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Session U1.3 Indigenous Identity in the Urban Space

1.Yuriko Yamanouchi: ‘To be Aboriginal’ in south western Sydney: Urban Dynamics of Aboriginal identity negotiation

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Abstract

This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal social identity in south western Sydney. For most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin. However in urban areas such as south western Sydney, Aboriginal social relations are not always exclusively based on kinship ties. In this area, organisations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting non-related Aboriginal people, in line with a notion of pan-Aboriginality. In this way, Aboriginal people encounter the people who cannot be identified through kinship ties. Aboriginal people can usually recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. But in fact there are some who, for various reasons, although claiming to be Aboriginal, do not share these cultural mores and traits. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement, to a certain extent provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the aforesaid organisations’ activities, Aboriginal people in south western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which includes those who cannot claim kinship ties.

Author bio:

Yuriko is originally from Japan. From the year 2002, she conducted PhD research on Aboriginal people living in south western Sydney (Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney). The topic of her thesis is Aboriginal people’s sense of community and identity in south western Sydney. She is currently teaching as a lecturer in Tama University in Japan. Her interests now are on Japanese-Aboriginal relationship in northern Australia as well as Aboriginal identity and sense of community in urban suburbs.

2. Robbie Peters: Big Al speaks: “Damage” and the anthropology of indifference

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Abstract

On NAIDOK day 2008 an Aboriginal man was interviewed from prison by 3KND. He sung a rap song written over the many years he spent in prison and inspired by the deaths in custody, incarceration and displacement he experienced throughout his life. After singing the song, he continued to hold stage with stories of what he called a life ‘from the gutter’ and the dark cloud of diabetes and heart disease that was killing his people at an ‘alarming rate’. Speaking of the death surrounding him, he claimed angrily: ‘they’re finally getting us, they’ve finally got us’. Urging the society out there not to take him the wrong way, he concluded: ‘nothing has society contributed to me, nothing but hate, rage and anger – the tri-fecta’. A week later he had found the temporary accommodation required to satisfy his release. Within a fortnight of his release he was dead. He died of a heart attack while in temporary accommodation in an outer suburb of Melbourne – the same suburb he found himself as a young boy when his adopted mother relinquished him to the care of an Aboriginal hostel and, potentially, the care of the biological mother who had given him up as a baby to her friend. Then only 12 years old, he tried in vain to reconnect with both these women. Unwanted, he roamed until police found him sleeping in a car, fingerprinted him, charged him and set in train what was to become a lifetime of itinerance and infringement. It was a life of rage and longing, but also, as he stated, a life captured in the term “relinquish responsibility”. This was the title of a form he had to sign in prison after refusing to submit to surgery while shackled to a hospital bed overseen by a prison guard and in the absence of his closest friend.

This presentation is by that closest friend. It will detail his life using personal accounts and the voluminous records of the state formed in the mismanagement of this one Aboriginal man.

Author bio:

Dr Robbie Peters lectures in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia (Robbie.Peters@scmp.mq.edu.au). He is the author of the forthcoming book City of Shadows: Kampung and State in Surabaya, 1945–2010 and articles on urban renewal and violence in urban Indonesia. He is currently researching the uses of anti-terror campaigns as a means of urban management in the Indonesian city of Surabaya and the counter-mapping strategies of low-income urban communities in that city. In addition, he is writing a biography of marginalization that follows the life of his late and closest friend, a heavily institutionalized Australian Aboriginal man.

3. Patrick Sullivan: Who are you calling half-caste? Aspects of classification, performance and identity in northern towns

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Abstract

In the mid-1980s I attempted to describe the culture of people who called themselves ‘half-caste’ in towns in the Kimberley. As this paper will outline, the first problem encountered was in terminology. Although many of the people I worked among were comfortable with this term, many others are not. This paper will begin with contestations around terminology, and then describe some of the aspects of Aboriginal town culture. In the course of the ethnography two other problems emerged. The first concerned boundaries. Aboriginal people in northern towns intersect with Aboriginal people in bush settlements as well as Aboriginal people from elsewhere in Australia, and with white people. Racially-derived terminologies do not accurately reflect cultural barriers or affiliations, nor do they describe universal characteristics. While still attempting to describe aspects of town culture, the problem of classification of the people who generate this culture receives more focus in this paper. It suggests there are two ‘axes’ of identity: classification and performance. Both of these have questionable antecedents and can act to disadvantage Aboriginal people and reinforce prejudice. The primary basis of the classificatory approach – descent – is racial and raises more questions than it answers. On the other hand, performance factors, ‘talking the talk and walking the walk’, can also be invidious. How is performance to be measured, in what contexts, by whom, and for what purposes ? In practice both ‘tick the box’ classifications and ‘walk the walk’ performance interact with each other in how Aboriginal people assess their relations with each other, and in how non-Aboriginal people, often covertly, assess Aboriginality. The conclusion for this paper, is that Aboriginal culture and identity in urban settings is not usefully ranked against benchmarks, but inevitably involves an interplay of these two factors that varies according to context. One consequence of this view is that there may be contexts in which neither are relevant at all.

Author bio:

Patrick Sullivan is a political anthropologist who has studied the engagement of Aboriginal people with the Australian Public Sector since his introduction to the Kimberley region, West Australia, in 1983.  He is a Research Fellow at AIATSIS and an Adjunct Associate Professor of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies (ANU). Much of his professional life has been spent working with independent Aboriginal organisations.  He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, as well as practical reports, and the book All Free Man Now: Culture, Community and Politics in NW Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra 1996).