Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 99 In einem kurzen Fazit führt Hillenbach ihre Analysen, die bis dahin immer ein wenig für sich standen, zusammen und gibt einen Ausblick auf die Zukunft der Text-Bild-Forschung. Mit ihrer Arbeit hat die Autorin sicherlich wichtige Impulse zu einer Ausweitung des Forschungsgebiets von Literatur und Fotografie geliefert und kann doch auf Grund einiger Ungereimtheiten und Schwächen nicht immer vollständig überzeugen. Jeff Thoss Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin Russell West-Pavlov, Jennifer Wawrzinek (eds), Frontier Skirmishes. Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992. (Anglistische Forschungen 409). Heidelberg: Winter 2010. Adi Wimmer This volume starts from the premise that frontier research in Australia reached a dead end in the early 1990s. The project is ambitious: in the introduction the editors list a whole range of discursive areas and aims. What it boils down to is this: “to examine these areas as multiple facets of a single broader issue: white Australia’s multi-pronged campaigns to control, on the cultural plain, the frontiers of a continent fully conquered in the 19 th Century but still felt to be insecure in less tangible ways.” (I daresay that not all contributors to this volume would underwrite the editors’ “state control” motive.) In 1993 Australia’s most prominent historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the term “black armband view of history,” arguing that most young historians had a biased view towards Australia’s colonial past, representing it primarily in terms of dispossession, violence and genocide. This was the opening salvo in what later became known as the “history wars” and this volume is clearly part of the anti-Blainey, left-wing campaign. Research on the “frontier aspect” of Australia’s 19 th century history was largely absent, as the opening chapter convincingly demonstrates. In 1999, Rod Moran published Massacre Myth, in which he examined the 1926 Forest River massacre in Western Australia. The result of his research was that it never happened, that it was in fact invented by a well-meaning missionary. His research represents a ‘skirmish’ towards the real ‘history war’, in which a polemical study by historian Keith Windschuttle (2002, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1: Van Diemen Land, 1803-1847) plays a key role. Windschuttle hangs like a ghost over this volume. Curious that almost all contributors mention - and revile - him, but none engages with his theses. Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 100 (Only four out of nineteen contributions list him in their Works Cited section.) To do so seems to have become the standard academic discourse in Australia: anyone suggesting that his argument may have at least some merit will be ostracized. You don’t argue with Windschuttle, you dismiss him out of hand. There is no consensus amongst the contributors on what impact Windschuttle has had on Australia’s discourse of Aboriginality: most contributors indicate that Windschuttle has re-ignited racist sentiment and has hardened the public’s stance towards a collective acceptance of guilt. James Boyce, however, whose impassioned, well-written essay “The Legacy of the Australian History Wars in Tasmania” is one of the best of this volume, also thinks that the history wars “have had little impact in Tasmania.” The reason, so his underdeveloped argument, is the Tasmanian “love of the land.” Boyce draws an interesting and - to us in Germany (and Austria) - flattering national comparison: “Why […] could Germans openly talk about the horrific crimes committed by their own parents’ generation, while so many Tasmanians were as yet too sensitive to talk about frontier crimes committed over 150 years ago? ” (55). In his introduction Russell West presents a view opposed to Boyce’s: even after Prime Minister Rudd’s apology to all Australian Aborigines, there is “unresolved unease” about black-white relations, fuelled by the “afterlife” of earlier armed conflicts. West opposes Rudd, who in 2009 publicly said it was time to leave behind us the polarisation that began to infect our every discussion of our nation’s past. To go beyond the so-called white blindfold view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish. But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers, and of our entrepreneurs. Russell West views white control as an invariable; then, the power came from the barrels of guns, now we have various mechanisms that maintain a cultural hegemony over the past and over the issues of white guilt. Citing Clausewitz, West posits that “in the contemporary Australian context, cultural politics is the continuation of frontier warfare by other means” (12). Strong stuff, that, establishing his stance as a radical proponent of “blackarmbandism.” “Genocide” as a core charge is given much space in this volume, without detailing how the term is to be understood. Oliver Haag has recently done an excellent job in problematizing and historicizing the concept and its history; but his article (July 2012) appeared too late for this volume (Haag 2012). What Russell West’s introduction fails to see is that Aboriginal lives ought not to be frozen in victimhood. This position was first presented in the late 1990s by Noel Pearson, for many the major sane voice in Aboriginal politics. 1 1 When John Howard, with Labor’s support, decreed the “intervention” into Aboriginal communities because most, if not all of them had developed an insidious culture of systemic sexual abuse of girls and boys as well as sexual violence in general, Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton were the major Aboriginal voices who Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 101 Pearson is approvingly quoted by Kim Scott (“an Aboriginal public intellectual I greatly admire”, 60) in his highly personal essay “Apologies, Agency and Resilience”: victimhood, the discursive paradigm clearly favored by West and the majority of this volume’s contributors, ought to be replaced by a “psychology […] of defiance, survival and agency.” But that rarely happens in this volume. Guilt and shame are forever present in all discourses. Sarah Pinto for example emphasizes the “guilt work” (124) that her discussed film The Tracker performs, citing Marc Golub’s term “redemption histories” for the Aboriginal film genre. After the Bringing Them Home Report, the hugely impressive march across Sydney Harbor bridge in May 2000 and the subsequent creation of ‘Sorry Day’, many political commentators noted a new sympathy in mainstream Australia for Aboriginal issues and were hopeful that the old discourses of guilt could be overcome. Pinto denies this with the argument that behind such voices was a wish to “repudiate white guilt.” Really? The Tracker, so Pinto concludes, insists that “guilt, blame and responsibility are not only possible, but also imperative to contemporary understandings and negotiations of this past.” A contrasting voice was that of Sir Ronald Wilson, President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and, together with Mick Dodson, President of the Royal Commission to investigate the ‘Stolen Generation’ issue. Chief Justice Wilson repeatedly stated that the Commission’s work was “never about guilt” but about an understanding of Aboriginal suffering and black-white reconciliation. The contributions are too numerous to be discussed individually and at length. “Teaching the Frontier” (Alexandra Sauvage) is a mercifully clear survey of how Australian history was taught from Federation onward to the present. Informative. Frances Devlin-Glass offers an interesting analysis of Pat Jacobs’ novel Going Inland (1998), in which the main character Zoe aligns settler violence with the holocaust. Devlin-Glass does not take issue with this hyperbolic claim. Instead, she argues that authors such as Thomas Keneally or Xavier Herbert express a sense of “shared victimhood” when writing of the Irish in Australia and Aboriginal history, a claim which I find not just false but outrageous. Numerous Irish settlers gleefully chased Aborigines from their land. Kate Hall examines “Violence and Accountability” in Sam Watson’s 1991 novel The Kadaitcha Sung and Alexis Wright’s more recent (and more complex) Plains of Promise. Once again we are flung into the Windschuttle/ Henry Reynolds battle, but matters of greater interest do follow. Hall points to the role of these (and other) contemporary writers as “narrative historians.” Since historians (such as Mark McKenna) have similarly transwelcomed it. That systemic sexual violence was rife in self-governed communities surfaced in 2004 and had been rumoured about even earlier. Aboriginal and nonaboriginal academics denied it. Australia’s most prominent historian Henry Reynolds ignored the reasons for the intervention and declared that the real reason was to roll back Mabo. In this he was the leader of the ‘denialist’ camp that brushed aside two important publications that revealed the extent of the abuses: the first by playwright Louis Nowra (2007), Bad Dreaming. Aboriginal Men’s Violence against Women and Children, the second by famous anthropologist Peter Sutton (2009), The Politics of Suffering. Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 102 gressed their professional boundaries in order to write fictional accounts, we learn that both the fiction writers and the historians have moved into each other’s terrain, both in an attempt to fill the gaps between fact and fiction. A hugely satisfying paper is Kelly Jean Butler’s “This is how I’m sorry: Witnessing the Frontier in Contemporary Australian Historical Writing.” Starting with a survey of the heated debate that Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River generated, she posits that Grenville’s structured account is just the tip of an iceberg of “hundreds of thousands” of very personal and, in their nature, unstructured responses to Australia’s colonial past. If James Boyce claims (earlier in the volume) that Mainstream Australia still does not want to address its violent history, Kelly Butler takes the opposite view, seeing a mass trend in Australian society to understand their own country by confronting the history. Citing Grenville, she argues that many “ordinary Australians” are looking for a “pulse of connectedness.” Citing Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, she advises us that The Bringing Them Home Report “seeded thousands of local initiatives toward racial reconciliation and Indigenous autonomy, including dinners and memorials, storytelling workshops and healing houses, educational awareness and stolen wages campaigns, land rights and environmental initiatives” (172). In short, there has been a remarkable shift in public awareness: everyone now wants to respond personally to Australia’s tainted past. They all want to confront the history of dispossession: “Hundreds of thousands were moved to witness to the stories of Indigenous Australians” (172). They did that not just as an expression of personal empathy, but as an act of defiance of the clay-footed Howard government. Such observations flatly contradict Russell West’s position in his opening essay. The volume is closed by an epilogue: “The National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the Frontier of Indigenous Alterity.” The editors did well to give the final say to a prominent public intellectual. Dirk Moses from Melbourne University provides a lucid account of how the various Aboriginal groups and factions responded to PM Kevin Rudd’s long-awaited apology, from the very positive ones at grassroot level (“a day filled with high emotions. We shed tears of sadness and joy, we hugged with happiness and comfort”) to the diehard rejectionists (“The word ‘sorry’ cannot mean anything to me”). One year after the event, Mick Dodson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that “beneficial change” had taken place, that “honest conversations” were now being conducted between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. He also spoke of concrete measures to improve the lives of Aborigines. So where is the “hidden frontier”, a frontier of covert surveillance and control, that Russell West claims still exists? Not to be found in Moses’ account. He does allow that it still exists as a discursive trope, but adds that newer complexities and nuances of Indigenous political thinking will have to be accommodated. I wish to end my discussion with a reference to the admirable Professor Marcia Langton of Melbourne University. Langton does not support the unrealistic (and for Noel Pearson, undesirable) demands from the radical Aboriginal section for billions of dollars of reparation. She demands a change in the Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 103 Australian constitution that specifically recognizes the worth of indigenous culture. By such a constitutional change the ‘frontier’ between Indigenous and white discourses might disappear. Which is clearly not in the interest of an Australian academic establishment focused on what Sid Finkelstein (in a different context) has called the “guilt industry.” References Haag, Oliver (2012). “The History of an Argument: Genocide in Australian History.” Zeitschrift für Australienstudien 26. 24-46. Nowra, Louis (2007). Bad Dreaming. Aboriginal Men’s Violence against Women and Children. Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia. Sutton, Peter (2009). The Politics of Suffering. Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. Windschuttle, Keith (2002). The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1: Van Diemen Land 1803-1847. Paddington: Macleay Press. Adi Wimmer Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Universität Klagenfurt