ABSTRACT
The author considers some of the reading positions that Benang offers and forecloses. By returning to a consideration of the crimes and misadventures of Ern Scat this historian, archivist and sadist, she looks again at questions of historical practice and the colonial archive. The author argues that Benang shows the limits of these by deploying aesthetic forms that fill the scene of reading with profound doubt. Readers cannot maintain a masterful position of knowledge and certainty before this text, however carefully they might trace a course through the facts. The author explores the text's treatment of sadism, and also argues that, again, it is through Benang's aesthetic form that a separation is enacted between a reader's look and the scenes of perversion that it describes. Benang describes very effectively the exchange of looks between Harley and Ern, and shows when perversion is aroused and when it falls.
