Transcending race: Further reflections on Australian Aboriginal culture

Abstract

The first Australian knew; we must learn to live with our differences, because differences - ethnicity, class - will always be with us. As competitive forces are released to effect economic progress, people group together to ensure success or to protect themselves from others. Conflict between them accelerates. To arrest the cycle in the interests of permanent peace, erect boundaries around such differences, even create them where they don't exist, then be in a position to federate them into interdependence, ultimately to owe allegiance to the boundary and not to the "material" inside it, which is now freed to move about in a controlled way through abstract space. Against conventional wisdom, what this means in the modem world is strengthening the idea of exclusive citizenship in the State - but after reconstituting States as units of the same scale and reworking relations within and between them. In the context of this discussion of 'race relations', to "owe allegiance to the boundary and not to the 'material' inside it" would be to deny that biological makeup is a determining factor in defining the human person. What is crucial is the Form of the person rather than his or her physical characteris