Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition

In the  introduction of the ethnology Kamilaroi and Kunai, the Reverend Lorimer Fison described a sensation he experienced studying the ‘‘intersexual arrangements’’ of indigenous Australians. He described feeling ‘‘ancient rules’’ underlying the Kamilaroi’s and Kunai’s present sexual practices, catching fleeting glimpses of an ancient ‘‘strata’’ cropping up from the horrific given conditions of colonial settlement, sensing some ‘‘something else,’’ ‘‘somethingmore’’ Kamilaroi andKunai than even theKamilaroi andKunai themselves, a some thing that offered him and other ethnologists a glimpse of an ancient order puncturing the present, often hybrid and degenerate, indigenous social horizon.1 Fison pointed to this ancient order as the proper object of ethnological research and used the promised feelings this order produced to prod other ethnologists to turn its way. But Fison cautioned, even admonished, other researchers that in order to reach this order and to experience these feelings they had to be ‘‘continually on thewatch’’ that ‘‘every last trace of white men’s effect on Aboriginal society’’ was ‘‘altogether cast out of the calculation.’’ 2 Only by stripping from their ethnological analysis the traumatic effect of settlement on indigenous social life could the researcher reach, touch, and begin to sketch the outline of that thing, which was not the present corrupted Aboriginal social body