ABSTRACT

The European sailors and settlers who landed on the shores of Australia during the 17th through the 19th centuries brought with them interactional customs which were very different from those we have just examined. They also brought with them the guns and assertiveness to impose their vision of human reality upon the Aboriginal people, in the name of the fruits of British civilization. One of the diarists of the first English settlement in Australia wrote of the initial approach, in 1788, of the ship bearing the first settlers as it entered Botany Bay and prepared to make its landing:

For on the Supply’s arrival in the Bay on the 18th of the month, they were assembled on the south shore, to the number of not less than forty persons, shouting and making many uncouth signs and gestures. This appearance whetted curiosity to its utmost, but as providence forbade a few people to venture wantonly among so great a number, and a party of only six men was observed on the north shore, the Governor immedi­ ately proceeded to land on this side, in order to take possession of his new territory, and bring about an intercourse between its old and new masters. (Tench 1789: 53) All intercourse with others initiates a necessary and funda­

mental change in oneself. A person comes to understand himself through recognizing what he has come to be for an other and through incorporating this reflection of himself into his own selfimage. It is not necessary that one accept the other’s impression of oneself as one’s identity; but it is necessary that one cope with the other’s impression, if only negatively. Hegel (1977: 111) has

written; ‘Self-consciousness exists only as being acknowledged.’ We are somehow dependent upon others for our own selfawareness. Our consciousness depends upon the consciousness for us of an other who is dependent in return upon our consciousness for him:

Self-consciousness is aware that it at once is and is not another consciousness, and equally that this other is for /tee//only when it supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the being-for-self of the other. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself. {Ibid.: 112) Sartre describes similarly the ‘look’ of an other by which one is

transformed - the look is the intermediary which refers me to myself. In the shock which seizes a person when he apprehends the other’s look, he experiences a subtle alienation of his world and all his possibilities (Sartre 1956: 265). The other’s look initiates a limitation upon one’s world which is ultimately a limitation of one’s freedom.