Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

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Sandra PannellAs Raymond Williams (1976) reminds us, the term ‘culture’ derives in a roundabout way fromthe Latin verb colere, ‘to cultivate’, and is thus associated with tilling of the soil. In this sensethen, it is easy to see how the forests of Far North Queensland were construed at the point ofthe first European incursions in the late 1800s as being without culture; brutish enclaveslacking refinement and the other human-created characteristics attributed to agriculturalvistas. From the 1870s onwards, a certain cultural framework emerged for perceiving thisenvironment. Based upon a series of binary oppositions, ‘scrub’ was seen as ‘wild’ and‘natural’, while the developing farms and towns came to epitomise a European sense ofdomesticated, cultural spaces. Given this environmental model, it is not so surprising thatthe Aborigines who inhabited the rainforests of the region were spoken of in the same termsreserved for these ‘dark’ and ‘repugnant’ ‘jungles’ (Savage 1992: 219). The writings of earlyexplorers, scientists and government agents alike, men such as Christie Palmerston (Savage1992), Archibald Meston (1889), and Robert L. Jack (1888), provide numerous examples ofthis usage.The recurrent spatial construction of Aborigines ‘in nature’ intersects with a familiar set oftemporal coordinates, in the process reproducing an all too commonly held ‘chronotope’(Bakhtin 1981) of Aboriginality. The RCSQ report and the nomination document consistentlyrefer to Aboriginal occupation and use in the past tense, locating these activities in thedistant past – within the prehistory of the region. In these two key documents, and in theIUCN evaluation of the nomination, ‘rainforest-dwelling Aborigines’ are identified as‘Barrineans’ – living vestiges of an earlier ‘invasion’ of ‘Oceania negrito type’ people (seeRCSQ 1986: 39; IUCN 1988). This reference to ‘Barrineans’ derives from an outdated anddiscredited theory of human evolution in and migration to Australia (see Brayshaw 1990: 25-26; Horsfall 2002).Discussing the results of their 1938-1939 expedition to North Queensland, the anthropologistNorman Tindale and his colleague Joseph Birdsell speak of the existence of a ‘Tasmanoidgroup’ in the rainforests of North Queensland (1941). The dozen ‘small’ or ‘pygmoid’ tribesbelonging to this group are said to exhibit physical characteristics similar to those ofTasmanian Aborigines, hence their use of the label. Tindale and Birdsell also referred to thisaggregation of tribes as the ‘Barrineans’, in reference to their territorial proximity to LakeBarrine on the Atherton Tableland. Both authors believed the rainforest-dwelling Barrineansto be “a separate small-framed type of modern man forming one of the earliest stocks insouthern Asia” (Tindale 1974: 89), and thus, according to these authors, the Barrineansrepresent “the first wave of the Aboriginal occupation of Australia” (see IUCN 1988: 4).In contrast to the portrayal of local people in Komodo National Park, and in many other WorldHeritage sites, the nomination document and supporting reports do not dispute the claim thatAboriginal people are the original inhabitants of the region. Indeed, in the evolutionary modelpresented in the nomination, Aboriginal people are identified as an endemic species alongwith the region’s fauna and flora. In this sense, Aborigines are located in the same ‘deep’time of natural history that also explains the formation and presence of the region’s wettropical rainforests. In much the same way that these forests are said to contain the “groupof birds considered to represent the ancestral [emphasis added] stock from which Australia’s,and possibly the world’s songbirds evolved” (DASETT 1987: 25), they are also home to‘humankind’s first comers’, the Aborigines, in their “natural state of humanity”(Kuper 2003: 390).In the flawed evolutionary picture presented in the nomination document and in supporting‘scientific’ reports, Aboriginal people and culture are portrayed in a pre-contact setting –leaching toxic plant foods, cracking rainforest nuts, cutting wooden swords and shields fromthe surrounding forests, weaving baskets, wearing bark cloth, and wielding Pleistocene-agedstone-axes (Figure 4) (DASETT 1987: 13; World Conservation Monitoring Centre 1992;RCSQ 1986: 39). This primitivist view of ‘ancient’ and ‘natural’ Aborigines, uncontaminated12
Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context?Lessons from the World Heritage Listby the ravages of colonial contact and culture, is perpetuated in the IUCN evaluationdocument, where continuing Aboriginal use of their lands incorporated within the Wet Tropicsboundary is confined to “traditional non-commercial purposes” (1988: 11). As indicated inthe IUCN evaluation, confining Aboriginal use of the Wet Tropics to ‘traditional’ purposes,supposedly in tune with nature, serves to maintain the listed environmental values of thearea. As this stated condition of the listing suggests, ‘traditional’ Aborigines, depicted as“authentic natives”, represent a world in which “culture does not challenge nature”(Kuper 2003: 395).The documentary sources and reports appended to the nomination document talk aboutsome of the ‘remnants’ of this ancient hunter-gatherer society ‘surviving’ at the BloomfieldRiver within the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area (see RCSQ 1986: 40-41). Others, not sofortunate, such as the “last remaining members of the ‘Bandjin’ tribe from Hinchinbrook”, areproclaimed to be “now dead” (ibid: 41), while the residents of Murray Upper are described as“less intact” (loc. cit.). Notable for their absence from this decimated demographic profile arethe Aboriginal residents of Yarrabah, the former Church of England Mission near Cairns.While their lands were included within the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, the communityof Yarrabah is clearly not regarded as one of the centres of “survival of the aboriginalrainforest culture” (RCSQ 1986: 41). When coupled with the idea of nature as anendangered array of evolutionary relicts, these proclamations about Aboriginal people andculture make the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area look more like a “nature cemetery” ratherthan a nature conservancy (Luke 1995: 17). As Bender points out, this kind of spatialtemporalrepresentation is not so unusual in the context of heritage protection:Those involved in the conservation, preservation and mummification oflandscape create normative landscapes, as though there was only one way oftelling or experiencing. They attempt to ‘freeze’ the landscape as a palimpsestof past activity (Bender 1999: 26).The omission of the Aboriginal residents of Yarrabah alerts us to the operation of anotherdichotomy, other than the primary nature-culture dualism. The nomination document andsupporting scientific reports set up an opposition between ‘cultural’ Aborigines in ‘nature’ andacculturated Aboriginal people situated outside of ‘nature’. ‘Natural’ Aborigines inhabit therainforest and observe ‘traditional Aboriginal culture’ in a pre-contact time frame (RCSQ1986: 40). Aboriginal people removed from their natural rainforest habitat, and living onformer missions or government settlements, are in terms of the indices of the RCSQ reportand the nomination document, both out of place and out of time. As presented in the RCSQreport, this spatial and temporal dislocation also equates to a loss of culture.As ‘endangered authenticities’ (Clifford 1988), Aboriginal people appear no different from theother ‘rare, very restricted and endangered species’ identified in the nomination document asliving in confined habitats throughout the wet tropical forests. Notwithstanding the tenacity of“the few remaining surviving gatherer-hunter societies” (ibid: 40), the general picture ofAboriginal ‘cultural heritage’ which emerges from these sources is one of relics and remnantsof material culture, devoid of social actors.Contemporary and apparently informed scientific propositions about Aboriginal society andculture strongly resonate with nineteenth century notions of Aboriginal people as ‘stone-agerelics’ or a ‘doomed race’. Indeed, there is little that separates these ideas from thoseexpressed in the report of the first ‘scientific’ expedition to the region in 1889, where localAborigines are identified as “savage and inferior races”, “destined to disappear” (Meston1889: 9). Like the Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland Report, ArchibaldMeston’s 1889 ‘scientific report’ also positions its discussion of the local Aborigines amongstthe more detailed descriptions of the region’s fauna and flora (Meston 1889). While it wouldbe comforting to dismiss the view of Aboriginality presented in nineteenth century accounts13
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Page 14 and 15: Sandra PannellFigure 3 (left):Walla
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