Journal of Australian Colonial History: Book Reviews
Vol. 11, 2009
Ravi de Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2006, ISBN 0 86840 954 5, pbk, 254 pp, $44.95.
Ravi de Costa has developed a unique perspective on Aboriginal Australian political activism and this book is an impressively researched contribution to Aboriginal history. An international scholar, his roots with third world people who migrated to the west, de Costa has lived and worked in Australia and is now in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto. His analysis of Aboriginal political activism is free of the bondage of settler colonial adherence to the notion of the egalitarian Australian polity that often compromises Australian scholarship on Indigenous issues. For this reason the book provides a refreshing view of Aboriginal activism and includes activists and the events that they have been involved in as legitimate and important to the ongoing development of Aboriginal rights and, by inference, the Australian polity in general.
De Costa's book rightly places Aboriginal transnationalism within the global movement for rights of colonised peoples the world over and describes the key players, their alliances and networks developed over time. The overall impression is of intelligent Aboriginal players and activists, utilising the instruments of domestic and international activism to seek redress for their people caught in the hegemony of the settler colonial regime. Local nationalist tropes have had extraordinary difficulty including Aboriginal concerns in the narrative of the nation and the international political action of Aboriginal people has been characterised as unnecessary grandstanding and ultimately irrelevant. While de Costa cleverly identifies a 'progressive nationalism' of the more recent Labor governments of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, questions remain as to how progressive such developments actually were. Recent history shows us how easily there can be major setbacks in the quest for a social order 'in which indigenous and other people can co-exist' in Australia (p. 4) and how far we are from this goal. Moreover, Indigenous transnationalism incorporates 'explicit criticism of those national institutions which are designed to address the concerns of indigenous persons as subjects, citizens and lately as indigenous peoples' (p. 7) and by its very nature challenges the Australian ideal of the egalitarian nation.
Global colonial capitalism has subjugated Indigenous peoples and ironically established the communication networks that have fostered interchange about the impacts of these regimes, whereby the seeds of discontent have developed into anti-colonial activism. While primarily concerned with the local and regional, Indigenous people have transcended their seemingly parochial concerns and the borders of the nation state, to develop international means of pursuing their claims for justice. The 'higher authority' to which they have appealed, identified by de Costa as 'both ideological and institutional manifestations of universal moral order' (p. 4), he identifies as humanitarian, Christian, feminist, communist and socialist philosophies, more recently expressed in terms of decolonisation.
While one reviewer has described the first chapter 'Transnationalism before the Nation-State' as the weakest, de Costa is to be commended on his attempt to establish the philosophical roots of Aboriginal understandings of relationships to others, across borders and within the settler colonial regime. He seems to have judiciously incorporated the anthropological and historical evidence available. The disregard of Aboriginal culture, indeed the trope of 'lost' culture, has meant that most assume that Aboriginal people have no viable means of dealing with human difference and rather are influenced by others, particularly western forms of political action. De Costa establishes the cultural value of 'connectedness' as having determined the ways in which Aboriginal people have readily developed alliances with other like-minded people, black, white and Indigenous. This could have been developed further as it is evident in Aboriginal dealings with others in the modern period as well; such attempts are important indications of cultural continuity. Suffice to say that for de Costa, transnational activity becomes a natural development in Aboriginal anti-colonial activism.
Certainly in later chapters de Costa dazzles with his comprehensive and penetrating understanding of the development of Aboriginal activism and the alliances and links developed within Australia and various parts of the globe. The weaving of more than eighty Aboriginal people into a transnational narrative of highly tactical political activism is thrilling. For example, more well known identities such as Paul Coe, Gary Foley, Chicka Dixon and Joe McGuinness have many references each and other luminaries seldom documented such as Jim Hagan, John Newfong, Josie Crawshaw, Shorty O'Neill, Ken Colbung, Charles Leon and Ken Brindle are also included, all of these within a narrative that rightly positions them as high-level political players.
New light is shed on the import of Aboriginal political campaigns. For example, the Tent Embassy of 1972 served to reconstruct Aboriginality into a national and international identity of black solidarity and of local cultural difference. The blockade against mining at Noonkanbah in 1980 moved from being a local to a national and international campaign culminating in the first appearance of an Aboriginal delegation before a United Nations human rights committee. De Costa includes discussion of Aboriginal leaders' rejection of terrorist violence as a means of anti-colonial action, which when viewed within the worldwide movement, shows extraordinary restraint and outstanding political thinking. The explanations for this could be taken further; it is important to consider non-violence as the product of Aboriginal spirituality, seeking resolution of difference and continuing the connectedness of all things.
Another reviewer has cautioned against optimism in ongoing appeals to 'a higher authority'; it is the case that much rests on the development of international institutions such as the United Nations and global political developments generally. The massive political changes associated with transnational capitalism, global warming and the depletion of natural resource bases arguably signal a new era in which the influence of 'a higher authority' will likely wane. The work of de Costa somehow reassures us that any such changes will herald new developments in Aboriginal political activism.
While de Costa positions Aboriginal political action in relationship to western human rights movements, he reminds us that it is also from Indigenous knowledge and the activism of Indigenous people that the world has been constantly reminded of the need for justice. This is a highly thought-provoking book.
Vicki Grieves
Citation: Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 9, 2009, pp. 212-14.