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Session U6.1: Governance, policy and identity in an urban environment

1. Gabrielle Fletcher: Being up when you are down: reading Indigenous urban space with a Twin Tower Twist

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Abstract

In 1984, Michel De Certeau described a ‘below’ world from the privileged gaze of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. For Certeau, this below is the space of lived experience that defies the ‘up’; the ‘god-like’ master- vision of the city’s grasp, by tactical re-authoring boundaries. By cutting and transgressing across a centred plan that is the elevated view that can only imagine ‘being down’, the ‘walkers’ of the city find subjectivity and agency in and of forms of spatial practice and ‘personal’ production. Thus taking the ‘text’ of the city and perpetually re-writing it. A shortcut through the park may represent the tactical resistive to the strategically intended of Park Street as a small totalised system. Just an example. A year earlier, the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Rights Act became the broad symbolic gesture to restore the ‘below’ world of Indigenous historic experience in very specific textual and spatial terms. As a plan from the (on high master-vision) centre, the legislation seemed to provide the administrative model for Indigenous reclamation of representational originary space as a compensation for cultural decimation with post-colonial relief. The Land Rights Act produces its own space, Local Aboriginal Land Councils, and thus becomes the very specific set of conditions in which LALCs can be practiced as spaces. The Land Rights Act can be enacted only in the space it authors. Outside of this space it is invalid and significantly cannot be read, and thereby practiced. At this point, the Certeauian begins to resonate, because within the lived space, the Land Rights Act is the ever vigilant master-vision, watching ‘the walkers’ with no relief from producing the practice, or practicing the production. There is no ‘down-below’ in this heterotopia: rather the totalised construction of subjectivity, delimiting the agency of its inhabitants by the very relationship to itself, and the certitude of these peculiar boundaries. This paper seeks to critique LALCs as duplicitous writer/ written spaces, through panoptic discourse and Certauian spatial theory. The Indigenous urban/regional boundaries will be explored, with particular emphasis on LALCs as spaces of urban centrality to render logic the heterogeneity of the metropolis. Issues of urban ‘authentication’ as a particular problematic within city LALCs will also be considered. Ultimately what seems useful in the interrogation of the relatively ‘new’ experience of Indigenous urban space is firstly to understand the map of its possibility, the prospect that Indigenous people might be up when they are down and what shapes are made.

Author bio

Gabrielle Fletcher is a Gundunngurra woman from the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. She is an Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University currently completing her thesis on Indigenous spatial narrative.

2. Jack Gibson: The (In)tolerance of ‘cultural appropriateness’

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Abstract

My paper is concerned with Aboriginal nonprofit, human service organisations. Specifically it focuses on the term ‘culturally appropriate’ and its use in such organisations.

Simplistically, phenomena described as ‘culturally appropriate’ are presumed to be ‘right and fitting’ for Aboriginal people, thus meeting presumed ‘Aboriginal’ standards and thereby implying a distinctiveness or uniqueness that is owned, controlled and managed by Aboriginal people. It is, in essence, autochthonous. Furthermore, cultural appropriateness is the basis by which Aboriginal people are employed; specialised programs are developed and implemented, specialist units established and assumptions about Aboriginal people made. It is characteristic of the perceived distinction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Ultimately, it legitimates Aboriginal uniqueness. Legislation, policy and commensurate structures and procedures provide ‘culturally appropriate’ phenomena with boundaries. Like that of knowledge from a positivist position it is represented as being hard, real and capable of being transmitted in tangible form.

My paper, however, challenges prevailing essentialist explanations of ‘culturally appropriate’ phenomena and adopts a critical view, thus challenging the authenticity of the term. I argue that the term is located in a political context and is thus constructed to meet certain political ends. Rather than define distinctiveness culturally appropriate legitimates particular notions of culture, thus perpetuating dominant political rhetoric, power bases and power relations.

Author bio

I am a Masters (Hons) student at UWS- College of the Arts – Centre for Cultural Research. I also work for an Aboriginal nonprofit organisation in Mt Druitt, Western Sydney

3. Phillip Batty: A record of confusion, failures ... and new beginnings: (de)constructing the aboriginal community controlled organization

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Abstract

Recent policy changes in Aboriginal affairs have led some commentators to argue that the era of 'Aboriginal self-determination' has come to an end. Nonetheless, one of the primary components of this apparently extinct era remains very much intact; the 'Aboriginal community controlled organization'. Over three thousand incorporated Aboriginal bodies are currently registered in urban and regional centers throughout Australia. A large proportion of them not only received government support, but continue to play a significant role in Aboriginal urban life. In this paper, I examine the origins and subsequent development of the 'Aboriginal community controlled organization', with a particular focus on Alice Springs. As I hope to show, these bodies were essentially created by government during the early 1970s in an attempt to accommodate - however imperfectly - the contradictory and indeterminate policies of Aboriginal self-determination. As a result, Aboriginal organizations remain ambiguous entities, neither 'controlled' by the Aboriginal 'community' nor by government. Rather, they exist in an ill-defined space, at the cross-roads of both. While this can produce chronic instabilities, both inside and outside such bodies, I will argue that their ill-defined status is not only a necessary feature of their operations, but the key to their continued survival.

Author bio:

From 1977 to 1980, Dr Philip Batty worked as teacher at the Aboriginal community of Papunya. In 1980 he co-founded the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). From 1991 he was the Director of the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Tandanya). He has produced several television documentaries and published widely. His awards include a Churchill Fellowship (1984), Northern Territory History Award (1991), UNESCO Media Award (1992), ASDA Cecil Homes Award (1997). BAA Michael Law Award (2000), PhD (2003), Australian Research Council Grant (2008). He is currently a senior curator at Melbourne Museum.