The dreaming, human agency and inscriptive practice.

Rumsey, Alan

Below I will be discussing what I take to be some characteristically Aboriginal forms of social memory and trying to draw out their implications for some recent attempts to rethink the oppositions between myth and history, orality and literacy. These are of course related oppositions, in that we tend to think of myth as an essentially oral modality and history in the strict sense as a written one. This association itself tends to take on the character of myth in that we regard it as not an historically contingent association, but as a deeply necessary one: the myth:history :: orality:literacy oppositions are homologous ones which together go to the heart of some dominant western constructions of our own social identity in relation to others. But the two bodies of theory I will be addressing here have by and large treated one or the other of these two oppositions in isolation from the other. While I do not have the space, or the brief, to say as much here about the literacy/orality opposition as about the myth/history one, by bringing them together in my conclusion I hope to at least lay some groundwork for a more radical critique of both oppositions, and of associated ways of stereotyping Aboriginal culture as the simple inverse of European. In particular, I will argue that the relevant differences in forms of social memory are best understood, not in terms of a simple binary opposition between orality and literacy, but rather among a potentially much more open ended range of what we can call 'inscriptive practices', the relevant Aboriginal one being the use of features of the landscape as a medium for the production and reproduction of meaning. This aspect of Aboriginal practice is by now well known among anthropologists and the general public, but it is usually identified more or less exclusively with myths of the ancestral past, with the dreaming. Drawing on evidence from Munn, Myers and other ethnographers, and on my own fieldwork, I will try to show that it is actually a much more general mode of orientation, through which a good deal of what we call 'history' - the past actions of known human beings - are also inscribed in and retrieved from the landscape.

Beginning with the question of myth and history in comparative anthropological perspective, I turn to an influential programmatic statement by Terence Turner in a volume of papers on myth and history among indigenous peoples of South America, in which he argues against received forms of the distinction,(1) in favour of a renovated one which he sees as more pertinent to the indigenous societies with which he is concerned. As a mode of social consciousness, 'Myth' says Turner:

may be defined as the unself-conscious projection of structures of the existing social order as the framework of events that logically transcend the limits of that order, notably, those responsible for the origins of that order itself or the origins of alien societies. The unself-consciousness of the projection means that the forms of the existing order, although in fact the historical products of human social action, assume fantastic form as the products of superhuman deeds or presocial, natural or supernatural beings (Turner 1988:243).

'History' as a mode of social consciousness is the opposite of myth in these respects. It takes as its point of departure the awareness that social relations are not . . . predetermined as the result of actions or events in an inaccessible past but are in significant respects shaped by individual or collective social action in the present (or in a time continuous with the present). The operative principle in 'historical' as opposed to mythic consciousness, in other words, is an openness to contingency, an awareness that the existing social order emerges as the effect of particular actions and events even as it contains them. History, then, is rooted in a consciousness of creative social agency as a property of contemporary social actors (ibid, p. 244).

These two distinct modes of social consciousness according to Turner are not necessarily to be understood as mutually exclusive alternatives, nor as all-encompassing in their range of applications within a given society. Rather, they have coexisted within, for example, ancient Greece, the New Guinea Highlands, and many of the indigenous South American societies discussed in the papers under review by Turner, in all of which cases historical consciousness has tended to develop especially in the context of 'social relations in which members of a society experience themselves as shaping, through their interaction, significant aspects of their social experience' (ibid., p. 246), e.g., the constitution of the polis in ancient Greece or of exchange relations in the New Guinea Highlands (ibid.).

Turner does not go so far as to claim that the historical mode of consciousness as thus defined is a cultural universal. Although, as one might expect from the New Guinea example (due to Lederman 1986), he rejects the assumption that 'simple' societies necessarily lack historical consciousness, and regards many of the lowland South American societies as powerful counter-examples to such an assumption, he adds that there are some 'simple societies that appear to lack culturally elaborated forms of historical consciousness' (Turner 1988:246).

HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA?

Aboriginal Australia could well be one of the ethnographic regions Turner had in mind. For most ethnographers who have commented on the matter (e.g., Stehlow, Stanner, Sharp, Myers) have agreed that historical consciousness is absent or weakly developed among Australian Aborigines. Most would probably agree with Levi-Strauss, that what they have, or had, were elaborate systems of social and natural classification which were capable of absorbing contingent events in such a way as to neutralize their particularity - i.e., that they were what Levi-Strauss called 'cold societies' as opposed to the 'hot' ones of the modern West. Or, in a later formulation by Sahlins, that they had a kind of 'prescriptive' social order, which assimilates contingent historical circumstances to prexisting structures 'by a kind of denial of their contingent or evenemential character' (Sahlins 1985:xii), as opposed to the 'performative' type which instead assimilates itself to contingent events.(2)

In Australia, 'the dreaming' would seem to provide a prime example of one such 'prescriptive' modality. But actually, there has been a striking (though unacknowledged) disagreement among anthropologists about whether the dreaming is opposed to historical consciousness, or an instance of it. The most notable advocate of the latter is none other than the inventor of 'cold societies' himself, Claude Levi-Strauss.

For Levi-Strauss what is of course of most interest about Australian Aboriginal 'totemism' (and kinship and marriage) is the abstract, logical structure of oppositions among its categories (Eaglehawk and Crow, Tree-Creeper and Bat, etc.) and their supposed relations of homology to social categories such as the moieties, etc. For him, what Strehlow and Stanner had seen as essential to Aboriginal cosmology - its groundedness in a totemic landscape - was a lesser aspect of Aboriginal culture: a means for

inserting irrationality, in its dual aspect of logical contingence and emotional turbulence, into rationality. Classificatory systems thus allow the incorporation of history, even and particularly that which might be thought to defy the system. For make no mistake: the totemic myths which solemnly relate futile incidents and sentimentalize over particular places are comparable to minor, lesser history: that of the dimmest chroniclers. Those same [Australian Aboriginal] societies, whose social organization and marriage rules require the efforts of mathematicians for their interpretation, and whose cosmology astonishes philosophers, recognize no break in the continuity between the lofty theorizing to which they devote themselves in those domains and a history which is that not of a Burckhardt or a Spengler, but of a Lenotre and a La Force. (Levi-Strauss 1966:243-40).

More commonly, anthropologists have seen 'the dreaming', not as a 'lesser history', but as an alternative to 'history'. Fred Myers, for example, in a formulation which is quite consistent with Stanner's (1963:143-4; cf. also Sharp 1974), speaks of the Pintubi 'erasure of the historical', and says that:

The Dreaming . . . provides a moral authority lying outside the individual will and outside human creation. . . . although the Dreaming as an ordering of the cosmos is presumably a product of historical events, such an origin is denied. These human creations are objectified - thrust out - into principles or precedents for the immediate world. . . . Consequently, current action is not understood as the result of human alliances, creations, and choices, but is seen as imposed by an embracing, cosmic order (Myers 1986:69).

Thus, in Turner's terms, the dreaming would seem to be a quintessentially 'mythic' (as opposed to 'historical') form of consciousness, as it apparently mystifies human agency and provides what he would consider to be 'an unself-conscious projection of structures of the existing social order as the framework for events that logically transcend the limits of that order', the forms of that social order assuming 'fantastic form as the products of superhuman deeds' As Munn has put it:

In Aboriginal thought the object world Was first created freely by the ancestors out of themselves. Since each generation must come to experience these forms as self-objectifications, it is not simply the ancestral transformations, the objects themselves, which are perpetuated over time, but also the underlying pattern of transformation - its bidirectional structure - which through a continuous process of subject-object identification is reiterated in each generation. There is, however, a fundamental difference in the relationship to the object which distinguishes ancestral and human objectification: the human being participates in objectifications already created by the ancestors, and bound to them (Munn 1970:157).

As this classic formulation by Munn suggests, she considers the most socially salient forms of human agency in the Western Desert to be those which ground it most patently in the objectifications provided by the dreamtime ancestors, i.e., male ritual:

The most central acts of creative autonomy and potency occur within the male cult where the individual constructs or renews ancestral objects and may play the role of his own ancestors in dramatic performance.

. . . But the forms to which the individual gives visible shape [in ceremonial performance] are forms in which . . . subjectivity has already been externalized, and which belong to the creative locus 'outside' the individual actor and 'inside' the country (loc. cit., pp.159-60).

In this view, the realm of the totemic ancestors is set off from everyday life, as 'dreamtime' to 'this time', and human agency is most centrally manifested in those limited contexts in which the two kinds of time become merged. As she elegantly demonstrates in Walbiri Iconography, the forms in which everyday experience of life 'on the ground' is constructed or represented are identical or structurally analogous to those of the dreamtime, so that, experientially, there is an ultimate identification between the two. But the relation between the two dimensions of existence is asymmetrical in that the only available forms of objectification were those created by the ancestors. As Pintubi men put it to Fred Myers: The Law 'is not our idea' (Myers 1986:53).

However that may be, there is in my view a potential problem with positing too big an asymmetry between these two aspects of existence, in that it is too conducive to an anthropological objectification or reification of 'the dreaming' itself - one which has the politically unfortunate consequence of providing support for an equally sharp dichotomy between 'traditional' Aborigines, who have it, and non-traditional ones, who do not. As Stephen Muecke has put it:

The dreaming is not a set of beliefs which is lost because it is no longer valid, it is rather a way of talking, of seeing, of knowing, and a set of practices, which is as obtuse, as mysterious and as beautiful as any poetry. Reading its present and public forms as . . . the relics of past customs is to deliver to it a death blow (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1984:14).

It is also compatible, not only with a sharp dichotomy between 'myth' and 'history', but also with identifying a whole people - in this case Australian Aborigines - with mythic consciousness.

To me, such an identification seems not only politically unfortunate, but also untrue to my experience with Aboriginal people across the top end of the Northern Territory and Kimberley region of Western Australia. To me, Muecke's formulation (also based on work in the Kimberleys) rings truer. So indeed do several aspects of Munn's account, the most relevant one here(3) being her claim that what is called the dreaming is ultimately a 'mode of orientation':

On this view, it is a fundamental mode of orientation [itals in orig.] to objects in which experience of self is firmly anchored in objective forms incorporating moral constraints . . . Put in another way, it is not merely a particular kind of object and meaning content which is being transmitted, but also a particular form or mode of experiencing the world . . . (Munn 1970:157-8)(4)

To illustrate this point, and to show how much continuity there can be in this 'mode of orientation' despite massive innovation in the 'kind of object and meaning content which is being transmitted', I want to quote briefly from a (much longer) text recorded in the 1950s by Jeremy Beckett, from Walter Newton, who was at that time the only Aboriginal person living in Broken Hill, NSW. The text, recently published and analysed by Beckett in American Ethnologist, was framed by Newton as a 'history of the world - or Australia'

When the history of the world - or Australia - began, the people all represented an animal. That's where they got their marriage from.

The first people were burned. There was a big flame. They were drawn into it. Some were saved, the best behaved, I suppose . . .

The second time the people were drowned, and this is where they were saved. The Holy Eaglehawk came and he punished the people. First of all the people in Broken Hill - all where the mine is now, the people were punished and buried here. Their veins turned into silver. That was the Wilyali: the boulders on one side of the hill, that's their flesh. There came an explosion, earth flew up and covered the bodies . . .

God certainly picked out a number to go on in the world again. He stood them apart and he punished the people all round him. There were convulsions, the ground blew up. They were standing up and he said, 'You can stay as you are.' He threw dust over them and they're now formed into rocks. That's Gunduwandi. They rose up a thousand feet high. He made a flat top - just a little bit - 300 yards away from his temple at Noontherungie - that's the holy Jerusalem of Australia

. . . The people grew in numbers and came back. The Holy Guluwiru came and punished the people. He crucified the people. He done that at Mayala Lake - took all their water and they perished, Wainyubalgu and Bakunji. He went from here [Broken Hill] to Mootawingie and made ranges and waterholes. He went a few miles from there, and his bodyguard caught a kangaroo, and that kangaroo - one kangaroo - fed thousands of people, like in the Bible. But he said to the bodyguard, 'Don't interfere with the stomach. Take it over there about 300 yards. I'm going to do something you can remember me by". They were laughing and talking with happiness. They looked over to the stomach. It had grown enormous. He said 'There's something you can remember me of.' By an hour's time it was 50 feet high and 100 yards across. About two hours later it was 100 feet high and 200 yards across. Later it was 150 yards high. He waved his hands and formed it into a solid rock, and it's as smooth as this bucket, and all the shapes of the stomach are there. He named it Yunda-ano. It's the other side of Mootawingie, standing out from the other hills, not a tree or a weed grows on it.

. . . The Guluwiru then just flew into a big cloud and went Heaven. And he told them before he left 'I won't be down among you people any more. You old folks may live to see what'll happen. They'll be a new race of people coming in years to come and they're going to control Australia.

. . . There's a place not far from here that's going to be called - I'm going to name it - Corona, that is at the Queen of England, owned by the Crown' (Beckett 1993:681-2).

Is this 'myth' or 'history', 'traditional' or 'non-traditional'? In his analysis of Newton's narrative, Beckett argues convincingly that it is an attempt to use some fairly traditional Aboriginal discursive forms to make sense of the unprecedented experience of colonization. Newton made his 'history' out of the mythology of his region, episodes which 'retain a family likeness to much other Aboriginal mythology in that they describe how 'Dreamtime heroes' . . . brought form to the landscape and to human affairs by performing deeds that linked the concerns of latter-day humanity . . . with world-shattering and world-forming events' (ibid., p.684). In this respect, and in its sharp bounding off of the creative dreamtime period from 'this time', this narrative is of a piece with more 'traditional' myths such as those enacted in the ritual referred to by Munn.

In Turner's terms, Newton's narrative is a prime example of the mythic mode of consciousness in that it mystifies human agency in the construction of forms of sociality, including the colonial order, which is preordained by the Guluwiru in the act of naming a place. The events of what Myers calls 'history in its most basic sense' are assimilated to a pre-existing order which is objectified in features of the local landscape. Thus, however un-traditional some its contents, this narrative shows the same basic 'mode of orientation' described by Munn in relation to the Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara.

But my concern here is not to place this narrative along some kind of continuum of the 'traditional' vs non-traditional or myth vs history. Rather, I want to use it as a point of departure for arguing against a tendency I see in the Aboriginalist literature for the kind of objectification discussed by Munn to be identified more or less exclusively with the dreaming, and hence with something like mythic consciousness. Though I do not dispute that it is central to narratives about the dreaming, I want to show that it figures in many other kinds as well, and in many other much more mundane aspects of Aboriginal people's social lives.

This is evident from many sources. To begin with my own experience, on the many trips I have made with Kimberley and Top End Aboriginal people to country they know well, and in the many accounts of it which I have recorded and transcribed, I have been struck by the way in which details of what we would call 'oral history' have been freely juxtaposed with the mythological - so much so that at first I often found it very hard to sort out one from the other, especially in what I was told by older people. For example, a lengthy description of his country by an old Ngarinyin man, Cocky Wujungu, which I recorded in 1976, is full of passages such as the following (translated from the Ungarinyin):

At that other place, where the Sale River branches off, a little boy looked back and cried. The river comes along there and turns around. His Pillow is there. From there it goes to where there is a junction. Her kidneys. It climbs up to Bull Creek. She sits there, that Wanjad [Wanjina who got speared in the Kidneys]. She's there as a painting. Her neck is painted there. There are a lot of paintings there at Bull Creek. That's the Gamulowan people's country. From there it runs in a different direction and there's a little creek where she bent herself. There's a Boab tree there that's bent like that snake. From there it runs to where Willy Wagtail cooked yams. Where Olgi sits down. Duck Hole, where Mangurla died [of Tonsillitis]. There's white clay there to the west, where it runs to Wawural, where it gets to be a really big river. Black Plum is there, Black Plum there where dogs walked alongside, that's where it [his tail] stood up. He cried on this side of the river where it goes that way. That's the surprise place. On the other side there is/was a house. A house got shifted. On the other side, the north side is where he cried. This [m-class thing, i.e. mayara 'house'] is on the south side, the desert side. Surprise place is where Len [Connell] lived, ours [i.e., our boss]. From there it goes all the way to those inquest stones, Coldsick Place, where there's another road that crosses over, going to Dead Man Hole. And there's another road that goes down to, what do you call it, Marlangguma, that police road. You cross over to Dead Man Hole. Two men died there, or rather one man. A mule killed him. A mule killed him! That [Aboriginal] man. Now who are those people, [to David Mowaljarlai] you call their names!

DM: Their names?

CW: Yes, the one who got killed by a mule there, Galurungarri [clan], isn't it? Or Brejirrad? No, Galurungarri. Well, a mule killed them. Those were your two unclew, sons of Manggulan, the two [buried at] 'Where His Penis Stands Up'.

From there it flows in the opposite direction, to Oobagooma. Oobagooma is on this side. There it hits the saltwater. It goes right down to the saltwater there, near the Isdell River, and there's a high rock table between the two rivers, like an island. There it goes up again, it comes from over there at what-you-call it, what's the name of that place? There's a plain kangaroo's arm bone in the water there, the plain kangaroo called Warlanda. Then it goes along [to where] he [Umbrella Lizard] said 'dewu, dewu, dewu' Lirriwundun [creaking sound from dog's grinding teeth], Lirriwundun, Enggalurra [his footprint, i.e. Milky Way's].

. . . That umbrella lizard was singing 'dewu, dewu'. Umbrella lizard, you know, umbrella lizard, he said 'dewu, dewu', he said 'dewu, dewu, dewu'. That was you, Ngularr and Nyombara came up there [i.e., their conception place]. That's Umbrella Lizard. She [Kookaburra] made a hole in the wall of the cave, something like this [points to wall]. She carved it out. That's those Ngarangarri people's [conception place]. Jadbawala came up there, and Maduwinali came up there, in our body [i.e., in our clan country].(5)

Many events of the larlay ancestral period are referred to or alluded to here, each of which is memoralized in the landscape. But so too are the former presence of an old station manager (Len Connell), the performance of a divination ritual to identify a suspected sorcerer (at 'those inquest stones'), the death of an Aboriginal stockman who was kicked by a mule, and the conception places of several known individuals. These are all the sorts of things that have often been pointed out to me and to younger Aboriginal people on trips to country. I'm sure this thorough-going mix of what appear to us as the mythical and historical is familiar to anyone who has had the pleasure of being shown country by Aboriginal people (cf. e.g, Keen 1994:112-117; Sutton 1988:254-5) and might seem so commonplace as to be hardly worth even pointing out. But it may not be so familiar to those whose impression of Aboriginal culture comes mainly through reading ethnography, for it has mainly dwelled on what seems most exotic: the way in which country is read with respect to the dreamtime. So in order to show how widely it is also used as a register of more mundane aspects of shared history, I want to cite some other ethnographic examples.

Fred Myers says of the Pintubi:

From one point of view, named places are signs from which Pintubi can interpret events in The Dreaming. From another perspective, it is also true that places can code or punctuate events in the phenomenal world. For Maantja tjungurrayi, the place Walukirittjinya is where his father was killed and buried; Tjulurunya is the place he himself was conceived; at another place he was initiated; his mother died at Tjituruurrnga; and so on. For each individual the landscape becomes a history of significant social events. Geography serves, it would seem, as a signifier of experiences; previous events become attached to places and are recited as one moves across the country (Myers 1986:68)

I would only add that the contrast Myers is drawing here between country as register of 'The Dreaming' vs 'the phenomenal' cannot necessarily be taken as isomorphic with a distinction between collective vs 'individual' viewpoints, as his formulation might seem to suggest. For although the relevant events may concern individuals, they are still, as he himself says 'social events', and the memory of them a more or less extensively shared one. Thus it is presumably not only for Maantja tjungurrayi that the places Myers mentions are associated with his personal identity in the ways Myers describes, but for other countrymen as well. In this respect, compare the excerpt from Cocky Wujungu's account of country above, where none of the personal or other historical associations he adduces is about his own person.

As an especially salient example of the sociocentric basis on which 'places can code . . . events in the phenomenal world' consider in particular the relations of 'conception' of the kind by which Maantja tjungurrayi is linked to the place called Tjulurunya (in the quote from Myers above; cf. also the Ngarinyin examples at the end of the passage from Cocky Wujungu above). The relevant form of conception is of course not the joining of ovum and sperm, but 'the quickening of the foetus, when the mother first notices that she is pregnant' (Myers 1986:50), which Pintubi, like other Australian Aborigines, attribute to her having been entered by a pre-existing spirit associated with the place where this quickening and realization have occurred (ibid.) The constitution of personal identity through this form of conception involves a complex interplay of the random and the preordained: the conception event is a contingent one, but the personal identity which it determines for the child is based on a pre-existing order of identifications between places and dreaming spirits in the socialized landscape. But, at least among the Ngarinyin and other North Kimberley people, this order is to some extent 'open to history' in that particular conception events can leave traces in the landscape that become identified with known individuals. For example, near a rock shelter along the King Edward River known as Ngegamorro Minjil Munganu (featured on the cover of Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993), there is a large rock with a small hole in it, about an inch in diameter and several inches deep. The hole is said to have been made by a bolt of lightning which struck it when a now-elderly Wunambal man named Collier Banymorro was conceived while his mother was camping at the shelter. This resulted not only in Collier being identified with the pre-existing spirit from which he takes his 'great name', but also in the rocks at that place being identified as 'Collier' (See Mowaljarlai and Rumsey 1993, segment 10, where David Mowaljarlai points out the hole as a 'window', and points to one of the stones saying 'That's Collier now', and to another saying 'And Collier here, look here'). Tony Redmond, a Sydney postgraduate student who is currently doing fieldwork with Ngarinyin people (and has also visited Ngegamorro Minjil Munganu) has aptly described this as 'a nice example of the fusion of mythic and historic modes, subject to shifting hierarchies of emphasis like all Gestalts worth their salt' (Tony Redmond, personal communication 23/11/94).

The Aboriginal set towards country as a store of meaning is not one which treats it as though its significance were already completely known, but one which instead assumes there is always more there to be discovered. Thus, with respect to the events of the dreaming, Kolig, for example has shown how

Walmajarri and Wangkajunga people who moved from the northern edge of the Western Desert into the Fitzroy Valley were able to read the local landscape in ways that connected it to dreamings from their own country (Kolig 1981). And on the more 'historical' side, based on her fieldwork with people on Cox Peninsula across from Darwin, Beth Povinelli speaks of

Belyuen people's story retrieval from countryside; they are constantly finding 'stories'. . . during everyday hunting trips. . . . one such story recounts how a deceased man left five brightly colored pebbles lined up on a log for his widow to find while she was hunting sugarbag . . . He put the five stones there to let her know his desire that she and their five children continue camping at a nearby site. A story may be made up of more mundane origins, such as the antics of a day's fishing trip. But people muster all such events when evaluating who 'has the stories' for a place (Povinelli 1993:33)

'Dreamtime'/mythical and 'historical' ways of reading country are not only similarly productive, they sometimes also make similar use of the trope of punctuated movement through a fixed series of named places. For example, in our fieldwork for the Katherine and Gimbat Land claims, and in claimants' evidence at the hearings, Francesca Merlan and I found that older Jawoyn people's accounts of country frequently took the form of narratives of travel from one major destination to another along walking tracks, from one named site to the next, where people's knowledge of country was evaluated by others according to the number of sites they could name and their ability to put them into the correct sequence (Merlan and Rumsey 1982:64-5; Jawoyn-Katherine Land Claim Transcript: pp. 584-5, 791, 812-3; Merlan ms. Ch. 4). This canonical way of knowing country is of course widely attested in the ethnographic literature, and its formal similarity to dreamtime stories has not gone unnoticed. Nancy Munn has given us a fine account of how the Walbiri represent both sorts of movement with the same iconography and hence comprehend their everyday experience in terms of a transcendental order (Munn 1973), but as far as I know there has not been any systematic study of the intertextual relationships between specific narratives at these two levels, despite the fact that they are often thoroughly interwoven within Aboriginal people's talk about country, as illustrated by Cocky Wujungu's text above.(6)

Nor is this way of constructing canonical accounts of country limited to discourse about 'traditional' forms of engagement with it (hunting and gathering, etc.). It is, for example, also evident in accounts by Aboriginal men of their work in the pastoral industry, from western New South Wales (Beckett 1978:15-16; 1993:684) no less than from the Top End (see Merlan and Rumsey refs. above) and Kimberleys (Oscar 1990; Wirrunmarra 1990), which are not organized chronologically, but topologically, as movements along droving tracks, from one named stopping point to the next. The same is true of the late Nyibayarri Jack Bohemia's recently published accounts of his thirty three years' work as a police tracker in the Kimberleys (Bohemia and McGregor 1995). Of the thirty eight texts, Bohemia's translator and coauthor Bill McGregor says:

Threaded throughout each narrative is a sequence of movement from named place to named place . . . [where] significant events occur.

[This] remains constant throughout different tellings of the stories.

Of course the texts differ in their degree of detail in the travel sequences. . . . But there are no texts without at least one travel sequence. At the other extreme are texts . . . which provide minute detail of every (or nearly every) camping place and dinner camp throughout a long period. . . . What is remarkable is that the events [they describe] happened half a century or more ago (Bohemia and McGregor 1995:23-4).

The final example I want to consider also comes from the Kimberleys, and concerns an Aboriginal 'outlaw' known as Pigeon or Jandamarra (the 'Sandawara' of Johnson 1979), a Bunuba (or Unggumi-Bunuba) man who in the 1890s worked as a police tracker, then turned against the police, released the prisoners he had helped them round up, and led a band of rebels who evaded capture for two years, raiding cattle stations, capturing rifles and ammunition which he was said to be planning to use in an all-out campaign to oust the Europeans settlers from the area. His story is one of the most often told in the Western Kimberleys, by white and black alike. To my surprise when I made my first field trip to the Kimberleys in 1975 and tried to elict 'traditional' stories from Ngarinyin people, it was the first one many of them wanted to tell me and for some the only one. Aboriginal tellings of the story generally differed from European ones in that the latter portrayed Pigeon's revolt as doomed from the outset by the inevitable march of civilisation and the Europeans' ultimately vastly greater fire power, whereas in the Aboriginal tellings, Pigeon was completely invulnerable to their bullets, as he had the magical ability to remove his 'wind' or 'heart' from his chest and concentrate it in his thumb, or even hide it outside his body altogether, in a nearby waterhole. In these versions of the story, the only way he could possibly be defeated was by the agency of another Aboriginal magician who would know his tricks. And that is what happened: the police brought in 'Mingko Mick' from Roeburn, who killed him in a final shoot-out near his hideout at Winjana Gorge.

Though I haven't yet run into any, a Western Kimberley Aboriginal person of Walter Newton's leanings might well refer to Winjana Gorge as the 'Holy Jerusalem of Australia' - such is its significance in local understandings of post-contact history. A Ngarinyin man Dangal Dan Bidd introduces the story to me on my first day of fieldwork in Australia in 1975, at old Mowanjum:

DB: This blackfella / He been start on this / this Aborigine been start on this / 'nother place here / in, oh: / well sometime, I got my car / and you and I if you like / you know / Thursday or Mon or Friday or Saturday we can go up there and camp with / you know, camp up there and I'll show you that cave . . . / I forgot his name this place, Winjana Gorge.

AR: Winjana Gorge.

DB: and they got this picture / sometime he'll come back / that black boy / he was acting something like Roy Rogers and them thing you know / but this is / this is fuckin' true / Really one this one.

On my later fieldwork in Fitzroy Crossing with Bunuba people, Banjo Wirrunmarra, a chief custodian of the Pigeon story explains:

BW: from eastern state right down / to north / right up / to west / they were killin'm THOOUUSANDS AND THOOUUSANDS OF BLACKFELLAS . . . but he heard that and some of his people been get killed too / some of OUR people been get killed . . . / so only one man / he had a feeling for his own people / . . . and he been keep PICTURING, you know / and maybe / that's how that thing been come to him / and so when he got a chance / so HE had to do it . . . / do it as a THEY done it . . . / but I, where I don't understand / why this wit [sic] doctor [Mingo Mick] went up there / this thing I don't understand . . . / and he been take the life of BLACK man and BLACK man been get shot by WHITE people why couldn't he leave ALONE /.

AR: If he LEFT it alone, what do you think would have happened?

BW: well he had to been a / king of Australia / and everything would have been come back right way

(Muecke, Rumsey and Wirrunmarra 1985:92-94)

Regarding the first of these two texts, note the way in which Pigeon is said to be there in the form of a 'picture' at Winjana Gorge, one which, unlike the ones seen of Roy Rogers at the cinema, is really 'true'. In other words, Pigeon's exploits are memorialized at Winjana Gorge in just the same way as those of the primordial creator figures at many other places in the landscape. So are those of his antagonist Mingko Mick in another part of Banjo Wirrunmarra's narrative, where he traces Mick's movements from Roebourne to Derby to Meda to Kimberley Downs to Fairfield to Pigeon's hideout at Tunnel Creek, a sequence which is repeated exactly in two otherwise rather different tellings of the story by Wirrunmarra recorded by Stephen Muecke in 1977 and by me in 1984 (see Muecke, Rumsey and Wirrunmarra 1985).

CONCLUSION

The main point I want to draw from all the above examples is that all of them are instances of what can be understood in Munn's terms as variants of a single 'mode of orientation', to place - to enduring, physical features of the lived landscape as a prime locus of objectification.(7) If within 'the dreaming' we include only those unchanging aspects of the landscape which were put there by the totemic creator figures, then this orientation is not limited to the practices relating to the dreaming, but must be seen as the mode by which those practices are generated, as well as others. The others include some forms of memory which clearly qualify under Turner's criteria as 'History', as they treat events as contingent, and focus on human agency as such. Indeed, in the case of the Pigeon story it is the Aboriginal accounts which give more play to contingency and individual human agency than do the European ones, which instead normalize it in terms of the myth-like lineaments of what Paul Carter has called 'imperial history' which 'reduces space to a stage, that pays attention to events unfolding in time alone. . . . [Which] rather than focus[ing] on the intentional world of historical individuals, the world of active spatial choices . . . has as its primary focus facts which, in a sense come after the event. The primary object is not to understand or to interpret: it is to legitimate' (Carter 1987:xvi).

Indeed, one of the most ubiquitous props on the stage of imperial history is precisely our received distinctions between myth and history, orality and literacy, and ways of identifying 'them' with the former terms, 'us' with the latter. Among the anthropologists I cited on this question above, Levi-Strauss alone took a different line, seeing Australian 'totemic myths' as a kind of 'lesser history'. What he was describing in that way, and what others were treating as pure myth, were the stories which are told about country. By contrast, according to Myers (1986:59), the Pintubi speak of country as story (turlku). Based on examples such as I have discussed here, I suggest that it is more appropriate to follow the Pintubi formulation and regard the landscape itself as, in Aboriginal terms the main locus of social memory, and all associated discursive elaborations of it as exegesis, by which stories are, as Povinelli puts it retrieved from the country. The distinctive aspect of 'the dreaming' is that these are stories which have been laid down for all time, which deal with what Tony Swain (1993) calls 'abiding events' whereas in the other cases I have discussed, such as the Belyuen people's five little stones, or the Pigeon story, the country stores memories that were inscribed there by human agents. In other accounts, such as Cocky Wujungu's, and in much of people's actual experience of country, both these strands are thoroughly intertwined. What is most characteristic of this 'mode of orientation' is not necessarily any particular emphasis on mythic versus historical consciousness, but the realisation of both in a particular form of inscription - in the places through which one moves in the course of social life.

In closing, I want to consider this particular form of inscription in relation to the other dichotomy I have mentioned but so far given short shrift to: between orality and literacy. However problematical his work may be in some respects, I accept the main thrust of Derrida's (1976) critique of western philosophical and commonsense understandings of the relation between speech and writing, i.e. that what we take to be distinctive about writing as opposed to speech - its iterability, detachability from its source, etc. - applies equally to speech. But my main objections to any simple orality/literacy dichotomy are not so much philosophical as ethnological. Stimulated largely by the empirical inadequacies of older universalising frameworks developed by scholars such as Jack Goody and Walter Ong, (but largely innocent of Derridean deconstruction) linguistic anthropologists such as Brian Street (1984, 1993), Don Kulick (1992) and Niko Besnier (forthcoming) have recently mounted an effective critique to the notion that literacy is a single, unitary phenomenon, and have shown profound differences in the way it has been taken up and used in different historical and regional settings.

What I think is suggested by evidence of the kind I have been developing here, and what we now need to develop, is a complementary anthropological critique of standard notions of 'orality' as a cross-culturally unitary phenomenon,(8) such as those elaborated by Walter Ong in his influential book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Drawing largely upon the empirical findings of students of oral literature from only a few settings: Ancient Hebrew, Indo-European and African, Ong posits a universal category of 'primary orality', which he characterizes as: additive rather than subordinative; aggregative rather than analytic, redundant or 'copious', agonistically toned, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, etc. For anyone who is at all familiar with the tenor of everyday life among Aboriginal people, many of Ong's putative traits seem off the mark. Most notably, the Parry-and-Lord-derived model of formulaic, copious, metrically regimented oral verse as the main form of social memory (based on such examples as Homeric Epic and the Rg Vedas) seems wildly inappropriate for Aboriginal Australia. Although some of the song cycles take many hours or even days to perform, the texts themselves were and are extremely condensed rather than 'copious' in relation to the events they are about. And Aboriginal myths were not and are not recited in a prosodically fixed form. I suggest this may be related to what I have said above, that the 'story' itself is seen to be located in the country, the verbalisation being only a means by which it can be, in Povinelli's terms 'retrieved'. The same goes for at least two other characteristic forms of objectification besides country, namely songs and paintings, as shown for example by Merlan (1987) and Morphy (1992) respectively.

In sum, what is evident here is not any simple phenomenon of 'orality', the nature of which is predetermined by the absence of 'writing' in the strict sense. Rather, alternative modes of inscription figure in combination with speech to comprise culturally specific forms of social memory which are not the simple inverse of 'literacy', but something which is, as they say in Kriol, 'different again'.

If that alternative economy of inscriptive and interpretive practices is, as I have argued above, capable of being used for the construction of 'history' as well as 'myth', it seems likely (and is strongly suggested by my Pigeon example) that 'history' in this alternative mode will not be the simple equivalent of the literary sort, but that it too will be 'different again'. One of the ways in which I would expect it to differ is in being far more negotiable and openly subject to alternative interpretation than its literary counterparts such as Carter's 'imperial history'. For a basic characteristic of topographic objectifications such as I have discussed above (as with song and visual art) is that they are not at all, in Ong's terms, 'copious' in the amount of specific information they convey, but rather, portentous or suggestive as to what they could mean. In other words, in both its historical and mythical uses, this particular economy of practices shows the same paradoxical combination, noted by Stanner, Myers, D. Rose and others, of apparently solid, enduring social forms, and extreme negotiability as to their specific entailments.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented in 1991 at a Sydney conference on Myth, History and Colonization in Aboriginal Australia and in 1994 at the annual meetings of the Australian Anthropological Association. I wish to thank all those who offered comments on it on those occasions. For their helpful comments on various written drafts of the paper I would also like to thank Gil Cowlishaw, Steve Feld, Ian Keen, Jan Kociumbas, Bill McGregor, Francesca Merlan, Stephen Muecke, Nancy Munn and Tony Redmond.

NOTES

1. In particular Turner does not want to base the myth-history distinction on a criterion of whether the accounts in question are intended to be about 'real' or 'true' events vs 'imaginary' ones. With respect to Aboriginal Australia at least, this is clearly an appropriate and useful move, since, as Ian Keen has reminded me, no such distinction generally figures in Aboriginal ways of classifying narrative genres, and the stories which westerners classify as 'myths' about the dreamtime are certainly considered by Aborigines to be true (cf. footnote 3). Hence I will give the matter no further consideration here (but see Sutton 1988 for interesting discussion of ways in which Aboriginal 'myths' can be taken as 'history' according to such a criterion, and also 'history' as 'myth').

2. While this formulation may seem not to differ much from Levi-Strauss', Sahlins applies it to a somewhat different range of societies, so as to displace the simple dichotomy between 'the west and the rest'. So he attributes the 'performative' modality not only to 'us', but also, for example to the Hawaiians. But Australian Aborigines remain maximally 'other' in this typology: 'I have in mind an ideal contrast between Hawaii, where kinship, rank, property rights and local affiliation are all open to negotiation, and the standard average Radcliffe-Brownian social structure of corporate descent groups, ascribed statuses and prescriptive marriage rules (say, Australian Aboriginals)' (Sahlins 1985:xii). But much recent Australianist ethnography (e.g., Keen 1993, Myers 1986, Povinelli 1993, Rumsey 1981, Sutton 1982) has cast serious doubt on the credibility of this 'standard average' view of traditional Aboriginal social life.

3. Also relevant is Munn's acknowledgement that, for Walbiri, the 'dreamtime' (jukurrpa) is not entirely separate and distinct from the ongoing present (yidjaru), but 'a series of real happenings in the past, and being in the country (or the ancestors and their guruwarri powers within the country), it is also an actuality within the present' (Munn 1964:96, as quoted in Munn 1986:226).

4. This quote provides a clear example of a second, more phenomenological strain in Munn's thought which has always been there alongside the more structural side which has been emphasized by critics such as Dubinskas and Traweek (1984) (cf. Munn 1986:224ff). Munn's notion of 'mode of orientation' can be seen as a nascent attempt to synthesize the two strains, interestingly similar to Pierre Bourdieu's more fully elaborated attempt at around the same time to transcend the opposition between phenomenological and objectivist approaches with his concept of 'habitus' (Bourdieu 1977). While Munn and Bourdieu were no doubt unaware of each other's work at the time (the 1960s), there is perhaps a common source in the work of Marcel Mauss, who first introduced a concept of habitus into anthropology, and whom Munn (personal communication, November, 1994) sees as having been one of the main influences on the more phenomenological side of her work at that stage.

5. The Ungarinyin expression is ngarrarin-da, literally 'in our being/person/presence/body'. For further examples of the use of the word stem arin (which here occurs with the first person plural inclusive possessive prefix ngarr- and locative postposition -da), see Coate and Elkin 1974:45. The same root as in arin also occurs in the words ari 'man', nyari 'woman' (ibid., p.400) and nyarin 'she herself) (ibid. p. 402).

6. Also relevant is this regard is Fred Myers' interesting discussion of the two levels of meaning of the Pintubi term ngurra ('camp', 'country'), which refers 'both to a temporary camp in which people live and also to an enduring "country" or named place. Ngurra is not only the human creation of "camp", but also the Dreaming creation of "country". Thus, as the concept by which Pintubi people most frequently appropriate space, ngurra always relates demarcated places to activity [alternatively by humans or Dreamings] that gives them meaning' (Myers 1986:55, cf. Elkin 1937:140-41, Merlan, this issue, p. ??).

7. Question: Can the same mode of orientation survive with something other than country as its 'object'? Perhaps so, with regard to the verbal and material 'determinations' of the kind theorised by Sansom: see Sansom 1980:43, f.n.14.; cf also Sansom 1982 regarding neo-traditional forms of memorialization used by Perth Aborigines.

8. This has been done by Ruth Finnegan to some extent in her (1988) book Literacy and Orality, but her main form of critique is to qualify the dichotomy by arguing that in the case of most societies, what we find in practice is a complex mix of, and interaction between, the written (in the strict sense) and the spoken, whereas I am assuming a more general category of 'inscriptive practices' which includes both of those categories, but is not limited to them, including also an open-ended set of other possibilities such as the ones discussed in this paper.

REFERENCES

BECKETT, J. 1978. George Dutton's Country. Aboriginal History 2:2-31.

1993. Walter Newton's History of the World, or Australia. American Ethnologist 20:675-95.

BENTERRAK, K., MUECKE, S., and ROE, P., 1984. Reading the Country Perth: Freemantle Arts Centre Press.

BESNIER, N. forthcoming. Reading and Writing in Polynesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (to appear in the series: Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language).

BOHEMIA, J. and MCGREGOR, W. 1995. Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

BOURDIEU, P. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CARTER, P. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay. London: Faber and Faber.

COATE, H.H.C. and ELKIN, A.P 1974. Ngarinyin-English Dictionary. (Oceania Linguistic Monograph No. 16) Sydney: Oceania Publications.

DERRIDA, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

DUBINSKAS, F. and S. TRAWEEK. 1984. Closer to the Ground: a Reinterpretation of Walbiri Iconography. Man 19:15-30.

ELKIN, A.P. 1937. The Nature of Australian Languages. Oceania 8:127-69. Reprinted in Oceania Monograph No. 3 Studies in Australian Linguistics. Sydney: Oceania Publications.

FINNEGAN, R. 1988. Literacy and Orality. Oxford: Basil Blackwells.

JOHNSON, C. 1979. Long Live Sandawara. Melbourne: Quartet.

KEEN, I. 1994. Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

KOLIG, E. 1981. The Silent Revolution. Philadelphia: ISHI Publications.

KULICK, D. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LEDERMAN, R. 1986. Changing times in Mendi: Notes towards writing Highland New Guinea History. Ethnohistory 33:1-30.

LEVI-STRAUS, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MERLAN, F. 1987. Catfish and Alligator: Totemic Songs of the Western Roper River, Northern Territory. In Donaldson, Clunies-Ross, and Wild (eds) Songs of Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: Oceania Monographs. pp. 143-167.

MERLAN, F. and RUMSEY, A. 1982. The Jawoyn (Katherine Area) Land Claim. Darwin: Northern Land Council.

MERLAN, F. ms. Been Nothing, This Town: Aborigines in Katherine, Northern Territory.

MORPHY, H. 1992. Ancestral Connections. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MOWALJARLAI, D. and MALNIC, Y. 1993. Yorro Yorro: Sprit of the Kimberley. Broome: Magabala Press.

MOWALJARLAI, D. and RUMSEY, A. 1993. North Kimberley Painting Sites. 45 minute video produced by Alan Rumsey in collaboration with University of Sydney Television. Available at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

MUECKE, S., RUMSEY, A. and WIRRUNMARRA, B. 1985. Pigeon the Outlaw: History as Texts. Aboriginal History 9:81-100.

MUNN, N. 1964. Totemic Designs and Group Continuity in Walbiri Cosmology. In M. Reay (ed.) Aborigines Now: New Perspectives in the study of Aboriginal Communities, pp. 83-100. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

1970. The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjarra Myth. In Berndt, R. (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.

1973. Walbiri Iconography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

MUNN, N. 1986. Afterward to the second edition of Walbiri Iconography Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MYERS, F. 1986. Pintubi Country, Pintubi Self, Washington: Smithsonian Institution 1986.

ONG, W. 1982. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

OSCAR, B. 1990. Droving Cattle to Broome. In Bunuba Stories. Recorded and Transcribed by Alan Rumsey Available at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

POVINELLI, B. 1993. Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

RUMSEY, A. 1981. Kinship and Context among the Ngarinyin. Oceania 51:181-92.

SAHLINS, M. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SANSOM, B. 1980. The Camp at Wallaby Cross. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

1982. The Aboriginal Commonality. In R. Berndt, (ed.) Aboriginal Sites, Rights and Resource Development, pp. 117-38. Perth: University of Western Australia.

SHARP, L. 1974 [1953]. Steel Axes for Stone-age Australians. In T.G. Harding and B.J. Wallace (eds) Cultures of the Pacific Selected Readings, pp. 69-90. New York: Free Press.

STANNER, W.E.H. 1963. On Aboriginal Religion. Sydney: Oceania Publications.

STREET, B. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

STREET, B. (ed.) 1993. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SUTTON, P. 1982. In J. Heath, F. Merlan and A. Rumsey (eds) 1982.

1988. Myth as History, History as Myth. In I. Keen (ed.) Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia, pp. 251-68. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

SWAIN, T. 1993. A Place for Strangers: Toward a History of Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

TURNER, T. 1988. Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact with Western Society. In J. Hill (ed.) Rethinking History and Myth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 235-81.

WIRRUNMARRA, B. 1990. My Life Story. In Bunuba Stories. Recorded and Transcribed by Alan Rumsey. Available at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

Alan Rumsey University of Sydney