AustLit

'Tim Rowe's critique of settler colonial studies is twofold: he alleges that a singular unbending logic characterises its interpretative approach, and that this approach is so flexible that it encompasses, for example,‘the removal of children’, the‘erection of a monument to the Stolen Generations’,‘the denial of native title or the recognition of native title’and‘the remembrance of violence or the forgetting of violence’. Rowse’s argument is that the structure is so rigid as to be all-encompassing, and to account for, in a theological manner, for any event that might occur. Here I see a contradiction, because even if Rowse’s criticism focuses on the putative strictures of a rigid interpretative model, it is the ability to encompass ostensibly contradictory phenomena that Rowse finds most‘unhelpful’. I would argue, in response, that Rowse cannot have it both ways.One cannot be simultaneously too rigid and too flexible. Rowse’s indictment would be more effective if he had produced one accusation and proceeded to demonstrate it. This is not only a matter of internal argumentative inconsistency,however. The problem, I believe, is that Rowse comprehensively misreads settler colonial studies’reliance on Wolfe’s logic of elimination. My response rejects the notion that settler colonial studies is a‘dangerous’undertaking.'