ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, and with increasing frequency, domestic white Australian travel narratives have mobilised encounters with Aboriginality as contexts for political and ethical critiques of white Australian hegemony that in turn reflect manifestations of sympathetic white liberal discourses of reconciliation. Texts such as Reading the Country by Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe (1984/1996), Barry Hill’s The Rock (1994), Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake (2000), and Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep (2002) produce rhetorical performances of reconciliation by appearing to represent the possibilities of white travellers engaging peacefully and respectfully with Aboriginal guides and hosts. This chapter focuses on how these narratives enact performances of a white Australian postcolonial sensibility towards Aboriginality that defines and expresses itself through a semiotics of empathy. It also investigates how the co-ordinates of this semiotics shifted in the 1990s in response to movements in the Australian public sphere vis-à-vis the politics and ethics of reconciliation, most prominently represented by the cultural impact of the publication of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1997). “Reconciliation” is used here to include the field of discourses that structure public debate about the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians during the last twenty or so years. Gillian Whitlock notes that “[d]iscourses of reconciliation have emerged in the past decade as one of the most powerful scripts for interracial negotiation in states which struggle with the legacies of Eurocolonialism”.2 In Australia, reconciliation between Aboriginal and European Australians has become a field of dominant utopian discourses in the public sphere. Not unexpectedly, reconciliation has become a significant theme for contemporary white Australian travel writers. But the meaning of reconciliation is not uniform or uncontested, and discourses of reconciliation have evolved in response to significant political events. This chapter examines how the discourse of reconciliation becomes manifest in recent travel narratives, and how the “script” of the performance of reconciliation has changed subtly over time.
