aboriginal studies
THE PROBLEMATICS OF LOSS
Tony Huges-d'Aeth
Peter Read
Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership
CUP $29.95pb, 248pp
0 521 77409 8
LIKE HIS 1996 STUDY Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, this new book by the important historian Peter Read seeks to answer the question: how is it that Australians connect to the places in which they live? And like the earlier book, which explored connection by examining disconnection, Belonging is a study which takes place within the problematics of loss. The feature of this latest book is that it looks directly at the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal senses of belonging. Does Aboriginal attachment to land preclude or pre-empt non-Aboriginal attachment? Can they ever be of comparable 'depth'? With extensive experience of writing about and working with the stolen generations (a term he coined), Read is well placed to make these kinds of comparisons.
His move is cognate with that of Henry Reynolds who has recently been concerned with what 'we' were and were not told. The troubled collective pronoun, what the American social theorist Thomas Dumm calls 'the problem of we' is the bane of many who try to write on issues of cultural identity. But if Read is interested in what this multiple shifting 'we' feels, it is a concern driven unashamedly by what 'he' feels. Belonging is an intensely personal book. The play between the instantiated voices of the 'we' and the earnest 'he' who is orchestrating the study is part of the intrigue of this work.
So how does Read go about this task? He talks to people and records their views with his tape-recorder. At times it can be strikingly effective. The book opens and closes with the story of Read discovering the Aboriginal history of the region north of Sydney where he had grown up. His initial research suggested that the proximity of this country to the earliest points of European invasion had destroyed Aboriginal connection to the land. He could find little evidence of Aboriginal people living in the country after the early part of the twentieth-century. The general sense of pastness was confirmed in Read's mind by poets like Douglas Stewart and Robert Campbell who wrote in elegiac terms of the vanished tribes, and by his own childhood adventures amongst the rock-art and shell-middens of the Hawkesbury gorges. This settled view was shattered by a chance meeting with Koori academic Dennis Foley. Foley told Read of growing up in this very country with his family, hunting and fishing in the Narabeen lagoon. Foley's grandmother had burnt his placenta and spread the ashes on trees outside the Royal North Shore Hospital. Read's point in this story is that Foley's revelations force a revaluation of the relationship between past and present. It is a crucial and profound intervention.
The most successful aspects of Belonging are those which combine interview and reflection. Read speaks with an eclectic cast of characters including a Northern Territory linguist, a Cuban-Australian academic, two different painters, an Indian-Australian who worked in central Australia and even the author's own New Age brother. The range of responses is predictably varied although unified by the fact that each respondent had given considerable thought to their sense of belonging to a place. Colleagues also go under the microphone, and Read extracts valuable insights on how ideas of belonging underpin the influential writings of Heather Goodall, Tom Griffiths, Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan. These four conversations? a mini-symposium? are one of the highlights of the book. Not all of Read's enquiries can be said to have the same force. His chapters on poetry and country music read like themed montages. The country music chapter appears thin compared to Clinton Walker's fine book about Aboriginal country music, Buried Country, while the slabs of poetry cry out for greater context than Read provides. His interviews of students, while interesting in a board 'vox pop' sense, are also somewhat undigested. Although it might seem to run counter to Read's ethic of listening, the voices of the young people could have been beneficially combined with the kind of reflection and analysis he employs elsewhere.
Read's work forms part of an intellectual trend which values 'affect'. Affective scholarship embraces emotions, sentiments, longings, memories and experience; in short, all the things that were once bracketed off from social enquiry to prevent them from muddying the waters of truth. The situation has rather reversed to the point where nothing seems quite as true as what one feels. Feelings however, and this is part of the courage of Read's enterprise, are hard to verify or compare. If you feel sick, you must be sick. If you feel relaxed and comfortable, you are relaxed and comfortable.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000