Reflections on Post-Apology Australia: From a Poetics of Reparation to a Poetics of Survival

Abstract

In the Australia of the 1990s, the idea of reconciliation, backed by government initiatives, enjoyed popular support. The discourse of reconciliation has been superseded by a discourse of 'crisis' in Aboriginal Australia. In this era of crisis, the Stolen Generations paradigm, characterised by a compassionate politics of testimony and witnessing, has lost much of its moral and political purchase. This shift provides context for my consideration of a parallel shift, from an aesthetics of reparation that flourished during the reconciliation era, to an aesthetics of survival which mediates an era of 'crisis ordinariness'.