Another country
Nicolas Rothwell’s new book Another Country is a collection of his writings on Northern (and particularly Aboriginal) Australia.
The book includes photographs by Peter Eve, and some of the people and places mentioned can be seen on Peter Eve’s website. I particularly liked the black and white photograph of Nicolas on the back cover. Nicolas himself is tall and thin, and his angles seem to emerge out of the tree roots behind him. All except his face, sad and knowing.
The book is organised into several sections (Pathfinders, The Lure of the North, In the Shadows, Portraits, Dream Places, Critical Questions) covering people, landscapes, places and the role of art. Nicolas is an intensely visual writer in the way he evokes landscapes and places. He conveys particularly well the Aboriginal art boom in Northern Australia precisely because he can write so effectively about the art itself. He especially conveys well the sense of the transcendent that underlies the artistic achievement.
The Prologue covers, as a good prologue should, what connects him (as author) to his subject matter. Then we move, in the section Pathfinders, to word portraits of various significant individuals in the Aboriginal cultures of the North as they navigate past and present. One of my pet hates is the term Aboriginal culture when used to imply there is only one: some Aboriginal languages have been divided longer than English has been from Iranian. One of the basic features of Aboriginal experience is precisely that it has never been refracted through a single culture. A cultural diversity that Nicolas conveys by simply being an accurate and thoughtful observer. Indeed, Nicolas writes passionately about the the loss of knowledge involved in the death of languages.
In The Lure of the North, we are drawn into what attracts and holds people to the stark sparseness of Northern Australia. Then it is In the Shadows, about what is happening in remote communities. Some of inspiring, much of it grim. Including street kids who have lost contact with Aboriginal cultures but yet are not part of wider Australian culture either. The shifting boundaries between Aboriginal cultures and the surrounding Australian culture is his prime subject matter. The piece Borderline Justice, about policing in Northern Australia (pp115-124), conveys very well the complexities of policing a genuinely and intensely culturally diverse society. Dying Days (pp125-135) covers the epidemic of kidney failure. Lost for Words (pp136-140) what the death of languages means. Nowhere To Go (pp141-149) covers the social and economic failure of the outstation movement and its importance as a mechanism of cultural resistance.
The Perfect Trap (pp150-155) is about the complete failure of the “self-determination” paradigm: the standard device in Aboriginal policy argument has long been the blame game: the buck never stops (p.152). Nicolas is driven to suggest the declaration of a state of emergency in many of the communities and sending in, in effect, intervention forces. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today (p.155). Another Country is, precisely by being so evocatively informative, a denunciation of the glib simplicities which have so often disfigured what passes for public debate in this country on indigenous issues. It is stunningly clear that the “it’s all about racism” line is so ludicrously inadequate as to display a complete lack of interest in what is actually going on, in favour of posturing within the wider Australian community (the this would all go away if all you moral and intellectual retards would just agree with your moral and intellectual superiors approach).
And it is not as if Nicolas in anyway wishes to whitewash the past. There is more than one reference to memories of past massacres, particularly Mistake Creek (pp222ff). But he makes it quite clear that one of the areas of definite improvement is that personal relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal are generally quite good.
Portraits is a series of studies of various individuals. Dream Places explores the interaction between culture, memory and landscape, particularly as refracted through the burgeoning indigenous art movement. Critical Questions looks at the dark side of that same movement: shoddy practices, serious authentication issues, the lack of intelligent criticism (as distinct from gushing endorsement). But the lack of genuine engagement involved in the lack of intelligent art criticism is precisely what helps the former problems to flourish. As Thomas Sowell would say, if people are playing a role as one’s moral mascots, then they are not being treated as full people.
The Epilogue, Journey to Yankaltjunku (pp269-300), is another very personal piece, about a journey Nicolas took some years ago with some Western Desert friends into their country, which had lain unvisited for decades. So we travel with people, but also into discovery, memory and myth. The last image is of a Telstra technician repairing a phone-box, completely indifferent to the folk around him: I watched this cameo from a distance, with the thought I should seek to preserve it: the red scatter of the hills, the sun reflecting on the powerlines, the old desert men and women, huddled close together, the phone technician, like a heraldry in livery, bearing news from another time.
The book includes photographs by Peter Eve, and some of the people and places mentioned can be seen on Peter Eve’s website. I particularly liked the black and white photograph of Nicolas on the back cover. Nicolas himself is tall and thin, and his angles seem to emerge out of the tree roots behind him. All except his face, sad and knowing.
The book is organised into several sections (Pathfinders, The Lure of the North, In the Shadows, Portraits, Dream Places, Critical Questions) covering people, landscapes, places and the role of art. Nicolas is an intensely visual writer in the way he evokes landscapes and places. He conveys particularly well the Aboriginal art boom in Northern Australia precisely because he can write so effectively about the art itself. He especially conveys well the sense of the transcendent that underlies the artistic achievement.
The Prologue covers, as a good prologue should, what connects him (as author) to his subject matter. Then we move, in the section Pathfinders, to word portraits of various significant individuals in the Aboriginal cultures of the North as they navigate past and present. One of my pet hates is the term Aboriginal culture when used to imply there is only one: some Aboriginal languages have been divided longer than English has been from Iranian. One of the basic features of Aboriginal experience is precisely that it has never been refracted through a single culture. A cultural diversity that Nicolas conveys by simply being an accurate and thoughtful observer. Indeed, Nicolas writes passionately about the the loss of knowledge involved in the death of languages.
In The Lure of the North, we are drawn into what attracts and holds people to the stark sparseness of Northern Australia. Then it is In the Shadows, about what is happening in remote communities. Some of inspiring, much of it grim. Including street kids who have lost contact with Aboriginal cultures but yet are not part of wider Australian culture either. The shifting boundaries between Aboriginal cultures and the surrounding Australian culture is his prime subject matter. The piece Borderline Justice, about policing in Northern Australia (pp115-124), conveys very well the complexities of policing a genuinely and intensely culturally diverse society. Dying Days (pp125-135) covers the epidemic of kidney failure. Lost for Words (pp136-140) what the death of languages means. Nowhere To Go (pp141-149) covers the social and economic failure of the outstation movement and its importance as a mechanism of cultural resistance.
The Perfect Trap (pp150-155) is about the complete failure of the “self-determination” paradigm: the standard device in Aboriginal policy argument has long been the blame game: the buck never stops (p.152). Nicolas is driven to suggest the declaration of a state of emergency in many of the communities and sending in, in effect, intervention forces. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today (p.155). Another Country is, precisely by being so evocatively informative, a denunciation of the glib simplicities which have so often disfigured what passes for public debate in this country on indigenous issues. It is stunningly clear that the “it’s all about racism” line is so ludicrously inadequate as to display a complete lack of interest in what is actually going on, in favour of posturing within the wider Australian community (the this would all go away if all you moral and intellectual retards would just agree with your moral and intellectual superiors approach).
And it is not as if Nicolas in anyway wishes to whitewash the past. There is more than one reference to memories of past massacres, particularly Mistake Creek (pp222ff). But he makes it quite clear that one of the areas of definite improvement is that personal relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal are generally quite good.
Portraits is a series of studies of various individuals. Dream Places explores the interaction between culture, memory and landscape, particularly as refracted through the burgeoning indigenous art movement. Critical Questions looks at the dark side of that same movement: shoddy practices, serious authentication issues, the lack of intelligent criticism (as distinct from gushing endorsement). But the lack of genuine engagement involved in the lack of intelligent art criticism is precisely what helps the former problems to flourish. As Thomas Sowell would say, if people are playing a role as one’s moral mascots, then they are not being treated as full people.
The Epilogue, Journey to Yankaltjunku (pp269-300), is another very personal piece, about a journey Nicolas took some years ago with some Western Desert friends into their country, which had lain unvisited for decades. So we travel with people, but also into discovery, memory and myth. The last image is of a Telstra technician repairing a phone-box, completely indifferent to the folk around him: I watched this cameo from a distance, with the thought I should seek to preserve it: the red scatter of the hills, the sun reflecting on the powerlines, the old desert men and women, huddled close together, the phone technician, like a heraldry in livery, bearing news from another time.