CLAIMING TRUGANINI - AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL NARRATIVES IN THE YEAR OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the i ndigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term 'multiculturalism' and 'hybridity', or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more gene rally, the dominant culture's demands for an 'authentic', visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contai ned. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these deba tes, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representation s in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encomp ass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified unde r the heading of 'Australian national identity'.