Tim Rowse

In the 1880s, these feuding speakers of Ngarinman, Mudbura, Bilinara, Ngaliwurru, Kangpurri, Wardaman, Gurindji, and Malngin found themselves confronted by a scourge of a different kind: Europeans with cattle, some en route from Queensland to the Kimberleys, others taking up ‘pasture’ in the Victoria River region itself.

Individuals have crises; dealing with them sometimes makes a person stronger. Perhaps nation-states are similar: crises make them stronger and better. But is humanity as a whole like this? This question is raised but not answered in Jared Diamond’s Upheaval ...

The Aborigines of Australia are among the more land-rich of colonised peoples. More than one fifth of Australia is under Aboriginal ownership, and a perpetual fund – established by Labor and fattened by Coalition and Labor governments – will add to this estate. To examine this recent change in Australian real estate as a ‘quiet revolution’ was a good choice of theme by Marcia Langton.

Our lives are awash with opinion polls. The daily newspapers, television, radio, and internet poll people on just about every subject. The survey of public opinion has become, since the 1940s, a pervasive feature of everyday life, and is now central to the political process. Sophisticated, large-scale polling of attitudes at the national level – such as the National Social Science Survey, the Australian Election Study, Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and the World Values Survey – is increasingly reported on in the newspapers, with the more complex analyses of these findings left to academic journal articles and books. Alongside regular national polling on issues and leaders by AGBMcNair, Irving Saulwick and Associates, ACNeilson, Roy Morgan Research and Newspoll, political parties commission their own secret internal polling and focus group studies in order to tailor their message to their audience. In this federal election year, we hear clear echoes of this as the ALP leadership repeatedly drops in the key words ‘clever’ and ‘even cunning’ whenever they mention John Howard.

We use the term ‘The Dreaming’ to refer to an Aboriginal way of thinking about their place in the universe; it is ‘a cosmology, an ancestral order, and a mytho-ritual structure’, in the words of Canadian anthropologist Sylvie Poirier. The Western Desert people with whom she lived for many months in the 1980s and 1990s (the Kukatja – though she acknowledges the difficulties of such labels) call it tjukurrpa, a term whose meanings include ‘story’. The stories are about the world- and knowledge-creating ancestral creatures. In the Kukatja world, as manifested in the Western Australian communities of Wirramanu, Mulan and Yagga Yagga, the more prominent stories are about Luurn (kingfisher), Wati Kutjarra (two initiated men), Kanaputa (digging stick women), Marlu (kangaroo), Karnti (yam) and Warnayarra (rainbow snake). When Kukatja narrate the travels of these creatures, they select segments in the itinerary that account for the narrator him or herself as a person who belongs to the places named in the story.

In recent years, ‘White Australia’ has become an episode in Australian history whose inception, imperfect execution and demise must be explained. Regina Ganter and her coauthors dwell on its spatial, as well as temporal, limits. ‘In the far northern townships, the dominant lived experience was not of a white Australia but of a polyethnic one.’ In northern coastal towns – particularly Broome, Wyndham, Darwin, Normanton, Cooktown and Cairns – people from Asia flourished and whites were marginal. Indeed, the Asian presence in Australia preceded that of whites. The first two chapters of this vividly illustrated book show a long and intimate association between Macassans and Yolngu (Arnhem Land Aborigines). Yolngu now recognise some citizens of Indonesia as ‘family’, referring to actual lines of descent.

Australians have been experiencing ‘intensified globalisation’ in the last twenty years. That is, our political leaders, ‘under the sway of neo-liberal ideology’, have made decisions that have ‘intensified’ the ‘widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide inter- connectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (David Held). They have curbed the influence of arbitration and promoted enterprise bargaining and individual contracts. They have deregulated banking and capital flows, and reduced tariff protection. They have made the tax system less progressive. They have reduced spending on social welfare. And they have privatised and corporatised many government services and utilities. Moran, preoccupied with political economy, tends to take as given the technological features of ‘intensified globalisation’ (the indexer saw no reason to include ‘computer’, ‘telephone’ or ‘Internet’). His sense of globalisation resembles Paul Kelly’s account of the dissolution of the Australian Settlement. With Australians becoming more ethnically diverse and less economically secure, there are ‘feelings of vulnerability and disorientation among the populace’.