"...same but different ...": Vom Umgang mit Vergangenheit. Tradition und Geschichte im Alltag einer Nordaustralischen Aborigines-Kommune.

Merlan, Francesca

By B. Duelke.

Cologne: Rudiger Koppe Verlag 1998

Pp. 1-299.

This ethnographically sophisticated and theoretically informed study is an examination of the relation between the everyday (Alltag) and tradition in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory. The author defines its object in various places as the analysis of a collective effort on the part of the people of the Daly River to intergrate the time horizons of the past into the meaning horizons of the present (p. 15, 250). Through these processes of intergration, they retain a sense of living within their tradition, in that 'Daly River style'. The recent period of land rights activity brought changes with it that thematised the issue of relationships between past and present. The study was presented as a doctoral thesis at the University of Frankfurt am Main, 1996, based on fieldwork conducted in the Daly River region principally between 1989 and 1991. The German system requires that doctoral theses be published as a condition of the degree. In its present German version the work remains, unfortunately, not widely accssible to Australianists.

The research project was originally planned as a kind of 'impact' study. By the time of Duelke's entry into the field, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act had been in operation for 13 years. How was it understood in Aboriginal communities, and what had its influences been? By no means conceived as a mechanical measuring of impacts, Duelke's investigation of the land rights situation also serves as a point of departure for exploration of societal dynamics, the givens of the everyday and the maintenance of distinctive forms of social process which Daly River people experience as having continuity with their past.

Duelke describes the context in which this investigation took place. Following early coastal exploration, a halting settlement of the region from the 1870s first by farmers, then pastoralists, miners, and from 1886, a Jesuit Mission, drew the Aboriginal occupants of outlying areas to the Daly River. By the 1930s, when W.E.H. Stanner conducted his fieldwork there, he noted that the country to the south and south-west of the former Daly River mission site was empty of its former occupants. There had been no mission prescence for nearly 60 years when the Mission of the Sacred Heart was founded at Daly River in 1955. So it was with the advent of land rights in the 1970s, the majority of residents of Daly River Mission (renamed Nauiyu Nambiyu) were people whose families had migrated to the mission from their outlying homelands. Their homelands had been made a reserve, and with the passage of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, became Aboriginal land, designated the Daly River/Port Keats Land Trust.

The situation, then, of most of the residents of Daly River was anomalous in terms of a certain growing acceptance within the wider Australin public of the inherence of Aboriginal identity in home country: these people whose own lands had been returned to them, but most of whom, while recognizing enduring links to these homelands, regarded Daly River as their chosen home.

Given the oppurtunity which came with land rights activity, some Daly River people did, however, move from the Mission to Peppimenarti, an outstation approximately 100 kms to the south-west. This place had served for some years as camp for a cattle operation. Those who moved were keen to run cattle and live on their own land. The community at Peppimenarti grew under the charismatic leadership of Johnny Stilton. A person of mixed racial descent -- his father a white man, his step-father an Aboriginal man with ties to the Peppimenarti area, and his mother Aboriginal from country not far from Peppimenarti -- Johnny had been taken from his mother as a child, and raised in institutions near Darwin. He returned to the Daly first, to strongly support the re-founding of the Mission, later applying himself to the establishment of the community at Peppimenarti, which would not have grown as it did without him. Peppimenarti arose partly in reaction and contrast to the Mission: in the local imagination, as a place where life was lived according to Aboriginal Law rather than by Mission rules; where marriage rules and ceremony were properly observed; but also tinged by a darker view of the claim to autonomy which Peppimenarti represented, as a place of dubious renown, where the discipline meted out to the drunken and violent was excessive and questionable -- perhaps not really Aboriginal Law or tradition at all, only "bullshit' or 'liar-story' -- where there were irregularities in communal accountancy, and so on. Through the person of Johnny Stilton and his role at Peppimenarti, Duelke explores the idea of the broker and of "mixed domains' (Miscberiche) of communicative style and content. (The latter concept, I thought, might intertestingly have been developed further).

In 1978 a land claim was lodged over the Mission and surrounding area by Malak Malak/Madngela (and later, Kamu), who were found to be 'traditional owners' under the Land Rights Act. The hand-back took place in 1990. The 'migrant' mission population participated in the claim, supporting it, giving evidence, and at the same time asserting their own connections to the Mission site -- as people who had looked after it, lived in it as their principal experiential space, exercised their responsibility for it in various ways, and were recognised as entitled to live there by the traditional owners. But, Duelke emphasises, the migrants showed recognition of the entitlements of the Malak Malak/Madngela by restricting their own claims for inclusion to the Mission itself, rather than to the surrounding area, and without diminution of their claims and sense of attachment to their homelands. For the mission-dwelling migrants, Duelke says, ties to their homelands were one context of significance, the decades of lived exper ience on the Mission another. Their decades of living at the Mission were the context for bringing past and present into congruence. They recognised their claims to the Mission as resulting from their history of migration, yet were able to see their relations to the Mission within the framework of traditionality. Thus Duelke brings into focus issues of migration and (in some other instances) of competing Aboriginal claims to areas of land which have played a large role in other land rights cases in this area (e.g., Finniss river, which she compares with the Daly River situation) and elsewhere.

The everyday of Daly River in the fieldwork period involved the 'palaver', or the constant meetings and negotiations required by the land rights business; relations to the Mission in its specific guise as the locus of the Catholic Church, with its covert and overt demands for participation; and the links and divergences between Daly River and Peppimenarti. She discusses the rythms of the everyday, with its daily, weekly and annual periodicities.

Interpenetrating these experiential spaces and times are the pervasive communicative styles and norms which Aboriginal people of the region summerise as 'that Daly River style', through which they experience and up-date for themselves a sense of operating within terms they recognise as traditional ones. The terms on which they bring past and present into congruence are not ones of rigid 'traditionalism', but rather involve the constant interdigitation of old and new -- what Basil Sansom, cited in this regard, had earlier referred to as the 'capacity of tradition to accommodate shifts and changes'. The realisation of change evokes an insistence on continuity; the mending and concealing of breaks allows not only forgetting and repressing, but the replacement of old by new. Dynamism is possible within the framework of a reasonably stable concept of tradition (Traditionsbegriff). Duelke sees the pervasiveness of kinship and its ordering and orienting stuctures and contents as fundamental to people's sense of liv ing within 'that Daly River style'. As in so many previous works on Aboriginal society, 'kinship' is seen as fundamental, here not relevant only as relatively fixed structure but as a pervasive medium of everyday practice. Duelke returns to W.E.H. Stanner's discussion of the introduction of 'skins', or subsections, into the Daly River, interestingly using the discussion of the lack of fit between them and kin classification to make points about Aboriginal interest in novelty, the historical career of innovation, and the contemporary preservationism of schools and institutions of the wider society that insist upon Aboriginal people's having 'skins', or something else, as a mark of their authenticity.

At the end of what emerges as a scholarly, well-grounded and also quite sanguine view of the elasticity of tradition, Duelke points to recent instances of Aboriginal dynamism in relating past and present -- the reactivation of ceremony at the Mission, and the turn to painting. Both arc forms of activity that signal 'authenticity', at least as much to a wider society as to Daly River people. The choice of these communicative forms, she suggests, points to the constructionist powers of the wider society, and to a question which her study has argued to lie very much within the capacities of Daly River people in their everyday lives: who has the power to define the authenticity of traditions?