Australian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson and Delilah

Abstract

In 1932, the respected anthropologist Raymond Firth wrote that the Aboriginal Australian manifested a strange trait, one unlike their indigenous counterparts elsewhere in the colonised Pacific. The Indigenous person, Firth said, ‘mutely dies.’ It would take just two hundred years of settler-Indigenous contact—and, within that span, a few intense decades of frontier activity—to decimate the Indigenous people who had been in Australia for forty thousand years. If this population died at all ‘mutely’, then it may well have been in shock and trauma. Silence, after all, is a common response to extreme suffering. To invoke Cathy Caruth, this implores us to engage in ‘a new mode of reading and listening [or viewing] that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demands’. These relations between contemporary and historical silence—as well as suffering and violence—powerfully arise in Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009), the focus of this chapter. Forgetting or denying Australia’s foundational structure of colonisation generates silence around what happened in the nation’s past. Samson and Delilah thus depicts trauma as a crisis of speech, a trope we can read as a reflection on representing Indigenous suffering in contemporary Australia. In analysing how the film depicts trauma in form and content, the chapter discusses silence, historical inheritances and belonging as central concerns of the film. These concerns draw all Australian subjects into positions of implication, although with incommensurate, unevenly distributed suffering between Indigenous and settler groups. Samson and Delilah is unflinching in its criticism of all implicated parties—the web of social, cultural and political forces acting on the couple at its centre. This adds up to an uncommonly holistic appraisal of the trails of trauma in a setting where colonisation is entrenched and continuing.