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David Carter: As part of our series of conversations, I'm here with Dr. Honni Van Rijswijk. Honni
is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law here at the University of Technology Sydney.
Her interests are very broad with a teaching focus on the Law of Thoughts and International
Commercial Law. What unites these, though, is her research and interest in law and literature.
I want to thank you for spending some time with me here Honni, but first let's start
with the book you brought with you. Honni van Rijswijk:
Today, we're talking about Swan Book, by Alexis Wright, which is her latest book. She won
the Miles Franklin for Carpentaria in 2007 and she's one of Australia's most important
writers. She's an indigenous writer and she's from the North, so she's from the Waanyi nation
and she writes very much from that perspective and is able to make, I would say, intervention.
She has a way of creating counter-imaginaries to legal ways of thinking and also dominant
cultural ways of thinking and so her work's really important.
David: In relation to the book, I suppose we'll come back to it but first I want to
talk about Harm. Harm is something that is central to the life of a legal practitioner
and a legal scholar. What kind of Harm do you concern with as a scholar?
Honni: I look at Harm in a range of areas actually. Harm actually unites a lot of the
work I do in law and literature. I've looked at Virginia Woolf, for example and her ways
of thinking about Harm as a feminist and her ways of making visible Harms that weren't
visible before, so that's what I see as one of the most important things that literature
does and that connection with law in literature that ... and it's very much modernist project
as well, that modernists such as Virginia Woolf was so interested in showing the ways
in which particular Harms drove society but were often invisible.
The thoughts of Harm, say led to the first World War that might have been hidden and
Woolf was very interested in the Harms of family and those that served quite devastating
personal Harms that ... towards women and children that weren't visible. I've worked
on that and I've worked on Harms that are known as madness but sort of thinking of different
frameworks to think about those kinds of suffering. Then I looked at broader Harms ... historical
Harms, so I'm particularly interested in ... because we're in Australia I'm really interested in
Harms to indigenous people and what sort of responses are demanded through those Harms.
David: Books then, I suppose, form a central part of our understanding of Harms as practitioners
or academic practitioners we learn about Harms through books. Swan Book is a piece of fiction
rather than a book of cases or book of evidence or that kind of thing, how can a book of fiction
tell lawyers something about Harm and why we should care about it?
Honni: Good writing persuades us and these arguments even whatever domain it is and I
think you would get examples really across time but ... that show that good writers use
the domain of fiction to make arguments and to make, I think, interventions into the way
we think politically and legally and socially. I always go back to the modernists as examples
for these but Alexis Wright is a really big example here.
She uses fiction but actually the arguments she's making have real world consequences.
She's definitely saying, "Look, this is the law of the Waanyi nation. This is how it's
continuing. It's very much alive." She's using what, I suppose, the Western or White Australia
sensibility we think of as fiction but actually what she's saying is, "This is real." It's
sort of fiction about a comment but it's a way to get out a representation of a continuing
law and it's a way to counter those dominant ways of thinking about indigenous people and
law. The fact that, say in Australian State Law,
we don't have meaningful encounters with indigenous laws, so you need some domain to actually
show, "Look this law continues and this is what it would look like if we actually had
a meaningful encounter," and Alexis Wright is one of those writers who actually does
that. David: In her book then, how does she write,
I suppose, that encounter with law? What's the story?
Honni: In the Swan Book and I read it very much in relation to commentary but the Swan
Book it's a dystopic, futuristic ... it's sort of a history of the future ... It's 2088,
though we've got 300 years after colonization and we've got the intervention that's been
around for about 100 years. The communities are quite devastated by that
intervention. There's still sort of ... The indigenous laws are still operating and you
get representations of that but there's very much the sense that there's been a little
bit devastation and the phrase that keeps appearing in the book is, "The fight for the
sovereignty of the mind. The sovereignty of the brain of indigenous people." That ties
in all kinds of Harms, so Harms to the person but also Harms to the land, and Harms to law
and sovereignty. There's this very much the sense that they're
all inter-related and the way in which Australian State Laws, etc. is all those Harms is shown
to be just so problematic and wrong and you really get that in a very visceral way in
the book. You get the sense of how devastating it is that through this particular Western
imaginary that cannot see the connection between Harms or indigenous people, Harms to refugees,
Harms to environment, that this is very much a part of the problem of this impending devastation.
The threat of the Apocalypse is obviously really big with us at the moment. People are
obsessed with zombies and I think there's something of that leaving in 2014 and fees
... environment fees, all sort of political economic fees. There's something about this
moment that is incredibly feeble. I think we are in quite a dark time.
David: One of the wonderful names that appear in book is Oblivia, clearly ... again, interesting
apocalypse, you name, what happens to Oblivia? Honni: Oblivia is a really interesting character
in one way to read it that I think it's actually if you think of her as a child who comes out
... say, the little children are sacred. This child has been *** by members of her own
community. She's deliberately mute as a result of that. She's incredibly traumatized and
so Wright is telling the story again of what happens to this girl. She's a teenager and
then she's sort of ... We watch her move into young adulthood but it's not the story of
trauma or victim who that we're used to reading. The story is not about the resolution of her
trauma, for example, there's no kind of psycho-analytic framework that would make sense of what she's
suffering. Wright always goes back to this connection
of Harm, so there's sensing, yes, of course, she's had this *** violence but the solution
is not about framing that *** violence in a particular way, the solution is to go
back to questions of sovereignty and authority and the environment and all the inter-connection
of Harms. She's an incredibly poignant character in
the book but we don't identify with her in a way that we would, say with her ... in the
book that's had more traditional kind of trumanity that gets resolved and that we sort to say
some sort of healing journey. There's no ... and suddenly it's just so bleak that there's no
healing journey in that sense. I think the healing or the hope comes from
this sense possibly of a wider responsibility. If the reader gets at the end of the book
and thinks, you know, actually those Harms are inter-connected that Northern territory
intervention is problematic on so many levels, but one of the problems is that isolates those
Harms that the law comes in to try and come up with a solution by focusing on, say ***
violence. But really what we need to look at are these wider, deeper Harms that are
producing those Harms. David: As a lawyer then, I suppose, a usual
reaction is I think, is to try and fix these things but these sounds like a quite sad ending.
Honni: It's a sad ending and it does have something to do with the time of fixing that.
One of the arguments that the book is making is to rush in with a response in the way the
law generally does is perhaps not the best response, that actually if we read it as an
elegy ... if we read it as a book that is encouraging a certain relationship to Harm
and laws. Then it's also encouraging a kind of stepping
back in order to respond, I think, more deeply and more meaningfully than with some sort
of legal response that touches the Northern Territory and dimension, just going to do
more violence and it's just going to isolate Harms. It's going to misread those Harms and
in the end it's not going to help it, it's just going to cause more damage.
David: Is this, I suppose, a narrative of anger? Of rage?
Honni: It definitely has moments. Alexis Wright is an extraordinary writer, so she has these
legal and political, I think, arguments ... theories as part of her work ... most important she's
just an incredible writer. The book moods has all sorts of tones and
they're definitely ... Oblivia definitely has moments where she just wants to destroy
everybody and at one point she's taken to the city by Warren Finch and they're sort
of forced marriage and he destroys this home that she had lived on, so she wants to destroy
him absolutely. There are definitely these different moods
but I think overall we come back to the holding of the elegy structure. That it holds rage
... that rage is not the end. We don't end with a tragedy. We don't end with revenge.
We end with, I think more of a question of what is going to come next but a place that
holds that question. It's definitely ... I'd say it's really quite a sad book and a thoughtful
book but it's not totally without hope. Also, Alexis Wright is just very funny, so
even though we've got these threads that are really quite depressing at times, she also
has moments where she's kind of characterizing or charactering the Australian vogue and sensibility
and she sort of refers ... There is a references based on different points and so it's quite
fun. David: We're left then with the question of
what to do. In the sense, back to law, what then should law do?
Honni: The argument of the book is that we need to take the imagination of law very seriously,
so that in the sense in which there's a certain imaginary that has animated the Northern territory
intervention. It's a very problematic imaginary, so I think what the book is saying is, "Let's
look at that. Let's re-vision how we examine relations between indigenous and non-indigenous
people and that we need to take sovereignty very seriously." Any move that doesn't involve
a real encounter between indigenous and non-indigenous people is just problematic from the start
that it's just wrong. It's wrong on so many levels and it can never remedy Harms.
The occasion for the Northern territory intervention is supposedly to be about the protection of
children but in the context of Australia's history and Australia's legal history in treatment
of indigenous people but this cannot work. There has to be, I think from the ground up,
a total revision of relations and a true encounter in law between those legal systems.
David: This is a pretty bleak picture of the future, I suppose in one sense, does Wright
give us some hope in her writing? Honni: I think she ... There's definitely
hope in the sense of the space that can be held by the sense of mourning the future.
I think the take-away message for the reader is that there is still time if we can mourn
properly, if we can relate properly to each other and to the Harms that have already been
caused. In the wide sense there is that hope and also the law, obviously would have a role
to play there. Then there's also the humor of Wright in her
novels which I see is ... because we go to these incredibly bleak places both here and
in Carpentaria, it gives you some relief as a radar to have these moments and, say for
example in the Swan Book, the dominant story really is Oblivia's search to try and find
sovereignty for her own mind. She's been dominated by these virus so instead of thinking through
trauma in the psycho-analytic model, is it kind of structural problem, it's figured as
a virus ... all these inter-connected Harms have taken over her mind and she gets these
different voices sort of telling her and she has no control.
They're often really funny moments, so for example she has a kind of bogan voice, sort
of interceding at some point and she says, "My virus thinks with a special slow drooling
voice, like an Australian with closed-door syndrome just singing its heart out about
cricket or football without a piece of thought." There's something obviously very sad about
that but she's being taken over by these voices but Wright also manages to, I guess, encourage
us to see the funny side of this dark part of Australia, I think wished a lot of people
would just feel at the moment that we're in this dark moment where people can feel no
compassion for indigenous people, for asylum seekers.
She also had other moments where she introduces this theory about why does Australians have
such hideous politicians and she basically had this paragraph where she talks about,
basically it's a little zombie narrative that they're actually zombies. There are moments
like that where you just kind of get this relief.
David: Then was there might be an elegy in a sense, this isn't then a mourning which
is, I think in the other words of Gillian Rose aberrant in the sense that it's a mourning
that is never ending, that we just sit in mourning and kind of never have any action
instead there were these funny moments which pulls us along but in the end it asks us to
do something. Honni: The elegy extraction demands that actually,
so the elegy extraction goes back to the Greek and is very much, since it's a process of
mourning. It's different from the psycho-analytic model but part of it is about collecting what
is left, say from the dead and a social transformation based on what has been lost and connecting
that to what comes next. It's not a sense in which nothing follows.
When I talked earlier about the laws that are stepping back or pausing it, it's not
as though there's never action, there will be action but it's a different kind of action
and this sort of elegy encourages us to see these connections of Harms and so that demands,
I think, a certain kind of thoughtfulness and a kind of going back five steps rather
than just thinking about one particular local Harm but actually kind of looking where these
Harms are connected. Let's look at the history of these Harms. Let's look at how they connect
to questions of colonization and to questions of sovereignty and coming at the Harms from
a deeper place, I think. David: In that sense, was law ... was judgments
made by courts but missed some of these Harms in sort of attempting to rush in and fix them?
Are you sort of arguing here to say that in essence, a good judgment might both do the
work of some kind of elegy? Honni: In a way I think and we do see moments
of that. I think if you compare, say looking at cases dealing with a stolen generations,
the movement from Kibilar to Tabaro is really important. You definitely see the courts at
that point in a way standing back and saying, "Well, how are we going to think about documentary
record? How are we going to think about past Harms in the present?" And really re-configuring
what they counted as evidence, what they counted as responsibility and not necessarily just
taking at face value, say the documentary record and the people's intentions at the
times. You do see that kind of ... I would say that
that's the sort of movement that we're looking for. I think realistically it's also political
project that caught can ensured examine things as much as possible in that spirit of thinking
through law differently and even if you look at native title cases they would be different
ways to think about that and ways to think through indigenous sovereignty and authority
that haven't been looked at by the courts but in the end it's probably going to be a
political solution.