Comic Strip “WHO KNOWS?”

While studying the subject, “The Invention of Africa,” which was based on V.Y. Mudimbe’s book of the same name, I was struck by the parallels I see in my own country, Australia, regarding the historical and present-day perceptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI). During my school years through the 1980s and 90s, schools taught Australian colonial history as “Australian history” and painted colonists largely as explorers and heroes. Indigenous histories were mostly excluded or simplified, and ATSI perspectives almost never included. I felt this was an example of what Mudimbe (1988) described as “stories about Others, as a well as commentaries on their differences, [being] but elements in the history of the Same and its knowledge.” Harmful narratives woven two hundred years ago about indigenous identities still persist today; often with no wider understanding or questioning of their roots. The current project seeks to explore the concept of knowledge, and whose knowledge is valued. This brief paper will outline the inspirations for both the content and the method used: a comic strip.

This project was inspired, in part, by interviews undertaken by Kirsti Melville with members of the Noongar nation. Noongar people were among those imprisoned on Rottnest Island, an exclusively Aboriginal prison site off the coast of Western Australia, from 1838-1931 (Melville 2016). Aboriginal people were driven off their traditional hunting grounds, where land clearing and alternations to waterways drastically changed the landscape and affected food supply. Noongar woman, Karen Jacobs, described it this way:

Melville (2016) noted that:

“With a rapidly dwindling food supply, Noongar men started shooting any animal they saw — a sheep, a chicken, a cow — not understanding the white law that animals can belong to people. To them, animals belonged to the land. The consequences of this misunderstanding were harsh. Aboriginal people started being arrested for theft, for trespassing, and it didn’t take long for the prisons to fill up.”

Today, ATSI people continue to face systemic discrimination, and disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system. Cycles of imprisonment and institutionalisation date back to early settlement when dispossession and subjugation began to dismantle the first nations’ systems of knowledge and governance.

Another poignant example at present is the struggle of the Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) people to save their lands and waterways from the potentially devastating impacts of the proposed Adani Carmichael Coal Mine in Queensland. Murrawah Johnson, a spokesperson for the W&J people, linked this environmental fight to a knowledge system:

“We’ve been fighting them, and in that time they have not managed to get finance, or build the Adani Carmichael Coal Mine and destroy our country, and destroy who we are, and our way of life, and our way of knowing things, and our way of being.” (Wangan & Jagalingou: Land justice now 2018).

Adrian Burragumba, a spokesperson for the W&J traditional owners, explained how the land was linked to Aboriginal knowledge systems:

“…it is our dreaming, it’s our past, it’s our present… and it’s our future. Without the emus, without the eels, without the trees — some specific trees are our totem trees — they would cease to exist and we would have no map to our past. There would be no bible, no doctrine, nothing to refer back to our law” (Robertson 2019).

Secondly, while comics, such as Tin Tin, and various forms of cartoons have been historically culpable for disseminating racial stereotypes and essentialising identities, they can also be used to “remove negative portrayals” (Bumatay 2012, p.47) within mainstream media, and stimulate readers to rethink stereotypes. Comics can use the “conventions of political cartoons, such as satire, parody, hyperbole and exaggeration [to manipulate] cultural boundaries… [and to] expose their internal logic and preconceived notions on both sides” (Bumatay 2012, p.47). Lastly, comics and cartoons can hold governments to account, and “uniquely problematise questions of history, collective memory, postmemory, and postcolonial identity [because they] exist outside of official channels… [and] the reader is constantly made aware of the image as representation and not objective truth” (Howell 2015, p.18).

For these reasons, I felt that a comic strip would provide a good opportunity to respond in kind to Bill Leak’s cartoon, while shining a light on how under-valued and unrecognised indigenous knowledge systems remain relevant to a number of social and environmental issues in postcolonial societies. I chose the expression, “Don’t you know anything” as the punchline in both sections of the story, because it is something you say when someone does not seem to understand a social norm, or assumed basic knowledge that is taken for granted. If they don’t know that thing, then do they, in fact, know anything? The title question, “Who knows?” invites the reader to reflect on the knowledge they take for granted, as well as what they may be ignorant of.

The comic aims to raise questions about what is considered to be knowledge, and whose knowledge is valued and accepted as such. In the illustration, knowledge about the land is highlighted, where one party sees it as a resource to exploit for economic gain, and the other sees themselves as a part of it; reliant on it. In the first section (early settlement period) there is a juxtaposition of a natural setting with an institutional setting (the jail). In the second section (modern times), these two things continue to be represented in the colour of the main characters’ clothing, which retains the colours of the nature and of the jail. This was done to represent the continuity of the colonial relationship over time, and the ongoing battle between traditional owners of the land and the institutions that have imposed their systems of knowledge, governance, and land management on them.

In summary, this project aims to problematise historical narratives about indigenous people and the complex array of social, cultural, economic and environmental issues that have been produced and perpetuated by colonial institutions within Australia. This was done by focusing on what constitutes knowledge, and how the failure to recognise alternative ways of knowing can be damaging, not only to those who suffer from this injustice, but ultimately, also to those who perpetrate the injustice.