holder (Woodward 1974:54).
For Railway Dam, Woodward repeated his doubts about ‘the strength and
permanence of the applicant Association’ (Woodward 1974:55). I later
describe how this widely-held view of the fringe dwellers’ suitability
to hold the title led to disputes and the title to Knuckeys Lagoon eventually
being held by the ADF. (12)
More substantial buildings at all three
Darwin camps were built by the expanding ADF before the leases were
eventually granted in 1979. By 1978 the dreams of those who first made
the claims were coming into realisation, as I described in Bunji (June
1978):
Knuckeys Lagoon is a land claim for camping.
It is about ten miles down the highway from Darwin, near Berrimah.
This camp of iron huts is popular with people from cattle stations like
Gilbert Knowles (13) from Finniss
and Ronnie Yates from Annaburroo.
On this day, Major Bangun
(14) has taken a mob out fishing at Shoal Bay in the community
ute. Neil Dargie, the camp’s bush mechanic had been working on the ute.
Today Margaret is giving Neil (15)
a haircut under the shade of the gum trees. Roy Kelly (16)
is cooking some kangaroo. ‘Long Willie’ Gaydon cut up the kangaroo.
Sitting on old beds under the verandah are Joseph Bishop with May and
Helen Stevens, (17) little Tania
and a boy, Neville Morton, (18)
out from Bagot for the day. The camp is very proud to have its own clinic
where Major’s wife Sally, looks after the first aid.
(19) They have slashers to keep down the high grass, and
a quiet place for ceremonies . . .
The Muddi Community (20)
ute comes back in a cloud of dust. Young Raymond Bangun, (21)
Hector and all the boys have been sent back to fetch more water to Shoal
Bay . . . The community is also angry that they haven’t got the lease
after so many years (22) Without
the lease papers for the land, they are told they cannot build better
facilities.
One thing is for sure, whatever happens,
the Knuckeys Lagoon mob will never be shifted!
By afternoon time, about half the people
had walked the mile down to the Berrimah crossroads. It had been a quiet,
lazy day.
While the determined claimants were alive, the residents maintained some control of future directions in partnership with the ADF. Although the title to the lease was presented to members of the community with a photographed handshake from Marshall Perron, the Minister for Lands and Housing on December 14, 1979, (23) the official leaseholder was the ADF. As leaders died over an eight-year period, power was increasingly held by the ADF, until, by 1997, the Knuckeys Lagoon residents complained that they had little input into the management and planning of the site, or the ADF. Bernie Valadian, who has been the executive
officer of the ADF for over 23 years states:
Our main concern right from day one was
to worry about the fringe camps - town camps - the transients coming
to Darwin...
We believed that if we could stabilise
the communities maybe we could get some help from government. We set
up temporary camps and applied for land, which took us another ten years
to get, in which time we developed programs for the people...
We help improve the effectiveness of
other government programs in that the infrastructure which we have established
allows for more effective delivery of other programs, such as health
and education... (ATSIC 1991:16-17).
It was during Sansom’s fieldwork that
future directions were being decided with the increasing control of
funding to the town camps by the ADF. Only the residents of the 301-hectare
Kulaluk lease held out against pressure to have the ADF hold the title
to their land. When it was announced the title for the Kulaluk area
would be handed to the ADF by the end of March 1979, the Kulaluk residents
insisted the title should go to those who fought for the land (Bunji
1, 1979). Henderson (1984:49) quotes a March 23 public service memo:
‘The [Kulaluk] group were still adamant that the ADF should not be involved
with the handling of the land title issue. The ADF advised that that
did not worry them and they would be happy to withdraw from the nastiness
of the Kulaluk scene’. In 1998, the Kulaluk community remains independent
of the ADF and has developed commercial projects on their lease. The
closely clustered housing at Kulaluk, shaded by trees and serviced by
an office and telephone, with a full-time manager employed by the association,
has a vibrant community atmosphere that is lacking at Knuckeys Lagoon.
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4.6 The mob in 1997
The size, dependency and permanency of the community at Kulaluk that concerned Judge Woodward were not an issue by 1979. After the organisation of residents, the GDA, was given the lease to Kulaluk in 1979, the number of residents increased from twenty-five in 1980 to ‘eighty to one hundred’ in 1995 (Wells 1995a:62). However, at Knuckeys Lagoon the number of ‘countrymen’ and women using the camp appears to have decreased. The ‘mob’ is not incorporated and has no official name. The residents live in three large iron huts in a barracks-like village of numbered huts spread widely over the lease, which is mowed and kept free of litter by outside workers. The lease is almost entirely cleared of trees and many of the huts appeared to be empty in 1998. Despite the remoteness of the site, there was poor lighting, no telephone and no on-site presence of the management. High-voltage power lines are suspended
from huge pylons across an easement that dissects the land. The electric
cables are a constant reminder of the tragic death of Louise Bangun’s
son who died after climbing a pylon. A white cross amongst the huts
marks a fenced grave where Louise’s brother, who was accidentally electrocuted
as a boy, was buried by their parents beside the family hut, since demolished
(Plate 7). Gaining permission for the burial at such a location was
a remarkable indicator of the community’s attachment to the site. Louise’s
father, Major Bangun, is also buried on a corner of the lease beside
the grave of Roy Kelly, the second of Sansom’s three ‘masterful men’.
(24) In 1997, a timber frame, used
to support a bough shade, marked the site of the ceremony held to burn
Major’s grandson’s possessions and smoke the houses on May 30, 1996.
In late 1996, (25) Louise suffered
a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. Despite her difficulties,
Louise Bangun is the undisputed leader and spokesperson for the community,
although Roy Kelly’s widow, Helen Stevens, is more senior.
The graves and the succession of leadership
through the Bangun family at Knuckeys Lagoon suggest that Sansom’s (1978b:107)
description of instability and indeterminate ‘futures’ at Wallaby cross
was premature. (26) At Kulaluk,
succession is even more pronounced. When the founding elder died in
1984, his niece succeeded him until her sudden death in 1986. Her son
then became president of the GDA until he also died suddenly in 1993.
His sister then took office until a shooting incident a year later but
remains a powerful figure, with all her extended family, at the community.
The sister of the original claimant and member of the Larrakia danggalaba
clan remained the matriarch with power of veto in Kulaluk affairs until
her death in 1999 (see Heffernan 1996; Secretary and Heffernan 1996).
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4.7
Sansom’s ‘anthropology of return’
After his ten-month absence from the field, according to Sansom, there was a three-day process for him to go through before re-entering the world of the fringe dweller. In stages, the returnee is given ‘the word’, the agreed accounts of missed events, by Aboriginal fringe camp residents ‘to put that fella right back in’ (Sansom 1980e:2, 1981a:263, 1983:30). (27) I suggest that Sansom’s description of re-entry to the field through a form of ‘Tardis’ time-warp (28) maintains the illusion of separateness, through disjointed time, which is necessary to explain the contradiction of a fieldworker in what Sansom maintains is a ‘segregated social field’. That is, the device neatly avoids the necessity of exploring links between two separate worlds. Discussing entry
and exit narratives in ethnographies, Lissant Bolton (2000:3) makes
the point that ‘a boundary is in fact a link - by separating two things
a boundary connects them’. In this regard, two of Sansom’s articles
on return are illustrated by a sketch by George Chaloupka of the Darwin
Museum, showing a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree in the foreground
stating: ‘Aboriginal land. Keep off. Trespassers enter at own risk’
(Sansom 1980e, 1983). Although there is no mention of the sign or
its political context in the articles, the sign could be read as a
marker of a separate Aboriginal domain. The inclusion of the illustration
could also be seen to emphasise the anthropologist’s privileged position
as an insider within that domain.
(29)
However, following Bolton’s point, I suggest that the sign can be
read as a boundary marker testifying to wider aspirations of the fringe
dwellers and greater conflict than is portrayed in Sansom’s decontextualised
observations.
In keeping with Sansom’s
other texts, his articles (Sansom 1980e, 1983, 1995) and keynote address
(Sansom 1998) on ‘the anthropology of return’ have nothing to say
about the political setting at ‘Wallaby Cross’, including what changes
might have occurred ten months, ten years or twenty years after his
original fieldwork. For example, the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act
1976 that covers areas from which the 500 ‘countrymen’ at Knuckeys
Lagoon are drawn, has had a significant impact.
As keynote speaker at
a forum on ethnography in Fremantle, Western Australia, Sansom (1998)
indicated how he was introduced to the mob in the 1970s. He said that
a ‘semi-retired’ public servant from the Department of Aboriginal
Affairs (DAA), Anita Campbell, had introduced him to a new bureaucrat
who would ‘take you around and teach you the skin system’. The revelation
of involvement by a government department further blurs the illusion
of separate worlds and of the ethnographer as neutral observer. I
believe it is also possible that the activism and land claims described
at the beginning of this chapter aroused the interest of the Department
and others in the previously unrecognised fringe campers as a community,
and may have had some bearing on how Sansom ‘found’ his fieldwork
site. I suggest that an entry narrative in Sansom’s ethnography that
revealed these connections would have weakened his thesis by making
problematic an overly sharp distinction between the camps and the
broader society.
Consistent with his theory
of parallel worlds, Sansom (1998) gave the example of his fieldwork
in South Africa where ‘a race filled scene’ made participant observation
‘a joke’. (30)
According to Sansom (1998), in Australia the anthropologist cannot
become ‘the Other’, and so it is presumptuous to worry that the fieldworker’s
presence as observer might change the cultural world of the people
with whom they work .(31)
I suggest that this argument justifies his role as a neutral participant
observer who does not need to explain his role. I also suggest that
without the need for reflexivity on his role, the anthropologist has
less cause to qualify the truth of his representations. In contrast,
I argue that fringe dwellers are engaged with the town and that, as
a fieldworker, I am a part of that process. Knowing the fringe dwellers,
and noting Sansom’s observation that running with more than one mob
is not possible without one’s hosts questioning the loyalty of ‘their’
anthropologist, I suggest that the Knuckeys Lagoon people agreed to
host a fieldworker for an extended period of time to advance their
cause.
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4.8
A segregated social field?
The ‘balancing of anthropological books that is long overdue’ is a recurring justification by Sansom (1982b:118). He criticises the portrayal by Sharp (1968) of the ‘ripple effect’ that the introduction of steel axes had on Aboriginal society, supposedly leading to ‘cultural dissolution’ and ‘demoralisation’ with ‘broken natives huddled on cattle stations or on the fringes of country towns’ (Sansom 1982b:119). Having established a negative baseline, including a criticism of Rowley (Sansom 1988a), Sansom then argues for persistence of Aboriginal ways in a ‘parathetic’ side-by-side world. By discrediting the studies of Sharp, Rowley and others that examine the interaction and responses between Aborigines and invaders, Sansom legitimates his use of a segregated social field with an internal dialectic (see Sansom 1980a:265). According to Merlan (1995:165)
who met Sansom in the field, he likened his writing to a report by
‘a war correspondent from the battlefield’. However, the correspondent’s
reports from the troops in camp never take us to the front lines.
Merlan (1995:174) comments:
Basil does not simply
choose not to elaborate the interconnections between Aborigines and
others in their situation of encapsulation. In many places he expressly
denies any profound inter-relation of the outside with what is essentially
Aboriginal in social action.
In Merlan’s opinion, the
failure to examine the relationships with the wider society has the
same purpose that I imply in my criticism:
Denying significant effect
upon Aboriginal modalities of action and, even more to the point,
not examining the ways in which today these modalities are problematic
for Aboriginal people, makes it possible to treat them as part of
a bounded-off life-world (Merlan 1995:175).
Like Sansom, Collmann
(1988:228) criticised anthropologists who ‘outdo the average layperson
in labelling [the camps] as aberrant’. If anthropologists were wrong
to write of tribal Aborigines in Australia until recent times as ‘self-contained,
self-producing social units’, says Collmann (p.228), specifically
referring to Sansom, ‘one can only marvel at the obscurantism of anthropologists
who must deny the reality they perceive in an effort to legitimate
its analysis’. Brady and Palmer (1984:66) also believe the impression
of autonomy in Sansom’s text is deceptive in a situation where Aborigines
are economically and socially lacking in power.
Austin-Broos (1998:296)
writes, ‘Sansom clings tenaciously to the view that certain types
of underlying social relations ... continue unaltered by urbanisation
or even the cash economy’. However, it is not that Sansom denies change
as a result of contact. He does mention the dislocation of cattle
station work (Sansom 1980a:13, 1980c:6; 1988b:162), the depression
in the industry during his fieldwork (Sansom 1980a:245), the Aboriginal
total dependence on cash income (Sansom 1978b:91, 1980a:245) and many
other influences. Even the ‘hinterland Aboriginal community’ (Sansom
1980a, 1980c, 1981, 1982b, 1985 ) ‘originated in the Aboriginal response
to the initiation of the demand for Aboriginal labour’ (Sansom 1980c:6).
The contradiction in his texts is his claim of an inheritance intact
in a segregated social field (Sansom 1980a:265). For example, when
Sansom writes of indeterminacy in the fringe camp society, he looks
more to a pre-colonial past than historical change for explanations
(Merlan 1995:167). As Myers (1984:258) says, ‘[The camp at Wallaby
Cross] is about time, but it lacks history’.
Sansom (1980a:185-186)
notes: ‘In 1975 one of the permanent camps of Darwin was spectacularly
raided’. In a detailed account of a raid by a White gang, Sansom describes
injuries to a female pensioner and ‘several tents fired with aid of
petrol’. Curiously, he fails to mention that the attack took place
at Knuckeys Lagoon amongst his interlocutors (see also Bunji August
1975). The NT News (July 21 1975) reported:
Two elderly Aboriginals
claim they were bashed and their tents set alight by a group of men
at Knuckey’s Lagoon on Friday night. The men, alleged to be Europeans,
arrived at the campsite late on Friday night. Most of the camp’s population
had left for the weekend to attend tribal ceremonies at the Daly and
Finke Rivers [sic]. Only four pensioners and two young men remained.
The men, who arrived in
a four-wheel drive vehicle, approached one of the tents and poured
petrol over it. It is claimed that before setting light to it, they
dragged out [a pensioner,] Dolly Knowles, knocked her to the ground
and kicked her in the face.
Mr Bernie Valadian, executive
officer of the Aboriginal Development Foundation, [pictured nursing
a baby outside one of the destroyed tents] said he believed the attack
on the camp had been premeditated. (32)
Although the association
is not made in the ethnography, the raid appears to have occurred
towards the end of a period of ‘organising for ceremony’ between June
and August 1975 described by Sansom (1980a:218), and before a period
at Wallaby Cross ‘that began in August 1975’, of ‘camp siege’
from a rival, though related Aboriginal group known as ‘that mission
mob’ (Sansom 1980a:133). Connecting the incendiary raid to the ‘Wallaby
Cross’ camp, and relating the incident to other events of August 1975
which are well documented by Sansom, may have further made a segregated
social field difficult to sustain.
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4.9
Process over structure
Sansom (1981a, 1985) claims his studies of fringe dwellers question the structural functionalist analyses of Aboriginal society already questioned by Hiatt (1965, 1982, 1984) and others (see Sutton 1999b). Sansom often generalises his findings, as in the claim that ‘Aborigines in the Australian North’ are people of labile groupings who ‘give the lie to Radcliffe-Brown’s (1952:10) assertion that social continuity "depends on structural continuity..."’ (Sansom 1981a:257). He makes the point that the flexibility of Aboriginal groupings has been ‘the bane of Anthropology’ and explains that: ‘In the Darwin hinterland ... the search for order of continuity is pointless and unreal’ (Sansom 1981a:278). However, in a study of fringe dwellers, Layton (1986:30) states that Sansom’s generalisations are applicable only ‘to selective aspects of traditional life: the parallels are to be found in traditional foraging patterns’. Layton (1986:32) concludes that the ‘particular anarchic pattern at Wallaby Cross is not a complete reflection of traditional Aboriginal social life’. Sutton (1999a:21-22) claims that: [A]s generalisations about all Northern Australian Aboriginal groups over time and in relation to country, and even merely as generalisations about Wallaby Cross people as whole persons, the generalisations [as above] from Sansom’s work are in my view unjustifiable... What is not made clear
in Sansom’s work is the extent to which these same people whose urban
fringe-camp daily lives were dominated by discontinuity and fluidity
also identified with enduring totemic estate-holding descent groups
associated with mostly stable areas of country, on other days and
in other places.
Shapiro (1997:209) describes
Sansom as ‘de-reifying the local organisation controversy’. However,
the debate is ongoing (see Sutton 1999a; Sansom 1999). For Myers (1984:258),
a criticism is that Sansom’s departure from ‘traditional forms found
in Aboriginal ethnography (clan, land, marriage, kinship, religion)’
downplays kinship as ‘a long-term objective reality’. White and Bain
(1981:189) also believe Sansom (1980a) underestimates the importance
of kinship. Evidence supporting Sutton comes from Sansom’s own texts,
as I will show, and from the hinterland land claims since prepared
by anthropologists. Many of the fringe campers are named in the Daly
River (Malak Malak) Land Claim (Sutton and Palmer 1980; Toohey 1982),
the Upper Daly Land Claim (Chase and Meehan 1983), the Finniss River
Land Claim (Toohey 1981), the Alligator River Stage II Land Claim
(Toohey 1981), the Jawoyn (Katherine area) Land Claim (Kearney 1988)
and the Kenbi (Cox Peninsula) Land Claim (Brandl et al 1979; Walsh
1989; Olney 1991). More will be involved in the Litchfield Park Claim
which was lodged in June 1997 before the sunset clause of the Aboriginal
Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 came into effect.
Sansom’s inclination towards poststructuralism, emphasising social action and the unstable signifier over ‘concrete forms’ is noted by Merlan (1995:167). In this manner Sansom (1985:92) claims ‘models of process’ are useful because ‘incursive Europeans’ did not recognise indigenous land rights due to the ‘flexible social arrangements’ of hunter gatherers and the ‘lability and impermanence’ of indigenous social forms. That is, he suggests Aboriginal claims were not recognised by the invaders because of the labile nature of Aboriginal groupings. However, the historian Henry Reynolds (1987) shows that Aboriginal social structures and attachment to land were recognised by colonial authorities but ignored by land hungry settlers. Though clearly unintended, there is a risk that Sansom’s defence of labile groupings begins to read like an argument defending the dispossession of Aborigines by those who chose not to recognise Aboriginal land tenure systems. As this is a process that is ongoing in Australia, it has political ramifications for the fringe dwellers. |
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4.10 Sansom and
Rowley
In the 1970s Charles Rowley produced three influential volumes (1972a, 1972b, 1972c) that belatedly placed Aborigines into the context of Australian history. In 1978 Sansom wrote: ‘the strength of Rowley’s books comes from his ability to identify underlying trends and social processes that will be relevant over years and even decades of development’ (Sansom 1978a:108). However, in later articles, Sansom (1982b:117, 1988a) is critical of Rowley’s reduction of Aborigines to ‘class actors’ who ‘reacted as other groups have done in similar circumstances’ (Rowley 1972a:353). Sansom (1988a:148) distinguishes his work from Rowley’s: ‘The task I have set myself is to discuss the effects of the centrality of different doctrines of person - one seated in the practise of a scholar [Rowley], the other vested in cultural practice among the Aborigines I know’. (33) With some justification, Sansom (1988a:150) claims Rowley’s sociology ‘remains determinedly culture free’, whereas Sansom aims to establish the ‘resilience of cultural practice’ (Sansom 1988a:152). However, instead of creating a dichotomy, it is my argument that more insight comes from balancing the two approaches. |
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4.11
Witnessing
Sansom (1980a:105) notes that the openness of life in the camps ensures that violence is controlled. In another Aboriginal community, Burbank (1994:156) agrees ‘that the public nature of fighting provides [the women] with an important safeguard’. Sansom (1980a:104) describes going apart to speak as ‘sneakin’ and a denial of mob jurisdiction, making privacy ‘the enemy [of] collective representation’. In the Darwin fringe camp ‘most of the time everyone knows what everyone is doing’ (Sansom 1980a:103). However, Burbank (1994:9) found that ‘in informal conversation, often in my own home at Mangrove’, women gave more personalised accounts of violent encounters than the consensual ‘verdicts’, or group determinations, that Sansom (1980a:128) described at ‘Wallaby Cross’.(34) While elsewhere is Sansom’s
texts there are indications of conflict between genders (see Section
4.18 this chapter) which might make agreed verdicts of happenings
difficult, the different accounts may arise from the nature of housing
design at Mangrove compared to the relative absence of enclosed shelters
in a fringe camp. Although the constructions were used creatively
and ‘people refused to allow the fact of created housing to pin them
down’ (p.111), I suggest that the building program (p.11) and tents
(pp.87, 221) at the time of Sansom’s field work were reducing the
opportunities of ‘witnessing’. During my fieldwork in 1997,
at Knuckeys Lagoon the iron houses that were widely spaced across
the lease meant ‘witnessing’ was restricted to extended family groups.
In the 1990s, at night the remaining members of the ‘Wallaby Cross’
mob locked themselves in their homes behind arc-mesh grills.(35)
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4.12
‘Living longa grog’?
Although Sansom makes no moral judgments on the drinking style in the camps, his account of the reliance on pensioners’ money to buy alcohol were reported in the Darwin media after the publication of The camp at Wallaby Cross. Pseudonyms do not protect fringe dwellers in a relatively small city, and I was told after the reports by someone closely involved that the Knuckeys Lagoon people felt betrayed by the news items purporting to represent Sansom’s description of them. Sansom (1980a:266) describes how pensioners guarantee a steady flow of cash into ‘a community devoted to a pattern of consumption whose focus is bought liquor’ where they announce fortnightly, ‘Here we all live longa grog’ (Sansom 1977:58). In my view, observations of drinking in a fringe camp without an analysis of the political context could be damaging to the community, as Sansom might have anticipated. Furthermore, the damage may extend to all Aboriginal people, if, as Sansom has done, ‘grogging’ style is interpreted as a form of cultural continuity (see Gibson 1991). Merlan (1995:165) suggests
‘dimensions of human suffering’ are overlooked by Sansom’s analysis
of Aboriginal drinking behaviour, including ‘shortened lives, ill-health,
the take-over of bodily praxis, the routinisation of drunken violence
and the linked abdications of responsibility’. Others, like Room (1984),
Brady (1991:188), Gibson (1991:187), Bolger (1991:51) and Hazelhurst
(1996) are similarly critical of anthropological explanations for
drinking behaviour. However, Brady (1991:193) acknowledges Sansom’s
work as a corrective to ethnocentric and moralistic descriptions of
culture loss amongst Aboriginal drinkers. According to Brady (1991:190),
the analysis of Aborigines and alcohol by Sansom (1980a) is ‘a welcome
change from the entirely problem-oriented approach of many earlier
writers’. Similarly, Saggers and Gray (1998:79) defend Sansom on the
grounds that the objective of his study was not the problems caused
by alcohol. Sansom (1977, 1980a) and others ‘act as a refutation of
the view that indigenous people misuse alcohol because they had, or
developed, no mechanisms to control its use’ (Saggers and Gray 1998:79).
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4.13 Did the mob
at Knuckeys Lagoon use the ‘skin system’ of social categories?
In his address to the Fremantle forum in 1998, Sansom (1998) made admissions that on his return to Darwin in 1988 with his ‘new and pregnant wife’ and step-son (see Sansom 1995:294), he had to learn the ‘skin system’ of the Darwin hinterland through his wife who was quickly given a skin name by Sansom’s interlocutors. Sansom (1998) admitted his return as a married man with a child ‘invoked a different kind of system’ at Knuckeys Lagoon. (36) During his fieldwork he had mixed freely as ‘one of the blokes’ and was apparently unaware of underlying systems. He now believes he was kept out of the social category subsection system deliberately in 1974-76 because the chain of implications and obligations associated with being categorised would have hindered his usefulness to his Aboriginal interlocutors. For example, certain people would not be able to ride with him in his vehicle (Sansom 1998). Although describing a different culture
bloc, according to Tonkinson (1991:77), skin categories ‘have little
relevance to the mundane hunting and gathering activities of the Mardu
band’. They are most useful when placing strangers into the kinship
system and in larger gatherings and rituals (p.77). Subsections are
not ‘on the ground’ groups and although they are exogamous, they are
not ‘marriage classes’ (p.72). Tonkinson (p.73) adds:
Social categories are very much less
important than kinship in everyday life, but there is a significant
correspondence between the two. The categories, by lumping together
sets of kinship terms within each, do provide individuals with rough
guides to the kind of patterned behaviour expected of them.
If skin categories were present in the
1970s as Sansom now claims, they would be evidence of predetermined
social structures he has ignored to strengthen his argument that ‘social
continuity vests in cultural forms rather than in structural arrangements’
(see Sansom 1981a:258). Indeed, Sansom (1998) has since made the claim
that Aborigines recognised the inflexible nature of this structure and
deliberately excluded the anthropologist from its obligations to facilitate
his usefulness to them. He adds, that as ‘one of the blokes’ in the
1970s he operated in a freer domain. Apparently these important revisions
only became evident when Sansom returned with his new wife, otherwise
observations of his position ‘as one of the blokes’ would warrant mentioning
in the original texts.
Several questions are raised by Sansom’s
admission. Firstly, in my experience with people from Arnhem Land who
use social categories, being placed into the skin system is not restrictive
for a White anthropologist in a mixed urban situation. As far as I could
tell, having a skin name did not prevent anyone sharing a meal or riding
in the vehicles I regularly rented on behalf of the fringe dwellers.
It is difficult to understand how anyone accepted into the mob could
have been kept out of something as basic as the skin system, solely
for materialist purposes, because to have been outside it while joining
a wide range of activities would have caused even more complications
than the supposed decision by the ‘masterful men’ to exclude him. Secondly,
Sansom’s interpretation rests on the secondary nature of fixed structures
in the fringe camp mobs, so the presence of a previously unmentioned
skin system that can regulate relationships and roles, questions that
supposition. Thirdly, if a skin system was present at Knuckeys Lagoon
in the 1970s, a trained anthropologist accepted into the mob could not
miss it. Therefore, if Sansom, as an observant fieldworker, was unaware
of its presence in the 1970s, and he makes no mention of it, the skin
system probably was not in use at the time.
(37)
Sansom told the Fremantle forum in 1998
that nobody put him into the ‘skin’ system when he began working with
the fringe dwellers. Sansom added that one of his informants of that
period, Norbett, when asked about his skin category, said ironically
it was ‘black’. Sansom continued, ‘northerners’ did not have ‘skin’,
or subsection categories, as this social form was an innovation spreading
from ‘the Gurindjis’ in the south (see also McConvell 1985). Brandl
et al (1979:15) note that the Larrakia people of the Darwin area could
have easily incorporated the section and subsection system into their
kinship system but did not do so. According to Stanner (1933:389) the
‘complex sectional, subsectional, or moiety organisation characteristic
of so large a part of Australia is not found among true Daly River tribes’.
People moving up from the south into the region were spreading the subsection
system (Stanner 1933:384) but this was so recent in 1932 that, in Stanner’s
experience, the ‘new form of organisation is not yet fully understood’
by the Aborigines who had incorporated it. Amongst the Malak Malak people
of the Daly River region ‘there is no evidence, past or present, that
moieties, semi-moieties, sections, subsections, or so called "owner-manager"
relations’ are part of the traditions (Sutton and Palmer 1980:47). A
little to the south the system is in use for convenience where it ‘provides
a formal mechanism for social interaction beyond the Wagiman social
boundaries’ (Chase and Meehan 1983:17). Merlan told the Aboriginal Land
Commissioner (Kearney 1988:23) that, in the 1980s, the Jawoyn people
of the Katherine area used subsections in a ‘neo-traditional’ way. The
usage was primarily to facilitate action between Jawoyn and neighbouring
groups, particularly in ceremony and intermarriage (see McConvell 1985:21).
It would be in keeping with anthropological
evidence that the skin system be little used or understood at Knuckeys
Lagoon in the 1970s. Instead, Sansom (1980a:182) claims that in the
fringe camp, ‘status titles belong wholly to events’ and are ‘contextual
and situational’ amongst consociates who have shared experiences of
‘running together’. ‘For Aborigines of the Australian North, social
continuity does not vest in "the arrangement of persons in relation
to one another". It vests instead in conceptual order’ (Sansom 1981a:279).
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4.14 Performative relationships
and the Dreaming Powers
As Merlan (1995:178) points out: ‘Unlike most works on Australian Aborigines, there is no entry "kinship" in the index to The camp at Wallaby Cross’, although Sansom’s book and articles have many references to kinship, totems, rituals and Aboriginal religion. Although he describes more flexible systems more than these bodies of knowledge and behaviour, Sansom also discusses the ‘Dreaming Powers’ (Sansom 1988a:153) and in a more recent article foregrounds these beliefs as ‘a massive apparatus of unfreedom’ (Sansom 1995:266). It is ironic that having limited Aboriginal initiative to ‘a segregated social field’ (Sansom 1980a:265), Sansom now attributes the inhibition of Aboriginal initiative to Aboriginal cultural continuities - specifically their belief in the Dreaming Powers. Using semiotics, the meanings laid down
by the Dreaming beings are likened to the langue or code of meaning,
in contrast to the parole of human action (Sansom 1995:272). Meanings
are attached to signifiers by the Dreaming Powers in what Sansom (1995:269)
calls ‘metonymic enchainments’ that are fixed and not available for
alternative interpretations. (The other force inhibiting individual
creativity, although a human one, is ‘the word’ as the expression of
agreed ‘verdicts’ of ‘what bin happen’). However, Sansom (1995:306)
believes the fringe dwellers seek to avoid the confining structure of
the Dreaming Powers, or ‘the Law’ as Tonkinson (1991:143) calls it,
by the use of creative invention, through an Aboriginal concept which
Sansom (1995:297) terms, ‘the fancy’.
(38)
Sansom maintains his thesis by creating
a dichotomy between the Law and the everyday actions of the fringe dwellers,
as he does between structure and process, despite the general belief
that Aboriginal beliefs act as a ‘blueprint’ for every aspect of their
life (Tonkinson 1991:143; see also Stanner 1963). It is not my purpose
to follow the debates over the separation of the sacred and the profane
in Aboriginal culture, and Sansom does not refer to them. He brackets
off Aboriginal ‘High Culture’, conducted in an Aboriginal language,
while pidgin, or Kriol, is used in the camps for ‘organizin for business’
(Sansom 1980-82:5). The dichotomy of two worlds is emphasised by the
shift that occurs as people change from one language to another - ‘an
adventure in which a person leaves one country of action ... to enter
another’ (p.5). The device is useful to bound a study for someone who
admits he was assessed as ‘notta law man really’ (Sansom 1980a:153,
1988a:153), but little evidence is given to show that the division reflects
Aboriginal views and actions.
‘In the Australian north’, ‘structured indeterminacy’ begins with the nature of kinship, which Sansom (1988b:170; Sansom and Baines 1987:350) insists is ‘effective’ or ‘performative’ kinship (see also Sansom 1981a, 1982a). Although the previously mentioned Paulie, ‘the dancing man of renown’ (Sansom 1988b:167), was a master of ‘High Culture’ (p.167), his relationships with the rest of the mob are presumably ‘characterised by structural indeterminacy’. How that indeterminacy relates to the ‘Dreaming Powers’ is not explained because Sansom (1988b:175) adds: Further to parade the Aboriginal glosses
[for performative relationships], I would have to deal with religion.
Those evident affinities between persons which cause them to favour
one another above and beyond the call of rational recompense are realities
which Aborigines refer to the Dreaming - to the sharing of totem and
the sharing of spiritual concerns that endow persons with like will.
In my view, based on my own fieldwork
experience, as well as my earlier involvement with Darwin Aboriginal
people, in an article about indeterminate social structure amongst northern
Aborigines, the Dreaming warrants more than the above brief endnote.
Knuckeys Lagoon was a ‘major regional
centre’ (Sansom 1980a:10), and references to ceremonies re-occur in
the text (Sansom 1980a:10, 74, 138, 200, 220). It is difficult to imagine
the organising of ceremonies celebrating links between people, land
and the ‘Dreaming Powers’ without the usual well-documented Aboriginal
kinship and other ascribed roles. However, ritual was of minimal interest
to Sansom, because he believed the ‘stultification of the transfiguring
vision makes the intricacies of its performance intellectually unchallenging’
(Sansom 1988a:153). For Sansom (p.153) ceremony ‘does not generally
celebrate originating charisma’. Yet ritual would hardly appear to be
irrelevant to the lives of his research subjects.
More recently, Sansom re-examines the
role of Aboriginal beliefs. He originally dedicated The camp at Wallaby
Cross to a ‘Singing Man’, Sansom’s ‘brother and namesake’ (1980a:119),
to whom he was close ‘in positional and structural terms’ (Sansom 1980a:120)
(39).
Sansom missed the funeral after the ‘singing man’ died, but he gives
a moving description of how he was consoled by the community on his
return (Sansom 1980a:120). In his revisionary article, Sansom (1995:260),
laments the suppression of the singing man’s songs after death as ‘a
betrayal of expectations that admired creations be allowed to continue’.
The suppression returns the songs to the Dreaming , from where they
came. This denial of human creativity extends to ‘a storied landscape’
that is part of ‘a total system’.
Ol Luke, one of the three leading men
at the camp in 1976, whose funeral is described by Sansom (1995:274-6),
‘ran a small business dedicated to giving town dwelling Aborigines their
respective pasts’ (Sansom 1988b:156-7; see also Sansom 1987). Sansom’s
account suggests that the ‘stolen generation’ from the Daly River region
were placed into the kinship system of their people by Ol Luke. This
is an intriguing but passing reference to a highly political aspect
of social dislocation and the land claim process, (40)
as urban Aborigines who had been removed
from their mothers sought to retrace their inheritance.
Ol Luke represents a region ‘assimilated
to a man’ continuing his hunter gatherer heritage through kindly acts,
despite his obvious position of authority, and the evidence of a structural
relationship connecting person to place. In this way, Sansom portrays
Ol Luke as a unique individual earning his reputation as ‘the Daly’
through ‘the culmination of individual rendered testimonies to the nature
of his being’ (Sansom 1988a:158). He was ‘made the Daly’ and ‘won’ respect
by ‘always helpin’. The failure to elaborate the political aspects of
Ol Luke’s actions, distancing him from the land claim process with its
emphasis on succession, is made explicit by Sansom’s use of Ol Luke’s
story as a refutation of Rowley’s historical and materialist analysis
(Sansom 1988a:158). Even the pseudonym which Sansom has given the old
man has none of the connotations of the ‘whitefella name’ he was known
by, which was ‘Moses’. (41)
More recently Ol Luke, or Moses, is described as ‘the last person to
know "all that Daly business" ... a strict man who made sure that youngsters
kept the law’ (Sansom 1995:279).
Sansom (1980a:16-19) claims it is a person’s
history of shared experience with others that decides their ‘close-up’
status as consociates. The shared experience of earlier struggles was
also a factor in the formation of a fringe dweller organisation to campaign
for land in Darwin, as I have already related. At Knuckeys Lagoon in
the 1970s, these shared experiences begin on cattle stations of the
hinterland: ‘It is individuals taken on their own who command the past
and can give experiential depth to time. Individual pasts are as distinguishing
as the ego-centred networks that adults develop for themselves’ (Sansom
1980a:139). However, the references to kinship at Knuckeys Lagoon that
have survived in Sansom’s texts suggest that there is more to the structure
of a mob than the ego centred groupings described by Sansom (1980a:16-19).
The grid devised by Schutz, used by Sansom (1980a:137), with the ego
at the centre, cannot in itself explain Aboriginal relationships to
each other. As Sansom (1995) has gone to some length to explain, Aboriginal
beliefs are amongst the least egocentric.
The mob is ‘mixed’, speaking fourteen
different languages (Sansom 1980a:11), but is held together by ‘that
Darwin style’ and a history of ‘runnin’ together’ (p.11). Tonkinson
(1974:41) and Stanton (1982:85) also describe the emergence of mobs,
or ‘residential identity groups’, which they note as originating in
centralised camps in response to disruption of the Aboriginal connection
to traditional lands. In the Western Desert, the classificatory nature
of the kinship system allows the possibilities of ‘an almost unlimited’
extension of Aboriginal relationships in mixed groups (Tonkinson 1974:41).
Other bonds for mixed groups are discussed
by Brandl and Walsh (1983:154), who list ten ‘sociocultural links’ that
are likened to the branches of a tree attached to the roots in the earth.
Where those links are found in Sansom (1980a), they are not expanded.
For example Mrs Nevill provides access to clay and sandalwood at a love-magic
sacred site that is used for trade with other groups (Sansom 1980a:198).
The giving of a tuft of a child’s hair, known as mipil, leads to exchange
ceremonies between groups ensuring: ‘Visitors to Darwin could come into
the camp to claim special relationship on the grounds that "you bin
get mipil longa wefella"’ (Sansom 1980a:220). These are just two of
many examples from Sansom’s texts, of Aboriginal relations to each other
and to the land that appear to play an important part in the cohesion
of a mob.
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4.15 Fringe dwellers
and the economy
Sansom (1980a:244) claims that ‘an eighty year history of dependence on the white supply of rations and wages’ now means the ‘[d]ependence on cash income is total’. Despite this alleged dependence, in a later article Sansom (1988b) constructs a case for ‘service exchange’ where money is transformed into peculiarly Aboriginal values ‘blackfella style’. Austin-Broos (1998:296) is critical of Sansom’s argument that ‘exchange or "helping" relations, for instance - continue unaltered by urbanisation or even the cash economy’. However, Merlan (1991:262) believes the concept of service exchange, not present in Sansom’s original ethnography, is more useful ‘than the opposition of symbolic and material "economies" in his earlier work’. While I agree with Sansom’s (1988b:159) statement that, ‘while in Aboriginal possession, the dollar is a thing both transformed and ambivalent’, my own findings would indicate that the transformation is because reciprocity and exchange are dominated by structural and ritual obligations, more than egocentric performative service. Another view comes from an Alice Springs
study by Drakakis-Smith (1981:41) who claims that Aborigines have become
‘an important consumption group’ where the ‘old natural economy ... has
disappeared almost completely’. I believe that Sansom’s emphasis on a
parallel economy, which is centred on the purchase of alcohol, fails to
situate Aboriginal fringe dwellers in the general Darwin economy. For
example, the fact that the Wayside Inn at the Berrimah crossroads sold
more wine than any liquor outlet in Darwin in the 1970s is significant
(see Bunji May 1973). More relevant is the question asked by both Langton
(1993:199) and Saggers and Gray (1997, 1998): ‘Who benefits from the sale
and distribution of alcohol to Aboriginal people?’
Sansom does not examine the articulation
of the two economies because he claims Aborigines do not do so. That is,
writing of the seasonal lay-offs in the cattle industry that gave Knuckeys
Lagoon a reputation as a dumping ground for redundant stockmen (Bunji
May 1973), Sansom (1988b:164) observes the self-evident nature of the
exploitation. However, he does not pursue this point because ‘[no one]
charged whitefellas with the imposition of seasonal alternations’. It
is remarkable that in 1988 Sansom (p.164) could make the following generalisation
about an Aboriginal acceptance of the sequence of lean times:
Proponents of direct action would find
it difficult to persuade countrymen that by joining in combinations (whether
lawful or otherwise) they might work against government or the collectivity
of their sporadic employers to alter these experienced givens of subsidence.
Sansom’s statement is contradicted by the
involvement of many of the people at Knuckeys Lagoon in campaigns for
equal pay and citizenship in the 1960s and the whole mob’s active support
for land rights in the 1970s. Although those generations are rapidly passing,
I know that during Sansom’s fieldwork the fringe dwellers remembered that
wage rises and citizenship were not given without long struggles which
involved most Aborigines in Darwin who were classified as ‘wards of the
state’ until 1964 (see Rowley 1972b:293; Bandler 1989:18; Wells
1995b). In a telling moment, after a fringe dweller associates alcohol
with the ‘time we got that citizen[ship]’ in Sansom’s book, ‘this man’s
further conversation concerns grogging not at all for it is part of his
already launched discussion of work and cattle station wages’ (Sansom
1977:59, 1980a:49).
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4.16 The fringe
dwellers’ attachment to place
Sansom (1985:83) states that he worked on the Humpty Doo land claim and ‘a previous needs claim’. Judging by the evidence, where Sansom (1980a:266) argued there had been a mob presence on the urban fringe for over forty years, that ‘previous needs claim’ was on behalf of Knuckeys Lagoon. However, in his texts Sansom does not strengthen the claims of the group by asserting ‘continuity of mobs in time must be fictions’ (p.266). (42) Images of turtles and water lilies in paintings by the fringe dwellers are glossed over by Sansom (1995:295) as ‘cheeky ... snatching and grabbing appropriation of the lagoon by ... fringe dwellers who have now used the lagoon for decades. As things used to be, native title in the lagoon vested in the Larrakiiya, Darwin’s original inhabitants’. However, I do not believe that the mob’s long attachment to the nearby lagoon can be dismissed as ‘cheeky appropriation’. Layton (1986:24) says that Sansom told him there is evidence of the fringe dwellers claiming secondary rights to local [Larrakia] sites on the grounds that these had links to sites in the Daly River area. Layton (1986:25) also reports that Sansom said: ‘In one instance men claimed legitimately to have succeeded to custodianship of a local [Larrakia] dreaming’. (43) In addition, the mob’s protests for land rights in the 1970s suggest that a large number of pensioners, families and unemployed Aboriginal people strongly identified with the fringe camp. The sign at the entrance to the camp (Sansom 1980e:1, 1983:30) is also an expression of ownership. This evidence appears to contradict Sansom’s portrayal of a people without futures, ‘corporate existence’, property or succession (Sansom 1980a:7, 19, 239, 132, 262, 258, 265; 1981a; 1982b129; 1985:83; 1988a:158). Based on my fieldwork in the fringe camps,
I find Sansom’s thesis to be confused by his division of residents into
fringe dwellers as the ‘privileged elite’ who regard the camp as home
(Sansom 1980a:9), fringe campers who maintain some independence from the
first group and fringe clients who rely on the patronage of fringe dwellers.
If a section of the mob regards the camp as home, why are they included
as people without futures? And why should ‘fringe campers’ be separated
from ‘dwellers’, particularly if they are kin, as they usually would be?
In the open fringe camp, I found that people claim their kinship rights
and are welcomed into the camp. (44)
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4.17 Bush workers and army camps
In her foreword to Being Black: Aboriginal cultures in ‘settled’ Australia, (Keen 1988), Reay (1988: x) warns: In discovering continuity with the past we need to be wary of attributing facets of contemporary Aboriginal culture to tribal antecedents... It may sometimes be difficult to determine whether a shared trait originated in precolonial Aboriginal society, colonial white society or the shared experience and situation of itinerant rural workers. I believe many of the group dynamics Sansom
describes in the private domain of the fringe camps, including the value
placed on consociates (see Sansom 1982a), are specific to the camps of
the Aboriginal cattle station workers because they come from the shared
cultural traditions of bush workers. If the drinking styles of urban nomads
and bush workers and the fringe dwellers at Knuckeys Lagoon are ‘independent
replications’ as Sansom (1980a:177) believes, it would be an incredible
but convenient example of parallel evolution to fit with his thesis of
‘Aboriginal understandings that are uncompromised’ (Sansom 1980a:74).
My point is that Sansom has not considered enough the enmeshing of fringe
dwellers and invaders in his detailed defence of the cultural legitimacy
of Aboriginal fringe dwellers against those who view Aboriginal drinking
as ‘a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of general [Australian]
culture’ (Rowley 1972a:234), or allege Aboriginal ‘intelligent parasitism’
(see Sansom 1985:40).
Trigger (1994:33) gives an example of how
‘the culture of pastoralism has become enmeshed with the culture Aboriginal
people have inherited from their forebears’. At Robinson River Station,
in the NT, Aboriginal stock workers’ cultural connections to the land
encompassed not only spiritual ties, but were constructed around the cattle
industry. Although Sansom (1980a:12) says, ‘Those Aborigines who dominate
the fringe camps of Darwin all have cattle station backgrounds’, I can
find no evidence of this. I believe that Knuckeys Lagoon was distinct
in character from Railway Dam, Kulaluk and camps of Arnhem Land people.
Each of these groups has their separate histories and population pools.
For the men, the distinguishing markers at Knuckeys Lagoon were the slang,
tight jeans, riding shoes and sometimes the cowboy hats or shirts of the
stock workers or ‘ringers’ from the cattle stations and buffalo camps
(see Sansom 1980a:12). (45)
Rowse (1991:8) suggests that male Aboriginal
stock workers hold this clothing in high regard because it symbolises
the shared ethos of male Australian bush workers. He considers it likely
that Aboriginal men used cowboy clothes to harness the colonists’ authority
to their own interests (Rowse 1991:9). Rather than examine similar possibilities,
Sansom (1995:282-4) looks for Aboriginal cultural continuities to explain
the value put on a colourful, but sweat and dust ingrained, ‘Rodeo shirt’.
He does not expand on the observation that the Aboriginal owner had ‘the
right to wear a drover’s hat, riding boots and the full issue of stockman’s
gear’ (Sansom 1995:283). Elsewhere, Sansom (1980a:222) also implies the
importance to the men at ‘Wallaby Cross’ of the accoutrements of the stock
worker.
Another point of difference between ‘Wallaby
Cross’ and other fringe camps was the ownership and sharing of ‘three
small trucks’ in the 1970s (Sansom 1980a:224-5) and the strict management
of those ‘camp vehicles’. No other fringe camp in Darwin has been able
to manage a single vehicle for an extended period, to my knowledge. (46)
The experience of station workers might make
this possible, while, for cultural reasons, in other camps vehicle ownership
would be difficult. Finally, in the days when most of the residents of
Knuckeys Lagoon had pastoral worker backgrounds, which is no longer the
case, I was struck by the mob’s singular purpose and willingness to accept
orders from their leaders, named by Sansom, and to organise for protests.
Sansom (1980a:179) and Beckett (1964:37)
note that the ‘work and bust’ habits of Aboriginal drinkers follows
the pattern set by the Australian bush worker (see Ward 1966:100). Rowley
(1972a:234-6), Eggleston (1974:56), Collmann (1979b:212), Sackett (1977:93)
and Hunter (1993:96) are others who note the connections between Aboriginal
drinking patterns and frontier lifestyles. (47)
Although Sansom (1980a:49) found an ‘absence of alien and externally imposed
ideologies’ in the camps, he admits: ‘Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern
Territory are the functional equivalents of the men who worked a century
ago in New South Wales as shearers, ringers, fence builders and so on’
(Sansom 1978b:91, 1980a:244).
The non-Aboriginal bush workers had more
opportunities and reasons to cross racial barriers in the course of their
work and in leisure than other White Australians. For one, as Sansom (1980d:110)
notes: ‘The relationship between black and white in Australia is associated
with asymmetrical sex’, which has often been a motivation for interracial
meetings (see Rose 1991:179-188). Therefore it is not surprising that
the ‘close up’ and ‘helpin out’ performative relationships documented
by Sansom (1980a:139, 1988b) and the ‘service economy’ (Sansom 1984a:42,
1988b:174), which Sansom claims are Aboriginal continuities, resemble
the bush workers’ values of mateship. ‘Close up’ countrymen are indicated
as ‘me real mates’ (Sansom 1982a:194), whereby ‘[the] closeness to a "mate"
is reckoned from and out of some remembered occasion’ Sansom (1982a:195).
Ronald and Catherine Berndt (Berndt and
Berndt 1987) did research in the army camps established for Aborigines
in the Darwin hinterland during the second world war. The tribal demography
they recorded in the camps parallels that of ‘Wallaby Cross’. It is likely
that patterns learnt in the camps have been incorporated with more traditional
ways for social control in mixed locations and activities. (48)
Berndt and Berndt
(1987:208-10) give models showing how a ‘European blanket of authority
variously affected Aboriginal traditional life’ in the region. In the
army camps, missions and cattle stations, work patterns and a sexual division
of labour interfered with Aboriginal socialisation. Stanner (1963:250-3)
also describes the outside pressures against traditional life in the area
and the Aboriginal strategies for revival of rituals.
Berndt and Berndt (1987:206) gained an
impression of ‘great vitality’ in the mixed army camps of the Darwin hinterland
where, unlike the racially divided cattle stations, missions and towns,
‘army rules applied equally to all persons’ and established a ‘sense of
solidarity’ (p.177). ‘These features together with material benefits presented
a view to which over 1,000 or more Aborigines were exposed. And there
is evidence to support the contention that they left a lasting impression’
(p.177). In the 1970s some of the older fringe dwellers had a shared background
of wartime employment . The number of older Aborigines from the hinterland
area with military names like ‘Captain’ and ‘Major’ also suggest the influence
of the war years.
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4.18 On-and-off marriages
To apply theories of flexible social structures to the marriage ties between men and women and commitment to children, is more difficult than accounting for the bonds between the 400 or 500 ‘countrymen’ who make up a fluctuating mob. This conflict between Sansom’s theory of mob construction and the more classical forms based on kinship finds a parallel in the mob, where ‘women "worry for" their ‘lations, men "worry for" mobs’ (Sansom 1978b:101, 1980a:253). However, a dichotomy between fixed relations and flexible mobs is partly avoided by Sansom in finding that gender relationships are unstable and subsumed to mob interest. According to Sansom (1978b:89, 1980a:242, 1984b:5, 1988b:171) the release of married women ‘to become girls again’ is described as ‘that on and off business’. In the region ‘they do not entertain time-bound definitions of relationships and endow them with futurity’ (Sansom 1978a:106) because many marriages are sacrificed in bad economic times when the relationship is ‘no longer self-sustaining’ (Sansom 1978b:93). In my experience, the description of on-and-off
marriages and breaking-up in hard times does not correspond to the many
relationships in the camps around Darwin where couples remain together
under extreme circumstances. In addition, in attempting to fit marriage
into his theories of labile groups Sansom highlights several contradictions
in his text. Firstly, the importance of kinship in holding a mob together,
especially in times of crisis, is confirmed (Sansom 1978b:101, 1980a:253).
Secondly, the analysis of the opposition between the wage dollar of the
men and the pension dollar of the women (Sansom 1978b:102, 1980a:254)
suggests the shortcomings of examining fringe dweller social structure
in a segregated social field outside the wider economic context (see Collmann
1979a). (49)
In the context of the difficulties
of life in the fringe camps, a fuller analysis is needed before attributing
unstable gender relations to supposedly Aboriginal cultural continuities
where ‘many (but not all) people change sexual partners with frequency’
(Sansom 1995:291). For example, Queenie, who Sansom (1984b:5) interviewed
on a Darwin beach for the 1976 census, had seven children to three partners.
She was said to be in an ‘on-and-off marriage’ (Sansom (1984b:5), as her
present husband was with another woman somewhere out of town. I maintain
that many factors other than supposed Aboriginal cultural continuities
need to be considered for explanations of the relationship between Queenie
and her spouse.
At the Fremantle forum, Sansom (1998) said
that aspects of kinship relationships remained largely hidden from him
at Wallaby Cross until he returned with his wife and stepchild in 1988.
Accepted as fictive kin to the fringe dwellers, Sansom (1998) says his
wife and the child became the ‘leading persons’ of the family while Sansom
‘walked lonely’ as ‘one of the blokes’. Perhaps this explains the earlier
lack of analysis of the kinship bonds that are emphasised by the women
and are said to provide succour (Sansom 1980a:253).
Sansom (1987:350) came to the view that
‘Aborigines of the Darwin region do indeed live in a world in which all
significant others are allocated kinship positions’, although he argues
for the predominance of ‘effective kinship’ (p.350). ‘Continuity over
time’, concludes Sansom (1978b:101, 1980a:253) is found in ‘the set of
a women’s female ‘lations’. These ‘women-to-women ties transcend the fleeting
though absorbing unity of mobs’. Sansom (1978b:101, 1980a:253) claims
women are concerned for kin while men gain status from the stockman’s
wage dollar. As the men in the cattle industry cannot avoid being ‘inconsistent
providers’ (Sansom 1980a:253), there is an underlying social structure
that nurtures the needy. According to Sansom (p.253) it is the pattern
of food preparation and distribution by the women that provides the ‘template
for all relationships of sharing within a grouping centred on a hearth’.
Those with a guaranteed pension on which the camp leaders rely are ‘no
chance combination but a group of older men and women who are all "lations"’
(p.253).
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I have argued that Sansom denies or filters out indicators which do not support his argument ‘that activity conducted within a world of Aboriginal business ... is distinct from the domain of black-white relationships’ (Sansom 1980a:250). My criticism is based on my own experience, both prior to and during my PhD fieldwork, and a careful reading of Sansom’s often contradictory texts in which the role of the anthropologist, his entry to the field and exit from it, and his ‘writing up’ of field notes are only selectively revealed. In my analysis, Sansom’s creative ethnography and essays become key evidence in themselves of an articulation between the Aboriginal domain and the wider world. Furthermore, just as Sansom has deconstructed ‘the word’ of the fringe campers as an Aboriginal ‘social construction of reality’ (see Sansom 1985:91), his texts, as a ‘construction of reality’ are available to be scrutinised, towards an alternative interpretation of life in the fringe camps. (50) Sansom’s graphic descriptions often give
the reader a sense of ‘being there’. Readers feel familiar with characters
in the texts like Norbett, Mrs Nevill, Tommy Atkins, Ol Luke and others.
As Marcus and Cushman (1982:33) suggest, realist techniques validate
the sense of an ethnographer’s intimacy with his interlocutors. In my
analysis, I use Sansom’s realistic representations of fringe dwellers’
concepts as a basis to analyse his texts. By critiquing the texts according
to fringe dwellers’ values, as portrayed by Sansom, I attempt to reveal
the observer/author behind the textual ‘Wallaby Cross’ and to restore
the ‘real’ Knuckeys Lagoon as the referent.
In a similar manner, Merlan (1995:165)
uses the vocabulary of the fringe campers to ask of Sansom’s text: ‘Are
we all ultimately restricted to just being "peepers"?’ A peeper in the
camp is one who takes an unwarranted interest in private affairs (Sansom
1980a:159). Merlan accepts the text as the referent, or as a reality
in itself, to make the reader complicit in the fringe camp politics
as a ‘peeper’. In addition, I ask, ‘Is the text "jus lotta talk"?’ According
to Sansom (1980a:205) a story of ‘what bin happen’ remains ‘jus "lotta
talk"’ until it is confirmed by witnesses. Agreed statements then become
‘the word’ of the mob which must be adhered to by those claiming affiliation.
In the mob, ‘withdrawal into a private language is a movement into a
separate jurisdiction’ (Sansom 1980a:103). Therefore, The camp at Wallaby
Cross remains as ‘lotta talk’, or ‘humbug’ disconnected from its source,
the agreed word of the Aboriginal mob, and claiming acceptance as ‘the
word’ in another mob, the remote circle of academia.
The text can be viewed as what the fringe
dwellers call ‘serious gammon’, because the anthropologist is in a position
of power ‘writing up’ after fieldwork, and able to shape what has been
observed without the ‘witnessing’ crowds of the camp. As Sansom (1980a:171-2)
notes, ‘serious gammoning can only begin when the intended gammoner
already enjoys clear political advantage’. Like Ted Wolsey in Wallaby
Cross, the anthropologist has to gammon because ‘details of past events
are owned’ (Sansom 1980a:174). To ‘write up’ a book which is not the
mob ‘word’, the anthropologist contests the mob ownership and asserts
his power in doing so. Serious gammon is ‘political argument in the
absence of political evidence’ (Sansom 1980a:175) and my critique has
attempted to make this point about Sansom’s texts. (51)
Sansom (1980a:160) claims that the opening
of issues which have been closed is a serious threat to the constructed
reality of the mob where ‘raising problems from a finished past is egotistic
post hoc aggression’ which defies a mob’s ‘synthetic realisation’. If
this is the case, does not this statement equally apply to a text that
raises mob disputes that have been resolved in the anthropologist’s
presence? But the term, ‘synthetic realisation’, is more appropriately
applied to the textual representation of a fringe camp society written
as ‘the word’ of the anthropological ‘mob’, and I suggest it is my opening
of issues that defies that constructed reality.
The camp at Wallaby Cross, describes
how Aborigines ‘use words in order to create and establish social forms’
(Sansom 1980a:4). Having described a model of social process at the
expense of evidence of pre-existing social structure in the fringe camps
and ignoring or downplaying evidence of links to the surrounding socio-economic
systems, Sansom (1995) later developed a theory of ‘pro-metonymic formations’
typical of Aboriginal beliefs through which meanings are ‘chained down’
and ‘massively preconditioned’ (Sansom 1995:272). He now claims the
Aborigines of labile groups are locked into a system of meaning that
denies human initiative. Previously, descriptions of ceremony
as ‘stultifying’ and ‘intellectually unchallenging’ and a Dreaming that
does not encourage innovation (Sansom 1988a:153) have been asides to
the main argument for processual modelling, but now Sansom (1995) tackles
this central contradiction.
A revisionary essay by Sansom (1995)
on the ‘anthropology of return’ shifts the emphasis to traditional structures
amongst the fringe dwellers, but provides clues as to how Sansom was
able to write his original analysis without seriously considering more
fixed traditional Aboriginal structures and beliefs. Sansom’s creative
solution comes from Aboriginal concepts of ‘the fancy’ as an ‘assertion
of individual vitality’ (Sansom 1995:297) in contrast to the Dreaming
Powers which ‘extinguish human initiative’ (p.297). Sansom (p.298) adds
that displays of fancy draw attention to ‘the message of the code’.
Therefore, I maintain that an interpretation of Sansom’s writing as
‘the fancy’ provides clues for a decoding, or deconstruction, of his
descriptions of life at Wallaby Cross/Knuckeys Lagoon.
Sansom (1995:294) describes the distribution
of cloth hung on lines during the ‘burning rag’ ceremony when possessions
of the deceased are burnt, the ashes buried and participants cleansed
by smoke and water. After the ceremony, when the spirit is returned
to the dreaming, pieces of the lengths of ‘mitril’ (material) are distributed.
Sansom (p.294) interprets these actions as an attempt to overcome the
‘human predicament’ of a Dreaming identity ‘whimsically visited on people’.
(52)
Sansom (p.294) adds that people act like Dreaming Powers in sending
pieces of fancy cloth out, at the time the spirit of the deceased returns
to ‘the whole cloth of undifferentiated Dreaming origins’ (p.294). (53)
Similarly, I suggest that the text of the anthropologist is sent out
as ‘fancy’, enabling the author to avoid the so-called ‘stultifying’
structures laid down by the Dreaming Powers by acting as a creative
power himself.
Sansom (1995:290) claims that rituals
after death ensure ‘authorship, design, ideolect, record, biography’
are enveloped by the ‘devouring Powers of the Dreaming’. Typically with
Sansom’s theorising, an opposing position justifies his own. In this
case, people have no lasting agency or biography and are virtually erased
after death, but his textual piece of ‘fancy’ exists outside those realities.
The deceased of Wallaby Cross cannot speak, Ol Luke can have no successors
(Sansom 1988a:158) but Sansom can create a work of fancy that lives
on.
I was often asked by the people at Knuckeys
Lagoon for photographs taken in the 1970s and passed the requests on
to Sansom. When I provided photocopies of newspaper photographs of the
1970s protests, the relatives of those pictured eagerly received them.
Often my book Bunji: a story of the Gwalwa Daraniki Movement (Day 1994)
was referred to by more literate ‘mob’ members. Other mob members referred
me to the video made by the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (1996)
during the ‘burning rag’ rituals at Knuckeys Lagoon for Louise Bangun’s
son. I consider this to be evidence in the camp of a need, politically
and emotionally, for the story of their struggle to be told and remembered.
The video shows the dead man’s belongings
being burnt in the ritual described by Sansom (1995:291-2). Women dance
with men and sometimes lead the very physical grieving and wailing.
The men’s ‘cock rags’, or red triangular loincloths, are loose fitting
and young dancers mix with the older dancers. The relatively modest
dress of the men can hardly be described as ‘revealing’ and I believe
Sansom’s other description of the covering as ‘decorated genitalia’
(p.291) does not do service to the mourning dancers. Similarly, I find
it difficult to view the tragic dance sequences as displays of sexuality,
or the emotion-charged ritual as ‘a celebration of freedom for the widow
or widower’, with ‘Nod, nudge and wink’ flirting between the young men
and women as Sansom (1995:292) suggests.
Sansom’s analysis of the ceremony proposes
a strong opposition between the pure fancy of ‘desire unmodified’ in
‘unformed youth’, against the commitments of ‘a compromised life’ of
‘achieved acts and accomplished things’ of their elders. As Sansom tells
it, human vitality struggles against the Dreaming Powers in the ceremony,
as do Sansom’s texts over a period of twenty years. In The camp
at Wallaby Cross the only tension which is described between the codes
of the Dreaming Powers and process of human vitality is in Sansom’s
mind, as the Aboriginal fringe dwellers recognise when they call Sansom
‘notta law man really’ (Sansom 1988a:153). In the latest revisionist
article (Sansom 1995), the conflict that existed in Sansom’s mind, between
structure and process is projected onto the Aborigines who are portrayed
as struggling against the Dreaming Powers.
Sansom’s criticism of other writers is
directed at those like Rowley who ‘render both description and interpretation
over to a Western world of discourse’ (Sansom 1984a:40). Unlike Cowlishaw
(1988a, 1988b, 1993, 1994), he does not interpret Aboriginal contemporary
values within ‘an oppositional culture’, but seeks to express ‘Aboriginal
doctrines’ (Sansom 1995:281) which he argues are examples of cultural
continuities. Ironically, for the Knuckeys Lagoon residents, who were
known for their determined resistance, the image of Aboriginal opposition
that Sansom (1995) paints is in opposition to their own allegedly restrictive
‘Dreaming Powers’. In a reversal of Rowley’s elimination of cultural
factors, Sansom (1995) has eliminated political and economic factors
from his research that a multi-sited study would include.
Sansom’s texts can be likened to rare
‘stripy bamboo’ that he describes being traded across Aboriginal jurisdictions
for spear shafts (Sansom 1995:304). As the bamboo is traded from hand
to hand it becomes estranged from its originating story as it becomes
disconnected from the custodians of the Dreaming associated with the
place of origin. In this way: ‘When some of these unknowns arrive amongst
us, they may, like stripy bamboo, come to us as imported fancies’ (Sansom
1995:301). I suggest that Sansom’s description perfectly parallels how
The camp at Wallaby Cross as a fancy signifier has become detached from
its signified, the mob at Knuckeys Lagoon. Sansom (1995:305) explains
how the rattle sound made by the thrower of a stripy bamboo spear is
associated with the ‘taking out of the victim’s voice box’ to leave
them as ‘wordless dead [who become] perpetually discontent and wandering
spirits’. Again, to follow my deconstruction of the texts, the parallels
are intriguing. Perhaps, complimented by my corrective critique, Sansom’s
text, as ‘stripy bamboo’, can be appraised in the context of its origins
and be admired as the artefact of a skilled craftsman, with more practical
application than as an object of fancy.
In his journal article, Sansom (1995:308)
admits: ‘I wrote this essay to render up an artefact of parting... It
had to be a fancy one’. For all ethnographers, the crossing over from
fieldwork into ‘writing up’ is difficult because it requires the participant
observer to rise above the social body in which he or she has been immersed.
Sansom, who believes it requires a strong sense of person to write successfully
(Sansom 1998), rises above the mundane of the Dreaming Powers, fixed
social structures, history, the wider economy - ‘one’s spirit is moved
in mindfulness of art to craft an object out of the fancy of one’s very
own things found’ (Sansom 1995:308).
‘Always the flash of the fancy flags
a place where two paths cross’, claims Sansom (1995:307). Although the
fictional place name ‘Wallaby Cross’ also suggests the intersection
of two paths, instead of analysing conjunction of Western and Aboriginal
societies, Sansom (1982b:135) describes a ‘parathetic’, or side-by-side
(see Merlan 1995:164), existence. In my reading, Sansom releases his
text, as a ‘flash of the fancy’, from the need to engage with the meeting
of Aboriginal and invader by arguing that art defeats history by remaining
forever contemporary (Sansom 1995:301). He also states: ‘a mob must
be taken out of time for its form to be examined’ (Sansom 1980a:260).
To place the mob back into history, I
have suggested an alternative reading of Sansom’s texts. Finally, it
remains to flag where these alternative realities meet. In the last
paragraph, perhaps intentionally, the ethnographic text, as the fancy,
‘draws attention to the code’ as the ‘real’ Knuckeys Lagoon intersects
with the textual ‘Wallaby Cross’. In the last paragraph Sansom reveals
for the first time that Roy Kelly, who is given his proper name throughout
the essay, is the same man as ‘Tommy Atkins’ of The camp at Wallaby
Cross. From that point the code that naturalises the fiction of Wallaby
Cross begins to unravel. (54)
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End Notes -
| 2. See also Sansom 1982b:118. |
| 3. Clendinnen (1999:88-93) gives a very positive interpretation of Sansom's text. |
| 6. Many of these television news items have been compiled into a videorecording titled Stand strong together: fighting for Aboriginal rights in Darwin 1971-1997 (Day 1997e). |
| 10. I was involved in preparing three of these claims. Toohey was appointed in August 1976 (Eames 1983:270). |
| 12. In May 1981 the NT Government approved a policy where 'title will be issued only to umbrella organisations or incorporated bodies affiliated with such organisations' (NT Government 1981a:2168). |
| 13. I met Gilbert Knowles again at Knuckeys Lagoon in 1997. |
| 14. Major Bangun is buried on the Knuckeys Lagoon lease. |
| 15. Margaret and Neil Dargie's daughter, Marlene, still lived at the camp during my fieldwork in 1997. |
| 16. Roy Kelly is buried on the Knuckeys Lagoon lease. |
| 17. Helen Stevens and May Stevens were still living at Knuckeys Lagoon in 1997. |
| 19. Sansom (1980a:248) noticed the respect given by members of the mob to a woman appointed 'Hygiene Lady' at Knuckeys Lagoon by 'welfare authorities' (the ADF). |
| 20. 'Muddi Community' was the name chosen by the Knuckeys Lagoon residents for their group. |
| 21. Raymond Bangun was still living at the camp in 1997. |
| 23. NT Archives photograph 06204. |
| 24. The burial of the third 'masterful man' in the Darwin general cemetery is described by Sansom (1995:274). |
| 25. The ceremony was videotaped for the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (1996). |
| 28. The television time traveller, Dr Who, enters the 'Tardis', which looks like a London police telephone box, to re-emerge in another era. |
| 29. See the account by Trigger (1992:86) of a 'whitefella' crossing into the Aboriginal domain at Doomadgee. |
| 30. For a discussion of the influence of Sansom's African work, see the summary by Merlan (1995:168) of Sansom's 1972 paper on uncertain relationships amongst the Pedi of South Africa. |
| #31. According to Sansom (1998), Povinelli said it is presumptuous to think that her presence would change the senior women's world at Belyuen. |
| 32. The Knowles family still use Knuckeys Lagoon town camp. |
| 33. The detailed obituary to Rowley by Young (1986) shows that his involvement in Aboriginal affairs far exceeded that expected of 'a scholar'. |
| 38. In this chapter, I suggest that Sansom uses this same device in his writing. |
| 39. Sansom (1995:260) describes his relationship to the singing man as a ngirriwat partner. |
| 40. Bunji (January 1982) printed a letter from the son of a Malak Malak woman from the Daly River region who 'grew up at the Retta Dixon Home' and was 'in town for the Daly River land claim'. |
| 43. In Chapter Seven I discuss the relationship between fringe dwellers and Larrakia people. |
| 44. Division between visitors and permanents does seem to develop when families are allocated rental housing, as at Bagot Reserve, and begin to resent transients (see Woodward 1973:25). |
| 49. As I note in Chapter Five, most fringe dwellers now receive a reliable income from social security payments. |
| 54. Once it is known that Roy Kelly is 'Tommy Atkins', an informed reader can deduct that 'Wallaby Cross' is Knuckeys Lagoon, 'Denton Pollock' is Major Bangun and so on. |