Abstract
Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.
Highlights
Aboriginal and other racialised children—refugee children, for instance—have furnished human scaffolds around which various national controversies flourish concerning Australian sovereignty in the shadow of Terra Nullius: who belongs in Australia, who can cross its borders, who must be kept out ... who is permitted to exist at all
This sovereignty–anxiety extends into the continent’s interior, where Aboriginal children are rhetorically deployed against their parents and communities, who are represented as foreigners within: the un-colonised remainder of a colonised people (Moreton-Robinson 2009; Mulholland 2016; Stringer 2007; Watson 2009a)
The second section draws out the significance of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ figure, as it is critiqued in The Swan Book, and argues that Terra Nullius is a Western legal principle, but is a colonial project of elimination pursued through First Nations children
Summary
Prime Minister John Howard took up that mantle by framing the situation in the NT as a national emergency, calling it ‘our [Hurricane] Katrina’ and linking it to a Hobbesian state of nature (Howard 2007: 69–70) He thereby depicted remote Aboriginal-controlled communities as lawless and in need of an external imposition of law (Faulkner 2015; Mulholland 2016; Stringer 2007).. The second section draws out the significance of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ figure, as it is critiqued in The Swan Book, and argues that Terra Nullius is a Western legal principle, but is a colonial project of elimination pursued through First Nations children. Rather than interpreting them as embodying neglect by their Indigenous communities, what if the cultural meaning of these children were interpreted as sites of potentiality, enabling the visibility (rather than occlusion) of Blak sovereignty? Once colonisers commit to reading for signs of sovereignty rather than of decline, only will the decolonisation of these systems be possible
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