The Janus faces of indigenous politics

At the 2013 conference of the Australian Historical Association, Tim Rowse brandished a recent copy of Arena Journal in its book form as ‘Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-colonial Present’, and railed against what he characterized as a ‘festschrift’ to Patrick Wolfe’s self-fulfilling project of the homogenization of Indigenous histories and experiences. He accused Arena of projecting the overarching singular narrative provided by Wolfe’s ‘elimination paradigm’. The session was tense. Rowse was himself subsequently excoriated by Marcia Langton, a member of the same panel, for using the terms ‘half-caste’ and ‘quadroon’ without raising his bunny ears each time these terms were used. Rowse later elaborated his critique of settler colonial studies by quoting Wolfe directly.