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Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law

As I write this review there is a news report on the television about the start of the twenty-first Commonwealth Games due to take place on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The heavily manicured cadence of the news reader’s voiceover is announcing that Aboriginal protesters have blocked the progress of the Queen’s baton relay at the readymade Camp Freedom under the banner of the Stolenwealth Games coalition. The story is told mostly through a menagerie of picture and sound grabs. Most of the report is being taken up with official voices, voices sought out by the journalist and producer for their views on the protest and delays; all they can see is something to condemn, this is what was sought out and invited in. Among the most political of the institutional messages of this report is a myth of the beach as a democratic space and the official inference that we are supposed to hear is that protest is unwelcome noise for the confabulations of a modern democratic politics represented by the Games: harmony through competition—it is more neoliberal than communitarian or generative. If there is a myth of the beach according to the news report then it is a demotic one, and although these beach-going people may speak, they do not have a voice that can be counted, divided, and pluralized. Note here that this is not a voicelessness arising from some sublime image of the awesome overwhelming power of the sea; it is instead the hegemony of order in a space where it is more convenient to wear less physically and psychologically. The news report concludes by reiterating that the arrival of the baton marks the start of the Games but remains silent on how we are to read the protesters’ message or their strategic position on a narrow stretch of land called The Spit. The metaphoric links of the protest to the baton point to something rotten in the Commons that the Games supposedly represent but the news report does not offer a riff on Hamlet or something more suited to our context like Carpenteria. By the time that this review is published, the Games will be over, but will the protest be? Kathleen Birrell’s Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law doesn’t seem to think so, and, nor do I.