Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation

By Deborah Bird Rose, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004, 236 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Ravi De Costa in the April 2005 issue.

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Deborah Bird Rose's latest work is the product of extended reflections on the ways by which Australians have hitherto understood and engaged with Indigenous cultures, those cultures themselves and what they might tell all Australians about the impending ecological crises the country is facing. In particular, she urges us to work on a new ethics that centres a concern about Indigenous suffering and colonial violence.

Rose develops her 'ethics of decolonisation' as a critique of European philosophical commitments. She sees these embedded in such language as 'wildlife' or 'emancipation' and on which colonial dispossession has proceeded. This critique is attentive of both the spatial and temporal assumptions of the project of colonial modernity, the 'punctuation, replacement, and exclusion'. It is an approach inspired by and drawing heavily on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who argued for an ethics in which 'self' was not substantive and absolute but relational, and for whom the absolutes of certainty or individuality were to be eschewed in favour of connection and the necessity of encounter.

The definition of decolonisation adopted is 'the unmaking of regimes of violence that enforce the disconnection of moral accountability from time and place'. However, the vision of decolonisation Rose then offers us is as a positive process of building something and of making connections, rather than that of 'undoing' or deconstructing the institutions of colonialism. There is a real stress on the need to recognise the ways in which all kinds of Australians are already connected and engaged with each other, a complement to the argument recently put by Stephen Muecke in his Ancient and Modern: Time, culture and Indigenous philosophy. Rose frequently draws our attention to the profound connections with the dead that any ethical encounter with Indigenous peoples must respect.

The book then moves to deploy this ethical framework through a series of analyses of encounters between Indigenous and settler Australians, many of which take place around the Daly and Victoria rivers region of the NT, south of Darwin. Considerable attention is given to the cultural activities of the pastoral industry, in which the engagements are complex and mutable.

For example, Rose insists on the 'awesome' capacity for subversion of rodeo, the 'camp draft' in particular: here the human/animal dichotomy is exposed and surpassed, destabilising the master narrative, in an argument reminiscent of Donna Haraway's recent 'Companion Species manifesto'. Does it matter that the human participants in rodeo may not see this dimension of their activities, basically a celebration of the culture of pastoral capitalism? Rose acknowledges the basic economic orientations of rodeo, but stresses that the complexity of such an event means that it exceeds any dominant framework. Key to this is the physicality of the event, the 'dust, sweat, shit, pain, blood, perhaps even death', that upsets the mentalities of order and control at the heart of modernity. The section concludes with a bold claim about the possibilities for understanding provided by the extreme experiences available on and beyond frontiers: 'As we hold our breath and clench our hands we can find ourselves increasingly excited at the thought that maybe, perhaps, civilisation will not win, ever'.

The book then deploys the ethics quite differently by offering a participant-observer critique of a tourist operation. Rose attempts to imagine how her ethics for decolonisation are affronted by the vernacular violence of a white, self-styled bush legend turned tour operator named Max. In a few hours of the tourist version of Timber Creek (an area of the NT in which Rose has conducted considerable field work), Max reaffirms through his narration and behaviour the core elements of dispossession and settler violence: 'conquest as an accomplished fact, Aboriginal conferral of legitimacy, the linear relationship of Black to White, White supremacy and racial contempt, sexual violence, and maleness as the primary condition for genuine belonging to society and to the land'.

The closing chapter returns to the ethical possibility and promise of decolonisation, detailing a range of activities to protect and respect an area on the south coast of NSW, now the Gulaga National Park. Here Rose juxtaposes the spiritual, social and economic commitments of Indigenous as well as settler peoples, showing the possibilities for co-operation and mutual existence that some have realised are far more substantial than the years of exploitation and conflict.

In addition to drawing on a long career of ethnographic research and oral history-taking, Rose uses a rich variation of texts, including reproductions in the text of drovers' carvings into water tanks, bush ballads, a tour operator's spiel, and settlers' journals, as well as a vast range of scholarship from ecology, feminism, cultural and environmental studies and philosophy. Anthropology has for some time focused its gaze to consider the point of contact, the character of relations and sociality that emerge in and beyond frontiers, for both Indigenous and European peoples. Rose's work is a challenge to Australians to see the 'dark times' around them and offers an ethics grounded in Australian experience with which engagements with others might proceed.

Citation

• Ravi De Costa. 'Review: Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation by Deborah Bird Rose' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'Captain Cook was the real wild one. He failed to recognise Law, destroyed people and country, lived by damage and promoted cruelty'.
  
  Reports from a Wild Country explores some of Australia's major ethical challenges. Written in the midst of rapid social and environmental change and in a time of uncertainty and division, it offers powerful stories and arguments for ethical choice and commitment. The focus is on reconciliation between Indigenous and 'Settler' peoples, and with nature.
  
  

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