The Northern Territory Emergency Intervention

The NTER has been justified by the supposed failings of Aboriginal communities to protect children in their communities from harm, most particularly sexual assault. As is now widely known, the NTER followed the publication of the Little Children Are Sacred report (commonly known as LCASR), commissioned by the Northern Territory Government, on the protection of Aboriginal children from abuse (Anderson and Wild 2007). Authors Patricia Anderson and Rex Wild made several recommendations in the report framed firmly within an understanding of the intergenerational violence colonialism generates, a sense that solutions would have to be well funded by sustainable resources provided by the national and territorial governments, and the idea that collaboration between Aboriginal and governing bodies from the ground up, rather than a top-down approach, would be essential to solving the problems of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory.

When the Howard government did act, their intervention was far from the careful recommendations of the report. The NTER effectively suspended Aboriginal self-determination principles through the NTER Acts; the Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment; the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment; and the Appropriation Acts 1 and 2 of the NTER (2007) in its suspension of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) of 1975. In essence, the government stripped Aboriginal communities of human rights. It removed the permit system for access to Aboriginal land, abolished government-funded Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP), subjected Aboriginal children to being taught in a language they don’t speak for the first four hours at school, quarantined 50 percent of welfare payments, expected Aboriginal people to lease property to the government in return for basic services, acquired Aboriginal land by compulsion, and subjected Aboriginal children to mandatory health checks without consulting their parents.

The NTER Acts of 2007 were followed by the Stronger Futures bills of 2011 and 2012 (the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill of 2011, the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory [Consequential and Transitional Provisions] Bill 2011, the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill of 2011, and the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012), which, while repealing some of the egregious “special measures” provisions of the 2007 NTER Acts, still lacked a “notwithstanding” clause requested by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to ensure that, in cases of ambiguity between the Stronger Futures bills of 2011 and the RDA, the latter shall prevail, as shall Australia’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). However, while the Stronger Futures Act is “intended to operate, and to be construed, consistently with the Racial Discrimination Act,” it nevertheless holds that the “tackling alcohol,” “land reform,” and “food security” measures are all “special measures” within the context of the 1975 RDA (Australian Human Rights Commission 2011, 26). The AHRC argues that deeming these measures to be “special” supposedly demarcates them as nondiscriminatory, a position with which the AHRC does not agree. Against the Stronger Futures approach, the AHRC argues that these measures “purport to have a protective purpose for some Indigenous people, or some members of Indigenous communities, but operate by restricting the rights of some or all of the members of those groups or communities” (7).

The NTER and its subsequent iteration, Stronger Futures, can be (and has been) seen as the consequence of the “failure” of Aboriginal communities in and on what is often assumed to be the equal, or equalizable, playing field of colonial capitalism. This is apparent specifically when we understand that the Stronger Futures Act seeks privatization in the area of land occupation and the granting of special licenses for the distribution of food and alcohol in areas affected by the legislation. The NTER has been assessed in this context as the failure of contemporary Australian governance structures to support environments in which Aboriginal communities can thrive, as the government deploys paternalistic and assimilationist strategies of government intervention, and is accordingly criticized by not only Anderson and Wild but also numerous scholars such as Peter Billings (2009) and Alissa Macoun (2011). The NTER manifests the Australian government’s demands for Aboriginal communities to conform to “normalized” governance strategies (Altman and Russel 2012; Morphy and Morphy 2013). The government response to the publication of LCASR ignored every recommendation in the report to construct local solutions in tandem with Aboriginal communities. It did so because, as a settler-colonial government, it is built on a structure that presupposes “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2011, 67). The figure of the sexually abused child was nothing more than a convenient stalking horse by which to continue such dispossession.

Reframing Human Rights and Literature: From Rights-Bearing to Right-Making

When many of us are taught how to think of human rights, we tend to think of them in their idealized forms alongside Gross Human Rights Violations, with the human as a singular subject at the core of the project.2 But how can we reimagine the right to access health, the right to free association, and the right to self-determination in an extra-anthropocentrically conceived world in ways that are not simplistically configured according to the impossible gap between, on the one hand, the UNDHR and its associated proclamations and, on the other, how those rights are regularly violated on the ground? What are our actual resources for building both ideas and practices of extra-anthropocentric human rights reiteratively? What happens if we move away from the ideals of human rights and toward making extra-anthropocentric human rights? This is crucial from the perspective of the unsustainability of anthropocentric human rights, not because we cannot afford for everyone to achieve the good life under colonial capitalism (although, as I shall explore later, this is indeed true), but because as a species we need to negotiate a sense of rights in relation to nonspecist and ecological sets of values precisely for the human itself to be sustainable.

Joseph Slaughter (2007, 4) proposes that the human-rights conventions of the UNDHR and its related legislative conventions share with the novel—and in particular, the bildungsroman—a subject. In both cases, this subject is proposed as commonsensical and available to all; but the constitution of the subject requires the work of literary and cultural forms to make sense of human-rights norms, which are simultaneously a fait accompli and a work in progress. The genre of the human is not an aspect of the essential human, then, but is fictional, having a character that itself can change. The very construction of character, its resistance and malleability, and its vibration, as it were, in the face of seismic changes in our sociocultural fabric, has to be described for us to understand an argument such as the one Slaughter makes. The subject of narrative discourse, be it explicitly fictional or not fictional, is always, in its radical sense, fictional.

I use this radical feature of the subject to contest Marianne Hirsch, among others, that the bildungsroman continues to serve as “the most salient genre for the literature of social outsiders, primarily women or minority groups” (Hirsch as cited in Slaughter 2007, 27). As I noted in the Introduction, while the bildungsroman continues to serve as the most apprehensible genre to those inured to reading within Wynter’s genre of the human, it is not necessarily the most salient genre for “minorities” of that vast variety of subjects rendered marginal to liberal human discourse in the first instance. Why is the most salient genre for such “minorities” inevitably the one in which “we” (a liberal, globalized/metropolitan reading public) understand “them” (the “losers” in the current global order) best?

Carpentaria reframes the argument on the relations between literature and human rights. One example of the exploitation of Aboriginal labor for colonial capitalism purposes is represented by one of the Aboriginal protagonist’s, Normal Phantom’s son, Kevin, who is intellectually brilliant but of necessity takes a job at the mine and is a victim of an accident on his first day that leaves him severely disabled (and easy “prey” for the bullying of racist white boys who, dressed in Klan-like hoods, drag him behind their car and leave him for dead). Less direct than this are the unflinching representations of three abandoned, glue-sniffing Aboriginal kids who are imprisoned instead of having their actual needs addressed. The white community is too concerned with other issues at the time, such as the egg-laying capacities of their hens (a comical yet poignant reminder of the dependence of some forms of production on nonmechanized and therefore strangely vulnerable life: instrumentalization does not guarantee predictable production outcomes where carbon life forms are at stake). While these children are not direct victims of the Gurfurrit mine as Kevin is, their behavior can be seen as an entirely understandable response to the prospects for Aboriginal youth that Kevin embodies. To put it bluntly, if one is to be consumed by colonial capitalism anyway, one option of a brutally limited range is to choose one’s own method of self-consumption and make it pleasurable, as in an escape, should such an escape be possible.

Within the humanities, focus on colonization as a singular traumatic event, or at least as the most overwhelming factor of quotidian life in Indigenous communities, tends to overlook questions of intergenerational Indigenous knowledge, questions of environmental sustainability, and functions of resilience. Such postcolonialism-as-trauma employs the narrow, medical model of (putatively diagnostic) narrative, in which a discrete symptom or set of symptoms is identified with insufficient reference to the complex physical, social, and nonmaterial environment in which it appears.3 If I were to ally myself with the kind of medical model that needs to encapsulate trauma as a singular event that we diagnose and then treat, I would fail to read the self-harming practices of the Aboriginal youth within the intergenerational, historical framework I posed in chapter 2. I might read them, instead, by applying a liberal individualist approach to the “flawed character” of Aboriginal youth. This would, however, be a reading complicit with the notion that Aboriginal youth live in an environment in which their choices are not constrained or “disabled” (Andersson 2006). Concomitantly, such a reading cuts off the possibility of interpreting Aboriginal youth’s self-harm as potentially resistant to a colonialist-capitalist system that will consume them anyway in the not-so-long run, as Kevin’s case evidences, and on its own terms at that, meaning according to an agenda in which Aboriginal youth have no substantive say.

Readings of character-as-symptom cannot in fact adopt a decolonial politics, precisely because they enable the systemic or structural violence of colonial capitalism through their inability to render that very violence as itself the ailment. They offer us the pathological Aboriginal in its stead. Even where the postcolonial character conforms to the model of the bildungsroman to access human rights, there is a sacrifice, in that the structural violence of colonialism, which brings normative human rights and human-rights violations in its wake, can be obfuscated. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions is a case in point here: for every Tambudzai, there is a Nyasha who cannot tolerate the conjunction between colonialism and patriarchy that “saves’’ Tambudzai from obscurity. Nyasha experiences Anorexia and psychosis, to use the pathological terms of character, rather than the effluent ones of colonialist-capitalist harm. Indeed, Wright’s refusal to parade her (non)characters in the traditional camouflage of characters as we are apt to recognize them—within the genre of the human, or what Slaughter identifies as “personality development” (2007, 4)—can be read as a further prompt to read subjectivity in Carpentaria outside those tropes.

Harm Reduction as Bizarre Persistence: Colonial Capitalism and Fifth-Wave Public-Health Theory

I have argued above that healthy character corresponds to rights-bearing subjects, whereas those assumed to be rights-seeking subjects (in this case, Aboriginal children) are posed as victims of a pathological “Aboriginality” within the colonialist-capitalist structure of the NTER. In this section, I advocate fifth-wave public-health theory as a model for understanding the damage of these normative readings of rights-bearing and rights-seeking subjects. I resist reading the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities as inherently pathological, the (mis)interpretation of the LCASR that justified the intervention in the first place.4 While a narrow understanding of the medical concept of resilience might read suicide rates, substance abuse, and other forms of self-harming behavior as signs of an inherent or pathological failure of Aboriginal communities, a clearer understanding of what substance abuse and related self-harming practices in communities such as those around the Gulf of Carpentaria might mean in relation to resilience is proposed by contemporary public-health theory, to which I turn briefly as a resource for how to open up our possibilities of reading the three imprisoned youth of Carpentaria otherwise.

Some contemporary public-health analyses reject framing health challenges faced by current globalized communities as events that can be addressed from within extant conceptions of public health. These challenges are best understood, public-health advocates argue, not as diagnoses so much as symptoms of the unsustainable ways of living promoted by late-capitalist political, material, and sociocultural practices of being in the world. These ways of being and the (failed) promises attached to them form a “fifth wave” of public-health challenges, in which public-health interventions per se have diminishing returns in an environment in which late capitalism and the ways of being in the world it habituates are themselves the ailment, not the secondary “infections” they produce: overwhelming poverty, substance abuse, malnutrition and overnutrition (leading to obesity), unemployment, and a host of related “conditions” (Hanlon et al. 2011).

In this context, the boys’ substance abuse is not a symptom of their illness, but a consequence of colonial capitalism as an ailment in and of itself. Conversely, reading the boys’ substance abuse as inherently pathological, according to the genre of character and its mutually sustaining narrow medical model, actually enables overlooking the construction and conditions of labor “offered” by the mine. Further, the boys’ substance abuse can be read as a complex element of resistance to colonial capitalism. If their choice is between, on one side, working under the conditions Kevin endures and, on the other, preempting that eventuality through a self-destruction that offers pleasure in the moment and is, on top of that, in direct contravention of the white Uptowners’ values, then their option to harm their bodies in advance of those bodies being turned into fodder for the mine makes sense: a sense analogous to that of the slave who murders her own child, or babies born into slavery, to protect those children from slavery. Both acts pose as unlivable the utilization of the Aboriginal/Black body as, materially, the subvention capitalism demands from colonized/enslaved bodies.

If white settler readers shrink from this reading, we need to consider that we may actually be shrinking from the impossibility Wright confronts, that of healthy Aboriginal living under colonial capitalism’s terms. Arguments to the contrary may express what we (want to) see: the empowerment of the boys to choose otherwise, to choose to preserve their bodies. Assumption of this possibility, this camouflage, disables the question of the boys’ abducted sovereignty through their instrumentalization and exploitation within the colonialist-capitalist economy Wright details. It is worth remembering, in this regard, that Wright’s first foray into nonfiction work, her 1997 Grog War, was on the struggle of community elders to restrict the selling of alcohol in the remote community of Tennant Creek, against the wishes of licensees and the broader community. It is also worth noting that Wright has spoken and written incessantly against the NTER, as its encroachment on the sovereignty of the Indigenous people of the Northern Territory is fundamentally unacceptable. She has stated repeatedly that the challenges facing the Northern Territory cannot be solved effectively without appropriate self-governance.5 In this light, Australian colonialist-capitalist governance represents the condition of late-capitalist governance that is itself the ailment, and the addiction and self-harm epidemics faced by the Northern Territory communities are symptoms of that ailment: this is fifth-wave public-health theory at work in conjunction with anti-colonialist-capitalist analysis.

One could view my argument about the self-harm of the glue-sniffing boys of Carpentaria as a kind of obverse of Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” a “relation that exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. . . . These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They only become cruel when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011, 1). Berlant is describing a present after the world wars and the affective disorders in it, which stem from the inability of the West to deliver on the promise of the good life that is the unquestioned yet generally unattainable goal of liberal-capitalist societies. In an obverse reading of Berlant, we could imagine a kind of enjoyable pessimism in desiring an obstacle to one’s flourishing, a kind of masochistic registration of the fact that one is never going to be able to “have” the good life in terms of one’s current position within the liberal-capitalist economy. However, I would argue that this obverse simply does not work in relation to Carpentaria’s Aboriginal community, the “downtowners,” since they do not appear to either desire or be persuaded by the good life in the first place, as we shall see in the case of old man Joseph Midnight, who comes to reject his company-built house as poison, preferring to live in a shack nearby.

I propose that the Aboriginal youth of Carpentaria, unlike either Berlant’s cruel optimist or their obverse, the masochistic pessimist, understand the system itself (liberal capitalism) not only as one within which the good life is unobtainable by/for them, but as one in which others’ belief in the fantasy of the good life for themselves entails the instrumentalization of Aboriginal bodies in high-risk manual labor, a fact of which they arguably have an embodied, intergenerational knowledge through the experience of colonialism. In this context, self-harming behaviors can once again be seen as neither cruel optimism nor pleasurable pessimism, but as the bizarre persistence produced by those who intimate at the embodied level that the self-destruction of their bodies is a preemptive act of agency in a system that will otherwise use those bodies in processes of slow death to keep others’ putative belief in the good life going.

Staging Geobiographical Value: Carpentaria’s “Timescape”

The extra-anthropocentric values posed by Carpentaria assist us in articulating a framework for extra-anthropocentric human rights, which include but exceed the rights of “the human.” They do so by assuming that human rights need to be a set of practices, not a possession; and they include centrally, not peripherally, those whose value systems are not consonant with property rights and other forms of entitlement through possession. Within some Aboriginal artifacts there reside value systems that prove to be resources capable of actualizing extra-anthropocentric, human rights, while they defamiliarize capitalist normalization.

Carpentaria deals in extramaterialist meanings, aesthetics, and value systems, intergenerational knowledges, and timeframes that do not distinguish between “Life” and non-Life, in Povinelli’s terms: time that reads the relation between humans and between the environment and humans within vast, intergenerational, epi(stemi)c time frames. In this respect, one could argue that, while non-Aboriginal cultures may be unaccustomed to grasping Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, for Aboriginal cultures this may indeed be a customary activity, consequent upon multigenerational and animist perspectives. Morton defines hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (2013, 1), his exemplary hyperobject being global warming.6

The opening of Carpentaria is radical in its displacement of humans from the forefront of characterization in the novel. It begins with the Rainbow serpent who carves the valleys and the rivers of the area and then takes up residence in the limestone aquifers it has molded. However, the serpent is not contained; it is not in the environment of the Gulf; it is that environment: “This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around the atmosphere and it is attached to the lives of the river people like skin” (2). In this sense, the serpent is not an environment so much as it is the very fabric of geobiographical being, in which the scale of human life is miniscule, and in which humans can live only if they have intimate knowledge of the river, as Normal Phantom does:

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of the water as it seasonally shifts tracks according to its own mood. A river that spurns human endevour on one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour. A town intended to serve as a port for the shipping trade for the hinterland of Northern Australia. (3)

I am not suggesting that what non-Indigenous readers need to do is to garner Indigenous knowledge of a character such as Normal Phantom, because as Alison Ravenscroft points out, this is impossible (2010). In her recounting of Deborah Bird Rose’s account of Yarralin manngyin—“that which is connected to the flesh and organs and when a person dies and is buried it gets up again”—Ravenscroft dismisses the obvious English strategy of this account, an appeal to “spirit,” quoting Bird Rose once again: Spirit “cannot but signal a body-soul dichotomy which is inappropriate to the Yarralin context.” Ravenscroft continues: “Translation fails, and into the gap so easily slips our own vocabulary and generic codes: magic and superstition, myth and magic realism. We make others’ objects of knowledge magic in a move that paradoxically tames and familiarizes” (216).

This move is accounted for beautifully in Graham Huggan’s definition of the postcolonial exotic (2001), and it is certainly not a move I plan to make; that is to say, I am not promoting making Yarralin objects of knowledge “magic,” nor suggesting we can know them as the Yarralin do. Ravenscroft closes her article on Carpentaria and its critics with the suggestion that the objects of the other inspire terror: “What might be most unbearable before another’s objects is one’s own necessary and impartial vision” (216–17). One translation of this into the terms of my argument is that the geobiographical, extra-anthropocentric imaginary and its values are at best terrifying and at worst incomprehensible to readers accustomed to the willful ignorance that colonialist-capitalist culture manifests toward the suffering of those refusing its deadly terms, readers simultaneously attuned to anthropocentric value.

We do not have access to the knowledge of Normal Phantom or the objects of Carpentaria, but we can trace in these artifacts a critique of the supposedly rational materialism of white colonizer society. Doing so provides at least a profile of what kinds of unbearable knowledges, or ignorance, the nexus of colonialism, capitalism, and whiteness funds, so to speak. The Uptown crew of whites in Carpentaria’s town of Desperance is represented by Mayor Stan Bruiser, who states: “If you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, it’s no use to you” (35). “Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground and raped them” (41). In Carpentaria, mining and rape are related violations. This is because capitalist culture, epitomized by Stan Bruiser, is simultaneously a culture of rape. The instrumentalization of objects extends to sexual gratification and includes the unmaking of the raped body as “human” in its objectification: “If you can’t fuck it,” he says, “it’s no use to you” (emphasis added), exemplifying the link between sexual assault and commodification I explored in detail in the previous chapter.

A key attribute of extra-anthropocentricity is the ability to accrue value to extrahuman, and thus multigenealogical and multigeological frames of time and space reference, values of a kind that would completely mystify Stan Bruiser, with his assumption of value as the ability to produce immediate gratification for himself, as the cult of individual self-“improvement” (actually, evidence of the ability of the self to accumulate wealth) according to the capitalist “ethic,” is his mantra. (Bruiser was a hawker selling goods at a profit of 300 to 400 percent after cost to remote towns and Aboriginal camps. In the 1970s he picked up a late-night radio tip, put all his money in a tin-pot mining company that struck it rich in Western Australia, and became wealthy overnight.) Let me take you back to the kind of time and space with which Carpentaria begins and which provide a startling contrast to Stan’s cripplingly limited perspective.

Carpentaria’s narrator explains that Desperance was set up as a harbor; but when the serpent in its infinite being caused the waters to recede permanently from the town, it sought a reason for its being, a myth of origins, an instrumentalist reason for being. At first it found this myth in the need to defend against the “yellow peril”; subsequently, the townsfolk turned to the management of Aboriginal people as their raison d’être:

When the yellow peril did not invade, everyone had a good look around and found a more contemporary reason for existence. It meant that the town still had to be vigilant. Duty did not fall on one or two; duty was everyone’s business. To keep a good eye out for when the moment presented itself, to give voice to a testimonial far beyond personal experience—to comment on the state of their Blacks. To do so was regarded as an economic contribution to State rights, then, as an afterthought, to maintaining the decent society of the nation as a whole (4).

The association between economic productivity and decency is exemplified in the ways in which the mining company further splits opinion in the Aboriginal community. Some are persuaded by its promise of a secure life; others, like Will Phantom, Normal’s son, protest ferociously against the mining company’s incursions on and into the land. Standing as woeful testimony to the mine’s lack of human right once again is Kevin Phantom, the one who works only one day for the mine, and that day becomes disabled mentally and physically for life, finally being accosted by three white boys in hoods who drag him behind the back of a car.

If the critic Ravenscroft sees Aboriginal objects that are sacred as threatening whites with the insecurity of whites’ partial knowledge, it seems clear that, conversely, mining capitalism produces benefits, such as modern housing, that produce fear of their consequences in some Aboriginals wary of the effects of colonial capitalism. Will is an activist against the mine, and old man Joseph Midnight refuses to move into the modern housing provided by the mine altogether.

“This is the only safe place left,” old man Joseph Midnight kept repeating to himself, as he wandered in and out of his old bit of a lean-to home. The structure of tin and plastic, in an ongoing state of disarray, stood behind the brand-new house the government had given him free—lock, stock and barrel—for cooperating with the mine, but which he said ‘was too good to use.’ (369)

Joseph feels he should never have been left, as an old man, to make the decision whether to cooperate with the mine or not: “He spat toward the new house whenever it caught his eye. He was suffering the unrelenting pain of a wrong decision” (372). His only hope for the future (not necessarily his own future defined as the limited world of the currently living, but his hope for a geobiographical future) lies in his love for Will Phantom, his wife Hope, and their child, Bala. When Will goes to sea to find Hope and Bala (who, for those of you who’ve not read the story, left with Elias, and Elias returns dead, but they don’t), old man Joseph Midnight “remembered a ceremony he had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment, he passed it on to Will. . . . The song was so long and complicated and had to be remembered in the right sequence where the sea was alive, waves were alive, currents alive, even the clouds.” Joseph Midnight warns: “ ‘Will, remember, you will only travel where the sea country lets you through’ ” (373). Immediately prior to this paragraph, the narrative talks about the “Clayplans [that] breathed like skin, and you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones. The old people said it was the world stirring itself, right down to the sea. . . . It made you think that whatever it was living down underneath your feet was much bigger than you” (369).

Carpentaria-land: Introducing Extra-Anthropocentric Human Right-Making

I may risk being read as anthropoligizing the Yarralin and Wright’s narrative, but let me go so far as to say that this is an animist cosmology, in which the skin of the earth and the skin of the people are connected. The connection is not spiritual in the Cartesian sense of the word, but embodied: remember that you can live with the river of the opening scenes of Carpentaria (quoted above) only if you can breathe as slowly as it does, if you can imagine your subjectivity and that of your land as one and the same through the lens of geobiographical time. I agree with Ravenscroft that we cannot know what this might mean to a person of the Yarralin; but this does not mean we can’t open ourselves up to the horror that old man Joseph Midnight sees in the “normal” vision of mining housing. The movement for environmental justice addresses issues of the contamination of the poor in the service of the wealthy. The direction I wish to go in, rather, is to ask: what if the notion of geobiographical time were perceived not as a threat to the living human, but rather, contra Morton, as an integral part of extra-anthropocentric quotidian being? What if, instead, ignorance of geobiographical time results in horror not only in terms of our ability to understand the necessary conditions for ecological well-being, but also in terms of colonizer-capitalist ignorance of human well-being as it might be (re)articulated in human rights within a geobiographical framework: extra-anthropocentric human-rightness?

This may be hard to imagine, because settler culture tends to fear it is as a speck of dust in the realms of geobiographical time, and accordingly, we tend to imagine that accruing subjectivity to the environment geobiographically conceived, and to us geobiographically conceived, would result in the diminishment of the human, much as a landscape of grandeur diminishes the human subjects painted small within it—this would be the extra-anthropocentric as Morton’s hyperobject. Yet, if its skin is our skin, somehow—perhaps we don’t need to know how this might be to at least investigate this possibility—then is such diminishment even rational, let alone inevitable? What if the diminishment of the land’s rights (an example from Carpentaria would be the poisoning of land and the rivers, and thus the kingfishers, through the mine’s production of lead waste) is indeed an attack on human understandings of rightness, in a kind of hyperintersubjectivity? This is of course more possible to consider in theory than in practice. In practice, the imperative to produce goods in a material system that is itself always hungry, that is by the logic of surplus goods and labour never satiable, cannot enable the kinds of human rights we might begin to envision with reference to the values of geobiographical time, because rights within a geographical framework would need to assume sustainability as part and parcel of a multigenerational/sustainable ethic.

In a 1990s essay entitled “Do Rocks Listen?” that deals with the challenges of Aboriginal land-claims rights in Australia, Povinelli stages the incomprehension of a land-claims judge listening to Betty Billawag explain the importance of a nearby Dreaming site, Old Man Rock. Betty Billawag explains that Old Man Rock “listened to and smelled the sweat of Aboriginal as people as they passed by hunting, gathering, camping, or just mucking about. She outlined the importance of such human-Dreaming/environmental interactions to the health and productivity of the countryside” (505). A companion of Povinelli’s points out to her (Povinelli) that the judge doesn’t seem to believe Betty Billawag’s animist “knowing” that Old Man Rock is a subjective witness; Povinelli responds that she thinks the judge believes that Betty Billawag believes what she herself, Betty, is saying; he just doesn’t believe it himself. Povinelli then goes on to say that the courts have accrued value to “traditional” beliefs and practices of the Aboriginals by splitting these off from their referents. In other words, such traditional practices are a compromise in an overarching value system that places capitalist value as the norm(al) and therefore invisible and unassailable belief that can then “afford” to make accommodations for traditional claims, but only where and when such claims do not undermine productivity in terms of the Australian gross domestic production. Here Australian Aboriginal labor is accommodated but does not stand on its own terms. “While belief and value, or more exactly, divergent epistemologies and the socioeconomic and legal apparatuses that support them, are at the heart of the conflict, Western economy and its epistemologies have been miraculously separated from the discussion. Western beliefs are not on the examining table” (514).

So here, then, is the challenge. If Betty Billawag needs to outline her belief/value system for the scrutiny of a court that sees no reason to put its own settler-colonialist-capitalist values under scrutiny, how can I, in my reading of Carpentaria, restage this confrontation differently? Here the difference consists in, first, having terms for acknowledging Aboriginal extra-anthropocentric labor and, second, not “outsourcing” responsibility for extra-anthropocentric human rightness to Aboriginal animist communities, who have (long) been burdened with the radical incommensurability of extra-anthropocentric being and colonial capitalism.

Phantom Labor: Extra-Anthropocentric Human Right-making

First, I’d like to suggest that the persistence depicted in Carpentaria, particularly in its representations of art-making, demonstrates how much labor goes into contesting and surviving the make-work project of settler-colonial capitalism. Settler-colonial capitalism works within what Povinelli calls “the carbon imaginary”: its logic is that not only of consumption of carbon-based fuels but also, as Povinelli points out, of fundamental acceptance of distinctions between carbon-based life forms as living and others as dead (2014). What we need to rethink radically, she suggests, is the divisions between the living and the nondead (because that which is nondead is not, has not been, and never will be able to be alive in the terms of the carbon imaginary). Thus, it is the assemblage of the geological and the biological that forms Wright and Povinelli’s mutual insistence on building geobiographical imaginaries that question the very notions of life and finitude that undergird Western philosophy. One way in which we can ground this concept is in the forms of art-making we find in Carpentaria. The novel figures intergenerational exchanges not only as interhuman, but as decimating Povinelli’s geontology. In her 2017 Geontologies, Povinelli defines geontological power as that which neoliberal governance uses to determine distinctions between Life and non-Life. According to Robin Wright, Povinelli explores how “late liberalism uses different ontologies of human and nonhuman arrangements of existence to both celebrate and discredit certain economic and cultural practices in order to facilitate the entwined logics of extractive capital and settler liberalism” (2017). One can think of Carpentaria’s art as the opposite of Povinelli’s geontological power, as a set of relations not only between generations of persons but also between the bios and the geos, the living and the not-dead, over time. This is the art of the novel as geobiography. Further, while intergenerational, geobiographical relations are marked by mutual obligation, they are also marked by gift exchange. Thus old man Joseph Midnight gives Will his boat, knowing that he will not survive to see Will return it, and he himself receives the gift of the stories and rituals he uses to prepare Will for his journey. Perhaps the preeminent geobiographical artistic capacity is given to Normal Phantom (and, on occasion, withdrawn from him): he can take the bodies and bones of dead fish and reincarnate them so that they sparkle with a vivacity that has nothing to do with taxidermy. The fish embody the vivacity of the dead who are marked not only as sites of mourning but also as sites of the celebration of the undead. This is highlighted by their capacity to sing from the walls of Normal’s fish room, his studio, where they are kept. Indeed, Carpentaria, as Ravenscroft notes, is marked by characters not knowing who is dead and who is alive, with cross-dressings of the dead as alive and the live as dead. This radical de-categorization, or rather discategorization, marks the importance of the artistry required to navigate the fabric between the geo- and bio-spheres, artistry that partakes of the persistence in the face of colonial capitalism and its abuses.

The fact that capitalism has no truck with this form of labor—just as it cannot recognize the labor of the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming interface except in terms of liberal accommodation that serves its own ends—can be seen, in the sense of human-rights practices as extra-anthropocentric, as a human-rights violation. The right to interact from and in a geos–bios right-making framework forms the antithesis of what one might call normative, or capital, human rights. Thus, Povinelli points out that, in relation to Aboriginal human-rights claims, in no way has the non-Aboriginal Australian government or public altered its understanding of the factual grounds of work, labor, human subjectivity, or environmental insentience. In short, the state produces a classic Batesian double message. It tells Indigenous persons: “Your beliefs are absolutely essential to your economic well-being; your beliefs make no rational sense in the assessment of your economic well-being” (Povinelli, 1995, 516).

This is a putative separation of labor and culture, with the reification of culture as not labor and art as product, rather than productive of resilient relationships in the geontological sense of transactions of obligation and gift. Art-making, in the particular aspect of persistence in which I place the examples from Carpentaria, is the making of an alternative extra-anthropocentric human right. It is a space, or an assemblage of materials, carbon and other, where or in which we can recognize, and are recognizing, that what constitutes the human right to live geobiographically is radically undermined in inverse proportion to the exploitation of contested land for capitalist surplus. Such persistence is about the endurance of ways of living that exceed the carbon imaginary and capitalist human rights. Fetishizing Aboriginal resilience in a context in which it is celebrated from the aspect of the separation of what is perceived to be Aboriginal culture, as opposed to productive labor, plays into the liberal governance of Aboriginality criticized by Povinelli, and in some sense naturalizes the notion that Aboriginal culture can withstand, or is resilient to, colonial capitalism, such that non-Aboriginals do not have to take responsibility for colonial capitalism’s harms.7 Instead, I identify the arts of specifically geobiographical persistence as forms of human right-making in practice.

The Bones of Carpentaria: Featuring Extra-Anthropocentric Human Right-Making

I propose, then, that there are arts of human right-making that need to be identified as such before we can understand what we might be killing off in aligning ourselves with the epistemology of the carbon imaginary and its values. Specifically, late capitalism assigns value differentially across a set of human labors that are positively assessed if they are productive within the terms of the carbon imaginary. They are not only negatively assessed, but unable to be named, if they issue from the eruption of Western epistemologies enacted by geobiographical practices. I agree with Ravenscroft that Carpentaria presents us with holes in our knowledge that we as non-Aboriginal readers, or more specifically non-Yanyuwa/Waanyi readers, can never fill (2010, 214). However, building on Ravenscroft’s argument, and the reading of Carpentaria offered here, we can begin to see the profile of the kinds of epistemologies we are as yet only beginning to name. This epistemological “infancy” originates from our difficulty in generating knowledge outside of the fundamental carbon binary of life–death that geobiographical practices fundamentally reject. The presentism of the carbon imaginary is entrenched in and by capitalist interests.

So, how can I characterize the extra-anthropocentric human right-making I draw from arts-based practices in Carpentaria? First, as noted above, these practices create a radical indeterminacy over the life or death of carbon-based forms. Wright’s Normal Phantom has the gift of reanimating the fish; and there are numerous other instances in which we cannot know whether characters are “dead” or “alive,” but are forced to reflect on their beings nevertheless. Nor does Carpentaria wish to satisfy us about the status of these forms. As Ravenscroft puts it:

It makes the very division into magical and rational, living and dead, body and country undecidable—at least for this white reader. This is not an undecidability that rests only in the Aboriginal protagonists, as some reviewers have suggested: it’s not just Normal Phantom or his son Will who can’t always tell what is living and what is dead, what is dream and what is waking, where one’s own mind ends and another begins. This undecidability is produced in me too. (2010, 207)

Interestingly, critic Katherine England describes what I am identifying as an imaginative capacity for practicing extra-anthropocentric human rights—that is, the refusal of a carbon imaginary—as an inability, or at least a deficiency. She says Normal Phantom “has difficulty differentiating between dead and living visitors to his fish room” (cited in Ravenscroft 2010, 222). This idea that the refusal of the carbon imaginary represents a lack of expertise may explain the fact that every major publisher in Australia rejected Carpentaria until it was published by the independent Giramondo in 2006. The fish withdraw their singing in Normal’s studio for periods of time, during which he is unable to undertake his radical “non-taxidermy,” but they do not die, in the sense that they come back when they wish to, once again enabling the craft, which is mutually desired by Normal and the fish; otherwise, nothing happens.

Second, this practice of extra-anthropocentric right-making, characterized by the co-constitution of the artist and the environment they both inhabit and shape, renders the art-as-product a term of impossibility. While those who come with their dead fish for Normal to reanimate, in a practice that defies any commonsense notion of taxidermy, may think of the artifact brought forth as products, the fish in Normal’s room defy the facticity of deadness: they register the mood of the room, sing in choirs, and “play dead” when Normal loses his capacity to reanimate them temporarily. His art-making is unmistakably related to his knowledge of the seasons, the rivers, and the seas of the area; his arts are co-constitutive of himself and the environment he both inhabits and shapes, and that both inhabits and shapes him. It is not dictated by his clients.

Third, these artistic practices, or rituals, of extra-anthropocentric human right-making are taking place in communities where access to human-rights discourses of the conventional, legal kind are so alien as to be laughable. The icons of the modern nation-state in Wright’s Carpentaria bear this out, from the mayor with his penchant for raping Aboriginal women to Girlie’s preventing Truthful, the policeman, from finding Elias’s bones and accusing her father, Normal, of Elias’s murder by accepting Truthful’s unwanted advances, and thereby distracting him from investigation of the raging fire she and her siblings set precisely to protect their father from such an arrest. They secure Truthful’s ignorance and appetites for their own purposes. Normal is frantic when he realizes they have stolen Elias’s bones from the fish room and burned them, as the “dead” Elias is Normal’s companion in that room. Thus, Truthful’s ignorance is not simply lack of knowledge about the origins of the fire and the bones of Elias; it is also his ignorance of the value of those bones to Normal Phantom, a value that Truthful would never be able to fathom in a million years as residing in what would seem to him, and does indeed seem to Normal’s daughters, a pile of smelly old bones.

Fourth, these practices are under threat, precisely because, as Povinelli has pointed out, liberal governance entails tolerance in an era of postcolonial, postslavery, and racial recognition; but such recognition and tolerance takes place only within the (il)logic of what liberal governance perceives as productive or sensible, or, I would argue, in Judith Butler’s terminology, “speakable” (1997, 132). This is the structure that produces the contradiction whereby Australian liberal governance of difference, as described by Povinelli, enables Aboriginal culture only inasmuch as it recognizes historical modes of being Aboriginal as described by settlers at the time of colonization, and inasmuch as the lands claimed have been occupied continuously by a community whose patriarchy is historically traceable. However, cultural practices that cannot play by these rules are under a death threat, because colonial displacement and genocide make the claim to traditional land and ways of living impossible, and because liberal recognition demands the gold standard of economic productivity, which discounts extra-material meaning. Or, as Povinelli puts it, citing Kristie McClure: “The appropriateness or desirability of toleration” of specific groups assures “a discursive framework within which toleration makes sense”; “many unregulated publics go beyond the conceptual barriers of the frame of toleration, ‘beyond which toleration appears foreclosed as senseless, as nonsense, in both principle and practice’ ” (2006, 13). That Carpentaria took so long to be published has in part to do with its discursivity exceeding the framework “beyond which toleration appears foreclosed as senseless”).

Apprehension of these artistic practices as human right-making activities enables a language, I propose, that increases our understanding of what liberal toleration not only allows to live and lets die, but what the liberal governance strategies of late colonial capitalism can make die. This is the case precisely because we are not accustomed to being able to name these practices in connection with human rights in the first instance, owing to the values of the “human” colonialist-capitalist imaginary subtending contemporary human-rights discourses. Having a language for what’s at stake enables humanists to forge alliances with those working across the geos–bios divide in the natural sciences and simultaneously in the countercultures of capitalism actually at work within our communities. This strategy of geobiographical articulation presents itself as an important step in taking a harm-reduction approach to the mastery of carbon-imaginary values, whose prospects for sustainability not only intergenerationally and transnationally, but even in the shorter term and in the first and second worlds, are far more in question than those of the arts of extra-anthropocentric right-making need be.

Conclusion: Novel Writing as Right-Making Practice and Artifact

What, then, has our reading of Carpentaria as an extra-anthropocentric human right-making artifact accomplished? It denaturalizes and renders absurd normative human rights by depicting the scene of rights-bearing and rights-seeking subjects as incomprehensible, or comprehensible only within colonialist-capitalist regimes of governance. Further, it articulates the Aboriginal rights-seeking persona of the NTER a fiction, one that is rendered pathological in view of the assumed health of normative, rights-bearing citizens. Self-harming behaviors, such as substance abuse, youth suicide, and related behaviors can be seen in an extra-anthropocentric context not as pathological, but as forms of preemptive harm reduction against colonialist-capitalist uses of what materialist cultures consider the Aboriginal body, but what is actually Aboriginal being. Further, Carpentaria demonstrates that some of the concepts Morton considers hyperobjects may not originate from an anthropocentrism that is innate to all human subjects, since the narrative poses an extra-anthropocentric hyperintersubjectivity as evidence of Aboriginal geobiographical being. From this perspective, anthropocentric human rights are unsustainable for humans among other beings, and are therefore deadly, or “capital” rights. For example, climate change as a hyperobject may be normative to the “citizen-who-bears-rights,” but is really intersubjectively constituted in a geobiographical framework, one that understands the mutual interdependence of humans, nonhuman animals, and other beings. To the extent that the Aboriginal is considered human, bearing in mind that the Aboriginal is human only in terms of liberal accommodation, the human may seem capable of imagining geobiographical frameworks. However, as long as extra-anthropocentric being is recognized only as a Povinellian compromise in an economy of colonialist-capitalist governance, extra-anthropocentric value is, in actuality, inaccessible to the rights-bearing and rights-granting human who depends upon such recognition.

If one reads Carpentaria as a normative human-rights narrative, it is possible to fetishize normative bearing of human rights, with “fetishism” defined as “that perversion which substitutes a fabricated object for a natural one perceived to be missing” (Suleiman 1990, 148). The fabricated object here, as in the NTER, would be the fantasy of the Aboriginal as seeking conventional rights, since there is no Aboriginal character in Carpentaria that trusts national or local governance as a source of rights in the long term. The natural object perceived to be missing would be the rights-bearing Aboriginal subject. Here I have attempted to offer an alternative reading, one that reframes the rather limited role literature is placed in when it is read as formative of normative human rights, or evidence of the failure of normative human-rights regimes to deliver on their promise, or both. Carpentaria offers a diagnostic of normative human-rights regimes. It demonstrates both the reason for their failure, which is their dependence on an anthropocentric notion of rights within the liberal politics of recognition, and an alternative to them: not the novel as a genre of the human per se, but the possibility of novel-writing as both practice and artifact of extra-anthropocentric human right-making. This opens up a role for the novel far beyond the horizons of its instrumentality in the service of normative human-rights regimes; the novel becomes a space of extra-anthropocentric human right-making in the sense of right-making creativity. One can affirm this creativity, however, only outside of readings of the tropes of Aboriginal as exotic and the Aboriginal as pathological, an eternally rights-seeking persona in view of the authority of rights-bearing structures of governance. The value of extra-anthropocentric right-making in Carpentaria thus depends upon the assumption—indeed the presumption—of Aboriginal sovereignty on geobiographically conceived Aboriginal ground. That such grounding may not entail, but decrease, white suffering may be a hyperobjective concept for settlers, but that does not, thankfully, make hyperobjectivity actual.