Page 85 - Literacy in the New Media Age

74 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

altering the more usual syntax of the verb invade, and of the noun invasion. In
the more usual usage, invade takes as an object-noun a word that stands for a
political or social entity of some kind. I can invade something which belongs to
someone politically or socially: I can invade someone’s property, land, territory
or privacy, or the pitch at a cricket game. But I cannot, in normal usage, invade
something that has no borders, is open, is not owned, belongs to everyone, and is
natural rather than social.
That is what Blainey does: ‘the coastal invasion of the whites’ is changing the
grammatical/syntactic scope of the verb invade and of its noun invasion, derived
from the clause ‘the whites invaded the coast’. It is now an act (‘the whites
invaded the coast’) which can take place in relation to a new category: ‘invade’
has been deprived of its political force, it has been made innocuous. It is
something done to something which is merely a geographical, a natural, thing,
not a political or social entity. (This view was lampooned years later in a film,
‘Barbequearea’, produced by aboriginal film-makers, in which a group of black
people in the costumes of Hanoverian guards arrive in a boat at a picnic ground,
ask a family of whites who are engaged in preparing their Sunday barbie what
the area is called, to be told ‘barbequearea’, a land which they then proceed to
‘invade’.) Similarly, to use a descriptive adjective such as white with the word
invasion has the effect both of obscuring real agency (not ‘the British invasion’).
It permits the ideologically convenient act of equating white and black invasions
(where ‘black invasions’ had been caused by natural events, such as droughts,
implying, perhaps, a natural cause for the ‘white invasions’ also).
The syntax of a small part of the language has been changed. The interest of
the agent of these transformations, the historian, is quite clear. A historian who
wished to appear as progressive politically, but whose instincts and interests
were deeply against such a move (as became overtly evident in the mid-1980s),
transforms the existing resources of the language to serve the directions of his
interest. There is nothing at all unusual in this: however, it became visible to me
only because an aboriginal Australian student used the example for work he did
in a course I taught in Sydney. The normal invisibility of these processes should
not deflect us from recognising their utter usuality, and their utter normality.
Their invisibility is evidence of the ubiquity of the process.
My second example (Example 2) goes in a somewhat different direction. It
consists of two linked texts: a position description and a job application based on
that description.

RESPONSIBLE FOR: The supervision of office staff providing
administrative services to the academic staff. The provision and
coordination of all student and student related activities within the
institute.

1 Coordination and supervision of the office staff providing
administrative support.