Brock, Peggy --- "Book Review - Words and Silences: Aboriginal Women, Politics and Land" [2002] IndigLawB 28; (2002) 5(16) Indigenous Law Bulletin 21

Book Review

Words and Silences: Aboriginal Women, Politics and Land

Edited by Peggy Brock
Allen and Unwin 2001
220 p
RRP $29.95

Reviewed by Felicia Fletcher

Words and silences: Aboriginal women, politics and land is a collection of essays by people working in the disciplines of anthropology, women’s studies, public history and law. It is, with one exception, a very disappointing collection. Peggy Brock introduces the collection with a hurried overview of 20th century case law pertaining to Aboriginal peoples’ rights to land. The introduction may not have been so shallow had Brock also covered the constitutional doctrines, which were used by the British to develop the common law rules, which formed the legal basis of the reception of British law in the colony of New South Wales. Brock could also have discussed the deferential relationship of the courts to the parliament and shown that case law in fact plays a minor role in the development and perpetuation of the fear of Aboriginal people and culture that is at the heart of race relations in Australia. Brock does not do any of this. Moreover she writes from the perspective of a workshop facilitator who has no business other than getting her name on the cover of a book. In particular, exception should be taken to Brock’s glib reference to usufructuary rights, because it is this point of law that has been used so successfully to diminish the self-determination of Aboriginal peoples.

Brock’s coinage of the ‘gendered nature of Aboriginal societies’ is also problematic, as is her certainty that nurture, as opposed to nature, is the defining principle for an Aboriginal woman’s identity. Brock’s analysis might be used quite successfully to describe the subjects and objects of liberal-feminists, but a liberal-feminist dogma is inadequate for identifying who Aboriginal women are. In fact, it should have been obvious to Brock from the variety of Aboriginal women who figure in the essays, that the need for an all encompassing dogma is questionable in itself.

It is a sad fact that with the exception of Hannah McGlade, all essayists agree on the ‘gendered nature of Aboriginal societies’. It is this consensus that makes the collection useless for projecting research findings from the perspective of the Aboriginal women themselves. With the exception of McGlade, the contributors to the book inevitably retreat to the academic traditions which direct them, and the liberal-feminist traditions that codify them. I will discuss later why McGlade’s essay avoids the schmooze that oozes in varying degrees from the other essays.

'Speaking what our mothers want us to say: Aboriginal women, land and the Western Women's Council in NSW, 1984-85’ by Heather Goodall is an essay that talks on behalf of, rather than through, the Aboriginal women written about, or to be more precise, catalogued. What could have been a living channel for Aboriginal women’s voices ends up being a boring commentary that satisfies academic requirements.

‘Seeking justice: Traditions of social action amongst Indigenous women in the south west of Western Australia’ by Pat Baines is a real shame job of an essay. It’s written by an anthropologist who seems to have an absolute desire to make people conform to her kinship categories. She stands outside the Aboriginal women, writing about them and studying them like an entomologist might study and write about beetles. The writer is someone who seems to like to ‘catch people out’ for being different to her expectations of them. The expectations she appears to have of her Aboriginal subjects are comparable to someone saying that a Catholic is not a real Catholic because he or she does not know who Oliver Cromwell was.

Deborah Bird Rose’s essay, ‘The silence and power of women’ is another yawn inducing clutter of polysyllables. Rose seems to think that an individual Aboriginal person should be the repository of all knowledge. The analysis in this essay is fatuous and immature, and her tendency to over-intellectualise basic, obvious things, is extremely self-indulgent. For example, Rose describes the wink as an opposition between the public and secret domains. The rigour of Rose’s research is also questionable. Would I be credible if I walked down the street, saw three fair skinned people, assumed them to be Christians and said to them ‘Please could you explain to me the love of god?’ Then upon hearing their answer I went away and said that their answer was shallow, selective, neither true nor false, and went on to parody the whole Christian belief system as a result of one encounter. Rose also cites men’s writing on themes such as the currency of knowledge. She would have been better served looking in the catalogue for some women’s views on the currency of knowledge. The source material, in particular a quote from W Stanner,[1] is better suited to the paternalism of the 1930s. Especially surprising is the claim made in the last paragraph that we are a plural society. I would like to announce that we are actually a polycentric society and that the majority rule ethos of our democratic system makes pluralism anathema.

Lack of editorial control by Brock is particularly evident in Diane Bell’s essay, ‘The word of a woman: Ngarrindjeri stories and a bridge to Hindmarsh Island’. This essay falls down in its failure to focus on the court and the parliamentary processes which put the factual content of the Ngarrindjeri women’s claims in the background.

McGlade’s essay ‘Aboriginal women and the Commonwealth Government's response to Mabo: An international human rights perspective’ stands out in the book. McGlade systematically deconstructs legislation derived from 20th century case law in a learned way. She does not try to impress herself on anyone. She lets the issues speak for themselves. She does not over-intellectualise anything. She does not divulge things she said she would keep quiet about. She does not write as though she’s a guardian angel for Aboriginal women, but in a scholarly way that reveals the system for what it is. McGlade’s success is to be found in her style because, unlike the other contributors, she does not try to ‘manage’ the information so as to claim it as hers alone.

I stopped reading the last essay, ‘Gendered landscapes: The politics and processes of inquiry and negotiating interests in land’ by Sandy Toussaint, Myrna Tonkinson and David Trigger, at the point where the authors were writing about the ‘cultural aspirations’ of Bennelong and Barangaroo as opposed to the cultural prerogatives of these two people. I just lost interest, thinking, ‘another one of them.’

With the exception of McGlade’s contribution, this collection of essays is very ordinary.

I would recommend it to anyone needing to prop up the one short leg of their coffee table, but photocopy McGlade’s essay first, it’s a good one.

Felicia Fletcher is an editor at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

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[1] Peggy Brock (ed), Words and silences: Aboriginal woman, politics and land (2001) 97.