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Professor Stephen Muecke

Challenges to Perform: History, Passion and the Imagination

Three Historical Passions

I am with Greg Dening, here to talk about the passions of history, and I shall do so with a performance taking three parts. I want to speak about the passion of the intellectual, the passion of the emerging identity and the passion of the scavenger. I will be performing three voices, one of an Aboriginal man with whom I have worked, Paddy Roe, and the others those of two younger Australian writers, Katrina Shlunke and Paul Magee.

1. The Passion of the Intellectual

I want to use the word ‘intellectual’ again, without apology. In the face of a whole lot of anti-elitism and dumbing down, I want to re-assert the value of intellectuals as storytellers. Intellectuals are not just university folk or bearded avant-gardists; they can be found in all walks of life. So my first performance will be from Aboriginal Australia, the North-West, around Broome, where Paddy Roe, Krim Benterrak and I put together a book called Reading the Country.

We are having a theological discussion. Paddy Roe remembers a man who came to see him once, a priest, and he laughs as he says, ‘he’s one of the man got bugarrigarra too, you know, that priest and that church, you call it, that’s bugarrigarra too.’

Bugarrigarra is the Nyigina word for ‘dreaming’. And he goes on: ‘That’s only bugarrigarra because nobody never seen true person (laughter) you know I don’t think, did they? did they ever see true person?’

What he is getting at is the fact that no-one has ever seen God: ‘I know Jesus was a human being, then he gone but his father; nobody don’t know, nobody never see-im because he’s a bugarrigarra.

Paddy compares this Christian god with the figures from his dreamings who people believe in and tell powerful stories about, even though they have never seen them. The stories told about them persist as traces in the landscape, like a dinosaur footprint: ‘Well that’s marrala bin walkin’ there, that’s his track ... he’s a man he bin singing but that’s his track.’

This story with the track as its concrete evidence has given the local people a law about mothers-in-law. ‘from bugarrigarra he [the mother in law] got daughter well that daughter is mine he might be promise me you know.’

What should a man do with his mother in law? ‘I gotta feed that mother tucker anything, plenty this way and bit of everything you know ‘til the baby grow big, little bit I take-im ‘way, might be that high then I grow him up you know ‘til he get woman.’

We have a situation here of mature Aboriginal men in the company of little girls they call their wives, a paedophilia scenario which Paddy Roe recognises: ‘like that ah English say, ‘What that?’ ‘That’s my wife’ (Incredulous)’WHAT?’ (laughter) ‘Yeah’ ‘You should be in jail’ but that man know what he’s doin’ (Laugh) he’s not silly ... he know how big he gonta be before he come to woman but he can feed him take him everywhere whatever he likes and nothing happen (Laugh) he got too much this one too (Gesture ‘brains’, laugh)’

And then he spins this out into a story:

I remember one time -

One bloke went in jail for seven years —

because eer the girl was twelve year old —

but that’s his promised girl (Laugh) you see?

Krim: Mm

Yeah, that’s his promised girl—

Now I come back, I dunno too —

I bin working out in Roebuck plains country —

In the windmills —

I told you about that cyclone come, not very long —

So when I come back I hear that man in jail —

‘What’s wrong with ‘im?’

‘Oh well, they took the girl away, put-im back in the convent —

and put the man in for seven years —

‘Yeah, what wrong?’ I said to welfare —

welfare, they bring me there —

‘No, no, no,’ I said —

‘That’s his promised GIRL

that’s his PROMISED girl —

he married about that high (laugh) —

he can carry his wife —

anyway where he travel around if he can’t walk (Laughter) —

if he get tired —

you know till he grow big —

when he grow big, he know, he got this one,’ I said (Laugh) —

you know —

when he grow big, then he see, he’s a woman —

THEN he know what to do —

make a woman out of him —

But he can walk around for years and years, just like that —

Nothing else —

Oh I got mad too —

‘You people try and dig little bit more deep —

you bin digging only white soil —

try and find the black soil inside’ (Laughter)

YEAH —

I said to him —

(…)

Oh they get-im out —

They got-im out again, let-im go —

That man, ‘You look after ‘im’

‘Oh I will too,’ I tell-im (pp. 193-4)

 

And then I wrote:

From the discussion with Paddy Roe, and his story, it is easy to see how different cultures produce different sorts of truths which hold good only within their own systems. But Paddy Roe’s approach is ‘intellectual’ in the sense that he doesn’t dismiss the white man’s institutions out of hand; he reads them from a perspective which takes into account cultural similarity and difference. Christianity and bugarrigarra thus have ‘invisibility’ in common.

The intellectual is on the margins of the common body of knowledge. By knowing things which come from elsewhere (the ‘frontiers’ of science and technology, the strange almost perverse discourses of the humanities, and other cultures) he or she makes raids on the common myths at the same time as building up new ones which will come to count as common knowledge one day. It is Paddy Roe’s confidence in the knowledge of his own culture which enables him to challenge in such a forceful way European notions of marriage, and he saves one of his countrymen from seven years of suffering. This is perhaps the power of the intellectual; to intervene in a situation and tell a story which can change the conventions for understanding things.

2. The Passion of the Emerging Identity

Katrina Schlunke’s Autobiography of the Bluff Rock Massacre, was a PhD, and will be a great book. It is a kind of ‘ficto-history’, by which I don’t mean a history corrupted by fiction writing technique (history always was!), but a text which is explicit about the relation between history and fiction. Like a designer telephone with a clear perspex, it shows us its workings. It disentangles and re-tangles the local history of the Bluff Rock massacre which took place around the Glen Innes/Tenterfield area 150 years ago. What took place is hard to figure out, as it partakes of all those ‘Niggers’ leap’ and cliff stories which are the condensation of truth and fiction, siphoning off the real horror of the wars of conquest and localising them in some landscape feature which both impossibly is and isn’t the place where something happened.

Katrina’s feelingful and intensely local history comes out of her own growing up in the area as she remembers and researches a history which is her own—BUT, not quite as she remembers it THEN, and not quite as she tells it NOW: ‘History is part of an unfolding invented by imaginative temporality and locality rather than distance from the present,’ she says.

We were always taught that histories are fixed in past time, rather than being inflected through ‘imaginative temporality and locality’, or even in her case, inflected through her identity: but that is how new histories are made. We remember how the powerful metaphor dreamed up by Henry Reynolds (The Other Side of the Frontier) was a lightning strike of the imagination which relaunched Australian history in a new direction: suddenly there was a pre-history to whitefella history, and a parallel other history, held apart at that moment, but perhaps reintegrating in interesting ways in Shlunke.

Schlunke’s deployment of her identity in locality has that same ‘lightning strike’ potential. She’s a Glen Innes girl, but going back there as a scholar she has to contrast the historical evidence of some sort of massacre with her ‘memory’ that there were no Aborigines in the area (people kept saying they were from Moree), contrasting with another memory that there were Aboriginal kids in her class at school. But those kids didn’t identify according to the ‘modernist meta-categories’ of race, class and gender. The ‘local’ classifications were ‘baroquely particular‘. You didn’t ask was someone Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal or whether they were rich or poor but were you respectable or a tart? Did you play netball of hockey? Did you know my family? Were you an outcast or did you have a group of friends? Were you a townie?’

She goes on to say:

I don’t think it helped to go back as a lesbian. Caught in the act of becoming postcolonial I was/am tremulously ‘lesbian.’ ... So this is not a lesbian pilgrimage but rather attempts a queer odyssey, arriving home only to set off again ...

And there is nothing queerer than the experience of a small town. Nothing more demanding of politeness-as-performance and nothing more likely to produce emotional maelstroms. Nowhere is more suited to the thought ‘She has got to be a dyke’ as you recall all that horse talk and the many women-only spaces of Churches, ‘Clubs’ and ‘Associations’. Nowhere is there a better example of what can and can’t be said. You can never be certain where an ally or enemy might be and you feel the physical threat in your heart/cunt/gut all the time you are loving the landscape and readmiring ‘country’ values. An intense dislocation and relocation occurs at the same time and in the same place. You can barely touch your girlfriend in anything like a semi-public place but long to experience the most sensational passions, hidden behind shearing sheds, in anonymous motels further along the highway, on walks along struggling rivers, because they re-awaken your desire for revenge, for something that has become the Big Secret that gives you energy to live in a place like this. You don’t want them to know, you want them to be like you. You long for them to speak your language, which of course some of them do, some of the time. Home is a safety net with holes. You begin to live in an odd world of recognition and mis-recognition. The laugh that you have when you go into the fish-and-chip shop wearing your ‘I can’t even THINK straight' T-shirt and the middle-aged, over-worked woman behind the counter saying, ‘Oh I know exactly how you feel love’.

The thesis is written pretty much in a subjunctive mood, full of maybes, possibility and doubt. In this sense it is an antidote to the pastoral call for certainty in the land-rights debates and the conservative political call for finality (a wiping out of the problem). It enacts or performs a critique of history-writing without making this critique explicit, methodical or even confrontational.

3. The Passion of the Scavenger

The scavenger finds useful things, and each one is a little piece of an archeological jigsaw. It involves a love of material which makes the ideological edifices of institutional histories fall away into immateriality. Paul Magee’s ethno-history, From Here to Tierra del Fuego, is a scavenging kind of writing which has been praised by one Australia’s greatest expatriate intellectuals, Michael Taussig, author of Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.

Magee takes you to the end of the world and then steps off into pure intellectual effusion. He's the tour guide you dream of when all roads lead nowhere and silence grips the soul.

Magee says that his approach is actually via the ‘ethnography of dispassion.’ He meets and speaks to travellers in Tierra del Fuego (themselves full participants in the neo-imperialistic Third World tourist economy) who are there ‘just to say I've been there.’ This makes him reflect on the theoretical tendency to imagine that people speak as they speak, and act as they act, out of a pursuit of truth, and a belief in the authenticity and/or moral probity of their actions. His travellers to the end of the world are purely cynical: ‘just to say I've been there.’

‘Why else would you go to the End of the World?’ A Swiss woman I spoke to in Chilean Puerto Natales was going there, she boasted, ‘just to buy the T-shirt that says I've been there.’ Her friend, meanwhile, planned to bypass Ushuaia altogether and fly to Puerto Williams, the Chilean naval institution on the other side of the Beagle Channel. This place as The Travel Survival Kit will tell you, is truly the Southernmost inhabited place in the world, despite Ushuaia's claim to be El Fin del Mundo. Even though there is nothing to do there, you may as well go anyway: ‘If you've come as far as Tierra del Fuego, you can hardly turn back now.’ That such an empty, unbelievable, formality is so compelling as to be enshrined in the ‘traveller's bible’ points to the impossibility of explaining such a culture in terms of the pursuit of truth, or something enlightening or even useful.

The fact that a whole regional economy (tourism) could centre around a bad joke made him reconsider the relation of humour to imperialism and power. ‘I decided that I would discover more about the history and present reality of Tierra del Fuegian colonial travel by investigating the bad jokes, silly anecdotes and offhand remarks I could collect there.’ This lead him to ‘an ironic and even self-defeating notion of salvage ethnography, a science that works by scavenging its way through the rubbish which doesn't usually make its way home in one's cultural baggage’.

‘Remember the future,’ says the French artist Orlan. A present tense reality we regard as trivial, trashy—dispassionate even—will take on epochal, passionate (and perhaps atrocious) dimensions to our future historians and judges. Magee’s comprehension of the trashy and trivial nature of Fuegian travel discourse (in the face of the monumentally detrimental nature of Third World travel) led him to rethink the atrocious Fuegian colonial past. This is certainly a history to write of with passion. The near total genocide of the island's original inhabitants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by wool magnates is almost an icon of the evils of colonial capitalism (itself hardly a spent force). Yet the uncanny fact is that the autobiographical accounts of that process are—if you look for it—replete with jokes, anecdotes and ironies. Indeed a salvage ethnohistory of the Fuegian genocide finds similarly dispassionate and cynical materials as that evinced by contemporary backpackers.

For instance, on the autobiography of one of the island's first colonists, E. Lucas Bridges (his The Uttermost Part of the Earth), Magee writes ‘...instead of demonising the colonist, attacking the imperial discourse he at times obviously expresses, the words to which I wish to hold Bridges are his jokes. This is the point at which those dead monuments of high theory might come back to life, as I focus on the things Bridges clearly regarded as trash even back then, at the beginning of mass world consumerism’.

So in effect Magee equates the cynicism and dispassion of present day travel with the secret cynicism of imperial history; this equation unsettling him in his very possession of the present (how will we be judged, when our actions, shorn of all frivolity, are seen in the same way we view the past?)

Magee uses a quotation from Walter Benjamin at the frontispiece of his book:

The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called upon us, but we, the masters, were not home.

I’d like to finish with this : ‘We, the masters, were not home,’ belonging and identity are crucial issues of the writing of Australian history. Whose home is this and how is the ‘we’ constituted? How do we write it?

The discovery of new Australian histories within this ‘home’ are no longer likely to be carried by Reynolds' ‘frontier’ metaphor, inheritor despite itself of the heroics of the overland explorer. The new histories will be carried by other voices, and there is plenty of room to attend to the forms history writing can take (the rhythms and dramatic dialogue of Paddy Roe’s oral delivery, effects which deliver truth for his people). Shlunke’s identity anecdotes create flashes of recogition for any historian of the local. And in the case of Magee, sifting through the trash pile of history, laughter can erupt and dispel the joint cynicism of imperial history and a consumerist ideology of the present. His work opened my eyes to an idea: what we call the rubbish dump of history—what is left out of the official histories—could be our richest resource.

Let us absent ourselves from the mastery of history, but let the great passions make their mark on the wrinkles and creases of our faces, which are the way we write our texts together.

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