Entangled Objects in the Cultural Politics of Childhood and Nation

Abstract

This article traces previously invisible stories of making, unmaking and remaking Australian childhoods and nation through the materiality of a baby possum skin cloak. The governing of Aboriginal childhoods is a central feature in the formation of nation states in settler colonial societies. An account of the process and its meanings, however, is difficult to bring into the public arena because of the intimate and shameful nature of the stories involved. The object of the baby possum skin cloak enables the telling of these stories because it is generated from a deep personal exchange between a settler colonial woman and an Aboriginal woman. It is no longer a story about the Other, but has become a story of mutual entanglement in the cultural politics of childhood and nation. The stories of the bodies and materialities of mothers and children which gather around the possum skin cloak open the deepest scars in the intimate history of childhood and nation. The possum skin cloaks also tell an alternative story through their participation in important symbolic acts of unmaking and remaking nation within a different imaginary. The story of the possum skin cloaks, both deeply personal and profoundly public, generate new possibilities for rethinking the complex entanglements of people and land in Australian nation-building. They can contribute more broadly to ways of rethinking other nation formations in the contested space of cultural contact zones.