Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia.

Merlan, Francesca

Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia

Yasmine Musharbash 2009

Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 272pp, ISBN 9780855756611

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One of the longstanding aims and achievements of anthropology has been to write about different societies and cultures without being judgmental. Yasmine Musharbash writes about a remote Central Australian Indigenous community in this way, focusing (as the title promises) on certain aspects of everyday life. This is a valuable offering, providing insight into the way things work in Indigenous communities that most Australians are not privy to, and that many would like to know more about.

However, Indigenous affairs is a complex product of historical forces and relationships, and it is not possible for writing about remote Indigenous communities to be read 'neutrally'. Of course, just now such writing is partly written, and will be read, in light of the debates about these communities, Indigenous welfare and well-being, and government intervention.

Yasmine Musharbash writes about daily routine among Warlpiri people of Yuendumu, a community 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, established in 1946, and that currently ranges in population from about 500 to 900 people. Common understandings about Aboriginal life are that social relationships are kinbased, dense and intense, and that Aborigines live differently from the Australian mainstream. Musharbash writes about how people live in places like Yuendumu, exploring how their use of houses differs from mainstream expectations, and focusing on what she identifies as the three most important dimensions underlying yapa (Warlpiri Aboriginal) camp life: intimacy, mobility and immediacy.

Musharbash creates a context for the reader to begin to understand yapa difference by telling a story that, at first hearing, makes the aspirations of Warlpiri people sound familiar. She lets us hear from a 17-year-old Warlpiri girl with whom she was sharing a camp one night and, importantly--now that media are widely available, and shape people's life-world and imaginations--watching the game-show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? When Musharbash asked Tamsin what she would do with a million dollars (this might not have been a meaningful question to many Warlpiri until relatively recently), Tamsin replied that she would build a really big house, with lots of rooms, furnished with blankets and video-players, televisions, tables and chairs, and that she would live in it ALL ALONE, in peace and quiet, letting nobody in. But, Tamsin added, this house would be at Yuendumu. Much of the rest of the book aims to contextualise this fantasy in the terms of contemporary Warlpiri life--in fact, defamiliarising it in anthropological style by developing for the reader an understanding of specific Indigenous meanings of space, movement and persons.

The level at which we share something with Warlpiri that allows understanding of these differences is abstract: in Western, as in Indigenous, settings, Musharbash argues (following Heidegger) that there are deep connections between the kinds of spaces and structures we live in, the way we construct and live in them, and how we think about them. For Warlpiri, a fundamental term is ngurra (camp), which refers both to places in the landscape (which Westerners would see as natural), as well as to human dwelling places and shelters. Musharbash grounds her description and explanation in her own postgraduate field research in a Warlpiri jilimi. Camps called by this term used to be temporary living places for widows in mourning; they were places of remove. However, since post-war sedentisation, the number of jilimi in Yuendumu, and their size and complexity, have increased. Musharbash lived in a jilimi, a camp, centred in a four-bedroom house, for a good portion of her concentrated research over 18 months between 1999 and 2001 (but her association with the community has extended over a much longer period). She shows that an amazingly large number of people move through a camp like this. During her main period of fieldwork, more than 160 different people camped in the jilimi. And just as is true for the Indigenous population, it is difficult to identify the jilimi as Musharbash's single and stable residence over this period, as she travelled around and camped with her close 'relatives'. Early in the book she introduces us personally to four women who were 'core' residents of the jilimi, also distinguishing those who were 'regularly', others 'off and on', and some only 'sporadically' there.

Musharbash was interested in the tenor of social relationships. Like any field researcher, she had to face the problem of what sort of data and information to gather, what kinds of systematic and occasional observations to try to make. As to systematic observation, she decided to record sleeping arrangements within the camp in some detail, as indicative of the nature of relationships among people, as well as the high mobility characteristic of people's living patterns. (Anyone who has tried to keep records of this sort will realise the effort it requires.) As noted, while only a few people were 'core' residents of the jilimi, a great many more people slept there, regularly and occasionally. And while there is a great deal about the house, once built, that cannot be materially altered, Musharbash points out that yapa exercise more direct control and expression in the nightly rolling out of swags and variety of ways people assume sleeping positions relative to others. She saw the ways in which people distributed themselves to sleep in the jilimi as a meaningful expression--not simply of 'kin' relations--but also of other aspects of current relationships (e.g. shared activity and sentiment). She makes the important point that in a world where most people consider each other kin, relationships are differentiated on a number of other bases. Not even those related to a senior jilimi resident in the same way (e.g. as her granddaughters) will share life in camp with that person in exactly the same way, or with the same regularity or intensity. Sleeping positions, she tells us, can be understood as 'spatial representations of lived experience'; they are, of course, not only representations, but part of that experience. She provides discussions and mappings of Warlpiri conventions of camp structure, the terms in which Warlpiri think a camp should be oriented and organised spatially. She also explores the kinds of relations that existed at various times among the camp's residents--relations that were enacted partly in the way they organised themselves as sleepers within the camp at night. In all these discussions and mappings, Musharbash locates herself, initially, as a relative outsider, then as someone who is a regular occupant of the camp.

The above should have made clear some of the ways in which Warlpiri social relations of residence and co-sleeping, while associated with a house structure, are not determined by it or narrowly coincident with it: they flow through, around and over it. Camp life presupposes limited fixity, great mobility, immediacy of coming and going, and intimate practices of mutual orientation, 'co-sleeping' (as Musharbash 'co-slept' with various other women) and co-presence within camps. The Warlpiri jilimi is not comparable to a Western middle-class household with a relatively small and fixed family membership, with its rather occasional 'guests' or co-resident, determinate 'other' relatives. Yet despite the very different role of the house here compared to our expectations, it should not be imagined that yapa are indifferent to houses. They are keenly interested in gaining access to them; this is one of the matters of greatest concern and debate at community meetings. Houses play a role in people's lives and are structures around which they organise, aggregate and disperse. Thus houses exist at the intersection of Western and yapa ways of building-dwelling-thinking in the world. Desire for a house should not be misread as the desire to live a Western lifestyle in terms of its core values of privacy, stability and future orientation.

Yet Tamsin's fantasy--with which the book opens and closes--does tell us something. It is a dream of not having to always engage with others; of having a place of her own, where she is not merely stopping with others; a 'calm centre of protected selfhood situated in the middle of life as she knows it'--a rather unrealisable dream of being alone and in control at Yuendumu.

The book focuses mainly on sleeping and living arrangements within the jilimi, with some attention to meal times and other activity. There is mention of children going to school, of people working in the community. But there is only limited discussion of how fluid, mobile, intimate and immediate camp and sleeping arrangements are related to activity more broadly. Relatively little is said about relationships between the sexes--the core jilimi residents were older women with children and grandchildren, who seem to have largely outlived their own marriages. Nothing is said about alcohol (which looms very large in community life in northern Australia where I have done field research) and very little about petrol sniffing or other substance (ab)use.

There is an interesting section, in which most fieldworkers will recognise themselves, on the considerable amount of travel incumbent upon anybody who has a functioning vehicle, and the enormous amount of socio-material preparation and 'hithering and thithering' (Musharbash's phrase) involved in any minor or major endeavour or expedition. Musharbash tells us she drove about 1000 kilometres per week during her fieldwork, most of this within Yuendumu. She also tells a familiar story of being asked to help people collect firewood. Thinking she would do this 'efficiently', she once collected a much greater than ordinary amount, towing a trailer to do this--only to find that storing and planning longer-term in this way did not work out as she hoped. The firewood disappeared in a twinkling, probably used more freely since more was available.

In short, this book is a product of anthropology's relativist tenor and ethnographic groundedness. It does not criticise Warlpiri practice or suggest that Warlpiri should live in houses differently than they do. It sheds light on how they do, and is welcome as an experience-near exposition of a kind of life that is foreign to most Australians. Yet Tamsin's fantasy, as well as an earlier article (Musharbash 2007) in which Musharbash broached the question of what 'boredom' may be in the Warlpiri context--interpreting it as people's subjective sense of the absence or curtailment of meaningful activity in their encapsulated condition--suggest that description, comparison and interpretation are also part of a wider evaluative project.

REFERENCE

Musharbash, Yasmine 2007 'Boredom, time, and modernity: An example from Aboriginal Australia', American Anthropologist 109(2):307-17.

Reviewed by Francesca Merlan, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University <Francesca.Merlan@anu.edu.au>