Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Uncategorized Australia’s modern-day mask Jacinda Woodhead Colonialism is generally considered something that we are past or post, as historical or theoretical. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall described colonialism as the ‘outer face’ of Western modernity from 1492 on, its features expansion, conquest and hegemonisation. Australia’s modern-day mask looks an awful lot like colonialism, many of the pieces in this edition observe; the opening lines of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘The Apology Day Breakfast’, for instance: my mother did not grow up with her mother I did not grow up with mine my son did not grow up with me White Australians, Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued, possess a ‘belonging derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital’. Thus the founding myth that colonisers came to this country and built and grew and from this land wrung profit. There is a powerful resistance to this narrative – there always has been – as the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the outcome of the recent Referendum convention, shows: Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago. We live in a country that has no treaty with its First Nations people; where the notion of ‘invasion’ is considered controversial; that celebrates this invasion, and does nothing to mark the enormous cost of the Frontier Wars; that debates decolonialism in the academy and at conferences, while Indigenous communities are left to face, largely alone, the brutal Intervention, the insatiable mining companies, and a judicial system that incarcerates Indigenous youths at monstrous rates. Colonial history lingers, but so, too, does living resistance, as the writing in this edition, such as Evelyn Araluen’s essay ‘Resisting the institution’, as well as her Nakata Brophy Prize-winning story ‘Muyum: a transgression’, make clear. Read the rest of Overland 227 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Jacinda Woodhead Jacinda Woodhead is a former editor of Overland and current law student. More by Jacinda Woodhead › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 17 January 202517 January 2025 · rape culture Neil Gaiman and the political economy of rape Emmy Rakete The interactions between Gaiman, Palmer, Pavlovich, and the couple’s young child are all outlined in Shapiro’s article. There is, though, another figure in the narrative whom the article does not name. Auckland city itself is a silent participant in the abuse that Pavlovich suffered. Auckland is not just the place where these things happen to have occurred: this is a story about Auckland. 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.
