Autonomy and relatedness : an ethnography of Wik people of Aurukun, western Cape York Peninsula

Abstract

I seek in this thesis to provide a critical account of Wik Aboriginal people living in and near the township of Aurukun on western Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland. It is set in a period of rapid and often traumatic changes for Wik, the seeds of which were sown during the seventy-four year mission period, but which accelerated dramatically with the imposition in 1978 of a local government administrative system based on the mainstream Queensland model. The decade or so following this saw the massive and cumulative penetration of the forms and institutions of the wider, dominant society. Yet, despite this, Wik people continued to carve out a social and spatial domain established through a distinctive way of life, defined in terms of particular sets of conjoint dispositions, beliefs, and understandings and through the forms, styles and contexts of social practices. In analysing this particular style of life, I argue that the essentially unresolved tension between personal autonomy and relatedness provided a fundamental dynamic to Wik social forms and processes. I examine the changing symbolic and material resources, such as cash and alcohol, through which autonomy could be realized but which at the same time instantiated relatedness. These new resources, I suggest, provided potent and unprecedented means through which personal autonomy could be realized. For these and other reasons, there was a trend towards increasing individuation of Wik, and the sundering of the control of the means of social reproduction which had lain essentially with senior generations. At the same time as this developing individuation, there was a rise in the importance of 'community' based forms, and of a construction of 'culture' as a set of reified practices which were posited as differentiating Wik from others, particularly Whites. I also examine Wik political processes in detail. The Wik domain was distinguished by a high degree of fluidity and contingency in the composition of the various collectivities coalescing around social actions. Despite the attempts of the Mission and more recent secular. regimes to alter the legitimate definitions of social and geographic space, the constantly ebbing and flowing currents of Wik social life acted to subvert these imposed designations of public and private spaces and their appropriate uses. This fluidity of structure and process extended to Wik political forms. Within the Wik domain, relations of domination and subordination were essentially created in and through the direct interactions between persons, rather than being mediated through objective institutions such as a legislature or bureaucracy. In such circumstances, not only political groupings but orthodoxy and legitimacy themselves were contingent and embedded in the flux of social life. Implicit in this thesis also is an argument against theories which see phenomena such as violence, large-scale alcohol consumption, and gambling, characteristic of many remote areas of Aboriginal Australia, as in some simple causal sense resulting from dispossession and alienation. Rather, it is argued that such phenomena can only be understood in terms of the complex interaction between core cultural themes, themselves historically located, and the circumstances of settlement life which have arisen through the colonial and post-colonial periods.