'Narratives of survival in the post-colonial North.' (Aboriginal Histories, Aboriginal Myths)

Merlan, Francesca

INTRODUCTION

In a volume (Hill 1988) which was one of the direct inspirations for the present contributors' holding a conference on 'myth and history' regarding Aboriginal Australia, Turner (1988:252) suggests that what may usefully be meant by myth is the formulation of 'essential' properties of social experience in terms of 'generic events', while 'history' is concerned with the level of 'particular relations among particular events'. With respect to Australian Aborigines, for many years anthropologists had assumed that the primordial attachments which stemmed from the 'givens' (as construed for quite some time, primary structures) of Aboriginal social life were well delineated, principally including kin relationship and attachment to country, and the linkages between them. 'Myths' were chiefly stories concerned with primordial creation of the countryside, and inscription of enduring meanings upon it through the activities of creator figures. Differences between 'myth' and other forms of narrative were largely, if not entirely, made in terms of content.

Questioning of the myth-history antinomy has come about fairly recently with respect to Australian Aboriginal material, largely as a result of anthropologists having increasingly acknowledged the presence within collected bodies of Aboriginal narrative of many elements and motifs recognizable as deriving from western social history and experience, but deployed in ways that defy interpretation as narrowly 'historical'. The fact that increasing recognition has been accorded to such elements is itself evidence of a certain liberalization within anthropology, of a lesser commitment to notions of socio-cultural formations as bounded and impenetrable to history, and of a rising concern with developing alternative bases of understanding and interpretation. In part, this has involved theorization of mimesis, specifically the 'other' imitating 'us', as anthropology's attempt to grasp its own modernist practices (Taussig 1992). There seems to be good evidence that such western elements have long been present in Aboriginal narrative (see e.g., Petri and Petri-Odermann 1970, based on fieldwork of the 1930s). But such phenomena received relatively little attention, and in fact may have often been set aside and devalued as evidence of 'culture contact', during a long period in which many practitioners of Aboriginalist anthropology conceived its primary task as documenting traditional cultures (for commentary on this and on changes in focus, see Elkin 1958, 1963, Berndt 1982, Hamilton 1982).

Indeed, before anthropologists generally perceived the importance of taking account of the nature and presence of western elements in Aboriginal narrative, it seems to have been their absence which was more widely remarked upon. Especially noted, given a certain pervasive western sense of the 'existentially unique' (Sahlins 1985:146) character of events of colonial contact, was an alleged absence of reference to them. From the high period of Aboriginalist structural anthropology we have a (now, almost notorious) number of claims that Aborigines 'deny' history, by somehow completely eliminating from collective memory any trace of events of colonial encounter that cannot be accommodated within a totalizing cosmology (Sharp 1974:117). In this vein (as Sutton 1988 has ably discussed), myth is largely seen as charter for a social order which remains essentially distinct from western influences (Berndt 1970, cf. comments in Hiatt 1975, also Sutton op. cit.); or to the extent that it does not, disintegrates into something no longer characterizable as an order but in terms of negativities of 'detribalization' and social 'breakdown' (Sharp 1974). I shall return in later portions of this essay to the issue of absence or paucity of reference to events of the colonial era, an observation I think cannot be completely dismissed, but requires reconsideration in terms other than those of totalizing cosmology.

Maddock (1988), in seeking to characterize the structure of certain Aboriginal narratives which incorporate themes of encounter and exchange between whites and Aborigines, initially appears to pursue a rather positivist inquiry into whether these might be deemed 'historical', though in the end he writes that there is no reason to see them as 'orally transmitted records'. He also suggests that though the unbalanced exchange which characterizes many of them results more from 'Aboriginal beliefs about primordial beings than from (retrospective) reflections on original dealings between Aborigines and aliens', there is indication in them of the 'emergence of political myths' (Maddock 1988:28). Sutton (1988) has usefully proposed some reformulation of the myth-history debate, discussing 'myth as history' and 'history as myth'. In relation to the first, following indications in Strehlow (1970), and discussion in Hiatt (1975), he shows that charter 'myths' which are part of social processes of contestation and validation of claims to land can sometimes be seen to have a clear relationship to the travels and life histories of involved persons, and that in some narratives the distinction between 'dreamings' and persons is blurred (cf. Keen 1994:114-5). Secondly, he shows that what might be taken, because of their reference to documentable figures and events, as more narrowly historical narratives, have a mythical character. This is so in that these figures and events are constructed, not in their supposedly normal historical specificity, but as exemplary of a state of affairs still valid or normative in the present. Perhaps the now considerable corpus of Aboriginal Captain Cook stories, of limited facticity but penetratingly comparative and ethical character (Middleton 1977, Kolig 1980, Rose 1984 and this collection, Maddock 1988, McDonald and Wainburranga 1988), have become prime illustrations of the potentially historical quality of myth and the mythical quality of apparent history.

Pursuing a variant deconstruction of the 'myth-history' opposition, Morphy and Morphy (1984) take a Barthean (1973) perspective. This does not take as primary some notion of opposition between a category of narrative of 'concrete events' versus one epitomizing cultural structure, but seeks to locate a common ground between them in the historicity of myth. The commonality being sought may, I think, be seen as related to Foucault's (1972, 1977) concept of 'discursive practices', under which head he comprehends delimitation of a field of objects, definition of perspectives for the agent of knowledge, and a play of practices that makes intelligible exclusions and choices. The finding of common ground in a notion of myth as the 'speech' of history (Barthes 1973) also brings to mind Sahlin's (1985:153) resolution of the antinomy of the structure of a cultural order versus history in terms of culture as 'the organization of the current situation in the terms of a past'. All these attempted resolutions of structuralist antinomies, in short, work towards widening the grounds of intelligibility of representational practices of people formerly deemed to be 'without history'.

In examining narratives of the colonial period from Ngalakan people of the Roper river in the Northern Territory, Morphy and Morphy (1984) observe that, despite a fifty-year period of intense frontier conflict and frequently violent settler-Aboriginal interaction, in only one account was there reference to whites causing the death of a named (that is, specific) Aborigine - and even in this account, the death was most directly attributed to a crocodile who bit a woman fleeing from unknown whites, rather than to them.

Morphy and Morphy suggest that the most enduring production in local Aboriginal narratives is the image of the 'wild blackfellow'. This is the Aborigine as yet ignorant of white-introduced foods, products, clothes and practices. The wild blackfellow is unable to make himself intelligible through speech, thus able to communicate only through gesture, creating the need for station Aborigines to mediate between 'wild blacks' and whites. Morphy and Morphy argue that in deploying the image of the wild blackfellow, Aborigines distance themselves from the colonial period. They are able to think of events of that time as having happened to Aboriginal 'others' (Fabian 1983), rather than to themselves, or people with whom they claim connection. The image is thus a construction of discontinuity between present and past, severing the connexion between known or remembered Aborigines and the conflicts of the early colonial period. These Aboriginal narratives thus need bear no close relation 'to what actually happened or was' (Morphy and Morphy 1984:462). They are myths of the past that fit the conditions of the present, the post-frontier period in which Aborigines and whites have lived not in opposition, but in (unequal) conjunction (loc. cit., p. 474). Morphy and Morphy also suggest that a key element in shaping the character of colonial era stories was the degree of Aboriginal participation in the violence perpetrated upon Aborigines who refused to comply, or were seen as threats and hindrances to the pastoral regime:

'. . . the fact that killings by whites within living memory involved the cooperation and participation of blacks is one of the main reasons why the role of whites in invading the country and killing Aborigines is played down. These killings have been projected back to the period before station blacks existed, to the time of the nameless, ignorant and aggressive "wild blacks"' (Morphy and Morphy 1984:475).

They also suggest that the present era, in which land rights issues have become significant, has the potential to wipe out the sense of the last few decades as a pastoral Golden Age, and bring about a re-valuing of traditional culture as ideological resource, as part of a heightened sense of opposition on the part of Aborigines towards whites.

On the basis of my own research in the Roper Valley as well as adjacent areas of the Northern Territory, among Aboriginal people who have individually as well as regionally somewhat varying social experiences and senses of the past, I generally agree that there is a paucity of remembered detail that can confidently be seen as having been transmitted from the early frontier era to the present. Nevertheless, some of Morphy and Morphy's conclusions are open to question. The work of Rose (1991) shows for the Victoria River area a rather large and historically particularizing corpus of narratives. Some of the stories that she relates are ones in which killings are attributed to particular whites with a well-established historical identity, both in Aboriginal and white terms. Aboriginal story-tellers also exhibit a clear consciousness and specific knowledge of Aborigines' participation in episodes of violence, both as victims and as perpetrators. It may be suggested that Aborigines in this particular area lived in conditions such that they never constructed a view of the proximate past as Golden Age in the way that Morphy and Morphy propose for the Roper Valley, and so did not suppress narratives of frontier violence to the same extent that Roper Valley Aborigines did.

I am sceptical of this as sufficient explanation. My own research in the Roper Valley, particularly among close neighbours and associates of the Ngalakan (Merlan 1978), indicates that these people, too, have imagery of the mangalanggar 'wild blackfella', as Morphy and Morphy report for the Ngalakan; but also a strong consciousness that Aborigines who camped outside the station purview in the early days were susceptible to being regarded and treated like 'wild blacks' i.e., contextually defined. They not only have knowledge of particular whites who committed or commissioned killings of known Aboriginal people, but also openly acknowledge the role that specific, known Aborigines played in assisting in the tracking and killing of other Aborigines in the frontier period. Old people spoke freely, without excessive or even obvious constraint, of the role that their grandfathers and (in two cases) fathers had played in shooting out Aborigines. One of the things that struck me most forcibly about the experience of being told about these matters was the extent to which descendants of these men were able to see their forebears' role as continuous with positive Aboriginal capacities (in hunting, tracking, and so on), rather than as a source of shame and grounds for contemporary recrimination among the familial survivors of the frontier era. In other words, descendants' constructions of these men were not of them as collaborators and Quislings, but generally of them as men of acknowledged prowess, who when called upon, brought this to bear upon the project of hunting out Aborigines who had not submitted to the impositions and demands of the station regime. My experience therefore suggests to me that one cannot too easily assume that Aborigines would necessarily suppress their knowledge of their forebears' participation in killings because of a clear-cut negative moral valuation of this role under all circumstances. It also suggests to me that meaningful assessment of operative moral values at particular periods is a difficult task, demanding enough with respect to the present but perhaps even more so where the evidence must be largely or solely derived from people's representations of the past. Among the oldest Aboriginal people with whom I have worked since 1976 (including Ngalakan), knowledge of the role of (usually, specific) Aborigines in early violence has been quite general. It is very likely that the consciousness of this will be significantly different$among younger people, and may not be reproduced among them.

While consideration has been given to the nature and relevance of a distinction between 'myth' and 'history' in Aboriginal narrative, the latter has often been translated into English and/or synoptically rendered. Partly for this reason, the work on myth and history has scarcely come together with a smaller volume of writing concerning changes and continuities in Aboriginal modes of discursive representation (Muecke 1983, Morris 1988). Muecke (1983) in particular has lamented that the recent rise of 'Aboriginal history' has taken place largely in academic English. There have however been some efforts to render especially Aboriginal narrative forms of English in the written medium, see e.g. Beckett 1993), as well as principally linguists' attempts to render narratives in Aboriginal languages, or English translation, in ways that indicate the discursively constitutive and expressive rather than merely contingent nature of their various levels of structure; e.g. Muecke, Rumsey and Wirrunmarra 1985, Merlan 1994, Bohemia and McGregor 1995). In the area of discursive representation there remain to be explored many concepts of narrative structuration which perhaps exist prior to, that is to say at a different and possibly more fundamental level than, what has been said about the distinction between myth and history.

While there is evident usefulness in some kind of distinction between dimensions of myth and history, in Turner's sense of the difference between narrativization of 'essential' or perhaps enduring properties of social experience versus the more particular, the interpenetration of the mythic and the historical in Aboriginal-white 'contact' stories alerts us to the difficulty of recognizing the difference between them, and asserting a categorical distinction. It makes us more aware of what may be a very general Aboriginal mode of juxtaposing the enduring and the contingent within a wider framework which allows and presupposes the continuous interpenetration and interaction of the two (as has been argued regarding canonical modes of western historiography as well, see White 1978).

A highly significant and general form of this relation is illustrated in Myers' (1986) discussion of the levels of meaning of ngurra 'country' in Pintupi. Myers (1986:55) refers to the persistently dual meanings of ngurra as the human creation of temporary 'camp' in which people live, and as the Dreaming creation of 'country'. Because at these levels named places acquire their identity through the activities of mythological personages and of living persons, ngurra is always based on a social reference:

'Neither "camp" nor "country" exist apart from the significance created by action or event, but "country" retains an identity enduring through time as something beyond human choice . . . Human and Dreaming action each contribute to the definition of landscape, although their constructions have differing properties. In relation to human action, one is historical while the other might be termed transhistorical' (ibid).

Elsewhere, Myers (loc. cit., p. 64-5) illustrates the interpenetration of these two levels of significance in everyday social action. People camping at Yayayi, finding an unusual rock form, tentatively and then more confidently and concertedly associated it with a kangaroo dreaming already conceived as associated with the area. Myers refers to this process as 'transforming landscape into narrative'. From my own experience of Aborigines' relations to country, I can easily imagine and illustrate the converse process, the transformation of narrative and its emplacement in landscape.

Having recognized these processes with respect to landscape, Myers (1986:68) writes that

'[H]istory . . . is incorporated into the unchanging, ever-present features of the physical landscape. The question is really to what extent this incorporation of history occurs: What endures and what is erased? The concept of ngurra offers considerable flexibility for expressing different kinds of relationships between persons and between persons and space, but it also elides their differences. The Pintupi inclusion of two levels of organization, "camp" and "country", in a single term reflects this possibility of reification, of action being converted to a structure that becomes the foundation for further action'.

Myers' (1986:69) identification of this and other forms of the 'erasure of the historical', while reminiscent of earlier claims (mentioned above) concerning Aboriginal denial of history, differs strongly from them. Those claims were totalizing, seeing the alternatives as either the complete incorporation of the contingent within structures of enduringness (in Sharp 1974, totemic myth and religion), or 'breakdown' of what was assumed to be the hermetically sealed social organization. Myers, in contrast, is concerned to give proper recognition to the dialectical interplay between the enduring and the transitory as his main finding concerning the character of social process. This is reflected throughout his Pintupi ethnography in an emphasis upon the 'negotiated' quality of life. With reference to landscape, what is mythical and historical is not completely and definitively given (despite Aboriginal representations of the Dreaming as unchanging), but is part of the negotiated, experiential formation of the socio-spatial dimensions of the lived world. However, I daresay that for many Aborigines today, the enduring forms of landscape are much less the medium and substance of negotiated meanings than is true of Myers' portrayal of the Pintupi. It is important to explore the penetrability and adaptability of Aboriginal social process, and the contemporary domains of signification in the complex inter-cultural present in which Aboriginal people live, constituting their sense of the exemplary and the transitory in relation to it.

Having observed above that a number of structurally-informed visions (Barthes, Sahlins) of the relation between structure and event, myth and history, have converged in trying to formulate the historicity of myth (and in Sahlins' case, of 'culture'), we may usefully bring into relation with Aboriginal narrative reference to those aspects of Foucault's concept of discursive practices that attempt to broaden its social location, and theoretically secure its historical movement. Foucault (1977:200) does not want to limit the notion of discursive practices simply to the production of discourse, and thus must see the notion of transformation as complex and multiply located. Discursive practices

'. . . are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them . . . The transformation of a discursive practice is linked to a whole range of usually complex modifications that can occur outside of its domain (in the forms of production, in social relationships, in political institutions), inside it (in its techniques for determining its object, in the adjustment and refinement of its concepts, in its accumulation of facts), or to the side of it (in other discursive practices)'.

One of the necessary steps to better conceptualizing 'myth' and 'history' in Aboriginal narrative is to explore the contemporary formulation of domains of signification. Anthropologists are properly less confident than before that the important 'givens' of social experience can be unproblematically identified. I would like to turn to consideration of two narratives, and explore their relation to the social experience of some Aboriginal people who live in the vicinity of Katherine town in the Northern Territory.

CONTEMPORARY EXPERIENTIAL MATERIALS OF MYTH AND HISTORY

Elsie Raymond is a Wardaman woman, now in her sixties, who has lived continuously in fringe camps and sometimes urban housing around Katherine town since the 1960s. But she grew up in her own, Wardaman country, one hundred and fifty kilometres and more south-west of Katherine town, principally on pastoral stations called Delamere and Willeroo. These stations are socio-historically continuous with others of the Victoria River region chronicled in Rose (1991), in the sense that frontier violence seems to have been unrelenting and intense well into this century. Some documentary historical detail will help to contextualize aspects of Elsie's narratives.

Part of present Delamere Station was first taken up by Alfred Giles, operating from Springvale, the first station established in 1879 only a few kilometres from the location of the present town of Katherine. Giles had made a first northern trip of exploration in the interests of survey and construction of the Overland Telegraph lines in 1870-71 (Giles 1926). Having become convinced that the land was 'idle' (Giles 1926:xi) and merely occupied by 'savage tribes' (Giles 1926: x), he accepted with alacrity the invitation of Dr. William Browne, a London-based financier, to settle and manage a property in the Katherine area, the eventual Springvale. Arriving in the north after a trek from Adelaide of over twenty months, and having built yards, huts, a lime kiln and a few other structures at a site he deemed favorable, Giles became aware that the sheep he had driven north were dying off in the Springvale area, their coats pierced by grasses, and hunted by predatory birds and Aborigines (of which there is sparse but telling mention in his diaries). He commissioned some of his white workers and 'blackboys' he had brought with him from the Centre to explore for better sheep country, and it was thus that he determined to take up Delamere Downs in 1880, and stocked it, initially with 3000 sheep, in the dry season of 1881. He left white stockmen at Delamere, and the depredations of Aborigines upon stock and upon camp stores, and subsequent ruin of property upon desertion of the camp by the whites, scandalized Giles (1928:176-9). There is no word in the diaries of any retaliatory action around Delamere, though there are mentions of encounters during the journeys of exploration with 'immense numbers of savages' (1928:162). There is just silence, but the reader may consider that the frontier ethic of the time enjoined both the 'teaching of lessons' to 'savages', and minimal documentary reference to this.

By the time Ruby Roney went to live on Delamere in 1904 with her uncle Paddy Cahill (later crocodile shooter and, from 1925, the first manager of Oenpelli mission station in what was to become western Arnhem Land), she recorded that 'The natives were still hostile in that country and every man travelled armed' (Roney interview). She also observed that no houses were then built 'near creeks and things for the natives to creep on them. . .' and that

'The first year we never ventured away from the house alone but we weren't worried by the outside natives though sometimes when the horse boy [one of five Aborigines regularly living at the station] went down the paddock to bring up the horses of the day, he would report to my uncle that he saw a strange black fella's track. But they never molested us'.

Willeroo was first settled and partly stocked in 1885. It is made more explicit in contemporary documentary accounts that there was considerable 'trouble' with the natives, and that whites took action against them. This station was originally established in the Moray Range, at a place Wardaman people alternatively call 'old Willeroo', and by its Aboriginal name, Monborrom. ('New' Willeroo is set in flat country, away from the base of the ranges), The old site is within the area that Elsie considers her 'father country', that is, to which she has ties of substantive identification through her father.

Willeroo manager William Sydney Scott was attacked and speared by 'a horde of wild savages' at nearby McClure Waterhole in October 1892 (Northern Territory Times and Gazette, January 1893). When news reached Springvale and Katherine, there was enormous outrage among resident whites. The supposed Aboriginal perpetrators were tracked up by an avenging party outfitted from Katherine, and we are left to guess at the scale of retaliation. By the time Baldwin Spencer (1914, 1928:899-904) visited Willeroo in 1913 to pursue ethnological research, he was assisted by owner-manager Tom Pearce (the former owner of Katherine's first pub, the Sportsman's Arms, and someone whom Alfred Giles had originally met droving bullocks north with his father, Old Tom Pearce)(1) in collecting information from the Mudburra and 'Waduman' natives who predominated at the station. While the intensity of frontier violence abated in this century, it was followed by a 'modern' period of materially meagre and highly oppressive and unequal living and working conditions imposed upon Aborigines by whites engaged in the pastoral industry.

Elsie was born at Delamere, probably in the early to mid 1930s. For much of her lifetime three adjoining stations, Delamere, Willeroo and Manbulloo with its homestead just a few kilometres south and west of Katherine town, were jointly owned and managed by Vestey's, a British pastoral company. Because she 'walked around', between and among these stations and sometimes, as her story below tells, on extended foraging trips away from the established Aboriginal camps, Elsie had close experience from her childhood and 'young time' of a wide expanse of this country. She is especially knowledgeable concerning the dreaming associations and stories of what is considered Wardaman country, within which her 'father country' takes in Old Willeroo, present Innesvale Station homestead (Jorrgonyi), and much of northern Delamere, including a Lightning Brothers dreaming place now quite renowned for its spectacular rock art (see Merlan 1989 for a map of the Wardaman area). While young, Elsie worked for considerable periods, especially in the house and dining room at Willeroo. From the Wartime she and members of her family were periodically at Manbulloo and around Katherine town; her father died at one of Katherine's wartime Aboriginal 'compounds' in 1945, at which time Elsie returned to Delamere. She came into town permanently with her younger children and husband in the 1960s, where the latter worked for a long time at the hospital as yardman, and Elsie had various jobs as domestic. They camped in humpies and swags, at the hospital and around the race course, until in 1970 they were deemed sufficiently 'responsible' by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to be offered occupancy of one of the first six houses expressly built for Aborigines, of whom there were rapidly increasing numbers in town, largely due to the implementation of the Pastoral Award (minimum wage), and consequent 'push-off' of Aborigines from station work. The house let to Elsie was located on what was then the eastern fringe of Katherine town. That is where I first met her in 1976. Her 'camp' was always a gathering place for her close family and countrymen, and she had a well-established pattern of movements around the town's Aboriginal camps, to the slaughter-yard where Aborigines known to one of the managers were allowed to collect offal, and up and down the town's central street to the offices of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, to Post Office and taxi rank, and to Katherine's main stores and convenience stores. Her eldest children remember the experience of living at Willeroo, one of her eldest sons having done stockwork there. Elsie's younger sons had grown to adolescence in Katherine, and her very youngest was of primary school age when I first met the family. For his part, Kaiser, Elsie's husband, had done stockwork at Wave Hill and elsewhere in the Victoria River district when younger, and so had similar experience of the transition from pastoral station life to town that Elsie had had, and similar early experience of 'walking around country' in the course of camp life and station work. On the pastoral stations, Aboriginal camp life and station life involving whites were spatially and socially separatist in many respects, but also interpenetrating, life on one side of the divide between Aboriginal camp and white station always conducted with various kinds of awareness of life on the other side.

From the time I first met them, Elsie and Kaiser were lobbying to gain some sort of land grant on Willeroo station property in order to establish a camp for their extended family there. Their efforts came to very little for a long time. The federal Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which had then just been enacted, established the means for Aborigines to make claims on traditional bases to areas of Vacant Crown Land. Though Kaiser was a Katherine-area representative to the Northern Land Council for a time, 'pastoral Aborigines' were not benefitted by its land claim provisions, their homelands having been largely taken up as station properties from an early date, and so not subject to claim. This was the problem the family confronted for years, since excisions from pastoral properties had to be worked out in agreement with the stations. However, by 1992 Elsie had been granted a small freehold excision in her 'father country', at Johnstone's Waterhole, in southern Willeroo.

Evidently, in the 1970s the (then) Department of Aboriginal Affairs considered Elsie and her family one of those better equipped to deal with the complexities of town life including the difficult situation of their being given access to a house and some facilities that other Aborigines did not yet have - and a cash economy. But if the present was complex, Elsie's sense of the past was and is, in many ways, no less so. She has an enormous fund of knowledge of dreaming mythology, particularly relating to Willeroo and Delamere country, but also a strong sense, if not always great narrative detail, of the course and kinds of events of colonial history there. She indicates particular places where she was told that massacres occurred, tells of early encounters of Aborigines with police and travelling whites at others, of shootings, poisonings and, even, the dynamiting of Aborigines hiding in a particular cave at Yiwangarlangarlay, Paddy's Spring on Delamere (named after Paddy Cahill). She thinks of many of these episodes in terms of specific Aborigines who were involved, some as the victims of shootings. She has a commanding grasp of the details of relatedness, past and present, among Aborigines of this area. Her sense of white-black interaction on the stations is also complex, her awareness of material and social inequalities never having become crystallized as a view of completely structured and determined oppression, partly because of her lifetime sense of the complexities of sexual relationships between Aboriginal women and white and 'half-caste' station workers, and the agency that Aboriginal girls and women might wish to claim for themselves in these matters. Her own younger half-brother whom she cared for when he was an infant was the son of the Chinese cook at Delamere, and was adopted by Tom Fisher, long-term white manager of Manbulloo Station (see Ogden 1992), significantly changing the nature of his interactions with his Aboriginal family for the remainder of his life. Elsie, like many other Aboriginal women of this area, suffered the trauma of having her two eldest children taken away by Welfare to a 'half-caste' home in Darwin. In order to secure the children, the patrol officer told her they needed medical attention. When she realized they had been taken away and institutionalized, she and her husband made their way, with difficulty, to Darwin to see them. Both children later returned as young adults to Katherine, retaining contact with their mother but again, leading a life partly different from their mother's in its range of social contacts, material forms, and outlook.

Through and partly because of all this, Elsie is a person who can speak of whites in a differentiating manner. Also, and partly giving rise to that differentiating disposition, she is personally steeped in and committed to values that she and others around her recognize as distinctively Aboriginal: material openhandedness, the intensive sociality of familism (which, though extensible, always asserts the importance of differentiation), and respect for those 'different' others combined with a rejection of the implications of hierarchy and subordination in both Aborigines and whites (which Aborigines of the Katherine area tend to critically designate in English as being or acting 'flash'). The sources of her knowledge, authority, and personal position among Aborigines of Katherine are, literally, grounded in a form of life which in many ways is not being reproduced. It is true, however, that over the past twenty years or so, what are regarded as 'traditional' Aboriginal forms of knowledge (of country, dreaming, and so on) have been re-valued in Australia (as they have in other Fourth World contexts, see e.g. Turner 1991). Elsie has thus participated in archaeological and 'rock art' projects, in film-making, in sacred sites inquiries, as well as in my long-term research on languages and social history of the Katherine area. Within the wider society, re-valuation of Aboriginal 'tradition' has generally been on the basis of an objectification and conceptual isolation of particular aspects of Aboriginal life, rather than growth of sophistication about them as part of and in relation to rapidly changing forms of social practice. Indeed, Elsie and some other Aborigines of her age and background, too, sometimes see as loss and contemporary confusion the weakening of knowledge and indigenous meanings which derive from a landed form of life. They speak of change in significant institutional forms, such as younger people marrying 'any way', or having 'no skin' (that is, marrying or having sexual relations without regard to the prescriptions which still inform the views of many older Aboriginal people concerning the acceptability of unions), and of the ubiquitous effects of alcohol.

Given this past and present, how does someone like Elsie narratively construct the values and meanings of a distinctive Aboriginal domain? There is little doubt in my mind that Elsie does feel that Aboriginal dispositions and knowledges are distinctively different from those generally found among white people, though over a life-time she has developed a wide familiarity with and tolerance for different forms of life. The two narratives, given below with commentary, seem to me illustrative of Elsie's modes of creating a distinctive Aboriginal domain which carries her sense of the past into the present, and attributing positive value and contemporary relevance to that past.

The first narrative was recorded in 1989, at Elsie's camp, with a number of members of her immediate family present, not always closely attending to our talk, but sometimes coming and going. Some of us had recently returned from a trip to Willeroo and Delamere, where we had been$visiting country and recording stories about places on those stations. Though over the years Elsie had told me about her early life many times, at greater length and in snatches, she was obviously stimulated by our recent trip to talk again about her youth at Delamere. I did not ask her to tell me any particular form of story for the tape-recorder, but just to talk about her time at Delamere however she liked. She spoke in Wardaman, which she has been teaching me since I first met her. The original Wardaman narrative may be found in Merlan (1994:331-66). The transcript's line structure, and consequently the line structure of the English translation I give here, is prosodically motivated (see discussion of 'tone units' in Merlan 1994), that is, by the intersection of intonation patterns and major pause breaks of the Wardaman original. The translation is into Standard English, rather than the Kriol spoken by many Aborigines of the Katherine area, including Elsie.

'ELSIE RAYMOND TALKING OF HER GIRLHOOD'

1. my father's mother Wuluwari

2. and old woman Yidujba

3. used to take me for black plum

4. black plum, when the rains used to slacken

5. they used to take me for black plum, walking around and camping out

6. for two Saturdays

7. the two old women used to take me

8. a long way

9. you've seen that hill?

10. that way from Mardird-ja? [place on Delamere]

11. you are that way

12. over there on top from it

13. that way

14. the hill over there

15. we climbed up

16. today [reference is to our recent trip]

17. from there we looked down that way

18. from that way

19. the two old women used to take me

20. they used to get black plum for me

21. and honey

22. there was no tucker [i.e., no rations, white man's food]

23. the two of them used to take me far

24. when I was little

25. like that [showing with hand]

26. they used to take me

27. they used to keep me in one place

28. only black plum

29. they used to get black plum for me, me too

30. I used to get it too

31. I used to fill up a billy can

32. then we'd take it to a flat stone

33. to dry

34. we put it to dry on a piece of bark

35. to dry

36. we put it to dry on bark, it dried out [illustrating]

37. how did they cook it?

38. with stones, with a flat stone

39. they heated the flat stone in the fire

40. they busted it

41. they heated it right through

42. it smelled good

43. that black plum juice

44. they put it on me, rubbed it into my armpits

45. and crotch

46. the two of them rubbed it onto me

47. to blacken me

48. the two old women

49. they rubbed and rubbed in it, the black plum juice

50. they kept me

51. my father didn't look for me

52. no

53. he sent me

54. 'you follow the two old women'

55. they taught me

56. 'Nawurla?' [Elsie's subsection or 'skin' name]

57. 'What?'

58. 'from around here the white men shot them

59. they shot us

60. mustered us up

61. from that way downriver

62. from Yuluy

63. right here white men shot them

64. at Yuluy'

65. two

66. my father's mothers

67. they used to talk to me

68. Nangala [FM's subsection category or 'skin']

69. they used to talk to me, those two old women

70. and I, awake

71. talking, you know

72. in talking, the two of them put me to sleep

73. wild people, they didn't talk more to me, until tomorrow, wild people

74. 'they shot them

75. long ago, the white men

76. those over there'

77. they didn't talk to me, I slept now

78. I was asleep

79. they shook me now, 'Nawurla, Nawurla', nothing, I was asleep now

80. early in the morning I got up

81. I asked them

82. 'you tell me'

83. they talked to me now

84. 'yes, white men shot us, they shot us from here, they shot us up along the hills'

85. 'is that so?'

86. 'yes'

87. 'later on, when you get big, you tell them the story now'

88. my father's mother took me camping out

89. for two Saturdays, my father was crying for me now

90. he was worrying and grieving for me now

91. old man grandfather

92. Berru

93. who had that old woman, my father's mother [i.e., her husband]

94. he sent that old man now

95. 'you bring Nawurla and all of them home now'

96. so the old man came with food

97. he brought food, meat, corned beef, sugar and tealeaf for us

98. [he came] searching, with meat and everything

99. as for us, we were eating only plums and honey

100. and eggs

101. of what's it

102. the crested pigeon

103. the crested pigeon

104. do you know [the word] galawarra [to FM]

105. spinifex pigeon

106. I searched for that bird, and put by the eggs

107. they taught me

108. those two old women have died now

109. well, I knew everything now

110. I knew, for they had told me many times

111. 'when you get big

112. you mustn't forget

113. talk to them'

114. old woman, my aunt

115. [and] my father's mother

116. used to take me right away, those two old women

117. not for one night's camp

118. for two Saturdays!

119. sometimes

120. they took me for three Saturdays

121. three Saturdays

122. we stayed and got eggs full up, one billy can after the other

123. the eggs of the spinifex pigeon

124. they're good too, like fowl eggs

125. they boiled them for me

126. in the billy

128. I cooked them well and ate them

129. what sort of yam is that?

130. I ate up the plums

131. and I ate eggs

132. I ate the eggs up quickly

133. like chook eggs

134. like that

135. I ate it up

136. and I ate all the honey

137. and I lay down to sleep

138. early in the morning the old woman took me

139. my auntie

140. my grandmother stayed put

141. 'take the child, you two go look for cheeky yam'

142. and the two of us went around looking for cheeky yam

143. riverine yam

144. I asked the old lady

145. 'Auntie?'

146. 'what sort of thing is magulu?' [cheeky yam]

147. 'Hey, come on, I'll show you'

148. she took me and spotted a yam wrapped around a tree

149. 'this is it', she said to me

150. 'dig it now'

151. I dug now

152. I opened it out

153. I dug

154. yam, like this

155. I opened it out and heaped it up

156. it was all around a single tree

157. we went to another tree

158. and we dug all around

159. we covered up the what's it, the little ones

160. we only got the big tubers

161. we got all of them

162. and took them back

163. the two old ladies cooked them in a ground oven

164. they didn't take other children, only me, one child

165. in the oven the two of them covered it and cooked it

166. until it was done

167. the two of them took it to the river

168. they stripped off the skins in the water now

169. they stripped and put the skins in corkwood

170. in a carrying dish

171. a coolamon [English]

172. they put all of it in a carrying dish

173. shoulder bone

174. the shoulder bone of a kangaroo

175. they had (one)

176. they sliced it

177. they sliced all of it

178. and they put grass underneath it

179. heaped up stones, and put grass underneath

180. they carried the yam now and tipped it into the water

181. Nid-niiid [sound made by cicada, a connection of which to cheeky yam is part of a familiar Wardaman animal myth]

182. nid-niiid, they said now [to promote leaching of the yam's toxin]

183. they put it all in the water

184. it stayed for one day now

185. and early the next morning

186. they gave me a big billycan like this

187. a clean one

188. 'round food, that food of yours'

189. what's it

190. 'it is mild now'

191. 'your food'

192. we went to the river, I saw it like that, yes

193. I ate it that way

194. it wasn't bitter

195. I put water, I dipped up water

196. I filled it up

197. right full

198. and another billy full

199. and another billy full

200. the old women [did] theirs separately

201. and mine by itself

202. in a little billy

203. the two of them ate and left me a little, they covered mine up

204. covered it up

205. I ate, there was no bread and damper, no

206. these things, honey

207. and cheeky yam only

208. black plum

209. and the eggs of the spinifex pigeon

210. just that

211. there were no food rations

212. I was like Livia [one of Elsie's granddaughters, about ten]

213. 'let's go home', grandfather came back to us with food

214. old man

215. Berru

216. he came to us over yonder

217. 'I'll have to take you back now, Jabarda [Elsie's father's 'skin'] is crying for the child'

218. he said to the old woman

219. the sister-in-law

220. of my father's mother

221. 'you take our swags ahead and hang them up'

222. he took our swags with the packhorse

223. the old man took all our swags with the packhorse

224. he took it

225. as for us, we walked behind him with the plums

226. we went, and the two of them saw a goanna

227. old woman

228. auntie

229. my aunt

230. she killed the goanna

231. shut inside [its hole]

232. the old woman dug the goanna, the tail

233. she pulled it

234. and bashed it

235. we went again now

236. and she saw another goanna

237. she dug and pulled the tail

238. pulled it [illustrating]

239. whack!

240. she hit it

241. four like that, four

242. big ones

243. two and two

244. a lot of them

245. we took them and ate dinner now

246. we ate vegetable food

247. what kind of meat? goanna

248. one goanna I took whole for him, for my father

249. and fat!

250. oh, none really! [i.e., the goanna was very sleek]

251. we took it

252. and we kept going

253. home to camp

254. up now

255. to Yerriyn [name of Old Delamere]

256. the two of them took me

257. home

258. what's that place

259. that I named to you this morning?

260. not Yerriyn

262. from the bush

263. we didn't go

264. we went back to Yerriyn

265. to camp

266. we went back

267. 'Oh! the two old women have brought Nawurla back!'

268. the old man said to them

269. 'Hello!' he said

270. my father

271. 'You wild thing!' he said

272. about me, that is

273. I was black then, covered with dirt

274. black

275. dirty bugger

276. I hadn't washed

277. my father cried and called

278. my father's mother

279. 'You can't take her bush!'

280. 'I will so!'

281. 'I'm showing her

282. where white people shot us

283. before

284. these sort of things, I'm teaching her'

285. she said

286. 'Is that so?'

287. 'Yes'

288. I had really grown, bigger than him [child present], like Jason

289. I didn't have breasts, no

290. no, I didn't have breasts

291. only my elder sister had breasts

292. [she was] a big child

293. she had breasts

294. I still didn't

295. 'Let's take her now

296. to her husband'

297. he said

298. my father

299. they took me to that old man

300. who died at Delamere

301. they took me

302. to Willeroo

303. the one Gin.gina [another Wardaman woman, of around Elsie's age or slightly younger] named to you

304. last night, who's that now?

305. Billy Muck

306. to him