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March 16, 2008
There is an interesting paper by Patrick Hutchings in Before Pangaea: New Essays in Transcultural Aesthetics, which are the papers from the Second Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics in 2004. These are published in Literature and Aesthetics (Dec 2005), the journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. In this paper entitled Australian Aboriginal Art he states that:
Founded/‘founded’ in 1788 a year before the Enlightenment’s sharp end, the French Revolution, ‘Australia’ was never an Enlightenment project. Nor was it a project of empathy. Actually to understand what the [indigenous] Australians feel for the land, their song-lines at once hymns and mental maps, is something that would have been utterly incompatible with the project of imperium. Empires take land, destroy cultures: the English do this with a bland air of benevolence.....the (indigenous) Australians were left, by and large, with what the Imperium did not want: and it wanted more than Sydney.
Australia's understanding of itself as a child of the Enlightenment is always at odd with Australia as a a penal colony in the British empire. The Imperium wanted their local authorities to establish a convict settlement and then, in due course, to let the usual land-grabbers in.
An Enlightenment Australia was overlaid on Australia as a penal colony? Or did the penal colony transform into Australia as an Enlightenment project? If so, when? Under under terra nullius indigenous Australians c were nobody, because their land to them at once useful and sacred belonged now, under laws which they could not understand, to the Empire.
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