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Book Review
| Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2003. pp. xiv + 410. $39.95 paper.
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| Bain Attwood's Rights for Aborigines is an important addition to the evolving canon on the interrelationships between white and indigenous Australians. His project provides timely scholarship on the discontinuities of the historical struggle of indigenous Australians to participate in a politically sanctioned, and mediated, liberal present. Attwood's approach is to select key case studies as 'representative' (p. xiv) of the development of indigenous engagement with white activists, and white ideas of justice, equality and fairness, in order to overcome colonial disadvantage. These case studies are ordered chronologically to provide clarity on the fractured discursive development of ideas like 'aboriginality' within a coherent temporal framework. They are significant within themselves, focusing on key historical struggles, for example, Coranderrk in the 1870s, the 1938 Day of Mourning, the 1967 referendum, and Tent Embassy in 1972, and will provide that most useful of references — a thorough account of a series of interconnected events with an intelligent analysis — for scholars of history, political science and law. The stand out, in terms of investigating closely the complex ways in which ideas of racial equality changed for both white and indigenous Australians as a result of their close working relationships, was the chapter on the Wave Hill strike. The careful reading of the narratives of engagement set up by CPA writer Frank Hardy with the Gurindji, in particular Vincent Lingiari, allows Attwood to investigate the individualised elements of political and psychological change, while still showing how probably the most politically significant discourse of recent times, land rights; emerged. |
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Attwood is a skilled, empirically driven historian, and this guarantees the book its rigour and detachment, which afford the reader a strong intellectual commitment to the material. There is an intentional eschewing however of oral and biographical sources, which Attwood feels will interrupt his desire to distance himself from the archive (p. xiv). I understand the point, and he conforms to his self-imposed criteria rigorously, but some critically engaged oral history would have allowed a more emotional connection for the reader, a more acute sense of the indigenous experience of violence and hurt that encompasses the changes he details. (For example, reading the chapter on the tent embassy against the vivid narrative in Roberta Sykes' memoir, Snake Dancing (1998) could have humanised, and also added a gendered perspective, to an already strong analysis). But within Attwood's theoretical/methodological project, which is also ultimately a political one, it is easy to appreciate why he has not done this. He engages with historicism as a specific tool of narrative construction and analysis. Historicism in this context, as Attwood tell us, is the Enlightenment idea that 'all peoples had to undergo a transition from antiquity to modernity', and that this meant it was impossible 'to go backwards in history' (p. 145). His point throughout Rights for Aborigines is to show how 'European ideas and ideals about the course of historical change ... exerted a powerful influence' (p. xi), over conceptions of Aboriginality and rights, particularly from the perspective of indigenous peoples themselves. This is done with skill and consistency throughout the book, and is reinforced by his reliance on solely documentary sources. Yet despite Attwood's obvious reference to critiques of historicism emerging from postcolonial and subaltern studies, there is a niggling concern that the book provides a soliloquy, rather than a conversation with its critics, about the impact of historicism on both white and indigenous experiences of a movement toward an Australian rights discourse constructed around race. |
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In invoking a critical historicism, historians must problematise their own humanist/liberal concepts, such as universalism of rights, equality and so on, all of which bear the burden of European thought. These liberal concepts, as Attwood in fact shows here, are mediated and strategic, particularly for indigenous Australians (this is especially evident in the chapter 'Equal rights, equal rights', on the 1967 referendum). But in an environment like contemporary Australia, where there is a need to challenge post-colonial political realties by drawing attention to their fractured state (as Rights for Aborigines does), is there not also a corresponding need to challenge the historicist certitude about temporal progression as a concept, and not just a tool? As Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests in Provincializing Europe (2000), there is an inescapable inevitability about Marxist historicism for European historians (as well as historians of Europe). Yet this also seems to suggest that there is an awakening responsibility to at the very least engage in questions which ask about translating the ontological certainties of Western history — such as chronological frameworks themselves — to postcolonial subjects. Attwood starts to rupture the idea of liberal progression, which makes this an immensely valuable book, especially when coupled with his skill as an archival historian. But allowing a chink to emerge in liberal Western certainties today, such as the very idea of 'understanding the past in the present' (p. 349), would make the book an even greater contribution. |
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| University of Melbourne |
ANN GENOVESE | |
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