<오스트레일리아>에 나타난 `인정`의 정치학

According to Richard Leonard, Australia is different from conventional movies with a happily-ever-after ending in the sense that Nullah goes back to his tribal roots and ways. The aforementioned movie critic goes on to maintain that this movie `articulates one side of a lively debate about how Australian indigenous people might reclaim their own heritage and dignity.` This laudatory movie review is more or less in line with the stated intention of the director of the movie, Baz Luhrmann when the latter called his movie `a journey to find out about my own country [. . .], the history of it, the Indigenous history of it.` Both the review and the director himself seem to understand the movie in the light of multiculturalism. The place where Nullah goes back to, this paper argues, is after all a mythologized nature away from both the white society and the aboriginal reserves. This demarcation of a sort of de-secularized and fantasized place as a territory for Nullah and King George is not intended to return dignity to the culture, nor to the aborigines, but to divert attention from the real issues of justice, rights, and ownership of the land. In the same light, the movie’s portrayal of the Faraway Downs as an ideal home/farm for the servant class of color, such as Bandy and Sing Song, despite its interracial harmony, is far from a democratic community. The racial Other is employed in this movie in order to provide the much-needed service to Lady Ashley and her supervision of her late husband’s cattle farm. By casting the farm owner as a caring benevolent one and, above all, by allowing the half-caste boy to return to his aboriginal grandparent, the movie seems to redress the past crimes perpetrated upon the so-called `Stolen Generations.` Yet, this paper argues that this imaginary redressing of, or compensation for, the past racial crimes actually serves to exorcise the white Australia’s guilt and, what is worse, tends to work as a substitute for the yet-to-be-made real compensations. The conclusion of this paper is that the multiculturalism of the movie makes, at best, the so-called `Benetton effect` and, at worst, a cosmetic cover-up for the white Australia’s ugly face of ethnic cleansing.