Following Bachelard’s dictum that the metaphoric power of the house lies in its potential as a psychological diagram ‘that guide[s] writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy’ (Bachelard 1994: 38), in the preceding chapter I interpreted the imagery of Tamsin’s fantasy, the space of her dream house, as exemplifying Bachelard’s idea of innermost protected selfhood. By drawing on the ethnography of this book, I related Tamsin’s fantasy house to her experiences of immediacy, intimacy and mobility, the core values shaping the contemporary everyday at Yuendumu. I suggested that her fantasy house intimates the way in which she desires to be in the world — if the impossible was possible. That interpretation of Tamsin’s fantasy was grounded in the analyses of Warlpiri engagements in and with the settlement of Yuendumu I presented in the body of this book; it approached her fantasy on the level of social practice and personal life history.
In this conclusion I offer a reinterpretation of Tamsin’s fantasy. Here I am concerned with Tamsin’s choice of imagery — the house — and the meanings of this imagery in the context of contemporary Yuendumu. Houses have consistently been central and financially dominant in Australian Indigenous policy over many decades; and while over time significant differences in the actual practices of distribution of houses have taken place, the underlying assumptions and expectations that come with the provision of Western-style houses seem to have remained the same. Viewed from the perspective of the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking, Yuendumu houses stand for the expectations the state has of Indigenous people — that they become like ‘us’. Moreover, the always ‘overcrowded’, often dysfunctional and partly derelict houses at Yuendumu become an expression of the Warlpiri ‘failure’ to comply, and, a failure to be in the world in ‘acceptable’ ways.
Yet Warlpiri people want Western-style houses. Council meetings to discuss housing allocation are by far the most heated as well as the best attended meetings; living in a suburban-style house with curtains, a lawn, flowers and an orange tree in the garden was one of Joy’s biggest aspirations; and Tamsin, asked what she would do with a million dollars, answers she wants a house. The question is, why do Warlpiri people want those suburban houses so badly, seeing that their practices of dwelling and their ways of thinking about and being in the world conflict so starkly with the values that houses are imbued with in the West? To answer this question, I employ Tamsin’s fantasy to explore in more depth the underpinnings of the intersection of the Warlpiri and the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking at Yuendumu. I do so by analysing Warlpiri and Western entanglements in each of the elements of the series, beginning with building, followed by dwelling, and then thinking.
‘We attain to dwelling’, Heidegger says, ‘so it seems, only by means of building’ (Heidegger 1993: 347). In order to dwell, in order to live the way we live, we need physical structures to live in, structures which allow us to live the way we do. As Heidegger elaborates: ‘Building as dwelling, that is, as being on earth, however, remains for man’s everyday experience that which is from the outset “habitual” — we inhabit it, as our language says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte’ (Heidegger 1993: 349).1
This deeply embodied sense of continuation between the structures we live in, the way we live in them, the way we think about them, and the way in which, as a result, we build them, is manifest in both the Warlpiri and the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking. Houses through their very structure allow for and perpetuate stability, privacy and future-orientation; while camps through their very structure allow for and perpetuate mobility, intimacy and immediacy.
At Yuendumu today, Yapa live in and around Western-style houses, the built structures of the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking. This situation is somewhat reminiscent of Robben’s (1989) study of canoe fishermen and boat fishermen, who lived in houses that were physically exactly the same, but lived in them in crucially different ways. The Yuendumu situation diverges from Robben’s example in that the Brazilian fishermen, of both canoes and boats, even though living somewhat differently in their respective houses, both live within the same series of building–dwelling–thinking. Their respective differences can be and are accommodated within (and inside) their houses, because their differences are variations of the values underpinning their shared series of building–dwelling–thinking. At Yuendumu, on the other hand, the practices and values jar with the structures.
The reasons for this become clearer if we look at what exactly Heidegger meant by ‘building’. Building does not mean that one has to build one’s abode with one’s own hands, but that building is done in a way that reflects practices of dwelling and thinking. At Yuendumu (and in other Aboriginal settlements across Australia) however, houses reflecting the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking have been provided. At no point in time has there been any consideration for accommodating Yapa practices of dwelling in the provision of houses; building thus cannot be said to have happened by Yapa in Heidegger’s sense. Houses are ‘built for’ not ‘built by’ Warlpiri people.
Depending upon funding, every year or two a few new houses are built at Yuendumu — and they are much coveted. Everybody wants one, and accordingly meetings about their allocation are probably the best attended and certainly the liveliest meetings held by the Yuendumu Council. There exists a long, much discussed and ever-changing ‘waiting list’ for houses yet to be built. Once the people to ‘receive’ a new house are identified, the ‘consultation process’ begins. Rather than any involvement in the architectural process, such actual consultation is limited to taking into account wishes as to design and location in the following ways. Usually, the number of bedrooms has been predetermined by council finances, and so if a three-bedroom house is to be built, the new ‘owner’ (in fact the person receiving the house does not hold legal title to the property and is required to pay rent to the council)2 is shown three models of three-bedroom houses that fall within the budget constraints of the council. I have not been able to undertake extensive research on this, but my impression is that Warlpiri people generally choose the biggest house, or, if they are all of equal size, the one most closely resembling a stereotypical ‘suburban’ style. Next, they have some control over where the house is to be built (within given building constraints, sewerage and power connections and so forth) and in some instances, the orientation in space of the house on the chosen block.3 Lastly, and also of course within the financial constraints set by council, sometimes people get to choose the colour of ‘their’ house. However, generally the question is not ‘what colour would you like?’ but something along the lines of ‘Would you prefer pink or blue?’.
There is, however, a building in Heidegger’s sense that is performed by Yapa at Yuendumu. In and around the houses, every night, Yapa erect their camps. Getting the bedding out, arranging swags and people in yunta, although lacking permanent structures, is exactly a building in Heidegger’s sense. In the olden days, Yapa set up camp wherever they were, structuring sleeping arrangements so that they spatially reflected the gender and marital distinctions of those people present. Today’s camps differ on a number of accounts: they are within the settlement rather than being located in different places across the Tanami; today they are more varied and complex in social composition than they were likely to have been in the past; they are erected out of different materials: beds, swags and blankets rather than moulds in the sand; walls, cars or suitcases rather than windbreaks out of branches, and so forth. Yet, as in the olden days, camps are set up every night, and as in the olden days, they serve specific purposes and they reflect gender and marital distinctions as well as personal choice. Camps are das Gewohnte.
So what we find at Yuendumu is the simultaneous building of two types of structures, each reflective of the series it belongs to. Most importantly, these two types of building, camps and houses, do not only spatially coincide, but they interrelate through the social practices of the people living in them. Camps are adjusted to fit into new spaces (and times) and houses are appropriated to make camps fit into them.
The structures of houses are built for Yapa, who engage with them habitually, amongst other things by building their own structures within them. Such use of houses does not coincide with the way in which they are meant to be used, and consequently, it triggers a steady flow of criticism from the mainstream.
Dwelling, according to Heidegger, is intricately interlinked with building, but has some degree of primacy over it. He says that we ‘do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers’ (Heidegger 1993: 350, original emphasis). Dwelling, in Heidegger’s sense, is the way we are in the world; it does not, and it cannot, arise solely out of the structures we dwell in but is reflected in them. What happens, though, if there are two series that intersect, where building is done both ‘for’ and ‘by’, as at Yuendumu?
Practices of dwelling, or ways of being in the world (which I have analysed throughout this book through the example of Warlpiri social practices of engaging with domestic space), are always formulated in dialogue with the world. As the world today is different from that of the olden days, so ways of dwelling today differ from ways of being in the world in the olden days. For example, living in settlements, in prolonged and close proximity to more people than ever before has meant, amongst many other things, that marriage practices changed as a result, which in turn has impacted on the ways in which jilimi have transformed into phenomena of novel social complexity, purpose, size and number. The jilimi I described in this book has certain commonalities with an olden days one, but is inherently different. Moreover, the jilimi is both a camp and a four-bedroom house. Warlpiri people dwell within this intersection; they live in both simultaneously, camps and houses; they speak English and Warlpiri, they know their country and how to hunt and gather, they watch television, go shopping, perform Warlpiri rituals, drive cars, work for the council or the childcare centre, go to church, know which firewood burns slowly or gives most heat, which one smokes. This does not, however, mean, as is often assumed in populist models, that Yapa live in between worlds — one (that of the hunting and gathering past) that is lost, and another (that of Western modernity) that is not yet reached — or that they negotiate two worlds (a Yapa one and a Kardiya one).
‘Dwelling’, Heidegger says, ‘is the manner in which mortals are on earth’ (Heidegger 2001: 146).4 We experience the world through our bodies, through ways of knowing that are embodied, and we continually communicate with the world about this knowing and understand the world through it. There is only ever one way of being, as there is always only one body from which one experiences such being in the world. By their being in the world and through their bodies, Yapa accommodate the intersection of the two different series of building–dwelling–thinking that characterises their contemporary lives. Dwelling at contemporary Yuendumu thus means that people live in camps (and in houses), and that these camps are in a settlement — a spatial manifestation, if ever there was one, of sedentisation, and the myriad of other colonial and post-colonial processes flowing from it. Yapa continually deal with the reverberations of this intersection of two different series of building–dwelling–thinking, through transforming, adjusting and modifying ways of dwelling, and thus absorb and accommodate the contradictions posed by the intersection of the two different series, the contradictions inherent in being fourth world people in a first world nation state.
The third part in each of the series, thinking, is a way of being in and understanding the world that is intricately linked to, arises out of, and feeds back into building and dwelling. As Heidegger puts it:
Where the word bauen [building] still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin [I am] mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. (Heidegger 1993: 349, emphasis in original)
And where in Germanic languages ‘to build’ equates ‘to be’, in Warlpiri ‘ngurra’ equates camp, family, time and country. Each series, in its own way, summarises notions of being in the world and of being a person. Personhood, in the Warlpiri case, revolves around the tensions of autonomy and relatedness. To live, shape, create, form, transform and express personhood thus defined, mobility permeates everyday life, immediacy is the primary way of being in the world, and intimacy is expressed and learned in specific ways. These core values — mobility, immediacy and intimacy — underpin Warlpiri sociality, Yapa ways of being in the world, Yapa thinking in Heidegger’s sense.
However, through the ever-presence of the intersection of the Western and the Warlpiri series at Yuendumu, the values underpinning the Western series — stability, privacy and future-orientation (through accumulation) — are there at Yuendumu as well. They may not be given precedence in the ways in which people relate to each other and the world on the level of everyday interaction, but these values certainly exist in Yuendumu, and are often communicated to Yapa through the criticisms by people who live within the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking.
To view the Warlpiri longing for houses as expressing a desire to live a Western lifestyle, a life revolving around the values of privacy, stability and future-orientation, values that conflict with Yapa ways of being in and thinking about the world, would be to interpret these wishes from within the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking. Instead, we need to remember that at Yuendumu houses are physical manifestations of the intersection of two opposing series of building–dwelling–thinking; and as such houses symbolise contradictory and incongruent expectations and desires. In other words, there are two readings — houses as symbolising the state’s expectations and houses as symbolising Warlpiri people’s desires — and while expressed through the same symbol, they are greatly at odds with each other.
Warlpiri people’s desires for houses come out of a deep appreciation of the metaphoric potency of the house, learned through decades of interaction with wider Australia. The geographical location of Yuendumu may be described as ‘remote’; however, this does not mean that Warlpiri people live in isolation. Yapa are citizens of the twenty-first century much as non-Indigenous Australians are, and are conscious, both through personal experience and through the media, of the dominant values. Warlpiri people are painfully aware of the low regard non-Indigenous people have of, for example, humpies, and read this, at least subconsciously, as low regard for Warlpiri dwelling and thinking — so much so that the Warlpiri Media Association which issues permits to take photographs at Yuendumu expressedly forbids the taking of photographs of humpies, as well as of people in domestic settings independent of physical structure.
In a socio-political climate intolerant of difference, the desire for houses is a desire for sanctuary from public, policy, and political disregard for alternative practices of dwelling and thinking. Wishing for a house is to use a metaphor that Westerners can understand. Wishing for a house expresses a desire for acceptance by the large and powerful encompassing society, as represented in the first instance by the state. This is not, I believe, a wish to be what is considered normal (live within the Western series of building–dwelling–thinking) but a desire to be considered normal. Furthermore, houses, because of their great metaphoric potency, also stand for those things that non-Indigenous Australians have and that Warlpiri people lack: good health, low mortality rates, good education, good incomes and so forth. Houses in this regard symbolise Warlpiri desires not to be like non-Indigenous Australians but to have what they have; the desire for a house here symbolises a desire for equality. And lastly, houses symbolise a wish for control expressed through a symbol readable by the Western majority.
I think it is fair to assume that Tamsin would not at all say ‘no’ to an actual house, but the house she describes is not a ‘real’ one. She described it as ‘really really big, with lots of rooms, and every room has furniture in it. Sofas, and beds, new blankets, and tables and chairs. And every room has a stereo in it, and a television, and a video player and a playstation’ and she would be the only person living in it. Nobody at Yuendumu, and hardly anybody anywhere else, actually lives like this. That is, she is not describing a way of ‘dwelling’ but something else. I believe what she wishes for is more than just ‘a house’. As I have emphasised, houses are powerful symbols. At Yuendumu, houses are also symbols of power; they are provided by the state, and they are provided with an agenda. Houses are beacons signalling a way of life and a way of being that is different from Warlpiri everyday experience. Houses are built and granted with little Warlpiri involvement. Houses are taken away, the ways in which Yapa dwell in them are criticised, and there are numerous attempts forcing people to dwell in them in the expected way (including by such means as the withdrawal of welfare money and refusal to undertake repairs, for example). Read this way, houses mediate the idea of what people do not have: control.
What Tamsin wants is a house that is hers and hers alone, built to her specifications, where it is for her to decide how to live in it and with whom to share and whom to exclude. What she wants, if only such an impossible thing could be possible, is control over a house (a space, her life) that is her own. Considering that Yuendumu is built on Aboriginal land, what is also, I think, encapsulated in her dream, is a desire for control over that which she already considers belongs to her. This desired life includes the known: Yuendumu and all it stands for, and right there in Yuendumu the possibilities of the wider world, houses and all they stand for. Most importantly, it is a desire to live a life not controlled by others and from the outside, but one where she is in control, where she holds the keys.