Dwelling in Discomfort: On the conditions of listening in settler colonial Australia

While critical scholarship on listening as a political practice has flourished in recent years (Bassel, 2017; Beausoleil, 2017; Dreher, 2009; Thill, 2009, 2018; Scudder, 2016), there remains much work to do on theorising political listening as a situated practice in specific contexts, including listening as a practice that might unsettle settler colonial relations. This article takes as its starting point the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart (henceforth, the Uluru Statement)—and the political climate of state refusal in which it emerged—as a prompt and challenge for thinking about broader conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia, within and beyond the frame of the state. In her pathbreaking work, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship, Susan Bickford (1996) identifies a range of practices necessary for ‘political listening’, including openness, receptivity, attention, engagement, duration, continuation and recognition. Extending Bickford’s conception of political listening to the settler colonial context, and building on our own theorisation of situated or located listening (Dreher and de Souza, 2018), this article theorises the generative possibilities of refusal, attunement, yielding, and dwelling in discomfort as listening-oriented concepts that might prompt a transformation in unjust social and political relations.

As we have argued elsewhere (Dreher and de Souza, 2018), listening is not only a technical process, but a politics that is located in time and space and specific contexts shaped by colonial histories – contexts in which we are differently and very unevenly located. We take Susan Bickford’s work as a starting point, recognizing the important engagements with feminist and feminist of colour work that underpin her theory of political listening. We also note that while Bickford writes from a settler colonial context, the U.S., she does not directly address this within the work, nor does the work directly engage with decolonial and Indigenous struggles or how we might develop protocols for listening in these contexts. Thus, our paper extends Bickford’s vital work by prioritizing decolonial and First Nations scholarship and knowledges, and by thinking from the settler colonial context of Australia in which the primacy of First Nations’ sovereignty over, and authority for those lands, must be the foundation for transforming colonial relations towards more just futures.

In this article, our interest lies in the vital resources the Uluru Statement provides for thinking more broadly through a decolonising and situated politics of listening that centres First Nations sovereignty, justice and truth-telling to extend and unsettle liberal democratic frames. We are therefore less interested in equality of voice and public deliberation as a route to justice than in unsettling and dissolving entrenched hierarchies of speaking and listening – transforming colonial relations by developing a ‘dispositional ethics of encounter’ that is both responsive and responsible (Beausoleil, 2017). We gesture towards a politics of listening that decentres and unsettles in a transformative politics which moves beyond careful deliberative listening, to also consider processes of redistributing attention and value – prioritising or privileging First Nations voices and unsettling settler colonial authority. We pay attention to how a commitment to political listening might register uncomfortable truths about historic, structural and ongoing settler colonial violence – engaging with the broader histories of First Nations struggles for treaty, land rights, self-governance and truth-telling beyond the horizon of liberal-democratic and rights-based claims to voice, including those that unsettle ‘the nation’.

We begin with a brief overview of the Uluru Statement and its central invitation to listen to First Nations seeking to be heard. Its single constitutional reform—a constitutionally protected First Nations Voice to Parliament—has been theorised as a mechanism that enshrines a ‘norm of listening’ within an amended Australian Constitution (Davis, 2018b) and a potential path to institutionalise political listening (Appleby and Synot, 2020). In this context, the Uluru Statement is at once constitutionally conservative and, potentially, transformative, refusing minimal or symbolic recognition in favour of meaningful structural reform.

Despite increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives within the parliament, at both state/territory and federal levels, representative democracy arrangements remain insufficient to fully account for First Peoples’ voices. Hobbs (2017b) has argued that the Voice to Parliament would actually rectify a persistent democratic fault in Australian socjety: ‘Although Indigenous people enjoy ‘full equality’ in the electoral arena, their position as an extreme numerical minority makes it difficult for them to be heard by government’. Indeed, the phrase ‘In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard’ underscores precisely the limitations of ‘equal citizenship’ as begun with the constitutional reforms of 1967 to ensure First Nations self-determination. Davis (2017, 127) has also noted the ‘typically utilitarian philosophy of majority rules’ frequently stifles proposals for reform on Indigenous issues.

We then explore multiple strategies of refusal, including generative strategies of Indigenous refusal of statist recognition. Where at its upper limit, Indigenous refusal denies the authority of the settler colonial state and sees political recognition as a technique of settler colonial governance (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2014), we explore the nuanced strategies of partial and strategic refusal outlined in the Uluru Statement that does important work to alter the ‘terms of recognition’ (Appadurai, 2004) without refusing the state entirely. The next sections build on our interest in attunement as a mode of relational adjustment and the related notion of yielding as relinquishing power and authority—practices which together open up ethical possibilities for settling in to discomfort and difference. Such orientations might begin to embrace the deeply intertwined and enmeshed ways we are responsive to, and responsible for, other human and more-than-human beings, including land. We argue attunement and yielding hold the potential to re-orient attention beyond a liberal frame of individual guilt to gesture towards a relational notion of reciprocity and responsibility based in coexistence and shared history, fostering conditions for situated listening where truth-telling in relation to specific First Nations geographies might take place. Finally, we develop the notion of dwelling in discomfort to offer a way of sitting with unsettling truths and histories that does not seek an exit from them, contributing to a politics of ‘hearing well’ (Stauffer, 2015) that attends to both unsettling truths and truths that unsettle. The sustained engagement of dwelling in discomfort describes the necessary, difficult and durational work of sticking with what is uncomfortable and unsettling as Indigenous-settler relations are renegotiated—with justice as the shared goal, even when the form and shape of justice is not yet known.

In May 2017 at Mutitjulu, at the foot of Uluru in the red desert of Central Australia, on the ancestral lands of the Aṉangu people, the Uluru Statement from the Heart (the Uluru Statement) was directly addressed and delivered to ‘the Australian people’.

Of course, by addressing the ‘Australian people’, the Uluru Statement leaves unproblematised the multiple inclusions and exclusions through which ‘the people’ are constituted in relation to the settler Australian nation. However, the key political move this makes—addressing the people rather than politicians or governments—compels serious consideration of Indigenous–non-Indigenous relationships more broadly, not only, or even primarily, through the State.

Where sovereignty was never ceded and treaties were never negotiated, a persistent refusal to listen to First Nations forms the foundation of the settler colonial Australian state and haunts contemporary political relations. The Uluru Statement centres a political aspiration to be heard, set against this long history of settler colonial refusals to listen. As Wamba Wamba lawyer and legal researcher Eddie Synot (2018, n.p.) argues:

[…] our ability to speak, and of non-Indigenous people to hear us – to actually hear us – has long been at the centre of problems in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The Uluru Statement, a culmination of the First Nations National Constitutional Convention 23–26 May 2017, followed an extensive six-month deliberative democratic process which saw twelve First Nations Regional Dialogues (the Dialogues henceforth). The nation-wide Dialogues that led up to Uluru were a structured deliberative decision-making process designed with and for First Peoples and led by local Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander groups in each region. This was the ‘first time a constitutional convention has been convened with and for First Peoples’ (Referendum Council, 2017b, p.iv). Simultaneously addressing the historical exclusion of First Peoples’ voices in the drafting of Australia’s constitution in 1901, and the continued problems of minimal or non-existent ‘consultation’ with First Peoples by successive governments, the Dialogues have been described as an innovation in deliberative decision-making and direct democracy (Davis, 2017, p.127). The Uluru Statement summarised the consensus position arrived at by the over 600,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates across the continent who participated in the Dialogues and was endorsed by the overwhelming majority at the Uluru gathering.

Central to the Uluru Statement is a single constitutional reform—a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament (Voice). Davis (2018, p. 41) argues the Voice provides a way to ‘imbue the decision-making of the government and bureaucracy with the cultural authority and cultural legitimacy of the foundations of Indigenous culture’ (our italics). Indigenous culture and knowledge would provide the moral and political foundation on which future decision-making and power-sharing arrangements are negotiated with regards to First Peoples. For Davis (2018, p. 43), the Voice ‘is a structural reform that compels the state to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in policy- and decision-making’ (our italics). The Uluru Statement also calls for the establishment of a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise plural processes of agreement-making (Treaty) and truth-telling (Truth), which we discuss further on. The call for truth-telling is a refusal to smooth over historic and ongoing oppression, powerlessness and cultural dislocation; to confront the over-incarceration of First Nations people (including youth) and disproportionately high rate of Indigenous child removals. In spotlighting these ongoing harms—what the Uluru Statement describes as ‘the structural nature of our problem’—responsibility for change to the settler colonial status quo is redistributed.

At the same time, the process of deliberation was a carefully circumscribed one that prioritised Indigenous agency and a locally-driven process; it addressed the consultation fatigue experienced by many First Nations communities and the history of minimal listening despite continuous ‘consultation’ by governments and bureaucrats (see Thill, 2009). Crucially, non-Indigenous Australians were not invited to be part of the deliberative process leading up to Uluru. Whether and how First Peoples are recognised in the Australian constitution is not for non-Indigenous people, or the settler-colonial state, to determine. Therefore, only after consensus had been reached through the Dialogues and subsequently endorsed at Uluru were we invited to listen in. We see this as significant precisely because non-Indigenous Australians were not being asked to ‘deliberate’ in the sense of carefully weighing up alternatives. Indeed, different modes of listening are called for, beyond those of democratic deliberation. While listening is crucial to deliberative decision-making processes where differing parties come to a place of consensus or accord, in the case of the Uluru Statement, it becomes necessary to pose the question: what kinds of non-Indigenous listening come after First Nations deliberation to ensure more just possibilities for future shared action? If deliberation is a ‘paying-attention-to’ (Bickford, 1996, p. 30), then how do non-Indigenous people listen after First Nations’ deliberation?

We propose the norms of non-Indigenous listening suggested by the Uluru Statement are best understood, not so much through the norms of liberal democratic dialogue and deliberation, but rather in shifting the terms and grounds of speaking and listening. This broader impact—beyond constitutional reform—also offers a listening route to attend to the nuance and diversity of standpoints that First Nations across the continent have expressed, post-Uluru. Responding to these voices, within and beyond the Uluru Statement, we offer refusal, attunement, yielding and dwelling in discomfort as concepts and practices that complicate, but also deepen, possibilities for living together in ways that transform colonial relations. We argue these practices have much to contribute to theories and practices of political listening within and beyond current democratic political arrangements, particularly in settler-colonial states.

While all twelve Regional Dialogues asserted the fact that Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded their sovereignty (Referendum Council, 2017), there remain contested positions among First Nations to both the process behind, and the proposals within, the Uluru Statement (Behrendt, 2019; Blanco, 2017; Davis, 2018; Hobbs, 2017; Synot, 2018; Murphy, Graham, and Brigg, 2017; Wahlquist, 2017; Watson, 2019). Indigenous Australians have long campaigned for constitutional recognition in close connection with other political aspirations, including assertions of sovereignty and claims for treaties and land rights (Davis, 2016, 2018; Hobbs, 2017; Synot, 2018; Thomas et al., 2019). In the three years since the Uluru Statement was released, First Nations discussions on the promise and limits of ‘voice’ have extended to the limits of democracy itself, and the homogenising (and colonial) imperative of a single Aboriginal voice (ABC Radio National, 2019a). Yet these tensions remind us what is at stake in ongoing struggles for justice, sovereignty and land. Exercising political voice and influence within the state-centric political systems can be understood as ‘part of a broader strategy for advancing [I]ndigenous self-determination by targeting a variety of parallel and complementary access points to political power’ (Murphy, 2008, p. 186). Attending to these multiple, sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting, histories and practices of First Nations sovereignty and refusal within and beyond state recognition is crucial to foster conditions of listening that can hold diversity, discomfort and ambivalence.

Questions of justice are intimately connected to conditions of listening, hearing, attention and attunement, within and beyond the law or the constitution, and in everyday life (Stauffer, 2015). We are interested in what attunement might contribute to a situated listening that is attentive and responsible, offering alternative routes to justice and living together. Richard Dawson (2013) takes up the notion of attunement in the context of justice as a way of ‘orientating oneself to meaning’, so that doing justice to ourselves and others involves paying close attention to both variations of meaning (p. xvii) and to different voices (p. 10). For Dawson, justice as attunement is concerned with ‘constituting appropriate selves and relations’ (p. i). What those appropriate relations are or might be cannot be pre-determined, but rather must emerge from the specific histories, contexts and grounds through which those selves and relations have been formed.

Practices of attunement are also found in ecological, spiritual, eco-political thought as well as in collective decision-making in democratic politics (Dreher and de Souza, 2018). In the political realm, the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW), for instance, observe moments of pause and silent attunement in preparation for future decision-making and collective action, one that might prepare for better political listening. For party members, the ritual of attunement before the conduct of meetings ‘helps adhere to a schedule, calms heated spirits in cases of disagreement and focuses minds on the objective of consensus’ (Faucher-King, 2005, p. 53). Inspired by the Quaker decision-making practice of attunement as ‘listening together’ (Molina-Markham, 2011, p. vi), this situated and contextual listening is sensitised and sensitive to others. The notion of ‘listening together’ to facilitate collective decision-making provides an alternative approach to Hannah Arendt’s (1958) conception of politics as ‘acting and speaking together’ (cited in Bickford, 1996, p. 56). Crucially, such practices of attunement provide space for a listening-oriented relation, rather than a logocentric, or adversarial one.

Of course, attunement here is a practice that comes before decision-making, setting the conditions for listening together that are simultaneously responsive and responsible. While non-Indigenous / settler Australians were not part of the process of deliberation that led to the consensus position delivered at Uluru, we find other spaces where attunement might assist in coming to encounter First Nations on their own terms. If attunement involves a space of pause and attention to others and our environment, as well as our locatedness, then it also provides conditions of possibility to listen differently in order to move to a process beyond deliberative decision-making to agreement-making and truth-telling that holds in tension our differently located positions.

For instance, the Uluru Statement and its aspirations opens a listening route to hold what are normatively framed as competing notions of sovereignty as incommensurable yet co-extensive. The opening passages of the Uluru Statement choreograph and anchor non-Indigenous Australians in relation to the sovereign First Nations:

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?

The Uluru Statement weaves together multiple knowledge systems (Indigenous epistemologies, common law and western science) and distinguishes between two ontologies of sovereignty – Indigenous sovereignty and that of the nation-state or Crown. The rhetorical question how can it be otherwise? challenges non-Indigenous listeners to reflect on the simultaneous ontological incommensurability and co-existence of these sovereignties. This counters the narrative put forward by former Prime Minister John Howard, and others since, that rejects the possibility for treaty on the basis that ‘a nation does not make a treaty with itself’. Yet close attunement to the statement undoes the logic of Howard’s refusal. From Professor Mark McMillan’s standpoint as a member of the Wiradjuri nation, for First Nations people, ‘treaty as a set of relations, as conduct of sovereignty itself, allows us to cohere in ways that best reflects not just the now, but the possibilities going forward’. It also models a reciprocal obligation for non-Indigenous people, reminding them/us that ‘sovereignty-never-ceded impacts their ability to construct a way that they operate their own citizenry and citizenship’ (ABC Radio National, 2019b).

Attunement as responsive relation also suggests a particular ethical disposition that characterises political listening and the vulnerability that comes with holding ourselves open to others, otherness and difference (Ahmed, 2013; Coles, 2004; Ratcliffe, 2005). Attunement foregrounds dynamic relation; it asks us to come in to relation with others in ways that are context specific and sensitive to power dynamics. Attunement to our differently located listening positions is crucial in not collapsing difference (as in a politics of empathy), but rather holding it and collectively moving to transform the uneven relationships that structure difference. Sara Ahmed (2013) discusses attunement in relation to its affective dimensions, and the difficulties in being open to what is around us when we encounter otherness and difference. For Ahmed, attunement requires ‘emotional labour’ but also political work that (re)orientates attention to the ways that ‘non-attunement’ might continue structures of harm and violence when we are not in a ‘responsive relation’ (p.17). There is a subtle but important distinction to be made between attention, a concept that Bickford (1996) identifies as key to political listening, and attunement—which can orient attention in particular ways. Attunement in the settler-colonial context can foreground a process-oriented and context-specific practice, grounded in the present context—such as the Country and lands we are inhabiting and living on.

As a political practice, attunement might prepare us for listening differently or doing politics otherwise – a path to reckoning with how we are implicated or complicit in existing political arrangements that harm Indigenous lives and mark Indigenous lands as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). Beyond the interpersonal and considering wider structures of encounter, we are interested in broader possibilities for political attunement, where the aim is not necessarily agreement, but rather a dynamic and ongoing process of relational adjustment. While power is rarely ceded willingly, ‘power itself must be transformed in its encounter with powerlessness’ (Dreher and Mondal, 2018, p. 11). In settler colonial Australia, more just power-sharing arrangements cannot be fully attained through a liberal politics of inclusion and diversity, or even democratic notions of political equality. A politics of listening that places at its heart the ontological primacy and sovereignty of First Nations people – one that both precedes and exceeds the white sovereignty of the ‘(never quite) post-colonial nation-state’ (Haggis, 2016, p. 16; see also Moreton-Robinson, 2004) – might prepare for more just future relations. Cultivating practices that are attuned to ‘sovereignty-never-ceded’ (following Mark McMillan) foregrounds protocols for the non-hierarchical sharing of power, co-presence and the co-building of future worlds.

In the settler colony of Australia, protocols for and practices of listening must attend to decolonial struggles and Indigenous sovereignties grounded in this place (following Quiggin). In this article we have sought to attend closely to the conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia, prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, to think through the politics and practices of listening required of non-Indigenous / settler Australians to register First Nations voices. In the ways we have outlined, the Uluru Statement, offered as it is in a spirit of reciprocity, models how we might prepare for ‘deep listening’ (Atkinson, 2002; Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2002) as part of a reparative process that involves a relinquishing of control and a giving over of authority to First Nations people in transforming future political action and social relations. We have shown how this actually unsettles conventional liberal democratic modes of deliberative listening which are insufficient to shift the settled (and settler-colonial) terms of speaking and listening.

By reflecting on refusal, yielding, attunement and dwelling in discomfort, we have extended Bickford’s (1996) conception of political listening to foreground the settler colonial context to find that the Uluru Statement asks us to respond through a situated listening—a positional and redistributive politics that is specific and grounded, rather than an abstract or general principle. This redistributes attention and value to prioritise First Nations voices and authority, and de-centres settler colonial comfort. We have offered these concepts and practices that can help us understand and perform what’s necessary for a more just politics.

There is much to be learned from listening to the ambivalent and contested relationships between First Nations and the state which resist the terms of liberal recognition, expose the provisional and exclusionary conditions of democratic citizenship, and undo the logic of settler-colonialism itself. Possibilities for living together in the wake of colonisation are found when political listening takes account of our position as beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession, land theft and colonial violence. If ‘hearing well’, as Stauffer argues (2015, p. 80), brings with it the potential to ‘break the known order of the world for those who listen’, then it also demands a break with the hierarchies of value and attention that condition whose voices and lives are made to matter or be heard, within and beyond the frame of the settler state. Therefore, we suggest listening must be firmly located within a decolonising, not simply a democratic, framework.