Questions for a thief

I wouldn't go as far as the anarchist provocateur and cocaine smuggler Abbie Hoffman, who entitled his autobiography Steal This Book, but I have a relaxed attitude to the ownership of texts. There's a finite amount of space on the shelves in my study, and my wife has made it clear that any volumes found creeping up the hall and into the lounge or our bedroom will be dealt with mercilessly. Because I like to buy books, I have to give them away regularly, too.

I wasn't upset, then, to discover one of the books I left on a table at Nathan Homestead Gallery has disappeared. The table is part of the Ghost South Road exhibition that Paul Janman curated for the gallery, and its books, maps, old magazines, and photocopied essays are supposed to help visitors to the show reflect on the images that Paul and his fellow photographers Ian Powell and Todd Henry have put on the walls. Paul and his friends have photographed places and peoples associated with the Great South Road's military history, so I put Vincent O'Malley's essay 'Te Riki ki Waikato: the invasion of the Waikato and its aftermath' on our table, and added The Needle's Eye, Errol Braithwaite's vivid but forgotten 1965 novel about colonial soldiers who move up and down the road between the taverns and balls of Auckland and the swampy battlefields of the Waikato.

An old topographical map I found in an op shop, complete the name, address, phone number, and annotations of its former owner, uses red stars to indicate roadside clearings where shots were fired in 1863 and '64, and redoubts where soldier-settlers and clergymen shivered behind earthen walls after dark.

Other objects on the table were intended to extend the Waikato war and the Great South road through space and time. An account of a restive, pagan Britain by Tacitus was supposed to remind visitors to the gallery that the colonisers of Aotearoa were once colonised by Rome, and that the road the British built into the Waikato Kingdom was consciously modelled on the highways the Romans ran across the realm of Boadicea.

Peter Eckart's enormous Moon Base Handbook, which features commendatory blurbs by famous science fiction writers and filled with incomprehensible equations and diagrams, was supposed to pose questions about humanity's next great imperial expansion. If space is the final frontier, will it be a frontier tamed with laser cannons and pocket theodolites?

When I visited the gallery on Saturday I noticed that the copy of Sven Lindqvist's Terra Nullius that I'd left on the table had gone. Lindqvist is a octogenarian Swede who divides his time between deserts and libraries. His most famous book is 'Exterminate All the Brutes!' , and describes a journey through the Sahara with an old and cumbersome computer loaded with historical documents for company. After finding an oasis and Lindqvist sets up his computer, and begins to read about Europe's nineteenth century colonisation of Africa. He moves from one half-forgotten text to another, collecting atrocities and noting the rise of a sort of pseudo-scientific ideology, then makes the shocking but utterly credible conclusion that Nazis ideology and the techniques of the Holocaust were invented in Africa, by generations of colonial administrators and writers.

Terra Nullius describes Lindqvist's journey through the deserts of Australia, where he ponders the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples, and discusses the role that the Aboriginals' extraordinary intricate cultures have played in the development of Western anthropological thought. The title of Lindqvist's book refers to the British belief that Australia had been an empty, uninhabited land before 1788. The Aboriginal peoples may have occupied the continent for many thousands of years, but their hunter gatherer culture was so distant from the paradigm of European civilisation that they could be treated as ghosts.

I liked Terra Nullius so much that I didn't notice, until I read a scabrous review of the book by Aussie Hugh Brody, that Lindqvist had managed to journey for months without meeting a single Aboriginal. Brody thinks that Lindqvist prefers his computer screen to people, and that Terra Nullius is really a disguised expression of the guilt Swedes feel about the wealth and safety of their society, and about the collaboration with Nazism that helped make them wealthy and safe. I agree with some of Brody's points, but I still think Terra Nullius is a fascinating book, and that it was worth adding to the table at Nathan Homestead.

I folded a photocopy of Richard Polt's essay 'The Question of Nothing' into Terra Nullius. Polt is an American philosophy who has the rare ability to make the ideas of Martin Heidegger, the German founder of existentialism who notoriously became a follower of Hitler in the 1930s, seem not only comprehensible but interesting.

'The Question of Nothing' examines typically Heideggerian phrases like 'The nothing nothings itself' and 'Why does nothing not exist?' and argues that they were intended to create a mixture of dread and joy - an 'abyssal wonder' - that can stimulate humans to perceive the world in new ways. For Heidegger, a mood like anxiety is valuable, because it can make us stop and look in new ways at the world around us. Objects that we normally treat as 'transparent', and activities that we can normally complete unconsciously suddenly become problematic, and disclose new meanings. We begin to open a door, and for the first time perceive the roundness and firmness and coldness - the thingness - of its knob. We stop swinging a hammer, and wonder at its power and shapeliness.

I put 'The Question of Nothing' into Terra Nullius because I was interested in whether Lindqvist and Heidegger were, at some level, doing the same thing. Lindqvist wanted his readers to see the people who filled a supposedly empty land: Heidegger, according to Richard Polt, wanted his readers to see the previously invisible world in which they lived. I wondered whether Heidegger's Nazism, which was spectacularly confirmed by the recent publication of his anti-semitic personal notebooks, made any good intentions in his philosophy irrelevant. What, I wondered, would Lindqvist have thought about his words being juxtaposed with those of the German philosopher?

I was intrigued to find, on Saturday, that the thief of Terra Nullius had removed 'The Question of Nothing' from the book, and left it on our table. Was this a repudiation of Heidegger's arguments, or of his politics, or of both? Did the thief take Lindqvist's book because he or she wanted to learn more about the colonisation of Australia, or was he or she trying to keep Australia's dirty history out of our exhibition? And why did the thief take Lindqvist, but not O'Malley, or Tacitus, or a blueprint for the colonisation of the moon? Perhaps I'll find out in time.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]