(Not) Saying Sorry

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Magowan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001): 193–201; cited by Graham Huggan, ... Hall, and Peter Carey which are concerned with an “empathetic reimagining of.
(Not) Saying Sorry Australian Responses to the Howard Government’s Refusal to Apologize to the Stolen Generations J AN E T W IL SON

Bringing Them Home and (Not) Saying Sorry

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A P R I L 1997 , following the tabling in the Australian Parliament of the Bringing Them Home Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC ), a process of Reconciliation was set in motion: the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation anticipated that this would be completed by the Centenary of Federation in 2001. But when the then Prime Minister, John Howard, at the nation’s first official Convention on Reconciliation held in May 1997, refused to say sorry for past injustices in a manner that resonated convincingly for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, members of the Stolen Generations and their descendants, as well as sympathetic and activist white Australians, the process was stalled for over a decade.1 Reconciliation as a strategy was marked by the instigation of the national ‘Sorry Day’ (from 26 May 1998), the signing of Sorry Books and Bridge Walks for Reconciliation (2000), symbolic gestures that were undercut by the Federal Government’s unfit apology.2 An appropriate apology was required that would make symbolic restitution through a show of public contrition: a speech act that was explicitly performative and demonstrated perlocutionary force3 in place of the personal regret that John Howard offered for 1

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Rosanne Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation: The Uncanny Witness of Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne,” Humanities Research 15.3 (2009): 107. 2 Haydie Gooder & Jane M. Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia,” Interventions 2.2 (2000): 239–40. 3 J.L. Austin, in his How to Do Things with Words, claims that making a performative utterance with perlocutionary effect can have the effect of “making something so”; cited by Allan Luke, “The

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the suffering caused by the policies of child removal.4 These demands dominated the assertion of identity and rights, and were a rallying call for marches and demonstrations of the Sorry Movement. Until Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his formal apology at the opening of his first Parliament speech in 2008, a substantial section of the Australian population continued to feel angered and betrayed by the Howard government’s inappropriate sentiments. This national refusal was all the more invidious as a number of church groups, state leaders, and police forces in Australia offered apologies within a year of the Bringing Them Home Report, and 1997 was a year of governmental apologies globally.5 This essay examines two fictional responses which entered the public domain just before Rudd’s official apology – Ray Lawrence’s feature film Jindabyne (2006) and the novel Sorry by Gail Jones (2007) – and asks what they contributed to the alternative narratives that challenged the nation’s master-narrative of colonization during Reconciliation.6 Both have been interpreted in relation to liberal white Australians’ outrage at the denial of historical responsibility,7 and to other Material Effects of the Word: Apologies, ‘Stolen Children’ and Public Discourse,” Discourse Studies in Cultural Politics of Education 18.3 (December 1997): 350–51. Gooder & Jacobs, citing Judith Butler, refer to the hyperlocutionary utterance, which is located between what feels “absolutely necessary to say and that which feels too risky to say” because it is potentially injurious; see “ ‘On the Border of the Unsayable’,” 231. 4 Howard’s comments included the following: “Personally I feel deep sorrow for those of my fellow Australians who suffered under the practices of past generations towards indigenous peoples [. .. ]. However, we must acknowledge past wrongs.” See Luke, “The Material Effects of the Word,” 354–55. The speech is available on the Australian Government website (www.nla.gov.au). 5 Gooder & Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’,” 239. In the U S A , Bill Clinton apologized for racism and race policies; in the U K , Tony Blair apologized for the Irish potato famine; there were apologies from the French Catholic Church for the deportation of Jews under the Vichy Government; and successive Japanese Prime Ministers were under pressure to apologize for the nation’s military actions during World War Two; see Luke, “The Material Effects of the Word,” 344. 6 Deena Rymhs comments on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ reconstruction, rather than deconstruction, of master-narratives in Canada in “Appropriated Guilt: Reconciliation in an Aboriginal Canadian Context,” E S C 32.1 (March 2006): 105–106. 7 On Jindabyne, see Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation”; among the studies of Sorry as a story of trauma are Dolores Herrero, “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarisation: Gail Jones’s Sorry,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3 (July 2011): 283–95; Rosanne Kennedy, “Australian Trials of Trauma: The Stolen Generations in Human Rights, Law and Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 48.3 (2011): 333–53; Christopher Eagle, “ ‘Angry Because She Stutters’: Stuttering, Violence, and the Politics of Voice in American Pastoral and Sorry,” Philip Roth Studies 8.1 (Spring 2012): 9–22; and Julie McGonegal, “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret: The Limits of Non-Indigenous Knowledge and Representation,” E S C : English Studies in Canada 35.1 (March 2009): 67–83.

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affective identifications with past Indigenous suffering in the wake of the Bringing Them Home Report. It focuses on the performativity of Reconciliation through the uttering of the apology, which in both film and novel is represented as a culmination of the trauma and unease suffered by white settler protagonists. In using the framework of the Reconciliation process and its addressing of historical injustice in the settler colony, I suggest, the texts speak directly to the hiatus caused by the Federal Government’s refusal to apologize. Indeed, pointed allusions to white settler violence, neglect, and indifference in the film, and metatextual references in the novel including the performative act implied in the title, Sorry,8 consciously position these texts in relation to the national debate. Although they draw attention to the “ideological, ethical and psychological assumptions underpinning the act of apology,”9 their conclusions confirm that Anglo-Australian colonialism continues to remain under scrutiny.10 Both texts, as narratives of trauma entailing the bearing of witness to unspeakable acts and representing white settler responses ranging from denial to guilt, can be interpreted as political allegories, a narrative mode which is intentional in Sorry.11 The acts of murder and violation of Aborigines with which they begin are readable as contemporary political refractions of the legacy of colonial dispossession and violence that underlies the Stolen Generations, while the trauma, guilt, and remorse experienced by their white female protagonists are applicable to the nation in general.12 The Anglo-Australian and Aboriginal characters have symbolic roles identifiable with the incomplete Reconciliation process and demonstrate some overlap between Aboriginal victims and white sympathizers. This allegorical dimension is reinforced by manifestations of the 8

Jones includes “A Note on Sorry,” giving information on the political context, while the title, Sorry, is a performative, perlocutionary speech act in its own right. See Gail Jones, Sorry (London: Harvill Secker, 2007): 215–16. 9 Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 109. 10 A.D. Moses asks whether the apology opens up new relational space for the Indigene in the national narrative or inaugurates a critique of settler colonialism; see “Official Apologies, Reconciliation, and Settler Colonialism: Australian Indigenous Alterity and Political Agency,” Citizenship Studies 15.2 (2011): 156. Rymhs considers whether guilt as depicted in literature and in public discussion might lead to tangible political action; see “Appropriating Guilt,” 107–109. 11 See Summer Block, “Interview with Gail Jones,” January Magazine (24 May 2014), http: //januarymagazine.com/profiles/gailjones.html (accessed 11 July 2014), and María Pilar Royo– Grasa, “In Conversation with Gail Jones,” Journal for the Association of the Study of Australian Literature 12.3 (2012): 10. I am indebted to Maria Pilar Royo–Grasa for giving me access to this interview and other relevant material. 12 See Herrero, “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarisation,” 288; and Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 111–12.

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uncanny and the gothic associated with the settler’s collective trauma of colonization stemming from identifications with the trauma of the Aborigines and new understanding of the nation in terms of what Ann Kaplan describes as the “traumatic contact zones.”13 This essay will argue that both texts, in keeping with revisionist interpretations of Jameson’s concept of national allegory,14 can be read as deliberate interventions in dominant settler-colonial narratives and history in their insistence on the past and its need for transformation into the present.15 Following the white liberal view that full reconciliation should disturb the dominant culture,16 they constitute discontinuities, breaks, and a feminization of the paternalistic role of the nation in the reconstructed master-narrative represented in Howard’s response to the Bringing Them Home Report.17 The apology that is uttered functions symbolically as an analogy for a formal national apology. In Jindabyne it is delivered on a sacred site, witnessed by members of both communities, while in Sorry it is uttered privately by a protagonist who allegorically represents Australia’s settler community.18 But in both texts its reception is only partial: in Sorry it is delivered too late, after the death of the person for whom it is intended; in Jindabyne it is abruptly rejected by a member of the Aboriginal community who slaps the apologizer. In each case, the abortive apology points to the liberal view held in transnational reconciliation movements (e.g., in Canada, where the apology was delivered in 1998) that

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Ann Kaplan, “Traumatic Contact Zones and Embodied Translators with Reference to Select Australian Texts,” in Trauma and Cinema Cross-Cultural Explorations, ed. E. Ann Kaplan & Ban Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2004): 45–63. 14 See Imre Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 803–27. Julie McGonegal argues that Jameson’s reworking of allegory as variable and contingent opens the nation to “imaginative revision”; see “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory and the Always-Already-Read Third World Text,” Interventions 7.2 (2005): 255. See also Lorenzo Mari, “‘ How Katherine Mansfield Was Kidnapped’: A (Post)colonial Family Romance,” in Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)Colonial, ed. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber & Delia de Sousa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2013): 63–75. 15 John Frow, “A Politics of Stolen Time,” Meanjin 57.2 (1988): 363. 16 Paulette Regan, “An Apology Feast in Hazleton: Indian Residential Schools, Reconciliation, and Making Space for Indigenous Legal Traditions,” in Indigenous Legal Traditions, ed. Law Commission of Canada (Vancouver: U of British Colombia P, 2007): 43); cited by McGonegal, “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret,” 70. 17 See Luke’s critical discourse analysis of Howards’ speech in “The Material Effects of the Word,” 366. 18 See Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 123; McGonegal, “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret,” 76.

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the apology cannot be considered as a substitute for full reparation19 or as defining or completing the Reconciliation process;20 at most, although no speech act can absolve the burden of the past, it can create the conditions for moral recompense, the amelioration of suffering. In Jindabyne’s and Sorry’s narratives of cultural disorder and racial tension, both Aboriginal and stereotypical white figures play minor but symbolic roles. The focus is on the inner world of the white settler protagonist, the psychological trauma caused by violation of Aboriginal people, and subsequent release in the performative act of apology. These contexts of delivery and reception show that the apology has value in the “moral economy of the white community” of Australia,21 concerned with the implications of the decade-long denial of the official apology. Jindabyne opens with the off-camera rape and murder of an Aboriginal woman by a white man, an electrician who is loosely associated with the hydroelectric scheme in the Snowy Mountains of south-east Australia, adjacent to the town of Jindabyne with its man-made lake. Four white men on a fly-fishing trip who find the body floating in a stream delay reporting it to the police, leading to hostility from members of the local community, including Aborigines. The focus moves to one of the fishermen, Stuart Kane, the insecurities and anxieties triggered in his wife, Claire, her anger at her husband’s act of neglect, and concern for the deceased Aboriginal woman’s family. Claire breaks the code of denial of alleged wrong-doing by the fishermen and their families, in their symbolic degradation of the body of the Aboriginal woman, Susan Connor. She takes up a collection and, although the Aboriginal family reject her offer of material compensation, she attends Susan’s memorial ceremony, uninvited. Stuart and his friends soon follow. Her husband apologizes to the Aborigine family: “‘I’m really sorry, OK. I came to apologise. My name is Stuart Kane and I’m one of the men who found your daughter’.”22 Although this performative speech act is rejected, 19

Luke points out that the Bringing Them Home Report recommended apologies from government and church leaders, but its calls for monetary compensation were rejected in court; see “The Material Effect of the Word,” 344. Kennedy asks about “the value of apology without justice or reparation”; see “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 108. 20 McGonegal claims that, for native activists in Canada, the process requires ongoing nonIndigenous engagement and mobilization; see “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret,” 70. Rymhs critiques Anglo-European discourses of reconciliation, the limitations of affective responses, and ‘false’ reconciliation to Aborigines’ redrawing of nationalism; see “Appropriating Guilt,” 118–19. 21 Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 121. 22 Jindabyne, dir. Ray Lawrence (Australia 2006; 123 min.). All quotations come from the film script.

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it achieves more than the failed attempt at material compensation; 23 the white Australians are allowed to stay for the ceremony, and reconciliation begins in the domestic sphere of Stuart and Claire’s marital difficulties. Sorry is set in north-western Australia in the 1930s and 1940s when the ideology of assimilation, hence the indignities suffered by the Stolen Generations, was at its height; it consists of several atrocities and violations. The focus is on the friendship between a white girl and an Aboriginal one: Perdita, the daughter of a recently-arrived migrant English couple, Nicholas Keene, an anthropologist, and his unstable wife Stella, who is obsessed with Shakespeare; and Mary, the family’s Aboriginal housemaid, one of the Stolen Generations, who had been taken from her family at the age of six and put into a convent. The story is Perdita’s bildungsroman, told partly in her own voice and partly in the third person, circling discontinuously around the central event, the crux of the novel, delaying its disclosure, yet paradoxically insisting on its centrality to the novel: Perdita’s murder of her father when she came across him raping her friend Mary, a crime for which Mary takes the blame and is imprisoned. This narrative of displacement and deferral images the structure of “traumatic time” and the psychic aftershock – the belatedness of memory – of this devastating tragedy. 24 Perdita develops a stutter and loses the power of speech as a result of repressing all memory of her act, recovering her ability to talk only after seeing a psychotherapist, and finally acknowledging her responsibility for her father’s murder. After Mary dies in prison, Perdita realizes too late that she should have apologized on account of her friend’s sacrifice. Her apology is one of regret: “There was a flood of hot tears, and a sudden heart breaking. I should have said sorry to my sister, Mary. Sorry, my sister, oh my sister, sorry.”25 Unlike Claire Kane in Jindabyne, whose reaction is one of indirect guilt, Perdita’s trauma is due to her suppressed memory of her deed, in allowing her friend to take the blame, and her inability to redeem the miscarriage of justice. The ethical structure of Sorry therefore differs from that of Jindabyne, in that its female protagonist is directly affected by trauma on account of her crime and its repercussions.26

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Frow points out that material cost should be secondary to the symbolic reparation represented by the apology with its humbling of pride (“A Politics of Stolen Time,” 363). 24 Herrero, “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarization,” 284; Kennedy, “Australian Trials of Trauma,” 349–50. 25 Jones, Sorry, 211. 26 On the differentiation between direct and indirect trauma due to colonial rule, see Irene Visser, “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3 (July 2011): 275–76.

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In exploring the traumatized subjectivity of the white settler rather than the Aboriginal victims, the abject of history, both narratives establish equivalences between trauma experienced on the individual level and trauma in the national context. Jindabyne attributes the presence of anxiety and the unease to indirect guilt, and identifies its disturbing events as an uncanny troubling from the past as colonial history repeats itself, coming back to disturb the present, bringing with it certain kinds of affect. The film has, in fact, been read by Rosanne Kennedy as a postcolonial ghost story, for, in allegorical terms, the narrative bears witness to the ways in which the Australian nation is being haunted by its unresolved past, an uncanniness signified by the lake that contains the original town buried below, an image for the suppressions and dispossessions that continue to haunt the present.27 The old stopped clock which Stuart Kane and his son fish up images the cessation of change, the stalling of time that the failed apology also signals. Sorry, in Dolores Herrero’s reading, displays gothic features and other kinds of defamiliarization characteristic of other trauma narratives, here indicative of abnormality and obsessive behaviour; Perdita’s buried consciousness is also a site of the uncanny offering her something both familiar yet strange, as Julie McGonegal comments;28 the narrative omissions and ellipses that it causes have their public counterpart in the historical amnesia about the Japanese bombardment of Dutch refugee ships in Broome in 1942, when she and her mother were living there, a traumatic event which haunts Perdita, for she thinks she witnessed it, but is not sure: “I was witness and not witness, and in any case, because of my stuttering, could not tell of what I had seen.” 29 Saying Sorry and White Settler Unsettlement In introducing the poetics of apology as the symbolic gesture required for redemption and healing in postcolonial Australia, both Jindabyne and Sorry contribute to the shift in the national imaginary due to the opening-up of the space of public confession with theoretical narratives, (auto)biographical writings, and testimonies of the Stolen Generations.30 These were presented orally to the 27

Kennedy, “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 111. Herrero, “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarization,” 288–89; McGonegal, “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret,” 78. 29 Jones, Sorry, 135–36; Maya Jaggi, review of Sorry, The Guardian (26 May 2007): 17. 30 See Bain Attwood, “Learning About the Truth: The Stolen Generations’ Narratives,” in Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Bain Attwood & Fiona Magowan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001): 193–201; cited by Graham Huggan, who comments on the difficulties of interpreting such narratives (whether as “ ‘ talking cure’ or as white containment 28

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National Commission of Enquiry and the Convention on Reconciliation in May 1997, and published subsequently as the Bringing Them Home Report. Like other transnational reconciliation movements in Canada and South Africa, this public memory project challenged colonial myths of white superiority and possession by implying that the white community’s political authority rested on unjust colonial conquest, thus threatening the legitimacy of white Australia’s citizenship.31 It enabled the activists of the Sorry Movement to confront the AngloAustralian settlers, who had benefitted from colonialism, with their responsibility, positioning them as witnesses to such texts.32 Feelings of bad conscience and guilt, opened up by the revelations of Indigenous suffering in the new space of collective memory, reinforced the unsettledness of the white settlers, by undermining their sense of “properly constituted national selfhood.”33 These ‘saying sorry’ texts, as I define them, can be read in relation to white anxiety over the stalling of the reconciliation process between 1997 and 2008, indicated by the outpourings of sympathy from white Australians towards Indigenous Australians. With their focus on the performativity of testimony, witnessing, and speech, they constitute a sub-genre of the Reconciliation narratives which in general foreground the white settler’s “range of unsettlements” 34 or anxieties about guilt and belonging. They are comparable to other ‘sorry novels’ associated with the national discourse of Reconciliation, such as Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2003), and Andrew McGahan’s White Earth (2004), which deal variously with land rights and colonialism following the passing of the Native Title Act of 1993, and have affinities with historical novels by writers such as David Malouf, Kate Grenville, Rodney Hall, and Peter Carey which are concerned with an “empathetic reimagining of the past” and its legacy of injustice and violence.35 In identifying a genre of ‘sorry novels’, Rebecca Weaver–Hightower compares them to the signing of the ‘sorry books’ in their emphasis on the “guilt of the colonizer and the shame of the colonized, complicated by the denial of both,” as notable in the settlers’ selfstrategy”); see Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2007): 97–98. 31 Richard Mulgan, “Citizenship and Legitimacy in Post-Colonial Australia,” in Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, ed. Nicholas Peterson & Will Saunders (Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1998): 179. 32 McGonegal, “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret,” 69. 33 Gooder & Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’,” 235–36. 34 “‘On the Border of the Unsayable”,’ 231. 35 Jo Jones, “Ambivalence, Absence and Loss in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon,” Australian Literary Studies 24.2 (2009): 70.

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identification as colonial victims of the British and thus similar to Indigenous victims of colonization.36 Like these, the ‘saying sorry’ texts are spaces for examining white settler guilt and apology, but unlike them they dramatize the uttering of the apology in addressing the mechanics of reconciliation. In affirming what the Federal Government had denied – the imperatives of the apology – and asking how the settler’s moral status and citizenship might be legitimated afresh, they exist in a politically symbiotic relationship to the era’s most prominent and powerful narratives: the autobiographies of the Stolen Generations, notably Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Kim Scott’s Benang (2000).37 That is, their stress on the disturbing unpredictability of memory, giving evidence, bearing witness, and accepting responsibility makes these, of all the ‘sorry’ narratives, best positioned as responses to survivor testimonies, and articulations of white liberal expectations as implied in the national Reconciliation agenda. The texts’ shared emphasis on individual testimony and giving witness responds directly to the politics of (not) saying sorry in Australia. However disrupted and incomplete, the apology and its underlying circumstances in Jindabyne draw attention to utterance as act, while in Sorry the absence of voice and alternative forms of communication stresses how trauma blocks awareness of the need for apology. Nicholas’s unrepentance following acts of violence towards Stella and Mary is noted: “But no apology was offered. Nothing was said.”38 Each protagonist who identifies with the Indigenous trauma is positioned as an “uncanny witness”: Claire’s speech in Jindabyne is an unwitting indirect testimonial, born of her nascent fears and anxieties and subliminal identification with the murdered Aboriginal woman, and bears witness to knowledge that is not consciously possessed, thus explaining why the murderer seems unconsciously to single her out.39 In Sorry, Perdita’s unconscious knowledge as a “mute witness,”40 her inability to remember what she saw or whether 36

Rebecca Weaver–Hightower: “The Sorry Novels: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Greg Matthew’s The Wisdom of Stones and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,” in Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, ed. Nathanael O’Reilly (Amherst NY: Cambria, 2010): 129–56; see also Marc Delrez, “Fearful Symmetries: Trauma and ‘Settler Envy’ in Contemporary Australian Culture,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 42 (2010): 62. 37 Huggan points out that these are not necessarily Reconciliation narratives; neither is David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon; see Australian Literature, 101, 105. 38 Jones, Sorry, 79. 39 Kennedy comments that the film suggests “psychic processes at work in the individual that shape responses to events, including whether an event is interpreted as traumatic”; see “In an Era of Stalled Reconciliation,” 110, where she further cites Shoshana Feldman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 40 Jones, Sorry, 79.

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she was a witness, shrouds her culpability as a site of the uncanny, betraying her compromised morality, perpetrating her stutter, and emphasizing the need for a cure. These parallel situations of loss and alienation, reinforced by the uncanny manifestations and melancholy that inform their psychic traumas, are positioned to suggest that psychological dislocation mirrors national dislocation.41 This recalls Heidi Grunebaum’s stress on the interchangeability of the individual with society when considering the debt of forgiveness and reconciliation to the dead and survivors: the seamless slippage from the “realm of subjective face to face relations to the realm of collective.”42 Nicholas Tavuchis also stresses that the necessary symbolism in making the apology of the one to the many, the moral asymmetry of the partners requiring its transformation into “a type of socially validated testimony and the offender into a kind of witness.”43 In their discourses of interiority and individualism which correlate with the public demand for apology, therefore, the ‘saying sorry’ texts are an empathetic mirror of the Indigenous testimonies. They accentuate the imperative of accepting responsibility for injustices suffered by Indigenous people through the opening of a corresponding testimonial space. Jindabyne and Sorry In Jindabyne, Ray Lawrence reworks a story written by Raymond Carver44 in response to the national debate about the official need to say sorry in a performative way that might foster a symbolic tolerance of racial difference. His culturally specific version of an American source focuses on the moral and ethical issues of Australian racial politics, rather than developing the dramatic potential of a murder story. The narrative traces the implications of the fishermen’s neglectful act: heedless of the spiritual offence and symbolic meaning, they tie the dead woman’s body to a tree so it will not float away, thus disfiguring her leg. Violent reactions come from the Aboriginal community, who hurl rocks through the men’s windows and write graffiti on their shop fronts, while tensions between the fishermen and their wives culminate in an assault on Stuart by one of his friends. The film dramatizes the psychological destabilization of Stuart’s wife Claire, the effects on the marriage, her empathy for the bereaved Aboriginal 41

Gooder & Jacobs, “‘On the Border of the Unsayable’,” 235–36. Heidi Grunebaum, “Talking to Ourselves ‘Among the Innocent Dead’: On Reconciliation, Forgiveness, and Mourning,” P M L A 117.2 (March 2002): 307. 43 Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Palo Alto C A : Stanford U P , 1991): 72. 44 Raymond Carver, “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” in Carver, Short Cuts (London: Harvill, 1995): 69–92. 42

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family, and her decision to make amends for the violation partly in order to assuage her own psychic troubles. The racial polarization and controversy stems from the metaphoric violation that constitutes the failure to report and hence acknowledge responsibility. Lawrence’s script takes its cue from Carver’s hero, also named Stuart Kane, who, in arguing with his wife over the same act of omission in failing to report a dead body discovered on a fishing trip, says: “‘Nothing happened. I have nothing to be sorry for or feel guilty about’.”45 This denial recalls the Australian Federal government’s attitude towards guilt over past injustice. Howard acknowledged that the maltreatment of Indigenous Australians was “the most blemished chapter in our history,” but that “Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.”46 In their indifference to the past and denial of any responsibility, the families of the four fishermen resemble those Anglo-Australians whom Howard targets in his speech. Both distancing and self-defensive, they suggest that only the criminal act is a cause for concern. Stuart Kane’s mother says: “The sooner they find out who did this, the better, then all this blame can go where it belongs”; and the wife of one of the fishermen, a friend of Claire’s, also advocates non-involvement: “We do understand what the family is going through. It does not make us responsible.” Similar to Howard’s denunciation of “symbolic gestures and promises,” which he sees as impeding the path towards reconciliation, there is no new space for Reconciliation.47 Lawrence not only recasts his source-text into the context of Australian Indigenous politics, but, in a brilliant touch, develops the figure of the white racist murderer: his ambiguous relationship to other Anglo-Australians is marked by gestures of apparent dispensation, delineating a guardianship role that is paradoxically threatening. Materializing uncannily in his bright-yellow pick-up van on the fringes of the jittery circle of the fishermen and their families – all oblivious to his presence – he is an alienated voyeur, superficially indistinguishable from other whites. He appears at critical stages of Claire’s psychic journey almost as if to intercept her, finally barricading her car on the same remote road where he had murdered the Aboriginal woman, then letting her go (but

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Carver, “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” 74. Luke, “The Material Effect of the Word,” 354–55. 47 Howard claimed that Reconciliation “would not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures [. . .] than the practical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in areas like health, housing, education and employment […]. It will not work if it is premised on a sense of national guilt and shame” (Luke, “The Material Effect of the Word,” 354–55). 46

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reappearing on the edges of the memorial scene).48 His god-like omnipresence and all-knowingness is crystallized by the single sentence he utters, speaking as an electrician to the vicar of the local church, having inspected the electrics: “‘The whole thing needs rewiring’,” an ironic tilt at the contemporary political discourse of Reconciliation.49 To this figure’s elusive yet symbolic presence can be traced the brooding spirituality and sense of menace in the film’s extradiegetic soundtrack, suggestive of unassuaged sadness, loss, and betrayal. The film concludes with him in his driver’s seat, slapping at a buzzing bee, a destructive act that recalls colonial mistreatment of Aboriginal people. The case of the imprisoned yet innocent Mary in Sorry can be read as a ThirdWorld narrative in which “the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of public third-world culture and society.”50 As in Jindabyne, the indivisibility of the political and personal appears in the angling of the novel’s consciousness about race, silence, and guilt to public debates following the Bringing Them Home Report. The authorial position of both texts favours the cause of the Indigene without attempting to reproduce the voice of the victim of racial discrimination: instead, issues of subaltern speech, subjectivity, and selfempowerment are approached through the empathetic identification of the European protagonist.51 Sorry can be read as a doubled national allegory of Reconciliation because the untold Third-World narrative of the half-caste Mary who has been taken from her family but never speaks her feelings or sufferings is intricately involved with Perdita’s white-settler one. Mary’s silence following her rape by Nicholas Keene and in taking the blame for his murder perpetuates the novel’s suppressed narrative of violation associated with the Stolen Generations; it overlaps with Perdita’s amnesia about the same event. Mary’s untold story and Perdita’s traumatized one create discontinuity and gaps in Perdita’s bildungsroman which operates on the literal level of signification. Both point to past events invoking guilt and shame on the national level.52 48

Lawrence develops the character of a God-like figure from an incident in the Carver story, which hints at a sexual dimension. See Carver, “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” 87–89. 49 Gooder & Jacobs talk of “rewired circuits of desire, will and subjectivity” in postcolonial settler nations (“‘On the Border of the Unsayable’,” 229). 50 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 5 (1986): 69 (italics in original). 51 Gail Jones speaks of the problem of conflating the different experiences of victim and colonizer in “Sorry-in-the Sky: Empathetic Unsettlement, Mourning and the Stolen Generations,” in Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New, New World, ed. Judith Ryan & Chris Wallace–Crabbe (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2004): 167. 52 Jameson points out that allegory “is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of

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The novel’s narrative of migration, set in the late-colonial era of the 1930s and 1940s, introduces the social upheaval and tragedy following the Japanese aerial bombardment of Broome as another historical counterpart along with the allegory of the Stolen Generations that Mary represents, to the domestic drama of violation. Perdita’s parents, new arrivals from England, are grotesque stereotypes of dislocated, dysfunctional colonialism. Her father, the anthropologist Nicholas Keene, treats the Aborigines he has come to study as primitives, and her increasingly deranged mother, Stella, quotes Shakespeare as the voice of ultimate authority in Perdita’s education but is unable to look after her. The novel has affinities with the other ‘sorry novels’ that attempt to manage postcolonial guilt, in that Perdita inherits the ambivalent split identity of colonized/ colonizer; like Mary, she is a victim of colonization, partly through parental neglect and dysfunction, but she is also a ‘colonizer’, in having to accept guilt and acknowledge responsibility for Mary’s sacrifice on her account.53 Jones locates the novel’s empathetic horizon in the circle of Mary and Billy Trevor, the deaf-and-dumb boy from the station owner’s family, through whom Perdita finds cultural knowledge and emotional nurture; but in keeping with the novel’s European bearings, a more complex healing structure is introduced in the form of her psychotherapist, Dr Oblov, a Russian migrant, whose own story of childhood trauma encourages Perdita to remember her original act, hence to recover her speech. As an extreme case of violence, suppressed guilt, and loss of Indigenous affection, Perdita’s narrative allegorizes the anxieties and estrangement of the liberal white settler who empathizes with the Aborigine yet is unable to effect political change during the era of the non-apology. This link is articulated following an improbable lapse of narrative logic when Mary refuses to tell the authorities that she had not committed the crime, although Perdita and Billy Trevor ask her to. Perdita concludes that imprisonment is a metaphor for her inability to speak – “Mary was blameless and imprisoned by something unspoken” – traceable to her initial imprisonment after white capture: She should have imagined what kind of imprisonment this was, to be closed against the rustle of wind and the feel of wind and of rain, to be taken from her place, her own place, where her mother had died, to be sealed in the forgetfulness of someone else’s crime.54

Mary’s suppressed story is displaced onto that of Perdita, whose speech is imprisoned by the unspoken trauma, the need to come to terms with the past and the symbol” (“Third World Literature,” 73); quoted by McGonegal, “Postcolonial Metacritique,” 255. 53 Weaver–Hightower, “The Sorry Novels,” 139. 54 Jones, Sorry, 204.

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record her testimony before she can recover her fluency. Her denial of responsibility for the deed – “I want nothing more than to fall into the oblivion and fatigue of forgetting”55 – can be read allegorically as reflecting the condition of white Australians afflicted with historical amnesia, while her belated recognition of the need to say sorry to Mary is a metaphor for the Howard government’s refusal to apologize and offer restitution. It acknowledges both the critical moment and the limits of the apology: But although it [atonement] was offered there was no atonement. There was no reparation. That was the point, Perdita would realise much later, at which moment, in humility, she should have said ‘sorry’.56

Re-Imaginings of the Nation The revision of the national imaginary discernible in the intertextual references in both narratives to the discourses of the Bringing Them Home Report and its related testimonials involves a feminization of the ethical landscape. The morally responsible white settler who reassesses her subjectivity in order to say sorry is gendered female, as is the Indigenous victim to whom, or on behalf of whom, the apology is offered. In both film and novel, images of patriarchy are degraded by indiscriminate immoral deeds: the god-like figure of the murderer in Jindabyne is not only racist; his dark destructive urges, it is implied, may extend to his own people; Perdita’s father rapes other Aboriginal workers besides Mary, and also physically violates his wife. Such indictments represent a reconfiguring of colonial metaphors of the nation as fatherland and the distinctive masculine discourse by which national agency is articulated.57 They again recall Howard’s speech, which elides the performance of a national response to the Bringing Them Home Report with its being represented as masculine and paternalistic. The re-imaginings by female protagonists, therefore, are political challenges to the patriarchal universe which Howard’s “Heroic Government” aims to extend to Indigenous people, promising better treatment, but possibly only prolonging the status quo.58 55

Jones, Sorry, 117. Jones, Sorry, 204. Herrero points out that the apology is the start, not the solution, nothing but a metaphor for Australians’ forgetting and the refusal of Howard; see “The Australian Apology and Postcolonial Defamiliarisation,” 293. 57 See, for example, Joseph Massad, “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism,” Middle East Journal 49.3 (1995): 467–83; Lorenzo Mari identifies Mansfield’s settler colonial nation as patriarchal, preventing communication between European and Indigenous cultures (“‘ How Katherine Mansfield Was Kidnapped’,” 70). 58 See Luke’s discourse analysis of Howard’s speech, “The Material Effects of the Word,” 366. 56

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In both texts, female expressions of regret and contrition constitute compensatory discourses for masculine maltreatment and violation of Aborigines, and imply some dislocation of traditional colonial hegemony with its ascendant nuclear family under the sign of patriarchy. The threat to the settler’s legitimacy in Jindabyne in the anger over the men’s belated reporting is manifested in Claire and Stewart Kane’s tensions and Claire’s gestures towards the Aboriginal family, displacing both from their circle of friends. Sorry introduces an alternative family unit: Mary, Perdita, and the deaf-and-dumb Bill Trevor, who create “their own little tribe,” from whom Perdita gains new forms of knowledge and belonging;59 it is marked by an alternative method of communication through signing, enabling Perdita and Billy to communicate with Mary in her penal institution. Female forms of mourning and psychic healing also suggest resistant alternatives to colonial and indigenous legacies. In the concluding shots of Jindabyne, an Aboriginal man’s attempt to expel the white Australian interlopers from the site of the memorial service is countermanded by one of the female mourners; the final song, a lyric composed by Susan, is sung in her memory by a young Aboriginal woman. Both film and novel, therefore, imagine “radical different alternatives,” in emphasizing the processes of cultural mediation inherent in literary texts, and the social inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in rewriting and redefining the national imaginary.60 The social and political elements of Australian society which ignore the Reconciliation issue are repositioned as marginal and morally questionable. In Jindabyne, these are represented by the fishermen and their families, who are initially indifferent; in Sorry, whose context is the Bringing Them Home Report, it is the Protector of Aborigines and the apparatus of social and judicial welfare services of the 1930s and 1940s which took Mary and others like her from their families, and in the novel refuse to investigate the suspicion that she had been wrongfully imprisoned. As has often been asked, who is Reconciliation for, the white settler or the Indigene? As Ann Kaplan points out, settler shame is merely a way of redeeming the white settlers’ own unease, not improving the conditions of Aboriginal

Frow compares the Aborigines’ resistant survival due to “living on borrowed time,” with earlier assimilationism and extinction (“A Politics of Stolen Time,” 362). 59 Jones, Sorry, 77. 60 McGonegal, “Postcolonial Metacritique,” 255. Szeman regards the notion of how the political inheres in the psychological and Indigenous trauma is projected toward the cultural (allegorically) via mediation in texts, as central to the problem of “cultural revolution” (“Who’s Afraid of National Allegory,” 810–11).

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people, a point which the apology throws into even greater relief.61 Nevertheless, both texts, in singling out female figures as the catalysts in saying sorry, show a radical shift in the white settler social structure through Reconciliation. The privileging of the white settler woman as the vanguard of the emerging moral consciousness about race relations is represented as an antidote to the brutality of the men: the murderer in Jindabyne and the father in Sorry, who indulge in rape and sexual violation. In both narratives, concerns about ethnicity, justice, and reparation mask anxiety about female victimhood. In Sorry, Gail Jones appropriates the story of a Stolen Generations victim to the European consciousness of Perdita, to whom, in significant ways, Mary’s suffering is transposed, and her recovery depends on understanding Indigenous loss. The interchangeability of the two women – seeing themselves as sisters, and as sharing sisterly solidarity – is central to the novel’s traumatic structure and intensifies the subjectivity of victimhood. The haunting and suggestions of the uncanny that inhere in both texts constitute a gothic turn in dealing with repression, and in Jindabyne the story gathers momentum ominously because the wife begins to put herself in the place of the murdered Aborigine and to imagine herself as victim.62 As Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs point out in Uncanny Australia, after colonization the conventional discussions between Self and Other become indeterminate, a certain unboundedness takes over at different times, each inhabits the other, disentangles itself, inhabits it again – so that difference and reconciliation coexist uneasily.63 Marc Delrez also points to the possibility of a deferred settler belonging in “a shared future” through positing equivalences of “bothness” between Indigene and settler in past experiences.64 The political contexts of the ‘saying sorry’ texts – the Stolen Generations debates, the risks of affective modes of reconciliation, the defence against guilt –suggest that they may be read as new postcolonial narratives which touch on the implications of being ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’ at the same time, and which play on the blurring of the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

61

See Kaplan, “Traumatic Contact Zones,” 51. See Carver: “I look at the creek. I float towards the pond, eyes open, face down, staring at the rocks and moss on the creek bottom until I am carried into the lake where I am pushed by the breeze” (“So Much Water, So Close to Home,” 76–77). 63 Ken Gelder & Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1998): 23. 64 “Fearful Symmetries,” 61; see also Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin–Glass & Lyn McCredden, Intimate Horizons: The Postcolonial Sacred in Australian Literature (Adelaide: A T F Press, 2009). 62

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