The Mother's Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays

Stephen Muecke

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783488155
• eBook ISBN: 9781783488179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be 'written up', 'after the fact' in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer.

Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre. In doing so he offers a rare and important theorization of the potential of speculative methods across disciplines including Literary Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies.

Part I

Indigenous Australia

There is no way of knowing that is not situated, so I’d like to begin at home, and in the past, in the vast Western Desert of Australia’s outback. This is where it all began for me. Or at least I had to meet Bruce McGuiness first, the Koori activist, at a party in Melbourne in about 1970. We met at the African Students’ Club, and he told me a few hard truths.

The move to WA in 1974 brought an even greater awareness of Aboriginal Australia, and I have written elsewhere about my friend Gloria Brennan, who taught me so much, and introduced me to so many people: Helen Corbett, Bobby Randall, Kate and Daisy George, Charlie Perkins, John Newfong.¹ She had a portrait of Don McLeod over her mantelpiece and treated him as some kind of hero. What would have happened if I’d taken her advice and dropped in to see him at Strelley on one of those early trips North? He probably wouldn’t have had any time for me. By the time I got to write about him, he was long gone. Let that be a lesson: the history-makers are closer to hand than you think!

‘The Mother’s Day Protest’ skips to the present, the very latest work I’ve been doing with the Goolarabooloo mob in Broome.

I wrote ‘The Great Tradition’ after being surprised, once again, how shallow – in a temporal sense – the field they call Australian Literature is. There is an urgent task, and I wish more scholars could be trained to carry it out, to record and translate more of that huge corpus of songs and stories that risks disappearing along with the many beautiful traditional languages of the Australian continent.

Finally, in this first section, is my homage to the work of Strehlow, in particular his 1947 classic Aranda Traditions. It is also an homage to my father, Douglas, who was acquainted with Strehlow at the University of Adelaide about the same time Don McLeod’s mob was going on strike.

Note

1. Stephen Muecke, No Road (Bitumen All the Way), (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997).

Chapter 1

Don McLeod’s Law

The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike

This chapter is an experiment in the geography of the concept. It looks at an episode in the history of the concept of the strike in Western Australia. Rather than treat the concept as an inhabitant of the mind, it is treated materially as a part of a cultural geography. We might find, for example, were we to analyse distribution in terms of spatial lexicography, that epistemology is fairly thickly discussed in urban Europe, but scarcely at all, perhaps never, in the remote parts of Australia. There, by way of contrast, people talk about tjukurpa [Dreaming] all the time. There is no doubt that concepts travel, in real time and space, and confront each other sometimes in violent ways; at other times they sail right past each other because no one has made an attempt to do the hard work of translating a concept like epistemology into tjukurpa, or vice versa, if indeed that is an appropriate thing to do.

This chapter will try to set up a method, as material as possible, for the analysis of the migration and translation of concepts into Australia along scientific or philosophical ‘trade routes’ without the assumption that they have a free passage into a kind of conceptual terra nullius. Their movement has to be earned. And Aboriginal people are encouraging or resisting, doing their own conceptual work (the controversial dreamtime, as translation of tjukurpa, bugarrigarra, etc. has certainly taken root, and ‘works’ in some contexts); at other times they use the ‘tools of the master’ (justice, liberation, resistance), with culturally specific ways of putting such concepts into practice, as we shall see with the strike.

When in a recent book I asked why there was no such thing as Aboriginal Philosophy,¹ the question was a provocation coming, in the wake of Foucauldian thought, from the idea that a given terrain can be traversed by different discursive formations, none of which fill that terrain completely. So, if perceptions and knowledge of and about Indigenous peoples seem confined to anthropology, history and literature (and not to philosophy), then these are rare, perhaps wonderful, things. Rare and limited: we have to specify the cultural and historical limitations and realise that these define the whitefella ways of knowing, because there are no reliable concepts crossing the frontier into the blackfella discursive formations.² So from here emerges an operative principle close to the concerns of ethnography: see how the concept establishes its local authority. Just because it seems to be universal, it does not mean it will ‘stick’ in a local context. One could, for instance, look at a concept like humanity, seemingly universal, and then find that it has an extremely limited local distribution in many places. So it is not for me to say if there is or not such a thing as ‘aboriginal philosophy’; it will be up to someone qualified (in aboriginality or philosophy) to carry ‘such a concept’ or set of concepts across cultural frontiers and do what they will with it. I didn’t define the concept just now, and I didn’t say which way it might travel, but there is no doubt that this kind of conceptual inquiry belongs as much to ‘the field’ as the seminar room. It is territorially circumscribed, it engages with real localities, languages and communities.

This, then, to put a label on it, would be a radical kind of ethno-philosophy, radical (from the roots) because it can’t find those reliable concepts that enable thought easily to cross frontiers. Can we assume, for a moment, that a version of traditional anthropology would have built up a kind of conceptual base, like the base of a monument, that would at least have had human, society (and other concepts like sex, marriage, rites of passage) as reasonably mobile concepts? But for me these are already way too loaded, heavy and hard to move around. They have their origins in the universalising European modernism born of Enlightenment enthusiasms. This modernism has now finally come up against postcolonial thought and found itself ‘provincialised’³ in the context of a new pluralised sense of world modernities; and it has also found itself provincialised, as it were, from within, via the critique of Bruno Latour, who suggests that European modernity should be ‘recalled’ like a defective industrial product.⁴

Yarning

I want to now tell the story of Don McLeod, borrowing something of the style of the bush yarn that I picked up in Western Australia and want to put that into writing here so that the sense of locality is preserved as style. It is, as I suggested above, in tune with a principle of cultural reproduction, so that the concept can be seen to move around with a supportive and specifically local cultural style.⁵

They say Donald William McLeod was the first white kid born in Meekatharra in Western Australia, in 1908. Meeka is way out in the desert, if you haven’t been there, on that track heading north from the Kalgoorlie goldfields. It would take you two days to drive there from Kalgoorlie, and Kalgoorlie is a long day’s drive from Perth, and Perth, they say, is the most isolated city in the world. But you wouldn’t be thinking like that if you were born in Meeka, and even less so if you were a local blackfella born there, born in the heart of your own country.

You’d think ideas would take a while to get around, on those long dusty roads, some of them so straight that they get names like the Gunbarrel Highway. People are talking to each other, they have a yarn about the state of the world, and they might say, well, here’s a thought, maybe we can do something with this. I am fascinated with the thought of sparseness, where words and concepts are so spread out that they become as valuable as gold nuggets, along with the laconicism of the Australian characters that inhabit this sparse landscape. So few words seem to be exchanged that they can regain a lost gravity; you can almost heft them in your hand. Out there you measure your words because you are a long way from the garrulousness of the city; maybe you have the time to think a bit more before speaking.

So, this is my question: Was the philosophy of the ‘fair go’ already in the Western Desert among the Nganyatjarra and other mobs, or did whitefellas like the McLeods bring it with them and spread it around? This philosophy, as simple as it was, and based on direct experience, then translated into action, helped create something that people came later to call ‘Don McLeod’s Law’,⁶ which was what they called this thing that lay as precious as gold at the heart of the first great Aboriginal labourers’ strike action, in that Pilbara country in the 1940s. On May 1 – Labour Day – 1946, eight hundred Aboriginal pastoral workers from twenty-seven stations in Western Australia walked off the job for better pay and conditions. This was the first industrial action by Indigenous Australians and people think it sowed the seeds for the famous Wave Hill strike among the Gurinji, in the Northern Territory, twenty years later.⁷ The Pilbara strike lasted until 1949, making it the longest strike in Australia’s history.

My discussion here relates to a parallel historical debate in the work of the Subaltern Studies group which asks if subaltern groups like Indian peasants (or Australian Aborigines) engaged in revolt, did they come to political consciousness via the agency of some whitefella ‘giving’ them a concept like the exchange value of labour or resistance. In other words, do they have to be coaxed out of some pre-political stage as Hobsbawm would have it, or did they in fact ‘read [the] contemporary world correctly’, which is the position that the Subaltern Studies school worked to develop on the basis of evidence.⁸

Don’s father was a bush mechanic, and apparently he used to tell his son, ‘Treat everyone as an equal; do the right thing to others and they’ll do likewise. Don’t put flowers on a bloke’s grave – help him out now.’⁹ Now in a frontier town like Meekatharra in early twentieth-century Australia, ‘everyone’ for the whitefellas would have meant themselves, the handful of whitefellas, not the blackfellas living in town or out in the bush. But the McLeods extended humanity to literally everyone, and in this, they were highly unusual, in fact downright treacherous from the point of view of that white mob, because, with the status of being treated like a fellow human being, certain rights of equality tend inevitably to follow.

According to a newspaper story written on the occasion of th...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Part I: Indigenous Australia
• Part II: After Critique
• Part III: Speculative Histories
• Part IV: Ecologies of Place
• Index