Abstract
Let us begin by noting that Australia’s postcolonial condition is for the most part a consequence of claims made upon it — land claims, compensation claims, and so on — by its Aboriginal people.* It would be possible to describe Aboriginal people at this point in Australia’s modern history as charismatic, in their capacity to mobilize forces much larger than their ‘minority’ status would suggest. When a claim is made on a sacred site, this feature is especially apparent: a government can look forward to losing millions of dollars through legal procedures that invariably bring together a ‘smorgasbord’ (as one newspaper described it) of interest groups over a protracted period of time. In this climate, Aborigines certainly continue to receive sympathy for what they do not have — good health, adequate housing, and so on — and yet at the same time they draw resentment from white Australians because they seem to be claiming more than their ‘fair share’. We have elsewhere described this double-headed view of Aborigines as ‘postcolonial racism’ — a form of racism which sees Aborigines as lacking on the one hand, and yet appearing on the other hand to have too much: too much land, too much national attention, too much ‘effect’.1 It is surely a strange irony to hear white Australians these days — including some maverick Federal politicians — describing Aborigines as more franchised, more favoured, than they are.
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Notes
Some of the arguments in this essay can also be found in a different form and context in Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).
Gelder and Jacobs, ‘Uncanny Australia’, UTS Review 1, 2 (1995), 150–69.
See, for example, David J. Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia (Melbourne: HarperCollins, 1995).
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin: 1976), p. 6.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Pelican Freud Library: Art and Literature, vol. 14, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 342–7.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différence’, Margins of Philosophy (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 1–27, 16.
See also Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘“Talking Out of Place”: Authorizing the Sacred in Postcolonial Australia’, Cultural Studies 9, 1 (1995): 150–60.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 171–3.
Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. x.
Reviews of Gibson’s book have been quick to make this point. See, for example, Alan McKee, ‘What is Postcolonialism?’, Screen 35, 3 (Autumn 1994): 311–15.
See William Sylvester Walker (‘Coo-ee’), When the Mopoke Calls (London: John Long, 1899); reprinted in Ken Gelder (ed.), The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gelder, K., Jacobs, J.M. (1999). The Postcolonial Ghost Story. In: Buse, P., Stott, A. (eds) Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_9
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