Against ‘contact’

Abstract

The use of ‘contact’ is problematic, in part, because it is often applied in ways that privilege nonIndigenous voices. In Cookian terms, the view is ‘from the ship and not the shore’. Hence objects, such as glass, ceramic, and metal tools produced by Indigenous peoples, tend to be interpreted from technical and historical archaeological perspectives, typically without commentary by those Aboriginal owners and custodians on whose land such items are ‘discovered’. That is, ‘contact’ is used, consciously or otherwise, in ways that perpetuate settler colonialism and appropriate cultural rights. I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate concerning the application of the term and concept of ‘contact’ in Australian archaeology. I commend the authors for their Forum piece and for its being informed by both theory and practice. I limit my comments to a few topics below and, overall, take the position that archaeologists should avoid using generic terms for encounter, engagement, and interaction between Aboriginal Australian groups and ‘others’ (whether British, Afghan, Macassan, Torres Strait Islander, etc.), but rather develop language that is specific to each circumstance or situation and place. Much as a construct of pan-Aboriginality in Australia subsumes individual groups into the nation’s whole (and thus undermines Indigenous cultural distinctiveness), so ‘contact’ as used by archaeologists masks more than it reveals. The critique of the use of ‘contact’ outlined by the authors has much in common with that levelled at ‘shared history’. As historian Heather Goodall (2002) noted, the concept of ‘sharing histories’ was a key goal of the Reconciliation process. The process, in historian Maria Nugent’s (2020) words, ‘clung to the idea of history as a discrete and stable set of facts that could be enriched and expanded by simply adding hitherto excluded experiences and perspectives without fundamentally changing the existing narrative’. Indigenous perspectives, it seems, could be inserted into a prevailing national story and create ‘a unified, consensual account’ of the nation-state (Goodall 2002:9). Thus ‘invasion’ could be ‘nicely’ accommodated! McNiven and Russell (2005) critique the categorisation of the contact period as a ‘shared space’ because it denies the reality of much of Australia’s post-AD 1788 history in which Aboriginal people were imposed upon, coerced, and dispossessed. It is apparent from just these two critiques that the concept of shared history is deeply problematic because of the gloss it gives to histories of contestation, resistance, and ‘contact’. Does recasting the idea of ‘contact’ as a ‘twotiered approach’ – ‘cultural entanglements’ and ‘colonialism’ – move the framing and re-writing of Australian archaeology into a more historically accurate, pan-Australian space? I am not persuaded. On the positive side, the authors adeptly apply these ‘tiers’ in their readings of the Pianamu cultural landscape. They make a strong case for applying them to create understandings of the histories and complex power relations across the ‘waves’ of pastoralism, policing, and mining activities that swept over Kuuku I’yu Country. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded that the construct of ‘cultural entanglements’ brings us a lot further than ‘contact’ in incorporating histories of violent militaristic corporate Capitalism, the introduction of diseases, invasion and dispossession, forced child removal, incarceration and deaths in custody, adverse health impacts, intergenerational trauma, and the continuing processes of settler colonialism. And why should we confine the concept of entanglement to all things ‘cultural’? Surely encounter with Indigenous peoples also included the introduction of invasive species, profound impacts on – including extinctions of – native species, and the devastation of Indigenous land practices, including plant and animal cultivation and aquaculture, through land clearance and market-oriented open agriculture. Did I mention climate change? Such are the levels and degrees of impact on different Aboriginal groups that it seems impossible to capture them in terminology based on a single word or summary phrase. Hence my view