Rex Ingamells and Ted Strehlow: Correspondences and Contradictions in Australian Settler Nationalism

Abstract

The standard story of Australian national cultural development revolves around a fundamental conflict between the forces of empire loyalism or universalism on the one hand and Australian nationalism on the other. Yet this narrative structure neglects the complexities of the settlercolonial, as distinct from the colonial, situation. This article is premised on the proposition that the settler-colonial situation is conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement of pre-existing Indigenous populations. While at certain historical moments, exclusive emphasis on the settler-metropole relation may be maintained, at others the disavowal of the settler-indigene relation common to both sides of the "two Australias" divide is rendered untenable by changing circumstances. It is into such a moment this article aims to situate its subjects-Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks-and it does so with reference to the correspondences between Jindyworobak indigenism and the indigenising settler nationalism evident in the "salvage linguistics" of Ted Strehlow. In doing so, the article aims to reveal the complexities and persistence of what it terms the settler predicament.

The negative Commonwealth: Australia as ‘laboratory’, then and now

“…Distance thus had to be shored updeprecations against what Geoffrey Blainey (1966) would condense into The Tyranny of Distance (see Blainey, 1966) were now often paralleled by the anxious consideration of a shrinking world. PR Stephensen's work can be seen as one anxious response, for example, and so too the works of Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks (see Tout, 2017bTout, , 2017c. The response to crisis -the response to all crises, including the First World War and subsequent revolutionary crises -was to keep Australia 'free of the Old World's contagion' (McQueen, 1979: 59).…”

“…In our respective work we have focused on the political traditions of the 'world turned inside out', and on those of Australian settler-colonial nationalism (Tout, 2017a(Tout, , 2017b(Tout, , 2017c(Tout, , 2020Veracini, 2021). If Christopher Hill (1972) had referred to the 'world turned upside down' as a project of emplaced transformation, the political traditions of 'the world turned inside out' advocated displacement as a response to social upheaval.…”

“…The first set of anxieties required that the nationalist political imagination adopt a radical version of settler-colonial 'indigenisation' (Tout, 2017a(Tout, , 2020Veracini, 2016). Responding to the second set of challenges required an increasingly interventionist state -the state's direct involvement would make settling the land possible again, and the state could be interventionist because in many ways the state preceded society itself (see Clark, 1906;Davidson, 1991;Lake, 2019).…”