A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

This article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright. The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life. Its dramatization of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations. Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from the invitation by the Indigenous signatories to The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) calling on all Australians to aim for a “better future” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our pedagogy has even more relevance since the defeat of the 2023 “Voice” referendum that symbolically and practically aimed to ensure that better future through a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body to parliament. We describe our pedagogy through the scholarship in political listening studies and the “ethics of reading” the combination of which engenders responsiveness and responsibility in a reader that is potentially (trans)formative of relationality. We argue that when higher education curriculum is attentive to pedagogies of listening relations to marginalized voices, the conditions for settler listening are being achieved both within higher education and beyond.

Keywords:

• Settler listening
• ethics of reading
• formative pedagogy
• Carpentaria
• Australian Indigenous-settler relations

We all need to listen well, for the voices of Australia that speak, the voices that should speak softly, have no qualms in telling us to give up our culture and assimilate. (Wright, 2002)

No one is listening to us. What we want. How we want to live. What we want in the future for our children. It’s for these reasons that I started to paint. I want government to listen to Aboriginal people. I want people in the cities to know what’s happening to us and our country. (Green, 2016)

Introduction

This article responds to Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006a) and the growing body of scholarship in media and political studies around political listening. It aims to expand the literature on the politics of listening, which has largely focused on media and politics (Bickford, 1996; Couldry, 2009; Husband, 2009; Lloyd, 2009; Thill, 2009) and on organizations (MacNamara, 2016, 2018), to consider higher educational pedagogy as a key site of responsibility for listening to Indigenous voices.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) addresses the 97% non-Indigenous, settler,¹ Australian population. Composed at the Uluru Convention by Indigenous signatories who gathered following a series of cross-country dialogues, it concisely expresses the aspiration for a reformed relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It names the “torment of our powerlessness” as a “structural problem” in need of change through the creation of a “voice” to parliament and a commission for truth-telling of history as the basis for agreement-making between governments and Indigenous groups. The Statement makes a powerful appeal “to be heard” to achieve a “fair and truthful relationship.”

Published more than a decade earlier, Carpentaria provides a rich fictional staging for the Statement’s appeal to reform listening relations between Indigenous and settler Australians. With its multiple depictions of the vicissitudes of listening within the frontier township of Desperance at the “top end” of Australia, it offers an exemplary opportunity to see and hear the problem of Indigenous-settler relations from Indigenous perspectives. Our reading project centers the epic novel as an opportunity for what political listening scholars, Tanja Dreher and Poppy De Souza, call a located practice of political listening as preparation for its actualization.² Preparation of this kind amounts to a pedagogy of self-awareness leading to responsiveness—even when the listening focus is occurring outside an educational setting. Our reading strategy is a response to the novel’s invitation to become attentive to seeing and hearing how listening relations are forming, and potentially transforming, the settler-state (Maddison & Nakata, 2020).³ We call our political listening pedagogy, “settler listening.”

The novel comprises many stories, including about storytelling itself, with a focus on three senior lawmen, Normal Phantom, Mozzie Fishman, and Joseph Midnight, navigating their cultural obligations to kin and Country while living as fringe dwellers on their own Country. The arrival to the town of a global mining company has further dispossessed the lawmen of their authority that began more than a century earlier with a failed attempt at transforming the area into a hub for the northern pastoral industry. Disputes between and within the clan groups about how best to deal with the destructive impacts of the mining industry and the racist mentalities of settler law in support of that industry, adds to the town’s fractious social relations. In contrast to this all-too-human world, Country, in all its terrifying and wondrous majesty, exposes the porous nature of the nation’s borders, unravels the colonial mentalities that would uphold the settler law, and unsettles the extractive logic of the nation’s neo-colonial economies.

The novel’s listening relations—between and across Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups as well as between Indigenous characters and Country—not only gives readers a profound insight to Indigenous life rarely given nonliterary representation. Listening relations are also structurally embedded in the novel’s narration demanding readers become aware of our own mental schemas and habits. The narrational style also troubles our readerly expectations when for most Australians it comprises the unfamiliar speech patterns of an unfamiliar thought world from an unfamiliar part of Australia.

Wright’s intention to write a novel discouraging a “tourist reader” (Wright, 2006b) emboldened us to view her epic as requiring a pedagogy foregrounding the listening relations it both depicts and textually produces. The novel does not simply tell an unfamiliar story, it expresses what one critic calls Australia’s “unstable ratio of nation and realism” (Mead, 2013) through a highly inventive narrative voice addressing the reader in a compelling way (Rodoreda, 2016), and does so with effects that cannot be assimilated by the critical category “magic realism” (Ravenscroft, 2010). Rather, the novel expresses what Wiradjuri author and literary critic, Jeanine Leane (2015), describes as the capacious temporality of “Aboriginal realism” reflecting the “deep history” held by storytellers in the present. Critically, Carpentaria reinvents the possibilities for Australian literature to speak as a political and poetic force that not only acts on the world into which it arrives, but also makes a world (Daley, 2016). We argue that the novel is dramatizing the difficult tensions of Indigenous-settler relations in a contemporary place and time that continue to reproduce invisibly and inaudibly among the majority Australian population. Carpentaria also dramatizes and produces a form of “deep listening” to Country and to the text itself, that offers a model for reforming listening relations to ensure a “better future” for all (Waller, 2018).

One of us is a media studies scholar, the other a literary studies scholar. Both of us are non-Indigenous. Our separate but related interest in the politics and ethics of listening brought us together to consider how political listening relations may be seen, felt, and potentially transformed by higher education curriculum. Media studies has long investigated the politics of voice for marginalized groups and given emphasis to the institutional strategies, resources, and practices necessary for “finding one’s voice” and “giving voice to the voiceless.” Charles Husband claims this orientation has tended toward an overly individualistic focus on the politics of expression (Husband, 2009). Media scholarship on democratic participation has shifted its attention away from the politics of voice to forms of responsiveness such as listening, reading, and witnessing (Dreher & Mondal, 2018). These more recent inquiries in media studies have affinities with literary approaches characterized as an “ethics of reading” and “reading in the event” that inform our pedagogy alongside the political listening framework (Attridge, 2004a, 2004b; Dreher & Mondal, 2018; Miller, 1987). These different fields of study, like our different teaching and research interests, converge with the ethics and politics of listening to overlap in higher education curriculum in challenging the “established hierarchies of attention” among dominant reading, viewing, and listening publics (Thill, 2009, p. 538).

Political listening in higher education institutions is essential given their histories of erasing Indigenous knowledges, the direct exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the production of knowledge, and Indigenous people’s exclusion from the benefits of such knowledge (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003; Nakata, 2007; Smith, 1999). One of the many benefits of the increasing participation of Indigenous scholars in higher education are the ways in which they have changed higher education’s self-understanding about how knowledge is produced and disseminated as public knowledge to communities—indeed, affirming a distinction between public and restricted knowledge—how knowledge outcomes are communicated to and between Indigenous communities, and also within the institution where knowledge is generated. This flourishing of new and ancient Indigenous knowledges, nonetheless, risks being at best a mere supplement to existing higher education curriculum if it does not transform the conventions of the disciplines from which the curriculum is designed and the pedagogies through which these knowledge conventions are conveyed in the event of learning (Phillips & Archer-Lean, 2019). Settler norms pervade and replicate within higher education, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the presence of policies such as reconciliation action plans (RAPs) and diversity and inclusion policies and protocols where the curriculum is designed and delivered (Smith et al., 2021).

In what follows, we describe the context of reading Wright’s novel with the aim of articulating the conditions for settler listening that may transpose to different institutional and/or pedagogical contexts. De Souza and Dreher’s framework of conditions for political listening (De Souza & Dreher, 2021) operates in our curriculum project through two levels: first, as listening is represented in the novel itself, and second, as readers who are also listeners to other readers of that novel. That is, through political listening’s representations in the novel and its performance in the classroom. Attridge’s account of “an ethics of reading in the event” and its effect on a reader’s idioculture further situates the framing of the political listening framework. Before giving an account of these frameworks, we locate the scenes of listening in the novel, describe the aims of the reading project within the course, Literature’s Ethics, at RMIT University between 2019 and 2023, and discuss the ways in which it is working as a formative pedagogy of settler listening.

Listening in Carpentaria

The drama of listening is shown on nearly every page of Carpentaria as well as embedded in the novel’s narrative structure. Who speaks and listens is but one dimension of listening. How the listening is occurring, including when it falters, while harder to assess, is also important to our sense-making. In many scenes this faltering of listening occurs between Indigenous characters as well as between Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters. There are many exhortations to listen by one character to another (Listen!), or by the narrator retelling part of a story as if to a circle of listeners: “But Listen! Listen? Quiet, quiet at the back. Listen. You are not going to believe this …”⁴ There is the ongoing failure of listening amidst the violence and racism of small-town Desperance—homonymically connecting “desperate” and “governance”—“Desperance was just a quiet little town, but if you listened hard enough, you would have heard the silence screaming to be heard.”

The novel’s intersubjective hierarchies of listening are contrasted with the interlocutory role of Country in the relations of speaking and listening: “wonderment, was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor.”⁵ Charismatic lawman Mozzie Fishman on a road trip toward Desperance can be seen “listening to the riotous choir of yippee yi-ays” of his beloved Country and Western tunes and would stop to pick up and “listen […] to the crying of the frightened voices of the sick people pleading not to be taken to the whitefella hospital where they would be treated rough, like they were strangers.”⁶ Mozzie is not only a good listener, he also makes good speeches and is viewed as a natural orator even by the white Uptowners, who are otherwise not good listeners: “they were convinced something was happening when they listened to Mozzie’s speeches because they said they felt the heat of fire burning the side of their faces.”⁷ We also see the three young boys, Tristrum and Luke, two of Mozzie Fishman and Angel Day’s sons, and their friend, Aaron, unacknowledged son of barman Lloydie, detained in the town jail known as Constable “Truthful’s planetarium.”⁸ The boys huddle into each other in a “whirl of raw-felt fear” of getting their “just deserves” from Truthful, while in the town, “all ears rung with the talk, talk, talk” of Gordie’s murder and the “petrol-sniffing kids” as his murderers.⁹ The “three little boys did not speak or ask questions because they knew not to listen to anyone in town.”¹⁰ “They had been told: Every time you go into that town, close your ears to the white people who might not even be human, who may be, may be not … It was hard not to listen when Uptown talked so persuasively. But little kids want to live, so they closed their ears up for good.”¹¹

Norm Phantom’s firebrand son, Will, has run from Desperance and by listening to Country, he outsmarts the Gurfurrit mine owner’s technologies of helicopter and gun that are targeting him. Will’s sister Girlie, the only sibling among Norm’s adult children who would listen to their brilliant brother Kevin, brain-damaged from a mine accident, was able to do so “because she could understand his lingo.”¹² Norm is frequently talking to his dead friend Elias’s spirit and the sea woman spirit, who the old people said you could hear way out to sea “if they listened closely at night.”¹³ In frustration, Norm would stop listening to the spirit beings to instead yell for their attention: ‘Sea! You listening to me at this moment I am speaking to you?… Have you finished with me yet or what?¹⁴ Norm could hold the attention of his Pricklebush auditors when he repeats the story of his father, told exactly as his father had by copying his old voice, which seemed to comfort the old people, and members of his family: “they stood around the front yard and listened.”¹⁵ Yet Norm is frustrated by children who don’t listen,¹⁶ including when he encounters his estranged grandson, Bala, for the first time and thinks the boy is not listening to him. In return, Bala, who is skeptical Norm is his grandfather, demands the old man be silent: “Shh. Listen! Be quiet. This is a quiet place. Always quiet. Always hide,’ he says to Norm who is angered and disbelieving at his grandson’s assertive disrespect.¹⁷

The novel’s multiple depictions of listening (or not) to the words of others, their stories, speeches, and (often misplaced) advice, gossip and rumor is countered by restorative moments of classical and pop music and of Country’s sounds: the climate, currents, winds, birds, and spirit beings such as the sea lady who guides Norm when he is lost and far from his usual part of sea Country. The sounds of life for Aboriginal characters are wider and deeper than the sounds of words that aggregate and circulate as so many over-governing discourses of Desperance’s Uptowner settlers in their failure to listen to the self-governing resources of the Aboriginal Pricklebushers’ “deep listening” to Country (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2002). This mode of listening occurs many times between Indigenous characters listening to the wind, the tides, the named and unnamed land and sea spirit beings, and the Yinbirras: “In the Pricklebush, everyone stopped to listen when the bush creatures became silent.”¹⁸

Literature’s ethics

The course frames its primary focus on Wright’s novel with films, texts and podcasts by Aboriginal Australian authors, storytellers, and scholars that center Indigenous conceptions of story, Country, and language. Readers self-selected a week in the schedule, and from within the weekly two-chapter range, selected a passage to vocalize. The collective event of reading occurred over seven of the twelve weeks of semester. Readers were not required to state their cultural heritage. Instead, it became a topic of discussion why such a declaration might be a difficult conversation to participate in for Indigenous peoples who comprise between three and five per cent of the general population, and an even smaller percentage of enrollment in Australian higher education.

Readers were guided in making their vocalization into a performance that would be felt as an experience for fellow listeners. Conventional literary critical anchors for approaching the novel soon gave way in our discussions following the vocalisations. Where the usual disciplinary focus would analyze the novel by locating the techniques of world-building or link the novel’s representations to other novels within an Australian literary tradition—that until recently ignored Indigenous stories and storytelling—we found ourselves talking about the novel’s refusal of our narrative expectations creating particular effects. (We discuss this mode of refusal later in the paper.) Rather than asking variations on the question: “what kind of literature is this novel?” we found ourselves repeatedly asking variations on: “what kind of reader do I need to become in encountering this novel?” While these questions emerged from the reading as it was happening, the conventions of educational course delivery require questions to be posed ahead of the event of the reading. For example: How did listening to these selections enable you to see and hear the individuals and groups of characters differently or otherwise than from your solo reading? How did your sense-making of actions and events at certain stages solidify or shift, and why? How was listening presented as a theme in that part of the novel? Who was listening to whom and how did that listening relate to subsequent passages in the novel? The passages of solo reading and listening to the collective reading led to the final writing assignment: “Listening to Carpentaria.” “Erin” chose to write an analytical response where she states:

Listening is a vehicle for creating change and Wright’s portrayals of the absence of listening show how the tense relations between settlers and First Nations Australians can’t be changed if no true listening occurs via officials who have the power to increase Indigenous sovereignty. This is one of the fundamental reasons that listening is represented as important throughout the novel.

A creative response came from “Violette,” who was inspired by the novel’s opening scene of the serpent being forging the riverbed to draw from historical newspaper clippings about the Brisbane River next to which she grew up:

In the light of Alexis Wright’s work, I’m encouraged to notice in other ways … When reading frontier-wartime texts dense with Aboriginal cultural notes by ostensibly empathetic authors, I’m aware of the lens I am reading through … My imagination outsources to fantasy because I have only ever known high-rises [on the] border of the [Brisbane] riverbanks. I’ve never believed the possibility of something different, [like] a floral-lined crystal-clear stream. … Shouldn’t everyone living there know this? How does anyone cut through the layers of stories to find truth? I pay attention to aural aspects in historical records in an attempt to listen and to see better how the landscape spreads across time, preceding my perspective, which is predominantly subjected to contemporary ghost stories and ratings-spurred mainstream news pieces.

The reading provoked a personal response from “Shane”:

Reading—listening—to [Wright] speak about why she wrote Carpentaria and her approach to its writing, was the key to unlocking what had until then been just another dutiful read of a dense and difficult assigned text. As I began to read—and listen—differently to Wright and the voices of Carpentaria, my heart began an emotional shift. This shift - in feeling and in better understanding Land and Country and the contemporary indigenous world—is occurring in ways I still don’t fully understand. While the book provokes me at a cognitive level, it has become more of an emotive force. That reads like an overly dramatic sentence, but it is true. As I say, I don’t fully understand the triggers for this shift other than it is Wright’s Carpentaria that is central to it. So, at one level the writing of this essay is for a submission as part of an undergraduate degree. At a different level though, I am looking to deconstruct and understand what it is about Carpentaria that has triggered this late-in-age shift.

Ethics of reading in the event

The course title, Literature’s Ethics, signals the non-normative, non-moralising ethics we are engaging where literature is named as an agency productive of a relation between a reader and a text, and of the relation reading (and writing) produces with oneself. On this view of ethics, change occurs with a reader and with literature whether at a personal or a collective level¹⁹. Our interest is in the production, the subjectification as Foucault²⁰ would say, of the reader’s self-relation or self-formation produced by the sustained and collective event of reading coinciding with other events that received extensive and/or intensive media reportage.

Reading Wright’s epic novel with a focus on the ethics and politics of listening also requires an accounting for the institutional and wider cultural contexts readers bring to their reading. A disposition to reading as a form of listening—like the disposition to political listening itself—is singular at each encounter with the literary work that is shaped, and in turn shapes, the wider, impersonal relations of the body politic. These relations are embodied by a single reader subjectivity. Literary scholar, Derek Attridge names this embodiment a reader’s “idioculture” comprising a matrix of habits and mental schemas (representations, beliefs, expectations, prejudices, preferences) that operate intellectually, physically, and emotionally to cohere into producing a relatively stable sense of individual continuity from the manifold of events and relations comprising human living.²¹ A reader’s idioculture is generally stable over a long period of time, and it is also open to change. It is largely shared with identifiable groups (family, neighbors, peers; one’s gender, race, class, etc.), and it is also unique to an individual. It is not primarily psychological, even though it includes psychological attributes. An individual is more than the cultural systems they have been inscripted into; more than the sum of the relations of those systems coalescing as though an individual node of those systems. An individual’s idioculture is not something to which others could have direct access (let alone assess or measure). One’s idioculture delineates the personal and impersonal elements, the relations and events in the singularity of a reading encounter that may be short-term or sustained over a considerable period of time, such as a reader’s entire life. The events may be large and significant in scale or ephemeral micro-events. Similarly, the relations may be the known and established socialities of family, employment, and education in addition to the barely recognized relations with human and nonhuman others of one’s environment and with which we are enmeshed consciously and unconsciously. Nonhuman relations include weather, animals, insects, bodies of water, wind and sea currents, rock and plant formations, among others.

Attridge’s account of what readers bring to a single work of literature highlights the cultural and institutional field, and the temporalities of that field, in which any event of reading occurs. Reading Wright’s novel within an institutionally located university course is unlike reading it privately as say a personal reading preference or as part of a book club. While each of these situated contexts also invoke an idioculture, they do not include the context of a higher education institution or require a response that is sustained, considered, and assessed. Similarly, our reading occurred among readers undertaking degrees in journalism, public relations, and media production.

Attridge’s idea of the intersection of an idioculture and a reading event also enables that event to be understood as interrupted by and enfolded within wider events, particularly for us in relation to Australian Indigenous (self-) governance that Australian news media reported at the time of our reading(s) of Carpentaria. Without attributing a causal effect to these events and their implications for reading the novel, we claim these temporal intersections are productive of a more open idioculture by intensifying our disposition to listening in the event of our collective reading. The first of these events was the destruction of the sacred site of Juukan Gorge by the mining company Rio Tinto in Western Australia in late May 2020. Widely reported over the subsequent weeks and months around the nation and internationally, its cultural and historical significance carried into the 2021 course with media reportage leading into the first anniversary of the event that coincided with our reading of the action-filled chapter, “The Mine,” where lawman Mozzie Fishman and Will Phantom succeed in blowing up Gurfurrit’s iron-ore plant.²² We considered how Wright in the early 1990s was herself involved in a community-led campaign against the Century Mining Company’s establishment in Gulf country.²³ In 2015, Century Zinc’s mining operations (as it came to be renamed) ceased, having come to the end of its operational lifespan (Martin, 2019). We discussed the possibility that writing that chapter within the novel enabled Wright (and other traditional custodians who were against the Century Zinc mine) to achieve a victory in fiction denied them in real life.

The second event of April 2021 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody which coincided with the week we were reading about the novel’s three boys, Tristrum and Luke Fishman and Aaron Ho Kum, having been arrested on the spurious charge of murdering Gurfurrit mine security guard, Gordie. The boys’ detention in the jail along with their assault by town mayor, Bruiser, leads to the boys’ suicides.²⁴ The 1991 Final Report made 339 recommendations, many of which are still not implemented today. In the thirty years since the Report’s tabling, 474 further deaths in custody have occurred (Allam et al., 2021). Our reading in the novel about the boys’ detention and suicides also coincided with the Northern Territory Government announcing in March 2021 (with Aboriginal members of parliament speaking against the government’s proposal that was reported through to May 2021) that it would be winding back on its implementation of recommendations relating to bail and the minimal age of criminal responsibility that had been supported and implemented from recommendations made in the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Youth Justice in the Northern Territory in 2017 (Breen & Gibson, 2021). In a tough-on-crime campaign, the Territory government sought to reverse its implementation of these recommendations showing that conditions for juveniles in the criminal justice system for Aboriginal children are worse than for adults. At the same time as this reportage, in May 2021, media reported that one of three Aboriginal boys in Port Lincoln, South Australia was killed due to a waste-truck accident where the boys had been sleeping rough overnight in a dumpster bin (Wahlquist, 2021). The South Australian boys and the fictional boys were identical in number and age even though the circumstances of the deaths (and injuries) were entirely different. At times during our reading of the novel alongside media reportage, readers drew attention to the similarities between the fictional and the real world for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. At other times, the connection seemed to come from within the novel itself. For example, focalizing Constable Truthful’s thought processes, the narrator tells us: “If there was a Death in Custody. He knew the sucker who would take the rap for it. But not if he could help it, he was not going to be the fall guy.”²⁵ The reportage of real-life events colliding with fictional representations of similar events during the time of reading Carpentaria attuned readers to the fragility of survival and justice for Aboriginal children.

The third event in May 2021 occurred when the Victorian State Government gazetted the establishment of the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission. It has the goal of formalizing a treaty between the government and the thirty-one First Nations groups represented by the two years of consultations leading up to the inauguration of the First Peoples’ Assembly, overseeing the appointments, reporting and processes of the Commission. At the time of the gazetting, the relevant government minister was quoted as saying the Commission’s role in truth-telling would necessitate “truth-listening” by the state (McMillan & Fowler, 2021). Listening to stories from Victoria’s early colonial past to its more recent neo-colonial present through truth-listening would involve an attunement that the novel itself dramatizes when Norm Phantom tells the story of his family’s massacre by settlers to the old people who assembled to listen.²⁶ It is clear from international truth-telling commissions conducted over recent decades that a preparation for truth-listening is needed within the polity in which they occur.

The fourth event that intersected with our fictional reading event occurred in a way that was different to the above and did not obviously have to do with settler listening. Rather, it affirmed the ways in which the relation between life and its fictional representation by Indigenous Australian writers can be amplified for political as well as for aesthetic effects. A week after the course ended in 2021, Melbourne’s Age newspaper (and ABC News) reported an unusual natural phenomenon of massive spider webs in the La Trobe Valley region of Gippsland, 150 kilometers east of Melbourne, that appeared overnight following weeks of heavy rainfall. The vast coverage of silver-white spiderwebs resulted from millions of spiders spinning their silky threads above the water-clogged soil to produce the effect of a massive veil draped across the tops of vegetation. The webs extended for many kilometers. Scientists described the phenomenon as not uncommon although the Gippsland locals had not encountered it in living memory, and it was a sufficiently strange event that it was reported as far afield as South Africa (Business Insider) and the United Kingdom (BBC). The spiderweb phenomenon at the climatically temperate southern end of mainland Australia appeared to be identical to a spiderweb description in the tropical north of the continent. Here is the passage of Constable Truthful’s encounter with the spiderwebs in Carpentaria:

[H]e thought he was losing his eyesight as he stared ahead at the fuzzy, lighter, paler-coloured road and countryside ahead. It looked as though there was a fog ahead, but soon, he discovered it was not fog at all … He could clearly see that he had driven deep into spider webs as high as the vehicle. A thick sheet of white surrounded him. Perhaps Truthful had never seen such a thing before, but it was an old story that sometimes happens overnight when a cloud of travelling spiders drop onto land from the sea wind and start building their webs the height of house walls. Ingeniously, the spiders work at night, flying through the air as they attach their silver webs to anything with height: electricity poles, fences, long grass, prickly bush trees. The fat-bellied creatures sat in the middle of their webs, while their long, sinister legs spread like lethal weapons, and looked like stars as big as saucers. He drove on, slowly, foolishly, he thought. A multitude of spiders crawled through his brain. He did not know what to do. He could not go back: he did not want to go back. He was locked in: he had to drive forward for there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to turn around. Without anyone to tell him what to expect, Truthful could never have realised how densely packed together those webs were.²⁷

The italicized words in the above passage suggest that Wright is signaling that the spiderweb description is literal even, or perhaps especially, as she uses the phrase “old story.” What might have been assumed to be a trope of containment and danger drawn from Greek mythology where the spiderwebs figuratively express Truthful’s disposition of being trapped within his own racist web of policing practices, the reportage of the Gippsland event showed us that the novel’s spiderweb description is more likely to have been drawn from a much older story: a phenomenon that literally occurs on this continent in particular climatic conditions. The above scene occurs as the violence of events are mounting: the three boys’ arrests for the murder of Gordie, a security guard for the mine’s operations; brain-damaged Kevin Phantom’s aggravated assault by a group of thugs that Constable Truthful fails to pursue; Truthful’s sleazy expectation of sex from one of Kevin’s sisters. The reader puts Truthful’s mental unraveling into a wider perspective of his (possible) sense of guilt or shame for his part in those events that include a dream (more so, a nightmare) that is recalled for the reader as a description of the boys’ suicides and the town mayor, Bruiser’s dismissal of Truthful’s seemingly horrified reaction to their deaths. The narrator gives no indication of Truthful waking from the dream, making the line between dream and reality, like that between the metaphoric and the literal also blurred. Rather than an exaggerated image of a spider web “spun” by Wright’s own pen to create a second level, figurative meaning (Truthful’s mental collapse within the racist web he himself spins), the Gippsland phenomenon demonstrated just how unexaggerated, how literal, Wright’s spiderweb figure is. The Gippsland spiderweb phenomenon provided a new sense of the literal in relation to the metaphorical, of reality in relation to the fictional, for us southern-based urban readers living in a relatively temperate climate. The collision of the fictional and nonfictional reportage of this spiderweb phenomenon enabled a new sense of Country’s power to displace the non-Indigenous meaning of “story” that too often dominates responses to Indigenous story and storytelling. Considered collectively, the accretion of these mediated events provoked our paper’s ambit claim: if awareness of reported events were enfolded within our reading and re-reading of Carpentaria, then conversely, our sustained readings of Wright’s novel unfolded within the body politic of Australia.

Formative and transformative pedagogies

We describe all the participants in the reading event as “readers” rather than as “students” (and teachers) to foreground the mutually formative role of listening to Australian Indigenous voices by primarily, if not entirely, non-Indigenous readers in a higher education setting. Further, we describe our pedagogic experience by turning away from the conventional terms of higher education discourse that is often dominated by demonstrating verifiable, repeatable, and quantifiable learning outcomes through the audit metrics of curriculum assessments and surveys (Connell, 2016; Kallio et al., 2016; Martin, 2016). Scholarly reflection on pedagogic practices in higher education tends to focus on the management of, or accountability for, the credentialling and socialization roles of higher education (Biesta, 2016). The prioritizing of these two roles of education tends to overlook the importance of education’s third role—and for education theorists like Gert Biesta, an under-examined role—the subjectification or self-formation of attuned and responsive citizens. The ethics of reading Indigenous, longform writing especially by non-Indigenous readers can be a generative experience of self-formation. Such an experience can be an affiliative encounter of relationality instead of being an interpretive experience of mastery of understanding. What Attridge describes as the singularity of this kind of responsiveness—“reading in the event” or the “happening” of the reading event—is not a happening that is defined or circumscribed by a clock or calendar even while acknowledging these tools are required for the delivery and management of curriculum.²⁸ From our pedagogic perspective, the “happening” of the reading event could be planned only up to a certain point, and not through conventional literary methods that would lead to a set of learning activities and outcomes that could then be documented and replicated uniformly.

Dis/positions of political listening

In De Souza and Dreher’s chapter, “Locating Listening” they describe practices that are preparatory for political listening.²⁹ In their article, “Dwelling in Discomfort,”³⁰ they describe four conditions of political listening: refusal; attunement; yielding; and dwelling in discomfort. These could be seen as synonymous descriptors of a single series, sometimes named as practices, at other times, conditions for political listening. We see these two series of descriptors as overlapping but distinct. The first series describes the disposition of the self in the listening relation, which in our case is the reader’s experience of reading as a mode of listening to Carpentaria’s voices. The second describes the situated context of that disposition within the wider relations in which the self is positioned, which in our case is the situated context of a metropolitan-based university course taken by media and communication undergraduates focusing on the ways in which political listening and reading practices may expose the relationality that reading and listening can open toward. Each of Dreher and De Souza’s political listening series speaks to a form needed for the listening to be transformative of both the self and the social relations of an institution, and each of these without a pre-determined content to that listening. In our locating of the politics and ethics of our reading experience as one that exemplifies De Souza and Dreher’s political listening typology, we are also foregrounding and widening the terms by which pedagogy—the relations of learning and teaching—is conventionally understood. That is, as fundamentally formative of relations and therefore potentially transformative. It is a pedagogy that need not be restricted to educational institutions. Nonetheless, it is in education institutions, that the (trans)formative nature of social relations can be viewed as a bounded site of settler coloniality. We aim, then, to account for a higher education pedagogy as being more than the credentialing and socialization of graduates into what Biesta calls various “cultural orders and traditions” that, upon graduation, would uphold the status quo of the settler-colonial nation.³¹ Rather, we seek to describe this listening pedagogy through the lens of a reader’s subjectification, their (trans)formation, and from within the very institutions that have historically contributed to upholding those colonialities.³² A self-conscious pedagogy of the politics and ethics of listening to Indigenous voices should do more than supplement a curriculum through giving space to those voices. It should reconfigure the mediated, communicative representations of Indigenous voices and aspirations within and across institutions that too readily replicate the settler-colonial status quo. We view an ethics and politics of listening as having a major role in higher education that requires transforming the pedagogic relations as well as the curriculum away from their settler-colonial disciplinary histories.

Refusal

The rejection by the Federal Turnbull Government in October 2017 of the Uluru Statement from the Heart was a compelling recurrence of settler violence, a mode of state refusal, toward Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This rejection was for De Souza and Dreher, as it was for us, an act that marked another starting point in thinking pedagogic strategies for countering such violence. De Souza and Dreher note the Uluru Statement’s address is to the people of Australia rather than to the state, it thereby offers a “roadmap to new norms of listening” that require a “shift in the terms and frames of encounter and exchange … to dissolve harmful hierarchies of value and attention that consolidate the settler-colonial status quo.”³³ While the state’s refusal was wholesale in 2017, refusal is not entirely the preserve of the state. The people of Australia, to whom the Statement is addressed, became more rather than less supportive of its roadmap for structurally recalibrating Indigenous-settler relations since the Turnbull Government’s refusal. That support was still in the majority when the wording of the referendum question to enshrine symbolic as well as practical recognition of Australia’s First peoples was announced in March 2023 before its defeat from the vigorous “No” campaign overriding the weaker “Yes” campaign in October 2023.³⁴ Addressing the Statement to the people rather than the state reminds us of the strategic ways in which speaking and listening, affirming and refusing, and attention and response may operate.

Refusal is not an exclusive property or resource held by the state. It is a resource that is neither absolute nor mutually exclusive among groups unequally positioned within a body politic. Long considered a political strategy with literary associations, refusal is a far more subtle engagement between groups of unequal power than the 2017 Turnbull Government’s rejection of the Statement would suggest. Maurice Blanchot’s critical reflections on the politics of refusal during Nazi occupied France and France’s continuing postwar colonization of Algeria, explains the logic of the strategy as one that contains the double power of the negative: affirming while also rejecting; a simultaneous yes and no as a response to the state’s logic of yes or no; the state’s logic of all or nothing (Blanchot, 2010). Further developed by Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audre Simpson, refusal is a political and methodological strategy of interruption of settler coloniality that is generative of actions and affiliative with groups in its critique (Simpson, 2014). For Simpson: “There was something that seemed to reveal itself at the point of refusal—a stance, a principle, a historical narrative, and an enjoyment in the reveal.”³⁵ Kahnawà:ke Mohawk refusal affirms its dispossession within its relation to the state, while simultaneously affirming a self-possession outside that relation. Refusal is a political strategy that has been attributed to Australian Indigenous writing since at least Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going (1964) anthology of poems as well as to Wright’s Carpentaria (Griffiths, 2017). What the 2017 state refusal of the Statement shifted for us was the need to rethink how Australian Indigenous writing could “shift […] the terms and frames of encounter and exchange” within the situated context of our higher education classroom.³⁶ For us, an affirmed sense of the necessity of political listening that starts with this strategy of refusal, needed to focus on our being predominantly non-Indigenous readers of Indigenous writing, and do so by way of foregrounding our reader positions as listeners. It is a pedagogical approach that can be further bolstered by incorporation of the Indigenist approaches to scholarship and literary criticism being developed by Australian Indigenous literary scholars (Flynn, 2022; Leane, 2014; 2015; Phillips, 2011).

Attunement

Forming the course around an exemplary text of refusal does not in itself produce the “relational adjustment” that De Souza and Dreher require of the practices and conditions for political listening. Attunement to the located, specific mode of refusal means locating the specifics of “alternative routes to justice and living together.”³⁷ Drawing from Richard Dawson (2013) on the justice work of attunement, De Souza and Dreher note that it involves “constituting appropriate selves and relations’³⁸ that are not pre-determined, but which emerge from the specific histories, contexts and grounds through which those selves and relations have been formed.”³⁹ We view attunement in our located context as being an attuned reader listening to and being formed by the text’s modes of address as these are represented in the novel, and between the novel and our collective reading. Notably, the narrational mode of address in Carpentaria shifted; at times we felt we were being addressed directly at other times, as if we were outside or to the edge of the storytelling like an eavesdropper at the edge of the represented relation thus de-centring our usual options for response.

The necessary adjustment De Souza and Dreher analyze in our situated context also involves more than adjustment with the textual relation. The textual adjustment needed to be bolstered by the other adjustments that were aslant to some of the conventions of university literary study. Just as De Souza and Dreher describe this attunement of a relational adjustment by gestures such as spoken Acknowledgements of Country, we too began each week of the semester with an Acknowledgement, verbalizing awareness of our locatedness (genealogically and geographically) to a specific location whether online during the pandemic semesters of 2020-2021 or on campus in the central business district of Melbourne so that our collective located-ness produced explicit self-awareness of a spatial and temporal “listening together.”⁴⁰ This weekly relational adjustment had been preceded at the start of the semester with a walk through the campus grounds to pause at specific sites of Indigenous inscription: the bronze sculpture of Country’s ancestral spirit Bunjil wrapped in a possum skin cloak titled, Wurrunggi Biik. Law of the Land (2016) designed by Gunditjmara Keeray Wurrong artist and language scholar Vicki Couzens in the campus’s main thoroughfare; the campus’s Indigenous garden, Ngarara Place, with plaques and signage explaining the Wurundjeri seasons as a site of respite and contemplation; the memorializing artwork, Standing By Tunnerminerwait and Maulboyheener (2016) meters from the edge of our campus boundary. The work marks the site of the two Palawa (Tasmanian) men hanged in 1842 in the fledgling colony of Port Phillip next to what would soon become the Melbourne gaol, parts of which are now within the University campus. Walking and talking about our location on the Wurundjeri land of the University’s city campus within meters of our classroom reminded us of the relationship of place to sense-making that further bolstered our attunement to Wright’s novel.

Yielding

Being attuned to our listening together, and our reading aloud, we are performing a pedagogy that is more familiar to primary than tertiary education. Tertiary pedagogies of reading usually foreground the cognitive over the haptic, kinetic, and aural dimensions of reading, and is already a yielding of the wider perceptual range for textual responsiveness. We reversed that yielding through the walking tour, the weekly verbalizing of locations and cultural genealogies, in addition to the weekly vocalized readings of the novel’s passages. These relational (re)adjustments through a widened sensory responsiveness were also preparatory to the yielding of interpretive mastery of the novel itself. As De Souza and Dreher note, yielding is ambivalent; it can mean both to give up and to produce.⁴¹ In our situated context, yielding included giving up the mastery of interpretive control that a repertoire of literary critical tools might have afforded us regarding the difficulty of access the novel’s style of narration occasionally produces. In our talk that followed the weekly reading aloud, we would discuss: Who is speaking here? Is this passage reported or imagined; is it remembered or hallucinated? What is going on here in relation to what we’ve already heard and read? What do you see, and what do you hear?—and without resorting to a literary critical repertoire. We also yielded other of our readerly expectations such as achieving a sense of resolution to the novel’s narrative threads such as justice for characters who suffer at the hands of brutish and ignorant racism. Yielding the fulfillment of our readerly expectations combined to produce a sense of discomfort at the non-resolution of justice within the fictional world’s sharply delineated social groups.

Dwelling in discomfort

Dwelling as a gerund implies the temporality of duration. Some readers found the longer we were reading, the less clear was the sense of story’s progression. The novel maximizes a divergence between a story and its telling to distort the chronology of events; a style of narration articulating a temporality that can be felt as like the weight of existence rather than of life’s progression, and which for many Indigenous Australians is their lived experience within the polity. The discomfort of the novel’s durational temporality was more keenly felt by readers seeking a coherency of plot, a consistency of narration and narrative point of view, and a resolution to the characters’ trajectories; possibly, felt by a tourist reader who Wright chose not to write for. There was discomfort for those readers seeking “answers” or “models” to Australia’s problem with settler-Indigenous relations when the novel and the pedagogical handling aimed to enable these relations to be seen and heard from Indigenous points of view.

Conclusion

Since this curriculum project began, not only has there been a change of Federal government in 2022 embracing the Statement’s tripartite reform roadmap known as “voice, treaty, truth,” the referendum that would have embedded that roadmap in the polity has been lost. The majority “No” result for the referendum has only further demonstrated the imperative of responsive listening relations within the polity for working toward a shared and “better future” between Indigenous and settler Australians. While the past, including the very recent past, for Indigenous Australians has been intergenerationally traumatic, it will never be exhausted by that trauma. The past also lives on in joyful, generative, and affiliative ways that are accessible through deep listening to Country and the profound narratives by Australian Indigenous writers.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Daley

Linda Daley is a senior lecturer in literary and communication studies in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. Her teaching and research focus on the affordances of literature for enabling social, political, and environmental justice. She has published on Alexis Wright’s fiction in Australian Feminist Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Lisa Waller

Lisa Waller is Associate Dean, Communication, in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia. Her research investigates how the news media shapes society, from its relationship with policymaking to its roles in local communities and the justice system. Lisa has two books: McCallum, K & Waller, L (2017) The Dynamics of News Media and Indigenous Policy in Australia (Intellect) and Hess, K & Waller, L (2017) Local Journalism in a Digital World (Palgrave Macmillan).

Notes

1 ‘Settler’ can be a problematic term to employ. What the term loses in nuance, it gains by creating the needed visibility of settler logic aimed at keeping invisible the dispossession and disadvantage between Indigenous peoples and those who migrated to Australia after 1788 and the benefits that accrue from that colonial project.

2 Dreher and De Souza. (2018). Locating listening (p. 25).

3 Our project has affinities with Indigenous-settler relations, a field that focuses on the questions that arise in the relation between these two groups in specific geo-historical settings, and for our purposes, in Australia. Indigenous-settler relations builds on, while moving away from, on the one hand, settler-colonial studies, concerned with how settler states impact Indigenous peoples both in the present and past. And on the other, postcolonial and decolonial studies that examine how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. See Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata eds., Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Springer: Singapore 2020).

4 Wright, Carpentaria, 87.

5 Wright, Carpentaria, 411.

6 Wright, Carpentaria, 121, 128.

7 Wright, Carpentaria, 133.

8 Wright, Carpentaria, 311.

9 Wright, Carpentaria, 318.

10 Wright, Carpentaria, 320.

11 Wright, Carpentaria, 321.

12 Wright, Carpentaria, 220.

13 Wright, Carpentaria, 245.

14 Wright, Carpentaria, 271.

15 Wright, Carpentaria, 101.

16 Wright, Carpentaria, 279.

17 Wright, Carpentaria, 306.

18 Wright, Carpentaria, 83.

19 Attridge emphasises an ethics of reading as being a form of criticism in tension with aspects of the aesthetic critical tradition of literature that has conventionally viewed the accomplishment of a literary work on criteria that are external to the work itself, particularly those of universality and historical transcendence (2004a, 13).

20 See in reference to the self-forming part of Foucault’s ethics, Michel Foucault (1997), 265.

21 Attridge (2004a), 21.

22 UNESCO compared the rock shelter destruction by the mining group with the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic State and the Banyan Buddha statues by the Taliban. ABC Radio, 28 May 2020. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/pm/pilbara-cave-explosion-on-par-with-palmyra-unesco-chair/12297884

23 Wright. (2006b). On Writing Carpentaria, 13.

24 Indigenous youth (10 – 17 years of age) are 5.8% of the total Australian population but comprise 46% of all young people in detention. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework Summary Report 2023. Retrieved from https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au/report-overview/overview/summary-report

25 Wright, Carpentaria, 334.

26 Wright, Carpentaria, 101–2.

27 Wright, Carpentaria, 355; italics added.

28 Attridge. (2004a). Singularity (pp. 58–62).

29 Dreher & De Souza. (2018). Locating listening.

30 De Souza & Dreher. (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 2).

31 Biesta. (2016). Beautiful risk (p. 128).

32 Biesta. (2016). Beautiful risk (p. 129).

33 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 10); italics in original.

34 When Opposition party leaders refused to give bi-partisan support to the referendum question and encouraged a negative campaign of disinformation and misinformation around the details of the advisory body’s formation – captured by the slogan, ‘If you don’t know, vote no’ – the majority support for the Voice eventually flipped to a majority rejection once polling began.

35 Simpson (2014), 107.

36 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 10).

37 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 10).

38 Richard Dawson, Justice as Attunement: Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, Economics, and the Rest of Life (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013) cited in De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 10).

39 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 10).

40 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 11)

41 De Souza and Dreher (2021). Dwelling in discomfort (p. 13)