Suchergebnisse

This thesis historicises the deployment of "traditional culture" in public discourse around Indigenous affairs from 1963-2007. It examines the various ways that the concept of traditional culture was publicly imagined and mobilised by both the settler-colonial nation and Indigenous peoples across issues relating to land, law and place. From the early 1960s, Indigenous campaigners situated traditional culture within land rights discourses, conceptualising it primarily as the ongoing practices of remote peoples in the Northern Territory. In the 1980s, the emphasis of discourse shifted, and traditional culture was chiefly understood as existing in physical sites of antiquity. Many white Australian nationalists assumed that these sites of culture were the possession of the Australian nation. Following Mabo and native title legislation, traditional culture was again conceptualised as the ongoing practices of remote peoples. However, by the late 1990s these practices were represented by many conservative commentators and politicians as the cause of dysfunction in Indigenous communities. The eventual result of this last shift in emphasis was the introduction of the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act (The Intervention), which situated state intervention into culture as necessary and benevolent. This thesis establishes that from the 1963 Bark Petition to the 2007 Intervention, traditional culture shaped key moments in Indigenous Affairs. It was employed as a vehicle to make arguments about national identity, or the granting or denial of land rights and self-determination; and was iteratively articulated and changed by these discussions. Between 1963 and 2007, Indigenous people continuously mobilised traditional culture to make claims on the settler state, largely involving rights to land. In response, the state continuously attempted to confine the concept's ideological implications on settler sovereignty and national identity, primarily through appropriating or reacting to tradition. Traditional culture thus emerged as a key way that the state and Indigenous peoples engaged with each other; central to the granting or retracting of rights. Understanding this shifting dialogue on traditional culture reveals the fickle and somewhat ambivalent relationship between Indigenous peoples and the nation in this period, and the ultimately unstable nature of Australian settler-colonialism.