"Finding a voice on indigenous issues: Midnight Oil's inappropriate appropriations. (http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-683798/Finding-a-voice-on-indigenous.html)
Article Excerpt Midnight Oil is undoubtedly Australia's best-known political rock band. For twenty-five years, the group has voiced demands for social justice and publicly criticised aspects of Australian society. It seems inevitable that the band came to be concerned with Indigenous issues and found ways to debate these issues within mainstream discourse. However, while seeking to promote greater understanding of the deleterious effects of 'white' Australia on the Indigenous population, the band made choices that some of the people they attempted to represent found offensive and viewed as perpetuating myths and prejudice. At times, Midnight Oil contributed to the silencing of Indigenous voices, particularly by suppressing or refusing to engage with the objections of Aboriginal groups. While the band may not have considered itself to be an independent instance of power, an 'epistemological a priori' (1) dominating knowledge, Midnight Oil's prominence in spheres of public debate meant that their message often drowned out that of those to whom they attempted to lend their voice. This paper will focus particularly on a controversy over the song 'Truganini' in 1993, when Indigenous groups exposed Midnight Oil's errors of fact, as well as their more generically 'white' misconceptions. The controversy forced the band into a dialogue with the community it claimed to represent--a controversy heightened by the fact that Indigenous issues were not yet prominent in mainstream, 'white' debate. The band's struggles can be seen to reflect Australia's attempts to negotiate its way out of a racial deadlock. 'Truganini' appears to be a turning point after which Midnight Oil learns to speak to, instead of speaking for, its audience.
In March 1993, the seemingly innocent liner notes accompanying the Midnight Oil single 'Truganini' sparked a controversy. These notes meant to shed light on the song by explaining that Truganini was 'the sole surviving Tasmanian Aborigine', (2) the last of her race, when she died in 1876. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre immediately called for a boycott of the single, highlighting the fact that 7,000 contemporary Tasmanians considered themselves to be Aboriginal. Perhaps more serious were the claims from the Centre that 'Truganini [had] become a convenient symbol for the terrible things white people have done, but also for the view there are no longer any Tasmanian Aborigines, that we are extinct'. (3) Not only did the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre attack Midnight Oil, it also challenged the traditional textbook representation of Truganini 'in chains', held by her European captors and, beyond this, the dominant perception of Australia's history. From the viewpoint of the Centre, the band's statement denied a current Indigenous presence in Tasmania, metaphorically producing the extinction it described by excluding an entire category..."
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"Finding a voice on indigenous issues: Midnight Oil's inappropriate appropriations. (http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-683798/Finding-a-voice-on-indigenous.html)
Article Excerpt
Midnight Oil is undoubtedly Australia's best-known political rock band. For twenty-five years, the group has voiced demands for social justice and publicly criticised aspects of Australian society. It seems inevitable that the band came to be concerned with Indigenous issues and found ways to debate these issues within mainstream discourse. However, while seeking to promote greater understanding of the deleterious effects of 'white' Australia on the Indigenous population, the band made choices that some of the people they attempted to represent found offensive and viewed as perpetuating myths and prejudice. At times, Midnight Oil contributed to the silencing of Indigenous voices, particularly by suppressing or refusing to engage with the objections of Aboriginal groups. While the band may not have considered itself to be an independent instance of power, an 'epistemological a priori' (1) dominating knowledge, Midnight Oil's prominence in spheres of public debate meant that their message often drowned out that of those to whom they attempted to lend their voice. This paper will focus particularly on a controversy over the song 'Truganini' in 1993, when Indigenous groups exposed Midnight Oil's errors of fact, as well as their more generically 'white' misconceptions. The controversy forced the band into a dialogue with the community it claimed to represent--a controversy heightened by the fact that Indigenous issues were not yet prominent in mainstream, 'white' debate. The band's struggles can be seen to reflect Australia's attempts to negotiate its way out of a racial deadlock. 'Truganini' appears to be a turning point after which Midnight Oil learns to speak to, instead of speaking for, its audience.
In March 1993, the seemingly innocent liner notes accompanying the Midnight Oil single 'Truganini' sparked a controversy. These notes meant to shed light on the song by explaining that Truganini was 'the sole surviving Tasmanian Aborigine', (2) the last of her race, when she died in 1876. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre immediately called for a boycott of the single, highlighting the fact that 7,000 contemporary Tasmanians considered themselves to be Aboriginal. Perhaps more serious were the claims from the Centre that 'Truganini [had] become a convenient symbol for the terrible things white people have done, but also for the view there are no longer any Tasmanian Aborigines, that we are extinct'. (3) Not only did the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre attack Midnight Oil, it also challenged the traditional textbook representation of Truganini 'in chains', held by her European captors and, beyond this, the dominant perception of Australia's history. From the viewpoint of the Centre, the band's statement denied a current Indigenous presence in Tasmania, metaphorically producing the extinction it described by excluding an entire category..."