Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Within a Cooee

Within a Cooee 127 Various ways in which an enriched poetics of meeting might inform public space design have been discussed. Whether the restoration of the performativeorchoreographicdimensionisconsideredfromanorthernorsouth ern point of view, it entails asserting that the “aesthetic means” used (to repeat Stanner’s phrase) have binding social consequences. In some way, the “autonomy” of the “program” replicates itself, seeding eventually a network of such sociable sites—the network of creative communities invoked in the opening section of Meeting Place—that possess the political skills of self-organizationneededtomanagetheeroticpotentialofamalgamation so that it keeps open a space for encounter. Here, though, I want to reverse thedescentofpoeticsintopraxisandrecountanexampleofhistoricalmaterial drawn up into the artwork. Common to both termini of the translation is the active role granted to creativity. In the historical event in question— an encounter between an officer of the First Fleet and a young Eora woman at Sydney Cove—the dialogue improvised is clearly driven by mimetic desire ; in the artistic recension of this encounter in a sound installation called “The Calling to Come” (1995, Museum of Sydney) a similar creative pressure is brought to bear on the historical record of their conversation. Onereasonforintroducingthismaterialistounderlinethepointthatthe representation of the meeting place must to some degree mimic its constitution . Any museum-goer is familiar with the systematization of the past found in installations of material culture or voice-over documentaries or other shop window/televisual-style theatricalizations. Reifying the visitor as an observer for whom the past is a foreign country, they manage a double sleight of hand: the voices of the past, the creative economy of social innovation that constitutes the stuff of history, is eliminated, and the visitor 128 within a cooee is, paradoxically, confirmed in the prejudice that essentially nothing has changed. The representationalist fallacy at work here masquerades as a plausible copy of past conditions, but its truth-giving stare lacks the erotic investment that would license—what is necessary in any communication motivated by desire—a concomitant invention of new terms, implications, and nuances inspired by the act of encounter itself. In other words, an engagement with historical materials involves a departure from the materials; the distance that lies between the circumstances of their production (and theeventstheyrelate)andthesituationofthescholar/artistinvitedtointerpret them is not an insurmountable barrier to the truth. On the contrary, it is the temporal equivalent of the gap, the middle ground, or the inter esse. Andthisparallelunderlinesthepointthattheinterpreterengagedwithsuch materials is under a moral obligation to introduce a supplement of new meaning if he or she is to remain true to the creative spirit informing the original. To attempt to minimize the difference between the original materials and their reproduction opens up a larger abyss in understanding, as it represses the material history of the materials and of the interpreter, who comes to them from somewhere, approaching across time and space. One of the best examples of an erotically initiated encounter stabilized as a meeting place occurs in the language events recorded in the language notebooks of First Fleet surgeon, surveyor, and astronomer William Dawes. Since their reemergence in 1995 these notebooks have attracted some interest , and it is not my intention to go over the whole ground again. In essence, though, it appears that the exchanges between William Dawes and an Eora woman, Patyegarang (a skin name meaning Eastern Grey Kangaroo ), fulfilled the condition that “meeting” should be a continued deepening of encounter, a performance where, instead of being settled, the rules of communication are rehearsed, renegotiated, and adjusted. The approach to this ideal of encounter, said to produce a maximum emotional intensity where those meeting are complete strangers, was made easier in Dawes’s casebecausehewastryingtolearnPatyegarang’slanguage—although,even in this case, it is obvious from the notebooks that Patyegarang was altogether more fluent in English, and Dawes’s efforts are inhibited by his preoccupation with fitting Patyegarang’s living discourse into the Procrustean framework of a classically inspired grammatical paradigm. Inanycase,thedesireofDawestogetthelaws(thegrammarandsyntax) governingIndigenousspeechwasbalancedonPatyegarang’ssidebyadesire to negotiate a political advantage for herself and the people she represented within a cooee 129 in the already unequal exchanges with Phillip and his officers. For a while, the different interests of Dawes and Patyegarang converged. In performances that were gestural as well as verbal, they marked out a middle ground wherethelawsgoverningbothofthemwereplacedinparenthesesandnew, provisional rules of exchange improvised.1 On one occasion Dawes asks Patyegarang, “Why don’t you (scorn to) speak like a whiteman?” Patyegarang replied, “Mangabuninga bial.” Dawes continues: “Not understanding this answer...