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Australian Geographer

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'Totally Wild'? Colonising discourses, indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife

Sandie Suchet

To cite this article: Sandie Suchet (2002) 'Totally Wild'? Colonising discourses, indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife, Australian Geographer, 33:2, 141-157, DOI: 10.1080/00049180220150972

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Australian Geographer, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 141–157, 2002

indigenous ‘Totally Wild’? knowledges1 Colonising and discourses, managing wildlife

SANDIE SUCHET, Macquarie University, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper offers a critique of politically dominant Eurocentric notions of culture and nature in Australia. In particular, it interrogates Eurocentric concepts of animals, wildlife and management, and seeks to unsettle these concepts by considering some of the diverse ways in which indigenous people in Australia know country, animals and wilderness. Using the metaphor of Eurocentric ontology in a hall of mirrors, the paper argues that Eurocentric claims of universalism for naturalised discourses that assume the adequacy of a nature–culture binary form a very fragile circular argument. Self-justifying the imposition and assertion of Eurocen tric concepts and practices is a mechanistic re� ection of the particular terms of reference set by Eurocentric knowledges and a denial of multiple ways of knowing. The dangers this presents are illustrated by examining how concepts and practices underlying wildlife management have self-justiŽ ed (continuing) colonising processes in Australia. Finally, the paper attempts to open up spaces that address these dangers. Situated engagement is introduced as an approach which could shatter the hall of mirrors—by clearly embodying and emplacing all thought and action, universalised boundaries can be recognised and breached and new possibilities imagined and realised.

KEY WORDS

Indigenous knowledges; wildlife management; nature; wilderness; postcolonial ism; situated engagement.

Each weekday TOTALLY WILD takes viewers on a stimulating adventure into the wilds of Australia’s � ora and fauna … (Totally Wild 2001)

Promotions and content of the popular children’s television program Totally Wild posit a clear difference between the wild and the everyday world of its viewers. As part of the popular media’s presentation of nature, Totally Wild re� ects and reinforces a particular view of a boundary between nature and culture. Unquestioning acceptance of the existence of ‘the wilds’ and their distinct separateness from our lives, and the accept ance of an external relationship between the human domain and entities such as � ora and fauna, are discussed in this paper in terms of Eurocentric knowledges. These knowledges are strongly in� uenced by Enlightenment science, industrial revolution technologies, Judeo-Christian beliefs, European philosophical traditions and dominant academic approaches to the construction of knowledges. Claims by Eurocentric knowl edge to legitimacy through universalism, objectivity and deŽ nitive causation allow an uncritical naturalisation of these ways of seeing and understanding the world as universal truths (Christie 1992). This denies knowledges constructed in alternative ontologies, cultures and discourses, such as indigenous knowledges, and justiŽ es

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/02/020141-17 Ó 2002 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc. DOI: 10.1080/00049180220150972 colonising processes in which people are marginalised, dispossessed and alienated (Escobar 1996; McDowell 1991).

In exploring relationships between colonising discourses and ontological pluralism, this paper initially interrogates Eurocentric understandings of animals, wildlife and management and reveals problematic aspects of the binary oppositions and assump tions which underlie the meanings of these terms. These binaries and assumptions will be unsettled by glimpses into situated indigenous knowledge systems in Australia. The manner in which notions of wildness and management justify colonising processes in Australia will then be examined in terms of a metaphor of a hall of mirrors. Finally, in an attempt to open spaces in which thought and practice can shatter mirrors, the approach of situated engagement will be introduced.

Unsettling animals, wildlife and management

Animals: Eurocentric assumptions of separation, hierarchy and reason

Static, naturalised boundaries between what is seen as ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are fundamental in Judeo-Christian traditions about the creation process. Man’s ability to name separates him from, and makes him more powerful than, ‘living creatures’ (and women): ‘And the LORD God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them …’ Genesis 2 19 (Plaut et al. 1981, p. 30).

ScientiŽ c method is also based on a belief in an objective world which humans need to understand and control through naming and categorising: ‘Imposing a model on the universe so as to take possession of it, an abstract, invisible, intangible model that is thrown over the universe like an encasing garment’ (Irigaray 1993, p. 121). In this model, scientiŽ c theory has separated animals into their own category. Forming a fundamental boundary in Eurocentric thought, it was only in the mid-1700s that Carl Linnaeus popularised the system of classiŽ cation still used by science today—binomial nomenclature—where animals are removed from any context, separated from plants and sub-classiŽ ed into genus, class, order, etc. (Whatmore & Thorne 1998; Anderson 1995). In exploring relationships between being and the ‘fragrant dwelling’ of earth, Irigaray (2000, p. 7) describes how the living ‘[u]nwittingly … distance themselves from what lavishes life, counting and calculating without making sure [of] their own steps or the values which guide them’.

As Eurocentric discourses set boundaries and external relations between culture and nature, the boundaries and relationships become dialectically embedded in mindsets and societies. Anderson illustrates the ways separation and hierarchy are reinforced and communicated by considering relationships between ‘humans’ and ‘non-human ani mals’ in the context of the Adelaide Zoo. She argues (Anderson 1995, p. 283) that:

The exhibition [of animals in zoos] showed nature not only conŽ ned and subdued but also interpreted and classiŽ ed. To that end, the zoo space occupied that critical nexus in the trafŽ c of ideas between scientiŽ c and popular.

The zoo is an excellent example of the boundaries and relationships set by Eurocentric discourses between nature and culture (Anderson 1995, p. 276):

… zoos are spaces where humans engage in cultural self-deŽ nition against a variably constructed and opposed nature. With animals as the medium, they

inscribe a cultural sense of distance from that loosely deŽ ned realm that has come to be called ‘nature’.

In the context of wildlife management discourses in Australia, concepts of animals and wildlife are also informed by, and inform, a belief in separation. Humans are not included in deŽ nitions of wildlife, and animals are further sub-categorised. In section 5 of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974—the act that sets the framework for ‘wildlife’ management in that state, animals are deŽ ned in scientiŽ c categorical terms:

… animal means any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, and at whatever stage of development, but does not include Ž sh within the meaning of the Fisheries Management Act 1994 other than amphibians or aquatic or amphibious mammals or aquatic or amphibious reptiles.

In a report evaluating wildlife management in Australia, ‘wildlife resources’ are charac terised according to Eurocentric scientiŽ c understandings of evolution, notions of value and scientiŽ c classiŽ cations. Thus Davies et al. (1999, p. 12) note that:

As a result of a long period of isolation from other land masses, many of the wildlife species are unique to Australia. This contributes to Australia’s status as one of twelve key regions for maintenance of global biodiversity. All three major groups of mammals are well represented, including two of the world’s three monotreme species (platypus and echidna).

The oppositional binaries of culture–nature and human–animal naturalised in Eurocen tric discourses do not exist in a power-neutral situation. Both ‘sides’ of the opposition do not have equal access to setting the terms of reference; the side that forms, asserts and imposes the representation is empowered (Fothergill 1992, p. 46; see also Irigaray 2000 for an exploration of the same theme in regard to masculine and feminine binaries). Thus, Eurocentric humans are privileged and perceived as the active, supe rior, progressive side of any opposition as they themselves have formed the opposition. To challenge Eurocentric beliefs that knowledge is universal and power relations formed are justiŽ able, it is necessary to identify and then unsettle the assumptions that underlie such knowledges. The characteristics of being able to consciously reason, be rational and have intent and purpose have been the most pervasive attributes used to externalise the relationship of culture from nature and human from animal. As feminist environmental philosopher Plumwood (1995, p. 155) argues: ‘One key aspect of the Western view of nature … is the view of nature as sharply discontinuous or ontologi cally divided from the human sphere of reason.’

Despite a variety of (often contradictory) ways Eurocentric discourses have repre sented relationships between culture and nature, a hierarchical opposition between human and animal can always be traced to notions of reason, rationality, intent and purpose. For example, inspired by Cartesian philosophy, nature is seen in certain discourses as inert and passive, having no inherent powers of resistance or agency. As such, humans relate to nature in order to reshape and reform it. Alternatively, in� uenced by Hegelian thinking, the human’s task is seen as actualising nature and animals through art, science, philosophy and technology so that nature can be con verted from something alien into something with which humans are comfortable (Passmore 1995, p. 136).

Although attempts are being made by contemporary philosophers to challenge hierarchical separations between humans and nature, many of these challenges revert to the universalising arrogance of earlier perspectives. For example, in presenting his own philosophy on nature, Passmore (1995, p. 140) argues:

No doubt, men, plants, animals, the biosphere form parts of a single com munity in the ecological sense of the word: each one is dependent upon the others for its continual existence. But this is not the sense of community which

generates rights, duties, obligations; men and animals are not involved in a network of responsibilities or a network of mutual concessions. (Emphasis added)

There are many ways in which human–nature relations are conceptualised in Western thought; however, they all construct a relationship of opposition between nature and culture, human and animal based on assumptions of reason and consciousness (Ander son 1995; Plumwood 1995).

Situated glimpses into multiple knowledges

Nature for all its apparent remoteness and distance from humans is, in some sense at least, socially constructed. (Anderson 1995, p. 275)

SpeciŽ ed boundaries and external relationships do not naturally occur between culture and nature, humans and animals. People make meaning in multiple, shifting ways depending on context, focus and position. Constructing complex worlds as culture and nature, human and animal, is not universal, true or ‘natural’ but is particular to Eurocentric knowledges. For those trapped in a universalising framework, acknowledg ing this speciŽ city can be challenging and unsettling. However, as discussed later in this paper, the spaces opened up by this acknowledgment can also be exciting and transfor mative. Throughout this paper situated indigenous peoples’ knowledges from Australia offer this unsettling yet exciting challenge to Eurocentric universalism (see Suchet 2001 for southern African challenges to Eurocentric notions of wildlife management). For example, Christie (1992, p. 5), a linguist working with Yolngu people in Arnhem Land, describes some unsettling aspects of recognising multiple knowledges:

I failed as I struggled mentally to arrange all Yolngu matha names into a hierarchy. I assumed, for example, that the distinction between ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ is a ‘natural’ one, an ontological distinction, a reality quite indepen dent of human attempts to make sense of the world. But there is no Yolngu Matha word for either ‘plant’ or ‘animal’.

The term ‘country’ offers another insight into contested ontological as well as physical terrains. Australian settler cultures draw on a concept of country as opposed to city. In this context, Goodall (1999) argues that country is often drawn upon to embody notions of land, people, families and society, and construct racialised landscapes of either productive conquest or heroic failure. However, the Aboriginal English concept of country offers a direct challenge to this separation from and domination over landscapes and people (D. Rose 1996, p. 8):

Country is multi-dimensional—it consists of people, animals, plants, Dream ings, underground, earth, soils, minerals, surface water, and air. There is sea country and land country; in some areas people talk about sky country. Country has origins and a future; it exists both in and through time …

Through the Dreaming, Aboriginal people know that speciŽ c animal species and humans were, are and will be interrelated at personal and social scales. Distinct, external boundaries are breached as Dreaming stories inform a responsibility to country based on a common heritage and kinship (D. Rose 1996; Suchet 1994): ‘Animals, they’re related to us … Animals were human before’ (Napranum elders cited in Suchet 1996, p. 211).

In beginning to outline what a ‘non-human-centred cosmos’ might look like, D. Rose challenges and unsettles Eurocentric assumptions of reason and superiority, such as those espoused by Passmore. Rose (1988, p. 379) argues that for Ngarinman people from the Northern Territory ‘ … human life exists within the broader context of a living and conscious cosmos’. Similarly, Williams (cited in Langton 1998, p. 27) argues that ‘Aboriginal people regard the environment as sentient and as communicating with them’. Rather than a naturalised notion of an inferior nature unable to consciously act and interact, we Ž nd epistemologies in which (Rose 1988, p. 379):

Other animal species are believed to be acting equally responsibly [as hu mans]. People, other animals and other categories of beings are moral agents. The whole cosmos is maintained through the conscious and responsible actions of different life forms.

These ‘conscious and responsible actions’ take many forms. For example, in regard to how seasons work, Rose (1988, p. 379) describes the following:

In a normal course of events rain comes because the � ying foxes have told the rainbow snake that the earth is getting very hot, the trees are all getting dry, the � owers that are food for the � ying foxes are gone. They ‘say’ this by going to roost along the river.

At Napranum, western Cape York Peninsula, elders conŽ rm, as cited in Suchet (1994, p. 44), that non-human agents send out messages:

We know when it’s harvest times when we see grass seed burst and the seeds fall off … When dragon � ies are around it’s good Ž shing, especially salmon … when the � ower [crab � ower, Bu’uk] blooms the mud crabs are ready to eat.

Conscious actors send out messages, yet these messages are not speciŽ cally directed towards a superior human. Thus (Rose 1988, p. 383):

… the messages themselves are not organised into a centralised, hierarchical structure. Information is dispersed throughout the cosmos. SpeciŽ cs emerge from a background of broader categories; simultaneous emergence indicates a shared ontological status. From this perspective, the cosmos cannot be seen as human-centred.

Wildlife: Eurocentric assumptions of linear progress and development

And the man gave names to the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts … Genesis 2 20. (Plaut et al. 1981, p. 30)

Since Judeo-Christian creation, animals have not only been classiŽ ed as a part of nature, deŽ ned as external and inferior to humans because they lack the ability to consciously reason, but they have also been separated into the binarised categories of wild and domestic or tame. Although these categories are widely perceived as ‘natural’, they re� ect speciŽ c Eurocentric cultural understandings. Drawing on his Canadian experience, Usher (1995, p. 203) suggests:

… wildlife … is not an objective description but a cultural statement of the relationship of people and animals (and habitat) in an agricultural, settler heritage. It appears to have no direct equivalent in aboriginal languages.

Linear notions of social evolution, progress and development underlie Eurocentric ways of knowing wildlife. Social evolution tells stories of humans progressing from hunter gatherers through to pastoralists and then to the pinnacle of achievement as agricultur alists. Civilisation is deŽ ned as the taming, domesticating and controlling of an external, separate wild nature, wild animals and certain wild humans through agricul ture, industry, gardens and cities (Whatmore & Thorne 1998, p. 435; see also Irigaray 2000; Morton & Smith 1999). Ideals of linear progress are embedded in Australia’s National Anthem: ‘In history’s page, let every stage, Advance Australia Fair’. The undeveloped existence of hunting and gathering is deŽ ned as the absence of civilisation, characterised as untamed, uncontrolled, savage and wild. Ideologies which romanticise ‘primitive people’, ‘wild animals’ or wilderness largely accept the dominant binaries but reverse the valuation of the oppositional relationship it proposes. In wildlife management discourses, the notion of wild is rarely addressed. Rather, the boundaries between what is wild and what is domestic are taken for granted or deŽ ned arbitrarily prior to any discussion or analysis. This is re� ected in Australian common law where animals are separated into two categories: ‘ … ferae naturae (wild by nature e.g. a wombat), and mansuetae naturae (tame by nature e.g. a dog)’ (Aslin & Bennett 1999, p. 11). An Australian Senate Committee report exploring the potential of the commercial utilisation of Australian native wildlife deŽ nes wildlife as ‘animals and plants that live in the wild’. Based on the Oxford and Macquarie Dictionary deŽ nitions, the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee (1998, pp. 8–9) referred to:

as ‘not domesticated or cultivated’, the converse of which is … domesticated animals … are ‘not wild’ … wild as ‘living in a state of nature, as animals that have not been tamed or domesticated’, and ‘wildlife’ as ‘animals living in their natural habitat’.

… ‘wild’

Although the report discusses the problematic deŽ nition of ‘wild’ animals that have been raised in captivity, it does not challenge taken-for-granted notions of nature, wild, domestic or tame.

There is a fundamental assumption underlying the linear, evolutionary notion of development. It is assumed that the wild can be adequately characterised by the existence of an authentic, undomesticated, untamed state. This original wild is viewed in positive and negative terms. Regardless of the connotations, notions of wild re� ect and inform a belief in the inevitability of linear time and a need to control, intervene in and manage nature. This can function to protect and conserve a perceived original— wilderness as sanctuary, wildlife as sacred, wild human as noble savage—or tame and domesticate wild, wilderness, wildlife, wild human in the name of civilisation and progress.

Situated glimpses into multiple knowledges

Wilderness is actually home to a fair number of people who know it intimately. (Rose 1988, pp. 385–6)

Beliefs in an original, untouched wild are deeply challenged and unsettled by other constructions of humans’ place in the world. Alternative understandings to dominant Eurocentric constructions are not based on human-centred assumptions of linear progress and development. Many ontologies do not assume that the wild is something separate from human, something authentic and untouched. It is important to recognise that humans actively interact with and transform complex worlds, both metaphorically and literally.

Rose (1988, pp. 384–6) examines Ngarinman concepts of country and contrasts them with Eurocentric notions of an unspoilt wild and controlled tame. Ngarinman describe degraded country (country that in Eurocentric land management narratives is seen as tamed and domesticated) as ‘the wild, just the wild’. It is seen as man made and cattle made, where nothing grows and life is absent. However, what is known in Eurocentric discourses as wilderness—unmanaged, unoccupied, terra nullius—is coun try that is cared for by Aboriginal owners and known as quiet, not dangerous and unspoilt by encroaching wilderness. D. Rose (1996, pp. 19–20) turns upside-down the Eurocentric notion of Australia as progressing from a prior, uncontrolled wild towards a present and future domesticated civilisation:

Since 1788, with the progressive cessation of Aboriginal land management practices … with the increasing congregation of Aboriginal people in settle ments, and with the introduction of new forms of land use and land manage ment, there is developing a pervasive ‘wild’—a loss of life, a loss of life support systems, and a loss of relationships among living things and their country. For many Aboriginal people, this ‘wild’ has the quality of deep loneliness.

Management: Eurocentric assumptions of intervention and control

Distinct boundaries and external relations justify the perception of nature and animals in Eurocentric discourses as separate and inferior resources, existing for rational, superior humans to understand, control, utilise and subdue (Plumwood 1995, p. 155). Being in the position of overlord allows humans to impose practices of intervention such as domination and management. Anderson (1995, p. 276) Ž nds that: ‘The cultural sense of separation has implied no neutral relation between humans and the non-human world but rather entailed detailed and persistent disciplinary practices.’ Irigaray (2000, p. 72) characterises a masculine-constructed world as ‘a violent, un canny world, which exists through the domination of nature, of animals, of other humans’. In this world (Irigaray 2000, p. 73):

[t]he natural environment becomes the wild, the perceived adversary against whom he must Ž ght. All that exists is reduced to what man must overcome. Beginning from his entry, he recreates it in order to dominate it.

Eurocentric discourses, informed by these conceptions of a separate and inferior nature, devalue nature, wildlife and ‘wild humans’—often by commercially valuing them—and construct them as resources to be developed or conserved to fuel scientiŽ c and capitalistic processes. Conservation and development are imposed through the manage ment of nature, animals, wildlife and humans. This is often achieved through the illusion of removing control, intervention and management. For example, national parks are often presented as exemplars of nature in all its glory, unspoilt and pristine.

Rendered invisible in this discourse are management mechanisms such as roads, fences, constructed water points, wildlife counts, reintroduced animals, culling quotas, feral animal baits and tourist infrastructure, as well as experiences of interaction and dispossession.

Whatmore and Thorne (1998) deftly link the past domination of ‘wild animals’ by the Romans in their violent gladiatorial contests and triumphal processions to their current domination by scientists, conservationists and politicians as animals are classiŽ ed and managed as ‘endangered species’. From a different angle, Anderson (1997, p. 464) explores current human control over nature through the ‘harnessing of science and biotechnology to the domestication of plants and animals’. Wildlife man agement programs are based on assumptions of control and superiority with the concept management containing these assumptions. Thus wildlife management pro grams in Australia aimed at commercially utilising wildlife as a resource for recreation, tourism, leisure and sports, as well as direct conservation purposes such as the containment and co-management of animals in protected areas, must all be viewed in the light of assumptions of separation, superiority and progress embedded within them (see Suchet 2001 for a more detailed critique of these programs).

Situated glimpses into multiple knowledges

As with concepts of ‘animal’ and ‘wildlife’, concepts and practices of ‘management’ dominating culture–nature, human–animal and human–human relations in many places are not a common-sense, natural way of knowing and doing. Glimpses into indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing in Australia soundly challenge and unsettle any attempts to universalise concepts of intervention and management. Rose (1993, p. 115–16) describes how the Victoria River people of the Northern Territory are hesitant to actively intervene in environmental systems:

… we might note that for many people non-intervention is frequently a virtue. The positive valuation of non-intervention rests on several assumptions:

· that the results of actions cannot be accurately predicted, therefore there are

times when it may be better to do less than more;

· that information from complex systems is never complete, therefore the process of determining exactly what sorts of interventions would be best is one that requires much time and many observations; · in a more pragmatic vein, that the system which is producing our current problems is not the system we ought reasonably to rely on to get us out of it.

These point a long way to explaining why, in Australia, European land use strategies are perceived by Aboriginal people to be founded in arrogance.

Certain wildlife management practices in Australia value some species, including ‘native animals’, above others, including ‘feral animals’, and implement mechanisms of control to remove feral animals to promote the perceived health of native animals. Clark (1999) suggests that a binary of civilisation and wildness underlies this practice as the colonising desire for new and exotic otherness is contrasted with a need for control. The irony becomes apparent as the impulse to order the strange by introducing animals to Australia is countered by a disregard for ordering as the familiar turns strange or feral. Reasserting control through management mechanisms resonates with the ongoing construction of an Australian sense of place as the indige nous character of certain animals is romanticised and the ferality of introduced species is condemned (Morton & Smith 1999). Aboriginal people in Central Australia are uncomfortable with Eurocentric management practices based upon intervention and control as their ways of knowing are based on different assumptions. Thus (Rose 1995, pp. 92, 95):

Ethics and value judgements which support playing favourites with some species over others do not Ž t easily into the Aboriginal world view … Many people expressed a sense of loss that the [locally extinct ‘native’] animals were no longer around but there was also a pervading sense of passive acceptance about what had happened. Rather than question why the animals had gone and then attempt to act to bring them back, Aboriginal people accept what they perceive as a change in circumstances which is beyond their control.

Although the ability of science to conserve and manage some of these animals may be assumed to be empowering, it is important to realise that from an ethical stance such intervention and manipulation may be undesirable. From an epistemological stance, conservation and management may be actually unthinkable. In Napranum, Aboriginal people have their own ways of relating to country which may or may not coincide with Eurocentric ideas about resource management. Rather than having these relationships judged on disembodied and decontextualised Eurocen tric values and priorities, traditional owners in Napranum want recognition and respect: ‘Use your common sense, but usually there’s different common sense’ (Peppan tra ditional owner cited in Suchet 1999, p. 238).

A hall of mirrors: wildness and colonising discourses

Eurocentric assumptions of an obtainable truth permits the naturalisation of Eurocen tric boundaries within a web of externalised relationships (such as the boundaries and relationships set between nature and culture). These boundaries and relationships can then be seen as the only possible way of knowing and are assumed to be shared by everybody and therefore can be universally applied: ‘As our culture has unfolded it has moved from concrete singularity and towards abstract universality’ (Irigaray 2000, p. 77). By applying universalised Eurocentric knowledge, other knowledges are ren dered silent, are ignored, devalued and/or undermined so that Eurocentric knowledges only hear, see, smell, taste, touch and engage with themselves. This denial of any dissent or alternative forms a circular argument as Eurocentric knowledges have only their own terms of reference to judge themselves against and thus the assumption of universality is legitimated. Irigaray (2000, p. 74) describes this arrogant self-blinding in regard to masculine self-legitimation:

He turns round and round within his own circle, the circle of his dominion. He makes everything that enters into the circle his own, subjecting it to his perspective, increasingly forgetting the path of what is, and of who is. He loses himself in the appearance of those things imagined or made by him, which he calls the world … man places himself here on earth in a circle woven of violence and dismay, thus closing every opening.

Drawing on the powerful image of an all-knowing self, centring itself in a hall of mirrors, Rose (1999, p. 177) eloquently illustrates this circular argument:

The self sets itself within a hall of mirrors; it mistakes its re� ection for the world, sees its own re� ections endlessly, talks endlessly to itself, and, not surprisingly, Ž nds continual veriŽ cation of itself and its world view. This is monologue masquerading as conversation, masturbation posing as productive interaction; it is a narcissism so profound that it purports to provide a universal knowledge when in fact its violent erasures are universalizing its own singular and powerful isolation. It promotes a nihilism that sti� es the knowl edge of connection, disabling dialogue, and maiming the possibilities whereby ‘self’ might be captured by ‘other’.

G. Rose (1996, p. 67) expands upon this metaphor in her ‘dialogue’ with Irigaray:

And the mirrors are frozen … SolidiŽ ed in their repetitive re� ection of the same, a solidity of morphological tumescence and of death. And mirrors can be walls. They cluster together, overlap, build a ‘palace of mirrors’ … provide ‘solid walls of principle’ …. They give form, they turn ideas into structures, ediŽ ces, they produce ‘the absolute power of form’ … the solidity of concepts, boundaries and order. All this is part of ‘a complicity of long standing between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone’ ….

Similarly, Sharp (1994, p. 139) applies a metaphor of imprisonment behind an inmates’ wall to Eurocentric attitudes and treatment of indigenous people in Australia:

In the long era of terra nullius, those in power were complicit in a silence of their own incapacity to recognize that a culturally meaningful social life could exist on the other side of the inmates’ wall they had built.

As Howitt and Suchet (in press), note, it is not Eurocentric knowledges themselves, or the existence of boundaries and relations that are critiqued in this paper. The argument is not for an absence or removal of boundaries and relations, or that Eurocentric knowledges are inferior to other knowledges. Following Irigaray (2000; see also Lor raine 1999), boundaries and limits are in fact celebrated, as it is their very existence— To be two—which nurtures difference and shatters any illusion of a universality predicated on a borderless, undifferentiated sameness. Rather, the context and realis ation of power relationships are now exposed through an examination of the way Eurocentric concepts of wildness in Australia are situated in a hall of mirrors: how assumptions of universalisation re� ect and legitimate their uncritical, arrogant, damag ing and often violent assertion and imposition. This exposure will open up spaces in which an approach of situated engagement can be introduced. By assuming that animals as wildlife, landscapes as wilderness, or particular people as wild, are self-evident epistemological givens, Eurocentric discourses in Australia legitimate the assertion and imposition of Eurocentric practices of managing, taming and controlling the wild–wildlife–wilderness. These actions silence, ignore, denigrate and undermine alternative knowledges so that it is only Eurocentric beliefs and values on which behaviour is judged. The circle is woven where assumptions of wild–wildlife– wilderness are legitimated by their own re� ections (see Figure 1). Eurocentric assumptions of separation, reason, hierarchy, linear progress, interven tion and control underlying culture–nature, human–animal, wild–domestic binaries

FIGURE . 1

justify a superior Eurocentric human controlling and colonising the inferior ‘other’— wild nature, wild animals and also wild humans: ‘[t]he Other was negation: nature, animal, black’ (Fothergill 1992, p. 49). Literal and metaphorical representations of the wild ‘other’ are fundamental sources of justiŽ cation for colonising processes. Repre senting, naming, categorising, mapping, writing, teaching and photographing construct images of uninhabited, pristine, harsh wildernesses, of wild animal resources and of wild, primitive, savage humans. Consider, for example, the title of a 1835 print by Robert Duterrau, ‘Woureddy, a wild native of Brune Island’. Colonisers use these discourses to motivate and legitimate their behaviour. Separating animals and humans from superior Eurocentric society legitimates the perception of wildlife and certain humans as resources which need to be managed and controlled for Eurocentric presumptions. Indigenous people in Australia have been, and continue to be, subjected to a range of disciplinary management practices leading to dispossession and disem powerment. These range from the forced concentration of people into mission stations, to the removal of generations of children from their families and communities, to imposed models of ‘community management’ and democratic governance (Howitt 2001a, p. 157).

Eurocentric representations of Australian landscapes, animals and indigenous peo ples have, and despite illusions of a post-colonial era, continue to motivate and justify colonising intrusions into Australia (Langton 1996). Jordon and Weedon examine Eurocentric representations of Aboriginal people and argue that:

Travel books and brochures on Australia often mention Aborigines in the same context as descriptions of the natural world—Australia’s land, plants and exotic animals. That is, in addition to viewing Aboriginal people as belonging not to HISTORY but to PRE-HISTORY (‘the stone age’), they are also viewed as belonging not to CULTURE but to the world of NATURE. (Jordon & Weedon 1995, p. 495)

In particular, the legal Ž ction of terra nullius has plagued, and despite the Mabo ruling, continues to plague, Australian approaches to environmental management. ScientiŽ c and tourist discourses continue to re� ect and reinforce Eurocentric cultural assump tions and justify the imposition of a range of Eurocentric thoughts and actions. Recent Queensland government publications on the ‘natural history’ of Cape York Peninsula unproblematically refer to the Peninsula as unspoilt, undeveloped wilderness and ignore the complex interrelationships that indigenous people in Cape York have with a plethora of conscious agents (Herbert & Peeters 1995, p. 2):

Cape York Peninsula is largely an undeveloped region. Biologically it is one of the richest and least disturbed wilderness areas remaining in Australia … Until recently, human impact on the Peninsula has been limited by difŽ culty of access.

Even programs and regimes formed with the intent of moving beyond colonial struc tures, such as co-management of national parks and the integration of indigenous knowledge into science, have tendencies towards deep colonisation (Rose 1999) as fundamental concepts and structures are assumed to be universal and remain unchal lenged.

Positive notions of wild and wilderness as an escape, spiritual space and true research domain, or of noble savage as original conservationist or keeper of solutions, romanti cise an illusion of a wild based on originality and authenticity, prior to and external from human control and interference. Other systems of knowledge and practice, let alone experiences of removals, evictions, interventions, control and management, are silenced and ignored. Langton (1998, p. 9) refers to this as another form of terra nullius, or a ‘science Ž ction’ through which Aboriginal people and their land management traditions are rendered invisible by the application of notions of wilderness to Aus tralian landscapes. She argues that this is a form of ‘ecological imperialism’ justiŽ ed by an ‘assumption of superiority of Western knowledge over indigenous knowledge sys tems …’ (Langton 1998, p. 18).

These Ž ctions of an undisturbed wilderness re� ect and reinforce narratives of natural, wild animals and inferior, primitive inhabitants. This ignores and denigrates Aboriginal epistemologies and legitimates colonising processes in which lands, seas, animals and people are constructed as resources to exploit and conserve (D. Rose 1996, p. 17):

… European and American-derived concepts of wilderness … involve the pe culiar notion that if one cannot see traces or signs of one’s own culture in the land, then the land must be ‘natural’ or empty of culture … the concept of terra nullius (land that was not owned) depended on precisely this egocentric view of landscape. Not seeing the signs of ownership and property to which they were accustomed, many settlers assumed that there was no ownership and property, and that the landscapes were natural.

Howitt (2001b, p. 234) argues that the imaginaries and realities of colonising processes in Australia cannot be ‘reducible to a single legal doctrine’ and the setting of boundaries moves beyond the concept of terra nullius. He argues that many of the ‘political and administrative boundaries, social and cultural divides and … spatial images that shape Australian public policy and cultural identities’ re� ect ‘a longstanding and foundational fear and loathing of the indigenous Other’. An uninhabited terra nullius, and represen tation of a feared ‘Other’, both re� ect the oppositions constructed between wild and tame. Embodied in the wild Australian landscapes, together with the wild animals, is the wild indigenous Other. Howitt (2001b, p. 234) draws on Malouf’s imagery that clearly contrasts light with dark, and comfort with terror, to illustrate this:

It brought you slap up against a terror … the Coal Man, Absolute Night … all you have ever known of darkness, of visible darkness, seems but the merest shadow, and all you can summon up … out of a lifetime on the other, the lighter side of things … weakens and falls away before the apparition … of a sooty blackness beyond black … you cannot conceive how it can be here in the same space, the same moment with you.

Dominant scientiŽ c, conservationist, tourist and popular discourses, together with political, economic, artistic and academic narratives continue to justify and legitimate Eurocentric colonising processes in Australia. The representation of wild human, embedded in (in harmony with) the wild ‘lands’ and ‘animal’-scapes (wild ‘country’) of Australia, legitimates colonising processes which ignore, devalue and marginalise in digenous people. Concepts and practices of management—be they managing wildlife resources as an overt aspect of a colonial project or managing wildlife resources as an aspect of a perceived ‘post-colonial’ project—bring with them very speciŽ c understand ings. These are used to explain and justify conquest, repression, management, conser vation and development as rational, natural and desirable. By separating and opposing culture to nature, human to animal and domestic/tame to wild, superiority and universalism is assumed, and multiple knowledges, which contest, contradict or impact on Eurocentric knowledges, are silenced, ignored, devalued and undermined. This reinforces ‘the myth of Europe’s historical and cultural superiority’ (Blaut 1993, pp. 25–6). As Anderson (1995, p. 277) notes:

… teleological conceptions of the rational human afforded it the justiŽ cation to order and control other spheres of life. These included [and continue to include] the feminine … the racialized slave, the animal and the environment in general … the rational (male) subject’s perspective began to be set up as universal … when in reality it was a ‘partial perspective’ that relied on various strategies of denial, exclusion, spatial separation and stereotyping of women, racialized peoples, non-human animals and ‘nature’ more generally.

Situated engagement: embodying thought and action

Assuming that Eurocentric ways of thinking and doing are universal not only reinforces the hall of mirrors by justifying colonising assertions and impositions, but also strait jackets thought and action so that imaginaries and realities are limited and conŽ ned. To break out of the straitjacket, to shatter the hall of mirrors, situated engagement is now explored and nurtured. Situated engagement is not offered as a new model or frame work, but is seen as encouraging embodied, open-ended, situated processes. By engaging—interacting and dialoguing—in situated, embodied places, universalised as sumptions can be unsettled and challenged and through recognition of multiple knowledges it becomes possible to imagine and realise, as co-constructors of knowl edges, possibilities that are not captured by the hall of mirrors. At present, this paper is situated within its own hall of mirrors as it engages with itself and eventually a wider discursive audience. Further empirical work, founded upon the notion of situated engagement, will allow for a fuller exploration of the conceptual, discursive and practical spaces opened up by the approach.

The notion of situated engagement draws on Rose’s (1999, p. 177) appeal for dialogue to help dismantle the hall of mirrors:

At the margins, within the domain of the ‘other’, one knows that the world, life and people express themselves with rich and interactive presences that are invisible from the viewpoint of deformed power, except, perhaps as disorder or blockage. The dismantling of this oppressive and damaging pole is a necessary step in moving towards dialogue. Dismantling will fail if it is conŽ ned to monologue; we must embrace noisy and unruly processes capable of Ž nding dialogue with the peoples of the world and with the world itself. We must shake our capacity for connection loose from the bondage of the monological self.

The concept of situated engagement offers a way to break out of the tongueless and earless (and unthought-of-senseless) conŽ nes established by Eurocentric knowledges (and exposed in this paper through an examination of culture–nature boundaries informed by and informing concepts and practices of wildlife management in Aus tralia). However, simply exposing and shattering the hall of mirrors by acknowledging the existence and possibility of multiple knowledges is not enough. The argument needs to open up material, discursive and conceptual places where respectful recognition of multiple knowledges challenges power relationships (see McDowell 1992 for an explo ration of the need to overturn and restructure relations of power in regard to feminist issues). Geographers and others encourage the opening up of these interacting material, discursive and conceptual places in which to engage. Bhabha (1990) refers to a third space, Howitt (2001b) draws on the metaphor of a tidal zone, Lavie and Swedenburg (1996) locate their explorations in a third timespace and Jacobs (1996) terms this space the ‘edge’.

Situated engagement means that all thought and action is fully contextualised by where people are positioned. In this manner, everyone’s ground is destabilised and people expect surprises, challenges and to be changed (Rose 1999, p. 175). Similarly, self-reliance and equitable sharing are celebrated (Jacobs & Mulvihill 1995, p. 9). Engaging—conversing, interacting, thinking, doing—therefore moves into the realm of not only considering how knowledges form, but also how they interact and why this matters (Howitt & Suchet in press). Irigaray encourages a transformation of the subject–object dichotomy to a ‘sharing between two subjects’ through a ‘transformative encounter with each other’ where (Lorraine 1999, p. 98):

… each one continually becomes in the ebb and � ow of concrete contact. Because each respects the history and intentionality of the other, each cannot assimilate the other to her or his own history or intentions. This respect provides limits on one’s own becoming, and these limits provide the material for further becomings. (Lorraine 1999, p. 98)

This transformative encounter is based upon listening and a gift of silence (Irigaray, cited in Lorraine 1999, p. 106):

[l]istening … not on the basis of what I know, I feel, I already am, nor in terms of what the world and language already are, thus in a formalistic manner … I am listening to you rather as the revelation of a truth that has yet to manifest itself—yours and that of the world revealed through you and by you. I give you silence in which your future—and perhaps my own … may emerge and lay its

foundation … This silence is a space-time offered to you with no a priori, no pre-established truth or ritual … It is a silence made possible by the fact that neither I nor you are everything, that each of us is limited, marked by the negative, non-hierarchically different.

This intersubjective communication requires a ‘touching upon’ that is more than just the word, that is the breath, the silence, the tone of voice, modulation, rhythm, etc. This prevents words from being abstracted and involves an embodied relationship in which words cannot be assimilated to the self but must remain situated in the other (Lorraine 1999, pp. 107–8).

In shattering mirrors that privilege Eurocentric ontologies and render indigenous and other discourses not just invisible but also marginal in political power structures, knowledges are not dis-placed and fragmented, but remain emplaced and embodied. It is not Eurocentric knowledge itself that is challenged but the mirrors—the realisation of power relations—which allow a mechanistic re� ection of self-formed terms of reference. When the mirrors are shattered, emplaced and embodied people and their knowledges can engage with each other as imaginaries and realities existing beyond the hall of mirrors (situated glimpses of which have been offered in this paper) are recognised and co-constructed. However, on re� ection, the metaphor of shattering mirrors is perhaps too violent a response to the violations involved in colonisation. Perhaps a metaphor of transforming mirrors into windows will allow knowledges to remain embodied and emplaced rather than lacerated by splintered glass. By looking through the windows perspectives can be gained that de-centre the assumption of any one knowledge as superior or universal. But looking out of the windows is not enough either. Windows must be opened. Allowing in a breath of fresh air, these windows must stay open and encourage people to actively and intimately reach in, reach out and reach across (Ellis 1998). As situated engagement not only identiŽ es differences but also celebrates in their limits, tensions and transformative energies, perhaps the ‘stimulating adventure’ foreshadowed in the promotion for Totally Wild will become one of challenging and opening one’s self to an engagement with different ways of seeing, thinking and doing, rather than a self-afŽ rming merry-go-round ride of what is ‘totally wild’.

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been possible without my teachers from Canada, southern Africa and Australia, in particular, Richie Howitt and Bella Savo. Thanks also to Leah Gibbs for stimulating comments.

Correspondence: Sandra Suchet, Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia.

NOTE

[1] The word ‘knowledges’ in this context is used to refer to the fundamentally different ways people know, understand, relate to and make meaning of ‘worlds’ (see Driver 1992; Rose 1997).

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