Critical Mass

Literary awards are funny things. They go like this: a panel of seemingly esteemed judges half-read some books then get together to discuss them. Titles are whittled down from an overwhelming number to something more manageable, and from there they are refined further, arranged into a longlist and, later, a shortlist. The value of a book’s presence on one of these lists cannot be overstated; suddenly, not only have more people heard about the author and their writing, but a certain merit is associated with the text that may not have existed before. The author is revered as a kind of singular genius, filled with a wisdom and talent unreachable by the rest of us in the masses. Bookstores curate shelves with the listed titles, a sticker sitting proudly on each of their covers.

In recent years, many brilliant and deserving works by Aboriginal authors have been placed on those award-winner shelves. The latest inclusion is Close to the Subject: Selected Works by Bundjalung and Kullilli multihyphenate Daniel Browning, a collection of essays and articles awarded the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction after it had already taken out the Indigenous Writing Prize at the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Upon accepting his most recent award, Browning stood in front of a crowded room, a solitary figure at the podium, and challenged the idea of the individual prodigy. Instead, he thanked the team at his publisher, Magabala Books, then acknowledged the many people in his lineage of ‘coastal mob’, their labour and relationship to Fingal and South Tweed, and their roles in making him who he is today.   

When I told my therapist I was reviewing Browning’s book, she commented that, in her eyes, Browning is a celebrity. We had previously discussed the culture of celebrity within the arts – what it allows people to get away with, but also what it feels like to interact with well-known figures, even in passing. I have been familiar with Browning for many years, reading his criticism or poetry in various publications, or hearing him talk and interview other writers on the festival circuit. But up until now, he has perhaps been best known for his work on radio, hosting Radio National’s Awaye! before taking on The Art Show. As such, his voice is one that many people across the continent – my therapist and I included – are familiar and comfortable with. Those same sharp and inquisitive tones carry the reader through Close to the Subject, which traverses a wide stretch of forms and subjects, from critical essays on the work of internationally acclaimed artists to profiles on survivors of institutional abuse. When I read ‘Dear Brother: The Harrowing Life Journey of Archie Roach’ in which Browning tells Roach that, upon reading his memoir, ‘I had absolutely no doubt I could hear your voice in my ear’, I felt an eerie sense of congruence. 

And yet Browning’s voice is far from the only one that appears on Close to the Subject’s pages. His commitment to ‘confronting the truth’ of this ‘nation forged in violence’ requires the inclusion of multiple perspectives. As Browning himself acknowledges in the book’s introduction, his ‘stories are always collaborative’, grounded in a relationality to everything that surrounds him. In this sense, Browning excises these stories from what J. Kameron Carter has identified as a prevailing ‘invest[ment] in the notion of the soloist’, one that cannot be separated from Western liberal ideas of humanity. Instead, Browning offers narratives constructed by, and communing with, many different hands as well as representations of multiple complex lives.   

An early example of this collaborative approach is ‘Cast Among Strangers’, the transcript of a radio piece where Browning interviews artists, anthropologists, historians, and curators about a 135-year-old plaster cast of Badtjala man Bonny, which was found in a French museum. As Browning tries to figure out how exactly this replica of Bonny’s body ended up in Lyon, a few of his interviewees speculate that perhaps Bonny went overseas to participate in volkerschauen – that particularly grotesque idea of a ‘human zoo’ – which took place across Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Volkerschauen featured ‘people from faraway countries [who] were recorded for a limited span of time’ and treated as curios that displayed the ‘primitive’ nature of cultures outside of the West. Aboriginal people from this continent were included in these shows, ‘singing, dancing, boomerang throwing, and even climbing trees’; some of these performers’ remains were held as objects of curiosity in foreign museums, away from their families and Country. Browning quotes anthropologist and curator Dr Roslyn Poignant, who wonders:  

Here, as in the remainder of Close to the Subject, Browning raises questions about the agency of performers who are colonised subjects-turned-objects: how much can these performances be attributed to creative autonomy (or financial self-interest)? How much autonomy can there really be within such a prejudicial framing?  

Within what Browning terms as the ‘complex perpetual machine of Australian settler colonialism’, the consumption of Aboriginal stories – shared in written form or otherwise – brings up similarly enduring issues. Being an Indigenous artist, writer, journalist, or any kind of storyteller in this nation can often feel like acting in a constant volkerschauen, with audiences taking your performance as the sole representation of an entire set of diverse cultures and experiences. This mode of reception brings to mind bell hooks’ ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, where she writes that, ‘within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’. For hooks, ‘the West’s fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object even while flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe’. This desire for the Other’s piquancy speaks to a fundamental insecurity within the Western subject. 

In the context of being Aboriginal in Australia, not only is our ethnic difference used to ‘spice up’ mainstream culture, but a monolithic construction of our Indigeneity – as not too close, but not too distant; as connected with our ‘primitive’ roots, but forgiving of and peaceful towards our invaders – permits the nation to carry on with business as usual. Australia was created by the original act of dispossession that began in 1788 and continues to this day; every other aspect of the state is built upon this foundation. So, if we as Indigenous people refuse this construction of our identity, the ground starts to crack, and the edifice of this nation state starts to shake. Browning’s work, in bringing together a multitude of voices and their attendant personal and cultural contexts, exemplifies the ways that, as Aboriginal storytellers, we can and must do more than follow the one script.  

Any kind of representation carries with it an element of risk: of being seen as the sole representative of groups of entirely different people, grossly agglomerated under the concept of ‘race’; or of being seen through just one reductive lens, one facet of your being. Browning tries to head off the latter in his introduction, writing that ‘the idea that the only value of my work is in its embedded blackfella subjectivity is also an assumption worth challenging’. Indeed, you would be foolish to read Close to the Subject and ignore the many knowledges and experiences that Browning carries with him. One of these is the ability to ask the right questions, even when they might be challenging – what Melissa Lukashenko calls in the book’s foreword ‘[s]erious questions, from a serious mind’.  

In ‘Unceded: Contesting the National, or Australia is a Foreign Country’, Browning lists a number of the nation’s crimes – the disappearance and torture of asylum seekers in offshore detention centres; the violence enacted against children, mainly Black, in prisons on the mainland – before asking, ‘Am I invested in these things? If so, what is the nature of my investment? Am I complicit? Do I cede my personal sovereignty to fortify the nation?’ These questions remind me of those in the viral ‘The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself’, including, ‘What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?’ And from these I pose my own related question: How do, or can, we conceive of individual freedom within the colonial pen without confronting the violences – plural and enduring – that allow the walls of the enclosure to remain standing? As Browning explains later in the same piece, current liberal ideas of freedom are based on the notion that we can or should be protected by the nation state. In order to obtain that ‘protection’, however, we are required to give up our allegiances to each other, constraining ourselves in the hopes that the state’s power will be used elsewhere.  

Again it’s worth asking how ‘free’ the colonised subject can really be within these constraints. Is it possible to make an uninhibited choice about your self-presentation or the kind of work you make? For instance, when I read Browning write about the realness of drag – ‘a performance of gender or identity so flawlessly and seamlessly authentic as to be real’ – I wonder if there’s an ‘authentic Aboriginal’ drag that we sometimes don when appearing on stages, from Federal Courts (for the purpose of native title claims) to social media, for outside audiences but also for each other. Then, another question arises: What does this performance of ‘realness’, of what is perceived as authentic, do to our ability to connect to each other? In ‘Phalanx (Woman’s Work)’ – a poetic piece that is one of the most powerful sections of Close to the Subject – Browning elucidates the emotional impact of these kind of performances, speaking straight to other Blackfellas: ‘So leave your judgement / And stop pretending your mob was practising traditional beliefs in the mangroves / When mine knelt down to pray’. Here Browning challenges what he calls ‘decolonial bullshit’ and asks us to confront the embarrassment that comes with the realisation that these may not be authentic or ‘real’ modes of relation, but performances conducted within a colonial context. By doing so, Browning creates a space that allows us and our ancestors a plurality of voices, stories, and experience, including ones that don’t fit into the two-dimensional narratives of anti-colonial heroics. He also reminds us of the very real debt we owe those who come before us: ‘We think of paucity / What they didn’t pass on / When we owe them the air that we breathe’. As Browning reminds the reader several times throughout the collection, the lives of our ancestors are not just located in the past but reverberate through time, into this present moment as part of what Browning calls ‘the contemporaneous past’. For Browning, how we understand this past is a matter of which perspective we choose to inhabit; as such, ‘if we are to tell the truth of our history, we must go to the entirety of it’.  

And what does it mean for Blackfellas to go to the entirety of our histories, complicated as they are? Browning suggests reckoning with what in my view is a basic fact: ‘there is no singular Aboriginality but a host of Aboriginalities, individuated by geography, family and community history, and lived experience’. Yet while this statement, at least for me, might not appear in need of stating, still we exist in a world that insists on what Browning calls, by way of Dr Anita Heiss, ‘the historical concept of a singular Aboriginal identity’. The fact that any of this feels somewhat liberatory and surprising to read in a published work – this reflection of conversations and realities we reside within day in, day out – says much. So often as Aboriginal people we are made into symbols, a political monument or talking point, rather than being acknowledged as real people with real lives and real, sometimes fucked-up, feelings. And like any other group of people, we are both special and ordinary, capable of hurting each other while also doing what is needed to keep us together (as Esther Montgomery illustrates in ‘When Mardi Gras is Over’, where she describes Aboriginal health workers refusing to support gay men with HIV). In that, there is humanity – a recognition that, while the traumas of colonisation persist, we attempt to live on within its constraint, and in that living we sometimes fail each other.  

A fear persists, however, that we have started to believe that this two-dimensional image of ourselves is the truth. In search of commonality, we may deny the real multiplicity of Indigenous experiences here and abroad – the irony being that such denial blocks the very connection being sought. This kind of connection requires a certain level of reflexiveness and ego death, something Browning clearly centres in his practice, reminding himself and his production team that ‘you are always the least important person in the room’.  

But rather than labouring on this as some kind of problematic concerning ‘Aboriginal identity’ – another mark against mob on this nation’s endless list of our perceived failures – Browning and his contributors turn their focus instead onto how these performances of Aboriginality are influenced by, and a result of, the nation’s struggle for its own identity. Even the labelling of us as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Black’ or ‘Indigenous’ is part of that identity struggle, placing a large swathe of people within a category that would allow us to be diminished, subjugated, and ultimately disappeared. Discussing several artists whose work reckons with and intervenes in ideas about Australia’s history in ‘Monumental Lies, or Countering Cook’, Browning quotes from an interview in which Jacob Nash states that ‘[w]e’re struggling with identity as a nation and how we deal with the past’. In order to try and address this identity struggle, Browning suggests in ‘Savour Labour: Object Biographies’ that the nation relies on ‘the production of myth’ as ‘a balm’; ‘[i]t fills a void in our consciousness’ and is ‘inherently reductive and unilateral’ with ‘no room for ambiguity or dissidence – only thinly-painted characters locked in binary opposition, their behaviour regulated by either good or evil for eternity’. I see this collection of works from Browning and his many collaborators as an invitation to Blackfellas to step outside of these national myths and to continue carving out our own spaces where our lives and stories can operate outside of this binary.  

Browning’s resistance to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once called ‘the danger of a single story’ is not just a personal reckoning. In ‘Unceded’, Browning explains that this is a political project, one that challenges the agenda of the nation state: 

This is why storytellers like Browning are necessary: not just because they are Blackfellas, but because they challenge these distorted representations and make others present, adding to the chorus of who we are and allowing us, as Fred Moten by way of Édouard Glissant puts it, to ‘consent not to be a single being’. Browning’s collection is an explicit attempt to live up to this phrase, both in presenting Aboriginal people as a collective made up of individuals with their own stories and lives and histories, and in demonstrating that he himself is a multifaceted, complex being, a convergence of histories and all those – kin and Country and life experiences – who have made his existence possible. 

When I think about hearing Browning’s voice in this collection, I remember another quote by Moten, where he states that he ‘always thought that “the voice” was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible’. Moten goes on to contrast this with the idea of a ‘sound’ which ‘was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise’. I might have thought it was Browning’s voice that was in my head as I read, but really it was an assortment of sounds challenging the overwhelming noise of a nation state that believes its attempt at genocide is complete.   

So while Browning and Close to the Subject have won awards, this is not solely due to the author’s individual brilliance. Rather, it is a reflection of the polyphonic nature of this monumental collection, not just in the pieces explicitly featuring multiple voices, but also those that reference other researchers and writers who contributed to a piece of writing (Browning notes, for instance, that ‘The Death of the Dancer’ is based on original reporting by Allan Clarke, Rudi Bremer, and Jai McAllister). None of this work is the result of some singular artistic genius or intrepid reporter paving his own path. Even in something as seemingly simple as a byline, Browning does everything he can to challenge that notion of the soloist, allowing a range of different tones and registers and timbres – the sounds of the people, that critical mass – to be heard.