posted on 2024-07-12, 17:06authored byFiona McAllan
In June 2006 the Australian media supposedly 'unmasked' unchecked paedophile crime in Indigenous communities, claiming this to be directly related to customary law (Brough 2006), and returned a conception of primitivism to a national debate invoked in the interests of national security. In June 2007 the media engaged in further graphic reportage, detailing an emergency intervention into unchecked communal violence, suggesting that it was inherent in Indigeneity.These situations have unfolded within a complex interplay of countervailing forces, discursively operating and intersecting across and through racialised and politicised discourses, where morality-imbued and white paternalist notions of self-determinism and re-articulations of legitimised histories, entwined with neoliberalist ideologies, had been paving the way for a 'crisis' at the heart of the nation. The stage had been set for spectacular re-enactments of Australian sovereignty and territorialism. While exploring these animations at length is beyond the scope of this paper, they will be signalled throughout it, with a focus on teasing out the practices and perspectives that continue colonising relations with Indigenous peoples and rely upon particular constructions of Indigeneity for this purpose.