The possibilities for recovery of land and revitalisation of life
Keith Hollinshead
Introduction: tourism and Indigenity
Aim of the chapter: tourism and Indigenous cosmology
This broad aim of this chapter is to describe some of the important bonds that tie Indigenous populations to their lived environments, and to account for the role and function of tourism in both reinforcing those unities for Indigenous groups/communities themselves and in commu-nicating those bonds and meanings for visiting non-Indigenous people. In order to cover these important psychic, symbolic, culture-sustaining matters, the chapter will be scaffolded in the following fashion:
it will open by introducing (or reminding!) readers as to ways in which Indigenous popu-lations are inclined to see their worlds, their environments, and tourism itself, today;
it will explore these Indigenous ways of seeing the world (and the spaces and places in it) cosmologically, in terms of the ways in which some longstanding cum traditional outlooks and practices are conceivably surviving, but also of the ways in which other fresher cum transitional outlooks and practices have emerged to conceivably prosper;
it will critique the fashion in which international tourism today has both culture-denying and culture-fortifying interface with Indigenous populations, notably with regard to the ways in which certain sorts of Western/Eurocentric/non-Indigenous orientation (in the opening decades of the twenty-first century) still dominate what is seen and valued through tourism; and,
it will close by offering a critical assessment of the state of health of the critical awareness that currently exists in terms of Tourism Management/Tourism Studies in many of the cultural stewardship and environmental stewardship issues, which arise in the course of the chapter. To that end, it will call for an increase in the provision of postdisciplinary schooling in Tourism Management/Tourism Studies in order to help those who work in tourism within uncertain cross-cultural scenarios become more open to the worldviews of ‘other’,
‘distant’, ‘Indigenous’, populations on revered matters of culture and nature.
Focus:‘land’ within the Indigenous worldview
In order to understand the intimacies that Aboriginal people have with their lived environment, it is necessary to appreciate the thought-world of Indigenous populations, and that is no simple task for non-Indigenous people to grasp. To perceive the thought-world of, for instance, Aboriginal people following a so-called traditional lifestyle, is to recognise a maze of relationships, and a myriad of networks of understandings that overlay other networks of knowing. Whereas Eurocentric knowledge tends to be based on the Western ideal of objective public knowledge, Indigenous knowledge (for traditional-following Aborigines in Australia) tends to be relational, and Aboriginals across the dry continent are vitally concerned with not only who owns the proper and received story through which the environment/the land is interpreted, but who has the right to hear (and know) that narrative. Thus, the environment to Indigenous populations is embodied as an element of and within Aboriginal thinking– that is, of patterned, relational thinking. The environment (the land) is not something that is separate from nature: the land is not distinct from people, from the heavens or from the longtime stories handed down from the past. In Stockton’s (1995) basic introduction to Aboriginal spirituality, fundamental differences between Indigenous thinking and Western thinking are succinctly stated by David Mowaljarli, an Aboriginal from Derby in the north of Western Australia:
Pattern thinking is Aboriginal thinking.
There is no big boss.
Patterns are about belonging. Nothing is separate from anything else.
The land is not separate from nature, people, the heavens, ancient stories.
Everything belongs in the pattern.
There is no ‘ownership’ in pattern thinking. Only Belonging.
Money cannot buy bits of a pattern.
Power runs all through a pattern. It cannot be sold. It cannot be separate from the pattern.
[But] Triangle thinking is Western culture thinking.
There is always a big boss.
There are other bosses who have power over people down the triangle.
Triangles are about money and power…
Triangle thinking separates everything into layers of power and administration.
‘Ownership’ is a triangle idea.
‘Belonging’ cannot fit into triangle thinking …
Triangles are separate from each other, and separate from patterns.
(Mowaljarli in Stockton 1995: 42–3; emphasis added) Here, Mowaljarli sums up the essential difference between the Aboriginal and Western/Euro-centric reverence for land and life. To Mowaljarli in his own‘country’ (i.e. in his own heartland and hearth-land), the environment cannot be separated from nature and nature cannot be se-parated from culture.
Whereas Western concepts of religion (and thereby the land and environment) contrast the sacred with the profane – or the supernatural with the natural (Stockton 1995) – there is no similar distinction within the Indigenous worldviews: everything is alive and connected, and therefore each thing is sacred. Accordingly, it is important for traditionally minded Aboriginal people to remain spiritually connected to the earth (to the land, to the environment) in order to continue living within that identity and thereby upholding those vitally inherited matters of being and becoming. In traditional society, groups and communities thereby conceive of Keith Hollinshead
themselves in terms of the sustained bond they have collectively with the earth (the land/the environment). The land is the generative font of existence: it is the spiritual point from and through which Aboriginal existence comes (Stockton 1995: 82). As Patrick Dodson– Chairman of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies– reminds us:
[The] land is a living place… not a thing, but a living entity. It belongs to me, belong to the land/rest in it/come from there. …
[The] land provides for my physical needs and provides for my spiritual needs. It is a regeneration of stories.
New stories are sung from contemplation of the land, stories are handed down from spirit men of the past who have deposited the riches of variant places – the sacred places.
(Dodson in Stockton 1995: 82)
Indigenous cosmologies today: some critical caveats
Before attention is turned to the case study for this chapter (i.e. to a critique of the recent Melbourne University text Blacklines, which outlines the recent strong projection of intellectual vigour in local, national and international spheres by leading Indigenous commentators within and from Australia), a number of qualifying remarks need to be made about the manner in which Indigenous cosmologies are interpreted in Australia today. These observations will be given through the following sections:
via caveats on the decipherability of traditional ‘Aboriginality’;
via caveats on the decipherability of transitional ‘Aboriginality’;
via caveats on the distinctiveness of Indigenous knowledge in general.
The interpretability of traditional Aboriginality
The processes by which Indigenous knowledges and practices are constructed are complex, as are the ways in which specific traditions are recognised and supported. The manner by which a cultural activity is deemed to be‘authentic’ or ‘correct’, and the manner by which a natural setting or environmental feature is deemed to be‘proper’ or ‘appropriate’ are – and have always been – influenced by prevailing power relations. Thus, received and popular notions in the modern-day world that traditions are static entities are as wide of the mark in Aboriginal settings as they are in European or other contexts (AlSayyad 2004). Thus, in recent years, those who have worked on matters of Indigenous traditionality in Australia have begun to develop not only richer insight into the political (or internal) struggles that have always surrounded definitions of legitimacy in the Aboriginal world, but have argued strongly‘for a deeper appreciation of the creativity inherent in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social lives’ (Taylor et al. 2005: xii).
The following example reveals how– in Australia – acts of social/cultural/political innova-tions are nowadays far from being automatically regarded as‘inauthentic endeavours’. In past decades, legal authorities in Australia have tended to work with over-restrictive interpretations of what constitutes an authentic tradition when questions of native title to land were examined.
But the common law across the broader nation has lately begun to catch up withflexibilities of Aboriginal practice on the matter. Whereas etic judgements were made in the past that tradi-tional activities and traditradi-tional activities were only those that were significant within pre-contact Indigenous society, it is now increasingly recognised that such external verdicts are overly pre-scriptive, and may even deny the given Aboriginal society its native right to allow its own Tourism and Indigenous reverence
traditions to evolve ordinarily (Strelein 2006: 66). Accordingly, it does not matter these days that traditional forms offishing are now undertaken via modern dinghies powered by state-of-the-art outboard motors manufactured in factories in Hong Kong, Japan or Germany (as recognised in a number of like cases reported by Strelein).
The interpretability of transitional Aboriginality
It is increasingly the view of observers of contemporary Indigenous Studies across Australia that the concept of‘tradition’ has been refined, and that – as Smith (2005: 203) reports, citing Sahlins (1999: xi) ‘[p]aradoxically, almost all of the “traditional” cultures studied by [early] anthro-pologists, and so described, were in fact neotraditional, already changed by Western expansion’.
Indeed, a strong expectancy has ruled inspections by non-Indigenous agencies of Indigenous life over the last couple of centuries, something that has not only given rise to an underestimation of the different transitional systems of value and meaning that actually characterise Indigenous life, but that has also underappreciated the degree to which Aboriginal people have large inter-cultural and potent inter-ethnic dimensions to their practices in culture and in nature. The following example reveals much about the new transitional forms of behavioural practice that constitute the complex articulation of Indigenous being today. As Smith has shown in his studies of Abor-iginality in the Central Cape York Peninsula of North Queensland,‘the socio-cultural heritage of hunter-gatherer society remains apparent in the lives of Aboriginal people across the region’ (Smith 2005: 237), yet ‘pastoralism, rather than hunting and gathering, has become the key economic mode and the foundation for the lived experience of regional landscape among the senior generation of Aboriginal families [there]’ (Smith 2005: 237). Indeed Smith finds that too many active representatives of government and even of anthropology fail to recognise the dynamism of emergent forms of Aboriginal cultural practices, and miss the degree to which ambiguous characterisations of tradition do in fact resonate through all sorts of transitional use of space and mimetic activity. All too frequently, Aboriginal populations are expected to be tra-ditional to be faithful to the‘true’ culture in order (externally) to be deemed Aborigines. All too frequently they are expected (by such administrative outsiders) to be unequivocally traditional and to remain decidedly autonomous in their relationships with land, nature and the environment (Smith 2005: 230).
The differentiation of Aboriginality as a distinct and separate culture
The whole notion of Indigenous culture, ipso facto, has become something of a problem in the humanities in recent years. The pervasive notion in the humanities and the social sciences had been the view that global humanity could best be understood as a matrix of particular societies each of which were different, discreet and self-regulating, and that each of these significantly singular societies had their own significantly distinguishable cultures through which that society’s institutions worked. In late decades, the neat seeming unity of distinct societies having distinct cultures has come into question. Certain social scientists (e.g. Warren (1998) working in Central America) have begun to reject the longstanding concept of traditional knowledge and of the visions of‘the simple’, ‘the savage’, and ‘the static’ that came hand-in-glove with it, and now prefer to use the term Indigenous knowledge, instead, because in their view the latter term can more roundly cover the variety of dynamic ways in which supposedly distinct Indigenous societies variously conjoin the pursuit of longstanding practices with new and fresh adaptable mechanisms. The debate rages on. Although almost all applied anthropologists and development specialists are now keen to avoid the stereotypical connotations of the hackneyed term ‘traditional knowledge’, Keith Hollinshead
many are not convinced that the construction‘Indigenous knowledge’ itself reasonably encap-sulates the full context of the lived experience in which Indigenous populations engage. In lieu of this, Haverkart and Hiemstra (1996), for instance, prefer to talk of the cosmovision of Indigenous populations – a term that covers everything from a found population’s land use/agricultural pursuits, its religious activity, its symbolic systems and its other local expertise. Although space limitations in this chapter do not permit a full critique of the language and other diffusive practices, and of the investigative issues of embedded ontologies and epistemologies with which this problematic concern is freighted, Rowse (2008) has provided a most useful baseline treatment of these issues of space and time. His main concern is the analysis of Indigenous people in Australia in terms of their uneven alignment with‘mainstream institutions and thoughtlines’, but he is also tuned in to matters of Indigenous vulnerability and survival elsewhere around the globe.
It is therefore useful to pay homage to Rowse (2008) and take an illustration of and about these difficult matters of the categorisation of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ vis-á-vis ‘Western knowledge’
from the coverage of Indigenous culture he prepared for cultural analysts. In his coverage of supposedly bounded societies and of supposedly cultural authenticities, Rowse takes pain to remind us (citing Muellebach 2001) that the category‘Indigenous’ is not one that can simply be claimed unilaterally, for there are always a large number of agents involved in such ratifications of being and identity, where some are internal to the group or community in question and some are external. Indeed, many have argued that even the word ‘Aboriginal’ is itself an external imposition on Indigenous populations, implying the existence of a unified across-the-nation collectivity – that is, of an unwavering people-dom. Such protestors maintain that the use of the term‘Aboriginal’ in this fashion is indeed a colossal imposition: it constitutes nothing but‘an assumed other’ as envisioned at distance ‘from beyond’, and in reality there is no secure totality or unified ‘continental’ or ‘national-level’ relationhood there to capture and so classify.
Case study: the rise of resistance literature An introduction to the critical discourse of Blacklines
In order to provide for readers an up-to-date account of the cutting edge issues that confront the Aboriginal people of Australia in the representation and projection of their culture and its reverence for‘nature’, a case study will now be offered focused on the recent Blacklines text produced by Melbourne University Press. This text (Grossman 2006) is a landmark work con-taining a collection of imaginative historical and personal commentaries, which would have been inconceivable even a couple of decades ago. Constituting a gathering in of the views of a range of the nation’s foremost Indigenous intellectuals, Blacklines is a pungent articulation of and about concerns of history, being, becoming and projection. It stands as a cogent assembly of‘resistance literature’ essays, which seek to explain and legitimate Indigenous worldviews, speaking col-lectively from the soul of ‘Australian’ Indigenity. Written with political, moral, ethical and pedagogical force, the Grossman publication is principally an assault on the sustained hegemony of institutionally blessed discourses of Aboriginality. To that end, 16 chapters of the aggregation are unified in the degree to which each commentator laments the limited extent to which Indigenous people have generally been able to define their own ‘Aboriginality’ from a, or any free, space. Thus, they are coherent in terms of the repeated demand within them that the Indigenous peoples of Australia must move to take repossession of themselves on their own terms, via their own perspectives. Hence, the Melbourne University Press commentators (in Blacklines) all appear to be drawn to the judgement that Aboriginality cannot be contained (as is often attempted from‘Western’/’mainstream’ perspectives) within a single viewpoint or expla-Tourism and Indigenous reverence
nation. They are generally vehement that static representations of Indigenous being must be actively and performatively resisted so that Indigenous people can advance to become subjects and not just objects of the accounts of Aboriginality that are in common currency. In toto, Blacklines composes a critical and resistant storm of protest against the appropriation of ‘Abor-iginality’ by, variously, ‘white’/’euroAustralian’/’Western’ interest groups and institutions. It serves as a pivotal account outlining the urgent need to develop a critical body of knowledge that addresses matters of Indigenous aesthetics and politics, whether it be composed by Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people (see Langton 2006) in the specified areas of the arts, film, television and other media. Alas, the declarative role and function of tourism, ipso facto, is not often explicitly acknowledged in this respect in the Melbourne University text, but its looming articulative power is potently implicit.
Blacklines and the call for re-imagined understandings
Although the motley crew of established and emergent Indigenous intellectuals speak from a broad range of sides, standpoints and scenarios, a number of commonplace lines of protest and/or aspiration are discernable within Blacklines. The following perspectives appear to lie at the heart of what these Indigenous expositors state have been – and remain – the limitations of the
‘whitefella’ control over representations of Aboriginal history, identity and contemporaneity.
Aboriginality defined by ‘the West’
All too commonly, Aboriginality has been defined by outsiders who operate within a racialised dialectics, which is centred on whiteness: Aboriginal people have thereby been repeatedly defined as a population that ‘lacks’, rather than a population that ‘has’.
Self-regulation is essential
Indigenous ‘Australians’ are vitally concerned about who speaks for them in all settings and cultural processes, and demand a general and corrective shift towards self-representation.
Closed definitions debilitate
All too frequently, Aboriginal people are assumed (externally) to be one single population, and are contained with unitary or absolute definitions that inflexibly fail to recognise the constellation of different peoples and the multiverse of identities that exists.
Authenticities are externally determined
Indigenous‘Aboriginals’ are regularly ‘measured’ in terms of Western textual interpretations of Indigenity, which became stale and hegemonic.
Non-traditional ‘aboriginal’ people are non-persons
All too commonly, even by anthropologists – and close contact government officials – authentic customary practice (and versions of it adjusted by outsiders/non-Indigenous insti-tutions) is taken to be the critical or only yardstick to assess Aboriginal qualities of existence:
consonantly, those who lead non-traditional lives tend to be grossly undervalued.
The underappreciated multiformity for art and cultural practice
The diversity of cultural practices (in general) and of art (specifically) is hugely under-regonised: outsiders in mainstream/Western society tend axiomatically but unwisely to search for the singular and unifying Aboriginal approach to such pursuits.
The casual and habitual appropriation of Aboriginal styles
All too frequently, Indigenous designs, expressions and narratives (and even identities) are fast-adopted by outsiders via a plethora of subtle and not-so-subtle strategies of‘Aboriginalism’:
not only are such non-Indigenous individuals and institutions not entitled to such styles and genres, but also they are regularly unaware of the precise meanings that sustain them.
Keith Hollinshead
The necessity for a complex repertoire of Indigenous responses
In order to protect Aboriginal values and virtues from the continuing caprice of outsider representations/misrepresentations and the calumnies of outsider appropriations, Indigenous populations need to deploy a complex repertoire of critical strategies and determinant articulations: manoeuvres for survival have to start from a multiplicity of Indigenous subject positions, and this litany of approaches will often appear to be inconsistent and contradicting.
The hybridisation of voice
In so many areas of life, Aboriginal people have to confront the densities of the ‘settler presence’, and it is often not thereby easy to determine whether an Indigenous person is thinking and speaking within or beyond ‘colonial discourse’: yet Aboriginal people must resist the defeatist assumption that they are axiomatically speaking from a marginalised per-spective, wherever they stand on any felt concern.
Many Indigenous outlooks are not readily understandable, beyond
All too commonly, well-meaning or ignorant outsiders will venture into Indigenous settings claiming to be conversant with ‘a’ or ‘the’ Aboriginal truth: in verity, many aspects of Aboriginality are not readily understandable to non-Indigenous people, and cannot be acquired overnight. Some Aboriginal worldviews are not readily attainable by non-Indigenous people, no matter how‘deeply he/she/they dig’ with the often grossly assumptive tools of mainstream/Western thought.
Blacklines and the call for engaged dialogue
It is common practice (when the future of Indigenous populations is discussed these days) for non-Indigenous interest groups and institutions that are sincerely concerned in advancing the conditions in which Indigenous peoples live (or with empowering them in some particular way), to maintain that the said Indigenous group or community must be accorded the right to self-determination, and must thereby be the body that always is given‘the stage’ to speak on for all salient Indigenous matters of culture and nature (or‘culture-nature’). But the established and emerging Indigenous identities who have contributed to Blacklines do not support that view wholesale. The assembled commentators in the Grossman text do not call for the axiomatic right for Aboriginal people to control all of the Indigenous expressions of being and becoming that undergird Indigenous issues of identity, history and representation. Rather, and importantly, they call for an opening up of the debate on such matter (Moreton-Robinson 2006: 72) – that is between‘blacks’ and ‘whites’, between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people, between blackfella brothers and whitefella brothers, wherever.
Almost all of the commentators explicitly support the view that in so many contexts it is very difficult for most non-Aboriginal people in Australia to fast-understand the cosmology, the spirituality or the structured locative knowledge (i.e. the place-bound knowledge) by which (at least) traditional Aboriginal society works– or put more directly (by the Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty) when he states that whites ‘can’t catch my dreaming’ (Huggins 2006: 62). But the contributors to Blacklines are generally in accord that as culture is a dynamic phenomenon (and a dynamic noumenon!), and as it is always everywhere created and defined interactively, it is nonsense now to enable only Aboriginal people themselves to speak up about Aboriginal issues (Perkins 2006: 98): Aboriginality is nofixed thing, but is a vitality or potency that arises inter-subjectively between ‘black and white in dialogue’ (Langton 2006: 118). It can indeed be very trying and tiring for the particular lead Indigenous elder/community leader/group representa-tive to have to regularly venture ‘out’ into non-Indigenous realms to speak on concerns of culture, cosmology or continuity (Sutton 2011: 5, 55, 172).
Tourism and Indigenous reverence
In this light, a number of the Indigenous intellectuals in Blacklines suggest that it is naive to maintain that Aboriginal people will make‘better’ projections of and about Aboriginality simply because they have a ‘greater’ understanding of their own ‘culture’ and their own ‘nature’
(Langton 2006: 115), or their own‘culture-nature’. As Aboriginality is a process in dialogue and a product of dialogue time and time again, it is essential that the communicative forces at work in that dialogic space are recognised. Meaning of and about Aboriginality is created dynamically and dialogically, and it is simplistic to expect that only Aboriginal people can be commu-nicatively effective in such inter-subjective ‘territory’. The articulation put forward there, and the imagination cultivated there must thereby be substantively collective. What counts is whe-ther– in that dynamic inter-subjective space – ‘the Aboriginal’ and ‘the non-Aboriginal’ are each treated in bonefide fashion as subjects not as objects. Clearly, the contributors to Blacklines do not think it is easy for most non-Aboriginal individuals to appreciate when they are addressing Indigenous issues from viewpoints supported by local Aboriginal groups and com-munities, for the most liberal and emancipated of non-Aboriginal speakers can soon falter to speak in stereotypical or ungrounded regard (Nakarta 2006: 132). Too many well-meaning
‘Western experts’ from each and every discipline can be closed to the baseless pretensions and the stultifying blindness of the standpoints they themselves operate from on and over‘culture’
and‘nature’ (Nakarta 2006: 133), or over ‘culture-nature’.
Thus, what counts is the opening up of fuller/richer/more frequent communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and for the refinement of discursive space where dia-logue is not denied but decidedly cultivated. Currently, too many non-Aboriginal scholars quote Indigenous writers or cite Aboriginal community views, but do not take the trouble to even engage with them (Morrissey 2006: 192).
Case study
Blacklines and the call for engaged understanding about ‘the environment’
In order to appreciate the degree to which the call of the Indigenous intellectuals of Blacklines for dialogue readily pertains to matters of‘the environment’, attention will now be turned to the specific
‘Knowledge in Action’ chapter in the book furnished by Fabienne Bayet-Charlton. Entitled Over-turning the Doctrine: Indigenous Peoples and Wilderness– Being Aboriginal in the Environmental Movement, Bayet-Charlton (who lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, and who has worked for the Native Title Unit and the Aboriginal Legal Movement, amongst other agencies) writes pointedly about the manner in which environmental policy so regularly works blindly but additively to dispossess Aboriginal people. As an environmentalist herself, she addresses the painful, identificatory difficulties involved in being ‘black’ and ‘green’ at the same time (Bayet-Charlton 2006: 171). In her view, many of the cultural clashes between Aboriginal (‘black’) and conservation (‘green’) interests are unthought ones. She appears not to be so much concerned where, for instance, Aboriginal groups and communities are perceived by environmentalists to be a direct threat to endangered species or to ecological diversity (Bayet-Charlton 2006: 175), but where those in the‘white’/‘outside’ environ-mental movement have only just begun to learn to listen to Aboriginal community voices about land and the environment, and where they have only just begun‘to learn to [cross-culturally] share’
(Bayet-Charlton 2006: 179) with regard to land and nature. To her, the shared goal in terms of environmental care and use must not be merely for self-determination for Aboriginal people, but Keith Hollinshead
must provide‘realistic’ and ‘contemporary’ self-determination. Although she acknowledges that some instances of successful alliances between (by implication)‘the black’ and ‘the green’ do exist – such as the respective legislated agreements of ‘Uluru-Kata Tjuta’ and ‘Kakadu’ Natural Parks in the Northern Territory (where these two parks are located on Aboriginal land that has been leased to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service – Bayet-Charlton 2006: 176; see also Toyne and Johnson 1991))– she maintains that insufficient cross-cultural listening has generally taken place.
It is useful to examine where the observations of Bayet-Charlton may be interpreted as a call for inter-cultural dialogue (or‘interlocution’) about matters of land and life for Aboriginal people. For instance, at the end of her chapter, Bayet-Charlton considers specifically whether the new business of ecotourism can yield a new answer for Aboriginal groups and communities. In noting that the pressure for Aboriginal people to be involved in bandwagon ecotourism projects is becoming extreme, she suggests that the jury is still very much‘out’ in terms of any conclusive cultural and psychic cost–benefit analysis conducted on them. In that light, Bayet-Charlton offers the following six penetrating questions about ecotourism today in Indigenous contexts:
Is ecotourism sustainable on an Indigenous cultural basis?
Is ecotourism yet another form of pressure on Aboriginal society and communities – this time as a form of duress on those least affected by the invasion and urbanisation of Australia?
Will ecotourism continue to perpetuate the stereotype of the destitute and incapable non-urban Aboriginal?
Will ecotourism perpetuate the stereotype of the wandering noble savage (i.e. of the quaint hunter–gatherer) as a sad or sorry remnant of the stone age – or is ecotourism in fact an appropriate and significant avenue of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people?
Will ecotourism open avenues though which non-Aboriginal people can explore and freshly understand all sorts of different Aboriginal people, eventually venturing into improved cross-cultural relationships even with urban Aboriginals?
Will ecotourism become yet another way by which non-Aboriginal interests continue to ignore urban Aboriginals for the sake of the supreme external vision of the‘traditional’ Aboriginal – a longstanding stereotype that sells well in the marketplace of travel?
(Bayet-Charlton 2006: 178, adapted).
Perhaps, in her own view, it is the recent softening of (or the retrenchment of) native title leg-islation that has produced the largest frustration for Aboriginal people (or for Indigenous intellec-tuals)? Bayet-Charlton (2006: 180) covers the matter curtly:
[Eventually we will all] collectively realise that native title legislation has been so watered down from its original intentions, and acknowledge that those [Indigenous groups or communities]
seeking to claim title to their land have so many provisos attached, so many hoops to jump through, so many hurdles to jump over, before a claim sees the light of say in the courts. These claims can then be rejected if records indicate that a non-Aboriginal person has so much as farted on that land. Native title has lost all but its simple and superficial meaning. This is a tragedy, considering all the good will and effort that went into the debating and formulating of the original legislation.
Such is the power of some of the direct feeling of the resistance commentators of Blacklines on matters of‘culture-nature’.
Tourism and Indigenous reverence