Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the moral conceptualisations of both places and temporalities in discourses about Aboriginal people in Australia. Preliminary observations from recent fieldwork in the Kimberley region will be presented.

Paper long abstract:

In popular discourse, Aboriginal people rarely inhabit their own contemporaneousness in positive terms but are instead conceptualised as either dysfunctional remnants of previously rich cultural traditions and/or as marking time until more desirable futures arrive. Aboriginal people of the northeast Kimberley region of Western Australia are an exemplar of this characterisation as people whose present-day lives have little moral value other than in their potential to change. While some projects encourage moral accountability of the individual to determine their own life, in regards to shaping Aboriginal personhood it is largely the state that is tasked with creating positive social transformations. To these ends recent government announcements have 'foreshadowed' the withdrawal of funding to social services in particular places, part of a strategy to encourage Aboriginal people to relocate to more urbanised locales. Problematizing remoteness as part of the past is therefore tantamount to a moral assertion connecting Aboriginal people's geographic residence to certain kinds of behaviour and lives constructed as dysfunctional. Conversely other kinds of places such as towns and cities are constructed as benign waiting rooms where Aboriginal people will be able to seize their intended futures. Drawing on the discourses surrounding Aboriginal people's lives in Australia, this paper teases out the moral connectedness of temporality and place and will present initial observations from recent fieldwork in the Kimberley.