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NEW WORLD CHOREOGRAPHIES

Dance in
Contested Land
New Intercultural
Dramaturgies

r ac h a e l s wa i n
 New World Choreographies

Series Editors
Rachel Fensham
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Australia

Kate Elswit
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
London, UK
This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects
embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance.
Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists,
practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes
movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance,
theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of
global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of
the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new
world choreographies.

Editorial Board
Susan Leigh Foster, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Gabriele Klein, University of Hamburg, Germany
André Lepecki, New York University, USA
Avanthi Meduri, Roehampton University, UK
Kirsi Monni, University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland
Jay Pather, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Prathana Purkayastha, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Gerald Siegmund, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14729
 Rachael Swain

Dance in Contested
Land
New Intercultural Dramaturgies
Rachael Swain
Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2730-9266 ISSN 2730-9274 (electronic)

New World Choreographies
ISBN 978-3-030-46550-6 ISBN 978-3-030-46551-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46551-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Dalisa Pigram and Miranda Wheen in Cut the Sky. Image Rob Maccoll,
Brisbane, 2018.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For Dalisa
My partner in crime
 Series Editors’ Preface

In the twenty-first century, choreographic projects and choreographic

thinking are responding to new political and social conditions and
prompting new aesthetics that in turn stretch the boundaries and poli-
tics of ‘dance studies’. Dance formations in this expanded global sphere
may be variously fluid, intermedial, interdisciplinary, collaborative or inter-
active. And very often, these ‘new world choreographies’ utilise corpo-
real interactions to imaginative and critical ends in dialogue with local
ecologies, technologies and communities.
With an openness to the many spaces in which dance so adeptly
manoeuvres, this book series aims to provide critical and historicised
perspectives on the artists, concepts, and cultures shaping recent devel-
opments in embodied performance practices. Alongside the emergence of
ever more complex questions about climate change, technology, global
capital, social justice and health, we need to continue to reorient our
thinking about choreography in relation to the world, in relation to others
and to ourselves. The series thus provides a platform to reflect upon
and examine how dancing mobilises emerging knowledge paradigms to
generate a creative aesthetics and politics. And the series curates the bold

vii
viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

and imaginative scholarship of interdisciplinary perspectives on movement

as we negotiate these contingencies of an ever-changing world.

Parkville, Australia Rachel Fensham

London, UK Kate Elswit
 Acknowledgements

The projects described in this book were developed in two very

different communities, the Kunwinjku community of Kunbarlanja,
Western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory where Crying Baby
(2000) was made and the Yawuru and multi-ethnic community of Broome
in the north-west of Western Australia where Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and
Cut the Sky (2015) were developed and performed. I wish to start by
acknowledging these communities and their cultural custodians for their
participation in, influence on, and witnessing of these three productions.
Intercultural performance processes require a particular kind of intense
participation from all those involved and a level of commitment that
is always at once both personal and political. The three productions
described in this book were co-created with artists from multiple Indige-
nous nations and from settler and European backgrounds. The embodied,
cultural and personal contributions of the cultural custodians, dancers,
choreographers, visual artists, designers, composers, lighting designers
and dramaturgs who are named throughout the following chapters, are
at the heart of this book. I especially wish to acknowledge my friends
and close collaborators: Storyman Thompson Yulidjirri; choreographers
Raymond Blanco, Dalisa Pigram, Koen Augustijnen and Serge Amié
Coulibaly; cultural dramaturg Patrick Dodson and dramaturg Hildegard
De Vuyst whose artistic, cultural and political practices have provided the
substance and the structure of the works described here.

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At the outset, I acknowledge that in my role as director or dramaturg

of these projects I have played but one part within the complex collab-
orations and ideas about performance described here. Because of this I
have endeavoured to foster a way of writing in which my voice is not
louder than the assertions of the practice itself, allowing the perspectives
of my colleagues to shine through. First and foremost in this regard is
the voice of Yawuru, Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, who
shares the artistic leadership of Marrugeku with me. We have collabo-
rated together since 1996, shifting through our different roles in each of
the works described here while supporting each other’s distinct responsi-
bilities along the way. As a co-devising dancer in all three works, as co-
choreographer of Gudirr Gudirr and Cut the Sky and with her extraor-
dinary ability to encapsulate the complexities of her people’s belonging
in dance, Dalisa more than anyone embodies and enables everything of
which this book speaks. If you are lucky enough to see her dance you will
not need to read this book.
I wish to thank the series editors of New World Choreographies Rachel
Fensham and Peter Boenisch for the invitation to include Dance in
Contested Land in this important book series and for their critical feedback
on drafts as the project developed. I am greatly appreciative of the editorial
guidance of commissioning editors at Palgrave Macmillan Tomas Rene,
Vicky Bates, editor Eileen Srebernik and editorial assistant Jack Heeney. I
am grateful to Alexander Heller-Nicholas and Siobhan Murphy, assistants
to the series editors, for their precise, timely and always cheerful assistance
and revisions of drafts during this process. I also thank the anonymous
clearance reader for their critical feedback which helped me expand some
key points in the final editing stage. I am truly grateful to Annabel Crabb
for proof reading my proof reading at the 11th hour. Real friendship in
action!
I am indebted to the wisdom, insight and genorisity of Yawuru cultural
leader, current Senator for Western Australia and Marrugeku’s Patron
and primary cultural dramaturg Patrick Dodson and Bunaba Cultural
leader June Oscar who is Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Social Justice Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commis-
sion. Both have made critical contributions to the intersections of practice,
theory, culture and politics described in these pages. I also acknowledge
the important perspectives on northern Australia (and on dance prac-
tices in particular) shared by Yolngu leaders Galarrwuy Yunupingu and
M.Yunupingu.1 I have quoted from a selection of Indigenous Australian
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

thought leaders whose insights into understanding Indigenous Australian

art reveal new pathways to enable the national imaginary. These include
Djon Mundine, Steve Kinnane, Alexis Wright and Marcia Langton. I have
aimed to minimise my application of the ideas of Kadiya (non-Indigenous)
scholars discussing Indigenous Peoples and their dance and artworks.
However, I have drawn from the important work of a small group of
non-Indigenous scholars who have each spent significant time living in
Indigenous communities where they have had the privilege to grow bonds
of friendship, family and responsibility over extended periods of time and
to learn from their own Indigenous teachers. These include Deborah Bird
Rose, Stephen Muecke, Franca Tamisari, Jennifer Biddle and Elizabeth
Povinelli.
This book has been written in the loving memory of two old men
whose lessons about art that is alive and in place permeates these pages.
During the period that I lived between Australia and the Netherlands I
had the good fortune to learn from Kunwinjku painter and storyman
Thompson Yulidjirri (circa 1930–2009) and Dutch director, producer and
visual artist Ritsaert ten Cate (1938–2008). While they were art worlds
and continents apart, they lived the same decades as artists, innovators and
teachers. I miss the generous spirit and mischievous glint in the eye that
they shared and somedays I like to imagine the conversation they might
have had, if they had ever sat down for a drink and a chat. Each of their
legacies live on through generations of artists.
Dalisa has been the first reader and cultural editor of all descrip-
tions of cultural and artistic practice conducted in her Yawuru home-
lands. I am truly grateful for her insight and fine attention to detail and
also the extended quotes that she has agreed to share with readers. I am
indebted to the support of my friends and Performance Studies colleagues
who read early draft chapters, including Helen Gilbert, Helena Grehan,
Anny Mokotow and Peter Eckersall. This would have been a lesser book
without your valuable thoughts and feedback. I also wish to thank the
Indigenous dancers, choreographers, writers and musicians who have
read sections of this book and given permission for their words to be
quoted as well as those who have spent many hours discussing the
issues surrounding the making of Indigenous dance with Dalisa and me.
These include Eric Avery, Mique’l Dangeli, Michael Greyeyes, Charles
Ahukaramū Royal, Vicki Van Hout, Edwin Lee Mulligan, Steve Kinnane,
Tia Reihana, Charles Koroneho, Victoria Hunt, Ghenoa Gela, Jack Gray,
Jecko Siompo and Amrita Hepi. Your words are either in or behind what
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

is written on these pages and your practice paves the way for the thinking
in this book. I also acknowledge the generous contributions and crit-
ical participation of settler performers Katia Molino, Sofia Gibson and
later Miranda Wheen. Your preparedness to interrogate performance from
the edges of what you can perceive has added critical perspectives to this
book.
I am thankful for the long-term working partnerships and friendships
with Justin Macdonnell and Gie Baguet who—in the choice to believe in
and book these productions—have facilitated the engagement between
the performances themselves and audiences around the world. I also
wish to acknowledge the endless investments of Marrugeku’s technical
teams and management staff whose efforts sit behind the works. Without
your extensive commitment to these projects, none of this could have
happened.
I thank the Australian Research Council for the Discovery Early Career
Research Award (DECRA) which supported the practice led research
project Listening to Country, one of a very few artistic research projects
which have been supported by the ARC. This book is one of the outcomes
of that period. I am grateful to my colleagues in the English and Theatre
Studies Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne. In particular Rachel Fensham, Head of School at the time of
my DECRA, Peter Eckersall whose friendship and collaboration extends
across decades and Denise Varney and Ken Gelder at the Australian
Centre who hosted my position.
There is the sense that the space this book seeks to outline, in which
Indigenous and settler artists meet each other to ‘remember the future’,
is one of an ongoing and acute state of reappraisal, revisioning, adjusting
and waiting to know. This has had implications for the journey of this
book which would perhaps ideally have resulted in another format—one
that is constantly being re-written and that never reaches the destination
of a fixed object with a finite number of pages and images. In that sense I
have written and re-written this book several times over already. What you
read here can be thought of as a moment in time that could begin to be
revised almost as soon as the ink dries on the printed pages. I expect that
those closest to me have been both perplexed about, and understanding
of, the long years it has taken me to finish this book. Part of this has been
the time it has taken me to work out the difference between my position
as a settler artist participating in the ‘together but distinct’ collaborative
journey of making these three works and that of a settler scholar writing
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii

about this intercultural practice. That is, what is appropriate for me to

share and what is not.
So to my close friends who are scattered far and wide around the world:
thank you for your understanding, for all that we share and for your part in
all of this. My love and gratitude goes to Sue-ellen, Threes, Henk, Scott,
David, Peter, Marijke, Brett, Sofie, Katia, Bridget, Brandon, Jack, Michael
Mohammed, Emma, Kate and Nancia. And to Dalisa, Serge Aimé, Hilde-
gard and Justin again—as well as being my closest collaborators, you are
also amongst my closest of friends.
And at last to family, my own precious circle of love and learning. To
Ella and Jade Jet with love for your love and gratitude for your patience
(or endurance) while I have finished this book. To my parents, my
brothers and to the family of Dalisa: without your support and love year
in and year out, none of this would have been possible.
Dr. Rachael Swain is the recipient of an Australian Research Council
Discovery Early Career Research Award (project number DE130100914)
funded by the Australian government.

Note
1. M. Yunupingu passed away in June 2013. Due to respect for his family and
Indigenous Australian traditions, his first name is not printed here.

Cultural Warning

Members of Australian Indigenous Communities are respectfully

advised that a number of people mentioned in writing and depicted
in photographs in the following pages have passed away.
 Praise for Dance in Contested Land

“Dance in Contested Land is a welcome reminder of the wisdom of Indi-

geneity and its increasing relevance today. It takes us on a journey into body,
choreography, and dance, a way to reconnect and recentre with earth, with
other sentient beings, and with our deepest most human selves. The work of
Marrugeku, of Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain, is a vitally important model
of interculturalism in a world of increasing division and disunity; of discon-
nection and isolation. Their work brings us beyond arid abstraction and dry
rationality to spirit, to land, to family, the natural world as our true home.”
—Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, leader of the whare tapere, tribal centres of
performance in Aotearoa-New Zealand

“Deeply ethical in its approach, Dance in Contested Land offers a compelling

contribution to the field of dance studies both in method and in content.
With rigor, care, and insight, it considers how Marrugeku engages First
Nations ontologies and research priorities in relation to European genealo-
gies of experimental contemporary dance, as well as within practices of trans-
Indigenous exchange. Based on a quarter century of collaborative work
between author Rachael Swain and Marrugeku, it unfolds with thoughtful
awareness of the many complexities—historical, personal, spiritual, political,
artistic among them—involved in intercultural practice. It provides a nuanced
example both of Indigenous dance making, and of how those from different
lands and locations might dance together, and witness each other dance.”
—Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Department of Dance, University of California,
Riverside, USA

xv
xvi PRAISE FOR DANCE IN CONTESTED LAND

“Dance in Contested Land shows a unique vision of Indigenous-non-

Indigenous relations through a new understanding of dramaturgy and
performance practice. Swain draws on her work as a co-artistic director of
Marrugeku to show us how dramaturgical processes must evolve to include
different ways of knowing and being in the world. Swain is a visionary
artist and thinker. Her proposition for a dramaturgy of listening to Country
gives attention to multiple voices, corporealities and the environment. For
scholars, dramaturgs and performance makers, there is much to learn from
this book about the future of what performance should be.”
—Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center CUNY, USA
 Contents

Prologue: On the Sharing of Knowledge xxi

1 Introduction: Contested Land 1

1.1 Land: Country, History and Ancestral Presence 4
1.2 Indigenous-Interculturalism and the Politics
of Recognition 11
1.3 Ways of Knowing 20
1.4 Language and Terminology 23
Bibliography 31

2 The Dramaturgies of Listening to Country 35

2.1 Marrugeku 35
2.2 Crying Baby 40
2.3 Indigenous Dramaturgies—Blood, Land and Memory 45
2.4 Dramaturgies That Make Place and Time Visible 50
2.5 Listening to Country Is Not Dance in Nature 57
2.6 Listening to Country and the Cultural Dramaturg 59
Bibliography 65

3 Gudirr Gudirr —Culturally Situated

Neo-Expressionism 69
3.1 Broome—Where Desert Meet Sea and Australia Meets
Asia 71

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

3.2 Gudirr Gudirr 76

3.3 The Uncanny Affects of the Intercultural 84
3.4 Dramaturgies of Disturbance 89
3.5 Kinesthetic Transference in Colonial Aftermaths 98
Bibliography 104

4 Cut the Sky—Dramaturgies to Disrupt

the Anthropocene 107
4.1 Seismic Shifts 107
4.2 The Apocalypse Has Already Arrived, or, Dramaturgy
as a Field of Simultaneous Tensions 115
4.3 To Be Inhabited by Country 123
4.4 Dancing Response-Ability, or, the Ethics of not Being
Alone in the World 133
4.5 The Will of a Cloud 136
Bibliography 144

Epilogue: Ten Things About Dramaturgies of Listening

to Country 147

Index 153
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Thompson Yulidjirri with charcoal drawing of a mimih

(Image Rachael Swain, Kunbarlanja, 1995) 37
Fig. 2.2 Mimi rehearsals near Kunbarlanja (Image Lorrae Coffin,
1996) 39
Fig. 2.3 Mimi in the Netherlands (Image Geert Kliphuis,
Terschelling, 1997) 39
Fig. 2.4 Thompson Yulidjirri at Kabbari (Image Sarah George,
Arnhem Land, 2000) 43
Fig. 2.5 Katia Molino as the crying baby (Image Jon Green, Perth,
2001) 53
Fig. 3.1 Dalisa Pigram in Gudirr Gudirr (Image Heidrun Löhr,
Sydney, 2013) 78
Fig. 3.2 Dalisa Pigram and the net in Gudirr Gudirr (Image
Heidrun Löhr, Sydney, 2013) 80
Fig. 3.3 Pigram and fight video, Gudirr Gudirr (Image Heidrun
Löhr, Sydney, 2013) 93
Fig. 3.4 Dalisa Pigram in Gudirr Gudirr (Image Helen
Fletcher-Kennedy, Melbourne, 2013) 97
Fig. 4.1 Ngaire Pigram as Dangkaba (right) with Edwin Mulligan
(below) watch dancers Miranda Wheen and Eric Avery
perform in Crocodile Scene, Cut the Sky (Image Marina
Levitskaya, The Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State
University, 2018) 122
Fig. 4.2 Eric Avery, Josh Mu and Dalisa Pigram in ‘Butterfly
Dance’, Cut the Sky (Image Jon Green, Perth, 2015) 126

xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.3 Miranda Wheen in Radiation Duet, Cut the Sky (Image
Jon Green, Perth, 2015) 129
Fig. 4.4 Miranda Wheen at Bandilngan during the Listening to
Country Lab (Image Sam James, the Kimberley, 2013) 131
Fig. 4.5 Rain Song Final scene Cut the Sky (Image Jon Green,
Perth, 2015) 142
 Prologue: On the Sharing
of Knowledge

This book has been written between 2016 and 2020, a heightened
political period for Indigenous and settler relations in Australia. In
2017 Yolngu lawman and national Indigenous political leader Galarrwuy
Yunupingu described this as:

a time of great importance to the Australian nation: when people will

decide whether or not they will deal with the relationship between Aborig-
inal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and settlers who came after 1788.
As I see it the nation is at an important crossroads – either a real process
of settlement will now take shape, or the nation will turn its back on these
issues. (2017, p.xii)

In 2015, following widespread debates on reform to recognise Indige-

nous Peoples in the Australian constitution, the government appointed a
Referendum Council of Indigenous Australian leaders from around the
country to advise the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition on
progress and next steps towards constitutional reform. It was an unprece-
dented process in Australian history, as Indigenous peoples were excluded
entirely from the 1890s consultation that led to the Australian Constitu-
tion. Months of regional dialogues with Indigenous communities from
across the country followed. In May 2017, 250 Indigenous leaders met
in a National Constitutional Convention at Uluru, the sacred site of the
Anangu peoples in the Central Desert. Together they proposed a rejection
of¯ symbolic recognition in favour of the concrete steps of establishing a

xxi
xxii PROLOGUE: ON THE SHARING OF KNOWLEDGE

First Nations Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission for the

purposes of truth telling. Makarrata is a Yolngu word which can refer to
negotiated processes of coming together after a struggle. It is a frame-
work for listening and hearing, a considered space for addressing trauma,
wrongdoing and for clearing space to move forward.
At Uluru on the 26th of May 2017 Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble
woman from the Barrungam Nation, read The Uluru Statement from
the Heart to the people of Australia. The document, jointly written by
the Indigenous leaders at the Constitutional Convention, contains the
stories, activism and self-determined political aspiration of hundreds of
Indigenous Australians. I quote from the Uluru Statement at length
here to emphasise critical intersections between Makarrata, Indigenous
led sharing of cultural knowledge and truth telling which together under-
score the possibilities of making dance in contested land as it is described
in this book:

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land,
or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one-day
return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of
the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded
or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty
millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the
last two hundred years? With substantive constitutional change and struc-
tural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a
fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We
are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their
families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love
for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They
should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our
problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a
rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny
our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture
will be a gift to their country. (Referendum Council 2017)

There was a lengthy pause between the issuing of the Uluru Statement
and the response from the Australian government.
 PROLOGUE: ON THE SHARING OF KNOWLEDGE xxiii

Four months later, under Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull,

the government rejected the proposal for a First Nations Voice to Parlia-
ment on issues concerning Indigenous Peoples to be enshrined in the
constitution. This dismissal came with a false characterisation of the Voice
as a third chamber of parliament. This rejection of the core tenet of the
Uluru Statement was in stark contrast to the overwhelming support from
the Australian public. The government’s pronouncements at the time
barely acknowledged the call for a Makarrata Commission and seemed
totally to misunderstand its underlying generosity and purpose.
This book has been written within both the guiding light of the ambi-
tion and negotiation of the Uluru Statement and also the dark shadow
of its rejection by the Australian government. The ‘waiting at the cross-
roads’ of the possibility for encounter, truth telling and Makarrata that
Yunupingu describes above reverberates through twists of time. It extends
back through almost two and a half centuries of waiting for a response to
the call to meet each other after a struggle for the purpose of negotiating
a way forwards. It reaches into Indigenous futures emerging from the
collective now.
The Uluru Statement contains a generous offer for the sharing of
culture made by Indigenous leaders announcing “We believe this ancient
sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nation-
hood” (Referendum Council 2017). What is so powerful about the
offer—given the desperation and the political context which are also artic-
ulated—is not only the generosity but the obligation it carries. Implicit
in this offering of the sharing of knowledge is an obligation for settler
Australians to listen and learn. To feel our (settler Australian) enormous
challenge of attempting to understand the richness of a culture with a
multi-millennial history. This obligation also calls for the responsibility
that it entails. This means support of Indigenous culture, language, dance
and art and ways of living in and knowing the world, but it also means
accepting intergenerational responsibilities for restitution in the light of
how much culture has been devastated under conditions of violence. The
Australian government’s rejection of the proposal for a First Nations Voice
to Parliament demonstrates that at a national level the generosity of this
offer to share knowledge has not been acknowledged or met, not even
part way, to the ongoing shame of the Australian people.
The proposition for intercultural dance on contested land explained
in this book is made as a proactive move to accept the generosity and
with it the responsibility offered at Uluru by outlining choreographic
xxiv PROLOGUE: ON THE SHARING OF KNOWLEDGE

and performative processes that enable a meeting in a considered way on

contested land for the purposes of listening, hearing and moving forward.
It describes the capacity of artists to work in this space and to address the
extended moment of waiting at the crossroads. It is a rejection of symbolic
recognition and an embrace of substantive change in choreographic and
dramaturgical practices for the empowerment of Indigenous peoples. That
is: acknowledging and addressing Indigenous sovereignty and deep spir-
itual connection with unceded land and restitution for epistemological
violence inflicted. Through describing new choreopolitical processes for
making dance and their implications for attending it, this book asks what
might ‘substantive change and structural reform’, mean for dance on
contested land? In what ways might that enable the ancient sovereignty
of First Peoples to shine through as a fuller expression of nationhood?
What does truth telling mean for dance in Australia and in other sites
of contested nationhood so the forces of amnesia no longer shadow our
history? And it insists that experimental choreographic processes which
take up the invitation to share knowledge and culture must also take up
the obligations.
Engaging in Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing has the
potential to radicalise thought in many areas: science, particularly rele-
vant in the face of global climate change, humanities, and, for the
purposes of this book, the arts specifically. But it’s a engagement
that comes with obligations both practical and conceptual. I have felt
these implications to underpin every page of this book as I have written
it. I am aware that the proposition—that a wider dance community and
its audiences might come to learn from Indigenous ontologies, values and
responsibilities while Indigenous communities are still living in, surviving
and resurging through the ongoing effects of colonialism and its pact with
capitalism—is a very delicate one. The Indigenous-intercultural projects
described in this book that seek to revision and re-orientate choreogra-
phy’s relation to movement, emotion and place can only exist in sites
of engagement which produce useful results for Indigenous communi-
ties and artists. That is, they enable and empower Indigenous voices and
embody modes of resilience, respect and relationality from radical acts of
listening to Country.
Dance in Contested Land offers a road map towards what it could
mean to dance together, cognisant of histories of trauma and repression.
It outlines an interculturalism that supports and follows Indigenous self-
determination and the distinct and differentiated work of Indigenous and
 PROLOGUE: ON THE SHARING OF KNOWLEDGE xxv

settler peoples in coming together after a struggle. The projects outlined

here demonstrate the capacity that artists have in applying imagination as
a political and cultural force for change and in making that vision visible
to audiences in many locations. This capacity may enable settler artists and
scholars to shoulder the obligations and therefore finally be able to accept
the offer of the sharing knowledge.

References
Referendum Council, Australian. 2017. “First Nations National Constitu-
tional Convention, Uluru Statement From the Heart.” Uluru: Refer-
endum Council. https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/event/first-nations-
regional-dialogue-in-uluru.
Yunupingu, Galarrwuy. 2017. “Forward.” In A Rightful Place: A Road Map to
Recognition, edited by Shireen Morris, vii–x. Carlton: Black Inc.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Contested Land

In this book, I trace an engagement between dance and the land it is

danced on, activated through intercultural choreopolitical processes in
sites of contest, survival and renewal for Indigenous Peoples in northern
Australia. Two dance projects provide the lens for this investigation.
The first is Gudirr Gudirr (2013) a solo performed by Yawuru and
Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram which explores the legacy
of past government policies for Indigenous Peoples in her home town
of Broome in the north-west of Western Australia. The second is Cut
the Sky (2015), a transdisciplinary interrogation of industrialisation and
climate change in the wider Kimberley region of the north-west which
draws on the experience and perspectives of Yawuru, Nyikina, Walma-
jarri and Bunuba artists and cultural custodians who have collaborated
on the work.1 Both productions were developed in intercultural, trans-
Indigenous and transdisciplinary processes between artists from these
language groups and with visiting Australian Indigenous and settler artists
as well as collaborators from other contested sites around the world.
The works described here reveal emergent choreoaesethetics and new
Indigenous-intercultural dramaturgies which reassert ethical relation-
ships with the land and other living beings, communities and histories.
Through thick description of performance making processes, I highlight
ways the works themselves ‘remember forward’ past/futures in the north-
west revealing ways in which land endures as an active presence. Yawuru
Elder Elsie Edgar states: “Buru yingan jayida” (Yawuru: Country is

© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Swain, Dance in Contested Land, New World Choreographies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46551-3_1
2 R. SWAIN

still alive) (2011, 115). Engaging in this aliveness through experimental

choreographic processes activates capacities for response-ability with
implications for making, performing and attending dance on contested
lands.
Indigenous dance is located and relational, not just to and with other
humans but also with non-human species and other sentient and Ances-
tral beings. Dance which traces trajectories of tradition across Indigenous
understanding of simultaneous presence of Ancestors and events both in
place and across time brings responsibilities and implications to other
locations, times and peoples. In sites where colonial invasion and acts
of cultural genocide have decimated private ceremonial and public forms
of cultural dance, music, song and language, these forms can remain
dormant or sleeping as a latent presence waiting to be awakened when
the time is right. In these cases, the breath of revival can be activated
through individual experimentation and collaborative construction, nego-
tiated within community. In this way, the dance projects conducted
in remote locations in northern Australia described in these chapters
reveal how micro-politics can have implications of macro-importance for
discourse in critical dance studies. This proposal forms the basis for the
notion of dance in contested land and the new intercultural dramaturgies
such practices can enable. New collaborations between Indigenous and
allied artists are understood to speak back to wider debates processed at
multiple levels of society and government.
Gudirr Gudirr and Cut the Sky are produced by Marrugeku, an
intercultural dance theatre Company co-directed by Pigram and myself.2
The Company began in 1995 on Kunwinjku land in Kunbarlanja, West
Arnhem Land and since 2003 Marrugeku has been based in the lands of
the Yawuru in Broome on the west coast of the Kimberley. This book
focuses on productions developed in the Kimberley between 2012 and
2015, a period of significant consolidation and expansion of Marrugeku’s
choreographic and dramaturgical processes and aesthetics. However, in
Chapter 2 I also discuss Crying Baby (2000) created in Kunbarlanja with
Kunwinjku Elder Thompson Yulidjirri in order to outline the emergence
of the interpenetration of conceptions of land with the social, the political
and the aesthetic which have since consolidated to become hallmarks of
Marrugeku’s more recent works.
I have been privileged to learn from the ‘school of Marrugeku’ and
the cultural custodians who have guided the work, many of whom are
quoted in this book at length. I write here as a director and/or dramaturg
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 3

of settler (Scottish, Irish and English) heritage and also as an immigrant

to Australia. My pathway to this role in Marrugeku was informed by
growing up as a Pākehā in the rugged beauty of the lands of the Ngai
Tahu, the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand.3 The sense that it was
a responsibility as both Pākehā and a citizen of New Zealand to learn
from the Tangata Whenua (Māori: people of the land) was installed in
me through my upbringing in New Zealand. I was encouraged to learn
Māori language and exposed to the intersectionality of culture, society
and land rights through to the work of Māori visual artists, writers and
activists of the 1980s.
The shock of moving to Australia as teenager in the late eighties,
with the shifts in my position as Pākehā in Aotearoa to Gubba on the
lands of the Gadigal in Sydney, was formative for me as a young artist.4
Witnessing Indigenous activists from the far reaches of the continent
gathered to protest against the nationalistic bicentennial ‘celebrations’ of
1988 exposed the vast gaping denial of Indigenous histories that has been
famously named the “great Australian silence” (1969) by Anthropologist
W.E.H. Stanner. This silence and the profound space of non-encounter
that persists in Australia between First Peoples and those of us of settler
descent continues to circulate in arts and scholarly practices and through
programming by sector organisations today. When the invitation to partic-
ipate in a collaborative dance and physical theatre project in West Arnhem
Land arose I had a sense of the importance and possibilities of this
work. However, the ways and means of this journey were yet to come—
a journey of learning new ways to listen, to see and to know. Equally,
as I will describe below, this included learning when to turn away from
what is not mine to know. My framing of the research, rehearsal and
touring of the projects described in this book is fundamentally informed
by this optic of learning, listening and turning away. I draw on exam-
ples from periods spent as a visiting Balanda in Arnhem Land and later
as a Gadiya in the Kimberley.5 In acknowledging my own position as a
settler artist and scholar participating within Marrugeku’s new intercultur-
alism and observing its trans-Indigenous exchange, the writing here owes
a debt to all those who have collaborated in these projects that began in
Kunbarlanja and have continued in Broome.
4 R. SWAIN

1.1 Land: Country, History

and Ancestral Presence
As a starting point in an intercultural investigation of dance and its
relationship to land, we must accept that the very concept of ‘land’ is
both cultural and political. In Australian Aboriginal English, the term
Country is used to denote an area of land formations and stories over
which a group or individual may have custodianship.6 Yawuru leader,
Professor Mick Dodson, explains that in referring to Country, Aboriginal
Australians:

might mean homeland, or tribal or clan area and we might mean more
than just a place on the map. For us, Country is a word for all the values,
places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area
and its features. It describes the entirety of our ancestral domains. (2009)

By contrast the noun land as defined in the Australian Oxford dictionary

foregrounds its value as property and nation state:

1) the solid part of the earth’s surface. 2) (a) an expanse of country;

ground; soil. (b) such land in relation to its use, quality, etc., or as a basis
for agriculture. (c) any part of the earth’s surface and everything annexed
to it, as trees, crops, buildings etc. (d) any proprietary interest in land. 3)
a country, nation or state. 4) (a) real property. (b) estates. (Moore 2004,
711–12)

Here land is identified as dry and solid, as agricultural commodity and

as real estate. These definitions present fundamentally conflicting values
underlying the conceptions of land as property and commodity versus
land as an area under custodianship containing waterways and atmo-
spheres and multiple living presences and events across time. This offers
an inherently fraught and unsettled site in which dance in Australia must
navigate its attachments to, and imaginative expression of, land.
In the language of the Yawuru people, the word buru translates to
the intersecting relationships between place, ground, seasons and time.
Yawuru Ngan-ga, the Yawuru language app, translates buru as: “Time.
Place” (Yawuru 2013). Yawuru buru, the homelands of the Yawuru,
therefore, contains all that has the occurred there, including its colo-
nial history of violent dispossession and, for those who follow Yawuru
customary law, the co-presence across time of sentient beings.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 5

The day-to-day activities, choreographic processes and rehearsal discus-

sions which have taken place in the projects described in this book have
engaged in Yawuru, Bunuba, Nyikina and Kunwinjku conceptions of land.
These understandings have therefore contributed to the values, logics,
protocols, ontologies and resulting dramaturgies which have emerged
from these processes. I quote from cultural custodians who have partic-
ipated in the work to acknowledge some open public understandings of
the impacts and effects of what is known in Yawuru as Bugarrigarra and
in Kunwinjku as Djang which have both been described in English as
the Dreaming.7 I do so carefully, with the respectful appreciation that,
as Stanner has explained: “We [non-Indigenous Australians] shall not
understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings” (1987,
225).
In their Cultural Management Plan the Yawuru state:

Bugarrigarra is often glossed in English as Dreamtime, and bugarri does

mean ‘dream’. However, the terms bugarri and Bugarrigarra signify a
non-ordinary reality, not mere insubstantial phenomena. Bugarrigarra is
a world creating epoch and the supernatural beings active in that time.
These beings are responsible not only for the formation of the world
and its contents but also for the introduction of social laws and princi-
ples governing human existence. Bugarrigarra is also credited with the
introduction of human languages, the seasons and their cycles, the nature
of our topography and the biodiversity. (2011, 30)

The Yawuru describe the non-ordinary, enigmatic presence governing

connection between human and Ancestral worlds in ways that have rele-
vance to this book: “From Bugarrigarra our Country is imbued with a
life-force from which all living things arrive. Within the Country our rayi
(spirits) and our Ancestors live. It is from the Country that our people,
our language, our stories and our Law arise” (Yawuru 2011, 30).
From my restricted knowledge I have come to understand Bugarri-
garra as offering both a mapping of Country and a mapping of social
interactions, operating in both the past and a continuous present. These
are bound in an ethics of responsibility, functioning in connectivity with
seasons, place, non-human species and in sentient specific lifeworlds.8
Kombumerri and Wakka Wakka philosopher Mary Graham’s seminal
proposal for two central observations in Indigenous philosophy about
nature, spirit and human beings that have not changed over millennia
6 R. SWAIN

has relevance here. She outlines these axioms as: “the land is the law”,
and “you are not alone in the world” (2008). The implications of this
ontology that understands that land, atmospheres, minerals, waters, the
living and the dead, non-human species and Ancestral forces all have pres-
ence and agency and are responsive and responding to human lifeworlds
will be explored in the following chapters.
The possibility of these understandings flows through Marrugeku’s
works and finds form in our practice. This is enabled through the
scrutiny and guidance of cultural custodians of stories, songs and dance,
whose authorship extends into the works through the dancers and in
the complex net of kinship ties and cultural responsibilities enacted in
the performance-making process. Graham’s proposal can be understood
as a broad framing of the conception of land explored for dance and
dramaturgy in this book. However, the processes that I describe are
grounded in projects undertaken in particular locations and with specific
nation-based knowledges shared by custodians with collaborating artists.
Senior Yawuru cultural leader and Senator for Western Australia Patrick
Dodson has provided cultural guidance to Marrugeku’s projects since the
Company relocated to Broome in 2003. His philosophical, cultural and
political contributions remain central to Marrugeku’s new intercultural
dramaturgies emerging from dance as a political act on contested land.
Along with being one of Australia’s leading Indigenous political figures,
he is Pigram’s grandfather (in Yawuru kinship terms). Over the years he
has also become Marrugeku’s primary cultural dramaturg, a term I will
explain in more detail in the following chapter.9
During 2009–2010 Marrugeku developed Buru, an intergenerational
knowledge transferal project and performance, devised and performed by
young people in Broome and presented for intergenerational audiences.
Dodson attended rehearsals along with senior Yawuru leader Peter Yu,
and together they spoke directly to the young cast, many of whom are
Yawuru. They explained the presence of two creation figures for Rubibi,
the Broome peninsula. Dodson named them as Boss Lizards:

These Lizards, they are called Lizards because we can’t say their name, they
are that important, they are that significant. They are very, very real. They
created all this land. In Broome, along this country, Karajarri County, the
Yawuru Country, Nyikina County right through to the desert to Uluru.
They have a big role. They are big things, bigger than anything you can
imagine. They can see for miles. They also have very clear eyes. (2010)
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 7

The understanding that the two Boss Lizards have a form, a name and
a presence that we (i.e. those of us who are uninitiated) cannot conceive
or imagine and yet are described in simple terms as two lizards exempli-
fies how Bugarrigarra can be explained so those learning about its most
basic, outer conception might be able to grasp something of its presence.
Outlining their existence not only as ‘real’, now, but also as a force that is
seeing and responding, “with clear eyes”, Dodson went on to describe the
Boss Lizards as possessing a hyper visual and aural sensitivity, interacting
with the minute detail of Country and human activity therein:

They can see the littlest things on the ground. Little foot prints, little hand
marks. Any things that have been done by people—they can see it. And
they have very good hearing; they can hear you whisper miles away. They
know what’s going on in here, (points to chest), inside. (2010)

In this way, narrative descriptions of figures from Bugarrigarra who

created the landscape are polysemic and devolve meaning in multiple
ways—simultaneously—to different sections of the community: initi-
ated/uninitiated, male/female, custodians and others. Such descriptions
are both guides monitoring multiple aspects of daily life, good and bad,
but also operate as an enigmatic and somehow shifting veil, obscuring and
revealing meaning in a complex and multifaceted patterning of narrations,
events, transformations and kinship ties.
The understanding that Ancestors of Country observe minute detail
of human interaction across time gives rise to another critical conceptu-
alisation of land which animates this book. That is, land as the site of
dispossession of Australia’s First Peoples, land as the primary object of
political power in the settler colonial relationship and land as the means
for the settler colonial state to secure its power and legitimacy though
past and ongoing conquest.
Around the world settler colonial societies have sought to break the
connection between Indigenous peoples and their lands so the state could
access the land for settlement, for natural resources and ultimately for
power and control. In Australia, as in other sites of colonial invasion,
the government has systematically implemented genocidal policies by
removing Indigenous children from their families to break the connec-
tion between children and their families, their culture, their language and
their land. In the name of assimilation, the Australian government prac-
tised barbaric measures of domination and control to eliminate barriers
8 R. SWAIN

to natural resources and land. The separation of Indigenous Peoples from

the land that provides their sustenance and way of life extends, addition-
ally, to disrupt the intimate connection between dance and the land it is
danced on.
These events reverberate with other contexts around the world where
both historic and contemporary government violence create an ongoing
“past, present, future” context where the prospect of meeting each other
to dance on contested land is a charged political and cultural site. Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) is an independent
scholar and artist who applies Nishnaabeg intellectual practices to Indige-
nous land-based education in Canada. She asks how is it possible to
“advance the process of Canadian reconciliation without talking about
land?” (2016). Simpson raises the critical nature of understanding how to
better share the land:

Land is an important conversation for Indigenous peoples and Canada to

have because land is at the root of our conflicts. Far from asking settler
Canadians to pack up and leave, it is critical that we think about how we
can better share land. That’s a conversation we’re not having, except when
conflict escalates. (2016)

Simpson’s Nishnaabeg and Canadian perspectives resonate with the

contexts of the projects described in this book and will be applied to
interrogate the primary question: How is it that we can dance together
on contested land? As Simpson identifies, taking contested land as a
frame raises questions of how intercultural dance sits within debates on
reconciliation, questions I seek to unpack below.
Anthropologist and political leader Marcia Langton of the Yiman and
Bidjara nations has noted that the divergent visions of land as seen by
settlers and Indigenous Australians: “produce a tension, one that spills
into the world of Aboriginal art” (2003, 52). The spill of this tension
between settlers and Indigenous people, and the forces they deploy in art
making have not been widely discussed in dance studies by First Peoples
or those who have, as Simpson puts it: “done the work within Indige-
nous intelligence systems to carry the knowledge in the first place” (2017,
199). Langton goes on to say “Aboriginal art expresses the possibility of
human intimacy with landscapes. This is the key to its power: it makes
available a rich tradition of human ethics of relationships with place and
other species to a worldwide audience” (2003, 55). Following this asser-
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 9

tion, Indigenous art can be understood as ever more relevant as awareness

of humanity’s impact on global environments and weather patterns grow.
Dance in Contested Land extends the purview of this statement into dance
practice to show how collaborative dance projects created on the terms
of Indigenous artists can cause contemporary dance forms to be ethically
re-evaluated, re-activated and quite literally re-mobilised.
That Australia is the only Commonwealth country to have no treaty
with its First Peoples has led to institutionalised and government-
sanctioned blindness and wilful denial of the visibility and presence of
Indigenous Australians, and their rights to custodianship of their own
lands. Perhaps the most well-known—and in a sense the most ludicrous of
these dehumanising acts of blindness—was the denial of citizenship rights
for Indigenous Australians in their own country until 1967. This selective
blindness was reinforced by Australia’s upholding of the British founding
legal doctrine of terra nullius, land that is supposedly legally ‘empty’ or
a ‘wasteland’, land belonging to nobody, until the final successful judge-
ment of Mabo v Queensland (No2) in the High Court of Australia in
1992. Dodson explains: “In 1992 the High Court repudiated terra nullius
as a monstrously unjust fiction. Its decision challenged the imagination of
the nation to incorporate indigenous culture and society into its national
fabric, despite its history of ‘unutterable shame’” (2009). This ‘mon-
strous’ denial of presence in place and associated narratives has broad
sweeping implications for dance, music, languages and visual arts practices
as does Dodson’s provocation for Australia to “incorporate indigenous
culture and society into its national fabric” (ibid.).
Despite the six separate British colonial self-governing colonies
agreeing to unite and become the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901,
their brutal colonial actions continued to cause waves of pain and loss,
the effects of which reverberate to this day. Government-sanctioned
actions to suppress cultural practices including dance, language and song,
alongside the barbaric intrusions of early modern industries—in partic-
ular the pastoral industry—led to dislocations of nations from their
Country. The effects of violent disputes over access to water, of Indige-
nous workers being paid only in minimal rations and in some cases
the rape of Indigenous woman followed by the forced removal of their
mixed-race children, continue to circulate through generations.10 These
events brought destruction to the retention of Indigenous pasts and also
destruction to the flourishing of Indigenous futures. The terms ‘colonial’
and ‘postcolonial’ may be useful chronological terms to define whether
10 R. SWAIN

the state-based British colonies prior to federation, or the subsequent

federal Australian government are legally responsible for compensation
and restitution should Australia ever attempt a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. However, the fact that the newly appointed state and federal
governments of Australia were made up of descendants of, and recently
naturalised, British citizens who adopted, continued and in some cases
expanded brutal colonial practices and rule of law, means in reality there
was no end to colonialism at Federation in 1901. This is why I do not
adopt the term postcolonial in this book as the purpose and nature of
the colonial project are an ongoing force with particular relevance to
Australian dance and its relationship to the land it is danced on.
Over twenty years before this book, in The Lie of the Land settler writer
and historian Paul Carter called into question the relationship between
the Western arts of representation and politics of movement across the
colonised ground, proposing that colonialism is sustained by the creation
of a subjectivity without an attachment to the land (1996). In Exhausting
Dance (2006), André Lepecki’s important contribution to understanding
relationships between ground, colonial violence, contemporary philos-
ophy and new dance aesthetics, he furthered Carter’s argument with the
proposal that to initiate an anti-colonialist discussion of a politics of the
ground we are required to identify discursive and kinetic practices that
highlight “the body in motion as an extension of the terrain that sustains
it” (2006, 100). He focused Carter’s proposal for dance studies stating:
“Therefore any politics of the ground is not only a political topography,
but it is also a political kinesis” (2006, 100).
A primary aim of this book is to identify, through intercultural inves-
tigation, new choreoaesthetics of place and time which activate this “spill
of tensions” (Langton above), to produce a “political kinesis” (raised by
Lepecki, after Carter) and to express ways in which land is “alive” (Edgar).
Together this framing of dance in contested land can contribute to a revi-
sioning of dance practice and theory. That is, I wish to counter the notion
of subjectivity without attachment to land in Australian contemporary
dance. I consider this subjectivity to be a colonial space of non-encounter.
I also challenge the notion that an ethics of relationships with place and
other species are restricted to the purview and responsibility of Indige-
nous art and dance. While this book directly addresses the possibilities
for, and capacities of, intercultural choreographic practice created through
collaboration within nation specific Indigenous Australian contexts, I also
challenge settler dance artists to understand that a subjectivity without
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 11

an attachment to land in Australia should not be accepted as the status

quo or something neutral. Instead this can be understood as an active
brutal stance, deeply informed by the white blindness and institutionalised
national racism that sustain colonialism. The implications of a binding
of person and place where gesture itself is remembered, reiterated and
reimagined through improvisational processes connected to Country and
its custodians will be detailed in the following chapters.

1.2 Indigenous-Interculturalism
and the Politics of Recognition
This book proposes that the moment of dance intertwining with situ-
ated histories of contact and exchange on contested land represents
a moment of new interculturalism. This interculturalism is, however,
grounded specifically in choreographic interactions between and across
the multiple subject positions of artists of Indigenous and settler descent
and of mixed-race identities within both. These choreographic transmis-
sions are understood to take place within the contested antagonisms
of a settler colonial nation. Dodson explains the wider challenges of
Indigenous recognition that these processes sit within:

Several attempts have been made to improve the relationship between

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian nation
state. Yet despite these efforts, we have not resolved the deep historical
grievances that linger from the unjust manner of Australia’s settlement.
While the disparity in our socio-economic circumstances is acknowledged,
there has been very little effort to address the structural inequalities that
have contributed to this. Nor has there been any genuine attempt to under-
stand the difference that exist between us, or examine how they could be
accommodated or viewed in an innovative or transformative light. (2016,
136)

This challenge to recognise and understand difference, including nation-

specific difference and to view this in ‘innovative or transformative light’,
asks complicated questions of the arts sector as we enter the third decade
of this century. Many of the previous centuries’ failings as Dodson lists
above still challenge our understandings of ourselves as a nation and are
expressed through our arts practices.
12 R. SWAIN

In my own writing and within Marrugeku we have chosen to use

the debated term ‘intercultural’, conscious of its past uses and abuses in
performance projects around the world. I also acknowledge that some
intercultural theatre and dance practices have been understood to perpet-
uate rather than subvert colonialism.11 I use the term to be reminded
that intercultural practice always takes place on the unstable and shifting
ground of cultural interaction, invoking histories of contact and providing
scope for remapping future exchanges in contested sites.
The important publications by Ric Knowles (2010) and more recently
Royona Mitra from this book series (2015) provide excellent discussions
of the histories, debates and contemporary practices of interculturalism
in dance and theatre. Both have adopted the term new intercultur-
alism which Knowles proposes as “a new kind of rhizomatic (multiple,
non-hierarchical, horizontal) intercultural performance-from-below that
is emerging globally” (2010, 59). This work, he suggests: “…involves
collaborations and solidarities across real and respected material differ-
ences within local, urban, national and global intercultural performance
ecologies”. Knowles, together with his collaborators and co-writers,
speaks to the continuing re-negotiation of cultural values and the social,
political and aesthetic re-constitution of individual and community iden-
tities in ways that have the potential to remake the real, with significant
resonance to conditions in Australia.
The modes of meeting each other in dance described in this book
can be understood to put pressure on some of the proposals from the
1990s emerging from discussions which transitioned from binary models
of cross-cultural collaboration to notions of sociocultural hybridity. These
include notions for a third theatre (Eugenio Barba), for interweaving
(Erika Fischer-Lichte), or cultural hybridity and a third space (Bhabha
1994).
Italian author and theatre director Eugenio Barba’s third theatre may
have had more relevance to earlier modes of cross-cultural practice where
artists understood to have come from two distinct cultures, practising
different art forms, encounter each other to produce new fusion practices
in a so-called third space. However, in communities where multiplicities
prevail, this model becomes less relevant. In her analysis of Akram Khan’s
choreographic practice as a British born dancer of Bangladeshi descent,
Mitra proposes that in diasporic contexts new interculturalism can be
a “relentless back-and-forth lived reality that permanently negotiates
multiple otherness from the perspective of another” (2015, 15).
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 13

Mitra’s framework is particular to the experience of dancers from dias-

poric communities who negotiate simultaneously being immigrant and
citizen, visitor and local in their new home. While different in its appli-
cation, the understanding of a “relentless back and forth lived reality”
for artists who identify with their own Indigenous nations and clan
groups, and at the same time acknowledge immigrant and/or settler iden-
tities, can give space to the nuanced ambiguities and constantly shifting
hierarchies of multiple modes of affiliation and belonging.
Aligned with postcolonial theories, Bhabha contends that a new hybrid
identity emerges from the interweaving of traces of the coloniser and
colonised, problematising the credibility of essentialist cultural identity
and notions of authenticity. His proposal of the third space is to shift
the “burden of the meaning of culture” from so-called ritualistic national
traditions to the ‘inter’ the inbetween space which he proposes is where
“the cutting edge of translation and negotiation” takes place (1994, 56).
The case studies following demonstrate that in Indigenous contexts the
nature of the multiplicity can include moments, however fleeting, that
privilege particular cultural configurations and embodiments, knowledges
and vernaculars, and yet which do not essentialise, but rather revivify and
reveal cultures operating with agency, within structural inequities.
Mitra proposes that “new interculturalism becomes an interventionist
aesthetic and an embodied, political and philosophical way of thinking
and being within oneself and ultimately shapes interactions with others”
(2015, 15). This stance informs the choreographic investigations within
the Indigenous-Asian community of Broome where Marrugeku has been
based since 2003 and which I will explain in more detail in Chapter 3,
where an embodied understanding of fluid, yet distinct and constantly
negotiated, subjectivities underpin the work of dance.
The possibilities and challenges of culturally and politically informed
meetings of Indigenous and allied artists in new intercultural practices also
deserve being reimagined within Indigenous led debates challenging
hollow attempts at symbolic reconciliation and recognition led by the
nation state. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand criticisms of recon-
ciliation have largely centred on ways liberal symbolic reconciliation have
failed to prioritise real material changes in land governance, allocation of
resources, and socio-economic conditions.
I align the processes described within this book with Métis scholar
and visual artist David Garneau’s call for “the need to create collabora-
tions beyond the project currently known as Reconciliation” (2016, 23)
14 R. SWAIN

which in turn require “forms of representation outside of the current

Reconciliation narrative” (2016, 23) drawing on “irreconcilable spaces
of Aboriginality” (2016, 27). Garneau makes an argument for ‘concili-
ation’ as a more appropriate and historically accurate starting point for
discussions. He explains how changing the frame of the project known as
reconciliation can demonstrate how nation-specific traditions potentially
offer viable pathways to peace-building, redress and healing within local
histories and cultural contexts.
It is in the spirit of new approaches to collaboration led by nation-
specific initiatives, guided by Custodians and by considering conciliation
and intergenerational responsibility that I seek to explore the reframing
of interculturalism through dance on contested lands. Settler Cultural
Studies writers and scholars Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs’ proposal that the
possibilities/impossibilities of reconciliation: “co-exist and flow through
each other in a productively unstable dynamic” (1998, 24) is useful when
approaching the troubled space of intercultural performance co-created
by artists of Indigenous and settler descent. In Chapters 3 and 4, I
will explain how embodiment of this productive instability takes form in
new choreoaesthetics which in turn work to destabilise hegemonic dance
practices. Here devising artists bring potent imaginations and political
and social perspectives, working actively with and through their multiple
cultural subjectivities as choreographic methodologies. This work is often
conducted in acute social and cultural circumstances and under ongoing
regimes of control and assault of First Peoples’ lives.
Garneau’s call for ‘conciliation’ aligns with the Yolngu concept of
Makarrata that I introduced in the prologue. The term Makarrata gained
heightened exposure following the issuing of the Uluru Statement from
the Heart in 2017; however, it was brought into national conscious-
ness much earlier by elected representatives of Indigenous nations at
the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC) in 1979. The NAC recom-
mended a Treaty of Commitment be entered into between the Australian
government and Aboriginal nations and chose the word Makarrata to
name this process.12 Gumatj woman of the Yolngu nation Merrikiyawuy
Ganambarr-Stubbs explains that the Yolngu concept has many layers of
meaning: “It can be a negotiation of peace, or a negotiation and an agree-
ment where both parties agree to one thing so that there is no dispute or
no other bad feeling” (in Pearson 2017) Without a dignified and perfor-
mative process of treaty negotiation the struggle, and the bad feeling,
continues at the heart of the nation.
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 15

Makarrata is a specific encounter between peoples in dispute. It is

inherently a process of truth telling, making peace and moving forward
into the future. Yolngu Elder Galarrwuy Yunupingu states that “In the
old days, the clan leaders would send a gift of cycad bread to the other
clan to request a meeting in a peaceful way. So, too, is the final Refer-
endum Council’s report a sign of friendship and a call to make peace”
(2017, x). The generosity and considered nature of this offer is aligned
with the Referendum Council’s rejection of symbolic recognition, to seek
instead “a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-
making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about
our history” (2017, 3). So too could we begin to understand new
approaches to collaboration conceived through nation-specific initiatives
in intercultural dance as an exchange of something of value, a material
offering and a process of transforming innovation to address the bad
feeling of historic and contemporary grievances which are ongoing.
The concept of coming together after a struggle in a state of ‘produc-
tive instability’, through a performative encounter of relational exchange
that is situated within a cultural framework, itself governed by First
Peoples, is the lens I wish to apply to the new Indigenous interculturalism
described in this book. Like a Makarrata, it is a respectful acknowledge-
ment of differences and requires a preparedness for all parties to both
speak and listen.
In their communication announcing their rejection of the Uluru State-
ment, the Australian government barely acknowledged the call for a
Makarrata commission and seemed totally to misunderstand its under-
lying generosity and purpose. The Turnbull government rejected the
request for an Indigenous Voice to parliament on issues effecting Indige-
nous Peoples on the basis of modernist homogeneity and assimilationist
policies. They stated they did not believe such a body was “desirable”,
arguing that the “radical” proposal undermines equality and the principle
of one-person one-vote:

Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having

equal civic rights - all being able to vote for, stand for and serve in either
of the two chambers of our national parliament - the House of Representa-
tives and the Senate. A constitutionally enshrined additional representative
assembly for which only Indigenous Australians could vote for or serve in
is inconsistent with this fundamental principle. (Turnbull et al. 2017)
16 R. SWAIN

Under this rhetoric, nation-building entails the fashioning of individual

citizens, governed by a uniform common civil code. Western moderni-
ty’s project to eradicate any legal and political recognition of cultural
and religious difference has implications for dance that are central to this
book. The projects described here call to account a constitution based on
homogenised ideas of equality and provide a foundation for a constitution
which recognises living together in difference. These ideas have important
implications for choreography including a focus on individual, cultural
and nation-specific difference and personal story embodied through
choreographic processes, connecting in turn to specific dance histories
which will be explained in the following chapters.
This stance brings acknowledgement of distinct nation specific and
mixed-race identities, which are often flat-lined in mainstream Indigenous
dance in Australia.13 The space for multiple Indigenous subject posi-
tions and the distinct practices, languages and identities of specific nations
performed in dance also brings into focus trans-Indigenous exchange
operating alongside and within new interculturalism.14 Relationships,
exchange and dispute between Indigenous communities and nations have
always been negotiated in large part through performance. This includes
the negotiation inherent to being a guest in the homelands of other First
Peoples through acknowledging the distinct and differentiated roles of
traditional owners of Country and visitors welcomed to that Country.
Tsimshian dance artist and scholar Mique’l Dangeli has described these as
host/guest relation-scapes (2016), a term I will apply in a discussion of
the production Cut the Sky in Chapter 4.
Around the world over the past forty years, recognition has become the
dominant mode of negotiation and decolonisation between the nation-
state and Indigenous nations. Debates on recognition have progressed
in distinct ways in different neo-colonial contexts. In Australia where
there is no treaty and has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
the politics of recognition have been rehearsed through the campaign to
recognise Indigenous Peoples in the constitution of Australia, leading to
the Uluru Statement as described in the prologue. In Canada, debates
have been largely centred on the limits of liberal symbolic reconciliation
post the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.15
Yellowknives Dean scholar Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recogni-
tion as a method of organising difference and identity in liberal politics,
questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histo-
ries of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 17

can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgement. Coulthard sets

out an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct and
redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather
than on seeking appreciation from the nation state. By retaining and
reworking a concept of recognition drawing on the history and example
of Indigenous political movements Coulthard develops an approach that
is more about “Indigenous peoples empowering themselves through
cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning that seek to
prefigure radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of
colonial power” (2014, 18). This resurgent politics of recognition draws
from the “grounded normativity of Indigenous modalities of place-based
resistance and criticism” (2014, 14).
Coulthard’s idea of Indigeneity traces trajectories of tradition from a
pre-colonial past activated through revival and resurgence to imagine the
horizon of a decolonised future. It grounds social identities in place-based
ethics, rooted in the land, which both predate and survive its colonisation.
Exemplifying this approach, Simpson draws on her teacher Basil John-
son’s reframing of recognition from within Anishinaabeg intelligence:

Recognition within Nishnaabeg intelligence is a process of seeing another

being’s core essence; it is a series of relationships. It is reciprocal, continual,
and a way of generating society. It amplifies Nishnaabewin— all of the prac-
tices and intelligence that make us Nishnaabeg. It cognitively reverses the
violence of dispossession because what’s the opposite of dispossession in
Indigenous thought again? Not possession, because we’re not supposed to
be capitalists, but connection, a coded layering of intimate interconnec-
tion and interdependence that creates a complicated algorithmic network
of presence, reciprocity, consent, and freedom. (2017, 185)

These understandings of recognition built on the grounded normativity

of specific nation-based empowerment and respectful yet experimental
engagement with traditional practices is where Coulthard and Simpson’s
revisioning of recognition aligns with this book. That is, the Indigenous-
interculturalism described here responds directly to land, and its First
Peoples’ priorities and politics. This is demonstrated through processes of
revival and reimagining of cultural dance practices through an embodied
engagement with land, its custodians and Ancestral, political and social
stories carried in the bodies of the dancers.
18 R. SWAIN

In the chapters that follow I will outline a dialectical understanding of

the recognition of difference, as difference engaged in encounter (with
people, places, histories, other species and land) as crucial to the new
kinetic modes which are enabled to emerge in situations of conflict on
contested land. The Indigenous-interculturalism described here enables
the possibility that self-determination and the sharing of (public, outside)
knowledge might co-exist and flow through each other, as indicated in the
Uluru Statement from the Heart. Here self-determination is understood
as the right to exist and thrive as cultures and peoples distinguishable
from the rest of society.
Malaysian anthropologist Raymond Lee’s ideas on tradition and
change can be brought to bear on self-determined Indigenous-led inter-
culturalism while also challenging earlier notions of a third space or
cultural hybridity. Lee sees traditions and identities within localised
modernities not as having ruptured from the past (including, with rele-
vance to this book past relationships with Country, both Ancestral and
topographical) but as being concerned with “a state of becoming that
does not always transcend the past” (2013, 420–21). This state of
becoming, while sharing the interstitial and ambiguous characteristics of
Bhabha’s hybridity, is grounded in lived intergenerational continuities,
localised politics and ongoing inequalities that simultaneously acknowl-
edge and dismantle cultural hierarchies and can reveal a level of reflexive
agency which is less defined in Bhabha’s claims. Lee proposes: “In partic-
ular, the notion of reflexivity imparts the possibility that people can
self-consciously use revived and reinvented traditions to address systemic
changes that affect their wellbeing” (2013, 414) (my emphasis). The term
“use” here is critical to the agency I describe above where co-devising
dancers bring potent imaginations and political and social perspectives to
the process of working actively with their multiple cultural subjectivities
as choreographic methodologies.
Indigenous-interculturalism is therefore fuelled by reorientation
toward land and toward “principles of reciprocity, nonexploitation, and
respectful coexistence” (Coulthard 2014, 12). This provides alternatives
to, on the one hand, liberal conceptual symbolic reconciliation which
floats outside of specific places and histories and, on the other hand, to
essentialist and generic conceptions of Indigenous subjectivity performed
in dance.
Fostering a choreographic working environment mobilised around
dismantling settler colonialism in dance that is shared by Indigenous and
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 19

settler artists who together foregrounding respect for Indigenous episte-

mologies can help to “perform into being” (Knowles 2010, 30) those
reciprocities born of solidarities amidst difference. In its processual appli-
cation in the projects described here, this approach investigates shared
concerns while grappling with global considerations, such as the gathering
storm of polarising cultural and religious difference, or the escalating
crisis of global warming—subjects which have been addressed through
Marrugeku’s projects. In this way, the case studies in this book give
purpose to such solidarities and shift Indigenous dance from a norma-
tive position as something to be appreciated by non-Indigenous viewers
for its cultural otherness (from a safe distance), to an intersubjective art
form speaking in distinct ways to Indigenous and non-Indigenous audi-
ences to address issues shared by and affecting the lives of diverse peoples
around the world.
From participating in and observing Marrugeku’s processes over
decades I have leant intercultural practice can also be open to its own
uneasy nature, grounded in the coexistence of difference and the possi-
bilities and impossibilities of (re)conciliation, as they co-exist and flow
through each other. This enables the possibility of trust and support
to function alongside the additional possibility of risk and challenge
while also, always fostering a respect for and acknowledgement of differ-
ence. Marrugeku’s distinct intercultural projects within Kunwinjku and
Yawuru contexts reveal that as culturally and historically located prac-
tice the functions of this risk and trust can vary greatly, cognisant of
present and past configurations of cultural contact and hierarchies of
power. In this way, intercultural practice can never be taken for granted
as a prescribed model or a predetermined set of protocols, applied from
one cultural location to the next. Intercultural dance demands receptivity
and responsiveness, rigorous openness, care and accountability to enable
a repositioning of values, subversion of dominant knowledge structures
and the reconstruction of relationships that have national significance.
For dance artists participating in intercultural dance within Indigenous
contexts questions then arise, such as how in these conditions we can
dance together in the gaps between us, conscious of our differences? How
can we make dance together and how do we witness each other dance?
What forms of dance enable us to productively listen to one another and
to listen to land that is danced on? What particular contemporary dance
processes are able to pay attention to local and national histories and to
map new cultural pathways to the future? And by counter-argument I
also ask what forms of dance have inherently contributed to the silencing
20 R. SWAIN

of such histories and attentions? In the following chapters, I will unpack

these questions further for choreographic practice to reveal the critical
capacities enabled by intercultural contemporary dance conducted in sites
of endurance, loss and revival for First Peoples.

1.3 Ways of Knowing

This book and Marrugeku’s practice engage in some Yawuru, Bunuba,
Kunwinjku and Yolngu cultural conceptions that I and many of those
reading this will never know in any detail, in particular ways of knowing
Country understood as Bugarrigarra or Djang as earlier outlined. From
the outset I acknowledge that as an immigrant of settler descent and as
an uninitiated woman I can never know the inside, or sacred and secret
aspects of these knowledges, their customary law and ceremonial dance
practices. At the same time, in Western academic terms, with its appetite
for acquiring knowledge and constructing meaning, it is impossible for
me to write about something which I cannot know. However, insights
gained from my Kunwinjku and Yawuru teachers and through collabora-
tions with artists and cultural custodians have shown me that there are
ways of giving space for, and acknowledging the presence and power of
knowledge which it is not my place to know about in detail. As such
this is also a way of acknowledging and positioning the experience of ‘not
knowing’ for non-Indigenous artists and scholars. I would argue that this
experience of ‘not knowing’ is a critical first step in the responsibilities
for living in, working on, researching and visiting unceded Indigenous
land that are described in this book as ‘listening to Country’.
The act of turning away from attempting to know in detail is itself a
practice and a quiet acknowledgement. In turning away and not looking
directly at a landform, an elder, a dance or by not asking questions to
clarify certain stories which might only be mentioned in scant detail, one
is also acknowledging the presence and power of that story, person, dance
or landform and the implications for that which it touches and influences.
This very act of turning away is a kind of knowing which in itself is a
destabilisation of how Western knowledge can function. Alternatively, in
European terms Michel Foucault’s comment that: “there are times in
life when the question of knowing one can think differently than one
thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if
one has to go on looking and reflecting at all” (1990, 2:8) has rele-
vance here. So at the start of this book, to be able to go on listening,
 1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED LAND 21

seeing and reflecting on danced attachments land at all, I ask the reader
to make space for ways of knowing differently that may engage partial
and incomplete understanding.
The intercultural dance projects and scholarship outlined in this book
have been developed in keeping with Indigenous research priorities. As
Yu states:

For First Nations people the globe over, the struggle has been to hang
onto four things – our identity as a people; the territorial lands and waters
of our people; our language; and our culture. Any program or policy –
or research project – that seeks to improve our lot, that seeks to address
our impoverishment, but that denies the centrality of these values, will be
doomed to failure. (2019)

This requires outcomes of choreographic research practices to be of

benefit to, and shared with, the local community and to acknowledge
sovereignty of the land on which the work occurs. The activities described
here have been conducted in a transparent way with custodians of each
location. This has included consultation and collaboration during research
stages, casting dancers from host as well as guest nations, showings
of work in development for feedback and ensuring each production
is performed for local audiences as well as toured to neighbouring
Indigenous communities.
As a settler artist and writer I know there are many good reasons
for me not to write this book on intercultural practice within Indige-
nous contexts. I acknowledge this and the limits of my own perspective
within this project. This book is therefore written out of the experience of
listening to, learning from, working and talking with Indigenous friends,
teachers and collaborators, while acknowledging our distinct and differ-
entiated positions. In this respect, I quote extensively and at times at
length from Indigenous artist and scholar colleagues and other Indige-
nous artists, activists, scholars and cultural leaders to ensure that their
voices are privileged, profiled and leading the discussions this book entails.
I cite their work to re-frame and re-evaluate intercultural dance and
performance practice and scholarly theory, but I do not attempt to build
new theory myself from Indigenous perspectives or cultural concepts. I
engage in Indigenous analytics as I have learnt them from the Kunwinjku
and Yawuru artists and cultural custodians I have collaborated with, but I
do not produce them or attempt to extend them. However, in acknowl-
edging the complicated and contested space of a settler artist/writer
Another random document with
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believed that nothing would so effectually stop the pauperising of the
people by indiscriminate charity as the trained nurse in the homes of
the sick poor, who would teach her patients how best to help
themselves. “To carry out,” continues Miss Nightingale, “the practical
principles of preventing disease by stopping its causes and the
causes of infections which spread disease. Last but not least, to
show a common life able to sustain the workers in this saving but
hardest work under a working head, who will personally keep the
training and nursing at its highest point. Is not this a great success?
“District nursing, so solitary, so without the cheer and the
stimulus of a big corps of fellow-workers in the bustle of a public
hospital, but also without many of its cares and strains, requires what
it has with you, the constant supervision and inspiration of a genius
of nursing and a common home. May it spread with such a standard
over the whole of London and the whole of the land.”
Two years later (1876) Miss Nightingale made an eloquent plea
in a long letter to The Times for the establishment of a Home for
Nurses in connection with the National Society for Providing Trained
Nurses for the Poor. This letter was later reprinted as a pamphlet on
Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor. In specially pleading for a Central
Home for Nurses, she wrote, “If you give nurses a bad home, or no
home at all, you will have only nurses who live in a bad home, or no
home at all,” and she emphasises the necessity for the district nurse
to have a knowledge of how “to nurse the home as well as the
patient,” and for that reason she should live in a place of comfort
herself free from the discomforts of private lodgings.
Miss Nightingale’s plea bore fruit in the establishment of the
Central Home for Nurses, 23, Bloomsbury Square, under the able
management of Miss Florence Lees. Nothing pleased Miss
Nightingale better than to get reports of the experience of the district
nurses amongst the poor, and to hear how the people received their
visits and what impression they were able to make on the habits of
the people. She was specially delighted with the story of a puny slum
boy who vigorously rebelled against a tubbing which Miss Lees was
administering.
 “Willie don’t like to be bathed,” he roared; “oo may bath de debil,
if oo like!” The implication that Miss Lees was capable of washing
the devil white Miss Nightingale pronounced the finest compliment
ever paid to a district nurse.
She has always impressed upon district nurses the need not
only of knowing how to give advice, but how to carry it out. The
nurse must be able to show how to clean up a home, and Miss
Nightingale used frequently to quote the case of a bishop who
cleansed the pigsties of the normal training school, of which he was
master, as an example—“one of the most episcopal acts ever done,”
was her comment.
At first the district nurses were recruited almost entirely from the
class known as “gentlewomen,” as it was thought both by Miss
Nightingale and Miss Lees that it required women of special
refinement and education to exercise influence over the poor in their
own homes. Also, one of the objects of the National Association was
to raise the standard of nursing in the eyes of the public. It was soon
proved that the lady nurses did not shirk any of the disagreeable and
menial offices which fall to the lot of the district nurse. Broadly
speaking, it is only the educated women with a vocation for nursing
who will undertake such duties; the woman who merely wants to
earn an income will choose hospital or private nursing. In the earlier
stages of the movement the district nurses received high
remuneration, and on this question of fees the Queen of Nurses may
be quoted:—
“I have seen somewhere in print that nursing is a profession to
be followed by the ‘lower middle-class.’ Shall we say that painting or
sculpture is a profession to be followed by the ‘lower middle-class’?
Why limit the class at all? Or shall we say that God is only to be
served in His sick by the ‘lower middle-class’?
“It appears to be the most futile of all distinctions to classify as
between ‘paid’ and unpaid art, so between ‘paid’ and unpaid nursing
—to make into a test a circumstance as adventitious as whether the
hair is black or brown, viz., whether people have private means or
not, whether they are obliged or not to work at their art or their
nursing for a livelihood. Probably no person ever did that well which
he did only for money. Certainly no person ever did that well which
he did not work at as hard as if he did it solely for money. If by
amateur in art or in nursing are meant those who take it up for play, it
is not art at all, it is not nursing at all. You never yet made an artist by
paying him well; but an artist ought to be well paid.”
A most important outcome of the introduction of a system of
trained nurses for the sick poor was the establishment of the
Queen’s Jubilee Nurses. Queen Victoria, moved by the great benefit
which the National Nursing Association had conferred, decided, on
the representations of the Committee of the Women’s Jubilee Fund,
furthered by Princess Christian, to devote the £70,000 subscribed, to
D
the extension of this work. The interest of the fund, amounting to
£2,000 per annum, was applied to founding an institution for the
education and maintenance of nurses for tending the sick poor in
their own homes, with branch centres all over the kingdom. The
charter for the new foundation was executed on September 20th,
1890.

D
Mrs. Dacre Craven had in 1877 proposed, in
a letter laid before Queen Victoria, that a part of
the fund of St. Katharine’s Royal Hospital should
be devoted to founding a Training Institute for
District Nurses of gentle birth, to be called
“Queen’s Nurses.”

The central institute was at first connected with St. Katharine’s

Royal Hospital, Regent’s Park, an institution which had always been
under the patronage of the Queens of England since it was founded
by Queen Matilda, the wife of Stephen, at St. Katharine’s Wharf,
near the Tower of London. Subsequently the headquarters of the
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Nursing Institute was removed to Victoria
Street. Central homes have also been established at Edinburgh,
Dublin, and Cardiff, and district homes all over the kingdom are
affiliated to the Institute.
The National Association for Providing Trained Nurses for the
Sick Poor, in which Miss Nightingale had so deeply interested
herself, was affiliated to the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute, but it
still has its original headquarters at the Nurses’ Home, 23,
Bloomsbury Square, so ably managed by the present Lady
Superintendent, Miss Hadden. The Chairman of the Executive
Committee is Henry Bonham Carter, Esq., an old friend and fellow
worker of Miss Nightingale, while the Hon. Secretary is the Rev.
Dacre Craven, Rector of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, whose wife was
Miss Florence Lees, the first Superintendent-General of the home
and branches, and one of Miss Nightingale’s devoted friends. Her
Royal Highness Princess Christian is President of the Association.
There is probably no movement which has spread over the
country so rapidly, and which appeals to the goodwill of all classes,
as the nursing of the sick poor in their own homes, and its success
has been one of the chief satisfactions of Miss Nightingale’s life. She
is always eager to hear of fresh recruits being added to the nursing
army of the sick poor, and it may prove of interest to quote the
regulations issued by the National Association:—

REGULATIONS FOR THE TRAINING OF

NURSES FOR THE SICK POOR,
AND THEIR SUBSEQUENT ENGAGEMENT
1. A Nurse desiring to be trained in District Nursing must
have previously received at least two years’ training in a large
general Hospital, approved by the Committee, and bring
satisfactory testimonials as to capacity and conduct.
2. If considered by the Superintendent likely to prove
suitable for District Nursing, she will be received on trial for one
month. If at the end of that time she is considered suitable, she
will continue her course of training, with technical class
instruction for five months longer.
3. The Nurse will, at the end of her month of trial, be
required to sign an agreement with the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee
Institute that she will, for one year from the date of the
completion of her District training, continue to work as a District
Nurse wherever the District Council of the Queen’s Institute may
require her services.
4. While under training, the Nurse will be subject to the
authority of the Superintendent of the Training Home, and she
must conform to the rules and regulations of the Home. She will
be further subject, as to her work, to the inspection of the
Inspector of the Queen’s Institute.
5. If, during the time of her training, the Nurse be found
inefficient, or otherwise unsuitable, her engagement may, with
the consent of the Inspector of the Queen’s Institute, be
terminated by the Superintendent of the Training Home, at a
week’s notice. In the case of misconduct or neglect of duty she
will be liable to immediate dismissal by the Superintendent of the
Training Home, with the concurrence of the Inspector of the
Queen’s Institute.
6. During her six months’ training she will receive a payment
of £12 10s., payable, one-half at the end of three months from
admission, and the remainder at the end of six months; but
should her engagement be terminated from any cause before
the end of her training, she will not, without the consent of the
Queen’s Institute, be entitled to any part payment. She will be
provided with a full board, laundry, a separate furnished
bedroom or cubicle, with a sitting room in common, as well as a
uniform dress, which she will be required to wear at all times
when on duty. The uniform must be considered the property of
the Institute.
7. On the satisfactory completion of her training, the Nurse
will be recommended for engagement as a District Nurse, under
some Association affiliated to the Queen’s Institute, the salary
usually commencing at £30 per annum.
 CHAPTER XXIV
LATER YEARS

The Nightingale Home—Rules for Probationers—Deaths of

Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale—Death of Lady Verney—
Continues to Visit Claydon—Health Crusade—Rural
Hygiene—A Letter to Mothers—Introduces Village
Missioners—Village Sanitation in India—The Diamond
Jubilee—Balaclava Dinner.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not the decline that it
reveals, but the first days of immortality.—Madame de Stael.

Miss Nightingale’s work for the profession which her name and
example had lifted into such high repute continued with unbated
energy. The year 1871 brought what must have seemed like the
crowning glory of her initial work when the Nightingale Home and
Training School was opened as an integral portion of the new St.
Thomas’s Hospital, the finest institution of its kind in Europe. This
circumstance added greatly to the popularity of nursing as a
profession for educated women.
Queen Victoria had laid the foundation-stone of the new hospital
on May 13th, 1868, on the fine site skirting the Thames Embankment
opposite the Houses of Parliament. It was erected on the block
system, which Miss Nightingale has always recommended, and she
took a keen interest in all the model appliances and arrangements
introduced into this truly palatial institution for the sick.
The hospital extends from the foot of Westminster Bridge along
the river to Lambeth Palace, and has a frontage of 1,700 ft. It is built
in eight separate blocks or pavilions. The six centre blocks are for
patients, the one at the north end next Westminster Bridge is for the
official staff, and the one at the south end is used for lecture rooms
and a school of medicine. Each block is 125 ft. from the other, but
coupled by a double corridor. The corridor fronting the river forms a
delightful terrace promenade. Each block has three tiers of wards
above the ground floor. The operating theatre is capable of
containing six hundred students. A special wing in one of the
northern blocks was set apart for the Nightingale Home and Training
School for Nurses. All the arrangements of this wing were carried out
in accordance with Miss Nightingale’s wishes.
The hospital contains in all one thousand distinct apartments,
and the building cost half a million of money. It was opened by
Queen Victoria on June 21st, 1871, and The Times in its account of
the proceedings is lost in admiration of “the lady nurses, in their
cheerful dresses of light grey [blue is the colour of the Sisters’
dresses], ladies, bright, active, and different altogether from the old
type of hospital nurse whom Dickens made us shudder to read of
and Miss Nightingale is helping us to abolish.” The new building
gave increased accommodation and provided for forty probationers.
The rules for admission remained practically the same as when the
Training School was first started at the old St. Thomas’s.
At a dinner to inaugurate the opening of the new hospital, the
Chairman, Sir Francis Hicks, related that Miss Nightingale had told
him that she thought it “the noblest building yet erected for the good
of our kind.”
But our interest centres in the Nightingale wing. The dining hall is
a pleasant apartment which contains several mementoes of the lady
whose name it bears. One is a unique piece of statuary enclosed in
a glass case and standing on a pedestal. To the uninitiated, it might
stand for a representation of a vestal virgin, but we know it to have a
nobler prototype than the ideal of womanly perfection sacred to the
Romans. That statuette is not the blameless priestess of Vesta, “the
world forgetting, by the world forgot,” but our heroine, whom the
sculptor has modelled in the character of “The Lady with the Lamp.”
She stands, a tall, slim figure, in simple nurse’s dress, holding in one
hand a small lamp—such as she used when going her nightly rounds
at Scutari hospital—which she is shading with the other hand. There
is also a bust of Miss Nightingale in the hall, a portrait of her brother-
in-law, the late Sir Harry Verney, for many years the Chairman of the
Council of the Nightingale Fund, and a portrait of Mrs. Wardroper,
the first head of the Nightingale Home when originally founded.
There is also a clock presented by the Grand Duchess of Baden,
sister of the late Emperor Frederick of Germany, who was a great
admirer of Miss Nightingale’s work and herself an active organiser of
relief for the sick soldiers during the Franco-German War.
The dining-hall leads into the nurses’ sitting-room. Each nurse
has her own private room.
The number of probationers slightly varies from year to year, but
is usually fifty-two, and there are always more applicants than can be
entertained. They are divided into Special probationers, who are
gentlewomen by birth and education, daughters of professional men,
clergymen, officers, merchants, and others of the upper and middle
classes, age from twenty-four to thirty, and Ordinary probationers.
The Special probationers are required to be trained to be future
heads of hospitals, or of departments of hospitals. They learn every
detail of a nurse’s work, and also the duties to fit them for
responsible posts as matrons, etc. The Ordinary probationers are
trained to be efficient nurses, and after some years’ service may
obtain superior appointments.
All nurses who have passed through St. Thomas’s are united by
a special tie to Miss Nightingale, who rejoices in their successes,
and likes to hear from time to time of the progress of their work in the
various hospitals and institutions of which they have become heads.
Mr. Bonham Carter, her old and valued friend, remains the
secretary of the Nightingale Fund, and Miss Hamilton is the matron
of the hospital, and has control of the Nightingale Home.
In the same year (1871) that the new Nightingale Home and
Training School was opened, Miss Nightingale published a valuable
work on Lying-in Hospitals, and two years later she made a new
literary departure by the publication in Fraser’s Magazine of two
articles under the heading “Notes of Interrogation,” in which she
dealt with religious doubts and problems. Miss Nightingale from her
youth up has shown a deeply religious nature, and her attempt to
grapple with some of the deep questions of faith, as she had thought
them out in the solitude of her sick-room, merit thoughtful
consideration.
Miss Nightingale has lived so entirely for the public good that her
private family life is almost lost sight of. But her affections never
ceased to twine themselves around the homes of her youth. After
busy months in London occupied in literary work and the furthering
of various schemes, came holidays spent at Lea Hurst and Embley
with her parents, when she resumed her interest in all the old
people, and ministered to the wants of the sick poor. Though no
longer able to lead an active life and visit amongst the people, she
had a system of inquiry by which she kept herself informed of the
wants and needs of her poorer friends. She was particularly
interested in the young girls of the district, and liked to have them
come to Lea Hurst for an afternoon’s enjoyment as in the days gone
by. It was soon known in the vicinity of her Derbyshire or Hampshire
home when “Miss Florence” had arrived.
In January, 1874, Miss Nightingale sustained the first break in
her old home life by the death of her father. He passed peacefully
away at Embley in his eightieth year and was buried in East Willows
Churchyard. His tomb bears the inscription:—
WILLIAM EDWARD NIGHTINGALE,
of Embley in this County, and of Lea Hurst,
Derbyshire.
Died January 5th, 1874, in his eightieth year.
“And in Thy Light shall we see Light.”—Ps. xxxvi. 9.
After her father’s death, Miss Nightingale spent much of her time
with her widowed mother at Embley and Lea Hurst, between which
residences the winter and summer were divided as in the old days. It
was well known that “Miss Florence’s” preference was for Lea Hurst,
and she would linger there some seasons until the last golden leaves
had fallen from the beeches in her favourite “walk” in Lea Woods.
Some of the old folks had passed away and the young ones had
settled in homes of their own, but no change in the family history of
the people escaped Miss Florence. She ministered through her
private almoner to the wants of the sick, and bestowed her name
and blessing on many of the cottage babes. By her thoughtful
provision a supply of fresh, pure milk from the dairy of Lea Hurst was
daily sent to those who were in special need of it. People on the
estate recall that before she left in the autumn “Miss Florence”
always gave directions that a load of holly and evergreens should be
cut from Lea Woods and sent to the Nurses’ Home at St. Thomas’s,
the District Nurses’ Home in Bloomsbury Square, and the Harley
Street Home, for Christmas decoration.
 CLAYDON HOUSE, THE SEAT OF SIR EDMUND VERNEY, WHERE THE
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE” ROOMS ARE PRESERVED.
(Photo by Payne, Aylesbury.)
[To face p. 320.

On February 1st, 1880, Miss Nightingale suffered another loss in

the death of her beloved mother, whose last years she had so
faithfully tended as far as her strength would allow. Mrs. Nightingale,
to whose beautiful character and example her famous daughter
owes so much, passed away at Embley and was buried beside her
husband in East Willows Churchyard. Her tomb bears the
inscription:—

Devoted to the Memory of our Mother,

FRANCES NIGHTINGALE,
Wife of William Edward Nightingale, Esq.
Died February 1st, 1880.
 “God is Love.”—1 John iv. 16.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His
benefits.”—Ps. ciii. 2.
BY F. PARTHENOPE VERNEY AND FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

After the death of her mother, Miss Nightingale still occasionally

stayed at Lea Hurst and Embley, which had passed to her kinsman,
Mr. William Shore Nightingale, and continued her old interest in the
people of the district. In 1887 the members of a working men’s club
in Derbyshire presented Miss Nightingale with a painting of Lea
Hurst, a gift which she received with peculiar pleasure. It was about
this time that she paid her last visit to the loved home of her
childhood.
Miss Nightingale’s time was now passed between her London
house, 10, South Street, Park Lane, and Claydon, the beautiful
home near Winslow, Buckinghamshire, of her sister, who had in
1859 become the second wife of Sir Harry Verney. Sir Harry was the
son of Sir Harry Calvert, Governor of Chelsea Hospital and Adjutant-
General of the Forces. He had been a Major in the army, and in 1827
assumed the name of Verney. The family of Verney had been settled
in Buckinghamshire since the fifteenth century. Sir Harry was at
various times member of Parliament for Bedford and also
Buckingham. He was deeply interested in all matters of army reform
and in active sympathy with the schemes of his distinguished sister-
in-law, and acted as Chairman of the Nightingale Fund.
At Claydon Miss Nightingale found a beautiful and congenial
holiday retreat with Sir Harry Verney and her beloved sister, who was
well known in literary and political circles; her books on social
questions had the distinction of being quoted in the House of
Commons. In the second year of her marriage (1861) Lady Verney
had laid the foundation stone of the new Buckinghamshire Infirmary
at Aylesbury, the construction of which Miss Nightingale watched
with great interest during her visits to Claydon. Her bust adorns the
entrance hall of the infirmary. During her summer visits to Claydon,
Miss Nightingale frequently gave garden parties for the Sisters from
St. Thomas’s Hospital.
 Lady Verney died, after a long and painful illness, in 1890, sadly
enough on May 12th, her sister’s birthday. Sir Harry Verney survived
his wife barely four years, and at his death Claydon passed to Sir
Edmund Hope Verney, the son of his first marriage with the daughter
of Admiral Sir George Johnstone Hope.
Sir Edmund was a gallant sailor, who as a young lieutenant had
served in the Crimean War and received a Crimean medal,
Sebastopol clasp. He had again distinguished himself in the Indian
Mutiny, was mentioned in dispatches, and received an Indian medal,
Lucknow clasp. He was Liberal M.P. for North Bucks 1885–6 and
1889–91, and represented Brixton on the first London County
Council. Sir Edmund married the eldest daughter of Sir John Hay-
Williams and Lady Sarah, daughter of the first Earl Amherst, a lady
who has taken an active part in the movement for higher education
in Wales, and served for seven years on a Welsh School Board. She
is a member of the Executive Committee of the Welsh University. Sir
Edmund has estates in Anglesey. Lady Verney is a member of the
County Education Committee for Buckinghamshire. She is
continuing her mother-in-law’s work of editing the “Verney Memoirs.”
Sir Edmund takes great interest in education and rural questions. He
is a member of the Bucks County Council and the Dairy Farmers’
Association, and has published articles on Agricultural Education
and kindred subjects.
After her sister’s death Miss Nightingale continued to pass some
of her time at Claydon until, in 1895, increasing infirmity made the
journey impracticable, and she has continued to interest herself in
the rural affairs of the district. The suite of apartments which Miss
Nightingale occupied at Claydon are preserved by Sir Edmund and
Lady Verney as when she occupied them, and are now styled “The
Florence Nightingale Rooms.” They consist of a large, charmingly
furnished sitting-room with a domed ceiling, situated at a corner of
the mansion and so commanding a double view over the grounds,
and a bedroom and ante-room. Miss Nightingale’s invalid couch still
stands in her favourite corner of the sitting-room, and beside it is a
large china bowl which loving hands once daily replenished with
fresh flowers, such as our heroine loved to have about her when she
occupied the room. In the adjoining apartment stands Miss
Nightingale’s half-tester bedstead and old-fashioned carved
wardrobe and chest of drawers. A large settee is at the foot of the
bed, and was a favourite lounge with Miss Nightingale during the
day. Pictures and family portraits hang on the various walls, and to
these have been added by Sir Edmund Verney a series of interesting
pictures culled from various sources to illustrate events in Miss
Nightingale’s work in the East. The rooms will doubtless in time form
an historic museum in Claydon House.
After her beloved sister’s death Miss Nightingale was sad and
despondent, and one detects the note of weariness in a letter which
she addressed in 1890 to the Manchester Police Court Mission for
Lads. She was anxious that more should be done to reclaim first
offenders and save them from the contaminating influences of prison
life. “I have no power of following up this subject,” she wrote, “though
it has interested me all my life. For the last (nearly) forty years I have
been immersed in two objects, and undertaken what might well
occupy twenty vigorous young people, and I am an old and
overworked invalid.”
Happily Miss Nightingale’s work was not done yet. Two years
later (1892) found her at the age of seventy-two starting a vigorous
health crusade in Buckinghamshire in particular, and in the rural
districts generally. The 1890 Act for the Better Housing of the
Working Classes specially roused her attention in a subject in which
she had always been interested. She had little faith in Acts of
Parliament reforming the habits of the people. “On paper,” she
writes, “there could not be a more perfect Health Directory [than the
Act] for making our sanitary authorities and districts worthy of the
name they bear. We have powers and definitions. Everything is
provided except the two most necessary: the money to pay for and
the will to carry out the reforms.” If the new Act were enforced, Miss
Nightingale was of opinion that three-fourths of the rural districts in
England would be depopulated and “we should have hundreds and
thousands of poor upon our hands, owing to the large proportion of
houses unfit for habitation in the rural districts.”
 In 1892 Miss Nightingale addressed a stirring letter to the
Buckinghamshire County Council on the advisability of appointing a
Sanitary Committee to deal with the health questions of the district.
“We must create a public opinion which will drive the Government,”
she wrote, “instead of the Government having to drive us—an
enlightened public opinion, wise in principles, wise in details. We hail
the County Council as being or becoming one of the strongest
engines in our favour, at once fathering and obeying the great
impulse for national health against national and local disease. For
we have learned that we have national health in our hands—local
sanitation, national health. But we have to contend against centuries
of superstition and generations of indifference. Let the County
Council take the lead.”
Miss Nightingale believed that the best method for promoting
sanitary reform among the people was to influence the women—the
wives and mothers who had control of the domestic management of
the homes. Her next step was, with the aid of the County Council
Technical Instruction Committee, to arrange for a missioner to teach
in the rural districts of Buckinghamshire. She selected three specially
trained and educated women, who were not only to give addresses
in village schoolrooms on such matters as disinfection, personal
cleanliness, ventilation, drainage, whitewashing, but were to visit the
homes of the poor and give friendly instruction and advice to the
women.
She knew, and respected the feeling, that an Englishman
regards his home, however humble, as a castle into which no one
may enter uninvited. Miss Nightingale had no sympathy with the
class of “visiting ladies” who lift the latch of a poor person’s cottage
and walk in without knocking. In launching her scheme of visitation
she did the courteous thing by writing a circular letter to the village
mothers, asking them to receive the missioners. The letter runs:—

“Dear Hard-working Friends,

“I am a hard-working woman too. May I speak to you?
And will you excuse me, though not a mother?
 “You feel with me that every mother who brings a child into
the world has the duty laid upon her of bringing up the child in
such health as will enable him to do the work of his life.
“But though you toil all day for your children, and are so
devoted to them, this is not at all an easy task.
“We should not attempt to practise dress-making or any
other trade without any training for it; but it is generally
impossible for a woman to get any teaching about the
management of health; yet health is to be learnt....
“Boys and girls must grow up healthy, with clean minds,
clean bodies, and clean skins. And for this to be possible, the air,
the earth, and the water that they grow up in and have around
them must be clean. Fresh air, not bad air; clean earth, not foul
earth; pure water, not dirty water; and the first teachings and
impressions that they have at home must all be pure, and gentle,
and firm. It is home that teaches the child, after all, more than
any other schooling. A child learns before it is three whether it
shall obey its mother or not; and before it is seven, wise men tell
us that its character is formed.
“There is, too, another thing—orderliness. We know your
daily toil and love. May not the busiest and hardest life be
somewhat lightened, the day mapped out, so that each duty has
the same hours? It is worth while to try to keep the family in
health, to prevent the sorrow, the anxiety, the trouble of illness in
the house, of which so much can be prevented.
“When a child has lost its health, how often the mother says,
‘Oh, if I had only known! but there was no one to tell me.’ And,
after all, it is health and not sickness that is our natural state—
the state that God intends for us. There are more people to pick
us up when we fall than to enable us to stand upon our feet. God
did not intend all mothers to be accompanied by doctors, but He
meant all children to be cared for by mothers. God bless your
work and labour of love.
“Florence Nightingale.”
 Still following up the subject of rural sanitation, Miss Nightingale
prepared a paper on “Rural Hygiene: Health Teachings in Towns and
Villages,” which was read at the Conference of Women Workers at
Leeds in November, 1893. It was written in her usual clear and
incisive manner, going straight to the root of the matter and
illustrating her points with humorous illustrations. “What can be done
for the health of the home,” she asks, “without the women of the
home?... Let not England lag behind. It is a truism to say that the
women who teach in India must know the languages, the religions,
superstitions, and customs of the women to be taught in India. It
ought to be a truism to say the very same for England.” Referring to
the village mothers, she says, “We must not talk to them, or at them,
but with them.”
As an instance of the happy-go-lucky style in which sick
cottagers are occasionally treated, Miss Nightingale relates the
following amusing stories:—
“A cottage mother, not so very poor, fell into the fire in a fit while
she was preparing breakfast, and was badly burnt. We sent for the
nearest doctor, who came at once, bringing his medicaments in his
gig. The husband ran for the horse-doctor, who did not come, but
sent an ointment for a horse. The wise woman of the village came of
her own accord, and gave another ointment.
“‘Well, Mrs. Y.,’ said the lady who sent for the doctor, ‘and what
did you do?’
“‘Well, you know, miss, I studied a bit, and then I mixed all three
together, because then, you know, I was sure I got the right one.’
“The consequences to the poor woman may be imagined!
“Another poor woman, in a different county, took something
which had been sent to her husband for a bad leg, believing herself
to have fever. ‘Well, miss,’ she said, ‘it did me a sight of good, and
look at me, baint I quite peart?’ The ‘peartness’ ended in fever.”
The manners of the women to their children in many cases are
greatly in need of reform, and Miss Nightingale quotes the injunction
of an affectionate mother to her child about going to school, “I’ll bang
your brains out if you don’t do it voluntally.”
Miss Nightingale deals in her paper with the need for drastic
measures to promote rural sanitation such as drainage, proper water
supply, scavenging, removal of dust and manure heaps from close
proximity to the houses, and the inspection of dairies and cowsheds.
In regard to the latter she writes, “No inspection exists worthy of the
name.” This was in 1893, and the alarming facts about the non-
inspection of rural milk supplies exposed in The Daily Chronicle in
1904 show that matters are little improved since Miss Nightingale
laid an unerring finger on the defect eleven years ago.
In addition to an independent medical officer and sanitary
inspector under him, “we want,” said Miss Nightingale, “a fully trained
nurse for every district and a health missioner,” and she defines her
idea of the duties of a missioner. These women must of course be
highly qualified for their work. They should visit the homes of the
people to advocate rules of health. Persuade the careful housewife,
who is afraid of dirt falling on to her clean grate, to remove the sack
stuffed up the unused chimney, teach the cottagers to open their
windows in the most effective way for free ventilation. “It is far more
difficult to get people to avoid poisoned air than poisoned water,”
says Miss Nightingale, “for they drink in poisoned air all night in their
bedrooms.” The mothers should be taught the value of a daily bath,
the way to select nourishing food for their families, what to do till the
doctor comes and after he has left.
However, the first great step for the missioner is to get the trust
and friendship of the women. And this “is not made by lecturing upon
bedrooms, sculleries, sties, and wells in general, but by examination
of particular rooms, etc.” The missioner, above all, must not appear
to “pry” into the homes, or to talk down to the women, neither should
she give alms. The whole object of the recommendations was to
teach people how to avoid sickness and poverty.
Miss Nightingale’s efforts to promote sanitary reforms were not
confined to our own land, but extended to far-away India, a country
in which she has, as we have already seen, taken a great interest.
She had watched the success of some of the sanitary schemes
carried out by the municipalities of large towns of India with
satisfaction, but there yet remained the vast rural population for
which little was done, a very serious matter indeed when we
consider that ninety per cent. of the two hundred and forty millions of
India dwell in small rural villages. Miss Nightingale prepared one of
her “searchlight” papers on “Village Sanitation in India,” which was
read before the Tropical Section of the eighth International Congress
of Hygiene and Demography, held at Buda Pesth in September,
1894.
In this she considers the condition of the rural provinces of India
from facts obtained by correspondence with people of authority on
the spot, and deals with the defective sewage, water supply, and the
difficulties arising from the insanitary habits of the people and their
attachment to old customs. “Still,” she pleads, “with a gentle and
affectionate people like the Hindoos much may be accomplished by
personal influence. I can give a striking instance within my own
knowledge. In the Bombay Presidency there was a village which had
for long years been decimated by cholera. The Government had in
vain been trying to ‘move’ the village. ‘No,’ they said, ‘they would not
go; they had been there since the time of the Mahrattas: it was a
sacred spot, and they would not move now.’
“At last, not long ago, a sanitary commissioner—dead now alas!
—who by wise sympathy, practical knowledge and skill had
conquered the confidence of the people, went to the Pancháyat,
explained to them the case, and urged them to move to a spot which
he pointed out to them as safe and accessible. By the very next
morning it had all been settled as he advised.
“The Government of India is very powerful, and great things may
be accomplished by official authority, but in such delicate matters
affecting the homes and customs of a very conservative people
almost more may be done by personal influence exercised with
kindly sympathy and respect for the prejudices of others.”
The celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897
was an occasion of great interest to Miss Nightingale, and in her