The Complexities of Home in Social Work

Carole Zufferey, Christopher Horsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000539653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Home is a complex and multifaceted concept. This book revisions how 'home' is used in social work literature by showing how it is positioned as being discursively represented, materially experienced and embodied, and multiply imagined as symbolic and existential.

Drawing on multidisciplinary understandings of 'home' and intersectionality, it analyses the privileging and disadvantaging social policies and complex interactional practices that contribute to one's sense of home including homelessness, mobility and the politics and complexities of homeownership. Providing social workers with practice considerations for different areas of social work, this book analyses how to makes and build a sense of home and community belonging for a broad range of client groups.

It will be of interest to all academics and students of social work, sociology, public policy, housing policy, gender studies and human geography.

1 Stolen Homes

Prologue

Amy Cleland and Carole Zufferey

DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-1

Introduction

To begin this book on home, we acknowledge that it is written on Stolen Lands. The British invasion of the Australian continent illegally dispossessed and murdered Aboriginal Peoples on the ‘legal fiction’ of terra nullius, that the land ‘belonged to no one’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, pp. 33–35). Before the invasion, Australia was already a multicultural country, with over 500 different Aboriginal language groups and ontological connections to country or land tracks as ‘home’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 31). We use the term Aboriginal in respect of the decision of local Aboriginal people whom Amy works with, who request the term Aboriginal be used, while appreciating that language cannot do justice to diversity (Cleland & Masocha, 2020). Colonial discourses and practices shape what home means in a non-Aboriginal context. There is much that white social work colonisers do not know about and will never know or experience of racism in Western societies. It is important for non-Aboriginal social workers to reflect on this power and privilege. Eurocentric service systems, institutional racism, racial discrimination and state surveillance contributes to the ongoing marginalisation of First Nations Peoples across the world, including Aboriginal Australians (Fredericks et al., 2019). Across the world, First Nations Peoples’ homes were and continue to be Stolen.

Legal and political state institutions are imbued with colonial discourses and white race privilege that continue to enact state violence beyond massacres and into state policies that define what home means from a Eurocentric perspective. White people’s ignorance and racism is thus maintained and left unquestioned (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). This includes Carole’s own ignorance as a white migrant coloniser writing this book on home (Zufferey, 2013). This prologue is an edited conversation about this book on home between Amy and Carole using a ‘yarning’ research methodology (see also Walker et al., 2014). It began when Carole was writing the chapters of this book and had an overwhelming feeling that something was amiss. She spoke to a colleague who had recently worked in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands about her book on home, who said: ‘have you got a chapter from the perspective of Aboriginal people in Australia?’ We did not. Carole was struck by this insight and the absurdity of two white, Western, middle class social workers, as migrants and colonisers, writing this book on home in the Australian context. How to include Aboriginal knowledges on home, she wondered. She then approached her colleague Amy Cleland for her thoughts. Their conversations highlighted that all that we do, including writing this chapter on Stolen Homes, occurs in the context of the invasion or colonisation of Australia. Colonialism is an ‘unfinished project, one that still lives with us each and every day’ (Cleland, 2015, p. 40). We invite the readers to reflect on this key message that homes are lived in the context of colonial invasions across the globe. This needs to be acknowledged here, at the beginning.

Carole and Amy have been yarning for numerous years about many different things. This yarn is Amy and Carole’s yarn about home. It is drawing on Amy’s knowledges, it is not presenting ‘Aboriginal Knowledges’ or ‘Indigenous Australian perspectives’. Amy has long been writing about displacing ‘discourses of colonialism and Eurocentrism’ in the social work discipline, which requires ‘an analysis of Indigenous contexts’ and more so, an ‘analysis of the non-Indigenous or White contexts’ (Cleland, 2015, p. 43). Amy introduced Carole, a white migrant coloniser, to a Turtle Island story of the Raven. The story is about a white professor looking for the answers located in non-white ‘other’ people (on his/her own terms), rather than engaging in a critical reflection on him/herself (Dumbrill & Green, 2008; Cleland, 2015, p. 48). The Inuit word for Europeans is ‘qallunaat’ and ‘qallunology’ is the study of white people, which reverses the colonial gaze (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). Homes were Stolen by ‘homeless Europeans’ who arrived in the Americas, Africa and Australia, supported by fictions associated with land ownership, labour, money and corporatisation (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). Carole has previously reflected on how white power and privilege constitutes her experiences as a social worker (Zufferey, 2013). This conversation with Amy contributes to her lifelong learning about challenging colonial mindsets and practices, focusing on home.

To set the historical context being referred to in this yarn, a few points need to be made about the Australian context. Homes were Stolen in Australia through the invasion, as well as colonial segregation and so-called protectionist and assimilation policies. Since the late 1700s, Aboriginal families were massacred and forcibly displaced from their homelands and segregated onto missions, reserves and stations across Australia, under institutional practices intending for the eradication of Aboriginality. The extensive powers of legislation, such as the Victorian Half Caste [sic] Act 1886 and the Western Australian Aborigines [sic] Protection Act 1886, legislated state violence and the removal of Aboriginal children, with racially segregationist intent. Please note that these terms such as ‘half caste’ and ‘Aborigines’ must not be used by white social workers because they are outdated, disrespectful and offensive. Generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families and communities, creating what is now known as the Stolen Generations, which continued until the 1970s. From 1939, ‘exemption certificates’ were introduced and continued until the 1960s (see Aberdeen et al., 2021). If an Aboriginal person qualified for an exemption, they had to show it to authorities to leave reserves, to move ‘freely’ in ‘white’ society, to be able to vote, enter hotels, schools and be exempt, to some degree, from protectionist laws. However, these exemptions were granted only if they relinquished their connections to basic human rights, to home and belonging, to connections to culture, heritage, family, language and identity. ‘Exempt’ people were no longer allowed to stay in reserves and missions and needed to seek permission to visit close family there (Aberdeen et al., 2021).

The privileges of white colonial migrants stand in contrast to the state violence experienced by First Nations Peoples in Australia and non-white migrants. The ‘White Australia’ immigration policy can be traced back to the 1850s when Australia favoured British applicants. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 provided the legal means to restrict immigration and remove ‘prohibited migrants’, which continued until the 1970s (Zufferey, 2013, p. 666). Carole migrated to Australia during this period in the late 1960s with her family from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Her mother recalled how the family was called into the ‘immigration office’ because the ‘officials’ wanted to ‘have a look at us’. She said that because we were coming from Africa, they thought that we were black. When we attended the ‘interview’ and they saw that we were white, they just looked at us and ‘signed the papers’ (Zufferey, 2013, p. 666). The family migrated to Australia because of Carole’s father’s employment at a mine owned by multinationals being built on Stolen Land (see Zufferey, 2013). This was one year before the 1967 Referendum that changed the Australian Constitution, to allow First Nations Peoples to be included in the Census count. However, the Australian Constitution still does not acknowledge that Aboriginal people were ‘the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent’ (Reynolds, 2021, p. 4) and that sovereignty was never ceded. Through the failures of the Constitution and numerous colonial policies, legislation and practices, homes and identities were, and continue to be, Stolen.

Talking about Stolen Homes

This prologue is presented as an edited themed conversation from the yarn that unfolded between Amy and Carole about Stolen Homes.

Everything is fundamental to colonisation

Amy: I am thinking pragmatically about your book, I think this idea of just having an acknowledgement of pretty much that…everything everyone does here is on Aboriginal land and should always preface Aboriginal people and centre that understanding, that everything that has come forth from here on, is because of colonisation. And so, I also think that those complexities of thinking, that an Aboriginal perspective is a one thing…any ways to challenge that in that message, even around Aboriginal knowledges, epistemologies…it is not just the one thing…that is why it is so hard…mine today is not knowledge of culture, it is knowledge and experience of colonisation…and how that connects with cultural understandings of home and place…but absolutely everything is fundamental to colonisation because nothing here would exist without this taking place.

Many Stolen Homes

Carole: Homeland was stolen from you in a sense? Would you say that connections to homeland was stolen by the state?

Amy: But when you say Stolen Homes, it depends on the way you define home, if you define home as country…people refer to homelands, we have gone back to ‘homelands’…people do say it is going back home to country. But what that means for that person, whether it is where they were displaced, or whether they know they are originally from, where their Dreaming and totemic relationships are, or whether it is where other family are, so it would just depend on how the person would define that home.

Who I am today

Carole: What would be your perspective, Amy? Your story or thoughts about home and how it is portrayed? In your own family? As a colonising idea?

Amy: I would say I can only offer it from my own perspective. The colonising idea is where it starts. We could be moved anywhere. In terms of my family’s story, it traverses heaps of different countries, countries on the one continent…my family being shifted and moved all over the place…my family has been decimated is the only word that comes to mind. When we talk about a discrete Aboriginal identity, that is quite rare in this day and age, you would be represented in a number of nations. And overseas influences as well. But in terms of the story of one of my grandmothers, just a number of places that she was moved around, created all sorts of new stories for her, new relationships for her and that is, of course, who I am today, as a result of all that journey.

Family is home

Carole: So, when you think of home, what do you think of like?

Amy: At this point for me, I think anywhere that family is, is what I think first about home. My family story, people created communities, people created families based on where they ended up. Just made a shitty situation as good as it possibly could be because whichever mob you were from, you were going through the same stuff. That deliberate attempt to disperse everyone is seen in the way a sister was moved there, a brother was moved there, or a Mum was taken there, and her kids were moved down there, that was very much obvious where people were taken and placed. And the types of institutions, like one for adults and one for children and there are images you can get from schools and there would be parents setting up camps outside of the school, just in the hope to see their kids.

Carole: Kids were stolen?

Being classified

Amy: Yeh and if you were exempt, you weren’t allowed to go to missions…all of these rules were designed to separate people and keep people separated. It was all about getting rid of the race.

Carole: So, the whitening of the race?

Amy: Yeh even white enough in character, not only skin colour, white in character…the different policies to assimilate changed over time, but those initial days of killing people, moving people out of the way, is where it all started with my family, as soon as the late 1700s, I can trace my family back that far.

Carole: Yeh and how they were moved around?

Amy: And classified! So, one of my grandmothers at some point was given an identity as a ‘half caste’ and so, therefore, was subject to the rules and laws that governed ‘half castes’.

Violence of the state

Amy: Yeh we have had lots of yarns and lots of academics write about the violence of the state, that was abuse by the state on Aboriginal people, and it hasn’t been seen that way, except by people who experience it. So, there is this blaming now of Aboriginal people about the situation that a lot of Aboriginal people are in, when it was created, that anarchy was created. So, I call myself a ‘nearly’ assimilated Aboriginal person. I am a product of that – but it does not mean that I am better off for it. And I think it is that difference between, ‘we had good intentions’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1. Stolen Homes: Prologue
• 2. The complexities of home in social work: Introduction
• PART 1: Revisioning home in social work
• PART 2: Practice considerations
• Index