The real and imagined stories of alternative colonisation presented thus far have been filtered through one person’s set of desires and fears. Unlike academic histories, ‘what if’ studies lend themselves to a broad range of voices. They draw from individual imagination more than institutional archives. Their ultimate medium is not the conference monologue; these ‘pipe dreams’ realise themselves in playful conversation. Like a masquerade, the creation of speculative histories is designed to bring people together—to present on public stage the fantasies that are usually kept in private thought. The end result is hopefully a renewed sense of collective possibility.
In order to ‘pass the pipe’, a number of publicly engaged writers were invited to propose a vision, dream, nightmare or alternative history that responds to the question of what Australia might have been like if not colonised by the British. Below is a selection of these contributions.
It is 2011. The former German colonies of Bismarckland, Hegelopolis, Kruppsreich and Bahroland have become social theme parks, experimental micro-states. Hegelopolis, on the small southern island across Tristan Strait from the mainland, is a faithful reconstruction of the society of the former East Germany, complete with a fleet of reconditioned Trabant cars and an extensive network of Stasi informers. Hegelopolis is especially popular with American tourists and senior citizens from the former GDR, many of whom choose to retire there. Bismarckland, lying across most of the north and west of the continent, is a vast penal colony, modelled on Kafka’s famous short story. The global market in corrective services has meant a vast influx of prisoners from all over the world, but especially from the US and China. Kruppsreich, on the Eastern seaboard, once a vast chain of smokestacks stretching from Neudarmstadt in the south to Stahlhelm, half-way up the east coast, is now repositioning itself as a biotechnology hub, sourcing organs and other body parts for the growing European market from a large pool of unemployed industrial workers. All three regard Bahroland, the home of the first German settlers in the nineteenth century, with a mixture of fear and condescension. Lying along the central southern coast, on some of the driest lands in the continent, Bahroland has become an ecodemocracy based on the teachings of the former East German radical Rudolf Bahro. A blending of indigenous landcare principles, advanced viticulture and associative democracy has made Bahroland a modestly prosperous, relatively harmonious society, almost entirely self-sufficient. But the rulers of Kruppsreich and Bismarckland are growing increasingly nervous at the spread of underground political movements in their territories which look to Bahroland for their inspiration. How will they react...?
Tom Morton is a broadcaster with ABC Radio National
At this lowest point in our political history and our growing sense of environmental catastrophe, it’s hard to think of any beneficial human invasion of this land girt by sea. Our present culture has much in common with the ancient Romans, with the worship of sporting heroes, public baths, gladiatorial games in mega-stadia and Proconsuls who govern the provinces for an overseas power. As a Europhile, if I construct an ideal society in my head, it would be a Danish/Italian mix of sense and sensibility.
So casting back to a pre-colonial time, I like to think how, despite no Bolognese fleet, the people from the most civilised part of Italy, Reggio Emilia, managed to bring their splendid quality of life—i.e. flair, fashion and food—to create the richest, best-dressed Communist state in the history of life style, to the southern continent they named Benvenuto. When the good people of Copenhagen also decided to sail south, their all-female government developed a system of true social justice and the most enlightened attitudes towards other boat people, minorities, the indigenous people and all the other creatures on the fragile continent, which they treated with care and compassion. Not surprisingly, the Danes’ gloomy disposition dried out in the tropical sun, so that the entire northern zone of Benvenuto was given over to hedonism, nudist camps and large free love parties in which the term ‘a Danish pastry’ acquired a new connotation. Conversely, although the elaborate statuary and marzipan-like facades of their private dwellings betrayed their cultural roots, the Bolognese developed a Calvinist work-ethic which led to them successfully reclaiming the dry inland, which they turned into sublime landscapes covered with the world’s best olive trees, while in the green coastal areas their vegetable gardens provided a renowned vegetarian diet. With the olive oil export profits, they built elegant piazzas in every town, with marble fountains running re-cycled water and the purest wine. In time, increased fraternization led to the lazy, sun-loving Danes developing a passion for opera, and the Bolognese, now working the one-and-a-half day week, were able to travel north for long holidays in nudist camps, where together they painted up and performed street opera every weekend.
Julie Copeland is a broadcaster with ABC Radio National.
The French and the Dutch plunder the place. Mind you, there’s not much obvious trade, but they ply the coastline picking the low lying fruit—sometimes literally.
Then the settlers come, the trading outposts. Dutch, French, even some English. What is to be made of the indigenous inhabitants? They are left alone in the main. After all, this is an island of commerce.
But what lies within the vast land? Exploration is sporadic but significant; there are new trading posts and roads and all that attends the needs of commerce.
Here it is now—a genuinely liberal home. The descendants of Indonesian-Dutch encounters; French-indigenous unions; some Anglo-Celtic mix—but a minority.
Religion is the product of missionary zealotry, but it seems reticent in a culture where no one faith predominates and where hedonism seems readily apparent.
The politics is far from lazy—the great southland is a geo-political plaything for much of the nineteenth century, up until the mid-twentieth. But when the inhabitants returned from The Sorbonne and Amsterdam they were radicalised. Their African confreres were carving out their own self awareness. Time to do it here.
We are Asian—multiracial yes, but our geography and heritage says we are not an outpost. Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City is the architecture of colonial masters. We are a point in that triangle.
Sport is just relevant—soccer of course. But what is to be made of New Zealand’s cricket obsession—but of course, the English!
The main game is artistic culture—the blending of the land, the sea and the multiracialism; a richness and an eclecticism that creates an interesting Sunday magazine travel article in the New York Times.
But the indigenous people of our land are marginalised. They live on the edge of town, the slum dwellers. Yet there is now genuine empowerment since our independence from the French in 1955. They are now in the loop—at last, a genuine terra australis.
Greg Barnes is Chair of the Australian Republican Movement
The Dutch, who controlled the Spice Islands of their East Indies Archipelago (Indonesia), settled a predominantly non-European population in north-western and northern Australia as trading outposts. These areas were unsuitable for European population because of adverse climatic conditions so the Dutch settled an Indonesian population who were mainly Muslims—thus the foundation of a multicultural population of Muslims in the north and Protestant Christians in the south.
There was also an amalgam with Australia’s indigenous nations who taught the Indonesian settlers survival techniques. As a consequence of the occupation of Western Australia, the Indian Ocean lay securely in Dutch hands from Cape Town to New Amsterdam (Perth) and the Indonesian Archipelago securely in the hands of the Dutch. This made it very difficult for rival trading nations such as Britain to gain access to valuable trade with China. During this period Portuguese navigators laid claim to western Victoria which they named Ispiritus Sancti and the site of Warrnambool became Porto Segusa, the colony’s new capital. Further East, French explorers La Perouse and Boudin established a string of settlements in the name of Louis XV. Louisville (Sydney) in Port Jackson became the capital of Nouvelle France. As a result of a minor war with Holland, the Dutch ceded the island of Tasmania to Britain—a new Sceptred Isle which would produce golden apples and timber for the British Navy. But the British navy was unable to rule the waves because the route to the lucrative trade with China was closed to British shipping as the French in La Nouvelle France and the Spanish in the Philippines controlled the Pacific Ocean.
The Australian continent presented a mixture of different languages and creeds, but there was no interrelationship and multiculturalism was unable to be implemented. Indeed the divisions made for tensions over a range of matters. Colonial armies had to be on the alert on the borders of the colonies because rivalries of their European owners stoked the fires of war, particularly during the nineteenth century when wool and cold were much sought after commodities.
Border and customs posts formed the nucleus of fortress towns. One major area of concern for many years related to disputes over the control of the Murray River which was claimed by colonial powers under different names. The French called it La Nouvelle Seine, the Portuguese whose border was in South Australia controlled the mouth of the river. The French desperately tried to obtain an agreement calling it Concordia. However for the sake of uniformity the powers agreed to call it by its indigenous name Meeton and the estuary of the river was named Goolwara.
Itiel Bereson is an author of Australian history books which are widely used in Australian secondary schools.
Through historical factors and the unexpected impact of sudden technological developments which we shall not explore here, Terra Australis, or as it was afterwards known to cartographers due to a scribe’s error, ‘Terror Ostrich’, became the last and forgotten colony of pre-Christian Rome. It remained an oligarchy with a titular head or Proconsul even after nominal Senate and ward elections were introduced in the late nineteenth century as the result of trade guild agitation. Though it gradually lost contact with the founding Motherland it continued to observe the best and worst of her practices.
Both sides threw up (if that is the Ciceronian term) demagogic leaders whose aspirations were balanced by the lowest level of virtues: Hawkeye, the mangrove swamp speculator who afterwards turned to Buddhism; Malfactus Frazone the failed sheep exporter; Wilmus Haydensus, ex commissar of the Praetorian Guards; Kimus Beelzebub the Lugubrious who campaigned for the two hour day and year long daylight saving and Howard Minor the vindictive leader of the small business aristocrats, known to his intimates as ‘Little Caesar’. As in ancient times the populace in the main ignored the epithets and sounds of broken crockery emanating from the Capitol.
The culture was marked by a laconic stoicism derived from the philosophy of Seneca. Its general homily declared: ‘Grin and bear it!’ with an equally influential axiom: ‘If you rise above yourself it’s because you are a windbag in need of puncturing!’ The populace believed avidly in magic, fate, sudden shifts of fortune, tax dodging and cheating the bureaucracy, and the wheels of chance. The wheels of chance were huge chocolate wheels which stood at every street corner where, for a sesterce, citizens could give their lucky numbers a spin. Hence the Ostrich popular saying: ‘Hit and run!’
Foreign and military policy was dictated by preservation of the frontiers against barbarian invasion. If you weren’t a citizen then you were a barbarian. Terror Ostrich had been blessed as an island nation but was haunted by ‘the Great Emptiness’, a metaphysical condition that affected the nation but which few cared to mention, much less define. Consul after consul raised the draft and maintained a watchful red alert from watchtowers along the northern frontier, where regional differences of culture, religion and race bred a healthy paranoia. One recent Proconsul, Paulus Kettledrum had actually led two legions into the wilds of Islamic Batavia and never returned. Some spoke of military debacle but others reported that he had been seduced by foreign ways and adopted the outward show of a nawob.
Like their fearless founding fathers the Ostriches loved to build roads in straight lines. Some of these disappeared into the Central Desert and never re-emerged. Neither did the construction engineers. The entire eastern half of the country however was interlaced with freeways which weren’t free at all. Donkey cart drivers were constantly arguing against a toll that equated them with elephant freight trains. The people and government of Terror Ostrich were great appreciators of water and wind power in all its forms. Unlike the Greek colony of New Zealand they took care to protect rivers from bad farming methods and their elegant aqueducts were considered a marvel of recycled materials.
The stoic asceticism of the nation was judiciously permitted a licence to excess on at least two occasions during the year, deliberately designed as safety valves, to celebrate the distinctive qualities of the two principal cities, Packer Maximus, and Murdoch Minor. In the spring the northern city celebrated the Floralia, a three-day sex and drinking spree highlighted by the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Then everyone went back to being half naked sunburnt citizens. In the south the citizenry was coyer. Their principle festival was the Equinox or ‘Spring Racing Carnival’ in which rich businessmen piggybacked their favourite mistresses, naked, around a large, rain-splashed circuit. The Southern Ostriches were connoisseurs of ‘form.’
Although the Terror Ostriches are seldom heard from on the world stage there are infrequent reports of a Republican movement to declare national independence after two thousand years of the continuing, absent but influential power of the founding city which this report has aimed to trace. The movement is not likely to succeed in the immediate future. The majority of the populace can no longer indicate the location of Rome on a map.
John Slavin is the opera critic for The Melbourne Age. He teaches ‘History of Cinema’ at the VCA and has just completed a doctorate in Australian national identity.
Like the Gaul of our headstrong predecessor Julius, Asia is divided into several parts. For years we had sailed the trade routes from the Red Sea to Co-Chin, as the Indians call their great port. Now it was time to go farther, perhaps to another Ultima Thule. C. Marcus Dugulus set forth eastward with three triremes, to trade with islands of spice without a middleman. What happened can only be deduced from the gossip of Moluccan island-hoppers. Two ships were lost in that fierce archipelago, and Marcus was forced to press even further east, passing through a tropical strait and bending southward. The Romans apparently arrived at a sheltering cape with sandy shores, and there established a temporary castrum, from which they never returned. Rumour speaks of their camp as a web of straight lines. Years thence, we wait still for news of their success, for evidence of their trading goods. Marcus Dugulus must surely have stamped his name upon those shores.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is Emeritus Professor at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including By and Large (Brandl & Schlesinger).
As is well-known, the entry of Japan into World War 2 created a crisis for Victoria, the British-born nation—a colony until 1901—on the continent of Australia. Along its border, stretching from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the mouth of the Murray River, it was already fighting a war with New Holland, the Dutch colony that occupied most of the Western half of the continent, and civil war had broken out in Provence de Sud between Vichy and Free French forces, with the capital Esperance changing hands almost weekly. There had never been any doubt that New Holland would join the war almost immediately, since it had become a haven for Boers following their defeat in South Africa, and only the vast reaches of desert had dissuaded Victoria and New Holland from a similar conflict. Nor had either the Axis or the Allies shown any interest in Provence de Sud, a colony of no more than 100,000 stretched around the Grande Baie (it had survived the nineteenth century only because it was separated from the British colony by Frederickstein, the small self-declared Germanic republic partitioned by Victoria and P-d-S in 1918. Many of Victoria’s Frederickstein Germans had been interned—others had taken to the hills and formed a resistance.
Japan’s entry to the war made Australia a pivot: conquest of Victoria would allow the Axis and the Japanese to link up and form a base for the conquest of India. That much is well-known. Less known is the real story of why Australia became such a multi-cornered battlefield, for it had suddenly been realised that the continent’s interior offered a supply of uranium unparalleled as to its quality and quantity in any areas within reach of the Axis powers—and the desperate and clandestine struggle for the continent that ensued.
It is an extraordinary story with almost too much history—the simultaneous and coordinated uprising of the Dutch East Asian and New Holland Communist parties in 1945, for example—and all the more extraordinary when one realises that it almost never happened. Had Dirk den Hartog landed a little further north than the verdant city on the banks of the southern Zwartzwaan River he would have encountered desert, and the Dutch might never have become interested in the place. Had the unassertive Baudin not died en voyage his more feisty deputy might never have sunk Flinders’ fleet and through sheer force of will established a town at Esperance. Mont Gambier that half-million strong Babylonian mix of German, Dutch, English and French, its bizarre creole and its hybrid cuisine would be unknown to us. Neither Gersheke nor Cabreu-Smith would have won their Nobel Prizes for Literature, Freud would never have settled here, Matisse’s Esperance series would not exist, there would be no Wiedner, Morgenstein or Guillame’s apassionata—writers borne of trilinguality, of a new Europe on an old continent. It may have been the colony of a single power.
But that of course is impossible to imagine.
Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine
The question what if is not just hypothetical, but came close to being actual. The French captain La Perouse who set sail with an expedition to colonise Australia was confronted with an option at the beginning of his voyage. A young officer called Napoleon offered his services. La Perouse had the perspicacity to decline his service and set out, arriving at Botany Bay just days after Captain Phillip. His stay on the shores was brief enough to have a suburb named after him.
What if he had actually accepted the young Napoleon? No doubt we would all be speaking French, our wine and cheese industry would have blossomed a century earlier, all the roads would be straight, and Alice Springs would have been our capital.
Nikos Papastergiadis lectures at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne
After their crushing victory at Waterloo, France annexed New South Wales, renamed Nouvelle Bretagne du Sud, to provide a penal colony for the large number of British dissidents opposed to the new kingdom of Normandy et les Anglo-Saxones, ruled by Napoleon’s cousin, the Princesse de Londres. The former British settlement of Sydney was renamed Bonaparteville, and in the late nineteenth century its old streets were largely replaced by several major boulevards opening onto a large square on the harbour. You will be greeted outside a replica of the Paris Opera House, built as a symbol of the dominance of French language and culture in Nouvelle Bretagne.
The peaceful collapse of the French Empire saw the emergence of a number of independent nations in Europe, and the successful revolutions of the Franco-Spanish colonies of South America. In 1898 the colony became a self-governing part of the Empire, and ten years later the new nation of Australia was formed through federation with Swan, Moreton and New Zealand. By 1940 Australia was predominantly English speaking, although its population was largely of southern European, Indochinese and Pacific origin. Australia is now governed by a Presidency, held jointly by leaders of all the major parties.
This brief historical sketch should explain the historical sensitivities of the Australians, in particular the need to speak in both French and English (the necessary French phrases will be provided for you in phonetic spelling), and to pay due attention to the complex protocol demands of a triumvirate head of state (known as les gouverneurs generaux). Your staff are currently reading the seven volume Histoire d’un systeme surveillant by a certain Michel Foucault, and will provide you with the appropriate summary on 8 by 4 cards.
Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at Latrobe University and author of ten books, most recently Global Sex (Allen & Unwin).
‘I tend a garden in my dreams, a garden on an island, where a city of light is built upon the cliff face; a city on the water, where music plays every day and the sun shines and the ferns are rich and green, and red and blue parrots dart between the trees. It is a beautiful and civilised place, where the people discuss poetry and sit on their piazzas watching the lights change on the water until late into the night; where a man and his three daughters can live in harmony, a quartet of delight, where there is no anger, no cruelty, no madness, no revenge; only words, and love.’
This is the final paragraph of my novel, Coldwater, which imagines what life might have been like for the Bronte sisters had they been born in New South Wales instead of Yorkshire. I recently had a conversation with a New Zealander (from Wellington, another city on the water), who asked me what I had had in mind when I described this magical place. Is it Sydney? Yes, I said, and no. In fact I was imagining an antipodean Venice, with all Sydney’s hedonism and aquatic charms, a Sydney with its heart truly engaged by the life of the mind, where great art is not just an excuse for a great party. An imaginary Sydney, then, but not an impossible one.
Mardi McConnochie is a novelist and screenwriter.
Extract from the Encyclopaedia of Australia University of the Second Reconciliation Press, Darwin 2002
The Cultural Revolution was a difficult time for Australians with family in China. Mao’s call for a revolution against the ‘four olds’ set in train upheavals in Beijing. This created an opportunity for Australians to finally to break free of the middle empire’s residual suzerainty.
For most Australians this meant little. Beijing had always given its Australian imperial governors great latitude. Conventions had built up that the Empire would appoint elders of the Aust-Chinese community as their representatives. By the late nineteenth century Darwin’s unique form of government, which included appointed and indigenous elders, had been formally recognised by the Emperor. Under His benevolent neglect, Australia became the most powerful trading nation in South Asia. It acquired the status of a regional superpower after having sided with Java’s indigenous and Chinese communities against the Dutch. Leading Aust-Chinese families held hereditary influence, much as had the Doge in Venice at the height of its power. Even after Mao’s victory, foreign minister, Chou en Lai had only demanded lip service compliance to communist ideology from China’s powerful Australian commercial Protectorate.
The Cultural Revolution came as a shock. The predominance of males arriving from China in the first one hundred years had led inevitably to blended families. After two hundred years most Aust-Chinese were of mixed race and proud of their quasi-independence. The First Reconciliation, occurring fifty-five years after the first and sometimes violent Chinese settlement, had led to the establishment of local indigenous elders’ councils throughout the country and conferral of equal legal status on all Australian residents. Mao’s persecution of relatives in China for their association with capitalist-roaders and Beijing’s demands that Aust-Chinese renounce their local loyalties and customs ultimately triggered Darwin’s 1968 War of Independence.
Duncan Kerr MP is Member for Denison (Tasmania).
Nothing but trouble from Europe. Dante whacked Mount Purgatory down here for a lark. The Dutch got shipwrecked. The Portuguese couldn’t find anything worth taking home. The Poms started a gaol. And the Frogs, before they started nuking, disappeared almost unaided down the plughole of the Pacific. There’s before that. The Romans ought to have got here. The Egyptians might have. The wily Odysseus—why not?
China’s answer to the wily Odysseus was the giant Cheng Ho. I have it on solid fourth hand authority that it’s going to take some time for historians to assess the validity of Gavin Menzies’ recent claims that the plucky Ming eunuch went just about everywhere you could go in a ship. Wherever he went it was about fifty years before Columbus. Cheng Ho is quite a character—took 30,000 crew with him on one expedition. In Sri Lanka he fought a war and won. Why did Ming China do this stuff? Why did they build the Great Wall? Failed policy is always inscrutable.
History and politics are both arts of amnesia. So I say, let bygones be bygones. My summer holiday in the southern winter hardly counts, but I know for a fact that the Maoris are still discovering Australia. The question is, who’s next?
My suggestion is that when the eastern part of Indonesia—let’s say everything south and east from Bali across to New Guinea—secedes from the Javanese Empire, it ought to immediately annexe (by friendly treaty of course) the unknown southern land. This would give the new kingdom some great cuisine, magnificent cloth and more volcanoes and earthquakes than you could point a stick at. Precedent? Greece’s recent annexation of Europe. Would our Prester Johnnie have to find a soul? It’s never too late for that.
Christopher Kelen teaches in the English Department at the University of Macau. His fourth book of poems, Republics, was published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000.
Though South Australian historians have largely concentrated on the Townsville Siege as being the opening salvo in the Antipodean Civil War, it would be fairer to argue that the Massacre at Alice Springs,* in 1949, was the first real incident of the conflict. The Muri communities in the North and North East of the continent were largely Islamic by the commencement of the Second World War. (In fact, the discipline and combat skills of the Muslim Muris forms a small but exemplary study of heroism in Allied memoirs of that war). There had been increased hostilities between English-speaking and Muri Northerners ever since the formation of specific Islamic and Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory.** These hostilities were being exacerbated, it is claimed, by Muri politicians and revolutionaries urging the Aboriginal peoples in the south and west of the continent to demand the identical set of political and civil rights won in the Northern Australian Parliament in 1935. On the other side, English-speaking Northern Australians were whipping up hysteria in their own communities regarding the increasing ‘Mohammedanism’ of the North. Though certainly true that by the end of the decade young Aboriginal men and women in the Southern States of Australia were converting to Islam in remarkable rates, there as yet had been no violent conflict between Christians and Muslims.
It is difficult to remain objective about the 1949 Massacre, given that it still is a continuing sore in the relationships between the two nations on this continent. There is no doubt that the attack on the New Medina Mosque was of an extremely heinous and blasphemous nature. What we do know is that a group of drunken English-speaking men set off from McGilly’s Pub on the early morning of 15 June 1949. They proceeded to force open the Mosque and to desecrate it by polluting it with bodily excretions and with slogans written in black paint. The force of the resulting rage expressed by Islamic Muris was catastrophic. The number of dead is still contested but certainly close to 150 English-speaking men and young boys were slaughtered in Alice Springs the two nights following the desecration of the New Medina Mosque. Many of the corpses had their genitalia and hands cut off in reprisal for the desecrations. The Townsville Siege may have seen the declaration of the North secession from the Federation, and the resulting Battle for Queensland, but the Massacre at Alice Springs saw the first wave of refugees flee from North to South. (And, of course, from South to the North. As we shall see, the revenge taken on Aborigines in the South by refugee Europeans was equally violent and atrocious). It is clear that any study of the terrible civil war that led to the formation of the Republic of North Australia and the Commonwealth of South Australia must begin by examining the circumstances that led to the Mosque’s desecration and to the subsequent slaughter.
from the introduction to The Crescent and the Kangaroo: The Antipodean Civil War by Bilal Willangallee, 1989
* Alice Springs was the Australian designation for what is now New Medina in the Republic of Northern Australia.
** The first Islamic School was set up in Alice Springs in 1936, one full year from the proclamation of full political rights to all Northern Australians. The schools were identified as necessary by Aboriginal Clerics as Northern Australian schools of that time refused to teach either Koranic studies or Aboriginal languages.
Chris Tsiolkas is a Melbourne writer and author of Loaded, Jesus Man and co-writer of Jump Cuts with Sasha Soldatow
Excerpt from J. Blainey and G. Howington eds. The Prehistory of Australia: Documents and Curios (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), pp 238-9.
This document was found by police in 1926 in the personal effects of Paul Lévinas, son of Jacob Lévinas and Emmanuelle Cixous, the writers and philosophers who arrived with the first Exiles. Note the arcane terminology, and the nostalgia for both the Exiles’ notoriously inefficient and disordered form of social organisation, and for the Aborigines’ archaic and wasteful form of land use which was bound to be overthrown or undermined.
Their names have been destroyed, but we still secretly speak their language, the beautiful creole of Gaelic, English, German and French they bequeathed us. They were the Exiles—an ironic, bitter name they wore like an ill-fitting shirt. Young Kantians, in search of a modernity different from that which had merely swapped God for Man, one idol for another. Europe couldn’t understand them—their rejection of Bacon and Descartes, their desire not to master and control the earth but find harmony with it. They took heart from Kant’s dream of a global, cosmopolitan democracy, but thought him too marked by Man’s hubris and racism. The peoples of the Indies and America, they thought, deserved inclusion in his vision of a common humanity.
The Exiles were denounced by the New Men, the scientists and politicians busy carving Europe into one vicious, trumped-up nation after another. Soon enough, in London and Vienna and Paris, they were being rounded up and slaughtered like dogs. And they fled from the future they saw, of imperialism and war, factories and machines of death. Fled to this otherness of the Earth.
When the Exiles arrived many were afraid, of the strangeness, of the humans with black skins, the Owners. On that day my parents made a famous speech: ‘We came not to invade but to seek refuge. Look into their faces, and see your own. We put our fate in their hands; their fate in ours.’ Two years later there was treaty. We lived and farmed only with their permission, and shared crops, medicines, and knowledge. We respected their Law and their sacred places.
There was tragedy too. In the South there was smallpox, and problems with common children, only resolved after three years of difficult adjustments to their Law. In the North there was war, for ten awful years, and a fateful split among the exiles.
Some warned of the coming of the Europeans, in their iron ships and their flying machines—warned of how they would kill and legislate, partition and possess, make this place a nation. They said we should learn their technologies and make ourselves strong. But we feared what we would have to become to resist them.
So much happiness. I remember the Centenary, when the Owners’ many tribes gathered in the centre with our people. There were ceremonies, speeches, music, a joyful intersection of dreaming tracks, songs and laws. There was hope for the future and the past, for life in this timeless place Gondwana.
But that was a long time ago, before the War. Before Australia, and the sadness you now see.
* My thanks to Pal Ahluwalia, who suggested the theme of ‘a different modernity’ for this piece.
Anthony Burke has published poetry and fiction, and is the author of In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Pluto Press Australia, 2001). He teaches international politics at the University of Adelaide, and is the publisher of the borderlands e-journal <www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au>
It was 1988. I was twenty-two years old and living the life of an impoverished student in the heart of Adelaide. I had just completed four years of an honours degree in Political Anthropology at the University of Zeponda and, facing unemployment, had chosen to come to Australia as a doctoral candidate. This was clearly the biggest adventure of my life. I came from a society that had been ravaged by British colonialism and had experienced the pangs of birth that many newly-independent, post-colonial societies endure. As a student of Anthropology, I was drawn to Australia as a far-away exotic island. This was my opportunity to live and observe at first hand the world’s most successful multi-cultural society.
As someone who grew up on the Zepondan coast, what fascinated me was the manner in which the ‘Boat’ was so fundamentally a part of Australian culture. Unlike Zeponda, where the boat had brought in a colonising culture that went about destroying anything indigenous so that a settler supremacy could be cemented, here the ‘Boat’ was a symbol of acceptance, of the recognition that different people could be accommodated and respected, allowed to become citizens of a country which was forged out of the very idea that difference had to be celebrated—a cornerstone of Australian identity.
My task was to understand what made this land ‘tick’—what made it so appealing to waves of people who had made the journey to settle here without fear or recourse to the kinds of ultra-nationalism that I had faced growing up. Why was it that the history of Australia was not littered with accounts of the genocide of its indigenous population? How had this country avoided the Zeponda equivalents of the ‘Zeponda type’ that had drawn its inspiration from social Darwinism and race theory of the nineteenth-century? What intrigued me in particular was how Australia had avoided the kind of politics of patriotism that our Prime Minister had engaged in—a defence of ‘Zepondaness’ that he argued was under threat from within the nation and by the arrival of new ‘Boat’ people
As a person who belonged to Zeponda’s first nation’s people, I was particularly interested to see how Australian Aborigines were integral to the nation, how they had been instrumental to forging this new multi-cultural society. It was only recently that the high court in Zeponda had overturned the founding myth of terra nullius through the Kingoni case— a case that unleashed a backlash from which we are still reeling.
As I stood at the bicentennial celebrations of the first arrival of ‘Boat’ people in Canberra, I rapidly understood that what set us apart was our founding histories. The first ‘Boat’ people of Australia were not the British colonisers who had set out to destroy Zeponda. Rather, they were dissidents fleeing oppression who joined together with the indigenous population to establish an Australia that would become a renowned haven for ‘Boat’ people who had nowhere else to turn. Yes, even as an impoverished student, this was a place where I could belong.
Pal Ahluwalia teaches Politics at the University of Adelaide. He has written extensively on African politics and post-colonial theory. His most recent book is Politics and Post-colonial Theory: African Inflections, published by Routledge in 2001.
First, the obvious. What if Australia had been colonised by the French? The prospects are entrancing and alarming. It’s not just that we wouldn’t have had to wait until the 1980s for good bread and good cheese. We’d still be a French colony unless we’d had a civil war. Our racism would be more subtle and self-righteous but also more contested. We would’ve had generations of Aboriginal students and intellectuals trained in Paris. Think of that. We would have a weirder relationship to American culture. We would be more cosmopolitan and more colonial at once. We’d be Catholic and anti-clerical. We might have had peasants.
The peculiar thing about British colonisation—for a contemporary multicultural society—is how successfully the British, or at least the English, destroyed their own folk cultures through the Industrial revolution. If the ethnicity of the coloniser is always (relatively) unmarked, or aspires to be, then in some ways for Britishness this was multiplied to the power of two by the absence of such traditions. British was the first modern ‘ethnicity degree zero’.
But what if Australia had never been colonised at all? This is the breath-taking and heart-breaking possibility, the very edge of the horizon of imaginability. Imagine, though, a modern Aboriginal nation or a continent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, trading with the Maori nation of Aotearoa, with New Guinea, the Republic of Kanaky, Indonesia, China, the USA. Might the north have become Muslim? What institutions and cultures might this Aboriginal continent have developed within itself and from those it invited in? What cultures and politics? A post-modern Aboriginal continent, global and territorial, unimaginably at home and wired to the world, and so Asian-Aboriginal as well. I’m beginning just to be able to imagine it.
David Carter is Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland and recently published Culture in Australia edited with Tony Bennett (CUP 2001).
If Australia had not been colonised by the British, must we suppose that it would have been colonised by somebody else? During the early fifteenth century the rulers of China supported a major program of voyages of exploration, with fleets travelling as far as Africa in the West and even, according to some reports, the Americas in the East. The program was brought to an abrupt halt in the 1430s, well before European ships had reached Asia or America. What if, after a few early and expensive ventures, the rulers of the maritime powers of Europe had also been persuaded not to support further voyages of exploration? Sceptics at the time used the example of Imperial Rome and the more recent case of Venetian imperialism to argue, correctly as it transpired, that the oppression of others by imperial powers invariably led to oppression and corruption at home. Imagine, then, that wiser counsels had prevailed in Europe, that states of the Western kind had not been imposed on the rest of humanity and that the market had not come to dominate all forms of economic activity. That is the easy part: the more difficult part is to imagine what alternative paths of development (including other imperialisms) were closed off by the West’s attempts to impose its vision of social and political organisation on the world. Western conceits dominate our imaginations, just as they have dominated our histories, and it is partly for this reason that the colonisation of Australia by somebody else seems such an obvious alternative to colonisation by the British. But we could perhaps try to imagine an Australia which, while exchanging things, ideas and visitors with various parts of the world—possibly even with Europe—remained largely in the hands of its indigenous inhabitants.
Barry Hindess is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.
The President of the Eora Nation stood in front of his house and looked down over the sweeping expanse of gumtrees and wattle bushes towards the water. Before him stretched the vast expanse of the river’s mouth, from the far left where he could see the smoke coming from the Boori’dioowoogul encampment at Parramatta to the extreme right, where Barra’woori people were settling down on the shores of the sea for the summer catch and the feast of oysters.
His Gadigal people had built a modern community before him, and life was good. The elections had been fair, and properly run, and, except for some insipid assaults on his character by his political opponent who was currently languishing in jail for treason, had been even-tempered.
The monitoring team from the United Nations had left, declaring that the election was transparent, and that the result was in accordance with the wishes of the people.
But although the world believed that the vast and largely uninhabited land of the South where all the Aboriginal peoples still roamed as had their forefathers for over two thousand generations, was a paradise of wide expanse, pristine rain forests, and pure rivers, the President knew that this was no Eden.
For soon, he and his people, and the entire Aboriginal nations of the South, would be at war with the northern kingdoms of the Gulf Country which had allowed people from Asia to sign contracts to extract uranium from the sacred ground of Kakadu. And this would be the defining war, because the land of their forefathers must, for all times, be kept quarantined from the destruction which the other peoples of the world had created.
He was interrupted in his musings by a cough. He turned. His assistant handed him a piece of paper. The Chief read it, and screwed it up, throwing it on the ground in fury.
More of those damned boat people from England had been sighted. More strains at the detention centres where they were being placed until they could be shipped back to their cold and hostile homeland. When would these damned people realise that the Great Southern Land was for the Aborigines, and the Aboriginal people would decide who they let into their country!
Alan Gold is an Australian writer who has published ten novels locally and internationally
Having had a different starting point Australia would have been country with real cities, not CBDs plus suburbs. If Australia were to redo its ‘colonisation’ then it could at least understand ‘settlement’ as a crucial part of urban planning. There are merits of density. The vastness of the continent does not have to be replicated and mimicked in the layout of towns.
I would suggest that Australia should be recolonized by a global taskforce of (ecological) engineers and urban planners. People who are not afraid of the future and crack down on the mythology that there is no space (or better, water) for population growth. For me, that’s eco-fascism. The question of water, for instance, is one of clever distribution and re-use. The fact that so many Australians, many of my best friends included, lack the utopian vision to overcome such short-term concerns and refuse to think in terms of ecological engineering is shocking to me. There are so many new innovative materials, plenty of sun wind energy available. On the level of research and small initiatives there is even a lot going on in Australia, but there is hardly any substantial political and economic will to push for real change. Society is so much more progressive than the political and economic class which is currently ruling this country. I do not want to blame the British for all this. Were, and are they such bad engineers? Perhaps not.
We could go back in time and suggest classic city builders such as the Italians. Venetian traders could perhaps have build trading posts on Australia’s West and Northcoast as early as the sixteenth century. More likely the Portuguese or the Dutch would have. The fact that they did not is more like a matter of coincidence. I am more interested in future scenarios in which progressive forces start to shape radical forms of urbanity. Instead of retreating in the suburbs, defending the pre-industrial farmer mentality where every one should be entitled to own their own micro piece of land (with a pathetic shed on it, ready to be blown away by the first big storm or burned down by bush fire), a new consciousness is required. If the Australian (media) mentality is profoundly modern and urban (which it is), then it is bound to set for a severe collision course with the pseudo peaceful reality of the suburbs. Send in the radical ecological urbanisers.
Geert Lovink is a (Dutch) media theorist and Internet critic, since 2000 based in Australia. He is the co-founder of Fibreculture, an Australian network for Internet research and culture.
>.<
][][][][][][][][pre][(terra)Form(a)][ed][ & ][colon.E][Sourced >.<delving in sun.burnt glass dams a][s][l][?][l e-topped .vs.
cancer][anger][ous
::wrenching nuns with whorls of gritty red.wined rims & knitted longing >...< earls of kin][etic][gs & stones .vs.
::shifting liquids dot-melting ][p.lease-][ .vs. bitta fronts >.......< rewurkable field][s & s][par][ring][ part][ner][s
::old i.song.sing.ing down.loaded & dusty radiating paths ][][][][][][] ][][][][][][][][][][][stream][ <=> ][][][][][][][by-parti][San Violences <=>non-talis][ha][manic sources .vs. charnel-hom][e-page-down][ing systems <=>Snake-parables [.vs.] link death. by. tinkering. <=>candled flame parchment vs land poking ][][][][][][][][][][][][][] ][][][][][.][][][][][][][][.+.][ .+. Conduc][t][ing & S][igh][essions .+.][nor mined][ .+.+.][& miming][ .+.-.+.][real(i)ty.uber.mined & brain-dam][n][aged][. ][][][][][][][][][]
][ ][ ][] [][ ]] ][ ]]] ]]][[ .... ][ ]] ..... . .].
MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] is an international net.wurk artist [see: http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker] and avataristic author of the networked “mezangelle” system. [sel][l][f reply.cation]
Following its overwhelming electoral victory in 1996, the Keating Labor Government announced its bold plan for cultural revolution. Everything hinged on the Australian Castles project, initiated in 1997.
By Christmas 1999, Australia had its first castle—Balmoral, in Bendigo—chosen by the PM for maximum symbolic impact. As a lesson in appropriation, the Bendigo Balmoral showed up the Scottish Balmoral for the simulacrum that it was.
Originally a sixteenth century tower-house, Balmoral Castle in Scotland was built in 1855 as a gift from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria. Keating knew that Albert was attracted to the tower-house because the surrounding woodlands reminded him of Thuringia in his native Germany, so that Keating saw Balmoral as a perfect illustration of what he took to be true of British history in general —there was nothing terribly historical about it. British history, Keating understood, was all about appropriation, imitation and symbolic inventiveness. These were not the exclusive property of any nation, convincing Keating that the Bendigo ‘copy’ would expose the Victorian ‘original’ for the imitation it had always been. From this lesson a cultural revolution was born
The ‘new’ Victorian Balmoral was an immediate success, drawing thousands of visitors a day. Bran Castle, the so-called Dracula’s Castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, which Keating commissioned for Canberra, proved also to be hugely popular, as did the ruins of Fremantle’s Poenari Castle, Dracula’s residential fortress in central Romania, built in 1457.
Today there are hundreds of Australian castles, pillars of a nation without nationalism. Yet only half a century ago, our history oppressed us.
Keating’s Lesson led straight to radical reform, especially the Welcome, Stranger immigration policy of 2001. As every Australian schoolchild knows, his lesson was that history had always been postmodern. The past had no essence, contained no spirit and could not determine our identity.
Niall Lucy is Head of the School of Arts at Murdoch University. His latest book is Beyond Semiotics: Text, Culture and Technology (London and New York: Continuum, 2001).
This land at the centre of the world—at the centre
because unknown—what millions of people walk
behind it and call to it as if they had not thoughts
but were birds or a tired herd dragging their heads
barely the distance before eye-blurring above an
absence—a desert thinking them—yet never arrive
for to do so one must know to where one comes.
This land has no yesterday only then-depth.
The land walks into their arms and without
questioning they know what they hold.
At dawn the dawn.
Yesterday is mercy—so much time ago.
And the trees, violent in their tops,
spreading through all of speech
so they starred their words
and gave the lizard their tongue
and the tongue to the dead.
This land at the centre of us, our assembled bodies,
our concealment—shall the guilt dig, the heroism
dig, the natural fear dig and reveal the hole our
spirits groped in for the raw true suffers, the new
bones with our own eyes, or shall there be found
there the furthest endurance—life ambushing the
unknown, just passing passing and never passing?
MTC Cronin currently lives in Sydney and her eighth collection of poetry, beautiful, unfinished ~ Parable/Song/Canto/Poem, is forthcoming in 2003.
I lived for a few years, long ago, in South Gippsland. It was beautiful there. One day I stood by a waterfall and surveyed the landscape. On one side there were rolling green pastures where sheep and cattle grazed, and the occasional discombobulated rabbit, myxed out of its mind, would scramble out of the ground, flubber around and disappear down another hole. Not that the holes were visible from where I stood. Nor signs of the war between blackberries and 245T. On the other side there was rain forest, dense vegetation, giant ferns that had been growing since the world began. Two different worlds.
I understood then a phrase I’d heard, a phrase not-quite-grasped, that had nestled just below the surface of consciousness. It was this: colonialism changes geography. Standing there, in this bifurcated landscape, I understood a little, the nature of Gippsland. But I could not fully grasp what it must have been like before the British, before the massacres, before the coming of the cow cockies and later the weekend farmers. What this landscape must have been like when, rather than being sketched out via a series of negatives—no rabbits, no sheep…—it was positively peopled. What it was like when Koori people lived here, before the British invaded.
And what if some other nation had colonised? Would there be croissants instead of rabbits? More philosophy in schools? Fewer massacres?
And what if Australia had never been colonised? What if there were another history, utopian and retrospective, a history of encounter and of circuits of exchange, in the course of which old and new technologies were to converge, generating an entirely new way of imaging the world? Imagine this: other modes of imagination, other ways of rendering fiction, visually and emotionally. Modes that emerge in the South and travel from place to place. Let’s imagine flows of knowledge, perceptive and practical, that pertain to a variety of techniques for the putting-into-motion of images, or the putting-motion-into-images. We are talking techniques here, techniques and technology, invention and adaptation and borrowing and tinkering. Projectors, lasers, trompe L’Oeil? I think not, but these are the terms I know. Consider how these journeys might have eventuated: from Southern Africa, across the Indian Ocean, for instance, or through the islands of Oceania, until a Maori delegation arrives, one day, on the beach, bearing images; or, rather, the material means for rendering, visually, the immaterial.
What are these motions pictures like? And where were (or are) they seen? Are they like the flicks, or the movies, or the pictures? Are they representational, or would it be more accurate to say dialogic, or virtual? Well this is a question to which there is no answer. Or let’s cut to the chase and put it this way: I have no answer, only speculation and desire. Desire for an other history of Australia, and another history of the cinema.
These images were secret, and so was the technology of transmission. I imagine (greedily, longily) that if you were initiated, or lucky, you might see these images moving in the depths of the forest, against canyon walls in the desert, but also in dwellings that were simultaneously temporary (like humpies) and permanent (like long houses), dwellings where one might lounge like a lizard while watching, or be poised, alert, ready for action. And I imagine a kind of industry (moving images not representational, but certainly imbued and mobilized by the force of repetition) that is not about export and the conquering of markets, but rather about the local and the continuous tension around what constitutes the here and now.
Imagine: another history of Australia, another history of motion pictures.
Lesley Stern is an Australian citizen, born in Zimbabwe and currently Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego.
You were right, I shouldn’t have come. This land is through me like poison now, doing its dirty work. To think the ancient mariners once called it Terra Australis del Espirita Santo, South Land of the Holy Spirit. There’s nothing now, just a hurting light and a humming silence. And I can’t come back to you.
There was an accident during an expedition. I can hardly write this, everything hurts. I’ve found a computer and am not meant to be here. I can’t be long. You’ll get a visit from The State in a couple of days, with some story about what went wrong.
I love you so much. Can you feel it, my arms enfolding you.
We were assessing levels of radioactivity. After plundering the riches of this land and then fucking it over completely with nuclear testing they’re assessing if they can populate again. That’s the real reason for this mission.
We came to a plain that was once an inland sea. Now it’s crusted over with salt and the bones of old vessels leer up from its bed like the carcasses of prehistoric beasts. The fishermen had chased the water as it bled from their grasp, they’d tried reaching it with concrete pylons that stretched like fingers into the vastness and then they’d tried netting it with canals and all that’s left is their graves. The three masted crosses look like the masts of ghost ships, reminding us of the folly of ever trying to tame a lake. Or a continent, for the world’s use.
The driver careered over a bluff and hit solid rock and the vehicle split like a watermelon. We were exposed. The air’s saturated, still, it will be for centuries.
We’re now in these isolation huts by a beautiful bay. There’s a headland like a toothbrush and the sky’s vaulting, optimistic, naive. At night there are stars like I never see back home. I stare at the great, heartbreaking cram of them and my stomach twists at what we’ve done to this land. I love you so much, it comes over me in great waves. I can hear footsteps. Don’t try and get me home. I’m holding out a hand to you, can you feel it, palm to palm.
Nikki Gemmell is the author of three novels, Shiver, Cleave and Love Song, which have been translated into many languages. She’s currently living in London.
It is recorded that when the American Indians first witnessed their white visitors shaking hands, they fell about laughing.
A kiss on two cheeks.
First, which side? (Although there are, no doubt, arcane rules for the natives of this cultural greeting practice, so they always know, and avoid pecking each other on the chin and banging noses).
My face is approaching yours. I am aware of the length of your nose. You are taller. Our glasses might clash, or maybe the brim of my summer hat will graze your cheek. (Maybe hats should be removed first—another arcane rule long since gone the way of the single silk stocking?)
Our hands are outstretched. We are anxious. Keenly anxious.
Like tennis, that other French game, we are facing each other, and we are dancing. Our feet stop at the required distance, as though we might choose to tango instead. You bend your neck, and incline your face towards mine. You are supplicant.
I tilt my face upwards and, holding on to habits past, stand on my toes, even though it’s not strictly necessary. I am open.
I am reaching for your hands, no, instead your arms are rising to hold my triceps, no again, the options are still fluid, we are rising still, like birds, and embrace our shoulders and hold each other’s backs, resting against the feel of a chest. I am soft and bosomy, and you are soft too, but there are firm pectorals beneath the cotton t-shirt. I belatedly fear a chest thump as from giant NBA star, but this chest is held back, politely distancing your stranger’s body at the same time as we have hurtled through space to eradicate our distance, keenly anxious.
Who is this person?
You are an Afghan stranger. You are young. You have stepped off a boat. Your religion strikes fear in my heart. Your circumstances draw me to welcome you, and yours to accept me, come what may, since thankfully I am not clad in razor wire. But this is no honeymoon, no meeting of two minds. We are keenly anxious.
Our kisses make sounds. Like birds. We don’t say peck for no reason.
Our kisses make speech impossible. There is no need to speak.
Our kisses mean we cannot see each other’s faces, except in a blur. There is no need to see.
We have rehearsed the conditions for intimacy. We have allowed ourselves briefly to be known. We have visited a stranger’s body, and returned, all within the realms of social grace. We are brave and strong.
A kiss on two cheeks.
The kisses are the same.
They are one kiss.
Only the cheeks are different.
Fiona Giles is a Sydney-based writer. Her new book, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts, is published in 2003.
Hophophophop hop op op op o los
Π O is a Melbourne poet