Dissolving- myths of exclusive national sovereignty. Part Two - Australia.

While the latest acts of violence in Papau are becoming more visible in the mainstream media (despite all attempts of Javenese nationalist elites to prevent media coverage in Papua) there is a campaign under way regarding recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Anglo-Australian Constitution of 1901.

Some indigenous activists argue that they are not bound by this Constitution. Conceived of in keeping with the racist ideologies of the late 1880s – which excluded First Peoples -  it simply does not apply to them.

There is no treaty (or treaties) between First Peoples and the imperial British authorities and their neo-imperial heirs, and little prospect of Anglo-Australian authorities taken effective action to remedy this major flaw in Australia’s foundations.

A recent paper by Marcia Langton “Indigenous exceptionalism and the constitutional ‘race power’) rightly identifies the obsolete notion of ‘race’ as something which has reached its use-by date.

Whatever is meant by ‘race’ it usually imagines some form of biological component as part of a means of conceptualising relationships between groups of people.

Like the modern nation-state, it involves a ‘blocked’ form of energy.

Marcia Langton says:

“In the slowly building campaign for constitutional recognition of indigenous people, it is vital we broaden the understanding that the constitutional tradition of treating Aborigines as a ‘race’ must be replaced with the idea of ‘first peoples’. By this I mean simply what is proposed in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (sic – Peoples – BR): It recognises that ‘Indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples, while recognizing the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such.’…”

While I agree with the need to consign the obsolete concept of  ‘race’ to the dustbin, and while I agree that Anglo-Australia needs to find a means of recognising this country’s First Peoples, I doubt if there is much else I agree with in Marcia’s position.

On the one hand, she seems to seek to transcend the limits placed on our creative imagination of who we are by European master narratives, she also seems to accept too much of the conceptual prisonhouse which has be instituted in this former British penal settlement.

The present Australian Constitution is a document which is riddled with the racism of the late 1880s, and is a document which was designed to protect the vested interests in the former British colonies which became the Australian States. First Peoples were excluded from all consideration, except to be deemed of no account.

The problem I have with Marcia’s position is that seeks to incorporate First Peoples and their Ways into a Constitution which preserves a monolithic Anglo-Australian formation rather than seeking to reform the 1901 Constitution to provide First Peoples with the means by which they may live full lives in accordance with very different values to those imported with the Church of England, European farmers, and the suburban notions of domestic order of their subsequent Westernised middle class families.

For me, any position which does not begin with the acknowledgement – not just of country – but of the fact that Australia’s First Peoples are captive of a modern nation-state is a position which can never restore and maintain the full well-being of those First Peoples (and, by extension, of non-indigenous Australians).

That is, any analysis which excludes recognition of the 214 years of struggle of First Peoples to socialise Europeans into this country’s realities leaves out some very important dimensions. And inevitably reduces into another exercise in ethnocide as the imported status quo exerts its powerful influence in all that is reproduced from such narrowly conceived ‘origins’.

This is a systematically distorting influence – institutionalised racism is rife in ‘modern’ Australian life, and professional deformations of those conceptual craftworkers who are recruited by the state are the price of entry into the Anglo-Australian systems of patronage.

The ‘modern’ condition is one which automatically assigns a vast privilege to itself – and assumes that while other peoples “of course!” have to change their Ways to fit in with ‘modern’ cultural specifications, there is no counterbalancing expectation that ‘modern’ Western Ways must change to comply with the cultural specifications which are grounded in this country.

Well, welcome to post-modern conditions.

There is ample evidence this ‘modern’ privilege is long overdue for reform. The attempts to delay this reform take many forms – but these attempts to delay the process will increasingly require more resources than can be afforded. Change is happening.

Life will seek out the constrained ‘freedoms’ it needs in order to maximise its full potential. Life is a process of realisation, just as so much of life in this country has been ‘unrealised’ since 1788 (rendered unreal by the imposition of failing narratives from the other side of the planet).

Many would agree that Marcia’s position is that of a realist. Some small changes to the 1901 Constitution are the best than can be hoped for.

But there is also a saying that the idealist is the only realist – since the idealist contains within their form of representation the germ of better futures which, in the fullness of time, are (to some extent) realised.

Part of this struggle is a struggle for the creative imagination.

This requires crafting new forms of representation – on all levels. These need to be fashioned in a spirit of cultural partnership between First Peoples and non-indigenous peoples.

Rather than propping up the drooping 1901 Australian Constitution a la Dali, we need significantly more exercise of our collective creative imaginations and creative powers (working with known realities). Until there is a critical mass, as we saw with the broad-based  effort across the face of life  leading into the1992 Mabo decision, change will not come.

A METAPHYSICAL "SELF"

One area where work is required is that provided by what is known as Australian Dreamings. Instead of a debate about evolution versus Creationism, where do First Peoples cosmologies fit into Australian life?

Within surviving Ways of First Peoples in this country life has been subjected to forms of signification which relate particular people to particular aspects of life. These systems of signification are not based on European Western modern notions of biology or society as understood by modern anthropologists.

There is an Anglo-Australian norm which operates to insist that First Peoples – in urbanised places like Wollongong where I live – do not rediscover their Dreaming identities. The ethnological norm implies that – once you have been stripped of your cultural birthright – under no conditions are you allowed to rediscover it as a lived cultural reality. First Peoples cosmologies are treated as a threat by 'modern' Anglo-Australian interests.

“NO DREAMING ALLOWED” declares the neo-colonial powers. Yet all of our lives are informed by our creative imaginations and associated ‘fantasy’ structures.  This is our condition!

Freedom, in this context, means the freedom to signify life in keeping with life’s own scripts – not some fantasy invented by others and forcefully imposed on First Peoples.

The struggle for this kind of freedom – a freedom of Being – must have its local situations, its specific contexts in which real matters are worked through. By the same measure, an enduring solution requires a change to a global force-field.

Without a global shift any local successes are more than likely to be beaten ‘back into proper’ shape by an oppressive regime.

At this stage of the transformative process it is difficult to be able to provide an account of a future condition – which will, in all probability, be different to what we can imagine at this time.

However, in both the Papuan-Indonesian and the First Peoples-Australian cases, a good outcome would be one where relationships between the various parties are informed by key values on both sides rather than mere domination by one side as is presently the case – reintroduction of reciprocity, perhaps, into Indonesian life the case of Papua, and respect for the whole of life in ‘modern’ Australia, perhaps, in the case of Australia’s First Peoples.

We all need to rethink life – and leave behind the empty shell of identity as provided by the somewhat medieval notion of a modern nation-state.

A national Constitution is part of the modern nation-state formation. The present Australian Constitution is a culturally one-sided document. It claims an exclusive form of sovereignty which systematically benefits some at the expense of many others, including First Peoples.

Can we imagine life in which the present Constitution is replaced with two-sided forms of representation – in which sovereignty is shared with this country’s First Peoples?

Well, that is the magnitude of the challenge life presents us with.

We may well discover our own metaphysical 'selves' in the process.

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More reading:

 Indigenous exceptionalism and the constitutional ‘race power’
Marcia Langton,
Melbourne Writers Festival
BMW Edge theatre, Federation Square, Melbourne
26 August, 2012

http://www.youmeunity.org.au/downloads/8f2d6396820886086f16.pdf