Paul Carter has been a regular visitor to our community over the years.
Paul's an historian, writer, philosopher and an artist who's currently chair in creative
place research at Deakin University.
He's also the director of the Deakin Creative, or deputy director of the Center for Memory,
Imagination and Invention.
Paul's authored many books, mainly concerned with Australian history and Australian places
and their identity.
Paul's recently ground-truthing, which is an examination of the place that we know
as the Mallee, and in particular the relationship of the poet John Shaw Nielsen and Jolly, or
Mack, as he's known, an indigenous character.
Paul's particularly interested in the poetics of placemaking and public space design and
the applications of this sort of creative research to community renewal, strategic planning
and policy formulation.
And I can say that he's definitely a friend of this community, with his assistance to
projects currently underway here, particularly in relation to the Old Muldera Base Hospital,
and of course as an artist's supporter of Palimpsest, and I'd encourage you to go and
see his work uneasily along the sand, which is a collaborative work down at the old homestead.
So, and I think this one probably follows Paul around like an old dog, he's also responsible
for the development and design of near and new, the elaborate surface treatment that
many of us will have walked across at Federation Square in Melbourne.
So with that, Paul, I'd like to introduce you, and welcome to Palimpsest number eight,
Paul Carter.
I've called this talk at Connections that Function, and what I wanted to do is to introduce
you to a 19th century, sometimes squatter, by the name of James Dawson, and I keep on,
it's actually quite appropriate to ask, you know, who is James Dawson on the James Boag
kind of, or Boag, or whatever you call it, analogy, because he was actually was a failed
distiller from Scotland, so he does actually have a kind of an alcoholic connection.
James Dawson established a kind of mixed sheep and cattle run in southwestern Victoria
run about 1846, after coming out from Scotland.
He had a very long association with the Warnambal, Simon Grampian's area, something over 50 years,
he was very long lived, and in fact not dying until virtually the turn of the century.
And I wanted to discuss some investigations that a group of us have been making into his
heritage, his legacy.
Why would I do that here?
That's really what I want to come to, because I think that particularly in the context of
the last presentation, it's not only the case that we need to think about collective agents
of collaboration, in other words, different segments or stakeholders or parts of the community
that will come together to produce better outcomes for the environment and therefore for ourselves.
It's also the case that we individually have to achieve more integrated understandings of
the different parts of our brains and bodies and our relationships with those around us.
James Dawson, it's a proposition of our research was exemplary in that respect.
He was somebody who brought together with extraordinary poise, common sense and courage,
a set of interests.
In other words, he was a proto-maker of better futures, and a large part of his career in
the Western District, his writings, more importantly, perhaps even his actions, were exemplary
of somebody who refused to allow environment to be separated from issues of social justice,
issues to allow the history of invasion to forget and indeed to supersede fully functioning
indigenous cultures, who was concerned for animals, who was concerned for the trees.
Above all, he was a public intellectual.
It's interesting not that this is a particular merit point, but there's no record of him
whatsoever in Camperdown, which is his hometown for 40 or 50 years.
The background to talk about him today is, again, another concept which I think is implicit
and explicit in Badger's art, for example, and probably is very interesting of any developed
philosophical system.
It's the concept of a creative region, and you can see already in that term we're bringing
together arts and sciences, both of which hypothesize possible states which replenish
what has become eroded through instrumentalist reason, ideology, prejudice.
Creative regions are regions understood as generative, and we're all familiar with the
uncreative region.
That's the one that federal governments like to impose on us, where we are always at the
bottom of the food chain awaiting something to be handed down, which generally speaking
is a kind of monocultural response to a complex situation that further reduces our capacity
to think for ourselves.
Creative regions reverse that.
In the book, Ground Truthing, which I brought out last year, I tried to make the case for
the Mali as a creative region.
A feature of a creative region is that it's understood relationally.
That is, as many, many layers, palimpsest, you could say, of journeys.
All journeys are poetic journeys.
Poetic thinking is essentially the relating of places that were formerly far apart.
All poems are basically regions.
They're kinds of poetic geography.
To think about a region, as I did through the words of John Shaw Nilsson, was partly
to reinterpret Nilsson as an ecologist and as a stitcher together of a rapidly sort of
fragmenting environment.
Creative regions are also situational.
In other words, you can't just take what you find in the Mali and dump it down, say, in
the Western District.
There are fundamentally different regional imperatives, cultural histories, environmental
orders that operate in these related but different regions.
Creative regions are situational.
That is to say that they come from something.
They are kicked off by something.
They build around certain kinds of nuclei.
For me, in writing about the Mali, for a whole set of reasons to do with white settler investments
and indigenous investments, I focused on Lake Tyrol, which is somewhere south of Mildura,
not least because of the ambiguity of the word Tyrol, which is variously rendered in
English to mean something like void, space, dark, heaven, expanse.
It's a term that is taken probably from indigenous languages, but its sense is a bicultural
sense.
In other words, it emerges for us now in translation, where it's been assimilated to ideas of the
open, a place of possibility, a place of possible meeting.
In that sense, the myth, if you like, the creative myth for that part of the Mali was
situational.
It took advantage of a particular feature within the landscape.
The other feature about creative regions is that they are interregional.
In other words, they're not top-down regions that have a kind of, what can we say, a sort
of policy fence around them.
It stops at the Lodden, or it stops at the Galvan, or something, or it stops downriver
from a particular irrigation plantation.
Regions are interregional, so my view is it's a bit like the Turtle story, that it's regions
all the way down.
It doesn't really matter whether you're in Manhattan, the Mali is to some extent a region
you can talk to, and it works the other way, increasingly probably.
What I mean by that is regions are larger versions of journeys, and particularly as Dawson
illustrates, journeys always involve coming from somewhere else.
I suppose so much of the pain and horror of modern history has been about the attempt
to try and put gates across those journeys, and then to fight over which side of them
you should be, rather than actually realising that the journey is not a line, it's a constant
negotiation, it's a constant diplomatic process of understanding and opening.
It's about obviously respect.
A creative region then implies a certain practice, it implies a certain attitude or disposition
towards those around you, it implies, in the case of migrants like myself, taking ownership
not only of places that we have come from, reflecting on that, it also understands something
about the unceded ground where we find ourselves, and the processes of affiliation that need
to be undertaken in order to start a conversation where, somewhere in that kind of friction
between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, other voices also start to emerge.
Creative regions then have all these characteristics, and I tried to talk about that, and it brings
me to James Dawson, who is James Dawson, apart from being a failed distiller son.
James Dawson is to begin with a set of relationships, and probably one of the key relationships
that we're trying to understand more about is his relationship with his daughter, Isabella.
Isabella was born on the first station that they established in Victoria on the Upper
Yarra in the late 1840s, sorry, earlier, well mid-1840s, and later in the 1840s they made
this extraordinary biblical migration with their capital down to a property that they
took up, southwest of the Grampians, where James Dawson became an employer of indigenous
shepherds, indigenous stockmen, indigenous hand workers, and also employed Aboriginal
women as domestic labour. The finance ledgers for all those interactions, those employments
were kept for about 70 years and they were destroyed in a fire, but in itself it was
remarkable that he insisted on written contracts for every single one of those people employed.
Isabella grew up speaking Japwara as a coolant language, and she was responsible for compiling
over a long period between about 1862 when she would have been, I'm not sure, about
19 or 20, and a decade later when she published the results of her investigation into the
local indigenous languages, she was involved almost on a daily basis in getting the language,
and there's some remarkable photographs of her sitting in the garden with the people
that worked on the property discussing the different languages and trying to get them.
So it was a classic colonial moment at one level, but as one delves deeper into the vocabularies
that were collected, you see that they are completely sabotaging what you would expect
to have happened from a scientific point of view. The vocabularies do not attempt to place
a theory over what is being performed and recorded on a day-to-day basis, but rather
go out of their way to record individual speech differences, accents, pronunciations, and indeed
to bring alive a place of meeting or interaction in a way that completely sabotaged the great
grammatical ambition of Victorian science, which is to reduce the language to ordain.
So that's the first interesting relationship, because James Dawson oversights this and encourages
it, and 11 years after she publishes her first records of vocabularies, he and she collaborate
on a book called Australian Aborigines, which remains by far the largest lexicon, grammar
and phraseology, of Gundige Mare and Jaipurin languages in existence. Pretty inaccurate,
I'm sure, but the point is that it does not add up in terms of a scientific inquiry. It's
better to think of it as the diary of a set of conversations that were left unfinished.
A second important relationship is with a Jaipurin elder who has various names. In one
version, he's called Kawan Kunawaran, he's also called Hissing Swan, he's called King
David. He becomes a close friend of Dawson's, and in fact there's an opera written about
him, which Dawson commissioned. It was pretty amazing, and Kampadar was performed in Kampadar
and taken to Warnambal. We're still trying to track down the sheet music, but it's there.
He becomes an extremely important collaborator on this project, with all the ambiguity that
collaboration had in the wake of the Umerala Wars, in the wake of the terrible events that
happened on the convincing ground near Portland. These guys get together, and they work very
closely to understand between them, not what was the past of indigenous culture, but what
it has to tell, largely the white settler community, and also the next generation of
Aboriginal people, about the principles of a creative region, a region that can be demonstrated
to operate at every level as an integrated mechanism for taking care of country. It really
are some quite remarkable articles that Dawson publishes in mainstream journals like the
Argus and the Australasians, where he will say, sir, I beg to draw your attention to what
the original and continuing possessors of this land say about the Pleiades. Fair enough,
and it off he goes, and he tells them exactly what they have to say about the Pleiades.
He knows, and his workmen know that what's being told here is not, oh, here's a little
bit of information about the stars. What is being told here is about a specific constellation
in relation to a specific set of biota, animals and birds, the rising and falling of the Pleiades,
are responding to particular patterns of nesting and migration and so forth. These two relationships
are important, but then there are also, and these relationships, I might say, become very
entangled. Isabella Dawson appears, an Aboriginal girl who takes on their name, James Dawson
emerges, and that's quite a common process of doubling, which is an indication of community
emerging, an attempt to try and work out some protocols of accommodation between an invasive
culture and one that's seeking to rationalize it. Also, he is defined by a set of interests,
which I mentioned before, a set of relationships and a set of interests. His relationships,
not only with his intimate community but also with the white community at large, are fascinating.
If the indigenous elders who cooperate with him are collaborators in that ambiguous sense
that always associates, is always associated with the native informant, James Dawson has
a similarly ambiguous relationship with the policymakers in Melbourne. He has very good
relationships with the von Gerrard's of this world. He commissioned von Gerrard to paint
Tower Hill. He also, in a remarkable moment, gets one of his Aboriginal stockmen to paint
von Gerrard painting. So that's quite a nice little bit of payback there. His interests
extended then. Primarily, there were issues about social justice. He was a life long,
how can we say, advocate of a humanitarian understanding of indigenous cultures and what
wreckage had been caused by invasion. He went out of his way, as I've indicated, to
try to bring to a broader audience, but including indigenous people, the fruits of what he
had found out from those people who worked with him about ways of life, about medical
practices, about philosophical understandings, above all about kinship and family practices.
He did that not as an ethnographer particularly, but as a humanitarian. He did it in almost
as a perfect exemplar of what Karl Marx wanted an integrated social producer to be. In other
words, he worked from his senses towards a sensuous understanding of his human environment.
In other words, I think this is really probably the critical thing, is that he integrated
his feeling of pain or suffering or pathos into his knowledge since produced concepts
and the concepts came back as ideas that functioned to make sense of the context of what was
happening. Absolutely historical understanding. In contrast with the scientists who were around
him who were very keen to absorb Aboriginal people into mission stations, Dawson was a
great enemy of mission stations. He was continually going on about how boring they were and how
nothing happened in these things and people who were perfectly able to look after themselves
or being treated as children. He was very active in Framlingham, he was very active.
Going around, basically, Victoria writing highly critical reviews of what was happening
in these places, trying to get better conditions even within that sort of compromise situation.
What was interesting was that in that process of trying to connect his own feelings, his
own empathies to make sense of his senses, he managed to remain, it seems, able to connect
all the different parts of his life. I suppose I'm not sure what doesn't happen when we
have compartmentalized knowledge is that connection between feeling, sense, making sense and concepts.
If you maintain that progression, then feeling starts to generate a set of relationships
between all the different fields of a region, fields of inquiry. They start to define an
integrated ethical understanding of the world and, of course, a practice. It does not lead
to what happens so frequently in scientific knowledge, which is resentment.
Resentment is very much what happens when we impose a system, as indeed people tried
to do on the Kulin nation's language. Resentment set in when it didn't conform to a scientific
model and then they would say, the natives have a remarkably meager syntax. This is resentment.
Resentment against the very thing you thought you loved, which was an example of scientific
fragmentation. He never went down that path. As a consequence of that, he was able to integrate
his passion for human justice with an equally strong passion for environmental conservation.
He is responsible for commissioning von Gerhard's painting of Tower Hill, which as many of you
will know, subsequently became a point of reference for revegetation and biodiversity
practices in that part of Victoria. He was also responsible for establishing the Mount
Raus, or the pre-national park version at Mount Raus. He was untiring in telling through
the columns of the newspapers fellow squatters how badly they were damaging the land, telling
them about their fencing. He even undertook an independent experiment to look at salination
in the Western District. He was very adamant that groundwater was receding as a result
of bad practices. All of this stuff he did off his own back. He was merciless with his
gun. He used to go around shooting everything he could see. He'd stuff it. He taught himself
taxidermy and he opened a public museum in Camperdown for the benefit of the public.
So he wasn't too good to be true. He was also an animal activist. He led campaigns against
cruelty to animals. He would have been very much at the forefront of what's happening
with live animal exports. He was continually advocating for protection, particularly for
cattle and cruel practices. Above all, he was committed to public education. He was committed
to public education for his region. He didn't attempt to tell people what to do in Gippsland
or in the Mali. He radiated outwards from his property. He moved from the far lower
Western District up to Camperdown. The previous property sort of failed. I'm not quite sure.
I haven't worked out what the financial situation was. But it was a little bit like a second
bankruptcy. I think it was good for Dawson. I'm sure Dawson had read the Communist Manifesto
as we all have. Somewhere in there, Marx says that every time there is an economic change
in one's life, it produces a social revolution. It certainly did for Dawson because it caused
him to leave Scotland and embark on this migrant career. But also when he left Kangaton, which
was the first property, it caused him to come back to Camperdown where he was able to embark
on these philanthropic activities. What we are finding is a man who is both a collaborator
and a saboteur. He was on the one hand trying to make common cause with peoples that he
did not pretend to have particular rights to speak for. He thought of them as neighbors
very much in the way he would have thought of neighbors in a Scottish village. He seemed
to be completely devoid of the conventional social Darwinist racism. He just took them
as he found them. What he found was individuals who added up to a community that he basically
came to regard as exemplary in the ways that they responded both to each other and to the
challenge of change. His productive life then was a life that was an integrated relay between
sense, concept, and bringing it back into sensuous production. That is how he held together
all these things. I went to talk to his great-granddaughter the other day. She showed me the scrapbook
that survived. There are a lot of fires down there. I don't know why, but his public museum
burned down. I don't know why it burned down. It was actually above the fire station, but
it burned down. He was very proud of his otter. He killed an otter somewhere in Scotland,
stuffed it, and brought it out. That was the core of his collection. Anyway, it all went.
He had quite a lot of stuff in there, which he probably shouldn't have had too. He didn't
know what people might think about him later. Anyway, it got burned or destroyed. In all
of those processes, he held together this common core of humanity. Humanitarianism is
somewhat, in our post-humanist environment, is somewhat disregarded. His capacity to be
a common human being, to hold together all these different interests without some irritable
desire to understand and possess and control, but rather to create through his work, and
the scrapbook illustrates it, an incredible miscellany of related interests. It's a literary
style as well, the style of the miscellany. Somebody who works from local instances which
touch him, and then starts to produce concepts, acts on those concepts, starts to produce
social change. As I say, he's not only a commissioning artist, he's commissioning opera writers.
He commissions an extraordinary monument to one of his indigenous friends. He would
have been out of the district when this man died, and Dawson was deeply upset by the lack
of respect paid to his remains, and puts up this immense obelisk in the graveyard outside
Campadam, it's a unique monument. He's tireless to try to hold these things together that
are falling apart all around him. So what is then? What is this thing, this creative
region then, when it's put through, how am I going for time, should I stop? Second? Five
minutes, five minutes, okay, on your buses. What is this thing that he's producing in
relation to that creative region, when it's sort of channeled through the individual life
of this man? I think what he's doing is he's producing a distinctive form of place-based
knowledge. It's a knowledge which is situational. Again, it is exemplary in terms of its responsiveness
to the engagements that he finds on his doorstep. He responds openly, he responds passionately
and constructively to the evident human injustices, and more broadly, the senses of destruction
he sees all around him. So he's both highly progressive, he's highly reactionary. He's
progressive in the sense he foresees the destruction that's happening, and he remembers it from
what he's been told, and he's also reactionary because he wants to arrest the rate of destruction.
So in terms of the climate change debates, he both wants to find an accommodation with
change, but he also wants to mitigate change, if you like, that double age. So he both wants
public education to encourage, again, very Marxian, to encourage a leisure which is socially
productive, but at the same time he cries out against the sheer waste of human potential
and also for the disregard of the spirit lives of non-human nature as well. So that is situational
knowledge and, as I say, it produces this incredibly animated skein of interconnected
interests, and behind it and within it and through it is the unspoken, un-understood
so far relationship between him and Isabella, who is at the dark heart of this whole regional
knowledge. It's to her, and the fascinations of the gendering of the knowledge that became
available through her discussions with the children that were now female adults that
she grew up with becomes another part that, you know, we will probably need other people
to help us to understand how that all works. The second thing that was very important,
this brings me to the subtitle of the talk, is that situational knowledge or place-based
knowledge is essentially at the capacity to speak the place, and the real burden of this
vocabulary was not to classify, to reduce and produce something that could be taken away
and spoken in Manhattan. It was actually to show that these, the people who were contributing
nouns and adjectives and verbs had an endless discourse, that it would go on so long as
the conversation went on, it would continue to exfoliate and produce more nuances and
more possibilities. And so he makes a great point, Dawson does in the publication, that
in contrast with the white maps, which have so few names, and all the names are so generic,
the indigenous people to that region had names for everything. And it wasn't, they couldn't
classify, they knew what a river was when it was necessary, but generally speaking they
also had a name for when a river didn't flood, as well as names for individual billabongs,
individual rocks, as was necessary. It wasn't that they just charted the place unnecessarily,
they charted it functionally, that is to say they made connections that functioned. Now
he's making that point in the 1880s, we understand perhaps the importance of being able to speak,
to be able to name, bring the place into being through names, I hope we do, but he understood
speaking the place as the key to belonging, the key to being able to live there, and more
important than that, the key to being able to produce the place. So it wasn't about
just putting up on your gatepost some aboriginal words saying, I live at such and such, and
thinking therefore they made you true, is it, or whatever, nothing like that. And that's
the case of Worong. So he, for some inexplicable reason, he knew perfectly well when he made
his second homestead outside Campodown, what indigenous words were for habitation, village,
for the stone huts and all the rest of it, he understood perfectly well all of that.
So what he chose to do instead, instead of using Worong, he used Worong. And Worong is
the word you find on Jaipurong, or Jaja Wurong, that word on the end there, which essentially
means lip, it can mean lower lip or upper lip, I understand. But why would he call his house,
on his fence, he said Worong, not Worong, I would say. Now why would he call the place
where he came to live, at the time that he was working on the Australian Aborigines,
on the vocabulary, which is 100 page vocabulary, in three different dialects, together with
grammar and syntax, why would he call the place where he worked and lived, lip. And
it appears that he called it lip because he was well aware that it was a word in these
languages that also referred to flowing, it also referred to the lip of a waterhole, it
referred to a weir in the river, it referred to a place of fluid change, a place where
something was expressed, and where therefore something fell out, was collected and moved
forward. So that Worong maybe, this is my speculation, had something in his mind to
do with the relationship between a talking place and a place where an essential element
for life, as Badger was pointing out, were pooled. But what was pooled there was not
simply an ecological relationship, what was pooled there were connections that functioned,
connections between living, between social production, between the intimate act of speaking
and listening, of inclining and reclining. These were connections that functioned. So
what I wanted to do this morning in the context of this symposium, mine was certainly free
range eggs, they don't really come from any particular discourse, they bring together
little bits and pieces of 19th century history, little bits and pieces of local history, some
reflection on the poetics of place making. What I wanted to bring to you today was the
thought that in addition to the social and political mechanisms we need in order to improve
our capacity to make decisions about the futures of our environments through the various means
of collaboration that we've heard about, it also involves remembering people who've already
shown us the way. Dawson is exemplary in that fashion, but he's exemplary because he wasn't
a scientist, he wasn't an artist, he wasn't even in a certain sense an intellectual. What
he was was a sensuous producer of the real. For him there was no difference between being
socially and producing a world in which things made sense. And that was his primary task to
make sense of the, whatever came along he made sense, unless of course it was running,
which in case he shot him. Provided it lay still. But the point of that too, when he
went out hunting it was not for the gratification of the kill, it was for public education.
It was actually part of his conservation policy. If they could have museums and stuffed animals
in the major cities of the world, why shouldn't they have one in Campedown? If they could
perform operas in Milano, why couldn't they do it in Campedown? He had a great, very developed
sense of Italian, he really believed in his own church tower basically. So I recommend
him to you as a contribution to thinking about a creative region, such as we have here, and
a reminder that there are particular avatars, there are particular people and spirits who
are very strong. And one of our tasks is in terms of inventing a better future is to remember
them. Thank you.
