Submission for blind peer review for the journal New Scholar
From 2013 conference at Macquarie University, Australian Literature: The Road Ahead
Title: A Flâneur in the Outback: Place and identity in walking narratives of central Australia
Abstract
Perceptions of space which were set down in the Dreamtime still govern the lives of many
Aboriginal people in the Australian outback town of Alice Springs. Yet the town operates as
a commercial centre subject to western rules and regulated at Federal, Northern Territory and
local government levels. In writing the postcolonial geographies of Australia, this paper
argues, an understanding of one space cannot be fully realised without understanding the
other.
Two walking narratives are examined which highlight how and where the life-worlds of
Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians intersect, a zone commonly called the frontier.
The figure of the flâneur is adapted as a critical tool for investigating this space, through the
texts. First is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative as retold by Tommy
Kngwarraye Thompson, called A Man from the Dreamtime (in Turpin 2003). Second is one
(walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Melbourne
writer Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).
A close reading of each story denotes the objects that are used to build a narrative
environment. In addition to constructing the ‘place’ of the story, such objects can be markers
of identity and the politicisation of space. The history of the flâneur is examined briefly via
Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin and others, prior to its necessary reimagining for adaption to the
Australian outback.
Keywords
walking, songlines, Aborigine, Dreaming, political geography, place, identity, Alice Springs
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The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we
reach the Old English leornian, ‘to get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back . . .
to the word liznojasn, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track . . . . ‘To learn’ therefore means – at
root – ‘to follow a track’.
Robert MacFarlane. The Old Ways (31)
Introduction
Walking and place have long been close companions on the road to knowledge, as Robert
MacFarlane’s etymology implies. For non-western cultures, walking was a way of knowing
the world, a means of understanding landscape and one’s place in it through the feet. Walking
constructed a spatial narrative of history, ‘a region one walks back into’ (MacFarlane 28). By
a similar path westerners have also articulated walking as a way of knowing, and it is evident
in the work of philosophers such as Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and
writers from Wordsworth to Dickens, Thoreau and others. In central Australia, narratives of
such journeys on foot abound. And they take on a special hue, reflecting and shaping popular
ideas of the national character while highlighting a history of colonisation and dispossession.
This essay examines how place and identity are represented in two walking narratives of
central Australia. It strives to bring attention to a concern pervading Australian literature: the
problem of writing postcolonial places. First is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming
narrative as retold by Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson, called A Man from the Dreamtime (in
Turpin 2003). Second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography
and memoir by Melbourne writer Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012). A close
reading of each story denotes the objects that are used to build a narrative environment. In
addition to constructing the ‘place’ of the story, such objects can be markers of the
politicisation of space. Here place is represented as space that is ‘overwritten with stories and
histories’ of the people who have lived there (Saglia 124).
Perceptions of space which were set down in the Dreamtime still govern the lives of many
Aboriginal people in Alice Springs. Yet the town operates as a commercial centre subject to
western rules and regulated by Federal, Northern Territory and local governments. In the
postcolonial geographies of Australia, the paper argues, an understanding of one space cannot
be realised without understanding the other. The chosen narratives highlight how and where
the life-worlds of Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians intersect, a zone commonly
called the frontier (see Turner 1893; Davis and Rose 7; Dewar 15; Carment 31). In narratives
of walking, encounter with landscape comes in two forms: phenomenologically through the
walking body, as well as through discourse, story and representation. The common thread of
walking renders both stories comparable as acts of placemaking; further, it allows a fusing of
literary criticism and geography ― perhaps as a narrative geography per Hones (2011) ―
and reveals the degree to which space in Alice Springs is racialised along with concomitant
distortion of identities. Together, the narratives span pre-, colonial and post-colonial periods
and are analysed using the (seemingly) unlikely figure of the flâneur, the detached observer, a
witness who walks.
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Narrating Central Australia
In 1984, author Xavier Herbert observed Central Australia to be ‘the stage on which the great
themes of Australian life are played out’ (Richards 2010, 2011). Widely perceived as the
heart of the Australian ‘outback’, the region embraces all this term implies: a place where
space has long been measured in terms of European settlement (McGrath 114). At the
nation’s centre is Alice Springs, where roughly one quarter of the population is Aboriginal, a
town recently defined as a ‘postcolonial city’ (Short 129). Australia’s best known frontier
settlement, Alice Springs was crowned the nation’s Outback Capital in 2002, then soon after
dubbed the world’s ‘stabbing capital’ (Author 42). Author Eleanor Hogan suggests ‘both
indigenous and non-indigenous populations were to some extent traumatised by the past and
present realities of frontier life, and that certain aspects of this – like violence, alcohol abuse,
racist attitudes – had become normalised as a result’ (The Wheeler Centre 2012). Alice
Springs is often represented this way, where ‘remote and mainstream Australia . . . collide,
with savage and unpredictable consequences’ (Skelton 2011). Others argue ‘the relatedness
of black and white . . . resist simple racial polarities’ (Finnane and Finnane 262). Those who
live in remote Australian places certainly know them as frontiers ― Homi Bhabha (1995)
described such areas as zones of cultural hybridity, Mary Louise Pratt (2008) as contact zones
― but, importantly, they also know them as home. Historian Mickey Dewar and others link
this frontier history and the central Australian landscape with representations of Australian
identity (Dewar 212-214; Stratton 38; Carment 31). Underscoring this paper then, is a metaanalysis of nation: if walking central Australia binds any texts so concerned to ideas of
nationhood (see Harper 2007, Griffiths 1996, Lynch 2007 and Haynes 1998), then nation
becomes the metanarrative in an analysis of literary walking.
In a language intimate with the biogeography of the region, the Arrernte — the Aboriginal
people who have lived there for some 30,000 years (Thorley 79) — call the town of Alice
Springs Mparntwe (pronounced em-barn-twa). The place itself springs from the deeds of
ancestral creation figures of Aboriginal mythology (Brooks 5-7), and its name means
‘backbone of the river’ (Kimber 2001). Other language groups live in neighbouring country,
in fact, prior to colonisation there were ‘six or seven hundred different tribes in Australia
speaking between them over two hundred languages (each as distinct as French and German)’
(Dixon and Duwell pxiv). Yet Australia was treated by the colonising power as terra nullius,
a wilderness to be conquered (see Bourke 1835, Carter xiv, Haynes 26-7, Rose 17). One
recent study of Alice Springs observes that ‘the structural and material violence of ongoing
occupation has become so omnipresent and integrated it is invisible’ (Lea et al 140); another
notes how its ‘place and space are social constructs that bear the imprint of power’ (Short
130).
Walking and place invoke the twinned notions of dwelling and journey and so construct
discourses of place-making. Such ideas resonate with Indigenous traditions of journey and
ritual, sometimes called songlines, which are still readily apparent in the liminal spaces of
Australian postcolonial geographies. The songs and stories of these walking journeys were,
and remain, a cultural pillar for Aboriginal people, representing an important link between
people and country. As Dixon and Duwell note, the journey narratives of the Dreamtime
Ancestors may contain both law and history (pxiv). From the outset, however, Europeans
gleaned little of the meaning and value of these stories. Clunies-Ross argues the ‘narratives of
wandering creator beings and the sites they created, and tales of supernatural beings who
have human as well as animal characteristics,’ help to explain sacred song and dance (241-2).
Bringing such narratives into the mainstream, however, is challenging. Oral exchange was
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the primary form of communication in traditional Aboriginal culture (QSA 2008). The
representation of oral stories as text necessarily involves mediation and perhaps some loss or
distortion of meaning (Fagan 2011, Fee 1997; Harris 1986, Cruickshank 98, Murray and Rice
1999; Dauenhauer 1999, Clunies-Ross 1986). Some cultural matters were secret: In the case
of A Man from the Dreamtime, some elements of the original story were not published for
this reason (Turpin xxiii). Conversely, there is a pressing need to preserve the oral wisdom of
Aboriginal elders as ‘the older generation, the keepers of the culture, pass on without passing
on their stories’ (Gibson 171).
Reimagining the flâneur
Though the term dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the
Crowd (1840) arguably marks the first literary appearance of the detached observer or
flâneur, the solitary walker who observes and records the emergence and evolution of the
modern city. Many have reviewed the history of the flâneur, citing him as a re-emergent
figure of twentieth and twenty-first century literature and critical theory (See Kramer and
Short 2011; Gluck 2006, Buck-Morss 1986; Waitt, Gill and Head 2009; Crickenburg 2007;
Autrey and Walkowitz 2012; Solnit 2001; Coverley 2012; Robinson 2006; Theroux 2011;
Nicholson 2008). Most cite the poet Charles Baudelaire and critic Walter Benjamin; for the
flâneur is less a figure of Poe’s London than one associated with nineteenth century Paris and
its arcades, demolished during the rebuilding and modernising of the city between 1853 and
1870 (Solnit 201).
Europeans first recognised walking as a consciously cultural act during the eighteenth century
in the work of Jean Jacques Rosseau (Solnit 2001:14). Previously the choice of those who
could not afford to ride, walking came to be valued as a ‘unique way of experiencing or
knowing the world’ (Amato 2004:103). More recently, walking has come to mean exploring
a relationship with place, experiencing nature in whatever way it might be imagined, or as
part of the search for spiritual and existential enlightenment. De Certeau (1984) described
how places become what they are through everyday practices, such as walking. Walking’s
rhythmic nature is linked to the meter of lyrical prose (Wunderlich 126, Chatwin 256) and
steps in a journey to lines on a page (De Certau 97; MacFarlane 18).
In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit cites the writerly walk as an easy way to find narrative
continuity. If a path is like a story, she argues, ‘then a continuous walk must make a coherent
story, and a very long walk makes a full-length book’ (128). The result is the walking
narrative, and its apprehension of objects of meaning en route is one reading of the world.
This is transcribed into text, which is available to the reader, allowing them to walk the world
a second time in the imagination. In the twentieth century, many examples arose from long
walks, but short walks also count. In fact, a popular form of literary response to a walk is the
walking essay, in which walkers who might be essayists are urged to ‘ambulate on paper
about ambulation’ (Robinson 1989/2006:29-30). The walking essay was taken up by Hazlitt,
Dickens, Woolfe, Stevenson and others, reaching a peak in the nineteenth century and
epitomised in American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking
(1862/2010).
Charles Baudelaire expressed the rise of modernity as an ‘unprecedented experience of
change and disruption’, characterised by the ‘loss of stable external references for individual
perception’ (Gluck 748). To the walker, modernity is manifest as unusual or unfamiliar
objects of place: a new bridge, an unfamiliar path. For the flâneur ‘read’ the city, as one
would read a text; an idea implied by Poe, but most comprehensively described much later by
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De Certeau (1984). Baudelaire’s flâneur is a passionate spectator of his environment
(Baudelaire 1860/1970:9), by turns a ‘popular journalist, urban reporter, caricaturist and story
teller’ (Gluck 749). In observing these unfamiliar objects of place, the flâneur’s walk is an act
not only of placemaking, but of cartography (Vaughan 2009). Walking traces a geography in
the mind and, through the feet, on to the earth, a visual representation in memory comprising
objects of significance and meaning to the walker. Through the navigating body — Merlau
Ponty’s ‘measurant of the world’ (Merlau-Ponty 248-9) — a walker creates awareness and
orients themselves within the bigger picture, creating place; when space feels familiar, it has
become place (Tuan 73; Casey 683; Relph 1). The body might be thought of as the
cartographer’s pencil in this exercise of map and meaning making.
In the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin lent the flâneur a political dimension, making him
more activist than journalist (Coverly, Art of Wandering 20). In 1956, Guy de Bord’s walking
experiments established walking as a commentary on the political geography of place (5-8).
Later Sideaway explored the affect of geopolitics, in which the geography of the walk is
revealing of, for example, the flow of capital (2009). And so the flâneur deviates from the
urban pathways of Paris to other environs, other climes. Theoretical work since 2000 has
posited walking as a critical tool for examining postcolonial geographies and other
landscapes (see Macauley 2000; Bassett 2004; Wylie 2005; Spencer 2010; Murphy 2011).
Raja Shehadeh uses an adapted flâneur in walking the frontier zone between Palestine and
Israel in Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2008). The flâneur appears
recently in Australian research (Lea et al 2012; Wood 2011; Instone 2010; Ryan 2010; Stead
2010; Yeoman 2010; Vaughan 2009; Waitt, Gill and Head 2008; Qvortrup 1997).
Clearly the flâneur is an adaptable fellow, having already undergone a number of costume
changes and re-imaginings since Poe. This paper further disrobes the ‘urban’ flâneur and
outfits him for regional and Aboriginal Australia. For in postcolonial environments, hurdles
of perception become paramount to the walking storyteller of place. Much that is not visible
to the naked eye while walking the city or countryside must nevertheless be unearthed and
recorded. Accounting for invisible displacements of histories and cultures past is key to
unlocking the many narratives apparent in any landscape, and can trace a path to a more
revealing ‘reading’ — to use De Certeau’s (1984) term — of our environment, and of those
texts purporting to represent it. To the best of this author’s knowledge, the flâneur has not
appeared previously in any analysis of Aboriginal literature, though anthropologist Isabel
McBryde compares Aboriginal walking of central Australian songlines to pilgrimage on the
El Camino de Compostela (McBryde 158). Invoking the flâneur in Alice Springs, however,
has its precedent: anthropologist Tess Lea and her co-researchers used the flâneur to
investigate Aboriginal resistance to anti-vagrancy laws seemingly designed to evict them
from shopping malls in Alice Springs (Autry and Walkowitz 2012, Lea et al 2012). More
than Baudelaire’s journalist or Benjamin’s activist, the modern-day flanuer emerges as a
geographic analyst, a ‘witness who walks’ and a scribe of the environment.
A Man from the Dreamtime by Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson
A Man from the Dreamtime is a traditional Kaytetye (pronounced kay-ditch) story, retold by
Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson, one of the few Kaytetye-speaking elders left in country to
the north of Alice Springs around Barrow Creek and Tennant Creek. Thompson told the story
to anthropologist Myfany Turpin as part of a collection of stories published as Growing Up
Kaytetye (2003). In the preface to AMD, Turpin gives background on her relationship to
Thompson, an appraisal of his standing in the community, and lists other contributors to the
project. One gains the impression of a broadly-based “Kaytetye” effort directed through
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Thompson, rather than a story from Thompson alone. Turpin admits the translation is not
perfect, but rather a delicate balance between accuracy and readability, struck jointly between
Thompson, other Kaytetye, Turpin and linguists (Turpin viii-x). In the book, the narratives
are presented side by side in Kaytetye and English.
AMD recounts the journey of Marlpwenge and Nalenale, an old Kaytetye man and a young
girl who are ancestors from the Dreamtime. They are married, but of the wrong skin. Skin
names are part of a kinship system which delineates how people relate to each other, their
roles, responsibilities and obligations and who they can marry (CLC 2013). Nevertheless, the
couple live together about 300km north of present-day Alice Springs. One day the ancestors
send a message on the wind, a plea for help from countrymen living to the south near presentday Port Augusta. The couple travel south to help, and the story of their journey tells the
origins and importance of the skin name system (AMD:28); in colloquial terms the narrative
might be referred to as a ‘skin story’. A journey on foot, it covers more than 1700 kilometres
each way. The story is an allegory, which reveals important elements of place, identity and
the cultural tradition of the songlines. Also revealed, is how the story might have changed
subtly since colonisation. The central message of the story is described here: ‘A single man
travels a long way, gets a wife from another country group and brings her back with him. The
Dreamtime laid the way …’ (AMD:37).
During the journey, the Ancestors observe objects significant to Kayteteye culture, law, and
for navigation; together the objects articulate a landscape well known to the couple. At
Alekerange (Ali Curung) they see ‘newborn puppies’, topographic features created by other
traveling ancestors. At Arntwatnewene or Bluebush, they find bush plum and later record the
location of two important soakages (where precious groundwater is known to be close to the
surface). In the desert, a working knowledge of the location of reliable food and water
supplies means the difference between life and death for a traveller on foot (Clarke 140).
Through the narrative, AMD maps a geography of survival for Kaytetye in a perilous
environment.
Aboriginal place, or ‘country’, is a ‘network of places linked by paths’ (Munn 215), fitting
geographer Carl Sauer’s definition of a cultural landscape (1925:6). As Ingold (2002) notes,
these paths were laid down ‘through the movements of ancestral beings in that formative era
known as the Dreaming . . . paths . . . continually retraced in the journeys of the living people
who take after them’ (228). Ingold cites the Walbiri tribe (Munn’s research) who ‘may draw
web-like figures in the sand whose basic components are lines and circles. Every line
conveys a journey to or from camp, while every circle conveys the act of making camp by
walking all around it’ (ibid). The idea of space becoming known through memory and the
stories of travel across it, is analogous to de Certeau’s vision of the city as place constructed
through ritual practices like walking (1984); the familiar territory of the flâneur. While early
white explorers navigated across such space using a compass and stars, Ingold proposes
Aborigines used narrative history. In the Aboriginal world view, Ingold argues, places ‘exist
in space but as nodes in a matrix of movement’ (Ingold 219). Local knowledge allows a
traveller to determine position by the historical context of previous journeys made. Ingold
calls this ‘wayfinding’, distinguishing it from navigation that references an independent or
global set of coordinates.
Such routes help Aborigines define a relationship with country, and with each other, through
the Dreaming stories and language (Donovan and Wall 3). When Marlpwenge receives a
plea for help, for example, he is bound to act. The conceit of the narrative is established and
he and Nalenale set forth. Yet the journey is also a lesson of Kaytetye Law. The term
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‘countrymen’ refers to groups living along the same songline, the track walked in this
Dreaming story. As well as the geography of survival, then, there is also this other bond, or
obligation, to other language groups who live along the same dreaming track. This emerges
as the narrator continues:
Marlpwenge and Nalenale used the soakages that were all along the track . . . It was a busy road. In the
old days people coming from the south used it to come to Oodnadatta; they travelled on foot, naked in
those days. The early white people asked the Aboriginal people to show them their track. They showed
them all their soakages and the white people took their horses and camels to the soakages to get water.
Marlpwenge knew where all these places were (AMD:26).
When the pair turns for home, the narrator tells us: ‘Aboriginal people would come back on
that track, on their Dreaming track, northwards. Those two Kaytetye people followed that
line. They are all relations along that track. Countrymen’ (AMD:33).
Here is the songline, or Dreaming track, along which economic and spiritual activity were
long transacted (Donovan and Wall 3). Ritual walking of the songlines is a form of
pilgrimage (McBryde 152), which underpins an emplaced Kaytetye identity forged through
kinship, intimate knowledge of country and obligations along the songlines. The narrative
path the protagonists travel generates a map of water and food sources; from the map come
knowledge of country and a network of places conjuring home. Significant is the striking
contrast between this picture and the colonial assumption of Australia as wilderness, which
recent research refutes (Gammage 2011; Head 1993; Langton 2012). Typically, the narrator
shifts perspective from ancient to modern times, first discussing events long past, then
shifting to the now and talking of ‘the old days’, implying flexibility of narrative style (Dixon
and Duwell 1994). Lastly, like the flâneur, the narrator notes new elements of the landscape
evident throughout the story, which are the influence of colonialism, to which we now turn.
Modern retelling of Dreaming narratives can include the use of postcolonial place names. In
the case of AMD, this means the narrative is either postcolonial in origin, or an older story
modified in the retelling. Of course, from the manner of its collection this is a traditional
story. Yet the Ancestors pass many examples of postcolonial infrastructure: Wagon Gap,
Adelaide Bore, Snake Well, The Bungalow at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. Arriving
at New Crown Station, they ‘travelled along where the railway is today – that track of theirs
where the white people put the railway line down. Before that people used to take camels
along that road’ (AMD:26). Talk of the ‘olden days’, modern place names and the fallout of
colonialism mark this as a syncretised version of the dreaming story, infused with later events
and colonial names of places, as well as new places previously absent. The essence of the
dreaming narrative remains, clinging to the songline that underpins the story.
Colonisation wrought many changes and conflicts across Kaytetye country, including
massacres of Aborigines, most notably at Coniston in 1928. And yet the massacres and
frontier conflicts are not mentioned here, while other elements of colonialism are. Of course,
massacre stories do not go untold, they are told elsewhere (some by Thompson, see
Koch1993). The point is, AMD is no polemic against the whites. Still, such events are
proximal and a matter of record, and could easily have been included. Perhaps mapping the
‘geography of survival’ takes precedence. Either way, the story is cultural before it is
political, and yet Kaytetye Law produces a political geography of its own.
Clearly, there is no longer a perfect fit between Kaytetye narratives, their language, and the
rapidly shifting postcolonial landscape before them. What word might Kaytetye have used for
The Bungalow, for example, where so many of their brethren were housed and mistreated at
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the hands of whites?1 The name has no precedent in Kaytetye, and yet appears on the
dreaming track of Marlpwenge (AMD:25). Any answer must seemingly support Dianne
Austin-Broos’ assertion that contemporary Aboriginal society is not so much embracing a
modernist worldview, as updating the traditional hunter-gatherer worldview. Like the flâneur,
these storytellers give meaning to the objects of modernity they find dotting their world
(Austin Broos 2009).
Alice Springs by Eleanor Hogan
Author Eleanor Hogan lived in Alice Springs between 2003 and 2010, working as an
indigenous policy specialist and residing in the urban Gap Area near the Central Business
District. In Alice Springs (2012), Hogan tries to take the pulse of her town as part of publisher
New South’s cities series.2 One way she does this, though by no means prevalent in the book,
is by walking. For its tight focus on the challenges of central Australia’s Aboriginal
community, Alice Springs met with harsh criticism from some reviewers (see Wilson 2012,
Author 2012, Finnane 2012, Mills 2012). Nevertheless, it remains an important text.
In her second chapter, The Gap, Hogan ventures from her unit on a shopping errand and
encounters Aboriginal people on the way. There are two types of journey here: one a
rambling stroll, around which Hogan hangs a second journey, her first-person traversal of the
political geography of alcohol in Alice Springs. As Walter Benjamin might have phrased it,
Hogan goes “botanising on the asphalt” (36), for she is an urban detective poised for social
encounter, in other words a flâneur. Hogan’s destination is Piggly Wiggly’s, an independent
grocery store catering to a largely Aboriginal clientele. The conceit for the walk is
established, and memoir is mixed with journalism for an ongoing discussion of the politics of
grog, over which the book circles for much of its length. In this respect, The Gap is a walking
essay, echoing Shehadeh’s walks of Palestine in which he uses ‘each meandering walk to
amble no less circuitously around received ideas about the region in order to peruse them
from alternative points of view’ (Spencer 40).
Like the ancestors of AMD, but differently motivated, Hogan notes objects of place she
passes on her walk, adding supporting facts along the way: the cyclone-fenced security
compound in which she lives, the number of murders in her area (43); that much of the
violence is ‘black-on-black’ (see also Finnane and Finnane 261). Aboriginal people are her
focus; there are few white people in Hogan’s Alice Springs, though they form 79 per cent of
the population (CDU 2010). Hogan’s walking prose echoes British author Iain Sinclair’s, not
in tone or style as much as the method of constructing place. Like Sinclair, Shehadeh and
other walking writers, Hogan brooms up the objects she sees and arranges them in order on
the walk, presenting them as issues or interesting anecdotes for expansion, discussion and
analysis. In Hogan’s prose, however, there is little discussion of walking itself and, in
contrast to Sinclair and Shehadeh in this chapter at least, Hogan’s ‘self’ rarely makes an
appearance. Hogan is not the romantic solitary walker of Hazlitt (14-35), or even Rosseau
whose ‘senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie …’ (Rousseau 108). Perhaps
Hogan abandoned such notions to make more room for political geography; as Jonathon Bate
notes: ‘the price of (romantic) intoxication with the spirit of things is a definitive break from
the human community’ (41). The polemical nature of Hogan’s text betrays Benjamin’s
activism, yet the dry political treatment renders the narrative what Finnane labels a ‘spiritless
inquiry’ (Finnane 2012).
In Lights Out for the Territory (1977), Sinclair argues what he passes on the path is not as
important as what he chooses to record. For it is the objects and thoughts he records, which
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underpin his prose. The result is overtly political, lying as it does at the intersection of
Sinclair’s self and the path he walks. As a depiction of place then, he judges it fiction. Here is
the hybrid nature of the walking narrative of place, amplified in a definition of
psychogeography, ‘the point at which psychology meets geography’ (Coverly,
Psychogeography 13). The psychology is that of the walker, whom the reader meets in any
resulting narrative. Another walker might not trace so political a trail, for this is Sinclair’s
tracing, a locus of points describing the arc of the places where his mind and memory meets
the environment. The narrative becomes the sum of his interests and background multiplied
by the objects he sees, the answer writ large on the blackboard of his politics. Similarly,
Hogan’s walk traces her psychology against the background of Alice Springs, a factor central
to any understanding of the narrative as ‘non-fiction’.
Concentrating elsewhere on the city of now and its challenges, Hogan turns briefly to the
Alice Springs of old. Walking toward the dry Todd River near Heavitree Gap, Hogan writes:
. . . dark figures drift down between the trees towards the river near the picnic area. It used to be a
sacred place where only men could go. Women traditionally made a detour 30 kilometres west . . .
because of the presence of men’s sacred objects at Heavitree Gap. If they passed through the Gap, they
walked in the footsteps of the men with their head bowed, looking at their feet. Some women still walk
this way or avert their gaze out of respect in the area (AS:44).
The reader is cast back to the Dreamtime and the journeys of the Ancestors. Walking a little
further, however, Hogan reveals the layer of modern infrastructure now dressing this ancient
world: the Ghan railway line, a five-way roundabout and highway, a dry riverbed where once
flowed a spring, and finally the Gapview Hotel. The effect is to juxtapose momentarily the
past with the present, emphasising the significant impact of colonisation on Aboriginal lives.
Hogan aligns herself with the political underdog, the dispossessed, she is on their territory.
Yet at times her discomfort is discernible; earlier she described Aboriginal people making
their way down the Todd Mall as ‘shoals of disconsolate fish’ (AS:23). Her conversations
with her ‘other’ are awkward, yet clearly she takes the part of Aborigines in her political
dissection of their predicament. Here Hogan betrays a curious imagining of self, which
perhaps speaks more broadly to the confused state of an Australian identity. Since the Land
Rights era, Australians have leaned heavily on indigenous culture as a means of establishing
a more authentic identity. In a recent interview, Hogan herself confesses she is a ‘do-gooder
urban type’ (The Wheeler Centre 2012). Similarly, some forty years earlier, Charmian Clift
donned a flâneur’s hat in The Centre, expressing her shame and uneasiness upon arriving at
Alice Springs, that ‘landscape of saints, mystics and madmen (203).’ Her feeling was ‘as
though you have taken an unfair advantage’ (ibid). Clift articulates a whitefella’s sense of
bewilderment over ‘what should be done’ about the situation of Aboriginal people: ‘What are
the dreaming people dreaming now?’ (206) she wonders guiltily. Here the flâneur protests
injustice and carries its trace into history’s prose, her fate ‘bound up with the fate of the city’
(Coverly Psychogeography 20). Importantly, it also describes the first of several competing
representations of Aborigines.
As she walks, Hogan describes the postcolonial predicament, a portrait begun in this paper in
A Man from the Dreamtime. Like Clift, her narrative is sewn with white guilt. As Hogan
strolls the impact zone between black and white, she chronicles the challenges for an
Aboriginal culture grappling with western modernity (in binary representations, the antithesis
of primitive culture). A simple phenomenological apprehension of place through walking is
supplemented by journalism, history and encounter; as Pietrantoni observes, encountering
landscape and conceptualising place is an ongoing process of negotiation between competing
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systems of representation (Pietrantoni 1); between the past and present of place (Massey
182). Writing place, as Thoreau might have urged, requires its syncretic and embodied
apprehension (Ryan 55).
Hogan’s project clearly exposes the inequality wrought by colonial expansionism and local
profiteering from alcohol. However, in articulating relations of power over a sociallyproduced space, the author herself reproduces a spatial politics of her own. For example,
strolling to the Gapview Hotel Hogan passes a white resort setting, where ‘Couples and
families lounge by the pool’ only to arrive shortly afterward at a ‘dusty tongue of dirt’, where
the ‘familiar surf of bottle tops, VB cans, casks and silver foil bladders’ ebbs at Hogan’s feet
(AS:46). The latter is an Aboriginal world, where, under large XXXX signs, Aboriginal
women linger in the bottle-o driveway waiting for ‘cheap take-away grog’ from the shop
itself: ‘small and dingy, with grimy fly strips’, where staff are ‘surly and patronising towards
Aboriginal people’ (ibid). Here is Marcia Langton’s ‘drunken Aborigine’, a common
representation, and familiar sight on the streets of Alice Springs (195). The contrast between
the ‘romanticised’ walker of the songlines, and the problem drinkers waiting for their fix at
the hands of profiteering publicans, couldn’t be more starkly wrought. And so the pattern
emerges: whites are demonised and blacks portrayed as victims, deepening predominant
media representations. In her neglect of more traditional (or ‘romantic’) representations,
Hogan bolsters the prominence of the drunk. But then, Hogan is largely concerned with
disadvantage; in a recent interview, she says of her time in Alice Springs: ‘there was a
lopsided emphasis among urban elites on media representations and symbolic issues at the
expense of a focus on basic need, especially in relation to social justice and difference
(Wheeler Centre 2012). In the same interview, however, Hogan provides a more nuanced
reflection on Alice Springs than is perhaps evident from her book. And her comments reveal
she aligns herself with a growing number of critics, who ― like Marcia Langton, who in her
recent Boyer Lectures outlines a history of the ‘economic Aborigine’ ― are encouraging ‘a
more sophisticated view (of Aborigines) than the archetypal one of the native as perpetual
victim with no hope’ (Langton Boyer Lectures 12).
Nevertheless, wherever we walk in Hogan’s published world of Alice Springs we find
Aboriginal suffering. Finnane & Finnane (2011) condemn similar representations as being to
‘reproduce a stereotype of Aboriginal people as victims, lacking agency’ (262). Upon her
return to the town in 2005, travel author Robyn Davidson pondered:
People come to the Centre hungry to learn - the town floats on the tourist dollar - but how are they to
penetrate something so inherently secretive and complex? How can they see past the drunks and the
misery, or the sentimentality and kitsch, to the sophistication and beauty of aboriginal ideas? (2005).
Nowhere in Hogan’s Alice Springs is seen Davidson’s ‘beauty of ideas’, merely the tragedy
of dispossession. As such, Hogan’s walk represents only a part of the town’s story. It
virtually ignores, for example, an emerging Aboriginal middle class in the town, revealing
that walking creates a particular form of place, one linked closely to the interests of the
walker. The fact that two people might walk the same street on the same day and return with
two entirely different narratives, highlights what elsewhere might be called a ‘naïve flâneur’,
the newcomer, unaware of the local lie of the land.
Intimately familiar with the imprint of colonialism in central Australia, Hogan describes the
politics of space. She notes that in 1984 the NT Government ‘banned the public consumption
of alcohol within two kilometres of licensed premises’, known locally as the 2-km law
(AS:54). When the Intervention came into force in 2007, Aboriginal remote communities
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were declared ‘prescribed areas’ in which drinking, possession and supply of alcohol, were
banned. In early 2008, this was extended to the Alice Springs (then) 21 town camps. The
immediate effect was ‘inhabitants, who already could not drink in public places, could not
lawfully drink in their own homes either’ (AS:55). Many Aborigines drink in public, in the
riverbed or on pathways and in parks; drinking camps are set up on the fringes of town, on or
behind hillslopes, tucked out of sight (Rothwell 2011). Begging for money to buy alcohol is
frequent (AS:64); Alice Springs’ CBD is subject to regulations targeting Aboriginal
pedestrians, enforced by security guards and police, who encourage Aboriginal people to
‘keep moving on’ (Lea et al 152). Walking further, Hogan warns an Aboriginal man and two
Aboriginal women of these alcohol laws:
‘You know you can get in trouble with the police for drinking in a public place?’ I say.
Geraldine nods.
‘Does it bother you?’
She shrugs.
‘I saw the police driving up and down the riverbed a little while ago.’
None of them seem fussed (AS:63).
Perhaps, like Marlpengwe and Nalenale, these Aborigines abide different laws of space,
defined by tradition, where the old ways still hold sway. The political geography of
contemporary Australia is superimposed over the top of these old ways. Yet the Aborigines
Hogan interviews appear to ignore the new ways in this produced space of structural
inequality, where Aborigines are ‘moved on’ (Lea et al 2012), and regulations create white
space that excludes blacks.
Conclusion
While some may have difficulty mentally transporting the flâneur from Paris to the
Australian Outback, the exercise has been worthwhile in this instance. The flâneur emerges
as both a figure of the text, and as a critical mode of reading. Like the nineteenth-century
Parisian flâneur encountering Von Haussman’s vision of modernity, the latter-day Aborigine
adapts old ways and stories to new circumstances superimposed on them by Europeans. For
the reader, the figure of the flâneur helps to negotiate two narrative snapshots of the same
landscape from differing cultural perspectives, revealing the extent and complexity of change
at Alice Springs since colonisation. This is important, for while many acknowledge Australia
has a black history, fewer might recognise that two separate laws now operate for some
Aboriginal people. Highlighted also, are the benefits and drawbacks of walking (and flânerie)
as a way of narrating place. Both AMD (2003) and Alice Springs (2012) reveal a peripatetic
place is highly selective, but sensitive to change. A purely phenomenological understanding
of landscape, however — here called the ‘naïve flâneur’ — is insufficient; the walker in a
postcolonial geography cannot ignore an almost inevitable and perhaps irreversible
politicising of the landscape.
A Man from the Dreamtime (2003) is a recorded and published version of a journey of
Dreaming Ancestors along a songline. The narrative reflects an emplaced culture, rich in
ceremony and myth, in which identity is established through kinship and an intimate
knowledge of place. Relationships and obligation are forged through country, family and
along the songlines. As Solnit writes ‘the songlines are tools of navigation across the deep
desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering the stories: in other words,
the story is a map, the landscape is a narrative’ (Solnit 72). But the telling of this story has
changed since colonisation, as new objects and encounters have emerged. Place emerges as
‘the concomitant of difference, the continual reminder of the separation, and yet of the hybrid
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interpenetration of the coloniser and the colonised’ (Ashcroft et al 391). Baudelaire’s ‘loss of
stable external references for individual perception’ (Gluck 748) becomes an influence on the
Kaytetye narrative. Thompson’s embracing of such change speaks of a dynamic narration of
the Dreaming, reinforcing that it is, as Stanner (1979) termed it, ‘Everywhen’. This
challenges commonly-held misconceptions of a ‘timeless land’, of an Aboriginal culture that
is unchanging and static.
There is a second possible motivation, an activism, in which an Aboriginal group might be
quietly railing against the imposition of colonialism (see Lea 2012). This was not evident
here. And yet the two dialectics mix in public discourse. In a recent article for Australian
Geographic, Marcia Langton argues against the myth that indigenous Australians can’t adapt
to modern life, and that declaring their land a wilderness is a travesty of justice. She notes:
‘The unspoken expectation is that Aboriginal people are “noble savages” and should not be
engaged in economic development such as mining, which could drag them out of grinding
poverty’ (Langton, The Aboriginal balancing Act 39).
Hogan’s more recent appraisal of the same region in The Gap, (Alice Springs (2012)) clearly
embraces this changing discourse. Hogan eschews romantic representations of Aborigines to
focus on issues of basic need. Hogan’s walking becomes a conceit from which to suspend a
second journey, a discussion of the political geography of grog. The narrative reflects
Hogan’s identity as writer-activist for the Aboriginal cause, yet recasts Aborigines once again
as victims. The cultural collision zone of Alice Springs, described by the postcolonial
theorists such as Bhaba, Pratt and others, emerges as the ‘Schism the nation is built on’ (The
Wheeler Centre 2012). But it is by no means the whole picture. Largely forgotten are
traditional representations (whom Langton might dub the ‘new noble savage’), as well as
those of an emergent Aboriginal middle class (Langton’s ‘economic Aborigine’).
At least two levels of produced space comprise Alice Springs: one governed by Aboriginal
law, in which history operates spatially, and which still holds sway for many. And another, in
which history operates temporally, a space that is subject to Federal and Northern Territory
law, as well as local regulation: all superimposed over Aboriginal law. The common theme of
walking highlights how a multiply-storied landscape produces different spaces and how
contemporary spaces still conspire to cast Aborigines as ‘other’. Walking and the figure of
the flâneur, suggest a way to unravel the complex spaces of contact zones such as Alice
Springs, a prerequisite to the writing of Australian postcolonial geographies. It is noteworthy
that these two spaces have been observed before: by the prominent Aboriginal activist and
Alice Springs traditional owner the late Wenten Rubuntja (Rubuntja & Green 2002), who
said: ‘When English people found our country, and [found] Aboriginal people, they put their
cities and culture all over our country. But underneath this, all the time, Aboriginal culture
and laws stay alive.’
§
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Endnotes
1.
2.
The Bungalow was a series of corrugated iron sheds operated by the Australian Government in the first half
of the twentieth century, where up to 50 half caste children and ten adults were housed, reportedly in
appalling conditions by modern standards. See ABC Aboriginal Australia: The Unfinished Business –
Places http://www.abc.net.au/federation/fedstory/ep4/ep4_places.htm
Alice Springs is part of publisher New South’s cities series, which asks authors to write about their home.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to my tireless supervisor Dr Ian Collinson and colleague and author
Tony Davis for their comments and suggestions on early drafts of this paper. Also thanks to
those attending Australian Literature: The Road Ahead in June 2013 who gave me helpful
feedback and words of encouragement after I presented an earlier version of the paper, and in
particular to Dr Jill Roe and Dr Karen Lamb. Finally, thanks to Richard Kimber, Dr Mickey
Dewar, Prof David Carment, Prof Rolf Gerritsen, Dr Melinda Hinkson, Leni Shilton, Jenny
Taylor, Dave Richards, Megg Kelham and Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds, for their generous
conversations over coffee about Alice Springs, walking and all things literary, historical and
anthropological.
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