ABSTRACT
Historical frame (the legacy of Australian colonialism and identity politics) The characteristics of colonialism in Australia and the understandings of national identity that became dominant within its framework functioned to create a binary division, both real and imagined, between the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the British settlers who sought to displace them as the rightful and ‘native’ possessors of the continent. The history of British colonization in Australia is fundamentally characterized by its overwhelming drive and desire to systematically eliminate the natives. Explaining the underpinnings of the logic of elimination in terms of its economic basis, Wolfe argues that:
Australia is not confined to the past killing fields of the colonial frontier where guns, poison and disease functioned to achieve this desired outcome (Reynolds 1981, 1987). More widespread, less obvious and in many respects more insidious, the logic of Australian colonialism has also operated in the discursive constructions developed and
Australia
applied by settler society to ‘define’ and ‘know’ the native in Australia in order to direct settler power, authority and control to facilitate their elimination (Chesterman and Galligan 1997; Davidson 1997). The discursive construct of the identity category ‘the Aborigine’ mirrors the economic impacts of colonialism in language and text. The creation of ‘the Aborigine’ as the identity category to locate the native peoples of Australia functioned to dehumanize, displace and deliberately disremember the 270 distinctive Indigenous groups who in 1788 occupied the Australian landmass in its entirety. The imposition of this homogenizing identity construct rendered the violent elimination of specific Indigenous peoples by British colonialism almost invisible. Consistent with the economic aims of the settlers, this strategy of discursive homogenization functioned to eliminate immediate and specific connections to country as authentic identities were suppressed and replaced by the artificial construct of ‘the Aborigine’. Importantly, discursive strategies to eliminate pre-existing Indigenous identities and replace the rich and complex diversity of unique peoples with the simple uniformity of a homogenous identity category enabled Indigenous peoples to be thought of, and imagined to be, a singular ‘Other’ in the discursive understandings of the settler society. ‘The Aborigine’ existed apart from settler society on the other side of the colonial frontier and was anomalous to the ‘modern’ Australia, based on their own civilization, that the British intended to build. Such thinking created a psychological state in which memories of the original inhabitants came to be suppressed on a national scale. This was especially true in the twentieth century. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner (1969) famously referred to this phenomena as ‘the great Australian silence’.
