Entering terra nullius: The White-Vanishing Trope and the Contest for Australian Space

Abstract

Beaumonts are not only ones who explored a little way off cultural map and disappeared into thin air: Harold Holt, Ludwig Leichhardt, Azaria Chamberlain, girls from Miss Appleby's school... All inhabiting now this Other space in Australian memory.1if you really want to point up a landscape that is deserted, then you put somebody within it.2THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON THE SPATIAL POLITICS of whitevanishing trope, cataloguing ways in which texts work constantly and simultaneously to domesticate and yet emphasize strangeness of spaces they construct. The texts usually depict two dichotomous spaces, representing two incompatible 'worlds', and their key action sequences take place on borders between these worlds. The spaces of these texts where whites vanish are depicted as regions where meetings of one world with another might occur, even going as far as merging; these are dangerous zones where social and cultural rules, mores and expectations are abandoned or weakened, with alarming consequences. Those whites who vanish enter a space marked as Other - as terra nullius. Again, counterinstance or undesirable condition subserve[s] needs of desirable one,3 with texts using anxiety about pockets of transgressive or unreliable spatiality in Australia as springboard to assert and endorse a distinctly colonial (and colonizing) politics of regulated, bounded, predictable space.In Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja reminds us of political nature of spatial arrangements:We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.4Particularly in Australia, land and nature are territories of mind, as well as a material resource subject to pragmatic negotiations.5 In fact, David Carter suggests, the land [. . .] has been most politicised of all our national images and is likely to remain disputed symbolic territory.6 Unpacking spatial arrangements of white-vanishing texts reveals evidence both of these kinds of disputes, and of inscription of power, politics, and ideology in a spatiality of difference and separation that is presented as selfevident. As Joanne Tompkins points out,alterity is firmly bound up in spatiality to extent that an exploration of nature of spatiality provides a means of understanding a nation's preoccupations with, and repression of, otherness.7The spatial representations in white-vanishing texts, like texts' constructs of time, arc characterized by hypcrscparations that oppose reason to irrational, culture to nature, and human to non-human. In these texts, spatial structures and values attached to configurations of land, landscape, distance, position, proximity, background, foreground, spatial purpose, and place perform division and disparity as their dominant ideological modes. The white-vanishing trope's spatial politics, like its politics of bodies and time, is largely a reflection and performance of white colonialism's meta-narratives of exclusion and difference.In many ways, arrangements of space in these texts closely mirror their arrangements of time.8 Vanishing occurs in disruptive, disturbing, chaotic, uncanny9 space, while not-vanishing occurs in regulated, predictable, Cartesian space, and it is Cartesian model that is ultimately valorized. The uncanny space illuminates and helps to define, but does not subvert, pervasive textual mode of Cartesian space as norm. Between these spaces, there is an antagonistic frontier or series of border zones, which separate incommensurable worlds of domesticated space and natural space, yet also act to link them, and to continually overwrite one onto other. The event of white vanishing provides a transgression from one space to other, which enables texts to respond by reinforcing constructed incompatability of dichotomized spaces, emphasizing need for strong boundaries between them, and demonstrating traumatic consequences of boundary transgression. …