aboriginal studies
LOST IN SPACE
Barry Hill
Lesley Head
Second Nature: The History and Implications
of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape
Syracuse UP $39.95hb, 272pp
0 8156 0587 0
Aboriginal here means aboriginal and Aboriginal: indigenous, as in what might have been native to a conception of place, and Aboriginal as in the present struggle over views of habitat and its evolving history. The 'Second Nature' Head is trying to talk about is the complicated history of concepts with regard to landscape: or to put this yet another way, the socialisation of the concept through time. All of the above is meant to be read with the appropriate and fashionable 'post-colonial anxiety'.
Already then, the book is a handful -- no, a mindful. This is also because Head ranges across the disciplines of geology, archaeology, and anthropology, history and cultural studies -- a Renaissance brief, if ever there was one. She wants to pin every idea back onto the ears of colonial history, while sweeping us forward to the age of Greenpeace contemporary holisms.
All this while happily announcing that consistent with her subject matter 'my theoretical position is ambiguous' and that 'moving forward on these issues requires a certain sort of positionality'. The last remark seems to be her way of saying that unlike some postmodernists she does not want to shirk a sense of political direction. After all this dancing and much use of the word 'complexity' she sets out towards her subject matter.
These are the 'contested traditions' (to use one of her borrowed phrases) or 'nested contextualities' (to use another) that bear upon the following: transformed landscapes; landscapes of social negotiation; change among hunter-gatherers; traditionality and primitivism; and the politics of the past. It is important to note that these topics are of world interest and everywhere contested in ways that express post-colonial dilemmas and that the real point of Head's journey is to place them in the light of what she calls 'the Australian evidence'.
She never quite manages to do this because her appalling style gets in the way. Here is an example, taken from the book's publicity:
This work raised challenges to both dimension of pristineness, primordiality and purity. Then notion of pristine in relation to physical landscape is often associated with primordiality and ancientness. Australia is labelled as New World in terms of culture, but its nature has always been synonymous with antiquity. Although there is much geological truth in this image, it is only part of the story; as might be expected on a continent with considerable bio- and geodiversity, there are many ecological examples of newness and change. The idea of purity has much in common with blank slates and emptiness -- 'a land untouched by human hands or footsteps'. While rock art galleries, fish traps, shell middens and artefacts scatters all attest in very visible ways to the prehistoric human presence in Australia, there are also signatures of human activity other than explicitly archaeological ones. In recent decades the landscape itself has been made to speak of its peopling, albeit somewhat ambiguously.
When I read this I remembered Orwell's Politics and the English Language, a puritanical tirade, admittedly, but the necessary antidote to mystificatory use of abstract nouns, jargon and the deadening passive tense that reveals the mental apparatchik in the progressive. Because the writing is dead in the water the thought processes fail to surface. In the case of Head, after she tables paragraphs like these (at the head of every chapter) she fills out the rest by paraphrasing other scholars. Page by page she moves from author to author, with hardly an original thread of thought to link them. Her book is as parasitic as the stock exchange.
The only fresh writing in the book are the interludes where she writes biographically about her ancestors to this country: English agricultural labourers who entered Aboriginal land and did the usual things in the early nineteenth century. This is moderately interesting because Head does have a breadth of reference about landscape and to some extent social history, so that she can place family history in the larger political and natural geography.
Your comments are invited: email them in a Letter to the Editor
Return to Australian Book Review /July 2000