Modernism, Antipòdernism, and Australian Aboriginality

Abstract

This essay describes entanglement in Australia of three concepts: modernism; 'settler modernity'; and Aboriginality. Its three principal arguments are: (i) that European perceptions of Australian Aboriginal cultures were deeply influential in development of modernism; (ii) that anxieties about proximity of Aboriginal and settler peoples in Australia - but also resistance to European theories of Aboriginal culture not validated through personal experience of interacting with Aboriginal Australians - influenced strong anti-modernist sentiment among some Australian artists and writers; and (iii) that perhaps this 'anti-modernism' might instead be characterized as an 'alternative' modernism in Australia - an entanglement of visions of progress and degeneration - to which I will give purposefully ugly label of 'antipodernism'. In developing these arguments I will make reference to Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) as inflected by work in Australia of Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, and discuss writings by Miles Franklin in particular, as well as Katherine Susannah Prichard, D.H. Lawrence, A.D. Hope, and Christina Stead.1Altogether, then, I will be exploring impact of a particular construction of Australian Aboriginality on development of modemist writing in Australia, a vast and complex subject, not least for its invocation of such contested terms as 'modernism', on one hand, and 'Aboriginality', on other. By virtue of providing an overview, then, I will necessarily crush significant nuances within writing of authors whose work I will mention; I am conscious also of working with a European figuration of Aboriginality, which is well removed from knowledge derived from lives, traditions, and experiences of real Aboriginal Australian men and women. I beg forgiveness for this on methodological grounds, for misconceptions of Aboriginality historically have been as influential on cultural development of European and Australian writing as those messy and entangled truths about Indigenous Knowledge that emerge directly from interventions by Aboriginal people and from collaborations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal thinkers and activists.As a starting point for this exploration I find useful a 'traditional' distinction made in discussions of Western modernity summarized by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar in his introduction to Alternative Modernities (2001). The distinction is that between societal modernization (the growth of scientific consciousness, development of a secular outlook, doctrine of progress, [... ] individualistic understanding of self, contractualist understandings of society, and so on) and cultural modernity, or modernism:By and large, proponents of cultural modernity were repelled by middle-class ethos - by its stifling conformities and banalities; by its discounting of enthusiasm, imagination, and moral passion in favour of pragmatic calculation and soulless pursuit of money; and, more than anything else, by its pretensions, complacencies, and hypocrisies as represented by figure of philistine.2Avant-garde artists, in this reading, invoke both the cultural patina of modernity as a spectacle of speed, novelty, and effervescence3 - they celebrate positive outcomes of a technological age - and also set themselves up against regimes of social and intellectual routine, of bourgeois aspirations, and political, social, and aesthetic complacency. In doing so, they break tradi2 tional forms in making of their art, architecture, design, and writing: they 'make it new'. They also make their artwork deliberately difficult to consume: because complacency of consumer culture is one of their targets; and because they work outwards from those new and challenging models of human subjectivity and history that rise from (i) scientific studies of nature, notably Darwin's in nineteenth century, and (ii) those new theories of human psyche, and materialist histories of culture, produced in early decades of tiie twentieth. …