The name is absent

130

Such activities as gambling, drinking in excess,
wasting money and neglecting homes and personal appearance
all have the effect of emphasizing their social distance
from white people. This type of reaction is an
aggressive assertion of low status; it seems to
say ’Look at me - I’m coloured and I’m dirty, drunken,
lazy, irresponsible like they all say - that’s my
privilege because I’m coloured - I can do as I like
because that is all they expect of me anyway’ (Fink,
1957:103).

Fink’s assessment is supported twenty years later by a rejoinder
*

to Gilbert - ’’They think we’re shit. So why not be shit?” (Gilbert,
1977:267). This choice of negative identity may be seen as a
defence against identity-diffusion: it is a choice that reflects
de Levita’s statement (1965:31) that ’’many a person would, if faced
with continuing identity diffusion, rather be nobody or somebody

■V

bad, or even dead - and this totally and by free choice, than
be not quite somebody”.

Mullard (1980:232) sums up the response of the Aboriginal

people in the same terms, namely as a means of warding off anomie.
’To resist is to exist”.

10.2 Interaction of Aboriginal people with'identification∕naming
»     4            »

by the dominant group

Because legislation for Aborigines was restrictive and dehumanising
and the definition of Aboriginal identity was negative, some of
those who were lighter in colour accepted the naming of the dominant
group inherent in gaining an ’exemρtion’, and passed from the ’world’
of Aborigines to a white world.

10.21 ’Passing*

Gale speaks of the ’’state of hopeless frustration” of the
Aboriginal people in Adelaide, and for some (1972:46) the ’’compelling
fascination motivating them to integration into European society”
(Gale, 1972:45).

10.22 Confusion

The arbitrary nature of identification meant that some people

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