Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks the invocation of differing temporalities and periodisations as public understandings of the governance of Indigenous difference shift in contemporary Australia. How is the present imagined to involve regression, repetition, or progression towards a new future for the nation?

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of a larger collaboration with Tim Neale, which seeks to understand how public understandings of the governance of Indigenous difference are shifting in contemporary Australia. Dominant conceptual frameworks for analysing this topic were established in a past era, in which scholars accepted a positivist account of Indigenous difference and emphasised the particularity of the Australian historical experience.

This paper begins with recent debates about January 26 —commemorated as 'Australia Day' and 'Invasion Day'. We are particularly interested in tracking the invocation of differing temporalities and periodisations as commentators and scholars make sense of complex developments. Specifically, the past two decades have seen incarceration rates soar, moves towards constitutional recognition stutter along, and the chaotic implementation of interventionist social policies aimed at refiguring Indigenous labour and sociality.

Is the present effectively characterised as regression, involving the 'return' to assimilationist imaginaries and 'ration days'? Does settler colonial governance involve an essential repetition of the attempt to 'eliminate' indigeneity, only manifest in different guises? Why is it that self-determination is increasingly rendered an object of memory, retrieved both as an epoch of future-focussed optimism and experiment, and a period that demanded a melancholic attachment to an idealised Indigenous cultural past? Is the drive towards Indigenous incorporation into the constitution premised on a new future for the nation?

Contemporary trends suggest that existing conceptual frameworks for analysing these topics may have lost their relevance, and that new conceptualisations and renewed international comparison are warranted.