The Utopian imagination of Aboriginalism.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Jorgensen, Darren
• Date: 22 September 2005

From its very inception, utopian spatialization has not been kind to Indigenous people. (1) Anticipating a program of colonial violence in centuries to come, Thomas More's original utopian society is only founded after the conquest of a foreign land:

But if the inhabitants of that land will not dwell with them to be ordered by their laws, then they drive them out of those bounds which they have limited and appointed out for themselves. And if they resist and rebel, then they make war against them. For they count this the most just cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no good nor profitable use, keeping others from the use and possession of it, which notwithstanding by the law of nature ought thereof be nourished and relieved. (2) Thus the foundation of Utopia is a hypocritical one, as the peaceable lives of its citizens are only secured as a result of violence towards other lives. The injustices of 16th-century capitalism, outlined in the first book, are only resolved in the second by a further injustice. The imperial logic at work here is but a simulation of one of capitalism's principal effects, this being the conquest and colonization of space. Indeed, as Christopher Kendrick argues, the second book of Utopia articulates the very invention of space in this historical period. (3) Amidst changing economic regimes, as Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism, space was a way of conceptualizing the experience of displacement. The topography of Book Two was the imaginary accompaniment to the reality of unemployment described in Book One, as dispossession and homelessness turn an immersion in place into a new idea of space.

That violence may well be inherent to the program of utopian spatialization was foregrounded centuries later by dystopian and critical utopian writers, whose imaginary topographies were often tarnished by totalitarian regimes or hegemonic cultures. (4) Yet these were largely representations of those living inside utopian, dystopian or revolutionary situations, and were not concerned with those whose difference disqualified them from the political consensus. It is instead science fiction, with its aliens and humanoids, that analogizes imperial and colonial history. One of the founding texts of the genre, H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, displays a capacity for working through the historical conditions of its imagination. In case readers missed the political relevance of his narrative, Wells compares Earth's invasion by a particularly malevolent species of alien to a recent terrestrial conquest:

The Tasmanians, for example, were entirely swept out of existence in a fifty-year war of extermination waged by European immigrants. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (5) In the novel, Wells plays with understandings of race and species, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, to question a prevailing and Darwinian assumption among Europeans that the Australian Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. (6) Bringing the inhumanity of this logic to light, Wells recognizes the injustice of the destruction of a people. In this he joined a growing humanitarian concern for the welfare of the first Australians. It would not be until the 20th century that a combination of violence and trade on the Australian frontier would give way to government policies of protectionism and assimilation. This concern for the Aboriginal, however, often remained tied to an expectation of their imminent demise. To 'Smooth the Dying Pillow' was one attitude from which such policies sprang. (7)

The original hypocrisy of More's spatialization is useful for unravelling this apparent shift from carelessness to care. While Utopia can be thought of as belonging to one moment of European history that displayed a willful disinterest in the fate of indigenous people, a belated concern for their welfare would appear to manifest a second moment of humanism for which this fiction is also famous. Early European interest in Aboriginal Australia was indeed humanistic, as anthropologists and missionaries brought to light the character of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. (8) These early texts, with their description of unchanging cultures and kinship systems, can be read as utopian spatializations of the prehistoric. While they demonstrated an interest in fellow human beings, they also inscribed this interest into static and ideal forms. Such representations also appear in colonial paintings of a similar period. After being painted only rarely, Aboriginals began to crop up more frequently in the later 19th century as dark silhouettes against the light and space of the Australian land. (9) The appearance of this noble savage, dressed in skins and engaged in traditional activities, takes place against the historical expansion of grazing into the less hospitable areas of the continent. Painting the noble savage coincided with the decline of another fantasy about the interior. This was the idea that an inland sea must lie there, waiting to be discovered and exploited. Indeed, the first piece of Utopian fiction written and set in Australia narrated the blissful repose that could be found on the shores of this delusion, in the arms of a thriving, pale-skinned civilization cut off from the rest of the world. (10) After the loss of several famous explorers, the dryness of the centre became the greater wisdom, and this fantasy of an oceanic interior was superseded by the idea of Aborigines living in harmony with nature and themselves. (11)

For Ian McLean, the absence of the Aboriginal in colonial art and its presence are two sides of the same conceptual coin. (12) The latter fills a void brought about by the absent expanses of the continent, in a substitution of one misrepresentation for another. While McLean wants to overcome the contrariness of such positions with a third way that is redolent of Homi Bhabha's hybridity, here I want to remain with the second moment, with the romanticization of the Aboriginal, insofar as it persists today. Whether as a spectator at Tjapukai Aboriginal Culture Park, or while shopping for 'authentic' Aboriginal art, non-Indigenous people frequently consume constructions of the tribal and traditional that are implicitly utopian, as they gesture to harmonious ways of life. While a marxist tradition extending from Ernst Bloch to Fredric Jameson has discovered the utopian buried in the most commercial of products, from sports games to soap operas, the utopian content of the...