archive : s0metim3s

See the most recent post for more cogent remarks.

Commenting on the recent report (here as a 6.4MB pdf) from the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse - which, perhaps not surprisingly, goes by the theologico-political title of Little Children Are Sacred - Guy Rundle wrote:

You don’t have to go far into Little Children Are Sacred, the report on child abuse in Aboriginal communities, to be shocked and appalled:

In [settlement name] I saw nothing but what was bad … I used to see boys and girls from ten and twelve years old sleeping together, but didn’t know nothing was wrong … . I saw things between almost children that I can’t describe to you. At the month’s end, when I was beat out, I met with a bloke of fifteen — I was going on twelve — and he persuaded me to take up with him…. I broke some windows to get into prison to get cured … If the girl can’t get money she must steal something, or will be beaten by her bloke when she comes home. I have seen them beaten, often kicked and beaten until they were blind from bloodshot, and their teeth knocked out.

Who can doubt that Aboriginal society is on the brink of collapse after such testimony?

Erm yes. Except the extract above isn’t from Little Children Are Sacred – it’s from (with a few archaisms removed) Henry Mayhew’s London Labour And The London Poor, his 1851 three-volume report on working-class conditions in the capital of the 19th century.

The rest of Rundle’s article is here.

Volume One of Mayhew’s report is here, and it’s worth perusing, if only to recall the sense in which and how racialisation happens - that it is not always fixed upon the same groups of people, but nevertheless groups in similar ways: as a relation to landed property, ownership, self-possession, indeed property. Note, for instance, Mayhew’s phrase “wandering tribes”:

Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, there are — socially, morally, and perhaps even physically considered — but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers — the vagabond and the citizen — the nomadic and the civilized tribes.

And it was astute of Rundle to draw the comparison. The enclosures - and the dislocations that accompanied them - produced London’s poor, and some of those ended up deported to what would, some time later, become Australia. And, later still, some of those who had been so racialised would become in turn the footsoldiers of colonisation, pogroms, the emblematic Irish cop in AU or the US, or the foundation of oftentimes deeply xenophobic Labor parties and unions.

But I digress, though not entirely, since what’s at issue here is protectionism, both in its social (or national) democratic variants and its theologico-political dimensions - from anti-trafficking campaigners to the return of the ‘Aboriginal Protection Agency’.

Because the thematics of “caught between two cultures” risks veering the discussion away from impoverishment, colonisation and landed property, the creation of superfluous populations (or those deemed superfluous to production), in/tolerance (among other things) into talk of ’social cohesion’ (with attendant and apparently self-evidently good notions of integration, assimilation, and so on). There is no “Aboriginal society” on the brink of doing anything - there was no unitary “Aboriginal society” before colonisation, not one after, not one today. Just as there is not one “Australian society”, no matter how much sovereigntists declare it is so.

And it’s this attribution of unity - of essences - that does the work here. That is: no one has suggested, on the basis of figures and reports on child abuse Australia-wide, that “Australian society” is about to collapse or, for that matter, intimated that there is something inherent to “Australian society” - or, heaven forbid, to Australians! - that results in such horrors. The ascription of homogeneity amounts, in the way this Protection Agency report has circulated, to wholesale vilification.

Racialisation, in other words, relegates the conditions of the lives of groups of people to the outside, as something foreign, anomalous. Not to do with ‘us’. Here, protectionism steps in to both assure ‘us’ that ‘we’ are better, but also sovereign - which is almost the same thing.

One could rewrite Howard’s infamous statement of “We will decide who comes here and the conditions under which they come” to read: We will decide who/what to tolerate and who/what to be repelled by, and we decide to repel that which is not (like or of) us. Child abusers? Not us. ‘We’, of course, identify with the state - which, apparently, neither exploits nor abuses (those other people’s) children, but protects them. I mean, really.