WRITING AUSTRALIAN CULTURE: Text, Society, and National Identity || BECOMING 'AUTHENTIC' AUSTRALIANS...

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BECOMING 'AUTHENTIC' AUSTRALIANS THROUGH MUSICAuthor(s): Janice NewtonSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 27,WRITING AUSTRALIAN CULTURE: Text, Society, and National Identity (April 1990), pp. 93-101Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23164573 .

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BECOMING 'AUTHENTIC' AUSTRALIANS THROUGH MUSIC1

Janice Newton

James Axtell (1981:273-315) writes that of the adaptive and reactive changes rendered on the

English colonists by the eastern woodland American Indians, the latter were most important.

Although traders, frontiersmen, farmers and soldiers adopted Indian food (com maple, game); medicines (teas and poultices); clothing (moccasins, deerskin camouflage); and techniques of

warfare (ambush, commando raids, Indian file, scouts), these aspects of Indian technology were

taken on to achieve the goals and values of white Christian Englishmen. Those people who

became more 'indianized', like deserters or traitors who sought refuge and stayed for long

periods in Indian camps; traders who took up Indian wives, language and clothing; and the

dirty, unchaste, hunting frontiersmen, had no role in English colonial cuture. They were feared

to have become savage, to have degenerated, and were placed by the colonial English 'outside

the pale of 'civilized' society, outside history itself' (1981:283).

The most important impact of the Indians was as military foes and 'cultural foils'. Axtell

considers that the main reactive change was the indirect influence of the English confronting the otherness of Indian culture - their unpredictability, their pride and revenge. The early

English colonists could not make the Indians disappear by converting them to Christianity or

by fighting them. The stubborn persistence of Indian culture was instrumental in shaping colonial culture. There was a generalised fear that a satanic Indian influence on the frontier

would promote a return to barbarism. The Indian was the 'other' image to work against when

introducing English government and religious institutions and the capitalist work ethic. The

Indian enemy evoked ambivalent emotions: fear, envy, hatred and respect. Paranoia about their

style of fighting encouraged a defensive 'fortress' mentality (Axtell 1981:307-8). The expense of patrolling the land contributed to the English Crown taking over the colonies and the

continuing expense of defence exacerbated conflict between the colonies and the mother

country, culminating in the 1776 revolution against the English. Ironically, the colonist

revolutionaries chose the Indian as their symbol to demonstrate love of liberty and fierce

independence. The long, determined opposition of the colonists to the Indians united thirteen

colonies in their common history of conflict on Indian soil (Axtell 1981:314-5).

Axtell's notion of 'cultural foil' is elaborated in Stedman s (1982) Shadows of the Indian

dealing with stereotypes of the American Indian. Strickland explains how ideas on Indians

became 'a mirror, a reflection of the white neurosis of the age' (1982:x). The wide range of

images are mostly fictional and sometimes contradictory. They range from the noble, beautiful

savage (a naked, gentle, Pocahontas); to a humble, cheerful, servile Man Friday; to a verbally

crippled 'Grunting Brave'; to the 'Bare-chested brave lusting for white women'; to the

animal-like predator, lacking a soul (Bomba, the jungle boy) (Stedman, 1982). Such stereotypes are important both because they created new realities through their application in Indian policies and because they tell us something about the inner worries and concerns of the Whites

(Strickland 1982:IX).

In this paper I take up an interest in the White Australian's response to the Aborigines in

Australia. The notions of 'otherness' and 'culture foil' could well be transferred and fruitfully

applied in our own context. I am less concerned with the reality of policies altering according

to changing stereotypes or images of the Aborigine, as this has been well-addressed by others

(Broome 1982). My central interest is the reality of some of the less powerful Whites, their



thoughts on and responses to the Aborigine. Although a largely unstudied area, a recent

collection by Donaldson and Donaldson Seeing the First Australians ( 1985) makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the response of early Europeans to the Aborigines - in

prose, art and photography, although 'From the outset... the Aboriginal was denied a position in the vision of the landscape and a place in European/Australian culture' (Urry 1985:63-4).

1988 was the year of the Bicentennial celebration of two hundred years of European settlement.

The Bicentennial Authority managed to retain the notion of 'celebration' and to defeat those

lobbying for a more sober 'commemoration' which implied a concern for the impact on

Aborigines. Earlier studies (Newton 1988, Marcus 1988a) have shown that the counterculture

in Australia has reached out to the spirituality of Aboriginal society or sites but by 1988 ... it

had become apparent that the interest in Aboriginally was not confined to such groups. There

has been a gradual welling up of interest on the margins of society, on what I have termed 'the

fringes'. It is not mainstream interest, but it has wide currency. It is an interest that emerges on

some ABC programmes,2 on some specialist radio stations and in some newspaper articles,

for example, The Age, Australian Geographic, and The Australian,4 It is an interest that is

particularly prominent in the artistic margins of society, among artists, musicians and perhaps

writers, and it is this area of the production of popular culture which I analyse here.

In the Bicentennial year and in the preceding years of preparation, some of those Australians

in the business of creativity have thought about their identity and about the extent to which

they belong to Australia, and they have fashioned creative work directly or indirectly in

response to this search for an identity. In their creative work they have incorporated or

interpreted aspects of Aboriginal culture.

Some of the earliest responses to Aborigines are found in the works of James Cook, Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson from Cook's first journey to Australia. Cook in particular

appeared to be influenced by classical writers and contemporary accounts of North American

Indians in his romantic description of the 'noble savages' of Australia (Williams 1985). Parkinson drew Aborigines with a Christian sympathy for his 'pagan brothers'. The engraver Chambers expressed true 'heroic courage' in his illustration of Aboriginal warriors (Smith

1985:30). Actual contact and deteriorating race relations changed the European image of

Aborigines to much more degrading stereotypes. In early illustrations, Europeans portrayed the woodland hunter as much more noble and heroic than the coastal Aborigines whom they knew much better. Hunting was seen as a legitimate sport for gentlemen and the illustrations

of Aboriginal hunting brought to mind the English hunt with Australian birds resembling

pheasants and kangaroos resembling foxes (Urry 1985:58-60). However when in the 1880s

and 1890s it was believed that the Aborigines were dying out, artists represented Aborigines

partly in profile or full-face for scientific record, and also in a romantic manner - passively,

unthreatening, disembodied heads in ill-defined backgrounds (Maynard 1985:92-107). Peter

son develops the notions of scientific realism and romanticism as exemplified in the picture

postcard craze of 1902-14. Some pictures presented romantic images of naked Aborigines in

natural surroundings, but most presented realistic views of poor Aborigines in European clothes, posed in front of their impoverished dwellings (1985). The influence of the romantic,

noble savage image was present from early times with Cook, it reemerged in the portraits of

the 1890s, and persisted in the pre-first world war postcards. It may have reflected or even

reinforced the policies of the period when Aborigines were thought to be dying out and

administrators attempted to 'smooth the pillow of the dying race'. But the image of Aborigines was not a timeless, monolithic one. Diverse stereotypes co-existed and waxed and waned.

Realistic degradation was another theme which made an impact. Peterson believes that the

94



negative realistic images of Aborigines bolstered ideas of racial superiority and supported the

white Australia policy (1985:179).

As in North America, images of the Aborigines may have been rooted in fantasy but they also

had political implications for policy. Fictional and contradictory images co-existed and may have reflected the inner worries or obsessions of the White people of the age. But until perhaps the 1930s, we do not find the image of the Aborigine and the culture of Aboriginal Society

being adopted by White Australians.

Unlike the English colonies in America it seems that Europeans in Australia made very few

adaptive responses to the Aborigines. Their food, clothes and medicine do not appear to have

been taken on by Whites. A few explorers and early pastoralists were able to make use of the

Aboriginal knowledge of the environment (Reynolds 1981:20, 141) and even 'backtracking' remained a mysterious skill owned by the Aborigines. Reynolds (1981:85) claims that the

balance of power on the Australian frontier tipped when Europeans improved their weapons,

grew more confident in the bush and most importantly, used the blacks as guides, trackers and

in para-military native police forces.

Very few Aboriginal language terms entered the Australian bushman's vocabulary. Lack of

knowledge of Aboriginal language prevented both an entry into the rich, local knowledge of

the environment and its resources and an understanding of the Aboriginal religious indentifica

tion with the landscape. The early settler Australian bushmen were often descendants of

convicts, local born Currency lads who developed their skills in Sydney. Convicts disliked and

distrusted Aborigines, who were sometimes sent to track them. Unlike the time of settlement

in America, when the yeoman farmers were little advanced technologically from the Indians,

Australia was colonized during the Industrial Revolution when whites had added technological

superiority and more interest in blatant exploitation of the land (Urry 1985:62-65).

In Australia's past, Europeans took almost nothing from Aboriginal culture and despised their

'stone-age' technology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s however, this contempt changed in

some quarters and, in keeping with a general questioning of values and concern for social issues,

a new romanticism bloomed and the counter culture here, like that overseas, looked to

indigenous tribes for inspiration. Although poet Les Murray believes that Aboriginal cultural

heritage has been neglected in Australia since the demise of the Jindy worobak movement, this

has not been so. He sees that the 'main effect of Aboriginal culture on the general Australian

consciousness in the last twenty-odd years had tended to flow through the conservationist

movement5 and, to a lesser extent, through painting and perhaps music' (177:550). It is recent

music that I discuss here. Before going into detail on Aboriginal influence in music it is

appropriate to discuss briefly the Jindyworobak movement, a literary movement which

provided a cultural context for particular developments in both art6 and music in Australia.

The Jindyworobak movement incorporated a generation of Australian poets from 1930-40. In

the gloomy times of depression and immanent war in Europe, young Australians were looking for freedom of spirit in their own country. Under the inspiration of Rex Ingamell who chose

the term Jindyworobak (meaning 'to join'), they acknowledged that they searched both for

spiritual values and a true bond between human beings and the natural world.

They found their sacred literary texts, so to speak, in Spencer's The Arunta and Devaney's The

VanishedTribes. The former dreamland of Europe was replaced by the dreamtime of Aboriginal Australia. The totems and reincarnations of creation time became figurative images rather than

sacred beliefs and the young, nationalistic, idealistic and enthusiastic Australian poets used

anthropological material and myths for the literary ends of personal, emotional, lyrical poetry.

They used the ideas and images of the Aranda material rather than the style and structure of

95



the ritual epics and impersonal sacred texts (Elliot 1979:xvii-xxviii). 'For Ingamells the

mystical sensations of site-magic were the key to his imaginative expression ' (Elliot 1979:xxx).

In spite of the personal, emotive response in poetry which came from a European tradition

Elliot claims that the young Jindyworobaks incorporated personal emotion and an element of

detachment which was probably a result of their seriousness and their respect for the decorum

of site magic. They did not aim for tribal, ritual type poetry but stood a little back from personal,

emotional immersion into the environment '...it appears to be something absorbed from the

landscape, the 'environment' or 'spirit of place' and in this respect of their own to something which had great importance in the Aboriginal mind

' (1979:xxx).

For ten years Jindyworobak anthologies were published successfully but by the early 1950s,

for the reading public the vogue was over. A 'rival' group of poets, the Angry Penguins, claimed

the Jindyworobaks were isolationst and overstressed a culture (Aboriginal) which could not be

recognized as a real basis of the dominant Australian culture. The Angry Penguins themselves

drew on ideas of the abstract from Europe. A reconciliation of the two movements may have

helped develop an Australian poetry but the movements were too extreme. World War Two,

although stimulating an initial nostalgia for the land, eventually unleashed changes which made

the Jindyworobak's isolationist, environmental values less relevant in Australia. Australia

became part of the world and received people from many parts of it. Australians could not

continue to be so self-occupied. Daily papers and literary journals ridiculed the Aboriginality of the Jindyworobaks. Judith Wright felt that, indeed, there was an 'overemphasis on rescuing and translating elements of Aboriginal culture into terms of a white viewpoint which failed to

understand the real basis of that culture' (Elliot 1979:279). However, some have argued that

the movement enabled Australian poets to get to know themselves better, by confronting the

issues of Australian regionalism and culture (Elliot 1979:lxiii, Wright in Elliott 1979:278-279).

Les Murray, a contemporary Australian poet has spoken of himself as the last of the Jin

dyworobaks. He continues to express a fundamental concern with 'country' and seeks spiritual values (Elliot 1979:283). Murray, like the Jindyworobaks, aims for Black/White convergence. He notes that early writers have written of Aborigines as 'others', as objects.

Identification with Aborigines has been sporadic and only fashionable during particular

periods. Some polemical writers have extolled an idealized Aboriginal image as a foil to the

distasteful 'Ocker' image (Murray 1977:569- 70). Murray, in his own work, seeks to avoid

both of these images of Australians. In his review of the poetry of Kevin Gilbert and lack Davis

(1984), Murray discredits those white Australians who acclaim such poetry (in order perhaps

to be humane or fashionable) as they are, in fact, patronizing in that they set a lower standard

of writing for black writers.

Murray has been strongly influenced by R. Bemdt's translation of the Moon Bone Song Cycle

(Elliot 1979:300-3) of the Wonguri-Mandjikai people, and unlike the original Jindyworobaks, he has attempted to make use of the structure of Aboriginal verse. He has written a cycle of

poems in the same style and metre as the Moon Bone Cycle. The Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday

Song Cycle has lines such as the following:

'...Now the ibis are flying in, hovering down on the wetlands

on those swampy paddocks around Darawank, curving down

in ragged dozens,

on the riverside flats along the Wang Wauk, on the

Boolambayte pasture flats

and away towards the sea, on the sand moors, at the place of the Jabirú Crane...' (Elliot 1979:305).

96



Murray's most recent collection The Daylight M oon has been reviewed by Mudrooroo Narogin,

Aboriginal writer Colin Johnson. Narogin perhaps resents Murray's attempt to become part of

the country like Aborigines are. Having appropriated the material land, is the European now

greedy to have the spiritual essence as well? Narogin will not allow that. He claims that

'Murray's sense of land is a sense of settled land. Walked over, cut over, planted over, lived

over, housed over in an Australian ethic of mateship which survives things such as injustice... Man makes the land; land does not make the man...' (Narogin, 1988:3).

In 1988 then, we find in the field of poetry a single but mainstream exponent of the

Jindyworobak vision, Les Murray. He hopes he has promoted and revived Aboriginal themes

and imagery, believes that Aboriginal and European elements can be fused in poetry, but

recognizes (and in doing so perhaps pre-empts Narogin's review) that the 'takeover smell, the

gubba smell, is still strong on us... ' (Murray 1977:570,554,571 ). In a literary camp on the artistic

margins of our society, the interest in Aboriginality continues.

Was or is there a musical parallel to the Jindyworobak movement? Murdoch in his introduction

to Australia s Contemporary Composers claims that creative Australian compositions began in Australian with John Antill's Corroboree ( 1972:xi). The excitement and promising potential of Australian composers is seen as resulting from their interest in the untapped musical

influences from the Pacific and from Aboriginal Australia. Research of ethnomusicologists such as Catherine Ellis have facilitated this interest (Maxwell-Davies 1972:ix). At least five

composers have had a serious interest in Aboriginality reflected in some of their compositions.

Antill, is known almost solely because of his ballet Corroborée, written in 1946. When a child, he attended a Corroboree at La Perouse which made a tremendous impression on him. It

stimulated an abiding interest in Aboriginal music which led to the assembly of a library and

the collection of recordings. It also led in what Murdoch calls 'a shimmering evocative

score',drawing on Aboriginal rhythms and making use of the bull-roarer. The Australian quality of Corroboree was a rallying call for composers for over twenty years (Murdoch 1972:9-11).

Two other Australian composers, Clive Douglas and James Penberthy, have also taken a

scholarly and musical interest in Aboriginal life. By 1947 Penberthy was composing works

inspired by Aboriginal folklore and continued to do so until 1960 (Murdoch 1972:157).

Douglas composed a Kaditcha Operetta based on an Aboriginal legend in 1937-38, his interest

in Aboriginal-inspired music continuing until about 1959. He consistently tried to identify and

use an Australian idiom in his music saying 'a musical idiom must be found which is so entirely Australian that no other influence can be felt. In this arduous search the imported traditions of

the white man disappear in the mists of long ages before he came to this country; and only there, in the mystical 'dreamtime' of antiquity can be found the all important link - the tribal

ceremonial chants of the brown man' (Murdoch 1972:76). Tq these composers it was crucial

to develop an authentic Australian music. Aboriginal tradition was felt to be an essential

ingredient for such authenticity.

The composers Antill, Douglas and Penberthy came after the poets of the Jindyworobak but

were equally serious and enthusiastic in finding an Australian idiom for their composition in

ethnographic material. Sculthorpe and Dreyfus, from a more recent generation have responded to wider and differing political stimuli. Dreyfus, of Jewish German origin, composed a school

opera on Aboriginal land rights in 1969 but one of his most successful works, (Murdoch, 1972:85) was a piece for wind quintet and didjeridu which he composed in 1971. In preparation for this composition he studied Aboriginal music, travelled to Northern Territory, and met

Winunguj, who was to play the didjeridu at the recording of the first performance. Dreyfus' other works do not draw on Aboriginal political themes or music (Murdoch 1972:85).

97



Sculthorpe, a fourth generation Australian, had a period of being aggressively Australian during which he studied and made use of Aboriginal folklore. By 1951 -9 he was rethinking his position and decided that his future creativity did not lie in the Jindyworobak approach. 'He felt that

there is nothing of melodic or rhythmic interest of any significance to the western mind to be

gained from the Aboriginal materials' (Murdoch 1972:166) In this he agrees with Don Banks

who doubts the possibilities of an Australian idiom. 'The limitations of our folk music and what

we know of Aboriginal music, cannot provide us with a fruitful basis to our music' (Murdoch

1972:17). Banks and Sculthorpe appear to discredit the depth and complexity of traditional

Aboriginal music exposed by ethnomusicologists, suggesting that it is alien, impenetrable and

perhaps no longer in existence in its full form. Ultimately, perhaps, they are saying that it is

irrelevant. From the distant academic atmosphere of England, Sculthorpe reasoned that he was

Australian 'had lived there all his life, and had observed and responded to its atmospheres....' his music would be Australian and there was no need to search desperately for an Australian

idiom (Murdoch 1972:166). In 1963 he wrote 'The Fifth Continent' for speaker, string

orchestra, harp, percussion, oboe and trumpet, and included recordings of wind howling and

didgeridu, but his more recent music draws on Balinese gamelan, improvisation, and a collage of genres including pop (Murdoch 1972:163-173). Sculthorpe is perhaps exemplifying the

emergence of the confident settler Australian identity. The settler reacts to the environment but

it is an environment without the original inhabitants, or at least an environment that has been

thoroughly appropriated by the Europeans. In Sculthorpe's case this could be almost accurate

as he was from Tasmania, a state which had ridded itself of all but part-European Aborigines

by the 1870s.

If there were Jindyworobak musicians (in sympathy rather than by physical association) it

would be the three earlier composers: Antill, Douglas and Penberthy coming after the peak

popularity of the Jindyworobak poets. The interest of Dreyfus and Sculthorpe in Aboriginal music has been more specialized and less embracing. Towards 1988, however, we do have an

example of composition in the classical tradition and suggestive of Aboriginal instruments and

music. Brenton Broadstock is a young Australian composer in residence with the Melbourne

Symphony Orchestra. His ballet Expedition relates to Burke and Wills exploration and,

although it was commissioned for the Victorian 150 year celebration in 1985, it can be seen to

represent part of the recent build up of interest in the nature of white Australians' relationship to the land. The piece is for Chamber strings and the allusion to clapping sticks and didjeridu is subtle. In the opening section 'Call of the Inland', Burke and Wills are portrayed as thinking about their expedition. This is, in a sense, their dream world and the heat, flies and Aborigines are each an element of the barren landscape which lures them to explore the centre. Anniver

saries and commemorations are periods when we take stock of our situation, analyse the past, consider the future. When it is an anniversary in relation to settlement in a territory, much

reflection must centre on the notion of identity, on belongingness to that territory. The White

Australian achieves belonging through pioneering, settling and taming the land. Perhaps the

belonging appears more authentic when there is a nostalgic recognition of the spiritual 'other',

the Aboriginal culture. Such reference to Aboriginally does not challenge the historical

invasion or present a vibrant, aggressive alternative to settler culture and complacency.

Concern with a landscape peopled by Aborigines has perhaps been much more obvious in

music with 'popular' roots; music which followed the radical political concerns of youth in the

late 1960s and 1970s. Part of student activism in these times was a concern with the Vietnam

War, with pacifism, womens' liberation, gay liberation and with Aboriginal rights. Left wing student groups consciously courted alliances with workers and Blacks. The paternalistic free

tutoring function of the students' Abschol organization changed almost overnight to the

98



function of political radicalizaron. In co-operation with urban Aboriginal groups there were

discussions of overseas black power movements, conferences, camps, demonstrations and

support for early land rights claims. After Vietnam, student and ex-student political action

moved more towards the environment and enthusiasm for spirituality. Urban Aboriginal bands

began incorporating traditional music and soon after, so did politically sensitive White bands.

Goanna in Spirit of Place made some use of didjeridu in the track 'Solid Rock (Sacred Ground)'

made in 1982.

Midnight Oil's political convictions include uranium, the environment and Aborigines. In 1986

they staged a Blackfella/Whitefella tour, travelling throughout the outback with an Aboriginal

group, Warumpi Band, and with Charlie McMahon of Gondwanaland. Their music is of

western origin but lyrics draw on the political struggle of the Aborigines. Peter Garrett, lead

singer of Midnight Oil, is interested in the Aborigines' 40,000 year history and cultural strength of their kinship system. His interest is not purely cultural or spiritual. He acknowledges that

'their culture and kinship system all comes from the land, so they must have land to survive,

and build an economic base to meet whites on their own terms' (Hawley 1986:6). Murdoch

recognizes that Midnight Oil see the outback as the real Australia and are earnest in their attempt to unite Black and White Australians in the same hopes.7 The show did not, according to

Murdoch, reveal any togetherness. Apathetic adults watched, children danced, but when Garrett

screamed for audience participation in one number, no-one responded. Murdoch, in her review

of 'Big Country's' programme on the tour, claims that although children appreciated the music,

much of Garrett's earnestness was naive and clichéd and his idealism 'wafted into the desert

night among the cans' (Murdoch 1987:3). But according to Hawley, who reported on the tour,

Jindyworobak, the fusion or joining of the two cultures, had a small beginning. Late in the night around a campfire in the Western Desert with the Kintore people, the two cultures jammed; 'The Aborigines picked up the Oils modem rock rhythms with music sticks and didjeridu, and

the Oils picked up the Aborigines' ancient rhythms ... with guitar and improvised drums, and

everyone sang or beat something' (Hawley 1986:6).

Southern Crossings' 'The Edge of the Desert',makes use of an Aboriginal didjeridu in

attempting to evoke some of the more barren landscapes in Australia. Perhaps the most noted

'environment' band achieving some recognition in the 1980s and providing background music

for ABC Bicentennial programmes on nature, is the band Gondwanaland. The band's name

evokes the land well before the Aborigines peopled it - a hypothetical southern continental

mass of the late Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras, including South America, Antarctica, Africa,

India and Australia. Didjeridu player Charlie McMahon is a drop-out Sydney University economics lecturer who advised the Pintubi community at Kintore for two years. He speaks some Pintubi and has a genuine, deep interest in Aboriginal culture. Gondwanaland appear to

be the white band that has most successfully fused the Aboriginal sound in western music and

continued to be creatively productive in this style. They have, I believe, been able to

successfully market or produce Aboriginal music in a way which is more acceptable to the ear

trained to hear western music in western time spans. (Unlike the traditional context where in

some ceremonies one note may sometimes be played almost all day, and the tension reach

almost fever pitch, before the second note is played and the cadence resolved). Gondwanaland

give us the satisfaction of melody and harmony from the electric organ while the didjeridu seems like a 'basso continuo' derived from the earth.

The final musical example I wish to refer to comes from a recording called Terra Australis by Peter Williams, performing under the name of 'electric hand'. The tape is a musical journey around Australia - at least around those sections of Australia environmentally beautiful or

relevant: Maralinga, Daintreee, Nullarbor, the Great Ocean Road, the Blue Mountains.



Electronic sythesisers are used to suggest particular sounds rather than to duplicate them and

in two tracks there is some suggestion of Aboriginal music.

William's central concern is the land. The Aboriginal 'feel' about some of the tracks does not

exemplify a deep knowledge of or political commitment to Aborigines. He recognizes their

balanced, successful traditional lifestyle, their history of suffering and the probable bias in our

knowledge about Aborigines that is released to us by the media. But he is disillusioned with

all political parties and movements and is suspicious of the motives of some Aboriginal groups. He sees Aborigines as the first immigrants (40,000 years ago) and focuses on the great age of

the land, a land which, he feels, no-one should own. The tape is subtitled: "music inspired by

images of the Australian landscape, to commemorate our Bicentenary". This is a personal bicentennial project. The Bicentennial Authority refused him permission to use the words

'Bicentennial Project'. Williams approached his local Member of Parliament and eventually received an interview with a senior member of the Authority after which a compromise wording was offered. Williams recognized that a link to the Bicentennial could be a selling factor but

claims that this was secondary to his interest in national identity and the land/people relation

ship. His badgering of the Authority was evidence that he was convinced that an individual

should be able to make a personal statement about the Bicentennial.

I have dwelt on this musician as I feel he exemplifies an important aspect of the movement on

the fringes of our society to incorporate Aboriginality. Although Hawley (1986:6) saw

Midnight Oil enjoying an isolated instance of cross-cultural empathy, Murdoch (1987:3) may be correct in her implication that the film showed an almost embarrassing, fruitless effort of

well-meaning White Australians to be embraced, not just by the land, but by the living people in it. While still recognizing the commitment of Midnight Oil and the understanding of

Gondwanaland, there is a sense in which the identification with the land has Aborigines as part of the land like mountains, gumtrees or rivers, not as another living society and culture.

On the artistic edge of society White Australians have acknowledged and responded to the

presence of Aboriginal culture. The Aborigines have been a cultural foil in the positive sense

that Whites rejecting their own culture or searching for a richer culture have sought out

Aboriginality. I think that this is more important than the possibility that Aborigines became

stereotyped representatives of the opposite of European civilization, of what was to be feared

in Whites' own natures, as in the American Indian case. Anthropology was involved in the

beginning as a stimulus to music and literature. Now that the creative arts have responded,

anthropology can contribute to an understanding of the meaning of this social activity. It is

justified in seeing the recent increase of interest in Aboriginal culture as related to the

Bicentennial. I see it as part of the build up to the commemoration, part of a cultural concern

with identity. Ronald McKie's book We Have No Dreaming (1988) is a reflection of our

emptiness and loneliness "because we have never come to terms with our transplanted rejection at the bottom of the earth". After 200 years in Australia "white Australians still have no inherent

attachment to the land like the Aborigines" (Stevens, 1988).

The Bicentennial can be treated as a festival or celebration in Turner's terms (1982 a & b). It

is a cultural shared event with opportunities for personal inventiveness "through a heightened state conducive to public creativity" (1982 a:12,20). Turner says that "in celebration,... much

of what has been bound by social structure is liberated, notably in the sense of comradeship and communion, in brief of communitas" (1982 a:29). It is doubtful whether Australia's

Bicentennial has produced this shared emotional state, this non- rational equalitarian bond. The

politicians and media may have attempted to produce an ideological communitas by structured

use of models and symbols from the past (1982 b) but, in spite of the enthusiasm for the Tall

100



Ships and the nation-wide beacons, it is doubtful that Australians have experienced wide-scale

communitas. The notion of liminal and liminoid can, however, enhance our understanding of

the cultural response to Aboriginality which I have been describing.

Drawing on Van Gennep s Rites of Passage Turner has elaborated a concept of liminality, the

state of being in between; a marginal domain charged with power and creativity that in tribal

societies takes place in many rituals. In modern society, Turner says, liminoid, like liminal, is

a more accurate phrase to use as there is more scope for choice, for creative play, and leisure.

All rituals can be seen as a passage, an anti-structural or proto-structural situation which

contains the seeds for structural change. Liminoid situations are the settings in which new

models and paradigms arise (Turner 1982 b:28,31 -3). Liminality occurs in transitional periods of history. It includes a self-reflective, self-conscious attitude of mind which, by being slightly removed from the structure and processes of society, can develop a freer understanding of it.

The moral order can be seen from a different perspective (Myerhoff 1982:117). As in a tribal

ritual marking a life crisis, the Bicentennial allows us to hover in a transitional, liminal state.

All of us may be in a position towards the edge of our social structure, "towards the borders of

the uncharted and unpredicted" (Myerhoff 1982:117) but I suggest that some writers, musicians

and artists, in a sense always in an outside-structure. liminoid state, have responded more to

the liminoid potential of the Bicentennial. In the recent years building up to the commemoration,

on the fringes of the cultural world Aboriginal culture has been drawn upon, not as a threat to

order, but as "a liminoid source of renewal and creativity". The liminoid edges are "charged with power and mystery" (Myerhoff 1982:117) and may lead to yet another chapter in White

Australians' quest for identity with the land.

Notes

would like to thank the following people for discussions and advice: Brenton

Broadstock, Peter Kirkpatrick, Julie Marcus, Peter Newman, Marj Sargent, Jo Vlcek

and Peter Williams.

A Big Country, Countrywide and Short station identification brackets.

3. 3 CR, National FM, 3 BBB (Ballarat)

4. Dick Smith, "Australian Geographic Society News" Australian Geographic July/Sept. 1988 p. 14; The Age Extra 25/6/88 p.4; The Age Extra 2/8/86 p.5,6; The Age Extra

25/6/88 p. 14; The Australian 14/12 p.7; Max Harris "Let's Celebrate a Brotherhood"

The Australian magazine 12-13/9/87 p.2.

5. See C. Anderson 'Aborigines, Ecology and Conservation; the case of the Daintree

Bloomfield road' 1987.

6. Particularly the works of Margaret Preston. H. McQueen The Black Swan of Trespass, Alternative Publishing Co-op Ltd. Sydney, 1979.

7. Murdoch herself is somewhat naive in her suggestion that the rubbish, broken cars, the

"rusting, rotting things of the White Australian culture", the "debris of the Western

world" is all that seems to be present of the culture the Aborigines want to preserve

(1987:3). She underestimates the ability of language, religious and kinship beliefs and

practices to flourish in a variety of material contexts.

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