Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemThe sorry people: non-indigenous Australians and emotional geographies of co-presence( 2011)Cultural geography has recently experienced an ‘emotional turn’ increasing attention toward the ways in which a politics of affect can illuminate everyday cultural practices and material processes. This research draws on such a theoretical framework. so as to critically examine a specific postcolonial formation called reconciliation, the national policy in Australia 1991-2001, which aimed to restructure the nation's legacy of colonial relations, including its emotional legacy of guilt, grief and injury. It is with this inheritance - a core part of official reconciliation efforts - that The Sorry People is primarily concerned. Reconciliation came into being in the context of a government failure to address past and present colonial injustices towards Indigenous Australians through material means. Instead the largely symbolic, nationalistic reconciliation process took as its aim the re-education of the nation, in particular, of non-Indigenous Australians in the ‘truths’ of colonial history. In this way, as a means of managing the consequences of colonial occupation, reconciliation was the first government policy to be structured around what might be thought of as the ‘settler problem’. The Sorry People examines the ways in which non-Indigenous reconcilers address their feelings of implication in bad colonial history whilst also seeking a way to move beyond this. While reconciliation rhetoric placed a strong emphasis on ‘shared histories’, this research questions whether non-Indigenous desire for new, legitimated, ‘shared geographies’ is as relevant. To this end this research investigated non- Indigenous involvement in the reconciliation movement in Victoria from 1997-2001. Using a qualitative case-study based approach, the research focused on two localities with active community reconciliation groups: Nillumbik Shire in Melbourne and Shepparton in regional Victoria. The affective dimensions of the reconciliation movement and economies of unintended affect are in part caused by non-Indigenous people feeling delegitimised as occupants in a nation established through questionable moral grounds. Emotions stick to some bodies and not others, with white settler Australians in particular being drawn into the work of reconciliation to make right the wrongs of their political ancestors. The Sorry People explores and critiques non Indigenous concepts of reconciliation, the emotional investments and motivations of those involved and the possible shifts in subjectivity experienced both in, and through, discourses of reconciliation.