cultural studies WHO ARE 'WE'?
John Docker
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
A Place in the Sun: Re-creating the Australian Way of Life
Harper Collins $22.95pb, 389pp
073 226 522 3
Who are 'we'? In terms of genre, A Place in the Sun might make us think, for a moment, of New Journalism. We, our two narrators, Cope and Kalantzis, travel around Australia interviewing Aboriginal spokespeople like Charles Perkins and Jackie Huggins, ex-Prime Ministers like Mr Fraser and Mr Hawke (whose favourite expression seems to be 'for Christ sake'), an assortment of politicians and community leaders and captains of industry, and multicultural figures like Helen Sham-Ho and Unity Party founder Peter Wong. Cope and Kalantzis say in their prologue that 'we leave our interviewers to speak for themselves'. This turns out not to be so. Characteristically, someone -- let's say, Perkins or Huggins -- will talk for a page and a half or so, then our narrators will take over from them, explaining and clarifying what the interviewee has just said in terms of the truths of Australian history.
The interviewers, that is, emerge as patronising, teacherly, authoritative and omniscient. Bakhtin argued that, contrary to the polyphonic Dostoievsky, Tolstoy's narrators never permit characters to be free people, to stand alongside their creator as equals. In these terms, A Place in the Sun is a monologic text. The interviewees are relentlessly written over. The interviewees become the means for the interviewers to express a frame story, to further their teaching and preaching. The stories of the interviewees are never allowed to wander, to go where they will, to lead on to other stories that might escape or challenge or turn upside down the frame story.
The frame story features another 'we'. We are the 'ordinary' Australians who came here as settlers from 1788 onwards. We are a recently settled nation of the New World, a nation of immigrants from all around the globe who by the early 1990s had created something new in history, a tolerant, pluralist, multi-ethnic, democracy that respects cultural difference and diversity. In this ideal society, we immigrants, fundamentally decent, recognise that Aboriginal people were the original owners of the continent, and that they were dispossessed by invasion and colonialism. We recognise that we, the post-1788 immigrants who constitute the Australian nation, have created 'difficulties' for the original owners. But such 'difficulties' can be overcome in the nation's narrative of progress, for we believe in 'history's road to fairness and redemption'.
How, in this Christian frame story, do we redeem ourselves in the light of what we know we have done to the original owners? Well, a microcosm of the possible is the community-in-diversity of Moreland, Melbourne. The Moreland City Council has put out a statement recognising Aboriginal prior ownership, loss, and disadvantage. Its mayor tells our narrators, 'Let's bring Aboriginals into our community and make them part of the mainstream.' Our narrators approve: 'It's all part of the process', they conclude, 'of coming to grips with what the Australian mainstream really is, and really has to be.'
Our authors are speaking here conventional multi-cultural discourse. The post-1788 nation is a community-in-diversity and difference, and Aboriginal people can be recognised as part of these myriad differences. We -- the nation of newcomers -- will include the Aborigines. We will recognise their particular differences by agreeing, for example, to Native Title, especially the 'generous offer' reportedly made by Noel Pearson, that 'the immigrants, the settlers', can 'keep everything they already have'. The Aboriginal people 'will be allowed to enjoy their Native Title over whatever land has been left over. They can keep doing what they already do with the leftover bits.' Reconciliation really won't be that difficult after all.
In A Place in the Sun the favoured term for we immigrants is 'settlers', not invaders, not colonisers. Yet it seems to me that Cope and Kalantzis do indeed speak in the tone and voice of the Colonisers. What if Aboriginal people disturb this tone? Both Perkins and Huggins, for example, express bitterness, loss, anguish, mistrust, frustration, anger, and fear. But such is not permitted by our authors to disturb their optimistic portrait of the 'national sensibility', where the mainstream of the immigrant nation 'love' Australia and 'belong' here. For our authors, it's apparently not all that psychically troublesome to love and belong to a land which was once owned by others, and whose history of brutal dispossession we know and are continuously advantaged by.
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