The inspiration for this book arises from the unsettling position of calling oneself Australian and living on stolen country whose peoples still live here and will always be here: This law, this country, this people, all the sameāGagudju. The authorsā non-Indigenous understanding of Gagudju Elder, Bill Neidjie, is that Gagudju lore, land and people are the same entity and are not lived separately. Elsewhere, Neidjie states to the reader, whether Gagudju, Indigenous, or non-Indigenous, that he is the same as you: All the same. I belong to this earth. This is illustrated through the following (Neidjie, 2007, p. 13):
Soon my bones become earthā¦all the same.
My spirit has gone back to my countryā¦my mother.
Now my children got to hang on to this storyā¦
I hang onto this story all my life.
My children canāt lose it.
This law,
This country,
This people,
All the sameā¦
In the context of this book, Neidjieās words are a statement of Indigenous sovereignty and are a way of constructing being in this place. He instructs the readers not to remove our subjectivity from the country on which we live, or from its people and its laws. His knowledge and his way of being in the world are not exclusive. Neidjie provides us, the readers, both a process and terms of engagement for living and being in Australia. This book is an attempt to contextualise the debates about Australian identities in relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. It argues that the Australian context remains colonial rather than being post-colonial. The way forward is not to construct a ābetter Australian identityā, but rather to participate in the hard treaty workāwhere there is still no treatyāto respectfully engage with Indigenous sovereignty (Haggis, 2007, p. 319).
1.1 Book Approach: The Question of Race, Racialisation, Australian Identities, and Indigenous Sovereignty
This book locates itself within critical race and whiteness studies from the UK, Canada, USA, New Zealand, and Australia. It seeks to deconstruct the racialisation of white Australian identities and cultural relations and draws upon the traditions of Western Sociology, Cultural Studies, and the emerging field of Critical Indigenous Studies to do so. The book is in response to public discourse that Australia has moved or needs to move beyond its colonial past. The original intent of this book was to ask āWhat would it take to move beyond a white Australia?ā The researcher aimed to investigate whether white Australian values are āa thing of the pastā, or if whiteness remains the hegemonic identity. After reviewing the literature, however, it seems as though this question also seeks to move beyond whiteness or beyond race. Is such an approach problematic in the context of Australia, where the invader/settler population remains the hegemonic identity that, in its self-definition, denies Indigenous sovereignty? This contention raises several questions in order to understand the relations of power that are enabled by the status of āwhite Australianā. How does race shape those who identify as white Australian and how they relate to the nation, multiculturalism, to difference and to Indigenous Sovereignties? Empirically, how do white Australians experience their own racialised subject position and the privilege it extends to them?
The main objective of this book is to do with the continuing construction of whiteness in Australian identities vis-Ć -vis Indigenous sovereignty and particularly concerning everyday vocabularies and ways of talking about white selves and Australian identities and Indigeneity. To achieve this, the research uses a case study of rural people who self-identify as white Australian to understand how they think about race and Australian identity in the context of Indigenous sovereignty in their everyday lives. The subsidiary objectives follow: first, to analyse whether discourses of multiculturalism used to deal with difference obscure the social construction of race; second, to analyse what the researcher has termed āthe great divideā between discourses of multiculturalism and discourses of Indigenous sovereignty in debates about Australian identity. The argument we present is that white Australians are ambivalent about their own racialised position and Indigenous sovereignty. This is because the discourse of multiculturalism has been the central story of how to understand difference under the umbrella of Australian identity. The story of migrancy and cultural difference built a national identity focused on tolerance of diverse-but-equal groups. This approach replaced race with culture. There is a lack of everyday critical vocabulary about the social construction of race to address the racial oppression and inequity. The national story of tolerance and acceptance does not include Australiaās colonial beginnings and ongoing hegemonic relationships with Indigenous people. As such, the white Australian discourses about identity and the nation continue to disavow Indigenous sovereignty and maintain white privilege.
To meet the objectives, specific understandings of race, racialisation, racialised groups, nation, and identity as social constructions underpin the book. Race is viewed from an anti-realist position. That is, having no biological referent there is no base for the word āraceā. However, it has been used to sharp effect and has lived consequences for those who are privileged and disadvantaged by its use (Baker, 2018). Kant defined race as having the following characteristics:
- (1)
Races form due to their reproductive isolation- (2)
Races evolved as major human lineages- (3)
Races are major biological groups in the present- (4)
Race is biologically inherited- (5)
Race is the taxonomic level below species in humans- (6)
All human populations belong to at least one race. (Kant, E cited in Hochman, 2018, p. 5)
This is in the context of there being a total absence of real biological markers of race, yet Hochman argues that as a group of characteristics combined can be used to form a definition of race as a scientific concept (Hochman, 2018, p. 5) that is a biological illusion (Hochman, 2018, p. 8). Hochman then gives a concise and convincing overview of current debates regarding race. Hochman proposes the use of āracialisationā and what he contends to be its companion term āracialised groupsā in order to adequately address the phenomenon in question that has no referent. Hochman proposes that āracialisationā has an ontological rather than normative thrust. It throws the reality of race into question. He draws on previous work to develop a more meaningful definition from Miles (1989), Small (1994), Blum (2002), Darder and Torres (2003) and Hochman (2017b). Hochmanās definition of racialisation tells us that groups are being understood as biological races.ā¦ [It] is a form of biologization. As it is it does not even tell us whether racism is taking place (2018, p. 12). Therefore, this book will apply an analysis of the power relations between racialised groups in Australia that result in privilege for some and oppression for other racialised groups. The approach is political and seeks to disrupt ongoing colonial relations while at the same time acknowledging the agency of minority groups and the possibility to have a critical race approach. The term āsettler societyā, which is often used, is a white discourse that protects hegemonic white privilege that relies on the initial lie of terra nullius and resultant dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This book applies the theories of critical race and whiteness studies. This body of literature understands whiteness as a system of power that privileges white norms, values, and systems of knowledge. These are kept protected through white discourses and practices that tell the story of how Australia was formed as a nation, who belongs to the nation and finally who is imagined to be sovereign. The book is also premised on the illegality of the assumption that Australia was terra nullius upon the arrival of Europeans in 1770. This means that British claims to sovereignty of what is now called Australia constitute an invasion and subjugation of Indigenous sovereignty that was not ceded, and continues not to be ceded. Thus, this book uses the term āinvader colonial societyā to refer to the society built upon colonial violence. Chapter 2 will examine in depth the concepts of nation including the concept of nations imagining themselves as sovereign (even though it is the state that holds illegitimate sovereignty in Australia), and Chapter 3 will investigate the literature on cultural identity.
The book identifies the nation as a socially constructed object. It explores the key critical work to date on the nation as an imagined community (Anderson, 1995; Chatterjee, 1993; James, 1996; Poole, 1999) and the subsequent process of building and maintaining a nation (Butler & Spivak, 2007; Goldberg, 2001). A key question for building modern nations is how to manage the diversity within it. Debates within multicultural literature argue that the management of diversity within this approach to nations is racialised (Goldberg, 1994; Vasta, 1993, 1996). This book applies the literature on critical race theory to multiculturalism to examine the ongoing racialisation that occurs due to the lack of a critical vocabulary around race in Australia. Further, in Australia, unlike Canada (Fleras & Elliott, 1993; Kymlicka, 1998) and New Zealand (Maaka & Fleras, 2000), the discourses of multiculturalism as a pathway to nationhood have not engaged with Indigenous sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson, 2015c, 2018). Additionally, Canada and the USA have examples of attempts to conceive of sovereignties differently (Anderson, 2014; Kymlicka, 2000; Simpson, 2014; Tully, 2000). These approaches are informative for debates in Australia bec...