Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 10:08:49 -0500
From: gruffydd-AT-uniwa.uwa.edu.au
Subject: Re: Time zone cow sounds


Dear Peter Stewart,
your points on the Hindmarsh issue and the commission's proceedings are
very interesting and informative.  The problem also involves the wider
issue of how the idea of "authenticity" is employed within white
institutions in settler colonies like Australia, Canada and New Zealand
(differences exist in each case, of course) to authorise specific
viewpoints amongst Indigenous peoples and dismiss others.  This is a
notable feature of reportage of many such disputes.  I did an inadequate
and tentative analysis of the use of the idea of the "elder" by the white
press as a means of discrediting or setting to one aside (I'm beginning to
dislike the ubiquitous term 'marginalising' so forgive the synonim) urban
radical Aboriginal voices in the Yackibindie Mining Dispute in WA in an
article published in  the book "De-Scribing Empire" Routledge  published
last year.  This might be of interest to you.
You are correct I believe in assuming that Australia is still in many ways
a late colonial society.  Just as many other societies are really still
neo-colonial, with a firmly entenched Fanonesque comprador class prepared
to confuse the post-independence élitist "nation state" (often
representative only of specific racial groups or religious groups or. at
least dominated by them., or where this is not the caese of sectional
interests, the rich etc..) with the idea of a post-colonial idependent and
decolonized state.
In the early postings on this list the definition Ashcroft, Tiffin and I
used of post-colonial to include the various stages from the moment of
colonisation was proposed.  In a number of places this has been attacked
for its homogenising of thedifferences between these  "historical" periods.
But viewed in another way, as we would do, it works to insist on the
transparent failure of much decolonisatiooj to effect any very great
radical break with the practices of the colonial period after nominal
independence.  It certainly insists on the importance of continuing to
recognise the "articulations" between the colonial and post-independence
(often late colonial or neo-colonial in character as you assert) periods.
It also insists on colonialism as process not fixed event, a process in
which no absolute disentanglement of a "new decolonised" reality is likely
to be achieved.  I stress ABSOLUTE.  I do not mean that no decolonisation
can be achieved or no radical change.  In fact to perceive the continuity
of colonial control past the moment of nominal political independence is to
ASSERT that possibility by facing up to the nature of the real enemy, which
is both within and without the post-colonial nation state.  It denies
repressive neo-colonial post-independence regimes from claiming to be
"free" from the controls and practices of the past or from constituting
themselves around mythic fictions of the "nation' which they then use to
justify repression and discrimination.
In the case of settler colonies like Australia this involves also
constructions of "multi-culturalism" with its obvious exclusions and
limitations and its top-down definition of "ethnicity" (what the devil IS
an Anglo-Celt anyway in anything but a profoundly partial reading of
Australian white history?)  It also involves the way in which cynical
members of our Labor Party (including the Prime Minister)  can play the
post-colonial card when he wants to support his demand for a Republic (a
good idea by the way) or tell the French they are colonising the Pacific
(which they undoubtedly are), but fail to recognise that the modern
Australian nation is post-colonial in so far as it is a nation profoundly
marked by the colonial process but not in so far as it is freed from it and
its ongoing effects (witness your Hindmarsh example).  For the same reason
I would argue that we need to assert that despite the very great
differences between settler colonies and non-settler colonised nations (I
resist invaded, since both were clearly invaded in a very real sense) a
comparative study remains useful in so far as the complicities which it is
asserted characterise the settler-colony (see for example Hodge and Mishra
"Dark Side of the Dream") are in fact not absent from the practice of the
colonial period and post-independence period élites of other colonised
societies, e.g. India. Malaysia or Uganda, to name a few very OBVIOUS cases
for those who know the specific colonial practices im each of these and the
function of the traditional ruling classes there in the colonial
administrative procedures and structures.

There's beem a lot of talk on the list about what specific issues we should
debate and about the lack of any real substantive issues.  Your focus on
the Hindmarsh bridge commission can be a means of focusing wider issues
which are of great relevance not only to the issue of indigenous peoples
within settler colonies, but the implications of how we theorise and deal
with these in our academic practice and analysis withion the definitions of
"post-colonialism', as a discourse.  Let's hope this list can debate some
of these issues in depth and with seriousness.
Thanks for your posting


Gareth Griffiths




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