Melancholic attachments : the making and medicalisation of Aboriginal 'loss'

Abstract

This thesis examines the loss of Aboriginal Australians as both an embodied experience and a powerful form of identity-construction. The focus of research is on southeast Australia where Aboriginal people, having suffered profound and often violent dispossession and state-authorised intrusion into their lives and communities, have been consistently defined in terms of their 'loss' of those qualities seen to constitute 'authentic' Aboriginality. I show how Aborigines have taken up and interacted with these dominant ascriptions of their identity such that the experience of loss has become a constitutive quality of Aboriginality in southern Australia, a pivotal basis of identification in public and political arenas. Further, I demonstrate how Aborigines' experience of loss has been reframed in dialectic with dominant forms of knowledge in changing socio-political milieux. In particular, I contend that in the last decades of the twentieth century, Aboriginal loss has been subsumed and redefined within the categories of psychology and psychiatry. I argue that this psychologisation of Aboriginal experience has significant ramifications in terms of how Aborigines are known and come to know themselves.