Papers by Richard J Martin
Social Identities, 2014
The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book hav... more The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright's work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.
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This paper explores the meaning of indigeneity in the southern Gulf country by focusing upon a gr... more This paper explores the meaning of indigeneity in the southern Gulf country by focusing upon a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who claim as a common ancestor a pioneering non-Aboriginal pastoralist. This early settler established a large cattle property on the Northern Territory/Queensland border at the end of the nineteenth century, where he participating in frontier violence as well as attempts to resolve such violence and promote more peaceable relations through various kinds of exchange, including the common-law marriage of his part-Aboriginal son to the daughter of a local Aboriginal leader. Drawing on Taussig's reflections on the economy of mimesis and alterity in colonial exchange, I analyse the ways in which different kinds of connections to the property in question have been phrased by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descendants of this man, as well as other local people, from first settlement in the 1860s through to the contemporary moment, when multiple and overlapping assertions of indigenous belonging by Aboriginal people intersect with articulations of an emergent autochthony amongst non-Aboriginal Australians with long histories of residence in the area.
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Gulf Country Aboriginal people perceive water as an integral part of the broader cultural landsca... more Gulf Country Aboriginal people perceive water as an integral part of the broader cultural landscape rather than a conceptually distinct element. Customary connection to and ownership of water therefore intersects with links to contiguous areas known in the anthropological literature as ‘estates’ and in local parlance as ‘countries’. For many Aboriginal people into the present, the ‘law’ which underlies this system of ‘countries’ was laid down in the Dreaming and does not change. ‘Nothing never change’ is the local form articulating this conviction. While a powerful expression of traditionalism, the commitment to leaving everything ‘like it is now’, in our findings, in fact involves an acknowledgement of environmental changes resulting from introduced plants and animals along with Euro-Australian settlement. Notwithstanding determined traditionalism, Aboriginal law, like settler law, changes constantly, responding to new challenges by transforming continuing traditions and incorporating influences from the broader society which are genuinely new and different. Drawing on the results of ethnographic research during cultural mapping work in the Gulf, we address this theme particularly in the context of land rights and native title processes over recent decades.
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This article focuses on human-plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Aus... more This article focuses on human-plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human-plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other-than-human relations in a more-than-human world.
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The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book hav... more The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright's work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.
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The politics of representing Aboriginality often focuses on questions of authorship and appropria... more The politics of representing Aboriginality often focuses on questions of authorship and appropriation. Much of this criticism rests on the simplistic assumption that texts created by collaboration and even uneven collaboration are not in some respects voiced by their subject or subjects. This paper discusses two popular texts about Aboriginal ceremonial songs or ‘songlines’ in order to challenge this assumption, reading Bill Harney with A. P. Elkin’s Songs of the Songmen: Aboriginal Myths Retold (1949), and John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families’ Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (2010) as Aboriginal texts. These texts are particularly interesting insofar as they focus attention on the relationship between voice and text, as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, being the products of collaboration by the anthropologists Elkin and Bradley with, on the one hand, a non-Aboriginal ‘Protector’ and popular writer (Harney), and, on the other, the subjects of the ethnography themselves (that is Yanyuwa Families). As I argue, the shifting ways in which the songlines of northern Australia are voiced in Songs of the Songmen and Singing Saltwater Country provides insights into the politics of representing Aboriginality in Australia, and the forces that have historically affected it. The close analysis of these texts focuses attention on the role of ethnographic fetishism for the exotic and authentic within the changing context of cultural production in Australia.
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Articles and Book Chapters by Richard J Martin
Indigenous people around Australia strongly assert the significance of their traditions within th... more Indigenous people around Australia strongly assert the significance of their traditions within the contemporary world. Queensland's Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 is typical of Australian legislation seeking the manage the tangible and intangible heritage of such traditions: its purpose, clearly stated in s.4, is 'to provide effective recognition, protection and conservation of Aboriginal cultural heritage'. Missing from the Act is any focus on economic empowerment for Aboriginal people, yet in many parts of Queensland today Indigenous heritage is viewed at least in part as an 'industry' offering a 'way out' of poverty for Aboriginal people through agreement-making relating to development. For the many Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous people employed in managing Indigenous heritage in Queensland, the financial stakes are certainly high in terms of both the fees that people charge to participate in cultural heritage surveys and the potentially much more lucrative forms of remuneration associated with successful developments, which may include sizeable compensation payments for the destruction of significant sites. This chapter examines the disputed intersection between law, cultural politics and economic development aspirations affecting Indigenous heritage management in this context, focusing on tensions and conflict between conservation and commodification.
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This book chapter discusses relations between Aboriginal people and environmentalists in the remo... more This book chapter discusses relations between Aboriginal people and environmentalists in the remote Gulf Country of Northern Australia, focusing on conflict as well as developing forms of cooperation between these groups.
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Land and location are central to the identities of those known colloquially as Blackfellas and Wh... more Land and location are central to the identities of those known colloquially as Blackfellas and Whitefellas in the Gulf region of northern Australia. Entwined spiritual and material features of “country” are significant in the ways indigenous people experience locations, encompassing intimate connections of persons in place for those with the greatest knowledge of classical cultural traditions. In contrast, for long-term residents descended from settlers, senses of emplaced identity derive from work experiences, confidence in the economic productivity of the land, and an appreciation of its “natural” and aesthetic qualities. However, these distinct relationships with place partially overlap through a shared history of working in the cattle industry. Our analysis of this complex social field addresses the
intercultural relations that inform assumptions about belonging and identity following British colonization some 150 years ago. The challenge is to apprehend parallel yet highly differentiated understandings of the same landscape amidst contestation over inherited indigenous connections with the land and the counterpoint of Whitefellas’ established residence over multiple generations and attachment to property. Here we argue for the study of identity and place connections in postsettler societies to eschew any exclusive focus on either indigenous or settler histories and ontologies.
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Papers by Richard J Martin
Articles and Book Chapters by Richard J Martin
intercultural relations that inform assumptions about belonging and identity following British colonization some 150 years ago. The challenge is to apprehend parallel yet highly differentiated understandings of the same landscape amidst contestation over inherited indigenous connections with the land and the counterpoint of Whitefellas’ established residence over multiple generations and attachment to property. Here we argue for the study of identity and place connections in postsettler societies to eschew any exclusive focus on either indigenous or settler histories and ontologies.
intercultural relations that inform assumptions about belonging and identity following British colonization some 150 years ago. The challenge is to apprehend parallel yet highly differentiated understandings of the same landscape amidst contestation over inherited indigenous connections with the land and the counterpoint of Whitefellas’ established residence over multiple generations and attachment to property. Here we argue for the study of identity and place connections in postsettler societies to eschew any exclusive focus on either indigenous or settler histories and ontologies.