Fair Game for the Same
I am sitting here in Broome, Western Australia next to a young Aboriginal Nyikina man who is wearing a GPS anklet bracelet that confines him to the city limits of this small and isolated city in the far northwest of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
I question myself, “…where are the papers written about the Aboriginal Australian’s in the context of colonisation of “body” by technological intervention (ie. the trajectory of ankle bracelets to the implantable) ?”
The room is bare except for a few mattresses and a huge television from which an Xbox gaming console is attached. An old woman lives in the same house and there is nothing to end in the fridge except a three-quarter empty plastic container of Black & Gold margarine. To buy anything more means visiting the local service station that charges fifty percent more for every item other than cigarettes and Coca-Cola.
The only way to purchase anything is with cash or a welfare ID card. I sit and listen outside with the old people on the front balcony to stories of hope and resilience despite the absolute carnage these human people suffer through on a daily basis.
It occurs to me to ask myself as a researcher, in observance of human people simply struggling to cope with technologically facilitated genocide, to what degree does the State, the Government, and more importantly, the corporations who mine this country intend to use these technologies against these very people? In observations of those humans in other parts of the world who wish to use this technology as a convenience by which to expediently and efficiently navigate and identify in their lives, I sweat in the topics wondering how long it will be before all humans are subject to even the most “dumb” implantable to track, trace and trigger intervention in their lives.
To me, it seems that the next level of intervention is not just of the lands that a community lives on, not the possession of assets or control of the movement of individuals but colonization of their own human transdermal state ie. implantable technology.
My partner points me to a book on my shelf upon my return home titled Joe Nangan’s Dreaming, and I turn to page 8 which contains a quote, “… because it was not tilled or harvested or grazed in European agricultural style it was considered ‘empty’ and available. The Government of the time recognized no Aboriginal land rights and encouraged the taking up of land for pastoral use.”
It now begs the question of whether what I am observing as a Researcher is now tied to the same concept where the ‘land’ is now the human body, that if the body is not being used productively then it is ‘fair game for the same’ and exploited by corporations and Government.
