How Many Countries?

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How Many Countries?
Stephen Muecke
It’s really a great honour for us, the authors of Reading the
Country, that our book is the pretext for this festival. And I
think I can speak for the other two in saying that we applaud
your aim to ‘revisit and recapture the intellectual radicalism
and political energy of that time’. We certainly need it, and I
could go on to talk gloomily of the dark times we live in.
But capturing such times is partly what I am getting at with
my title, ‘How Many Countries?’ I will go on to talk about mul-
tiple ontologies and other arcane matters under that heading,
but my first point is that reading the country, reading any part
of the nation, including Roebuck Plains, for me means sooner
or later confronting the effects of globalising corporate capital.
Things may have seemed a little more innocent in ,
when we slaked our thirst with the beautiful cold water of
the spring at Djarrmanggunan, Paddy Roe’s birthplace. The
water was rushing out of a pipe into an old bath serving as a
cattle trough. Paddy stood up and said of the water, ‘Aaa yeah,
middle of the heat more cold.’¹ And today the spring has been
trampled by cattle and no water is visible, only mud. It is not
just cattle on Roebuck Plains destroying the jila (springs). The
industrial regime is changing from pastoral to heavy industry.
Exploratory fracking licences have been issued from near
Broome right across to the Fitzroy river valley. Cultural and
ecological issues are sidelined by what seems to be a massive
neoliberal consensus (corporations plus the state plus most
workers) about what is ‘good’ for the country.² ‘Country’, then,
is a word whose meaning can oscillate wildly between small
sites and the whole nation.³ That’s not a bad thing. Trick is to
make that oscillation work for you, if you care for country, not
just leave it in the hands of exploiters. I agree with myself then,
my  self, that it is important to keep even the smallest

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sites visible. And that even the smallest sites contain masses
of knowledge, and perhaps power, a power of resurgence, if
we refuse to accept that it is only a matter of time before the
march of capital stamps its heavy footprint over the whole
country, over many countries; that what happened in the
Pilbara must now happen in the Kimberley, in the kind of logic
the Western Australian Government uses.
There is more than one logic, just as there is more than
one country, and it is with this pluralism that we can contest
the narrative that ‘it is only a matter of time’. So, I’m going to
tell you why, if I had to do it again, I could not write Reading
the Country the same way. In fact, I am doing it again, with a
book that might end up being called The Children’s Country,
about country up the coast to the north of Broome. Now,
Reading the Country was composed around a fairly simple
idea. Roebuck Plains was the one country, the constant, the
pivot around which all these possible interpretations revolved.
There was one country and multiple representations of it. For
a long time now I have abandoned this subject-object model
on the grounds that the country, like the European concept of
Nature, would be made singular and foundational, and that
the readings would be mere representations of it, historically
real, but somewhat arbitrary, provisional and relative. Now, in
a new model which I have learnt from Bruno Latour, I want to
abandon the singular ground and give full ontological weight
to each ‘reading’ or rather build up descriptions of several
different worlds constituted by all kinds of things and beings,
not just by humans who have the virtuoso capacity to see and
read differently.
So when Woodside Petroleum looks at Walmadany (James
Price Point), the site on the coast that they wanted to use to
build a gas plant and port, their activities institutionalise the
site into a quite different world from the one that Paddy Roe
showed me around decades ago, and different again from the
one where the activists situate their base camp for the anti-gas
campaign. What elements constitute the Woodside version of
Walmadany? The resource they are after, methane gas, is cen-
tral. They see it as a part of nature, over there, unconnected
with us humans, in fact we are alienated from it. (I should add
that popular ecological discourses share this same European

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view of Nature, which is why they too alienate humans from
‘wilderness’). Woodside’s modern institutions set up their
outposts in this place such that certain practices can occur:
anEconomy, a way of doing Science and deploying technology,
and a way of managing an organisation. A globalising western
modernity extends its tentacles here as if it had no connection
at all except to extract one part of its Nature, the gas, along the
pipeline, which is now a metaphor as well as a technology, a
metaphor for an institution that is built to get in and get out
with nothing sticking to it. No need to renaturalise, as I like to
say now.
Because if I no longer hold with one nature, and think
there are many natures, one for each country, and that
natures are entangled with cultures, then for me it follows
that visitors have to renaturalise, to adapt after arrival. But
you will protest: the laws of nature are universal, as shown
by physics and chemistry. They are in a way, as if they were
designed to permit another law, a law that powerfully exploits
and transforms matter as if it came for free, in a world without
end. Try telling the residents of the city of Baotou in Inner
Mongolia that the mining of rare earths there comes for free.
When these peoples’ hair turns white and their teeth fall out,
their bodies are making an argument that is specific to this
particular natural-cultural arrangement. Universal laws of
nature are not always relevant, they are specifically applicable.
Once you take the first step, establishing that nature has
to be reinstituted, rebooted, because the version of nature
that European modernity brought with it has hit an ecological
wall, then the other institutions have to be readjusted as
well. Science, the Law, the Economy, Aesthetics, all have to
be reinstituted. They do not have to be completely replaced,
because of course there are good things about them, and they
have always, in any case, been subject to change. But with
my new project, The Children’s Country, I want to specify the
changes that might have to be made in the light of indigenous
and ecological local matters of concern. What will the children
of the future think if we fail to start instituting the necessary
changes? It is a question of survival, of persistence rather
than opposition and critique. It is about redirecting the flow.
For this reason, I want the book to speak, like Latour in his

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Inquiry, to each mode of existence (Science, the Law and so
on) on its own terms, as they are practically instituted. The
ethnography, the descriptive writing, will follow what it is that
keeps the institutions alive as going concerns. These insti-
tuted modes are equally real as each other and are busily and
simultaneously composing themselves, with and without our
help. They are works in progress, and I hope to expose their
more solid attributes as well as their sensitivities. Humans
and things interact in the composition of these worlds, they
intra-act agentially, as Karen Barad puts it, because this is a
process in which human subjectivities are being invented and
sustained. Likewise, in what we used to call the ‘objective
world’, facts are brought into being and kept alive in their net-
works of relations. So-called Nature is no longer the privileged
site of the real, nor is Society a place for humans alone.
Surprising interruptions
If the real is neither settled in some domain, nor separated
off, it might be characterised, strangely enough, by surprise,
or irruption. A bit like a scientist discovering something in
their lab, yelling out and high-fiving their colleagues. Or a poet
defamiliarising the most mundane object: ‘So you think that
because the rose/ is red that you shall have the mastery?’ The
real is present, emergent and performative. My ethnography
will reproduce moments of surprise, encountered during
‘field-work’ which is kind of everywhere. It won’t ‘capture’
those moments in a prose that reports back on them (across
that interpretative divide) but reproduces the surprise with the
necessary estrangement of its writing techniques.
I can illustrate this with a scene from Aaron Burton’s
documentary Sunset Ethnography (). I want to add, to the
element of surprise or irruption that we are looking for in the
scene, a suggestion to look for institutions. If we reject ‘society’,
‘language’ and ‘nature’ as too transcendent, we can nonethe-
less fall back on institutions, a very practical thing to do.
When Mick Taussig, Teresa Roe and I ‘act’ in this film, whose
institutions are we acting as extensions of? Or rather, how is
our acting passionately extending those institutions?
For years I was in the habit of meeting the patriarch of
the Goolarabooloo community, Paddy Roe, under the old

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tamarind tree where he had his meetings, and now, over a
decade after he passed away, the tree is even more institu-
tionalised. But I make a serious blunder as we are filming a
documentary called Sunset Ethnography. Having decided that
the tamarind tree might be a good spot to film a conversa-
tion, we install ourselves there as Aaron Burton is doing the
filming. Michael Taussig and I are staging a conversation
about the theory that is supposed to relate to the workshop on
‘experimental ethnography’ that we were holding at the time
with a few colleagues in Broome:
Michael Taussig: What about a different understanding
of the representation of theory itself in its relationship to,
aah, call it raw life? That seems to be very important to
me, that the theory is not like a … flag that’s nailed to the
experiences, but has a much more … sinuous relationship,
often barely visible?
Stephen Muecke: Yeah, well, it does, I think. Like, from
Michel Foucault I gleaned the idea of the, of the specific
intellectual. And I found I could immediately say, yeah,
well, that’s what my friend Paddy Roe is. He’s not a general
intellectual, he’s one that works through, um, specific
situations, and his technique is a storytelling technique.
He persuaded people. He did his politics through seduc-
tion, and ah…¹
Local whitefella: G’day. The woman that owns this block is
just inquiring as to what you’re doing here.
SM: Teresa?
LW: Yeah, Teresa.
SM: Yeah, she knows me well. Tell her it’s Steve.
LW: Steve, Steve’s here. Is that all I need to say?
SM: I think so.

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. Mick Taussig, 
From Sunset Ethnography © Kurrajong Films, reproduced with permission
. Teresa Roe with Stephen Muecke, 
From Sunset Ethnography © Kurrajong Films, reproduced with permission

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LW: Oh, she was a bit miffed. Somebody under the tree,
she couldn’t see who it was.
SM: Tell her I’m real sorry.
LW: I asked if they got permission, and she said, ‘I don’t
know.’
SM: I didn’t know I needed permission. I worked with old
Lulu on this spot years ago, that’s why I came back here.
LW: Yeah yeah, no, that’s OK. No, nothing else needed?
SM: Tell her I’m sorry.
LW: Yeah yeah, that’s all right [He walks off]… Steve.
MT: What about the place of, ah, pictures and images
in the story, that would seem to me to be important in
developing the experimental ethnography?
SM: Yeah, well all I can think about them is their role as
mediators. Um, they’re not illustrations, they open another
window, another mediation, so it’s not about… ‘I am
interpreting the world’, but er…
[Teresa Roe walks up]
MT: Hi there, how are you?
SM: How are you?
TR: Heeeey! Good to see you. Good to see you, Steve. [we
hug] Been a long time.
SM: Yeah. Only last year I was here. [I introduce] My friend
Mick.
MT: How you doing?

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SM: This is Aaron.
Aaron Burton: Nice to meet you. Hi.
SM: Well, we had some good news this week.¹¹
So in order to be as practical as possible, as realistic as
possible, I want to follow the networks of associations
that keep institutions alive, especially as they encounter
interruptions (like Taussig and I being interrupted in the
smooth flow of our intellectual talk; or like when your ISP
‘goes down’ and you have to launch ‘Network Diagnostics’
software to find where in the chain of links the break is).
With interruptions you find out once again how things
work; the networks are made real again because we have
toretrace the connections.
Law and Dreaming
Now let’s take the institution of the (European) law in
Australia, clearly a massive institution of statutes, courts and
archives, closely networked with training institutions, legisla-
tive functions of government, enforcement functions of the
police and so on. In its encounter with Aboriginal Australia we
witness, historically and in the present, all sorts of ‘interrup-
tions’ and failures. These are of interest to the ethnographer
because they show the workings of this institution as it tries
to repair the breakdowns. But why did they occur? Partly
because there is another institution of the law, that Aboriginal
people follow, called bugarrigarra around Broome. There
are contradictions between White and Black laws, problems
that are not solved by direct application of English Common
Law. No, it has to be modified, things have to take time to go
in a roundabout way; they zigzag, and after years of labour
something called Native Title Law has been painstakingly
produced in order to make compromises for an initial blunder
of colonisation, the so-called Terra Nullius doctrine.
So if you are a White lawyer, you know how to inhabit
‘theworld of the law’, with its networked institutions, actors
and modes of existence. You may have no idea about what

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goes on in the institutions of Indigenous law, like the bugar-
rigarra. And if you are an anthropologist you might mediate,
and get caught in the fight, as described by Paul Burke. He
begins his Law’s Anthropology: From Ethnography to Expert
Testimony in Native Title, with an image of physical damage
sustained by anthropologists in such encounters:
The bodies of anthropologists, bruised from their encoun-
ter with native title, are to be found recuperating all
around Australia. Some, still wounded from humiliating
cross-examination, swear, yet again, never to be involved
in another native title claim. While they lament their
lack of influence, others warn of native title completely
engulfing anthropology and ruining it (see, for example,
Morris ). One Aboriginal leader has made the
opposite claim—that anthropology has engulfed native
title law— blaming anthropology for the High Court’s poor
legal conceptualisation of native title.¹²
What causes these bruises on the bodies of anthropologists?
It is not so much the mismatch between two different legal
institutions, I think, it is the mismatch among three things:
what is a stake for the Indigenous people (what they want
to protect and sustain); the social-scientific methods of the
anthropologists (with their specific modes of verification and
authorisation); and the admissibility of evidence according to
legal procedures and rulings. Three different regimes of truth
that can inhabit the same space only with difficulty, the usual
difficulties that are negotiated in the ins and outs of discussion
in hearings, briefings, affidavits and last-minute promptings
in the corridor.
Now, the anthropologists wouldn’t have so many bruises
if they could just work on so-called traditional cultures in a tra-
ditional way. They wouldn’t have to test their science in public
or in a law court to see if it holds up in another institution. At
this point I could do a description of what I think bugarrigarra
law is all about: the travelling of the ancestor beings Malara
and X (who can’t be named), the ceremonial procedures for
the initiation of boys, the texts of the sacred songs, the cer-
emonial artefacts, and so on. Such descriptions of Dreamings

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often appear in anthropological texts on Australia, and they
strike me as very partial translated summaries, struggling
not to reproduce clichés. How can such law be given its full
ontological weight? Perhaps it can’t be in a text of a few pages,
perhaps the text should somehow acknowledge the thousands
of years it took for such a mode of existence to put on weight,
for its existence to be really palpable? I don’t think the ethnog-
rapher should give up in the face of this huge difficulty. On
the contrary, one should try harder to write such a description,
recognising the failures of past descriptions, looking to invent
a new template that does it justice.¹³ Itmeans, obviously,
guarding against the age-old slogan of the front line of mod-
ernisation: ‘they believe, we know’. When whitefella law makes
a blunder, like ‘Aborigines have no sovereignty over land’,
or when Western Australia’s premier Colin Barnett, makes
a political blunder like saying the coastline at walmadany
is ‘unremarkable’, or an anthropologist makes a knowledge
blunder like assuming Aborigines don’t understand biological
conception (because ‘they believe’ in rayi, children’s spirits),
then these failures call for new templates to be made. These
modernists could try to carry on regardless, as they have in
many cases, by forcing people off their homelands, or sending
Aborigines to sex education classes so they can understand
reproduction the correct scientific way. We have an inkling
what is lost each time these modernist universalist templates
are imposed without modification; a whole world is threatened,
a whole world, not an Indigenous version of the same world.
Now, in conclusion, about the law, I want to worry about
how these two laws relate to each other. I might have seemed
to be saying that they were locked in battle, or ontologically
incompatible; if one is in place, the other can’t be. But if
we listen to my teacher, Paddy Roe, he doesn’t seem to say
anything like that. He is talking more like a sovereign leader
making a highly diplomatic statement:
Law —
That’s bugarrigarra, law—
I think English say—
‘dreamtime’—

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But we say bugarrigarra—
law
He actually isn’t opposing the two kinds of law. There is a dif-
ferent discursive logic here, the one that has been called ‘same
but different, really’. ‘Bugarrigarra’ ≅ ‘law’ ≅ ‘dreamtime’. The
effect of the way that Paddy puts it is not contrastive at all, it
is integrative of the things that actually are living there in the
country, one next to the other. His style introduces a tonality,
a smooth texture, a flow that invites you into its movement.
Living country, they call it, or living culture. Paddy Roe’s
finger inscribes bugarrigarra into the sand at walmadany,
ashe is saying ‘this is bugarrigarra’. He used to do it over and
over, whenever some whitefella developer came along wanting
to ‘modernise’ his country. As he inscribes bugarrigarra into
the country, it is like saying, with an indexical sign that is not
a sign, ‘it is going to be very hard for you blokes to move us off
here’.
Reference and science
Scientific knowledge, in Latour’s account, is elaborated with
a mode of existence he calls reference.¹ It is what enables
knowledge to be passed and maintained across great distances
in time and space. It might be born in labs and accumulate in
archives, but it needs the collaboration of colleagues, human
and non-human actors, to sustain it. It, too, is tested against
alterity. This would be experimental method. If the same
results can be obtained with a repetition of the experiment in
a somewhat new context, then the facts are sustained and can
continue to exist.
Now, Aboriginal people in Broome don’t do this sort of
thing, surely not? Where are their labs and archives? Exactly:
while everyone agrees that Aboriginal people have lots of
knowledge, they are not quite sure where they are hiding it.
Itkind of pops up unexpectedly. Let us recall, before going on
to a case study, that Latour’s ‘Anthropology of the Moderns’¹
has successfully ‘provincialised’ western modernism (as
Chakrabarty led the way for history). The universalist preten-
tions of this modernity are now somewhat specified and
moderated, and can only now enter into negotiations with all

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kinds of others. The old colonial pedagogical attitude, based
on universalist pretentions, was not conducive to negotiation.
So the case of Phillip Roe and the sea turtles is relevant
here. Phillip Roe is a key figure in the campaign against
mining interests taking over the country that his family has
custodianship rights over. Now, at the time of the Woodside
Petroleum push to build a gas plant at Walmadany a team of
scientists was engaged by the state government to carry out an
environmental survey. Hawksbill and Green sea turtles were
two animal species on the list to be investigated. The nesting
study commissioned for the Department of State Development
found only one ‘old’ nest and three false crawls. An independ-
ent and peer-reviewed study into marine turtle nesting in the
James Price Point area led by University of Melbourne marine
biologist Malcolm Lindsay found  turtle nests and  false
crawls over the / nesting season. This independent
study was one of a few carried out by ‘citizen scientists’ on
different species. They were able to point out flaws in the
design of the government report, which, for instance ‘surveyed
only  % of the coastline most threatened by the precinct,
overlooking the significant  km. strip of important nesting
habitat’.¹
The scientists doing the government report didn’t seek
or obtain the help of Phillip Roe who has hunted turtles and
gathered turtle eggs in season all his life. His people have been
doing this for innumerable generations. He pointed out to the
citizen scientists that turtles around Walmadany often nested
on the rocky foreshore. The government scientist hadn’t both-
ered to look there because they ‘didn’t expect’ or ‘would be
surprised’ to find turtles nesting in a rocky place. Informants
were also amazed at Philip’s uncanny ability to point out nests
when they couldn’t see any traces of a nest in the sand, or, on
one occasion, pointing into the ocean and saying the special
word (undud) for mating turtles. It took my informant a few
minutes to see what Philip was seeing.
Alterity introduces the unexpected, disrupting the repeti-
tion of the already known that I think characterises the spread
of modernist universals. For the government scientists the
science hadn’t really extended beyond the lab back in the city
and they were closed to the possibility of extending collegiality

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to Phillip Roe. That the citizen scientists were prepared to
do this meant that their lab included aspects of the West
Kimberley. It went further in time and space, which is what a
referential mode of existence is meant to do, as it discovers
and then sustains its forms of truth so that they can be relied
upon.¹ This is what I mean by the process of renaturalisation,
and it is what any good scientist would do anyway, that is,
not expect that a new context will allow the reproduction of
results from elsewhere.
Politics in circles
Surprise or discovery is not really what one expects from the
mode of existence that is politics. Its truth conditions are not
about extending knowledge in time and space, which is why
we often accuse politicians of lying—they will renege on their
pre-election promises. Politics is about extending representa-
tion, in both senses of the word; the politician counts for the
people in the electorate, and hopes to speak to them and for
them in a language in which they can recognise themselves.
There would always be some difficulty for a white politician
from a capital city far to the south to represent Aboriginal
people who may even refuse to vote; but that is a rather
general issue.
The more significant thing for my ethnography is the or-
ganisation of alliances that either builds up or diminishes the
number of spheres of influence that are associated, broadly,
with the two sides of the gas plant issue. And if I do not want
to use ‘society’, I can replace it with ‘association’, which means
not just associations of humans, but also things, concepts,
feelings as these link up to create real worlds. ‘Society’ is what
still has to be made, it is not the explanatory term one can
easily fall back on.
The interiority of a sphere is constituted by the elements
inside breathing the same atmosphere—you can tell that I’m
using the language of Peter Sloterdijk here¹— or having the
same values, while being surrounded by a membrane that
provides immunity. To this, I would add Latour’s idea of
partnerships or allies in political causes, and different spheres
might be drawn together in political association. Yet, these
spheres are fragile, and tactics of imitation (Gabriel Tarde)

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are political tactics that attempt to redraw the spatial map of
associations of different spheres.¹ That the bubble of capital-
ist confidence is constantly under threat of bursting may not
be such an arbitrary metaphor, and it certainly applies in the
case of Woodside’s tenuous relationship with its joint venture
partners. Woodside’s bubble finally burst in April  when it
announced that it would not continue with the  billion dol-
lar gas plant. All along, it was the state government’s financial
and political support that was urging Woodside on. Thehead
of government, Barnett, you might recall, was the one I said
made a ‘political blunder’ in saying that the coastline at
Walmadany was ‘unremarkable’. Suddenly he wasn’t talking
the same language as the people he was supposed to represent.
For them, the beautiful red cliffs were quite remarkable, which
is where a political mode of existence can cross with an
aesthetic one.
But just to conclude this section on politics; you will
excuse me, I hope, for complicating the picture with the ad-
dition of Sloterdijk’s spheres. But they are useful in that they
reinforce Latour’s rhetorical figure of the circle as that which
characterises the political mode of existence. Politicians
talk in circles. They can’t be expected to adhere to the truth
conditions of scientists whose knowledge is organised to
persist over long distances and times. Political talk is true for
short periods— as they say, ‘a week is a long time in politics’.
It sounds the right note, gathers further allies, and increases
its sphere of influence. It will network with institutions and
influential individuals to extend its circle, which of course was
the case with Barnett’s political work in the Kimberley, where
the Aboriginal organisation the Kimberley Land Council was
a key ally. In the end, Barnett’s Woodside episode was a failure.
In the state election of June , a Green candidate collected
 per cent of the votes in the town of Broome, going against
the major parties’ trends, and nearly getting elected.
Aesthetics
Now, if Barnett blundered politically by saying that the
coastline was ‘unremarkable’ implying ‘empty’ in that time-
honoured settler style, suitable for ‘development’, then this
is a point where the aesthetic crosses the political. The red

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35
cliffs are identified with the places where people love to go
fishing and swimming, which are significant sites for law
and culture, which contribute to tourism—nothing much
to do with capitalist efficiency, profitability and rationality
(Latour). But feelings like ‘love of country’ cannot be ignored
if my ethnography is to find out what the core values of the
negotiating parties are. You know what the central values are
when people will lay down their life for them. The late Joseph
Roe said the last thing he would give up in any negotiation is
the right to protect law and culture, bugarrigarra: he was like
a garbina, shielding his country. While his major opponent,
the politician Barnett, might say that the last thing he will give
up is the right to exploit Nature, which probably comes down
to Efficiency, Profitability and Objectivity, core values that
never seem to migrate into Indigenous Australians’ spheres
of influence without threatening their very existence as
Indigenous people.
I want to give an example of how this love of country was
mobilised as political activism in the campaign against the
gas plant, and stay within Sloterdijk’s ‘sphereology’: spheres
are interiorities that are defined by their passage to the
outside through mechanisms of attraction, repulsion and flow.
Sunday  May  in Broome, Mothers’ Day², provided an
‘atmosphere’ in which the anti-gas protesterstried the charm
of love hearts, and so on, to lure the police into imitative
association and hence into a mutual sphere of protection.
The protesters, against all expectations that there would
be sporadic violent protests, came up with an unexpected
idea. They tried to create a common sphere with the police;
they could not assume they were already securely in one (as
co-citizens of the Nation, for instance). This was a kind of
spell exercised in the context of (what Latour used to call
‘transfearance’, now Metamorphosis) remembered as the
previous year’s ‘Black Tuesday’ when police got quite violent.
The rhetoric of this ‘Platonic love story’ seemed to say: ‘We
are all within the charmed circle of mother-love-fertility,
within yet another sphere of celebration of the national day
for mothers.’ All this is spatially organised and imitative
rather than communicative—they would like the love to be
contagious by association.

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This unexpected manoeuvre by the activist campaigners
worked. It came as a surprise as it produced a counter-real.
Some of the police said they were touched and took flowers
home to their mums, the broader community was ‘charmed’
and therefore seduced into sympathy for the campaign. Itwas
coherent with their core beliefs (What do you love about
Broome? The beach, the fishing, Where do you go fishing?
Upthe coast…). Affect and other aspects of an aesthetic mode
of existence take on weight here and assert their singular
effects. They are strong in themselves, they are not the effect
of something else. I have made the point about Barnett’s
mistake in trying to reduce this mode of existence. By saying
‘unremarkable’ he tried to deflate the aesthetic sphere, so that
efficiency and profitability could take over. But by discounting
the attachments of the Broome folk who ‘love the place’, he
committed the basic political sin. He lost numbers. People
moved and attached themselves to the ‘Save Broome’ cam-
paign, which was contingently making itself attractive with
the good timing of the Mother’s Day event.
And let’s not forget what is positively asserted by aesthet-
ics for the Goolarabooloo and for the Broome people. The
latter, and the tourists, even though they often make the
mistake of equating ‘country’ with Nature, as in ‘landscape’,
nevertheless inflate an aesthetic sphere with a million amateur
and professional photographic clichés and postcards. That
in itself is a long modernist European tradition. Let’s not be
too cynical, the aesthetic does come into existence each time
a photo is taken; a way of being in the world is created (‘in-
staured’) as into each photo flows a formal composition that
‘holds up’—as the photographer contemplates it on the screen
and makes a decision to press the delete button or add it to the
disparate archive that is helping keep an aesthetic associated
with Broome alive.
An important aspect of Sloterdijk’s sphereology is that he
asks us to ‘abandon the idea of space as an empty field’.²¹ Like
Latour, who wants to trace real chains of association and trans-
formation, Sloterdijk does not invest the gap or the ‘in-between’
with utopian potential. Spheres, as I am trying to imagine
them, must abut like living cells in a body. Applied to James
Price Point, Walmadany, we can now see this as a space that is

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37
full of Indigenous and activist/resistance tactics for together-
ness; it is not an empty space for Woodside to occupy. Living in
a sphere is a vital experience of being animated together; the
same experience applies to media spaces like Facebook as used
by the Save the Kimberley and other allied groups.
This spatial tightness, with spheres abutting each other
and sometimes dissolving into each other when they find
they are swimming in the same atmospheres, breathing the
same oxygen, also means that discourses of emancipation
don’t work so well for the analysis and the writing we might
perform. It will not be a question henceforth of cutting ties in
order to liberate, but cutting ties in order to engineer further
and more productive connections; changing the flow. This has
consequences for the writing of ethnographies which work up
close with their partners in a critical proximity (immersion)
characteristic of forms of fictocriticism, like that of Kathleen
Stewart.²² Critical proximity means not withdrawing to a
‘perspective’ out in that empty space somewhere, that claims
overview and impartial judgement. It means a contingent and
negotiated ‘earning the right to participation’ in a particular
sphere, as I have said elsewhere.²³
So, I’ll be interested to hear what you think about my new
version of Reading the Country as applied to an ethnography
of the country north of Broome. As I said, I can no longer
hold the ‘country’ as central and equivalent to Nature or the
objective world. Nature has to be rebooted, reinstitutionalised
through a process of renaturalisation. This recasting of
Nature, so that it becomes closer to natural-cultural composi-
tions, is closer to Indigenous networking, I think, where
bilbies, turtles and whales are all part of ‘society’ and play
their parts as enshrined in the Law.
So once Nature is rebooted, all the other modes of exist-
ence have to be adjusted too.² The scientist arriving to do an
EPA realises that her European version of Nature—one size
fits all–will not cut it. By paying ‘due attention’ (Whitehead)
she will be surprised by the ‘something more’ that is of-
fered by the processes of natures reproducing themselves.
Methodologies might have to be adjusted too. Scientific
reliability comes through spreadsheets and statistics, and that
is essential. But to them she might have to add Indigenous

READING THE COUNTRY: 30 YEARS ON
38
colleagues with their non-statistical ways of knowing. They
also perform exactly what scientific modes of knowledge are
supposed to do— make knowledge persist through the genera-
tions and across great distances. I want the sciences to be able
to do what they do best, but in a new way adjusted to local
conditions. For example, Steven Salisbury, the paleontologist
of the dinosaur footprints, collaborates in a way that makes
him an exemplary kind of scientist in the way I have been
describing. He is prepared to say, working with Richard
Hunter, that a dinosaur footprint is the emu marala, not ‘they
believe’ it is marala, while ‘we know’ it is really a trace of a
-million-year-old suaropod.²
And in a multirealist framework, each mode of existence
has its own way of reproducing itself, with its own felicity
conditions. They can be described in such a way that they
don’t try to take over each others’ territory, either cross-
culturally, or within a given ‘culture’. There are good reasons
why English common law can’t take over the bugarrigarra,
reduce it to some sub-clauses covering ‘customary law’. There
are good reasons why, within what many whitefellas like to
call their ‘modern society’, the Economy can’t take over the
institutions of the Law, or Science swallow up the Aesthetic, or
Politics trump Religion.
Where, you might ask, is the political edge in all this happy
pluralism? As the planet faces up to what could be its greatest
set of crises, radically new conditions will pertain. We can
either ecologise and adjust, or continue to modernise as usual.
Those who would do the latter know that the planet can’t sus-
tain that strategy, yet they are prepared to go for the end-game.
In the name of ‘what the market can stand’, they attack every
progressive institution within sight. For me, the politics of
caring for country, for countries, for the whole country, is one
of caring for the institutions that sustain what we care most
about: scientific discoveries, creating works of art, organising
politically to increase numbers. I think it is a mistake to start
from the position of ‘protecting Nature’ via country. Nature as
the stable backdrop to human activity is an idea as dangerous
to human existence, as the notion of the Economy as second
nature is toxic. Nature is composing itself in conjunction with
our institutions, through multiple mediations. The sea grass

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39
of Roebuck Bay maintains its existence with the care of the
working group from Environs Kimberley. This is a mediation
the Goolarabooloo and the other Indigenous peoples of the
country have always understood, life sustained by networks of
multiple beings. Avoiding the reduction to Nature means also
taking seriously and helping grow their precarious institutions,
like Paddy Roe’s tamarind tree in Broome, that have already
provided answers to really important questions like, how do
you look after country without money, without Native Title
and without a Nature–Culture divide?
Notes
 Kim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country, rd edn,
Re.Press, Melbourne, , p. .
 David Trigger, ‘Mining, Landscape and the Culture of Development Ideology in
Australia’, Ecumene, no. , , pp. –.
 The term ‘Country’ has been increasingly used over the last few years for some
Indigenous version of the home territory for which one is a TO (traditional
owner), for instance ‘buru’ in the West Kimberley. It is especially evident in the
phrase ‘being on Country’, which implies a reciprocal ethics of care.
 Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, Cultural
Studies Review, vol. , no., March , pp. –.
 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, .
 ‘The globalization of knowledge is clearly not a one-way process of intended
transmission … in modern science, knowledge becomes global both by processes
of localization and delocalization. Knowledge is always bound to local conditions
of its reproduction, and the problem of encounters between different knowledge
systems embedded in different local conditions is a persistent feature of
historical development.’ Jürgen Renn and Malcolm D. Hyman, ‘Chapter :
Survey’, in Jürgen Renn (ed.), The Globalization of Modern Science, Edition Open
Access, Berlin, , p. . http://edition-open-access.de/studies///index.html
 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs, vol. , no. , Spring , pp. –.
 William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book I, New York, New Directions Publishing,
, p. .
 Sunset Ethnography, dir. Aaron Burton, . https://vimeo.com/
 See ‘Intellectuals, Power and Truth,’ in Benterrak, Muecke and Roe, pp. –.
 Sunset Ethnography, ’.’ to ’.’
 Paul Burke, Law’s Anthropology: From Ethnography to Expert Testimony in Native
title, referring to Noel Pearson in the Age,  August .
 Latour AIME website: ‘The first question is modernisationist; a front line of
modernisation is set up which is going to limit, each time it is extended, the range
of available types that could explain any situation. The second solution consists
in doing the analysis of this modernisation effort by noting, on each possible
occasion, the failures of the first solution.’ http://www.kachinas.be/seminaire -
latour/wp-content/uploads/sites//How-To-AIME.pdf
 Latour, Inquiry, chapter .

READING THE COUNTRY: 30 YEARS ON
40
 Latour, Inquiry.
 Environs Kimberley media release,  March . http://www.environskimberley.
org.au/wp-content/uploads///EKMR-.pdf
 The Wilderness Society, Environs Kimberley and Conservation Council of WA,
James Price Point Science Assessment Report: Updated Supplementary submission
on the WA government’s Browse LNG Strategic Assessment for a proposed gas
processing hub at James Price Point, Kimberley WA, May .
http://www.environskimberley.org.au/wp-content/uploads///james-price-
point-science-assessment-report.pdf
 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, trans. Wieland
Hoban, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, .
 Gabrielle Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation, Félix Alcan, Editions Kimé, Paris, 
[].
 Stephen Muecke, The Mother’s Day Protest and other Fictocritical Essays, Rowman
and Littlefield International, London , chapter .
 Réné ten Bos and Kaulingfreks, ‘Interfaces’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. ,
no., , pp. –, p. .
 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, Durham, .
 Stephen Muecke and Max Pam, Contingency in Madagascar, Intellect Books,
Bristol, , p. .
 Didier Debaise, Pablo Jensen, M. Pierre Montebello, Nicolas Prignot, Isabelle
Stengers and Aline Wiame, ‘Reinstituting Nature: A Latourian Workshop’, trans.
Stephen Muecke, Environmental Humanities, vol. , no. , , pp. –.
http://environmentalhumanities.dukejournals.org/content//.toc
 University of Queensland Dinosaur Lab. http://www.uq.edu.au/dinosaurs/index.
html?page=