Page 84 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 73

present image-like quality of writing is coming much more to the fore, in many
different ways, given the affordances of this technology.
My assumption is that syntactically and textually writing may be becoming
more speech-like once again, while in its visual/graphic/spatial dimensions there
is a move in the opposite direction, away from speech. As always (as I will show
in my ‘historical’ discussion of the clause/sentence in this chapter) this is a matter
regulated in the end by social and not by technological factors.

Two examples of ‘transformation’
I will now discuss two examples of how I see the resources of writing, starting
with the process of transformation. The first (Example 1) is a brief extract from a
history of Australia, A Land Half Won, written by an Australian historian,
Geoffrey Blainey, in 1972.

In Central Australia … the Pitjantjatjarra were driven by drought to expand
into the territory of a neighbour.
Several of these invasions might be partly explained by a domino
theory: the coastal invasion of the whites initially pushing over one black
domino which in turn pushed down outer dominoes. But it would be sensible
to believe that dominoes were also rising and falling occasionally during
the centuries of black history. We should also be wary of whitewashing the
white invasions. We should also be wary of the idea that Australia knew no
black invasions.
Even when Aboriginal tribes clung to their traditional territory, fatal
fighting within the same tribe or between members of hostile tribes was
common. It is possible that many tribes suffered more deaths through tribal
fighting than through warfare with the British colonists in the 19th century.
(Blainey, 1972)

A number of points could be discussed here: the then current Western ideology of
the ‘domino theory’ (‘if one country in South-East Asia turns communist, all
will’), the a-causal nature of these dominoes rising and falling by themselves, the
‘history’ of aboriginal Australians, and so on. Blainey was, at that time, regarded
as a politically progressive historian, and so he did not wish to perpetuate the
formulation that had been used earlier to name the process of dispossession and
colonisation, namely ‘settlement’. That term, with its implication that there had
been an empty land just waiting for its settlers, had of course been used in
Ireland much earlier, as it had in North America.
The term which had then come into use to name the reality of that history was
that of ‘invasion’: a hostile, violent, aggressive act against people and their land.
Blainey softens that term in two directions (apart from implicating black
Australians in the process also), by introducing the much more neutral terms
‘expansion’ and ‘expand’ to gloss ‘invasion’ (‘expand into the territory’), and by