POLC 4470 Week 2 Assignment

POLC 4470 Week 2 Assignment | Tulane University

Assignment 2: Whose customs?

Here is a rudimentary, if incendiary, question: what are the subjects that turn Indigene Peoples off when they are asked about things like their skin color, their customs, their dances, even their skills in throwing a boomerang? 

These people below are your Indigene cohorts--students and staff sitting in the Great Hall on the Quad of the University of Sydney. They are answering awkward, sometimes insensitive questions. How do they reply to them? Here's the link featuring 20 minutes of questions and answers.

Ask us anything: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Links to an external site.) 

Can you think of equivalent questions addressed to you if you are stereotyped into a specific ethnic group, or culture, or religion? What would be the best way to react?

From Botany Bay, its not-so-secret river, and the burgeoning town of Sydney located in New South Wales, we now head across the expansive continent to Western Australia (WA). Most of it is inhospitable land with little rainfall or fresh water to sustain the population. A territory nearly twice the size of Alaska, it counts just 2.5 people per square mile. The few population centers are on the coast such as the state's capital in Perth; nearby so-funky Fremantle ("Freo" as the locals call it); Albany on the southern tip known in the past for a massive whaling industry and a military outpost; and Broome up north which is much closer to Singapore or Malaysia than to Sydney. Kalgoorlie, a former gold mining center not on the coast, is an exception.

Indigenous stories abound in Western Australia--12% of its population is Indigene--and author Kim Scott is at its cutting edge. In some ways we'll be WA-centric with both he and Claire Coleman (Terra Nullius) being Noongar writers from the southwestern part of the state. Self-styled urban Indigene author and artist Sally Morgan is a member of the Bailgu people of the Pilbara region in WA and is a professor in Perth. And probably Australia's most acclaimed writer, Tim Winton, went to high school in the old whaling port of Albany where he likes "hanging out" when not engaged in surfing, fishing, and camping.

One of the most trenchant accounts of cruelty towards Western Australia's Aboriginal population is captured in the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence (which several students alerted me to during our discussions). It focuses on A.O. Neville, a really bad guy who was chief protector (1915-36) and commissioner for native affairs (1936-40) but became the arch-enemy of protecting the Aboriginal population. He believed that kidnapping "half castes" from their families and then breeding them with white people would over time eliminate their Indigene origins. Neville is superbly played by Kenneth Branagh, so superbly that you wonder if he can really be considered a bad guy. The soundtrack is by Peter Gabriel. Watch this three-minute trailer to see how inspiring, or depressing, this movie is:

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE - Trailer (Links to an external site.) 

For the record. Even though the glamour of Botany Bay's settlement owes much to its colonialization by the British, it is off the coast of Western Australia that the first European, primarily Dutch, ships arrived, many of which were shipwrecked off the treacherous coast. The most famous was the Dutch East India ship Batavia, which was lost in 1629, a massacre of some of its crew having taken place, and it has been the subject of many books--scholarly and not so scholarly--a number of films, and even an opera.

It's hard to stress how isolated the state is from the rest of Australia. Not surprisingly, a referendum in 1933 asked citizens: "Are you in favor of the State of Western Australia withdrawing from the Federal Commonwealth?" Two-thirds of the population rejected the idea, though six of 50 electoral districts were in favor, largely in gold-mining regions.

To this day anti-Canberra federal government sentiment continues to feed the cause of sovereignty. During the pandemic, support for WA secession grew again, reinforced by its hard-border closure with the rest of Australia in 2020. A poll last October found that 28% of Western Australians support the state leaving the Australian federation. It has led to the establishment of the pro-secessionist "WAxit Party" modeled on Brexit. 

Here is a regional map:

Western Australia (Links to an external site.)

Without further ado let's turn to the novel published by Kim Scott in 2012 titled That Deadman Dance. There's no better way to engage with the novel than to hear one in a series of talks titled "Australian Literature 101," hosted by the Wheeler Center in Melbourne, and recorded in 2012. The gracious host is Ramona Koval at the University of Melbourne and the discussant is a rather reticent Philip Morrissey, Coordinator of Australian Indigenous Studies, also at the University of Melbourne. 

Please watch this video which explains the makings and structure of That Deadman Dance:

https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/australian-literature-101-kim-scott-that-deadman-dance (Links to an external site.)

With this background, do begin reading Kim Scott's novel. As Morrissey notes the time frames it is set in are ambiguous. Choose your favorite citations from the book--it's easy to do on Kindle. Good advice is, once again, to let the text speak for itself--the whole text and not fragments or sections of it.

Delving deeply into symbolism is an option if you feel confident doing it. Try to be ingenious, creative, contrarian, challenging convention. You have two weeks to submit the final paper on Sunday, February 21 by 8pm.

Objectives

After this module you should be able to:

• Distinguish differences between states in a federal system such as Australia is.

• Review what makes the Aboriginal experience in Australia unique.

• Identify the grounds for secessionism that breaks away from an independent state, whether on moral grounds or policy differences.

• Explain Kim Scott's juxtaposition of the two characters who represent native culture and customs on the one hand and white colonist society on the other as they increasingly confront each other.

• Speculate about the differences in values between the Noongar people Scott writes about and other cultural groups.

• Give your own appraisal of the character of the nineteenth-century whaling industry.

Depict how Americans are portrayed in Scott's novel.  

• Design

Here is a rule of thumb. The "Introduction" and "Objectives" beginning each Module are the core elements that serve as lectures as well as explicit purposes for the reading. 

When I want to add important materials to a Module after we've started on it, I'll keep these to a minimum. I'll include them in our Discussions forum in order not to alter the "Introduction" which would require constantly alerting you that the Intro section has changed. So, for example, my prerecorded talk on Kate Grenville's Joan Makes History was on the Discussions forum last week.

One other content change: I'll rarely use the "Announcements" feature so as not to clutter up our Module except when we need to deal with ongoing events such as hurricanes, closures, and other high-order changes.

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Submission Instructions

Submit your assignment answers by 8pm Sunday February 21. Remember, as the syllabus states, any honest and original attempt to answer all the assignment questions clearly based on the readings earns full credit, but late work is not accepted. Click the "Submit Assignment" button and upload your document as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

Grading and Evaluation

See the rubric below for details. Make sure to read my Assignment Comment once your assignment is graded. If you like, reply to it in an Assignment Comment, or if you have any questions.