Reclaiming the Future: Young Australians and the Fight for Country
Project Synopsis
Supported by the University of Queensland 's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, 'Reclaiming the Future' is a project examining new youth formations and activist cultural performance in Australia. The project seeks to identify:
This project will evaluate initiatives undertaken by young Australians expressing a desire for new relationships with country. Researching the events, sites and performances of new youth formations, the project explores the interfacing of environmentalism, indigenous rights activism and technoculture, observing a range of collectives, 'tribes' and performances, from environmental to post-rave.
Recently, local commentators have reported on strategies undertaken by non-Aboriginal Australians in efforts to achieve a sense of belonging on the continent. There has been discussion of the Australian landscape's capacity to shape, to nativise , to render its settlers authentic citizens - who, by necessity, adapt, or are assimilated to the conditions of country. There has also been discussion on the desire to assume custodial obligations towards Australian landscape as the descendents of the continent's recent settlers make amends for social, economic and environmental behaviour long signifying foreign-ness and detachment.
Are youth becoming ever more engaged in pleasure-seeking and escapist entertainment in an era of growing global uncertainty? Is the withdrawal from political participation particular to western consumer style-cultures an irredeemable feature of local youth subcultures? Are the colonialist legacies of environmental and social malpractice challenged by contemporary generations? How are young non-Aboriginal Australians entering into dialogue with local indigenous peoples? Is such dialogue productive? What constitutes the cultural politics of contemporary activist cultures? Is it effective?
Reclaiming the Future seeks to address these questions. Through participant observation and informal audio recordings the project will gauge the background, motivations and attitudes of participants in a range of groups, events and performances.
Background and Significance
Over the course of recent acts of dissent - from protest of the World Economic Forum meeting at Melbourne's Crown Casino ('S11' 2000), to the Festival of Freedom at Woomera Detention Centre (South Australia 2002), to Kevin Buzzacott's Walking the Land pilgrimage from Lake Eyre to the Sydney 2000 Olympics - political and media spokespersons have described the largely young participants as 'un-Australian'. Curiously, identifying with a global movement, many young people aren't particularly aggrieved by this description. They are less nationalist, more cosmopolitan. Furthermore, more or less uncomfortable with the archetypal ('true-blue') Australian character sanctioned, for instance, by both major political parties, many have even sought to embrace the label. Rather than becoming offended by the description, they define their sense of belonging to Australia in ways that break with a tradition of nationalism: they identify through a sense of indigeneity that is most clearly articulated through their connection with landscape.
To be published as a book, Reclaiming the Future seeks to chart the contours of this remarkable circumstance in which networks of youth holding environmental, human and indigenous rights grievances have mounted a range of initiatives in defense of what they describe as 'country'. Their 'fight for country' illustrates the strengthening appeal of a particular version of indigeneity within contemporary Australia. Building upon a familiarity with place which necessarily involves some intimacy with its history - its human (Aboriginal) antiquity, its ecology and its colonial history - 'country' is becoming a key trope in Australia. Without expressing itself as a nationalist position, this familiarity with country is evident in participation in the struggle against native forest logging practices, the nuclear industry, and incursions on Aboriginal land rights. Focusing on the creative spirit of play and protest in contemporary youth subcultures (located, for example, in feral practice, tactical media, new music cultures, and intercultural performances), Reclaiming the Future investigates just how young, un-Australian Australians, construct and legitimate their identification with the natural environment.
Based on a critical ethnography (with extensive interviews) conducted amongst contemporary youth, the project is informed by multi-sited field and documentary research. Investigating non-state sponsored initiatives conducted by young Australians (often in collaboration with indigenous Australians), it attempts a comprehensive navigation of the cultural politics of youth in a postcolonising nation. Attending to the coalescence of party and politics in contemporary youth activist cultural performance (particulary that inscribed in the 'carnival of protest'), the project seeks a fresh approach towards youth culture.