Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

N icholas Thomas (Session Commentator) I want to say something about each of the terms of this session 's title ['History, Memory , Voyages'] . We routinely use the word 'h istory' in two senses. On t he one hand, we refer to the actual processes of continuity, change and struggle in the past and the present. Those processes give us all different genealogies and situations. They make nonsense of the notion that g lobalisation produces sameness. They also mean that the idea of contemporary art must be defined by its useful incoherence. On the other hand, history is a construct, an invented narrative, too often a national narrative , a story of birth, growth , maturity, and progress. Such narratives a re generally founded on violence , at least often on radical excl usions. It is not so much the framework of Western scholarship, but the larger cultural form of national history that, with other categories of modernity, has been almost pervasively imposed , that has marg inalised local and I ndigenous conceptions of time, presence, and power. Those local understand i ngs and perceptions may be obscured but are nevertheless sustained, not annihilated , by modern history; they continue to inform local practices and are available to be reshaped , adapted , and extended . I n this exhibition the idea of the waka emerges in this way. It litera lly means canoe but also (to translate crudely) equates with society or tribe, or better with 'collectivity'. Because collectivity is shaped by voyages and by ancestors, any canoe is really a h istory canoe, in the sense that some European paintings are history paintings. And we m ight say that the video that Jim Vivieaere showed in his presentation features history dances and history fashions. My sense is that we might have gained something if we ceased using history as a noun and thought of it only in this adjectival sense. If for the time being we need to concede that histories are usually texts - or at l east narratives - rather than objects, memories consist of images rather than stories. Sometimes they a re very strong images, yet strangely mute and decontextual ised ones. For me strong memories are like perplexi ng works of contemporary art that cry out for a caption or descri ption, but at the same time resist or belie precisely that kind of neat label or defin ition. Of cou rse, memory can col l ude with history as art can sustain the nation , but both can i n fact work to restore and rei nvigorate what has been suppressed and obscured . I n principle , the nation and h istory never learn to count past one: one narrative; one people; one home. These analogical ideas cause, or at least inform , racism and genocide, they a re also untrue to the principles of culture and sociality typically sustained by speakers of languages of the Austronesian family, which incidentally stretches across the hyphen that so awkward ly links Asia-Pacific. In those cultures, spread throughout i nsular South-East Asia and across Ocean ia, there were in a sense no societies, only relations of descent and affin ity - that is, a dialectic between genealogy and alliance, between locality and wider relations . Sociality was - and i s - by definition non-exclusive. To put i t paradoxica lly, i t was based i n extension : that is, in the practice o f voyag ing . If o n e voyages, home ceases t o be a sing le unit and becomes a d ivisible relation . You may have a home where you do not live, and another where you do. You may live on somebody else's homeland as I do. White Australians might acknowledge that, not only as a belated and insufficient gesture, as part of a process of redressing i njustices agai nst Aboriginal people , but also because it gives us an opportun ity, maybe, to think about who we a re without reference to the tired categories of nation , culture and identity. We cou ld thi nk instead through principles we might derive from t he ancestral cultures o f this region - the voyage, exchange, and relational sociality. We can count past one, not by acknowledgi ng many cultures in place of one nation, but perhaps by not cou nting at all, instead by acknowledg ing each other's different situations by giving and taking, by expressing our critical respect for gifts, works, performances and presentations. Academic work, for instance , can be seen not as expert commentary but as response , as part of a flow of communicative transactions. 80