In the light of this event and debate provide a political context for this review by Ken Gelder of Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture, and Indigenous Philosophy in the Australian Humanities Review. Gelder says that in:

Stephen Muecke's latest book, Ancient and Modern, we get quite the opposite procedure: an ambitious non-Aboriginal or 'whitefella' attempt to describe 'being Aboriginal' and to account for what Muecke calls Aboriginal philosophy. Muecke remains Deleuzean in this latest work, even speaking about the latter's 'reterritorialisation' in Australia. Whereas Reading the Country had placed Paddy Roe's stories and Muecke's Deleuzean commentaries side by side, this new book is, I think, an attempt to become Deleuzean and Aboriginal simultaneously, to somehow fold these two realms together almost to the point of indistinguishability. Indeed, this is Muecke's primary method here: to entangle continental theory with Aboriginal practice. A chapter about another senior Aboriginal man is called 'Boxer, Deconstructionist', in which we are told that Boxer's stories have 'the power that is often attributed to European theories'.2 Aboriginal people might very well be surprised to find themselves recast in this way, but Muecke is as enthralled by their stories as he is by the continental theory he brings to bear upon them. It can often seem as if by one he really means the other, and vice versa: this is the strategy he brings to the topic of 'being Aboriginal', and it is probably fair to say that sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't.

Or more accurately, authentic Aboriginal culture is seen as 'traditional' (non-modern) and located up north, and in the centre. Down south in the cities urban aborigines are deemed 'modern'.