After Belonging: Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’

Abstract

AbstractA classroom can be a place to belong. Students become settled, ideas become familiar, relations become belongings. Teachers attentive to belonging can support critical conversations without fear that students will accidentally stumble onto alienating terrain. But the desire to settle, to make familiar, and to belong is not without its own ambivalence. For example, should non-Indigenous Australian students feel they ‘belong’ when engaging with the legacies of settler colonialism? Is learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and communities a desirable way for non-Indigenous students to feel settled in Australia? Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work interrogates two impulses towards belonging among non-Indigenous Australians. On the one hand, she considers the erasure of Indigenous belonging through the legal fallacy of terra nullius and its subsequent variations in myths of British belonging to Australia. On the other hand, the essay questions non-Indigenous appeals to Indigenous communities as potential partners in national projects of collective belonging. Moreton-Robinson shows that non-Indigenous Australians ‘possess’ their symbolic home in the nation-state at the expense of Indigenous belonging. In what ways can non-Indigenous students be invited to question practices of belonging? What new classroom might this produce, and would everyone need to belong?