On gammon, global noise and indigenous heterogeneity: Words as things in aboriginal public culture

Abstract

‘Gammon’, a term derived from English and which can be glossed in Aboriginal Australia as meaning fake, cheap or broken, is shared across varieties of Aboriginal English and has become affectionately revered as icon of an intra-Aboriginal public culture. The shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines gammon as the distraction proffered as one’s pockets are picked and, more generally, as humbug or nonsense — glosses which capture the playful dissimulation and ‘put-ons’ of which gammon consists in northern Australia. This article details the correspondence between gammon as a style of intra-Aboriginal verbal play, neoliberal critiques of past Aboriginal policy and transnational concerns with authenticity in musical popular culture. I argue that Gammon’s mediatized resonance speaks at once to a colonially derived Aboriginal social complexity, recent, neoliberal shifts in the framework of Aboriginal government, and to discourses of the real in popular musical media.