A Place for Strangers:
Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being
Tony Swain
Cambridge University Press 1993
A Place for Strangers is the first work of anthropology I have read
about the Australian Aborigines; for a would-be anthropologist living in
Australia I am rather shamefully ignorant of the indigenous peoples of
my own country. This volume was an enjoyable education.
A Place for Strangers is, in the author's own words,
about the historical coexistence of two spiritual principles in Australian
Aboriginal Law. On the one hand there is the 'waterhole': a site-based
life potential co-joined with specific human beings. This is immanent
and radically pluralistic. On the other hand there is a continuum which
can lead to 'Heaven': non-locative powers which, in their most
extreme form, are relegated to a distant and unknown place. Here is a
tendency to social and spatial transcendence, potentially pan-
Aboriginal, and at times flirting dangerously with monistic ideals.
My thesis, quite simply, is that the latter principle has emerged, in
varying degrees, as Aboriginal people sought to accommodate
outsiders and make a place for strangers.
The first chapter looks at the first of these principles, at "pre-contact"
Aboriginal ontologies. Swain begins by trying to clear up some of the
confusion about Aboriginal understanding of time and the body,
arguing that their attitude to these is a result of their affirmation of
place as a primary ontological category. He discusses their
construction of place and its stress on relationships and links between
places rather than on autonomous locations. (This part of the book
may be of particular interest in the wake of the recent Mabo High
Court judgment on native title and the attendant political brouhaha.)
The next four chapters are case studies of different encounters of the
Aboriginal people with strangers, in each case focused on the resulting
changes in their world-view.
In the Torres Strait the Australian Aborigines came into (or perhaps
have always been in) contact with the Melanesian peoples of the New
Guinea archipelago. These were Lawful peoples, albeit people with a
different Law, and were linked to the Aborigines through trade and
intermarriage. Cosmologically the Aboriginal response to this contact
was the Hero myths, which are representations of a "connection
without union". The same Heroes feature in rather different Guinean
myths designed to do the same thing -- make the "other"
understandable within their own ontological framework. The conclusion
is that the Aborigines and the Melanesians had a shared cosmology but
different ontologies. The Australian Heroes are trans-locational, and it
is suggested that the matrilineality of many Cape York groups is part
of a response designed to prevent them becoming "transcendental
beings", and thus to maintain the primacy of place.
Traditional theory has it that Aboriginal culture was too inflexible and
rigid to respond to the White invasion in the south-east. Swain argues
that this was not the case at all, and that by the 1830s, when the first
detailed accounts of Aboriginal customs were written, Aboriginal
cosmology and ritual had already changed in response to the invasion.
This response was not a simple matter of borrowing elements of the
invaders' philosophy and religion. Aboriginal groups in south-east
Australia accepted the existence of "evil" not as a result of the
teachings of missionaries, but as a concept necessary to understand
the behaviour of unLawful Whites. They created the All-Father and
raised the sky above the earth not as a direct borrowing from
Christianity but as a deliberate attempt to root their ontology in a
source of power other than the land, since their links to that had been
fractured by dispossession and death.
The contact with Macassan traders in Arnhem land, while nothing like
the White invasion in impact, was more threatening than the contact
across the Torres Strait. The Macassans brought no women with them,
so intermarriage was impossible and exchange of goods was the only
binding force. The All-Mother cult was an attempt to control the
implications of this contact, and the threat of occupation of land by the
visitors. It embodied a vision of Aboriginal unity transcending the
existing locative ontology ("the mother of us all"), but still respecting
plurality of place. The contradiction and tension inherent in this was a
consequence of trying to maintain the importance of place while
interacting with a people with a Land-less Law. The possible origins of
elements of the All-Mother cult are found amongst the Bugis and
Toraja of Sulawesi. The metamorphosis of the All-Mother into a
passive Earth-Mother is a later phenomenon, and one assisted by the
preconceptions of ethnographers, popular writers and missionaries.
The final study is of Aboriginal interaction with pastoral white Australia
over the course of the last century or so, and in particular the history
of some of the major cults. The Mulunga cult was focused around
military opposition to white settlers and was pan-Aboriginal, involving
the breaking down of territorial boundaries. Throughout pastoral
Australia the Aborigines were forced to accept a new moral order that
incorporated such things as rations, pay, labour and a cash economy.
The Djanba cult in the Kimberley region was a response to this which
drew on the universalising elements of the Arnhem land All-Mother cult
and made a place for time - and a universal conception of space - in
the world. The Woagaia cult involved seeking equality within the
framework of White Law, something that allowed the involvement of
Whites such as Don McLeod. Both this cult and its descendant Djulurru
had aspects that are sometimes considered representative of
'Cargoism'; Swain sees these as "an attempt to reestablish cosmic
balance through the symbolic acquisition of equality within a White
Law expressed in terms of commodity wealth". This is tied in with the
beginnings of the land rights movement.
I don't know enough about the Australian Aborigines to evaluate the
central thesis of A Place for Strangers, but it seems plausible enough
and Swain presents his case convincingly. Whether it is correct or not,
the general coverage of Aboriginal ontological frameworks provided is
extremely informative; the summary I have given does little justice to
the depth of this work. A Place for Strangers was lent to me by a
friend, but I was sufficiently impressed by it that I intend to buy my
own copy if the paperback is cheap enough.
