Whereas The Politics of Suffering, both essay and book, found a white audience willing to embrace his conservative view of Aboriginal people, Sutton’s promotion of Aboriginal permanence in this book has likely missed the contemporary zeitgeist.
In Australia, rural causation of climate damage, land toxicity, extinction through clearing (flora and fauna) and mass fire events that extinguish ancient forests are counteracted or even entirely denied because of the ‘necessity’ of food production and even a colonial-generational relationship to landholdings.
...the settler-colonial logic of elimination—of displacement for the purpose of replacement—has come to align in ever more destructive ways with the economic logic of neoliberal capitalism…
…the post-1967 period, in which settlers have been no longer able to deny Indigenous existence, has been marked by the development of new strategies that seek to submerge, subsume, or to otherwise evade the implications of Indigenous sovereignties…
From frontier wars and Indigenous genocides to the global war on terror to mass shootings of synagogues and mosques, extra-legal and exceptionalist violence abounds where whiteness is structured in narratives of its own decline and even reversal.
