Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity

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Author: Tracey Banivanua-Mar | Penelope Edmonds

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Chung Hua University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-04

Making Settler Colonial Space

10.1057/9780230277946 - Making Settler Colonial Space, Edited by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds

Also by Tracey Banivanua Mar: VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL DIALOGUE


Also by Penelope Edmonds: URBANIZING FRONTIERS: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND SETTLERS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY PACIFIC RIM CITIES


Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity Edited by

Tracey Banivanua Mar Lecturer in History, La Trobe University, Australia and

Penelope Edmonds Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia




Editorial matter, selection, and introduction © Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–22179–6

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Making settler colonial space: perspectives on race, place and identity / edited by Tracey Banivanua Mar, Penelope Edmonds. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–22179–6 (hardback) 1. Great Britain—Colonies—History. 2. Spatial behavior—Great Britain— Colonies—History. I. Banivanua Mar, Tracey, 1974– II. Edmonds, Penelope. JV1011.M35 2010 909' .0971241—dc22 2010002678 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Contents vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds ‘Guys Like Gauguin’ Selina Tusitala Marsh

1 25

Part I Appropriating Emptiness 1. Appropriating Space: Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism Adrian Howkins 2. ‘Never Mind Our Country is the Desert’ Eve Vincent 3. Carving Wilderness: Queensland's National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands, 1890–1910 Tracey Banivanua Mar ‘The Clay Maiden’ Serie Barford

29 53

73 95

Part II Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces ‘Don’t Read Under a Coconut Tree’ Serie Barford 4. Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia Denis Byrne 5. The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces around Early Melbourne Penelope Edmonds 6. Race, Greed and Something More: the Erasure of Urban Indigenous Space in Early Twentieth-Century British Columbia Jean Barman

101 103

129

155

v



List of Figures and Table

vi Contents

Part III Making and Unmaking Places

7. The Imagined Geographies of Settler Colonialism Lorenzo Veracini

177 179

8. The Politics of ‘Periodical Counting’: Race, Place and Identity in Southern New Zealand Angela Wanhalla

198

9. ‘Fantastic Dreaming’: Ebenezer Mission as Moravian Utopia and Wotjobaluk Responses Jane Lydon

218

Part IV Thirdspace and Middle Grounds ‘Acoustic Shadows’ Serie Barford 10. Patyegarang and William Dawes: the Space of Imagination Ross Gibson 11. Indigenous Music as a Space of Resistance Crystal McKinnon 12. Indigeneity’s Challenges to the Settler State: Decentring the ‘Imperial Binary’ Jay T. Johnson ‘Whakatangi’ Mua Strickson-Pua Index

241

242 255

273 295

297



‘Has the Whole Tribe Come Out from England?’ Selina Tusitala Marsh

List of Figures and Table

1.1

Modern map of Antarctica showing territorial claims.

4.1

Map of the Manning Valley Region, New South Wales.

107

4.2

Boomerang picture theatre, Taree, New South Wales, 1923.

120

9.1

Wotjobaluk map showing the space-names and directions of the totems and classes.

219

1904 Survey plan of Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola (Yearly fieldnotes 1903–36), Plan B762.

226

9.2

30

Table 12.1

A bicultural commitment: goals and structures

280

vii



Figures

Tracey Banivanua Mar is the author of Violence and Colonial Dialogue: the Australian-Pacific Labor Trade (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), and the co-editor with Julie Evans of Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (RMIT Publishing, 2000). Her PhD won the Dennis Wettenhall prize in Australian History, University of Melbourne in 2000, and her book was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Australian History and the John and Patricia Ward History Prize for 2007. She comes from Lau, England and southern China and is a proud Moalan. Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa-New Zealand and is of Samoan, European and Algonquin Indian ancestry. Her poetry collection Tapa Talk was published by Huia in 2007. Serie has spent time in the Loyalty Islands and on Grande Terre (Kanaky-New Caledonia) and this has inspired much of her recent work. ‘Don’t Read Under a Coconut Tree’ was written from the comparative safety of an abandoned cook house within spitting distance of the Coral Sea. It’s a response to Robert Fisk’s account of the Armenian holocaust. ‘Acoustic Shadows’ was drafted after she visited Nakety, the home village of Eloi Machoro (a freedom fighter or terrorist – depending on your political affiliation) and was completed in Tiendanite which is the tribal home of the assassinated FLNKS leader, Jean-Marie Tjibaou. Serie’s work in progress is entitled ‘Disrupted Narratives’. She performed extracts from the manuscript at the Mau Forum (Auckland) and at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2008. She is interested in alternative and counter-narratives and how they survive in tandem with dominant narratives. Jean Barman writes about Canadian and British Columbian history, and is the author of The West beyond the West: a History of British Columbia, which appeared in a third edition in 2007. Stanley Park’s Secret: the Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch and Brockton Point (Harbour, 2005) won the City of Vancouver Book Prize. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Denis Byrne leads the research programme in culture and heritage at the Department of Environment and Climate Change NSW. He is also adjunct professor at the TransForming Cultures Centre, University of viii




Technology Sydney. His research interests and publications cover the areas of intangible heritage, the interface between popular religion and heritage discourse, Aboriginal post-contact archaeology, the heritage of racial segregation in NSW, and the history and politics of heritage conservation in Australia and Southeast Asia. His 2007 book, Surface Collection, a set of archaeological travel essays set in Southeast Asia, offers a new way of writing about archaeological heritage and explores the proposition that heritage discourse is as effective in burying the past as it is in revealing it. Penelope Edmonds is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in The School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. Penny’s research and teaching interests include colonial and postcolonial history, Australian and Pacific-region contact and transnational histories, with a special interest in the Pacific northwest coast, as well as public history and cultural heritage. Her PhD won the Dennis Wettenhall prize in Australian History, University of Melbourne in 2005. Penny is co-editor with Samuel Furphy of Rethinking Colonial History: New and Alternative Approaches (RMIT Publishing, 2006) and the author of Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth Century Pacific Rim Cities (University of British Columbia Press, 2010). Ross Gibson is Professor of Contemporary Arts at the University of Sydney. As part of his research he makes books, films and art installations and he encourages postgraduate students in similar pursuits. His recent works include the books Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) and The Summer Exercises (2009), the video installation ‘Street X-Rays’ (2005), the interactive audiovisual environment ‘BYSTANDER’ (a collaboration with Kate Richards) (2007), and the durational work ‘Conversations II’ commissioned by the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. Adrian Howkins is Assistant Professor in International Environmental History at Colorado State University. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2008 with a dissertation titled ‘Frozen Empires: a History of the Antarctic Sovereignty Dispute between Britain, Argentina and Chile, 1939–1959’. Jay T. Johnson is originally from Kansas City, Kansas and of Munsee Delaware and Western Cherokee descent. Jay is currently on faculty at the University of Kansas teaching cultural geography and Indigenous Nations studies courses. His current research interests concern the broad area of Indigenous peoples’ cultural survival with specific regard to the areas of resource management, political activism at the national



Notes on Contributors ix

x


Jane Lydon is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. Her books include Many Inventions: the Chinese in the Rocks 1890–1930 (1999, Monash Publications in History), Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (2005, Duke University Press), (co-edited) Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia (2005, Australian Scholarly Publishing) and (co-edited) Handbook to Postcolonialism and Archaeology (World Archaeological Congress, 2009). In 2008 she concluded a long-term research project conducted in collaboration with the Indigenous community at Ebenezer Mission, northwestern Victoria, which forms the basis for a book titled Fantastic Dreaming: the Archaeology of an Australian Aboriginal Mission (AltaMira, 2009). She is currently working on a four-year ARC-funded project titled ‘Aboriginal Visual Histories’. Selina Tusitala Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent. She teaches New Zealand and Pacific Literature at Auckland University. She is currently completing her first collection of poetry, ‘‘Afakasi’. The development of Pasifika Poetry is her latest research passion. Selina recently edited Niu Voices: Contemporary Pacific Fiction 1 (Huia Publishers), a collection of short stories and poems by selected Pacific writers and poets. Crystal McKinnon is a post-doctoral candidate in the Department of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University. Her thesis project examines Indigenous resistance to oppression through the use of the creative arts, including music and literature. She is an Amangu and Yamatji woman from Western Australia. She currently sits on the Board of Directors for Victorian Aboriginal Community Services Associated Limited (VACSAL) and has sat on the Victorian National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Celebration (NAIDOC) Committee for the past four years. Mua Strickson-Pua is an Aotearoa-born Samoan Chinese poet, short story writer, exhibited artist, story teller, comedian, free style rapper, social commentator, media personality and ordained Presbyterian P.I.C. Minister. Aiga Pua from Papasataua Savaii and Purcell Malaela Upolu Samoa. He is married to Linda, father to Ejay and Feleti (Nesian Mystik fame), Papa to Jane Filemu, Che’den Sofi and Dremayer Liberty Choir. He is a graduate



and international levels and the philosophies and politics of place that underpin the drive for cultural survival. Much of his work is comparative in nature but focuses predominantly on New Zealand and North America.

of Massey University and Knox Theological College, Otago University. His first poetry book Matua was published by Pohutukawa Press (2006). He describes his poetry as Soc Doco Poementary. He is currently working on his second poetry book Fiapoko: Confessions of a Brown Bourgeoisie, a Pua family book entitled 28 Scanlan Street: the Pua Years, and Manu the Dragon of Magele Mountain with his grandchildren. Mua is a respected community worker and Minister who serves the Pacific nations communities in Auckland Aotearoa. He lives on Waiheke island with Linda working at their art of Aiga theology and life practice. Lorenzo Veracini is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His research interests include the comparative history of colonial systems, settler colonialism, settler societies, and Australian history and historiography. Lorenzo is currently writing a global history of settler colonialism. Eve Vincent was a founding co-editor of Spinach7 magazine and is the co-editor of two anthologies, Cover Your Tracks: Creative Histories by Young Victorians (Express Media, Fitzroy, 2001) and Scrapbook to Somewhere (Breakdown Press, Carlton, 2004). She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney. Angela Wanhalla is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Angela’s research interests are in gender, race and colonialism in New Zealand, the history of the Canadian West, and the history of intimacy, focusing on interracial relationships and hybridity. She is the author of In/visible Sight: the Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2009).



Notes on Contributors xi



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Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies

Colonialism, between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, has produced a profound and extensive rearrangement of physical spaces and peoples. Moved by force of circumstance or necessity as migrants, slaves, indentured labourers, convicts, refugees or seekers of wealth, millions of people, entire societies in some cases, were reorganised during the colonial era. This has left an enduring and unresolved legacy in the socalled postcolonial present, for in most cases, Indigenous societies and First Peoples were already present in the places to which people moved. As a result new meaning and social demography had to be carved and asserted over existing and enduring Indigenous spaces. It is this historical process of remaking space, and the intricacies of interaction – violent, ideological and cultural – between colonising and colonised peoples that is explored by the essays, poems and narratives in this collection. Centring around the Pacific Ocean, with its proliferation of settler colonies, contributors take us through an expanse of time, place and region to piece together interwoven but discrete case-studies that illuminate the transnational threads and local experiences that produced, or made colonial space. The field of ‘colonial space’ has tended in the past to be dominated by the traditional geography and planning disciplines, or in recent times by a sometimes apolitical cultural geography. These have proved to be somewhat deficient as explorations of the social history and specificity of colonialism. As Robert Freestone observed incisively, over a decade ago, on the characteristics of the geography, planning and environment fields, they have tended to be ‘pre-theoretical, landscape focussed and inclusive of familiar topics, such as land-use zoning, development control, garden suburbs, and new towns’. Freestone continued that these fields included only rare ‘glimpses of the Indigenous peoples whose lives were 1



Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds


unalterably changed, cultural practices compromised and destroyed, and land rights extinguished’ in the service of colonial empires.1 Although in the last two decades many advances have been made in the connected arenas of human emplacement and imperial geographies, we argue that work exploring the distinctive and specific spatial histories of settler colonialism’s dispossession and marginalisation of Indigenous peoples has only just begun. As Jay T. Johnson and others argue, although the discipline of geography has frequently marginalised Indigenous perspectives, the growth of an international Indigenous peoples’ movement and increased attention to Indigenous rights and knowledges within national and international forums has allowed new approaches to come to the fore. Much of this research has an activist orientation, with some researchers seeking to decolonise the geography discipline to create genuinely anti-colonial geographies that are concerned with breaking and ‘writing the silences of the present as well as the past’.2 Yet, despite these important calls to decolonise geography and the imperial geographical knowledges that continue to support imperial hegemonies, often attempts at redress remain in the realm of theory and little scholarly work attends to the local, particular and often violent historiographies in settler colonies themselves on the ground, the very micro-conditions which underpin, produce and reinforce settler spaces in our nominally postcolonial societies.3 Further, much scholarship in the area of historical geography is also characterised by its propensity to conflate the spatial politics of settler colonies with those of the colonies more broadly. This is despite an increasing, though distinct, scholarly focus on the intricacies of distinction that sets settler colonialism apart in the annals of European colonial ventures.4 In the simplest terms, settler colonists went, and go, to new lands to appropriate them and to establish new and improved replicas of the societies they left. As a result Indigenous peoples have found an ever-decreasing place for themselves in settler colonies as changing demographics enabled ever more extensive dispossession. Settlers, in the end, tended not to emigrate to assimilate into Indigenous societies, but rather emigrated to replace them. In geopolitical terms, the impact of settler colonialism is starkly visible in the landscapes it produces: the symmetrically surveyed divisions of land; fences, roads, power lines, dams and mines; the vast mono-cultural expanses of single-cropped fields; carved and preserved national forest, and marine and wilderness parks; the expansive and gridded cities; and the socially coded areas of human habitation and trespass that are bordered, policed and defended. Land and the organised spaces on it, in other words, narrate the stories of colonisation. As legitimate



2

3

spaces for First Peoples conceptually and geographically receded, in the Anglophone settler colonies of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, north America and Hawai’i, Fiji or southern Africa, late nineteenthcentury extinction narratives colluded with stadial theories of human development to locate Indigenous peoples in other times, or out of time, in ways that legitimised and naturalised spatial displacements.5 In this context Indigenous peoples came to be treated as legally and socially anomalous in their own lands. As such, and as we witness in many of the examples in this collection, self-consciously benign sounding policies of assimilation, merging, absorption or protection heralded a range of legally sanctioned practices whose goal of abolishing Indigenous peoples’ languages, histories and identities are increasingly identified as genocidal.6 As contributions to this collection individually explore, the diminution and reworking of entitlement for Indigenous peoples in settler colonies may be effectively tracked in the physical reorganisation of land and space where the ideological apparatus of settlement frequently shaped, and was shaped by, the organisation of urban, rural and social spaces. Key amongst such ideological tools, of course, was race. While narratives of extinction compelled the removal and replacement of Indigenous peoples from newly settled lands, ideas of race naturalised such narratives from the nineteenth century. Race has thus taken up residence, not just in the well-explored statutes, policies, language and other social infrastructures of settler colonial societies. It has also found permanent residence in settler colonial landscapes and cityscapes, where racially coded legacies continue to generate contests over the ownership and belonging of space. Viewed through the lens of race, therefore, the mutual productivity of colonialism’s rearrangement of spaces and bodies becomes most keenly observable, for as Judith Butler noted bodies and spaces are mutually imbricated.7 We and others in this collection argue that within the asymmetrical and frequently violent processes of settler colonialism, such processes are writ large.

Race, space and the settler colony: a connected scholarship In the British Empire of the nineteenth century, while settler colonies exported raw materials to the British metropole and their sister colonies received metropolitan goods in turn, ideas, new settlers and generations of labourers from the colonies also moved in circular ways throughout the empire’s networks and trajectories.8 That is, in settler colonies, and indeed in their postcolonial manifestations as nation states, the issues of



Introduction


the appropriation of land, the movement and migration of labour, and the racialisation of space converged. More than simply geographically distinct, therefore, the very establishment of populated and economically viable settler colonies was deeply reliant on the managed migration of labour.9 From the reproductive labour of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women to populate colonial shores, to the imported convict, enslaved, indentured or other cheap immigrant labour that established profitable industry, settler colonialism’s political economies have always pivoted on relations of race, with all of its sexual and gendered constructions. Notwithstanding the racial anxiety that inflected settler societies, new colonial polities that came to be imagined as hybrid spaces inevitably formed and confounded the most strident of settler rhetoric on racial purity. Settler colonialism’s economic and social imperatives therefore necessitated the creation of difference while also seeking its removal. As we see in a range of essays in this collection, the resulting interactions between hierarchies of race and the formation of space manifested physically in markers and inscriptions of ownership throughout the resulting landscapes. Beyond a simple rush for land, settlers sought new homes, fashioned new places of belonging out of the land they appropriated, and purposefully set about recreating its physical and ecological condition through domestic plantings or larger scale acclimatisation programmes.10 After all, as the essays in this collection elaborate, unsettling reminders of alternative and Indigenous claims to land remained ever present on the landscape. Ownership had to be seen to be believed, and rapid zoning, fencing, planting and a range of cultural strategies cooperated to give observable effect to settler purchases or acquisitions of paper title to land.11 As such, the dispossession of Indigenous owners has necessarily been an ongoing process. Space, that ideologically inflected landscape produced by settler colonies, was clearly a prime commodity, and yet surprisingly few studies of settler colonisation have focused on the transformations of space that gave effect to dispossession. There is a healthy scholarship on the legal and physical processes by which Indigenous landowners were dispossessed. Whether focusing on the act of transferring title from Indigenous owners to newcomers through treaty, purchase, legislation and outright land grabs, or on the social processes through which Indigenous peoples were denied effective sovereignty, histories of settler colonialism stand to gain much from the spatial histories of cultural geographers and ecological historians.12 If dispossession is a perpetual process – one that is as perpetual as the ongoing presence of Indigenous



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peoples – then it is also one that integrates ongoing legal, social and political processes, many of which have a spatial dimension. Significant studies have already illuminated the way in which spatial and ecological changes to land gave effect over time to the transfer of title. Likewise the power of renaming places, or of imposing grids for streets, property boundaries, crop placements and so on, in enacting possession through the creation of new, settler-defined places is increasingly attracting scholarly attention.13 From this varied scholarship it is clear that it was never enough just to acquire legal title to Indigenous land. Instead it needed to be reimagined and shaped by the colonial eye. It was in the process of reimagining that ideologies of race and the organisation of space developed a remarkable synergy. Race and space, after all, have one overwhelming and pervasive commonality – they each are conceived as natural, given and elemental. Space has been viewed in colonial gazes as tangible and geometric, while race is conceived (still) as anchored in human biology. Both race and space have been represented, therefore, as nature par excellence.14 In the last few decades new and vital fields of enquiry including historical geography, postcolonial and critical race theory have emerged to question and reject the dominant notion that ‘spaces, and the arrangement of bodies in them, emerge naturally over time’, demonstrating that the development of space is a process of uneven power inscription that reproduces itself in the creation of oppressive spatial categories.15 Such thinking rests on formative historical materialist work such as the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, who proposed the idea of social space as a process, and feminist work that has revealed the operations of classed and gendered social space.16 Just as notions of social space have been reconfigured, a radical rethinking of race has occurred in the last three decades. Race is ‘always a phenomenon whose existence must be explained rather than invoked as a natural category’, writes David Roediger; ‘it is pivotally made in human relationships, rather than found in DNA.’17 Scholars of race generally accept this position, and contend, further, that race is not a static transhistorical category, but that different social groups understand and shape racial ideologies in vastly differing ways. The ‘inherent instability’ of such racial ideologies is now a subject of intense research.18 Accordingly, proliferating studies of the construction of race, along with active attempts to ‘de-centre race’ have led to increased scholarly attention to its opportunistic emplacement, and the processes which ‘reproduce racial divisions in time and space’.19 Scholars working in this broad field of concern seek to expose ‘hierarchies that emerge from and in turn produce oppressive



Introduction


spatial categories’.20 Finally in scholarly encounters between cultural geography and postcolonialism, it has become abundantly clear that social relations generate specific geographies and produce specific subjects.21 One of the insights of such encounters has been the elaboration of connections between the seemingly totalising cartographic projects of imperial powers and the localised, anxious, intimate relations of settler colonialism experienced by Indigenous peoples and settlers. An increasing number of scholars are beginning to assert, as many do in this collection, that it is necessary to trace a close illumination of lived local spaces and the everyday encounters between settlers and the Indigenous peoples that imperial maps sought to elide. Despite the wealth of scholarship exploring, critiquing and analysing the historical interplays across and between the structural formations of settler colonialism, racial ideologies and the organisation of space, as well as efforts to decolonise geography and history, there remains a gap in understanding. Much existing work on the spatial dimensions of colonialism remains somewhat distanced from the human and social histories, the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples and newcomers, and the legal shaping and segregation of settler societies. These studies in turn rarely engage the works of cultural and social geography.22 As contributions to this study explore, however, the ongoing act of dispossession has necessarily involved a much more thoroughgoing rewriting of land and production of social space. Beyond the work of surveyors, fencing contractors or artists who reimagined land, or the architects, town planners or farmers who physically reshaped it, there were also the police, the architects of social policy, the census takers, the missionaries, the protectors and officers of Native welfare, or the town councillors who voted on by-laws and curfews, who recoded spaces as white and settled, wild and untamed, or hybrid and dangerous. All such zones of settler colonialism remain in constant negotiation, however, and Indigenous peoples continue to resist and reclaim urban, rural and public places as sites of existence, survival and remembrance. Such actions have demanded an ongoing unsettlement and challenge to colonial society that has proven to be equally, if sometimes subversively, powerful. We seek to reflect these contestations in this collection of essays, which marries an interdisciplinary range of scholarly approaches to histories of race, settler colonialism and space. Central questions of concern to us are: How were Indigenous peoples’ lands reorganised by, and in the midst of, settler societies? What was (and is) the distinct spatial commerce of settler colonialism both for immigrant and Indigenous peoples? How have issues of race and space been mobilised within this



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context? Finally, to what extent have Indigenous peoples resisted this reorganisation and maintained or created new social spaces despite the radical physical changes of the colonial and postcolonial world? The painting Billabong, our cover image, by the Australian (Nungar) artist Trevor Nickolls, speaks powerfully to the themes of our volume. ‘Billabong’ is believed to come from the Wiradhuri (Australian Aboriginal language of central New South Wales) word bilabaŋ, referring to a meander of a river that has been cut off, or a usually dry streambed that is filled seasonally, similar to an ox-bow lake. Nickolls’ curved billabong resides within a radically transformed landscape of straight, ploughed and enclosed European fields, a landscape almost denuded of trees. The painting suggests to us the apparently totalising rearrangement of Indigenous cultural landscapes by settler colonialism. While many definitions of billabong refer to it as ‘dead water’, in fact, such waterways only became more important to Aboriginal people as places of refuge and as food sources as invasion and partition and rearrangements of their lands increased. In times of flood, even today, these important bodies of water are revitalised, and may once again become places of plenitude for people and animals; in line with Nickolls, whose work often shows that while Indigenous Australian cultures and landscapes have been transformed and often damaged by Europeans culture, Indigenous cultures and sites nevertheless retain their residual power and are reminders that alternative and Indigenous claims to land are ever present.

Making spaces: a collective study Any attempt to understand the causes and formation of settler colonial space in, over and in spite of existing Indigenous spaces must begin with the question of availability. How was it that the administrative, legal and imaginative worlds of colonial societies came to anticipate the availability of Indigenous peoples and their lands for appropriation? While no author in this collection offers definitive answers to such a question, the first section, ‘Appropriating Emptiness’, focuses on the varied constructions of emptiness and associated ideas of ‘wilderness’ as a managed discourse that rendered prior Indigenous domains legally, though perhaps not socially, irrelevant. In the Australian colonies and British Columbia, for example, emptiness was at the heart of the presumption of terra nullius on which the British built claims of sovereignty within European law. In a book centred on the operations of settler colonial states, it may strike some as curious that we begin with a chapter exploring colonial



Introduction


activity in a space that is physically uninhabitable and unavailable for settlement – the Antarctic. Adrian Howkins explores the notion of ‘empty lands’ in a space that was literally, and uniquely, empty of human habitation. In an analysis of the imperial language of exploration and conquest used by claimant nations Britain, Norway and France, and the settler colonies of Argentina, Australia, Chile and New Zealand, he seeks to offer insight into the mentality of settler colonialism. Howkins traces both the political machinations that have produced the pie-chart that arbitrarily apportions sovereign Antarctic territory to claimant nations, while also exploring the discourses underpinning such negotiations. Howkins argues that gendered and raced, the terms of expression used in evoking exploration and scientific endeavour in the Antarctic were deeply colonial. Moreover he argues that contests over Antarctic space represent the highest and purist state of settler colonialism – notwithstanding the eventual failure of settlement in the Antarctic. Discussions on the claiming of Antarctic sovereignty, the peopling of empty space and the penetration of virgin country, he suggests, proceeded unsullied by the inconvenient presence of Indigenous peoples and domain. Settler colonialism, he suggests, pursued geographic territory and was only incidentally about the displacement and management of people. As a yardstick for settler colonial practices and discourses elsewhere this may provide intriguing insight into the settler colonial administration of occupation. Eve Vincent in the second chapter explores a remarkably similar discursive strategy to that examined by Howkins in discussions of the Antarctic desert. In a narrative that interweaves personal and scholarly analysis, past and present, Vincent explores the social impact of the cartographic emptying of the ‘desert’ lands of Antikarinya, Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha country in central South Australia. As past and present intersect in her chapter, she tells of the initial and ongoing impact of the nuclear age on Aboriginal peoples and their lands. In the 1950s, surveys wrote the country in maps and descriptions as empty desert, infertile, nondescript, effectively uninhabitable, and good only for crossing. Like the Pacific Ocean, imagined in the same period as a watery desert, the country around Emu Fields and the Maralinga Range became the sites of repeated atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the British government, with the blessing of the Australian government. Far from uninhabited at the time of testing, Vincent traces the immediate and ongoing impact on the people who were caught in the rolling clouds of radioactive fallout. But her chapter is not simply about the practices of erasure, both cartographic and physical, of settler governments.



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Rather it foregrounds the persistent counter-mapping enacted by Anangu people, women in particular, who continue to follow the roads, lines and practices with which they have mapped and filled their domain into the present. Far from barren, this country as Vincent demonstrates is full with history, ownership, meaning and life. Told through the entwined story of recent successful protests by the organisation Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta against planned nuclear waste dumps ‘in the desert’, Vincent offers a complex account of competing Indigenous and nonIndigenous spatial strategies. If deserts in settler colonial imaginings of land and place were dead, empty space, wilderness was its counterpart. As Tracey Banivanua Mar explores in the third chapter, by the end of the nineteenth century in the settler colonies of the Anglophone world, wilderness had come to be imagined and reconfigured as positive empty space. Positive, that is, in the sense that it was reconfigured as emptiness that was useful for scenery and recreation. In the late nineteenth century, throughout the settler colonies of the Pacific basin, a movement to enclose and preserve wilderness produced the world’s first national parks, all of which were not gazetted until the last inch of cultivatable land had been excised. But wilderness, as it was imagined in the late nineteenth century, could only exist because it had been, or would be, emptied of human habitation. As Banivanua Mar shows through the example of the Bunya Mountains National Park, wilderness was violently, legislatively and spatially produced before it could be preserved. Moreover, as she explores, the preservation of imagined empty space apparently contrasts with the existing policy trends of settler governments to produce closer and closer settlement that would fill up apparently natural landscapes with the vista of recognisable cultivation. Indeed elsewhere in settler land offices, emptiness, or blank spaces on maps, was still the anticipatory condition that compelled the expansion of settler occupation and selection. Banivanua Mar argues, however, that the contrast had an underlying coherence. The push to enclose and preserve wilderness coincided with a national coming of age of settler colonies. It manifested the geographic excesses of settler colonial appropriations of Indigenous lands, and she argues that national parks were approached as monuments to the landed affluence of settler nations. But while enclosing wilderness as national parks represented an institutional policing of emptiness that produced wild and uncared-for lands, the ongoing resistive practices of traditional owners of the Bunya Mountains area, the Jarowair, Wakka Wakka and Barunggam peoples, have left the region open to negotiation, even within the limits of settler legal systems.



Introduction


Just as Indigenous peoples lost the power to exert ownership over their lands in the forests, borderlands and pastoral areas of newly forming settler colonies, their loss in settled districts and developing urban areas was equally fast and unprecedented. In the second section, ‘Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces’, we consider settler colonialism’s rapid conversion of communally owned Indigenous lands to an expanding cadastre of European private property and the consequences of this for Indigenous peoples. ‘Cadastre’, a common technical term in surveying and tax collecting, is defined as ‘of or showing the extent, value and ownership, of land for taxation’. The term, originally from the Greek katastikhon, a list or register, from kata stikhon, means ‘line by line’. In French cadastre referred to a register of property.23 In settler colonies Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands literally line by line, as meeting places, traditional food sources, water holes, and sacred sites were overwritten with European property claims. Denis Byrne explores the resultant tense and nervous spatial system of cadastral control and Aboriginal subversion in the Manning Valley, New South Wales, the lands of the Biripi people. As Byrne writes, the European cadastral system made an ‘instantaneous’ appearance on Aboriginal lands, without regard to Aboriginal social and spiritual spatial systems, and played a decisive role in racial segregation in a landscape that was always to be unsettled. While overt policies of segregation are often associated with the American South or with twentieth-century South Africa’s apartheid system, Byrne considers the many official policies as well as unofficial practices shaped though convention that segregated settler colonial urban and rural spaces in Australia. Looking through the disciplinary lens of archaeology and heritage, however, he argues that such racial segregation in Australia barely registers in the ‘tangible’ record. Instead, Byrne points to practices of subversion and resistance using oral accounts, memory work and the mental maps of Aboriginal peoples, to describe their experiences of segregation. As Byrne asks, ‘how do you live in landscape that no longer belongs to you?’ He describes the many ‘gaps in grid’ and moments of ‘anti-cadastral activity’, the subversive spatial tactics that Aboriginal people enacted, such as fence jumping and orchard raiding, to challenge the new spatial regimes of the settler colonial project. Turning from the cadastre of pastoral lands to urbanising precincts and the urban grid plan, the second section continues with an exploration of the racialised frontiers and segregations of the nineteenth-century settler colonial city and their connections with the broader colonial project. Settler colonial cities were crucial transitional sites where Indigenous



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lands were rapidly converted to European property. Here, attempts were made to construct a colonial order at the municipal town level when outlying areas were seen to be uncontrolled and outside the reach of the law. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century early towns, often initially mixed places of some Indigenous/non-Indigenous interdependence and small-time mercantilism, later became settler cities operating as nodes in active transimperial networks, through which bodies, ideas and capital increasingly flowed in the circuits of empire. With increased settlement these cities became ambitious, gridded achievements, serving an influx of immigrant populations, and rather than joining with existing Indigenous structures, overcoded Indigenous lands and partitioned Indigenous peoples in the process. The bustling settler city, imagined as a rational, ordered and triumphal place of settler commerce and progress, became a symbol of empire which served to further justify the expropriation of Indigenous land. Indeed, just as Tracey Banivanua Mar has shown that the settler imaginary requires the sequestering of spaces as constructed zones of aesthetically proscribed ‘wilderness’ emptied of Indigenous social spaces, so too settler cities were discursively narrated as spaces of progress, commerce and modernity – spaces of the highest stage of development in the Western historicising narrative aggressively exclusive of Indigenous peoples. The creation of both spaces, institutionalised wilderness and settler cities, presupposed and functioned upon the discursive production of an absence of Aboriginal peoples. Although in cities and national parks today ‘post’-colonial Indigeneity is signalled and reinscribed in the landscape through Indigenous heritage walks and marked Aboriginal sites, they are overwhelmingly monuments to the ‘pre-contact’ past. Sites of contact or ‘post-contact’ between Aboriginal people and Europeans are generally invisible, thus firmly placing Indigenous peoples on the ‘pre-historical’ pre-modern side of the traditional/modern divide.24 Both spaces, settler cities and national parks, operate discursively on the precondition of Indigenous absence. Despite Indigenous peoples being depicted so often as anomalous to the growing settler city, they were frequently present in and vitally necessary to the early European settlements built on their lands. Early urbanising zones were therefore as much colonial frontiers as the classic ‘frontier’ of the prairie, pastoral zone or borderlands. Indeed, although now forgotten and written out of settler memory, the frontier sat at the very heart of early town and city building, a process that was crucial, and monumental, to the settler colonial project. Penelope Edmonds considers early Melbourne as an urbanising frontier, a contact zone, that was



Introduction


both a contested and a shared place of concern for Aboriginal peoples and newcomers. Settler colonialism’s rapid reorganisation of bodies and spaces produced new polities and unprecedented places. Evoking Ann Stoler’s ‘intimate empire’, where ‘mixed-race’ relationships were vital political sites,25 Edmonds argues that this urbanising settler frontier was also an intimate frontier. Bringing together considerations of settler colonial space, gender and violence, Edmonds explores this intimate frontier and the many Aboriginal town camps around Melbourne in the 1840s that were visited by European men in search of Aboriginal women. Despite later twentieth-century efforts to merge, absorb and assimilate Aboriginal populations, in this early period anxious attempts were made to partition Indigenous peoples and control interracial relations at least nominally in civil, urbanising zones. The story is different, however, in town or native fringe camps, which were often left unmentioned in official municipal archives, seemingly hidden spaces, often spoken of in euphemistic terms. Viewed by Europeans as in-between zones of licentiousness, these camps were nevertheless often the homes of Aboriginal peoples, pushed off their traditional lands, and increasingly segregated from the emerging gridded city precinct. Rather than a racially pure, ordered civil city centre to an otherwise unruly pastoral periphery, Edmonds proposes that a range of frontier spaces – urbanising spaces, town or fringe camps and outer pastoral frontiers – in fact had more in common with each other than is often acknowledged. Here, race and gender came together in imagined, material and indexical ways, producing a violent array of frontier spaces that were mirrored in other settler colonial settings. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century Aboriginal camps and reserves in settler cities on the Pacific Northwest Coast were also increasingly coveted by newcomers, seeking to wrest them away by licit and illicit means. Jean Barman’s chapter traces comparatively the fate of the First Nations’ reserves that were located in urbanising areas of late nineteenth-century Vancouver, and within the city precinct of Victoria, Vancouver Island, on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Barman explores the erasure of Indigeneity from the cityscape, a phenomenon that occurred throughout many settler towns and cities with the increase of immigrant populations and the growth of industrialisation over the latter part of the nineteenth century. Examining how racial narratives of the time worked together with urbanisation and sheer greed to dispossess First Nations peoples of their city-based land holdings, Barman also points to something more. Issues of identity and education, inflected by constructed notions of mixed descent, played a significant role in the amount of power First



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Nations groups had to negotiate with colonial governments. Although ultimately none kept their lands, some made better deals than others. Barman argues that by virtue of their mixed descent the Lekwungen, or Songhees peoples actually brokered a better outcome for themselves with colonial powers, compared to their Indigenous counterparts in Vancouver. In this way she suggests the historical foundations for emergent and starkly contrasting approaches to contemporary land claims where legal precedent has increasingly established mixed descendancy as a powerful disqualifier for recognition of land rights. In the third section, ‘Making and Unmaking Places’, we chart the processes of imaginative geography in the multiple refashionings of place. Lorenzo Veracini considers the imaginative geographies that are distinctive to transnational settler colonial strategies in their broad discursive and structural manifestations. While colonialism and settler colonialism are both concerned with the making and unmaking of places, he asserts we should attend to the geographical specificity of settler colonialism – and in particular to the realising role of anticipatory geographies. He restates the central premise upon which this collection is based, that spatial history and cultural geographies must take proper account of the structural distinction of settler colonialism. For as the essays of Howkins, Vincent and Banivanua Mar elaborate in the first section, settler colonialism was premised on the emptiness of land, both actual and constructed. Whether this was produced through the determined commitment to legal fictions of terra nullius, through the corrosion of treaty rights that Wanhalla explores, or through the physical removal, enclosure and erasure of Indigenous peoples as explored by Edmonds, Barman and Byrne, settler colonisation was distinctive for its structured imagining away, or cartographic genocide, of Indigenous peoples.26 Veracini offers a sharpened overview that threads these localised experiences together in a mutually informative way. But while the structural distinction of settler colonialism from its colonial counterpart is critical to developing a sense of its human impact, we maintain that the two were mixed and at other times in tension with each other. By looking at both the geographical reach and ideal but rarely realised environmental transformations, Veracini observes that the geographical imagination of settler colonialism was shaped by foundational episodes of success as well as failure. This is an important addition to the work of Howkins in the tracing of the discursive strategies of settle colonial geographies. Angela Wanhalla reveals modalities of settler dispossession in all their localised and particular ways, in her exploration of the census



Introduction


taking process in Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century. Wanhalla examines the politics of periodical counting as it impacted on Nga- i Tahu, the predominant Ma- ori group of the South Island, showing how colonial census combined with cartography to remake Ma- ori communities and place. She explores the census not only as a racial document, but also as a process with material, spatial and political implications for both the colonial government and Ma- ori with its wilful refashioning of a white demographic effecting the erasure of Nga- i Tahu and the subsequent dispossession of their lands. But counter-narratives may also be found in the census. As Wanhalla reveals, this historical document also embodied Nga- i Tahu resistance to colonialism, where they critiqued the census process, recounted populations, and ‘forced officials to rework the census process to account for cultural practices’. As Wanhalla concludes, ironically, the ‘Blue Book’, also known as the beneficial register, an evolving document and a result of the historical colonial practice of census taking, now forms the basis of tribal membership and therefore supports claims from the 1998 Nga- i Tahu settlement reached with the New Zealand government. The colonial remaking of community and place has been countered and refashioned again by Nga- i Tahu cultural and political assertions. To close the third section, Jane Lydon’s chapter considers the particular imaginative geographies of Moravian missionaries at the former Ebenezer Mission in Victoria, southeastern Australia. Lydon explores space and surveillance in the creation of didactic, religious landscapes designed to teach Aboriginal residents how to live as subjects of Christianity and civilisation. First highlighting the Wotjobaluk landscape dense with social and ecological meaning, Lydon then considers the juxtaposition of an enforced and highly utopian geography that emerged from a long Moravian lineage of ideal European congregational towns, which then manifested in the new world. Here, idealised landscapes and disciplinary architecture were designed to instruct Indigenous peoples and teach through example and performance. Missionaries sought to refashion the Wotjobaluk world spatially and culturally through a ‘reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the Indigenous population within modern settler society’. Lydon traces the landscaping of the Ebenezer Mission based on European prototypes, such as the function of locating the mission-house in a central and commanding position and the operation of European systems of domesticity. Despite apparent missionary control, however, Lydon describes the strategies of mobility and evasion adopted by Aboriginal residents to undermine the spatial apparatus of the reserve. Crucially, however, this idealised Moravian spatial



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and moral geography was one of transformation, not erasure. Although the Moravian ‘fantastic dreaming’ clashed with the Wotjobaluk worldview, it was one that also differed markedly from that of settler colonialism, which, as Lydon notes, held no place for the Indigenous peoples. The final section of this collection, ‘Thirdspace and Middle Grounds’, concludes with explorations of the unfinished business of settler colonialism. The chapters in this section explore constructed spaces that are untethered from a simply geographic location, but which are no less made by settler colonial contests over historical grievances, belonging and survival. Every contribution in this collection has understood colonial space as produced not simply as a geographic place to be travelled across, allotted or carved, nor as merely defined by the erasure of the colonised by colonisers. Rather, the essays have conceived of settler colonial space as a process of production through oppression, resistance and accommodation, and as both a material place and phenomenon of the imagination. Reflecting the empirical reality of settler colonial relations between Indigenous peoples and newcomers, the focus of many chapters has been on the production of space through contexts of prevailing conflict and sharp inequities. Ross Gibson’s exploration of a shifting, and necessarily imagined intersubjective space of negotiation between a British surveyor, William Dawes, and Patyegarang, an Eora woman from the area of the first Sydney settlement in the 1790s, is an attempt to consider the space of a middle ground.27 In an account that respectfully imagines an intimate meeting of minds between Dawes and Patyegarang, Gibson evokes a ‘space for possibility’, a moment during which the context of intensifying conflict and tension between inhabitants of the penal garrison and Indigenous peoples recedes. Using the words of Dawes’ journals, including the Eora words he recorded and sought to understand – poetic words that exceeded the crude functionality of communications across colonial divides – Gibson brings to life the remarkable historical characters of Dawes and Patyegarang. They come alive within a space of their own making, and for a short time resist the developing polarities of the colonial world. At the same time Gibson engages a discussion of the collective space of historical imaginings, one that is still contested and inflected with the conflicts of the past. He reminds us that the spatial dimensions that made settler colonial places have been as intangible as memory and imagination. Crystal McKinnon’s chapter explores the reaches of Indigenous peoples’ resistance in Australia, particularly through the community production of sites of political and creative autonomy. If survival is a foundation of resistance particular to the genocidal impact of settler



Introduction


colonialism, she argues, then autonomy has been and remains a precondition of survival. Building on the work of scholars such as bell hooks and James Scott, McKinnon argues that historical scholarship cannot take full account of Indigenous protest and resistance without properly acknowledging the significance of foundation-building resistance within the social margins of the settler colonial world beyond which Indigenous peoples were historically pushed. Exploring the vehicle of music production within and for Indigenous communities, she argues that Indigenous music scenes of varying genres were private physical and intellectual spaces where political discourse and mobilisation were merged. These Indigenous spaces, she argues, are empowering not in spite, but because of their marginal status, and as such they affirm and celebrate the normative state of being Indigenous. Like Gibson and Johnson, McKinnon evokes a sense of space that is political and intellectual, that is located in the communicative currents of musical lyrics, and exists in the shared historical consciousness they evoke. But at the same time, McKinnon engages a sense of political space that is necessarily and crucially geographically located, but which moves with the people who make it. In a sense, it is this geographic embodiment of an Indigenous politics of survival and strength that amounts to a structural resistance against the erasure, through both expulsion and absorption, that was enacted in Australian settler polities. What McKinnon’s analysis brings to the overall collection is an opportunity to focus on the strengths of Indigenous peoples, the opportunities of marginality, and the complexity of the making of settler colonial space. The final chapter in the fourth section, by Jay T. Johnson, develops the notion of ‘thirdspace’, or that space of political potential that lies between the incommensurable sovereignties of Indigenous and settler nations. Johnson focuses his discussion on the political strategies of Ma- ori and Pa- keha- in Aotearoa New Zealand, where since the 1960s and 1970s in particular, national attention has been paid to the resolution of Ma- ori historical grievances. The Waitangi Tribunal which revisited past land grievances; a move towards bilingualism (English and Ma- ori); and an emphasis on building a bi-cultural nation have resulted. While apparently progressive by global standards, Johnson asks whether bi-cultural approaches might not necessarily subsume Ma- ori sovereignty or self-determination within the settler polity. As he puts it, Ma- ori have been left to assert self-determination as an act of resistance. Echoing McKinnon’s understanding of the spatial as a politics of place not necessarily permanently anchored in place, Johnson discusses the emplaced assertions of Ma- ori self-determination throughout the landscape of



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Aotearoa New Zealand – in the protection of a schoolhouse, the placement of memorials, and the smallest autonomous acts that mark the national landscape. As he puts it, Ma- ori self-determination is exercised and asserted within any given place within the settler state creating ‘holes in the fabric’ of settled landscapes and thirdspaces of negotiation that step beyond the binarisms of settler government-driven paradigms. This rewriting of space, like the ‘blacking out’ of music venues that McKinnon explores, constantly challenges and unsettles the made spaces of settler colonial states. Throughout each of the four parts of this collection, we have placed the poetry of Pasifika and Ma- ori poets based in Aotearoa New Zealand. All reflect in their own ways on the themes carried throughout the collection. Their placement at the beginning or the end of each part is intended as a preface or conclusion for they each distil the threads of coherence that weave together the resident themes. Selina Tusitala Marsh opens with a reflection on the mapping and making of Europe’s Pacific and colonial world; Serie Barford’s short story concludes the first section with the story of the Clay Maiden, a place of significance to Ma- ori near Waitakere whose preservation under the guardianship of the New Zealand government as a socially ‘empty’ landscape amounted to a double dispossession. Barford’s poem ‘Don’t Read Under a Coconut Tree’ remembers the violence of colonial frontiers as an enduring presence in a postcolonial world; Marsh opens part three with a poem focused on the influx of settlers that swamped Ma- ori in Aotearoa New Zealand; and a third poem by Barford reflects on the spatial themes of resistant spaces developed in the final section. Finally Mua StricksonPua’s poem ‘Whakatangi’ closes with a final comment on the endurance of Indigenous landscapes. The section ‘Thirdspace and Middle Grounds’ is an appropriate final word for the collection as a whole. The essays that make up the section are speculative about the boundaries of the contested political spaces that now continue to remake, reinvent and occasionally recover the physically appropriated geographies in postcolonial settler nations. The section also brings to the surface the contested histories of settler colonial pasts through the spaces they occupy. The layered mythologies that have overwritten Indigenous spaces with the codes of settler ownership have constructed settler identities and have been crucial in delivering longevity to initial violent or legally invented acts of dispossession. It is therefore of little surprise that history wars rage in many of the settler colonies that have been explored in this collection. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the historical research of the Waitangi Tribunal has led to much soul-searching



Introduction


historical inquiry that, as many historians have argued, has reframed both Ma-ori and Pa-keha- understandings of the past.28 In Canada, a range of steps since the 1990s, including retrospective treaties such as British Columbia’s controversial Niska Treaty, constitutional acknowledgements and national apologies for past maltreatment of First Nations peoples have made small but progressive steps towards the acknowledgement of injustices of the past. In Australia, a range of public and academic historical enquiries have tiptoed towards a broader national acknowledgement of the widespread massacres and blunt bureaucratic violence of decades of state legislation and national policies geared towards invasive social engineering. At the time of writing, in other settler colonies of the Pacific basin, in the US and US Pacific territories, there has not been the same national focus on the settler colonial past, but this is certainly not due to an absence of strong Indigenous assertions of presence and survival. In many cases the question of whether settler colonialism amounted to genocide has been a central element of the search for national metanarratives. Vicious backlashes from sections of non-Indigenous societies, from both conservative and progressive persuasions, have resulted in all cases in domestic policy shifts that increasingly turn back the clock on political advances made by Indigenous peoples in the 1970s and 1980s. In all cases the search for national history in postcolonial settler nations has been highly contested.29 Ceridwin Spark observed in reference to the settler colonial landscape that there are ‘no presents without pasts . . . no places of self-determination that exist outside of places produced through colonisation and assimilation’.30 We cannot, in other words, reflect on the postcolonial settler landscape without understanding its violent and layered past. Explorations of race and space in settler colonies, and the shifting sites of oppression and resistance – the makings of space – may assist in understanding the patterns of power in today’s settler nations. For a clear signal that this still matters we might glance at the global context. Contest between signatories of the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples speaks powerfully of the ongoing pertinence of control over space in nominally postcolonial societies. In draft form for over twenty years, the Declaration was finally adopted in September 2007. However, the governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States were the only four to cast a negative vote in the final adoption, and their objections were principally to do with the status of customary law and land. Such refusals speak volumes on the continuing spatial imperative to deny the sovereignty and land rights of Indigenous peoples in such settler societies.31 For as contributions to this collection



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testify, it has historically and continuously been the case that a denial of Indigenous sovereignty and land rights, both observable in the arrangement of space, has been central to the internal cohesion of colonial and postcolonial era settler states. We hope that this collection of voices – academic, poetic, Indigenous, non-Indigenous and activist in dialogue with each other – may contribute to an understanding of the dominant and subversive impact of making and remaking settler colonial space. Notes 1. See Robert Freestone, review of Of Planning and Planting: the Making of British Colonial Cities (1997) by Robert Home, Journal of Historical Geography 24, 3 (1998): 381. Another work, Imperial Cities: Landscape Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert, is also a view largely from the metropole. While useful, this work does not adequately address the violent or oppressive exigencies of settler colonies or their cities, nor the requirement for Indigenous peoples of formerly colonised societies to write of their own historical conditions, giving their perspectives on space and empire. On problems with cultural geography see, for example, Catherine Nash, ‘Cultural Geography in Crisis’, Antipode (March 2002): 321–5. 2. Jay T. Johnson et al., ‘Creating Indigenous Geographies: Embracing Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights’, Geographical Research 45, 2 (2007): 117, 118. 3. For important new work see, for example, Daniel Clayton, ‘Critical and Imperial Geographies’, in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Piles and Nigel Thrift (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 354–68; and ‘Introduction’, in Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 1–6. 4. Distinctions between settler and franchise colonies have been made since as early as Francis Annesley’s 1698 distinction between ‘colonies for trade’ and ‘colonies for empire’. See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context Series, ed. Quentin Skinner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155–6. The literature on settler colonialism is extensive. Some defining studies are offered in Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: the Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Donald Denoon, ‘The Political Economy of Labour Migration to Settler Societies: Australasia, Southern Africa, and Southern South America between 1890 and 1914’, in International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives, ed. Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (Hounslow, Middlesex: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984); Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: the Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999). For some more recent explorations see the collection of articles in Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Annie Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Caroline Elkins



Introduction

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Making Settler Colonial Space and Susan Pedersen, eds, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005). Adam Smith is generally credited with these ideas of stadial progress, a model of the age of hunters, pastoralists, agriculture and commerce, where these four stages came to be understood as distinct, hierarchical and successive modes of production. Importantly these are conceptualised in a progressive, teleological fashion, figuring European society as the highest ‘stage’. The key point is that the stages came to be conceptualised as distinct ‘modes of production’ and Indigenous peoples were often figured as ancient ‘hunters’ without rights in land. The coalescence of ideas of the entitlement to own the land that one tills expounded by John Locke’s (1623–1704) Two Treatises of Government, with ideas of political economy driven by the rapid changes of the industrial revolution were also important factors in the creation of particular philosophical views of colonists. See R. L. Meek, ‘Smith, Turgot and the “Four Stages” Theory’, in Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1977), 23, 29; James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: the Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also Johannes Fabian, Time and Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Patrick Wolfe, ‘On Being Woken Up: the Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1993): 197–224. The literature on settler colonialism and genocide is a large and growing body of work. For some of the most recent writing and thinking on the topic see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997); Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (London: Duke University Press, 2003); Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006). See the contributions by Norbert Finzsch, Philippe R. Girard, Ann Curthoys, Raphael Lemkin (edited by Ann Curthoys) and A. Dirk Moses in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also the edition on settler colonialism and genocide in the Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2008). Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), ix, 33. On ‘networks’ of empire, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Anne Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). See also Lester and Fae Dussart’s use of ‘trajectories’ in their article ‘Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th-Century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’, New Zealand Geographer 64, 205 (2008): 217–18. See, for example, Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–48.



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10. John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Katherine Raine, ‘Domesticating the Land: Colonial Women’s Gardening’, in Fragments: New Zealand Social and Cultural History, ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Bronwyn Labrum (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), 76–96; C. F. H. Jenkins, The Noah’s Ark Syndrome: One Hundred Years of Acclimatization and Zoo Development in Australia (Perth: The Zoological Gardens Board of Western Australia, 1977). 11. See, for example, Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 16–40, who argues that the British put particular emphasis on the erection of houses, the planting of gardens and the fencing of land as strategies and symbols of possession of Indigenous lands. 12. For scholarship that looks comparatively at the historical and legal processes by which Indigenous peoples were dispossessed, see the comparative studies, C. K. Meek, Land Law and Custom in the Colonies (London: Frank Cass, 1968); Weaver, The Great Land Rush. For specific histories, some recent and some classic, see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1989); Frederika Hackshaw, ‘Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi’, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. I. H. Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989); I. H. Kawharu, Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Claudia Orange, An Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2004); Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987). 13. In addition to those mentioned below, see Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001); Giselle Byrnes, ‘Surveying Space: Constructing the Colonial Landscape’, in Fragments, ed. Dalley and Labrum; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Essay in Spatial History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987); Cronon, Changes in the Land; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi; Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (1998). 14. We owe a debt to Patrick Wolfe for this terminology, the product of many and unreferenceable conversations, and wish to thank him for his work as a peer reviewer. 15. Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 16. It is the formative work of Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) which has influenced much scholarship in the area of critical urbanism and cultural geography of the last two decades, although often unacknowledged. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (first published as La Production de l’espace, 1974), (Cambridge: English translation Basil Blackwell, 1991), 73. See also, Andy



Introduction

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

Making Settler Colonial Space Merrifield, ‘Henri Lefebvre: a Socialist in Space’, in Thinking Space, Critical Geographies Series, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 168. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 33. David Roediger, ‘Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments’, Theoria (December 2001): 77. For various key texts on the construction of race see, for example, I. Hannaford, Race: the History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); K. Mahlik, The Meaning of Race: Race History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994). Barbara Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143–65. Michael Cross and Michael Keith, eds, Racism, the City and the State (London: Routledge, 1993), 3. Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law, cited from the rear cover. For example, some noteworthy works related to Australia and North America: Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Jane M. Jacobs Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire; Daniel Clayton, Island of Truth: the Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000); Richard White and John M. Findley, eds, Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserve in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); Neil Smith and Ann Godlewska, eds, Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Lindsay J. Proudfoot, ed., (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); on specific subjects see also Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). Key amongst these are studies of assimilation and other social engineering policies of settler governments. For the key settler colonies under consideration in this collection, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, see the comparative studies by Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). See also Francesca Bartlett, ‘Public Stories of the Stolen Generations: Narratives of Assimilation and Resistance’ (La Trobe University, 1999); Bringing Them Home: a Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997); Suzanne Fournier, Stolen from Our Embrace: the Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997); Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle,



22

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

23

WA: Fremantle Arts Center Press, 2000); Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974). Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, ed. Sara Tulloch (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997). See, for example, Denis Byrne, ‘Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past’, Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82–107, 91; Melinda Hinkson, ‘Exploring “Aboriginal” Sites in Sydney: a Shifting Politics of Place?’, Aboriginal History 26 (2002): 62–77. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: the Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, 3 (2001): 829–65. Veracini cites Norman Etherington, ‘Genocide by Cartography: Secrets and Lies in Maps of the South-Eastern African Interior, 1830–1850’, in Disputed Territories: Land Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, ed. David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 207–32. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–94. See, for example, the various reflections on the ways in which the hearings of the Waitangi Tribunal have reshaped the way history is done, in Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005); Michael Belgrave, ‘The Tribunal and the Past: Taking a Roundabout Path to a New History’, in Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Michael Belgrave, Merata Kawharu and David Williams (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005); M. P. K. Sorrenson, ‘Towards a Radical Reinterpretation of New Zealand History: the Role of the Waitangi Tribunal’, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Kawharu. Although by no means an extensive list, the following studies and edited collections explore the political underpinnings, and the kinds of investments that are inherent in the various history and culture wars being fought over colonial pasts. With regard to recent disputes regarding historical memory and responsibility see Tony Birch, ‘“History is Never Bloodless”: Getting it Wrong after One Hundred Years of Federation’, Australian Historical Studies 118 (2002); Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘On “Getting it Wrong”: Collateral Damage in the History Wars’, Australian Historical Studies 127 (2006); Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘On the Border of the Unsayable: the Apology in Postcolonizing Australia’, Interventions 2, 2 (2000); Francesco Paolo Vitelli, ‘Epic Memory and Dispossession’, Issue 1 (2005). For comparative considerations of related history wars, see the edited collections Nyla R. Branscombe and Berjan Doosje, eds, Collective Guilt: International Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roy Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn’t Enough: the Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Finally for a wider exploration of history’s imperialism see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). Ceridwin Spark, ‘Home on “The Block”: Rethinking Aboriginal Emplacement’, New Talents 21C, Journal of Australian Studies (St. Lucia Queensland: API Network, 1999), 59.



Introduction


31. All four governments expressed particular, but not exclusive, concern over Article 26 which reads ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to own, develop, control and use the lands and territories, including the total environment of the lands, air, waters, coastal seas, sea-ice, flora and fauna and other resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used. This includes the right to the full recognition of their laws, traditions and customs, land-tenure systems and institutions for the development and management of resources, and the right to effective measures by States to prevent any interference with, alienation of or encroachment upon these rights.’



24

‘Guys Like Gauguin’

I thanks Bougainville for desiring em young so guys like Gauguin could dream and dream then take his syphilitic body downstream to the tropics to test his artistic hypothesis about how the uncivilized ripen like paw paw are best slightly raw delectably firm dangling like golden prepubescent buds seeding nymphomania for guys like Gauguin

II thanks Balboa for crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and pronouncing our ocean the South Seas hey thanks, Vasco for making us 25



Selina Tusitala Marsh


your underbelly the occidental opposite of all your nightmares your waking dreams inversion of all your laws your darkest fantasies thanks for seeing the earth as a body the North as its head full of rationality reasoned seasons of meaning cultivated gardens of consciousness sown in masculine orderly fashion a high evolution toward the light thanks for making the South an erogenous zone corporeal and sexual emotive and natural waiting in the shadows of dark feminine instinct populated by the Africas the Orient, the Americas and now us



26


Part I Appropriating Emptiness





Appropriating Space: Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism Adrian Howkins

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, colonial powers frequently used the rhetoric of ‘empty lands’ to justify their actions. Almost always, of course, such rhetoric was nothing but myth: used to legitimate violence and dehumanise Indigenous inhabitants. In one continent, however, colonial powers laid claim to a territory that really was empty: Antarctica. The southern continent is the coldest, the windiest and the driest place in the world. More than 98 per cent of its land surface is covered in ice and there is perpetual darkness over much of the continent during the long Antarctic winter. Uniquely among the world’s continents, Antarctica has no Indigenous human population. Although the surrounding oceans teem with life, the continent itself supports no flora or fauna larger than a flea. In a sense, there is nothing to appropriate but space itself. Until the early nineteenth century, Antarctica remained a purely hypothetical continent – geographers believed in its existence, but nobody had ever seen it.1 In the 1770s, Captain Cook had sailed south of the Antarctic Circle and speculated on the existence of a southern landmass due to the shape of the icebergs; but he thought the region would be too barren to be worth discovering. Around 1820, expeditions from Britain, Russia and the United States claimed to be the first to set eyes on Antarctica. But not until the twentieth century did the continent become part of broader processes of European imperialism. Between 1900 and 1950, seven countries – Great Britain, New Zealand, France, Australia, Norway, Chile and Argentina – made or delimited formal territorial claims to parts of the Antarctic continent (see Figure 1.1). During the 1940s and 1950s, these seven countries began to establish permanent stations in Antarctica to support and legitimise their political claims. Over the same period, the United States and the Soviet Union began to show an increasing interest 29



1

Appropriating Emptiness

Figure 1.1

Modern map of Antarctica showing territorial claims.

in the politics of the southern continent, although neither superpower made a formal territorial claim. As part of the work of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–8, a massive international scientific research endeavour with a particular focus on Antarctica, Belgium, Japan and South Africa also began to construct permanent stations in and



30

around the southern continent. However, none of the permanent stations built in Antarctica has permanent settlers. Until this day, soldiers, scientists, administrators, tourists and others visit Antarctica, but they always return ‘home’ to somewhere else. With no Indigenous population to displace and no permanent settlers, Antarctica might seem to pose a number of challenges to scholars of settler colonialism. This chapter will suggest that imperial claims to Antarctica reflected – or rather exemplified – the mentality of settler colonialism. Antarctic imperialism offered an ideal type, the ‘highest phase’ of settler colonialism. Rather than running counter to existing definitions, Antarctica epitomises the elitist, racist and exclusionary mentality of the settler colonial project.2 ‘The Great White South’ offered imperialists all the glory of empire without the messy reality of having to rule over colonial peoples.3 They saw this idea reflected in the cleanliness and simplicity of the landscape. Certain Antarctic visionaries, such as the North American Richard E. Byrd and the Argentine Hernán Pujato, even dreamed of Antarctica as offering a new dawn for civilisation.4 Not only did they want to recreate the societies that they had come from, but they sought to create new and better societies than the ones they had left behind. The hostility of the environment offered an opportunity to demonstrate the racial fitness of the imperial powers, helping, they believed, to legitimise their rule both at home and abroad. The continent could be painted the appropriate colour on imperial maps and reflect the expansionist ethos of empire. In short, Antarctic space itself could be appropriated and constructed to fit colonial desires. In terms of its geography and environment, the Arctic is the closest region to Antarctica. In some ways the history of imperialism in the far north is similar to that in the far south. The harshness of the Arctic landscape has been appropriated to demonstrate the strength of metropolitan powers and the economic, scientific and geopolitical potential of the region has been be used to justify imperial interest.5 But in stark contrast to Antarctica, the Arctic Regions contain significant Indigenous populations. In seeking to explain imperialism in the Arctic north, scholars have therefore been able to draw upon and elaborate traditional narratives of settler colonialism.6 Whereas settler colonialism in the Arctic generally follows traditional patterns, Antarctica offers a truly unique perspective on the settler colonial project. This chapter will begin by examining early twentieth-century British Antarctic imperialism. It will suggest that certain British officials saw Antarctica as the ‘ideal settler colony’, not only brimming with potential economic wealth but also free of the usual entanglements of empire.



Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism 31


It will then look at how states ‘mimicked’ the British settler colonial mentality in Antarctica. Sometimes, as in the case of New Zealand and Australia and possibly even Norway, this mimicry initially took place as part of the same British imperial project. In other examples, most particularly with the competing claims of Argentina and Chile and also with France, this mimicry opposed British pretensions with the result that Antarctic imperialism became a much less simple proposition than British officials had hoped. The inclusion of Argentina and Chile within the paradigm of settler colonialism might be controversial: the two South American states tended to see their claims to Antarctica through a nationalist and at times distinctly anti-imperial lens. The Argentine and Chilean claims, however, may be viewed as part of broader expansionist policies, which conformed to the racialised and gendered power structures of settler colonialism. The final section of the chapter will examine Antarctica from the perspective of the postcolonial present. In 1959, the twelve nations that had participated in IGY scientific research in Antarctica signed the Antarctic Treaty. This treaty suspended (or ‘froze’ in the official pun of the negotiations) all sovereignty claims to the continent for its duration, bringing an end to the active phase of territorial rivalry in Antarctica. While the subsequent Antarctic Treaty System, which governs the continent to the present, has done much to keep the southern continent peaceful and protect its environment, it continues to perpetuate certain exclusionary practices that date from the period of mid-twentieth-century colonialism. Even today, the sovereignty claims made in the early twentieth century legally survive as frozen relics of Antarctic imperialism, ready to be revived if ever economically exploitable minerals should be found. As well as exposing Antarctica’s imperial practices of spatial organisation, both past and present, this chapter seeks to raise questions about the settler colonial mentality more generally. By suggesting that Antarctica provided imperialists with the ‘ideal settler colony’, the history of Antarctica suggests that it was space, not people, that was at the centre of the settler colonial project. Not only does this idea challenge the notion of a settler colonial mentality forged in the struggle against an Indigenous population, it also unsettles the assumed centrality of settlers themselves.

The ideal settler colony? In early 1912, as part of the so-called ‘heroic era’ of Antarctic exploration, the British Naval Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions



32

trudged to their deaths across the icy wastes of the South Polar Plateau and the Ross Ice Shelf. They had reached the South Pole, only to find that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian party had beaten them to it. On their way back to their base on the shore of the Ross Sea, the five adventurers succumbed, one by one, to hunger, cold and exposure. When news of the ‘tragedy’ reached the outside world over a year later, responses ranged from mild condemnation to lionisation.7 There was a general feeling, however, that even if Scott had gone about things the wrong way, he had comported himself in a manner befitting an English gentleman. Even in failure, Scott’s efforts to master nature struck a resonant chord with an imperial ethos raised on ideals of muscular Christianity and self-sacrifice: ‘from these frozen regions of the South, there seems to come, like a trumpet call, a message: the greatness of England still’.8 At the heart of Scott’s story was the mentality of settler colonialism – a desire to conquer nature and to appropriate space – narrated on an epic scale. Scott’s expedition helped to set a standard for future Antarctic exploration. The enterprise was exclusively white and exclusively male. Herbert Ponting, the photographer on the expedition, titled his book of photographs The Great White South. The racial connotations of the expedition can also be seen by the dismissive British attitude towards a Japanese expedition of the same year. Officials in Britain privately dismissed the Japanese as interlopers in a white man’s continent and the Australian public in particular was suspicious of their presence in Australia en route to Antarctica.9 The Norwegians, in contrast, as a staunch Nordic race, were worthy competitors for the British. The myth of Captain Scott, in fact, would probably have been inconceivable had he been beaten by anyone but Amundsen. The racial aspects of heroic era exploration fit almost perfectly with the mentality of settler colonialism. In contrast to settler colonial situations elsewhere, women were excluded from participation in the heroic era of Antarctic exploration.10 This fits uneasily with the broader settler colonial project, where female reproductive labour was a requirement for producing self-sustaining settler populations. Many members of Scott’s expedition enjoyed the exclusively masculine company and revelled in the absence of women.11 Men were reliable and physically capable of the arduous conditions of polar exploration; women, they implied, were not. Male explorers believed that the presence of females would weaken their resolve, to the detriment of their attempts to prove their racial fitness. Women would domesticate an enterprise that was deliberate in seeking to escape from the mundane everyday world of Edwardian Britain. Scott and his fellow explorers explicitly gendered the landscape: they viewed the Antarctic environment both





as female and as a place to be conquered. In some instances at least, such rhetoric was undoubtedly a cover for homosexual feelings. Apsley Cherry Garrard – a man who found relationships with women difficult – was by no means alone when he implied that his time in Antarctica was the best of his life.12 Rather than offering an allegory for the impending end of empire, as several authors have claimed, Antarctica and the story of Captain Scott offered an idealised vision of the imperial future.13 In contrast to the simplicity of Scott’s tryst with nature, the British imperial world of 1913 was full of complex uncertainty. New geopolitical rivals, such as Germany, the United States and others, were emerging to challenge Britain’s assumed hegemony. In the colonies, rumblings of colonial nationalism were inexorably intensifying. These rumblings accompanied a sharpened critique of colonial practices among some metropolitan voices.14 Empire was becoming more difficult to justify both at home and abroad. In Britain itself, all was not well: women were demanding the vote, labour unions were demanding improved pay and conditions and Ulster Unionists were threatening to scupper any solution to the ‘Irish Problem’.15 In these circumstances, stories from Antarctica offered more than just welcome relief: they offered the hope of a better future, shorn of the dangerous complexities of the present.16 By the time of Scott’s death, a large part of Antarctica directly to the south of South America had already been claimed by the British Empire. The so-called Falkland Islands Dependencies had been established in 1908 and included the Antarctic Peninsula, the Weddell Sea and the surrounding sub-Antarctic islands. The British sovereignty claim to Antarctica was based on the settler colony of the Falkland Islands themselves. The Islands had been taken by force from a handful of settlers under the jurisdiction of the government of Buenos Aires in 1833.17 The government at Buenos Aires claimed to have inherited the islands, known in Spanish as the Islas Malvinas, following independence from Spain in 1816. Great Britain wanted the islands to serve as a naval station in the South Atlantic and simply deported all the Argentine settlers who refused to submit to British authority. Geopolitical motivations clearly lay behind this move: the British wanted a naval supply station close to the strategically important Cape Horn. In order to be effective, the British needed at least a handful of settlers to occupy the islands. Given the rainy climate and almost total isolation, there could be few less glamorous destinations for British settler colonialists. But a combination of sheep farming and fishing, alongside the government interest, made the archipelago sufficiently economically attractive to



34

draw around 2,000 settlers, many of them from Scotland. In a similar fashion to Antarctica, the Falkland Islands had no Indigenous population. The competing claims of Argentina, however, helped to create a siege mentality typical of many settler colonial situations around the world.18 The principal motivation for Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies was economic. The British wanted to tax and regulate the booming whaling industry that was developing in the seas and oceans around the Antarctic Peninsula in the first decade of the twentieth century.19 Following the rapid decline of whale populations in the northern hemisphere due to chronic overfishing, Norwegian whalers in particular had begun to head south in search of a new supply of whales. They established whaling stations on South Georgia and other sub-Antarctic islands around the Antarctic Peninsula. Due to this expansion in the Antarctic, the world’s whale oil production increased from 149,100 barrels in 1904 to 812,000 in 1914.20 There was also a belief – based on an almost complete lack of knowledge about the Antarctic interior – that the continent could contain vast mineral wealth. The potential for economic gain was a central part of the settler colonial mentality, in which the land itself was seen as a productive resource. Closely connected to the economic motivations for making a claim to Antarctica were geopolitical considerations. As well as being an economic resource, whale oil was also of strategic value: during the First World War it was used in the manufacture of explosives. Similarly, officials believed that strategically important resources such as iron, coal, petroleum (and later uranium) might be found under the Antarctic ice. Perhaps most importantly, British strategic planners extended their geopolitical rationale for claiming the Falkland Islands to their claims to the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Occupation of the Antarctic Peninsula, officials reasoned, would help to guarantee control of the strategically important Drake Passage. This southern sea route around America would become particularly vital if ever the Panama Canal were put out of action in a future war. Such considerations reflected a global vision of empire, which were often expressed in the need to deny strategic benefits to potential adversaries. Sea-lanes were crucial to the British imperial system. As in settler colonial spaces throughout the world, the British justified their claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies through assertions of scientific authority and the idea of ‘improvement’.21 Without imperial rule, British officials argued, the marine wealth of the Antarctic would be squandered. It would either be underexploited (a classic example





of natives not improving the land, or in this case the nearby states of Argentina and Chile) or overexploited as in the case of the South Atlantic sealing industry which had effectively destroyed itself in the early nineteenth century through its own rapacity. British rule, British officials argued, offered the possibility of a well-managed, sustainable whaling industry. Sir Miles Clifford, the Governor of the Falkland Islands from the mid-1940s, made the case explicitly: The only true wealth that this area contains, so far as we know today, is still as in the past its marine wealth – its whales and seals; these, as we have noted earlier, could readily be exterminated by indiscriminate killing and it was the recognition of this danger which decided His Majesty’s Government to bring these industries under control and lead to the establishment of British sovereignty over the area now known as the Falkland Islands Dependencies. The motive was a purely unselfish one, to conserve the harvest of these seas for the benefit of mankind as a whole.22 In the years after the First World War, the British established an oceanographic research project, with a particular focus on the marine life of the Southern Ocean, which became known as the Discovery Expeditions.23 The Discovery Expeditions initially used the ship from Captain Scott’s first expedition, adding a layer of romantic association to the scientific case for British sovereignty. Alongside the economic and geopolitical motivations for Antarctic empire, the region continued to inspire a strong emotional attachment among British politicians, officials and the general public. In 1914, just as the First World War was beginning, the Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton set out on an expedition in which he intended to walk across the entire Antarctic continent.24 Concerned about the outbreak of hostilities, Shackleton telegraphed the Admiralty asking whether he should cancel the expedition. The Admiralty replied that the expedition should proceed as planned, since it was good for the morale of the British people.25 The idea of walking across Antarctica had obvious geopolitical implications. By conquering nature – in this case by the simple act of walking across it – Shackleton believed that he was demonstrating that the continent would rightfully belong to the British Empire. Again, such an attitude resonates with the mentality of settler colonialism, where ‘taming the wilderness’ provided one of the surest demonstrations of imperial rule. It is interesting to note that the British had different standards for ‘conquering nature’ for different parts of



36

their empire. In Australia, for example, the act of walking across land was not considered to be sufficient to demonstrate ownership by the Aboriginal peoples. As it turned out, Shackleton’s expedition would never begin its walk across the continent. The expedition’s ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice before the trans-Antarctic party set off. There followed a dramatic story of rescue and survival that has been told and retold as an epic story of ‘exemplary leadership’.26 The shipwrecked explorers hauled, sailed and drifted their three small lifeboats to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. From there Shackleton and a handful of men sailed the most seaworthy of these small vessels, the James Caird, across the treacherous Drake Passage to South Georgia, leaving behind the remainder of his crew. In South Georgia, he sought help from the whaling companies and travelled on to South America, where he found a ship to rescue his stranded crew. Not a single life was lost, at least on that side of the continent.27 Just as in the case of Scott’s ‘heroic death’, the British claimed victory in failure. The rhetoric of heroic defeat has a place in the settler colonial mentality.28 For many of Shackleton’s party, however, the ending was not happy. They returned from Antarctica to head to Flanders. The trenches, mud and barbed wire contrasted starkly with the simplicity of ‘the ice’ and many of Shackleton’s men lost their lives in the conflict.

Antarctic sub-imperialisms: New Zealand, Australia and Norway In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Leopold Amery, Undersecretary at the British Colonial Office, called for the whole of Antarctica to be brought into the British Empire.29 He argued that this should be done piece by piece, making full use of the white dominions, in particular Australia and New Zealand. Over the course of several imperial conferences this ambition became official imperial policy. Few policies attest to the surviving ambition of the British Empire in the aftermath of the First World War more than this desire to possess the entire Antarctic continent. It speaks of a colonial arrogance that really did believe in mastery of space and nature. In retrospect, British Antarctic imperialism could easily be added to Ronald Hyam’s list of the interwar ‘follies of empire’ that presaged the beginning of the end for the British Empire.30 In the short term, however, it brought the Antipodean dominions into the Antarctic game, with a New Zealand claim to Antarctica in 1923 and an Australian claim in 1933.





New Zealand was initially a somewhat ‘reluctant collaborator’ in the British Empire’s Antarctic enterprise.31 There was no great tradition of interest in the southern continent and a general apathy towards sovereignty claims. Nevertheless, it was New Zealand that received the first pie-piece of Antarctica as part of the British imperial carve-up. In 1923, New Zealand made a formal claim to possession of the Ross Sea region of Antarctica. This was the region that had been made famous by Scott, Amundsen and other heroic era explorers as the best route to the South Pole. For the next forty years, the New Zealanders would do little with their Antarctic claims, in large part because they were more focused on the settler colonial project inside the boundaries of their own country. It was only in the mid-1950s that the country would emerge as an important player in Antarctic politics, most notably with Edmund Hillary’s participation in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957–8, which famously completed Shackleton’s aborted plan to cross the whole of Antarctica by land.32 In contrast to New Zealand, Australia already had a significant history of direct involvement in Antarctica. The Australian Frank Hurley, for example, had taken the iconic photographs of the sinking of the Endurance during Shackleton’s failed expedition. As Brigit Hains has shown, ‘the ice’ provided a complementary landscape to the ‘inland’ for constructions of the developing Australian national identity.33 Antarctica provided a new frontier in which ideals of Australian-ness could be forged. White Australians did not leave the mentality of settler colonialism behind when they travelled to Antarctica. Rather, they took with them gendered and racialised ideas of conquest of nature, which closely – but not exactly – mimicked those of British settlers and explorers. For Australians, just as for the British, Antarctica offered an idealised version of what they wanted the settler colonial project to look like. The simplicity of the landscape and the absence of Indigenous peoples contrasted starkly with the moral compromises faced by settlers in Australia itself. For much of the twentieth century, the figure of Douglas Mawson dominated the Australian Antarctic consciousness.34 A geologist and adventurer, Mawson personified the twin ideals of science and exploration. Many people commented on his Nordic features, which appeared to make him the perfect racial type for the role of Antarctic hero. His pragmatism contrasted with some of the pomposity of English Antarctic exploration, although his personality tended to be domineering. He recounted his Antarctic exploits in the best-selling Home of the Blizzard (1915). This book stressed the ordeals faced by polar



38

explorers in the harsh Antarctic environment and not all of the members of the expedition made it back alive. On Mawson’s own trek, his two companions Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis both died. When Mawson returned alone to the Australian base, he could not be recognised because he was so depleted by dog liver poisoning (hypervitaminosis) and exhaustion. Nevertheless, once again, the story of survival against the odds trumped the story of senseless loss. By the time that Australia formally delimited its claim to Antarctic territory in 1933, France had already made a claim to its own sector in the middle of the area that the British Empire had designated for Australia. This French claim put an end to the British Empire’s continental ambitions. But despite this setback, the Australian claim meant that Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia between them asserted territorial rights over two-thirds of the Antarctic continent, with ‘Australian Antarctic Territory’ being by far the largest of these three claims. In 1954, with Australia moving increasingly away from its political dependence on Great Britain, the Australian government constructed its own permanent base in Antarctica, which was named Mawson Station. For a short period, this base was the only permanent station in Antarctica outside the Antarctic Peninsula and it served as a declaration of Australian independence and self-assertion. Norwegian compliance with British whaling taxes and regulations in the Falkland Islands Dependencies provided one of the major legal bases for Britain’s ongoing claim to sovereignty in the Falkland Islands Dependencies.35 As such, the Norwegian role in Antarctica up to the Second World War might be thought of as allied to the British imperial position (despite the rivalry between Roald Amundsen and Captain Scott). In 1938, the Norwegian government called for a conference to be held in the city of Bergen to discuss the question of Antarctic sovereignty. As the leading Antarctic whaling nation, it made sense for Norway to establish a clear understanding of who owned what in the region. At the same time, the German Ritscher expedition was establishing a Nazi presence in the area to the east of Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies. In January 1939, in order to prevent a German claim the Norwegian government asserted its rights to this region, which became known as Queen Maud Land. The proposed conference of Bergen would never take place due to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi invasion of Norway. But the Norwegian government retained its claim to Antarctica and in many ways viewed it with the same settler colonial mentality that had led to the colonisation of the Arctic north of Norway.36




40


French, Argentine and Chilean interest in Antarctica developed, in many ways, in opposition to British ambitions in the region. But these interests were no less imperial for being opposed to British imperialism. In 1924 the French government made a claim to a small sliver of Antarctic territory known as Terre Adélie, on the opposite side of the continent to Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies. France had a historic interest in Antarctica through the exploration of Jules Dumont d’Urville (between 1837 and 1840) and Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1901–1904, 1908–10) and already laid claim to the sub-Antarctic islands of Kerguelen, Crozet, Saint Paul and Amsterdam. But there was no question that a major motivation for this claim was to prevent the British Empire gaining control of the whole of Antarctica. The French claim lay in the centre of the region that Australia was meant to claim under the British Empire’s gradualist strategy of Antarctic claims. Such an obstructive policy had its roots in the geopolitical ‘great games’ of empire, which continued into the post-First World War period as Britain and France vied to take control of the League of Nations’ mandates that had been confiscated from the countries on the losing side of the war. The claim functioned as one more French territory on the map, an appropriation of space in which representation mattered far more than reality. The French government would do little to occupy their Antarctic claims until after the Second World War. An expedition in the 1948–9 season failed to reach Terre Adélie, but a year later they successfully constructed a base. Despite some problems, this marked the beginning of a permanent French occupation of Antarctica. As with the earlier British imperial claims, France’s interest in the southern continent offered a useful distraction from domestic problems and served as a clear statement that France had not given up on its imperial ambition. The French presence in Antarctica brought renewed tension with Australia, which had initially viewed the region as part of Australian Antarctic Territory.37 By the time of the International Geophysical Year of 1957–8, however, the French and Australian rivalry had largely been subsumed within mutual fear that the Soviet Union would establish permanent bases in Antarctica. In the Antarctic Peninsula region, the principal challenge to Britain’s own claims to Antarctic sovereignty came from Argentina and Chile. In the early years of the Second World War, both South American countries advanced sovereignty claims to the Antarctic Peninsula region. These claims overlapped substantially with each other and with



Imperial opposition: France, Argentina and Chile

Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies. On one level, Argentine and Chilean interest in Antarctica purported to be nationalist and ‘antiimperial’. According to the governments of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the Antarctic Peninsula region was a geological continuation of South America and hence an ‘integral part’ of their national territories. Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies therefore represented a colonial imposition on South American territory. Despite the fact that their own two claims overlapped, Argentina and Chile developed the idea of a ‘South American Antarctica’ as a vehicle for their anti-imperialism.38 At the Pan-American conference in Bogotá in 1948, Chile and Argentina sought to make common cause with Guatemala, another country that felt aggrieved at a British imposition on its rightful territory (in Belize). Such sentiment sought to capture the postwar anti-colonial zeitgeist and it appears to have been popular in both Argentina and in Chile. In Argentina, anti-colonial agitation over the question of Antarctic sovereignty complemented a concurrent attack on British ‘economic imperialism’ in Argentina itself.39 British companies owned important sectors of the Argentine economy, including the most important railroads, and Argentina’s agricultural exports seemed to be ‘dependent’ on the British market. In the early 1930s, even the Argentine Foreign Minister, Julio Roca (son of a famous President), admitted that Argentina was ‘an economic part of the British Empire’.40 The government of President Juan Domingo Perón, which came to power in 1946, launched an all-out attack on British interests in Argentina. His campaign against British occupation of the Islas Malvinas and Antarctica neatly complemented this attack on ‘economic imperialism’, since it gave a concrete form to an otherwise rather abstract notion. In 1947, following the nationalisation of the British-owned railroads, President Perón declared the ‘economic independence’ of Argentina from the British Empire. The Malvinas and Antarctica would continue to prove useful nationalist tools into the 1950s and beyond – most tragically during the Falklands/Malvinas war of 1982.41 During the 1940s and 1950s, Antarctica offered a more attractive space for nationalist posturing than the Malvinas, since the lack of a permanent British population made the diplomatic repercussions less severe. In March 1948, Chilean President Gonzalez Videla became the first head of state to visit Antarctica. Speaking at the two recently constructed Chilean bases, he furiously attacked the ‘spent imperialism of European colonial powers’.42 In Chile, underlying geopolitical fears focused on Argentina, but it was politically expedient to present the case in the rhetoric of anti-imperialism and make common cause with Argentina





around the idea of a ‘South American Antarctica’. President Gonzalez Videla found himself in an embattled domestic situation and claims to Antarctica combined with anti-imperial rhetoric allowed him to appeal to both left and right. In Chile, as much as in Argentina, the politics of Antarctica were infused with domestic considerations, in particular the rise of assertive nationalist movements in both countries. Despite such vocal anti-imperialism, Argentine and Chilean claims to Antarctica might themselves be classified as ‘imperial’. From a certain perspective South American sovereignty claims to Antarctica can be seen as a continuation of the general histories of territorial expansionism of both Argentina and Chile, in particular of their southward expansion into Patagonia. This South American expansionism is a relatively understudied example of settler colonialism. In the late nineteenth century, the governments of Argentina and Chile waged wars of extermination against the Indigenous peoples of Patagonia. These campaigns were explicitly founded on positivist doctrines of scientific racism and later on ideas of the organic state. Argentina’s ‘War of the Desert’ of the 1870s and 1880s made particular use of the rhetoric of empty lands (‘Desert’) to justify their expansionism. The peoples of Patagonia were seen as biologically inferior and their murder was seen as a simple ‘speeding up’ of the evolutionary process.43 When Argentine and Chilean politicians, government officials, writers, lawyers, soldiers, sailors and scientists thought about and travelled to Antarctica they did so with the mentality of settler colonialists. They wanted to occupy the space and make it their own. The South American settler colonial mentality was neither wholly derivative of European precedents nor wholly original. Argentines and Chileans consciously or unconsciously adopted practices of Antarctic exploration from Scott, Shackleton and other heroic era pioneers. But they also adopted gendered and racialised conceptions of ‘conquering nature’ that meshed with their specific South American experiences, particularly with ideas of the organic state and expansion into Patagonia. Inextricably linked to the South American settler colonial mentality in Antarctica was the developing academic field of ‘geopolitics’. As neutrals throughout almost all of the Second World War, the geopolitical theories of Europeans such as Rudolf Kjellén and Friedrich Ratzel had not been discredited in Argentina and Chile as they had been in most of the rest of the world. On both sides of the Andes, military planners thought in terms of the strategic importance of space and the need to deny any possible advantage to others – especially each other. Very quickly, the question of Antarctica became central to Argentine and



42

Chilean geopolitical thought.44 In Chile, General Ramón Cañas became the leading geopolitical theorist and from the very beginning of his career he stressed the strategic urgency for Chilean claims in Antarctica. In Argentina, Hernán Pujato, President Perón’s right-hand man in Antarctic affairs, stressed the geopolitical implications of Argentine Antarctic sovereignty. The South American ‘geopolitical vision’ shared some similarities with Britain’s global strategic world-view, but it was certainly not derivative and tended towards more spiritual, organic conceptions of the importance of space. In a book entitled Relatos Antárticos (1958), the Argentine Admiral Díaz recounted the 55,010 miles that he had sailed as part of Argentina’s Antarctic campaigns in the 1940s and 1950s. The book is infused with religious and specifically Roman Catholic language, but perhaps most striking is his blatant gendering of Antarctic space: Antarctica is a masculine continent. There are no women there and it is possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of women who have visited before 1958 . . . The Antarctic continent is a frozen, inhospitable place of frequent and violent storms and treacherous crevasses. It is barely accessible and barely known, silent except for the roars of the wind. On some days the sunshine offers a panorama of supreme beauty and on a clear winter night it comes alive with the fantastic lights of the southern aurora. It is a land where the young men of Argentina can forge their spirits and elevate their hearts.45 Once again, the gendering of landscape might be a cover for underlying homosexual fantasies, carefully hidden from the public gaze. Another Argentine publication entitled Antarctica: Land of Machos (1971) states that it is impossible to ‘Ser Antártico’ (‘To be an Antarctican’) without spending an entire winter on the continent, with all the deprivations that that implies: ‘solitude, separation, sexual abstinence . . . ’46 Most obviously, such assertions were part of Argentina’s attempt to prove itself racially equal to, if not better than, their European rivals. The idea of ‘testing racial fitness’ was taken up by Miguel Serrano, a Chilean author who travelled to Antarctica as part of the first Chilean expedition in 1946–7.47 Serrano was a curious individual. He was a fascist sympathiser who believed that Adolf Hitler had fled from Germany to a base in Antarctica constructed by the German Ritscher expedition of 1938–9. His ideas, however, did not put him completely outside the Chilean establishment: several years later he would serve as Chilean





representative to India (where he would be able to indulge his interests in Eastern mysticism). Serrano’s account of Chile’s 1946–7 expedition to Antarctica recounts conversations in the officers’ mess on the journey southwards in which the officials and guests discussed the ‘genius’ of the Chilean race. His fascination with the Antarctic landscape – in particular its light – proved contagious, even among colleagues who did not share his extreme views. Central to his attitude towards Antarctica was the idea that the continent offered Chile an opportunity for rebirth and self-assertion. The sovereignty claims advanced by Argentina and Chile during the early years of the Second World War led to a bitter three-way sovereignty dispute with Great Britain, which would last for the next twenty years. Over the course of this dispute the three countries competed to demonstrate their scientific and environmental authority. They sought to appropriate and to represent Antarctic space in ways that suited their political claims. Violent forms of spatial appropriation typical of the settler colonial project actually became part of the diplomatic conflict in Antarctica. In some instances, the two South American nations challenged Britain’s claims to ‘dominion over nature’ directly. In Argentina, for example, Perón threatened to ‘saturate’ the Antarctic Peninsula with Argentine scientific bases in an attempt to outdo the British at their own scientific game. Argentina’s proximity to Antarctica combined with its relative postwar prosperity permitted Perón’s government to focus its resources on this issue. Perón wanted to conduct more science and better science than his British rivals. This strategy offered a self-reinforcing argument: science both legitimised and facilitated Argentine penetration of the Antarctic Peninsula region. Over the course of his presidency, Argentines constructed more than ten permanent bases in Antarctica, many of which survive today. And by the mid-1950s, Argentina was, by many indicators, the country with the leading Antarctic science programme. Central to the Argentine Antarctic project was the person of Hernán Pujato, the visionary behind Perón’s ‘Antarctic Dream’.48 Having worked his way up through the ranks of the army, Pujato’s career in many ways paralleled that of President Perón. But rather than diverting his energy into politics, Pujato focused on Antarctica. Pujato had become fascinated with the southern continent and believed that it held the key to Argentina’s regeneration and to its emergence as a ‘great power’. By testing themselves against the cold, harsh environment of the southern continent, Argentines would be reborn as a stronger, fitter nation.



44

In other instances, the South American challenge to British claims to environmental authority was less direct. Rather than seeking to compete for scientific authority, certain South Americans sought other, non-scientific, ways to represent and understand Antarctic space, which would demonstrate their sovereignty. This strategy was particularly attractive to the Chileans, who were the poorest country involved in the dispute. The Chilean writer, Francisco Coloane, for example, wrote a story entitled The Conquerors of Antarctica (1945), in which he transplanted the myths and legends of Chilean Patagonia to the shores of the Antarctic Peninsula.49 This approach offered many Chileans a familiar way of understanding an unfamiliar landscape. The familiarity of the stories created something of a folkloric claim to Chilean sovereignty; if the same characters inhabited both Chilean Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula then the region must belong to Chile. Less poetically, the Chilean lawyer Julio Escudero, who had drafted the decree delimiting Chilean Antarctica in November 1940, argued repeatedly against Chilean involvement in a ‘race for bases’ that he believed his country had no chance of winning.50 Rather than seeking to compete for environmental authority in Antarctica, Escudero suggested that such activities had no basis in international law. Traditional titles and acts of administration, he suggested, gave validity to Chile’s claim. Despite these Chilean efforts to sidestep claims to scientific authority, scientific knowledge proved to be tremendously powerful. The International Geophysical Year of 1957–8, in which all seven claimant countries took part, consummated the relationship between Antarctic science and politics. This was a global endeavour to promote understanding of the world’s geophysical systems, initially promoted by scientists from Britain and the United States.51 Its focus on hard empirical science left non-scientific ways of representing the continent looking distinctly anachronistic. Both Argentina and Chile found themselves swept along, somewhat reluctantly, by this vast scientific enterprise.52

Antarctica’s postcolonial present Alongside the seven claimant nations, five other countries conducted scientific research in or around Antarctica during the IGY of 1957–8: the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Belgium and South Africa. All five countries showed an acquisitive interest in the southern continent and, not coincidentally, all five of these countries had significant histories of imperial expansion of their own. Most significantly, both the United States and the Soviet Union refused to recognise any territorial





claims to Antarctica, at the same time as reserving their rights to claim any part of the continent.53 In the United States, the Jacksonville-based Antarctic Colony Associates came up with a fully developed plan for Antarctic colonisation based on a combination of ‘hereditary traits’ and ‘pioneer drive’ within the US population.54 Although this plan was never put into action, US State Department officials did not dismiss it completely. The Soviet Union viewed Antarctica as a stage on which to demonstrate communist technological and scientific supremacy and their publications derided the scientific achievements of capitalist countries such as Britain and the United States.55 For a while, it looked like the Cold War might spread to Antarctica. The IGY marked a decisive turning point in the history of Antarctic imperialism and ultimately prevented Cold War hostilities from developing in the far south. From the middle of 1958, the twelve nations that participated in IGY scientific research in Antarctica met in Washington, DC to negotiate a limited internationalisation of the continent through the Antarctic Treaty of December 1959. The traditional historical narrative idealises the connection between the IGY and the Antarctic Treaty as a rare example of scientific cooperation leading to political harmony. Although this is certainly part of the story, the reality was a little more complicated. The actual scientific results of the IGY helped to convince Britain, the United States and others that claims to exclusive sovereignty in Antarctica were not worth the economic and diplomatic costs involved. The IGY shattered the myth of Antarctica as a ‘frozen El Dorado’ at least in the short term. The ice was too thick, the climate too hostile and, most importantly, no major mineral deposits were found. Having decided that limited internationalisation was in their best interests, Britain and the United States sought to design a treaty that would retain their political influence in Antarctica without the need for formal political control. In attempting to bring this about, they exploited the idea of scientific cooperation as a tool to achieve their political aims. The Antarctic Treaty negotiations created an explicit connection between science and sovereignty. Only those countries conducting IGY research in Antarctica were invited to attend the Washington conference. This requirement provided a useful way of excluding potential ‘troublemakers’ including Soviet satellites and the newly independent states of the ‘Third World’, bristling with antiimperialism. In 1956 and again in 1958, India had attempted to raise the ‘Antarctic Question’ at the United Nations.56 The combined opposition to this proposal from Britain, Argentina, Chile and other Antarctic



46

claimants – despite the bitter disagreements between themselves – was a sign of things to come. Scientific research in Antarctica did not come cheaply and many countries in the Third World simply could not afford to build expensive scientific bases in Antarctica in order to win a place at Antarctica’s political table. In a similar fashion to the way the British and other colonial powers used economic influence as a way of maintaining political influence in many former colonial powers, in Antarctica their chosen tool was science. The retention of imperial influence into the Antarctic Treaty System is best expressed by Article IV of the Treaty, which suspends (or ‘freezes’ in the official pun of the negotiations) existing claims, rather than renouncing them entirely. All seven claimant countries continue to assert their sovereignty over ‘their’ parts of the continent. The South American interpretation of the Antarctic Treaty is in some ways the most honest. The governments of Buenos Aires and Santiago present the Antarctic Treaty, if not quite as a recognition of their claims then at least as an acknowledgement of their existence and a guarantee against further opposing claims being made. Even today it is a legal requirement in both Argentina and Chile that all maps of their countries include their respective Antarctic claims. In 1978, the Argentine government flew a pregnant woman to Antarctica to give birth to the first baby born in Antarctica, further mixing Argentine blood and soil and creating the first ‘Antarctican’. The Chilean government runs a school at its Villa de las Estrellas settlement in the South Shetland Islands. The initial antiimperialism of South American claims to Antarctica has given way to a fully-fledged settler colonial mentality. At the same time, the ‘reluctant collaboration’ of Argentina and Chile with the Antarctic Treaty System serves to legitimise it by including two fairly unlikely members in the ‘exclusive club’.57 During the 1980s and early 1990s, Malaysia led an international campaign against the ‘colonial’ nature of the Antarctic Treaty System.58 Picking up on India’s campaign to raise the Antarctic Question in the United Nations in 1956 and 1958, the Malaysians condemned the Antarctic Treaty System as an ‘exclusive club’ of colonial powers. Despite the efforts of Malaysia, however, there exists a general inclination to overlook the exclusionary elements of the Antarctic Treaty System. Because Antarctica has no Indigenous populations, we are unwilling to see Antarctica as part of the broader processes of settler colonialism. And yet the Antarctic Treaty System represents a reformulation, rather than a repudiation, of the practices of settler colonialism from the early twentieth century. Contemporary scientific claims to legitimacy in Antarctica




48


Conclusion By looking at Antarctica as part of a wider ‘settler colonial project’, this chapter expands the range of places that can be studied from within this paradigm. Throughout the twentieth century, people approached the barren, inhospitable continent of Antarctica with a desire to possess, to colonise and to appropriate space. The shaded pie-pieces on Antarctica’s map attest to the imperial carve-up of the continent. Rather than abolishing these assumed claims and rights, the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 maintains them in a state of suspended animation. Despite all the praise heaped upon the Antarctic Treaty for its successes in keeping peace and protecting the environment, the exclusionist practices of settler colonialism are written into its text and continue to govern the continent into the postcolonial present. The fact that Antarctica is not normally included in analyses of settler colonialism, or even imperialism more generally, attests to the rhetorical success of the Antarctic Treaty and its signatories in convincing the world that a genuine ‘decolonisation’ has taken place, or even that there has never been imperialism in the southern continent. It was no coincidence that all the countries involved in the twentiethcentury ‘Scramble for Antarctica’ were also practising settler colonial imperialism in other parts of the world. But Antarctica is clearly missing something: people. Settler colonialism in the southern continent was not forged in the struggle against an Indigenous population. When settler colonialists went to Antarctica, what they found was not what they found in already inhabited places like Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and Patagonia. Since Antarctica had no Indigenous population, its settler colonialism could not be wholly derivative of a settler colonial mentality produced elsewhere. It is also significant that there are no permanent settlers in Antarctica – nobody actually ‘lives’ there – although permanent colonies remain an important ideal. The Antarctic context, with its incredibly hostile environment, produced an ideal form of settler colonialism based purely on space. On closer inspection, however, the focus on space, not people, in Antarctica, is perhaps not so unusual. In fact, Antarctica was seen as an ‘ideal settler colony’ precisely because there were no people. It was



rest on the idea of doing some good, making use of the landscape in a particular way. This is not so very different from the settler colonial ideal of improvement that has been used to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from lands throughout the world.

a veridical Platonic form of what the settler colonial project could be like and should be like. The Antarctic imperialism of Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, France, Argentina and Chile – as well as that of the United States, the Soviet Union and others – was more than a simple reflection of a settler colonial mentality developed elsewhere: it was an idealised version of this mentality. Many settler colonialists wished that the rest of the world were more like Antarctica. Antarctic imperialism in a sense can be seen as the ‘highest stage’ of settler colonialism. Such a statement has important implications for the study of settler colonialism in other parts of the world: it suggests that people were incidental to the settler colonial project. The struggle against Indigenous peoples was not central to settler colonialism; rather it was an unwelcome distraction from the central goal of appropriating space. This realisation helps to explain attitudes taken towards Indigenous populations throughout the rest of the world. If people do not matter, then what happens to them does not matter either. Perhaps even more unsettling to the settler colonial mentality and to the study of settler colonialism is the possibility that the settlers themselves do not really matter. Antarctica, after all, became an ideal settler colony without any permanent settlers. On a global scale, the Antarctic Treaty sustains itself through the control of space, not through an ongoing struggle with an Indigenous population. Policies that ostensibly promote science and protect the environment also stringently regulate who and what can and cannot enter the southern continent. Antarctica is the most protected environment in the world, but it is also the most difficult to get to both logistically and politically. This produces a number of paradoxes. The signatories of the Antarctic Treaty preserve the continent for the sake of people who cannot – by virtue of their education, nationality or economic status – go there. Antarctic policy-makers laud the fact that nuclear waste cannot be dumped in Antarctica, where there are no people, ignoring the fact that this means it must be dumped in places where there are people. Many of the traits of settler colonialism not only continue to survive into the postcolonial present of the Antarctic Treaty, but also continue to be valorised, to the point where it is difficult to challenge them. Exclusionary practices of science ‘for the good of humanity’, for example, differ very littler today from when the British Empire first made its sovereignty claims to Antarctica at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such considerations highlight both the continuation of imperialism in Antarctica and the centrality of space, not people, to the settler colonial project.




50


1. Stephen Martin, A History of Antarctica (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996). 2. See Brigid Hains, The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002). The discourse of Australian Antarctic exploration was highly gendered and highly racialised. 3. Herbert George Ponting, The Great White South (London: Duckworth & Co., 1922). 4. Martin, A History of Antarctica; Susana Rigoz, Hernán Pujato: El Conquistador Del Desierto Blanco (Buenos Aires: Editorial María Ghirlanda, 2002); Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 5. See the work of Richard C. Powell, for example ‘Science, Sovereignty and Nation: Canada and the Legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958’, Journal of Historical Geography 34, 4 (2008). 6. Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, Narrating the Arctic: a Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002). 7. Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8. Quoted in Peter Beck, The International Politics of Antarctica (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 26. 9. Martin, A History of Antarctica, 145. 10. Griffiths, Slicing the Silence. 11. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910–1913 (London: Constable and Co., 1922). See also Sara Wheeler, Cherry: a Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1st US edn (New York: Random House, 2002). 12. Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World; Wheeler, Cherry. 13. Authors who have made this assertion include Philip W. Quigg, A Pole Apart: the Emerging Issue of Antarctica (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983) and Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). 14. Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge, 2nd edn (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 15. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: H. Smith & R. Haas, 1935). 16. Jones, The Last Great Quest. 17. Barry M. Gough, The Falkland Islands/Malvinas: the Contest for Empire in the South Atlantic (London: Athlone Press, 1992). 18. Terrence Severine Betts, A Falkland Islander Till I Die (Brighton: Book Guild, 2004). 19. J. N. Tønnessen and Arne Odd Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 20. Ibid. 21. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). 22. Sir Miles Clifford, Broadcast Address by His Excellency the Governor, 1948. In Sir Miles Clifford Papers (Oxford: Rhodes House Library, 1948). Italics added. 23. Ann Savours and Margaret Slythe, The Voyages of the Discovery: the Illustrated History of Scott’s Ship (London: Chatham, 2001).



Notes

24. Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, 1st edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 25. Martin, A History of Antarctica, 152. 26. The classic work is Lansing, Endurance. Also see Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell, Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer (New York: Viking, 2001). 27. Three members of the trans-Antarctic expedition’s Ross Sea ‘depot laying’ party on the other side of the continent lost their lives. 28. This legacy of heroic failure comes out strongly in Texas with the call to ‘Remember the Alamo’. It is also present in the failed expeditions of Burke and Wills and Ludwig Leichardt throughout the Australian interior. 29. Peter Beck, ‘Securing the Dominant “Place in the Wan Antarctic Sun” for the British Empire: the Policy of Extending British Control over Antarctica’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 29, 3 (1983). 30. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: the Road to Decolonisation, 1918– 1968 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 31. Malcolm Templeton, A Wise Adventure: New Zealand in Antarctica, 1920–1960 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000). 32. Klaus Dodds, ‘The Great Trek: New Zealand and the British/Commonwealth 1955–58 Trans-Antarctic Expedition’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33, 1 (2005). 33. Hains, The Ice and the Inland. 34. Philip J. Ayres, Mawson: a Life, Miegunyah Press Series (Carlton South, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 1999). 35. Tønnessen and Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling. 36. Bravo and Sörlin, Narrating the Arctic. 37. Griffiths, Slicing the Silence. 38. Eugenio A. Genest, Pujato y La Antártida Argentina en la Década Del Cincuenta (Buenos Aires: H. Senado de la Nación, Secretaría Parlamentaria, Dirección Publicaciones, 1998); Adrian Howkins, ‘Icy Relations: the Emergence of South American Antarctica During the Second World War’, Polar Record 42, 2 (2006). 39. William Roger Louis, Ronald Edward Robinson and John Gallagher, Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher Controversy, Modern Scholarship on European History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976); Michael W. Doyle, Empires, Cornell Studies in Comparative History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); David Lambert and Alan Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 40. Roger Gravil, The Anglo-Argentine Connection, 1900–1939, Dellplain Latin American Studies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985). 41. Rosana Gúber, Por Qué Malvinas? De La Causa Nacional a La Guerra Absurda, 1st edn (Mexico and Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001). 42. Gabriel González Videla, Memorias, 1st edn (Santiago de Chile: Gabriela Mistral, 1975). Also see Pyne, The Ice. 43. Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz, Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005). 44. Philip Kelly and Jack Child, Geopolitics of the Southern Cone and Antarctica (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988); Jack Child, Antarctica and South American




45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

Appropriating Emptiness Geopolitics: Frozen Lebensraum (New York: Praeger, 1988); Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics in Antarctica: Views from the Southern Oceanic Rim, Polar Research Series (Chichester, published in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge by John Wiley, 1997). Emilio L. Díaz, Relatos Antárticos (Buenos Aires, 1958), 13. Oscar A. Torres, Antártida, Tierra de Machos; Relatos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Drusa, 1971). Miguel Serrano, La Antártica y Otros Mitos (Santiago de Chile, 1948); Miguel Serrano, Quién Llama En Los Hielos (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Nascimento, 1957). Genest, Pujato y la Antártida Argentina; Rigoz, Hernán Pujato. Francisco Coloane, Los Conquistadores de la Antártida (Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag, 1945). Chilean Foreign Ministry Archive, ‘Comisión Chilena Antártica, 1949–56, 1958’, 14 July 1949, Minutes of Meeting. Walter Sullivan, Assault on the Unknown: the International Geophysical Year, 1st edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961). Adrian Howkins, ‘Reluctant Collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica During the International Geophysical Year 1957–58’, Journal of Historical Geography (forthcoming) Beck, The International Politics of Antarctica. US National Archive 702.022/9-150, Office Memorandum from Boggs (OIR/ GE) to Hulley (BNA). Nikolai Andreevich Gvozdetskii, Soviet Geographical Explorations and Discoveries (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). Adrian Howkins, ‘Defending Polar Empire: Opposition to India’s Proposal to Raise the “Antarctic Question” at the United Nations in 1956’, Polar Record 44, 1 (2008). Howkins, ‘Reluctant Collaborators’. Beck, The International Politics of Antarctica.



52

2 Eve Vincent

This chapter is concerned with two historical moments. The first is the British atomic testing programme carried out in a remote part of the state of South Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government, with the support of the Australian government and the involvement of Australian army personnel, undertook an extensive nuclear weapons testing programme between 1952 and 1963 at three separate Australian locations, including Monte Bello Islands, Emu Fields and the better known Maralinga Range. The second set of events under consideration is a relatively recent struggle against a proposed nuclear waste dump, which a neo-conservative Australian government under Prime Minister John Howard planned to locate in the same region where the mainland nuclear tests began. A group of Aboriginal elders led the fight against the nuclear waste dump, and were ultimately successful in 2004. These elders held vivid and disturbing memories of ‘the bombs’ detonated in their homeland during their youth. Their lives had been shaped by the profound effects of both radioactive contamination across the region, and preparations for the testing programme which involved attempts to control nomadic Aboriginal populations in this unevenly colonised area.1 In this chapter I employ auto-ethnography, historical scholarship and Aboriginal oral histories to tease out the significance of the relationship between these nuclear projects, past and present. This endeavour takes its lead from the campaign conducted against the proposed waste dump, where evocative campaign statements made use of a constant movement between ‘then’ and ‘now’. This narrative strategy inspired my own. The chapter shifts between moments and settings in order to argue that a dominant colonial understanding of the desert as an empty, dead and disused space underpinned past and present decisions 53



‘Never Mind Our Country is the Desert’

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Road-tripping Between 2000 and 2005 I travelled between Melbourne and the South Australian outback opal-mining town Coober Pedy many times. Sometimes I went by bus, sometimes by car. I got to know the road. We passed flamingo-pink salt lakes, sparse scrub, lines of trees that signified creeks. We always stopped for ginger beer and hot chips at a roadhouse that stands at the turn-off to Woomera. In 2000 ‘Woomera’ was just a place name, a sign we passed on the way to Coober Pedy. By 2005 it had become something else, something terrible. For the Australian public ‘Woomera’ was to become synonymous with the hardline asylum-seeker policy of mandatory detention, a Howard-era political flashpoint I will return to later. The bitumen’s edge met grass, then dirt, then grainy red sand, then white powdery dust. The desert! The sky! It was vast and strange and powerful. We were headed for a spot 850 kilometres north of South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide, where over a million residents of the state’s population of just over 1.5 million are concentrated. ‘Strong stories change the way people think’, says anthropologist Deborah Rose.3 I have road-tripped thousands of kilometres because of this story. I’m not sure how to begin it. And I’ll never get sick of the ending.

July, 2004: damper, jam and cream On 14 July 2004, Australia’s neo-conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who held power for over a decade, announced that a national low-level nuclear waste dump planned for South Australia had been scrapped. Outmanoeuvred by the liberal Mike Rann’s ‘anti-dump’ South Australian state Labor government at every turn, Howard gave in after realising he could not continue to ignore sustained community opposition. Howard was clearly unimpressed, but marginal Adelaide seats were at stake in the 2004 federal election which easily returned him to office. In late July I visited Coober Pedy again, at the same time that Rann passed through for a series of community meetings. At the time of



about the value and meaning of these places.2 In telling this story, I have interwoven the life stories of a group of inspiring Aboriginal women with my own story of involvement in anti-nuclear struggles. Movement, indeed travelling, emerges as a central trope of the chapter: I begin it with a journey.

writing Rann is associated with enthusiastic policy initiatives that aim to expand uranium mining in his mineral-rich state. That sunny winter morning he came to Umoona Aboriginal Aged Care Centre an anti-nuclear hero, for celebratory damper, jam and cream.4 Rann is a smooth talker but I had to believe him when he said that throughout the protracted waste-dump battle he treasured the letters of support he received from the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a council of senior Aboriginal women based in Coober Pedy. After all how many letters to the Premier sign off with the intensity of Mrs Eileen Unkari Crombie: ‘One of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta who always sticks up for a man like you till the end of the world’, Mrs Crombie wrote to Rann after seeing him on the television: Keep fighting! Don’t give up and we won’t give up. Keep fighting because kids want to grow up and see the country when we leave them, when we pass on. They’ll take it on. Hope they’ll fight like we fellas for the country. We don’t want to see the irati – poison, come back this way. We’re not going to give up.5 The Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta are a council comprising senior Anangu (Aboriginal) women from Antikarinya, Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha countries. Kupa Piti, according to some local versions, is Yankunytjatjara for ‘white men’s holes’; the non-Indigenous place name ‘Coober Pedy’ is based on a transliteration of this description.6 Kungka means woman, and tjuta means many. The Kungka Tjuta came together in Coober Pedy in the early 1990s to revive traditional women’s culture: to ensure the transmission of stories and knowledge; the continuation of cultural practices; and the maintenance of their responsibilities to country. The old women were worried that their children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren were growing up in town, whereas they had grown up travelling the country, ‘learning the country’. They wanted to give their ‘children and grandchildren something more than video games, drinking and drugs and walking the street’.7 In early 1998 the federal government announced it planned to build a radioactive waste repository within a 67,000 square kilometre arid region of South Australia, which encompassed the countries of Antikarinya, Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha people. The Kungkas responded with an announcement of their own. Their ‘Statement of Opposition’ became a sort of mission statement for their six-year-long anti-dump campaign. They called their campaign Irati Wanti (‘The poison, leave it’).



‘Never Mind Our Country is the Desert’ 55

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We are the Aboriginal Women. Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya and Kokatha. We know the country. The poison the Government is talking about will poison the land. We say, ‘No radioactive dump in our ngura – in our country.’ It’s strictly poison, we don’t want it . . . We were born on the earth, not in the hospital. We were born in the sand. Mother never put us in the water and washed us . . . They dried us with the sand. Then they put us, newborn baby . . . in the warm sand. And after that, when the cord comes off, they put us through the smoke. We really know the land. From a baby we grow up on the land . . . Never mind our country is the desert, that’s where we belong.8 I became involved in a small greenie, or environmentalist, support group for the Kungkas, undertaking awareness and fundraising for them in cities, where political campaigns are won and lost. A good friend moved to Coober Pedy to coordinate things from there and I visited every winter. The Kungkas were ‘talking straight out’ to settler Australians when they insisted, ‘We know the country . . . Never mind our country is the desert. That’s where we belong.’ The ‘never mind’ is perhaps impatient, and certainly confident, in its explicit challenge to settler ignorance about the desert. This ignorance is far from innocent: it is bound up in the opportunistic discursive production of a particular social space as uninhabited, and a historical legacy of colonial activity that sought to empty the desert – specifically, in this case, for the purpose of conducting British nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. My attempt at a genealogy of the discursive production of the desert as blank space proceeds from Michel Foucault’s now general point that space is fundamental in any exercise of power.9 Following more particularly the work of Henri Lefebvre, I want to insist that the word ‘space’, connoting both a void and a vastness, is never empty of meaning. Spaces, according to Lefebvre, obscure the conditions of their own production: illusions about space as passive, natural and intelligible proffer an understanding of it as unconstructed, as existing prior to the subject’s engagement with space.10 Australian cultural theorist Ian Buchanan brings home the lesson that applies in invaded and colonised territories: ‘we need to think of space in terms that do not permit a notion such as empty space to circulate and be given currency’.11 This



The Kungkas’ letters and statements are now collected in a book published by the campaign office, Talking Straight Out. The Statement of Opposition begins:

point applies particularly to the desert. Consider Jean Baudrillard’s chapter ‘Desert Forever’ in his philosophical travelogue America. For Baudrillard the desert bespeaks the ghastly, culture-less new world and signals only a lack. ‘The desert’ is both a metaphor for American cities – ‘no monuments, no history’ – and describes a physical place ‘with no origin, no reference points’.12 And when Australia’s federal government designated the South Australian desert as a site for waste in 1998 it revived, or perhaps more accurately relied on, a powerful colonial construction – that of the desert as empty, dead and disused. As an example of the potency of images of the desert as empty, consider briefly the way in which refugee advocates, throughout the mid-2000s, suggested that at the Woomera detention centre the barbarity of the mandatory detention regime was mirrored by the supposedly apparent barbarity of the landscape in which it was situated. This socio-political drama unfolded just 300 clicks down the road from the centre of our ‘solidarity’ campaign, but we were learning very different lessons: that space is never simply an apparent or pre-existing backdrop to events.13 The colonial imagination, I will go on to show, figured the desert as a remote wasteland. This dominant understanding of the desert obfuscates another. To the Anangu who inhabit the desert, this ‘dead space’ is a network of known places. It is life-sustaining and full of meaning, and is criss-crossed with secular, historic and personal stories, as well as dreaming tracks.

July 2002: straight roads We go out country with some of the Kungkas to help pick a strongsmelling spindly plant known as Irmangka Irmangka, bush medicine that we will later bottle, market and sell in cosmopolitan Melbourne. ‘Grandmothers been making ’em since a long long time ago’ reads the label. Goanna fat or no-brand margarine forms the base of this powerful ointment. The Kungkas opt to travel in the ‘flash car’ and three of us tail them in my battered ute.14 The landscape blurs out the open window. At one point our convoy pulls over suddenly and I ask the Kungkas in the other car ‘How much further?’ ‘Not far,’ assures Mrs Austin. ‘Long way,’ mutters Mrs Crombie. That night, sunburnt and dusty, feeling queasy after my first taste of roasted maku or witchetty grub, I ask the others what was talked about in the ‘flash car’. Most of the conversation was in language, but the Kungkas also spoke in English in order to teach the greenies.





Repeatedly, they pointed out where the new Stuart highway (paved in 1980) crossed the route of the old, which meandered from station to station. Occasionally they would sigh and complain, ‘This road. Long, straight road. Boring road.’ Throughout colonial history, the desert has been thought of and treated as a remote wasteland. This conception is especially evident in histories of white exploration. In Roslyn Haynes’ Seeking the Centre she depicts the arid interior as an exemplary blank space, restlessly reconstituted by colonial fears and fascinations, as alternately nightmarish and utopian.15 Early explorers’ accounts depicted the desert as a vast, geographically uniform and featureless ‘wilderness’. Haynes notes: ‘The changelessness ascribed to the desert was also attributed to its Indigenous inhabitants; both were seen as primitive, obdurate and inimical to civilisation.’16 This point becomes important when we consider that for Australia, the atomic testing programme of the 1950s and early 1960s represented a distinctly modern experience, a moment of postwar maturation. I elaborate on the atomic testing project at a later point in this chapter. Comparing Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of place and space, Stephen Muecke focuses on the role of naming in the respatialisation of the continent. Muecke contends that Indigenous people charted the country in as much detail as a city street directory provides: ‘the number of Aboriginal place-names still exceeds the number of names bestowed by the colonisers’.17 According to Muecke, ‘parts of the sandy deserts of the centre, which we tend to call “unsettled” areas, are still just as densely named as other parts of Australia’.18 Contemporary road maps of the Australian centre owe much to the work of the surveyor Len Beadell whose popular memoirs provide a particularly rich source of colonising spatial narratives.19 Beadell ‘blazed’ the east–west road across the centre, the Gunbarrel highway, named after Beadell’s Gunbarrel Road Construction Party, who ‘liked [their] roads straight’.20 The Kungkas, recall, seem to find straight roads ‘boring’. Beadell’s memoirs repeatedly evoke the desert as ‘limitless’, ‘lonely’, ‘desolate’, ‘unexplored’, a ‘vast wasteland’ and ‘virgin bush’. In 1947, when Beadell was approached by the Long Range Weapons Organisation (LRWO) about the potential for a rocket range which included a diagonal corridor across one and a half thousand miles of country between Woomera and Broome, he replied, ‘I know a million square miles of nothing.’21 Beadell went on to survey and identify appropriate detonation sites for the British atomic testing programme, working for the Woomera



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Research Establishment (formerly the LRWO) until 1988. He constructed a network of access roads through central Australia, many of which he named after his children. Reflecting on his life’s work, Beadell has said that he is proud to have ‘opened up’ four thousand square miles ‘that hadn’t been touched by anyone since the world began’.22 I see Beadell as a kind of nuclear-age nomad, methodically recording longitude and latitude readings and making topographical notes, his travelogue guided by modern spatial technology – the compass and the Land Rover’s trip speedo. Of course, Beadell’s reconnaissance missions brought him into contact with numerous Indigenous family groups and communities. Indeed, Beadell’s name captions many of the photographs published in books about Anangu life in the Western Desert over this time period.23 Yet Beadell interprets signs of Indigenous ceremonial and social life as objects of primitive interest, ‘mysterious’ remnants discarded in an ‘untouched’ landscape.24 In his memoir, Blast the Bush, Beadell’s story reaches a kind of atomic climax, which he interprets as marking the beginning of historic time in the desert.25 Blink and you would miss it – in a microsecond Totem One, the first bomb detonated as part of the British atomic testing programme, vaporised a 100-foot-high steel bomb tower. With his back to the detonation, Beadell observed a ‘blinding flash’ that lit the horizon line, and felt a wave of intense heat. He then turned to the mushroom cloud when a spontaneous joke was played on the gathered media. Someone pointed to the cloud’s shape and exclaimed ‘a perfect portrait of a myall blackfeller written in the atomic dust; the new and the old have come together today’.26 Beadell is jolly in recounting this scene but other recollections of the Totem One blast are disturbing. In a submission to the Royal Commission, ex-serviceman Jim Balcombe described a ‘searing flash of light which came through from behind me, through the back of my head, it felt as if my eyeballs had been thrown out in front of my body’. Instructed to run, Balcombe was ‘picked up by the bomb’ and thrown ‘thirty-five feet sideways’.27 Thus, as Beadell determines, marks, bulldozes and names a grid of straight lines across the desert, he conjoins the practice of respatialisation with another kind of overlaying. A country he supposes to be empty of history is seen to make history. As Muecke writes, ‘Australia is a country where the deep Indigenous narrative lines have been confused by the imposition of another grid of lines.’28 Today of course, thanks to Beadell, the desert is ‘known’ rather than ‘the unknown’, ‘mapped’ rather than ‘blank’. But how was the desert already known, already mapped?





Oral histories from the Western Desert are densely saturated with place names that relate long journeys and refer to constant travelling. Anangu people used to ‘walk everywhere . . . walk to one place and then to another’.29 This walking was done barefoot and linked an extensive network of water sources. Jessie Lennon remembers her parents ‘travelling all the time, walking from one rock-hole to another visiting people. They did not know anything about whitefellas.’30 Similarly Kungka Tjuta member Ivy Makinti Stewart remembers ‘living at Ernabella . . . There were no bores, no store, we would get water from the creek and eat bush food. My father would go out hunting with spears, no rifle then.’ Mrs Stewart and her family ‘travelled every way through that country, walking and carrying our swags’. 31 As an adult, Mrs Lennon – who grew up with Kungka Tjuta member Mrs Eileen Wani Wingfield – moved not from ‘camp to camp’ as her parents did, but between bush camp and ceremonial life, pastoral stations, missions and ration depots. In the northwest rations were most commonly issued by ‘doggers’ and station owners in exchange for work. Historian Robert Foster has shown that in southeastern South Australia ‘Aborigines were able to adapt ration distributions, which aimed to control and administer Indigenous people, to fit existing patterns of seasonal movement.’32 Yankunytjatjara Elder Yami Lester’s childhood reminiscences also demonstrate that movement patterns were changing; walking was no longer done just by tjina (foot): After a while (living traditional way) we came back to the station, and Kantji [his father] got a job, looking after cattle and shepherding sheep . . . Kantji walked the sheep, while we rode on wagons pulled by camels. From Wentinna we moved down to Mt. Willoughby where Kantji worked for a while, then southeast to Evelyn Downs. From Evelyn Downs we travelled to Arckaringa where Kantji did some shearing . . . From Arckaringa we’d ride back on the trucks to Wentinna and from there we’d walk to Wallatinna, south of Granite Downs. We’d follow the creek up to the hills and walk across the bush, where our people knew the places and were able to find water in the rock-holes, claypans and swamps.33 Lester’s narrative connects a series of known places and captures constant movement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous economies. Collecting dingo scalps for itinerant non-Indigenous doggers was a common type of casual work for Indigenous people between 1900 and



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the 1950s, and provided an ease of mobility between Indigenous and non-Indigenous economies. Dingoes were taking sheep and calves on pastoral properties, and the South Australian government purchased the scalps.34 Kungka Tjuta member Mrs Emily Munyungka Austin ‘used to move around a lot when Dad was buying dingo skins’.35 Mrs Austin’s father, Jim Lennon, was Irish and made a living by trading skins for tea, sugar, flour and clothes, with Indigenous scalp collectors. Lennon sold the skins to the police, who then burnt them. I came to think of movement as a tactical spatial practice, which allowed for the maintenance of relationships between places along those ‘deep narrative lines’ referred to by Muecke. In a contemporary setting, Anangu people continue to move, catching lifts with family, friends and strangers; in old, battered cars; on buses; in Toyota troop carriers on bush trips, with an energy and frequency that is astounding, considering the age of the people I know. They move across the country to visit people and maintain relationships. And the Kungka Tjuta, as part of the Irati Wanti campaign, travelled the whole country, to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, in order to stand up for their country.

15 October, 1953: The Bomb The Kungkas’ 1998 Statement of Opposition continued: All of us were living when the Government used the country for the Bomb . . . The smoke was funny and everything looked hazy. Everybody got sick . . . When we were young, no woman got breast cancer or any other kind of cancer. Cancer was unheard of with men either. We were people without sickness . . . The Government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now, again they are coming along and telling us poor blackfellas, ‘Oh, there’s nothing that’s going to happen, nothing is going to kill you.’ And that will still happen like that Bomb over there.36 ‘The Bomb’ referred to is Totem One, witnessed by Len Beadell and detonated by the British government on 15 October 1953 at Emu Fields, a flat claypan 280 kilometres north of Coober Pedy. On the morning of 15 October a dense radioactive cloud travelled over Anangu communities and pastoral stations in the Coober Pedy region.37 The eerie, deadly ‘black mist’ it produced was investigated by the 1984 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, as a result of Yami Lester’s insistence.





In the early 1980s Lester, who attributes his blindness to exposure to radioactive fallout, contacted the Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser with his story and the Pitjantjatjara Council joined atomic ex-servicepersons, many of whom were dying of cancer, to call for a Royal Commission.38 Lester told journalist Robert Ball that the Yankunytjatjara camp at Wallatinna was enveloped by a ‘black mist’ that rolled through the mulga scrub and ‘brought death’.39 Within forty-eight hours of hearing an explosion in the south ‘everyone in the camp was debilitated by uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhoea’.40 Skin rashes broke out, and healthy children started going blind; some partially recovered their sight, others did not.41 Kungka Tjuta member Mrs Eileen Kampakuta Brown describes: The smoke caught us. We got up in the morning from the tent . . . everyone had red eyes. The smoke caught us – it came over us. We tried to open our eyes in the morning but we couldn’t open them. We had red eyes and tongues and our coughing was getting worse. We were wondering what sort of sickness we had. There were no doctors, only the station bosses. All day we sat in the tent with our eyes closed. Our eyes were sore, red and shut. We couldn’t open them . . . All people got sick right up to Oodnadatta . . . we all got sick.42 Angelina Wonga, another Kungka Tjuta member was camped at Wantjapita: with my mother, father and sister, all the family. Sitting down. And when we seen a bomb went out from the South. And said, eh? What’s that? And then we see the wind blowing it to where we were sitting down. That was the finish of mother and father. They all passed away through that. I was the only one left. We’d been travelling on camels. I let all the camels go . . . I lost everything.43 The Royal Commission found that on 17 July 1953 Ernest Titterton, who was responsible for the safety of the Australian public, assured Prime Minister Robert Menzies ‘that no habitations or living beings will suffer injury to health from the effects of the atomic explosions proposed for the Totem trials’.44 Both Totem tests were delayed due to easterly winds that would have contaminated the Emu ‘campsite’, by then a temporary town supporting 400 inhabitants.45 Totem One was eventually detonated a week late under unusual meteorological conditions. The day had no wind shear, exactly the kind of conditions highlighted as dangerous by a preparatory report.46 The Totem One



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cloud rose to a height of 15,000 feet after three minutes and drifted northwest without its radioactive particles dispersing. It was still clearly visible twenty-four hours after detonation.47 The Report of the Royal Commission concludes: ‘Totem One was carried out under wind conditions that the A32 report had shown would produce unacceptable levels of fall-out’, a decision that ‘failed to take into account the existence of people at Wallatinna and Welbourne Hill’.48 Explaining the decision to detonate, historian Heather Goodall, researcher for the Pitjanjatjara Council during the Royal Commission, notes the British team was under pressure from their government to demonstrate the ‘dramatic success’ of Britain’s nuclear weapons capability. During the Cold War arms race ‘a risk to the health of a small number of Aboriginal people seemed a small price to pay for British pride’.49 As Yami Lester summarised: ‘We don’t know the times and the days. We had no clocks or calendars in the bush. But the Royal Commission found that the weather was not right that day, too dangerous, and the scientists should have known.’50 When Royal Commissioner Jim McClelland concluded that the decision to detonate ‘failed to take into account the existence of people’ in the northwest, he referred to the efforts of the testing project to establish population patterns in the testing areas. The first tests carried out on the Australian mainland were at Emu Fields, where Totem One and Totem Two were detonated. Due to difficult access and limited water sources, the testing site was moved southwest in 1954 to Tietkins Plain on the southern edges of the Great Victoria Desert, serviced by train from the Transcontinental Railway Line.51 This permanent site at ‘Maralinga Range’ usurped parts of the Central Australian Aboriginal Reserve. The Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee (AWTSC) oversaw safety aspects of the tests; since 1947, the LRWO had employed Walter MacDougall as a ‘Native Patrol Officer’ to safeguard Aboriginal interests from ‘contact or encroachment’ arising from the British government’s guided projectile (rocket) range established in the same area.52 MacDougall was concurrently acting as a Protector under the South Australian Aborigines Act, in which guise he reported to the Aborigines Protection Board (APB). To what extent these roles presented conflicting responsibilities is unclear. The LRWO assumed that people in the Woomera region were largely ‘detribalised’, whereas the APB claimed to ‘protect’ the traditional lifestyle of Western Desert Anangu and ‘counter the influences which [impelled] them to leave their country’.53 MacDougall was required to ascertain ‘the location and habits of Aborigines’ over thousands of square miles of desert (and to ensure their





safety).54 His task was impossible; support was inadequate and his advice was repeatedly ignored. Any criticisms or suggestions he ventured were met with reprimand. Indeed Chief British Scientist, Richard Penney, complained that MacDougall seemed willing to place the ‘affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth’.55 It is not surprising then that MacDougall ultimately adhered to the ‘wishes and policies of Government’ rather than the ‘wishes of Aborigines’.56 Testing conditions in the South Australian desert were consistently exalted, because of its status as a ‘vast open space’, which was ‘largely uninhabited’.57 This was a myth, the fallacy of which the safety committee was loath to admit. The distances traversed by MacDougall’s patrols increased as the Woomera range was extended in stages, and eventually encompassed the Emu Fields testing site. In October 1949, for instance, MacDougall covered 358 miles in his Land Rover. His March 1952 journey covered 2,166 miles.58 MacDougall’s survey of the Emu area in June 1952 yielded an ‘unreliable census’ of 172 Yankunytjatjara people residing on pastoral properties. He stressed, however, that in the spring when the Totem trials were scheduled, ‘this population might be very differently distributed as people moved south and west to collect dingo pup scalps’. This information was ignored.59 As the distances of the patrols increased, so did the complexities involved. Initially MacDougall undertook head counts at stations and other settlements, such as railway sidings. However, MacDougall became increasingly aware that his data were uncertain. He found that while ‘bush natives who know me [through his three years as stock manager at Ernabella] will make their presence known as soon as they recognise me’, other groups who generally avoided ‘contact with whites’ had no trouble evading him.60 This comment highlights the ridiculousness of aerial patrols, which Anangu people routinely hid from.61 Extensive travel characterised many Indigenous groups encountered by MacDougall. To his surprise they ‘show very little interest in . . . the white man, and visit the missions or white communities [very occasionally]’.62 MacDougall found it difficult to determine the ‘boundaries of tribal country’ due to ‘drifting’ populations.63 Of course, Anangu people were not ‘drifting’. Much more active words are needed to describe their patterns of movement. In 1950, MacDougall’s patrol confirmed ‘large scale and continuous Aboriginal movements in an arc from Coober Pedy in the northeast, through Woomera to Ooldea in the west and beyond into West Australia’.64 Movement was also noted from the Central Reserve, south to Ooldea. This latter route, which traversed



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the Maralinga Range, convinced MacDougall to recommend in 1952 that the ‘LRWO support the closure of Ooldea Mission, with the transfer of its population south to Yalata’.65 MacDougall advocated that Ooldea mission be declared a ‘prohibited zone’ to hundreds of Anangu who had strong spiritual and secular relationships with it. Eventually the ‘Maralinga lockout’, as anthropologist Kingsley Palmer has termed it, was precipitated by a split between the state and federal branches of the United Aborigines’ Mission (UAM).66 However, plans were in place to ‘hand over’ the Ooldea residents to Lutheran missionaries (who had a mission west of Ceduna at Kooniba), and a pastoral property at Yalata had been purchased for this purpose. UAM mission workers left Ooldea suddenly on 24 June 1952. The APB immediately ordered the Kooniba Mission Staff to Ooldea to ‘assemble the natives, who had spread over a wide area when they were informed that the Mission would be closed, and convey them to Yalata’.67 The ‘natives had spread out’ according to their traditional orientation: Pitjantjatjara elected to head north, Kokatha to Yalata, and the Wirungu west, boarding the tea and sugar train to Cundeelee.68 MacDougall assisted the Kooniba mission staff in loading people onto trucks, sixty at a time, and also into camel-drawn wagons, to be conveyed to Yalata. Lutheran pastor Eckermann’s recollections of the morning are evocative: MacDougall’s Land Rover loaded with the entire Kooniba party [made] light work of the steep, fluid sand-hills, as indeed it should, having once run across the continent from Woomera through the trackless dead heart.69 MacDougall’s Land Rover was en route to Tarcoola siding, where the Pitjantjatjara had travelled by train, intending to continue north to Ernabella. According to Eckermann, MacDougall intercepted the Pitjantjatjara and claimed they ‘were asking to be allowed to return to Ooldea, and . . . follow their southbound comrades to Yalata’. MacDougall readily agreed ‘since he was much concerned about clearing his territory of natives in preparation for the coming atomic trials’.70 According to oral testimonies collected by Brady and Palmer and presented to the Royal Commission, MacDougall had coerced the Pitjantjatjara group. Through a combination of ‘persuasion, cajolery and orders’ they were forced to turn south, abandoning the old walking routes that linked Ernabella with Ooldea through the so-called ‘trackless dead heart’.71 The Pitjantjatjara were then effectively cut off from their





country, as MacDougall ordered rations to be cut to all northbound travellers from Yalata.72 The legacy of the ‘Maralinga lockout’ makes for heart-breaking reading. The southern Pitjantjatjara/Maralinga Tjarutja people (as they became known) were alienated from their land, which they knew to be subject to violent and long-term damage; Palmer notes they were constantly ‘crying for country’.73 He writes ‘the Yalata people felt a huge sense of loss as a result of not being able to access their own country’.74 They compared the grey dusty limestone country of the Nullabor fringes unfavourably with the red spinifex desert they had been forced to leave.75 Kungka Tjuta member Myra Tjunmutja Watson also associates Yalata with loss of connection with country and social formations sustained by country. Mrs Watson was ‘born near Ooldea mission. There in the forties. The missionaries there at Ooldea.’ She was married and working ‘away’ at Gerard ‘at the time of the bomb. We seen the smoke go up, all orange and red, all going up. Orange colour. We see the colours going up.’ In 1970 she went ‘looking for her people’: They were in Yalata. They sent them to Yalata. Then I went to Yalata to find them. But there were only a handful there. There used to be big tribes of people. Camps used to be all over . . . They put the bomb there. In our country . . . In the middle, right through. All the smoke there . . . finished all our people, in the [Great] Victoria desert. You look at it on the map, nobody living in [that] desert. All our people gone.76

Past, present, future The Royal Commission, as Graeme Turner says, ‘represented the completion of a ritual of separation [from Britain] which had to be performed if Australia was finally to be in its own place’.77 Turner goes on to critique the popular meaning the Royal Commission gave the atomic testing programme: the story of the British–Australian colonial relationship, between the centre of empire and a peripheral, Anglophile Australian government. Intent on exposing ‘the devastating material effects of colonial domination’, the Royal Commission grossly ‘misrepresented the Australian Government’s degree of culpability’.78 The colonial relationship between Indigenous people and the Australian government was ‘submerged under the weight of another story’.79 In eliding this ‘other story’, which would necessarily tell of an ongoing relationship between the Australian state and Indigenous people, the Royal Commission enacted another ‘ritual of separation’, that of the past from present.



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By contrast, when the Kungka Tjuta ‘testify’, the past is recalled, analysed and related for the purpose of affecting the present. The remembering and retelling of ‘Bomb testimonies’ remained a priority throughout the Irati Wanti campaign; I was drawn to investigate this insistent movement between past and present. Deborah Bird Rose and Heather Goodall have shown that Indigenous peoples’ histories make sense out of colonial experiences by presenting very different versions to the dominant account of the past.80 Historical events as they are recalled in community memory may be both sequenced in a way other than is usually demanded by narrative history, and interpreted in a way that undermines the meanings drawn from the dominant interpretation of that history. Goodall provides the example of a Pitjantjatjara man, Kunmanara of Ernabella, who attributed a devastating 1948 measles epidemic to the 1950s British atomic testing programme. In a detailed analysis of Kunmanara’s interpretive process, which led to this ‘realisation’, Goodall shows Kunmanara’s construction of events to be consistent with ‘his sense of injustice and dispossession over invasion’.81 While the Royal Commission shaped a ‘consensus interpretation’ of the same set of events Kunmanara ‘held out against it’, demonstrating that ‘social negotiation of memory is not irresistible and . . . does not leave monolithic or seamless accounts of the past’. For Rose, the differences are ‘irrelevant in a fundamental sense’. Rose has recorded Yarralin stories from the Victoria River region of northwest Australia, which identify Captain Cook as the key figure of invasion. In settler Australian mythology Cook discovered the continent. The Yarralin people’s Captain Cook stories may be at odds with settler knowledge of Cook’s journeys but they are a ‘vehicle for analysis’; they are a succinct summation of colonial relationships structured by domination and destruction.82 The Kungkas’ statements and letters do not represent past experiences in a way that upsets, or contradicts, the accepted chronology of historical events. Their claims about the effects of the Totem One bomb are substantiated by non-Indigenous accounts of the past. But like the Yarralin, the Kungka Tjuta present a powerful case study in remembrance. The Kungka Tjuta employ a particular narrative device, drawing the past into the present, for the purpose of affecting the future. The Captain Cook ‘moral saga’ has a pedagogical function; it is a dialogue between two moral systems.83 According to Rose the moral system of Cook, which is shared by the non-Indigenous colonisers, represents immoral law.84 It is a law of domination and destruction, contrasting with





Yarralin law which is ‘directed towards life, towards the maintenance of living systems’.85 The Irati Wanti campaign evidences the Kungkas’ similar commitment to maintaining their part of the world, the South Australian desert, as a life-giving system. The Kungkas’ letters and statements demonstrate a world-view that is directed towards life (‘they have to have their life’). They venerate water, which is life-sustaining, and warn of the destructive capabilities of the irati, radioactive poison. The Kungkas’ statements and letters also provide a succinct summation of the relationship between ‘the Government’ and Anangu people, structured by domination, destruction and, importantly, resistance. Within the Yarralin history of Cook the term ‘Government’ is conceptualised as ‘something inflicted upon [Yarralin people] from the outside, which they [have been] powerless either to change or evade’.86 Within the Kungka Tjuta’s statements and letters ‘the Government’ is also conceptualised as the locus of destructive power and a profoundly frustrating source of ignorance. In the Kungkas’ letters and statements capital G ‘Government’ is a shorthand reference for past and present regimes (‘the Government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now again . . .’). I also understand it to conflate actual structures of power with powerful ideas. While the Kungka Tjuta use ‘Government’ in this general, conceptual sense, as the campaign continued and the Kungkas became more involved as respondents to bureaucratic processes, they were more likely to note specificities. The then federal government was chastised for eliding the responsibilities that come with power, such as listening and responding (‘it’s just like our words went on the winds . . .’). The Kungka Tjuta did not accept they were powerless to change the course of the waste repository project the government planned to inflict upon them. Talking and travelling became methods of articulating counter-narratives, which radically disrupted the federal government’s unconvincing story. These counter-narratives resonated with many nonIndigenous Australians and forced an epistemological contest between ways of knowing the country. And, out of that contest, the Kungkas emerged: ‘Happy now – Kungka winners. We are winners because of what’s in our hearts, not what’s on paper.’ They get the last word: People said that you can’t win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. We told Howard you should look after us, not try and kill us. Straight out. We always talk straight out. In the end he didn’t have the power, we did.87



68


1. South Australia was established as a free settler state in 1836. However, in the arid northwest of the state, regular contact between Aboriginal groups and settlers was only established in the 1930s. Peggy Brock, ‘South Australia’, in Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown, ed. Ann McGrath (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), pp. 216–18. 2. My analysis of these events owes much to the work of Australian scholars Heather Goodall, Deborah Bird Rose and Stephen Muecke. I also draw on the insights of seminal theorist of space Henri Lefebvre, whose arguments have very particular implications when applied to Australian settings. 3. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Morality and Captain Cook’, in Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001), p. 61. 4. Damper is a kind of colonial-era bread; it contains basic ingredients but is traditionally made on a camp fire. 5. Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, Talking Straight Out: Stories from the Irati Wanti Campaign, ed. Nina Brown (Coober Pedy: Alapalatja Press, 2005), p. 68. 6. Jessie Lennon, I’m the One that Know this Country! The Story of Jessie Lennon and Coober Pedy, compiled and ed. Michele Madigan (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000), p. 47. 7. Talking Straight Out, p. 6. 8. Ibid., p. 12. 9. Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Power and Knowledge’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 131–41. 10. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 17–18. 11. Ian Buchanan, ‘Extraordinary Spaces in Ordinary Places: De Certeau and the Space of Postcolonialism’, Span 36 (1993), p. 56. 12. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 123–4. 13. ‘Clicks’ is Australian slang for kilometres. 14. ‘Ute’ is short for utility; in North America they are known as pick-up trucks. 15. Roslyn Haynes, Seeking the Centre: the Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 66–7. 16. Ibid., p. 34. 17. Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1992), p. 5. 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. See, in particular, Len Beadell, Bush Bashers (Adelaide: Rigby, 1971), which deals with the construction of highways in central Australia and Blast the Bush (Adelaide: Griffith Press, 1967), which is about the site selection and preparation for the atomic testing programme. 20. Beadell, Bush Bashers, pp. 1–2. 21. Address by Len Beadell to the Annual Conference of Rotary District 982, Shepparton Rotary Club, Shepparton, Victoria, 2 March 1991, J. D. Somerville Oral History Collection, State Library of South Australia, OH 454. 22. Ibid. 23. See Lennon, I’m the One that Know this Country!; Christobel Mattingley (editor and researcher) and Ken Hampton (co-editor), Survival in Our Own



Notes

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Appropriating Emptiness Land: ‘Aboriginal’ Experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836 (Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992). Beadell, Blast the Bush, p. 172. Ibid., pp. 210–11. Ibid. Noel Sanders’ analysis of the Totem One trial as a ‘media event’ quotes the Sydney Morning Herald, whose journalist ‘saw the profile of an Australian Aborigine formed by soaring flames’. Sanders notes that Australian atomic discourse appealed to modernity and the ‘new’ postwar ‘Australian destiny’. Noel Sanders, ‘The Hot Rock in the Cold War’, in Better Dead Than Red: Australia’s First Cold War, 1945–53, ed. Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 155–162, p. 157. The term ‘myall blackfeller’ is a derogatory term for Aboriginal men, and carries connotations of ‘wild’ often being used in contrast to ‘tame’. Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia: Statements from Australian Witnesses A–D, National Archives of Australia, A6450. Stephen Muecke, No Road (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997), p. 192. ‘Nyila Nellie Wintinna’, in Coober Pedylanguru Tjukurpa: Stories from Anangu of Coober Pedy, ed. Janet Skewes (Coober Pedy: Umoona Community Council, 1997), p. 23. ‘Jessie Lennon’, in ibid., p. 19. ‘Ivy Stewart’, in ibid., pp. 41–2. Robert Foster, ‘Feasts of the Full Moon: the Distribution of Rations to Aborigines in South Australia: 1836–1861’, Aboriginal History 13, 1 (1989). Yami Lester, Learning from the Land (Alice Springs: Institute of Aboriginal Development Press, 1995), pp. 8–10. Helen Chryssides, Local Heroes (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1993), p. 229. ‘Emily Austin’, in Skewes, Coober Pedylanguru Tjukurpa, p. 31. Talking Straight Out, p. 13. ‘Operation Totem’, in The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Volume One (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985), 6.4.1–16, pp. 174–94. The Pitjantjatjara council at this time represented Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjara peoples. Anti-bases Campaign, Weapons in the Wilderness: the Exploitation of the North-west of South Australia (Adelaide: Anti-bases Campaign – South Australia, 1991), p. 19. Robert Ball, David English and Peter de Ionno, ‘A “Black Mist” that Brought Death’, The Advertiser, 3 May 1980, p. 1. Ibid. Robert Ball, ‘A “Devil Spirit” That Didn’t Go’, The Advertiser, 3 May 1980, p. 1. Talking Straight Out, p. 92. Ibid., p. 91. ‘Operation Totem’, 6.1.15, pp. 144–5. Ibid., 6.1.20, p. 146. Ibid., 6.1.17, p. 146. Ibid., 6.1.22, p. 146. Ibid., 6.2.19, p. 151. Heather Goodall, ‘Colonialism and Catastrophe: Contested Memories of Nuclear Testing and Measles Epidemics at Ernabella’, in Memory and History



70

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 55. Chryssides, Local Heroes, p. 229. Mark Shepard, The Great Victoria Desert (Chatswood, NSW: Reed Books), p. 157. Geoffrey Gray, ‘Aborigines, Elkin and the Guided Projectiles Project’, Aboriginal History 15, 2 (1991), p. 154. Gray shows that considerable opposition, based on concern for Indigenous welfare, greeted the 1946 Chifley Labor Government’s announcement that a British guided missile range was to be established near the Central Australian Aboriginal Reserve. MacDougall’s appointment was made in response to public criticisms. Maggie Brady, ‘The Politics of Space and Mobility: Controlling the Ooldea/ Yalata Aborigines 1952–1982’, Aboriginal History 23, 1/2 (1999), p. 3. Mattingley and Hampton (eds), Survival in Our Own Land, p. 93. The chapter ‘“Atom Bombs Before Aborigines”: Maralinga’ is derived from the ‘Final Submission on behalf of Aboriginal groups and individuals to the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia’. The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 8.4.37, pp. 308–9. Brady, ‘The Politics of Space and Mobility’, p. 4. The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 2.1.25, p. 15. Ibid., 6.3.14, p. 154. Mattingley and Hampton (eds), Survival in Our Own Land, p. 90; The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 6.3.52, p. 170. Patrol Report, August 1951, quoted in The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 6.3.19, p. 156. Aircraft pilots were instructed to ‘keep a sharp look-out for new tracks, camp fires, and signs of entry into the area’. There were no reports of ‘anything untoward’. The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 6.3.57–8, p. 171. Patrol Report, March 1952, quoted in The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 6.3.19, p. 156. Ibid. Mattingley and Hampton (eds), Survival in Our Own Land, p. 90. Brady, ‘The Politics of Space and Mobility’, p. 5. Mattingley and Hampton (eds), Survival in Our Own Land, p. 242. Ibid. Kingsley Palmer, ‘Favourite Foods and the Fight for Country: Witchetty Grubs and the Southern Pitjantjatjara’, Aboriginal History 23, 1/2 (1999), p. 52. Pastor N. A. Hample, ‘Yalata, Lutheran Mission: 1952–1977’, 1977 (unpublished manuscript provided to me by Sister Michele Madigan), p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Brady, ‘The Politics of Space and Mobility’; Palmer, ‘Favourite Foods and the Fight for Country’; Kingsley Palmer, ‘Dealing with the Legacy of the Past: Aborigines and Atomic Testing in South Australia’, Aboriginal History 14, 2 (1990); Maggie Brady and Kingsley Palmer, Diet and Dust in the Desert: an Aboriginal Community, Maralinga Lands, South Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991); The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 6.3.38–41, pp. 166–8.





72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Mattingley and Hampton (eds), Survival in Our Own Land, p. 90. Palmer, ‘Dealing with the Legacy of the Past’, p. 19. Palmer, ‘Favourite Foods and the Fight for Country’, p. 53. Ibid., p. 54. Talking Straight Out, p. 92. Graeme Turner, ‘Semiotic Victories: Media Constructions of the Maralinga Royal Commission’, in Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader, ed. John Frow and Meaghan Morris (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 188. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. Goodall, ‘Colonialism and Catastrophe’; Rose, ‘Morality and Captain Cook’; see also Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991). Goodall, ‘Colonialism and Catastrophe’, pp. 67–72. Rose, ‘Morality and Captain Cook’, p. 62. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 73. Talking Straight Out, pp. 116–17.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.



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Carving Wilderness: Queensland’s National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands, 1890–1910 Tracey Banivanua Mar

In late October 1903, Queensland’s Inspector of Forests, G. L. Board, took a walking tour of a timber reserve in the southeast ranges of the Bunya Mountains. These ancient ranges rise abruptly from the flat fertile regions of southern Queensland where the climate is more temperate and less humid than the tropical capital, Brisbane, a few hundred kilometres to the east. Making special mention of the mountain climate as ‘most salubrious and bracing’, Board scrambled through the reserve’s scrubby terrain, traversed rugged outcrops and ranges both timbered and bald, and camped in the notable peace of mountain air. As he went, he viewed the lands around him with a practised gaze that evaluated soil quality, water, topography and the value of timber. The soil, Board later wrote, was ‘a rich chocolate’ and the land was ‘splendidly [supplied] with cold running water’. On the Balds – the stark rugged hills throughout the ranges where only grasses rather than forests grow – he scanned the ‘fair grasses’, praised their ‘luxuriant growth’ and reflected on their availability to the encroaching gridded farmlands of the fertile plains. But for the purposes of settlement, Board wrote, the mountains held little value, being steep, ‘somewhat rugged’ and ‘only fit for foot traffic’.1 On concluding his tour, Board stood on a rise in the southeastern extreme of the mountains where the foothills met the fertile plains below, and surveyed the signs of colonisation before him. With his back to the mountains, whose rugged unsettlement left blank spaces on the colony’s survey maps, he faced the emerging chequerboard scene of straight fences and property boundaries before him. There lay the Dalby plains where cultivation by Queensland’s settlers was bringing the straight inky lines of the Lands Office’s maps into being. He described the ‘Dalby plains stretching to the horizon in the south’ and the unknown and undulating ranges of the mountains rolling away to 73



3


horizons in the north, east and west. Reflecting on the effective empty space of the mountains, he wrote that with the exception ‘of two or three kangaroo shooters the mountains are deserted’.2 In fact the mountains were not deserted in 1903, and it was a matter of wide settler knowledge that they never had been. At the turn of the century the Indigenous peoples of the Bunya Mountains and surrounding areas were still present in the region, often as newly designated trespassers on settler property. In the following years they would be removed by the Queensland government as an indirect result of the evaluative information Board’s survey provided in 1903. For, as this chapter explores, Board’s lyrical celebration of the mountains was purposeful and possessive. As a surveyor, his professional and ‘imperial eyes’ gazed on the empty country of mountains in ways that searched for and extracted value from land that was, in this case, ‘exceedingly grand’ and amongst the ‘most beautiful bits of scenery in Queensland’.3 With ‘a small outlay in clearing lines here and there to the edges of the range to give the visitor extensive views’ he wrote, these mountains could be made valuable in ways that were relatively novel to settler colonial appropriations of Indigenous spaces.4 For Board was reporting to the Lands Office in Brisbane on the suitability of the Bunya ranges for permanent reservation as a national park. The healthy climate, water, soil and fly-free air, he argued, could supply Queensland with health resorts and a ‘sanatorium of wide repute’. He recommended that the entire Bunya Mountains be reserved as wilderness, that parts of it, like Mowbullan mountain, ‘should never have been allowed to be alienated’, and that ‘it would be a disgrace to allow this beautiful spot to be . . . lost to the public.’5 Following the excision of all farmable country from the mountains’ boundaries, he advised, they should be proclaimed as a wilderness park – a national park for the people. The Bunya Mountains National Park was proclaimed five years later in 1908, and the expulsion of the diminished population of Indigenous peoples in the area followed soon after. This removal of Indigenous peoples was as critical to the colony’s creation of an authentic wilderness as the marking of boundaries, for as this chapter argues, notions of wilderness were essentially empty spaces in the colonial imaginary, and necessarily emptied spaces in colonial histories. The creation of national parks and wilderness reserves began in North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in what seems like a marked departure from the land-grabbing settlement practices of the nineteenth century’s ‘great land rush’.6 Throughout these Anglophone settler colonies, colonial and



74

federal governments had invoked diverse doctrines, methods, ideologies and laws to enable widespread dispossessions of Indigenous peoples.7 Outright violence, treaties and treaty breaches, Native Land Courts, legal fictions and statutory enactments were all variously harnessed to these dispossessions amidst prevailing and fluid ideologies of labour, land, civilisation and progress.8 As discussed in this chapter, common to the varied methodologies of dispossession was the powerful moral imperative or commerce surrounding notions of wilderness and wasted land – wasted that is, by the ill-use of Indigenous peoples. Filling up land with cultivation, purpose and progress was therefore a settler mantra of such force that any move to enclose and preserve vast stretches of ‘nature’ appears to be a significant shift. While the early national parks movement has been explored, these explorations have tended to highlight their various uses as national monuments and resource reserves. Many have explored the extent to which we might view them as the beginnings of a conservationist movement.9 But fewer have considered the parks movement explicitly in its settler colonial context, either as a means of exploring the origins of the parks themselves, or as a means of exploring the structural momentum of settler colonial practices of rewriting the spatiality of Indigenous lands.10 This chapter considers the convergence of discourses on land, race and property that framed the history of the Bunya Mountains National Park, while examining the spatial strategies that produced them. Board’s vision, for example, displayed the evaluative gaze typical of surveyors who, as Giselle Byrnes has recently described and as Ross Gibson explores in this collection, were often the literal ‘cutting edge’ of empire.11 Like the explorers that preceded surveyors, and the settlers that would follow, their vision was imbued with the ideological agenda of that ‘mode of appropriation’ – of possessing through seeing – and their evaluations of the utility of country were geared towards ‘filling’ with cultivation and progress, that which they saw as qualitatively empty.12 Spatial histories of occupation in Australia, and settler colonialism more generally, have explored well the ways in which the production of colonial societies was enacted ideologically by filling empty, wilderness and wasted lands with the visible activity of ownership and commerce. The abstraction of geographical knowledge for maps and selection, the naming of place or the performance of possession through placing survey pegs, fences and other ritual and material inscriptions were key elements in the process of producing spaces full with settlement.13 In the case of Board’s investigation of the Bunya Mountains, he also searched for and evaluated land whose use



National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands 75


to the settler state would reside in the aesthetic emptiness of wilderness. I argue in this chapter that this was entirely consistent with settler approaches to land settlement, and that national parks were framed as a form of development that produced wilderness as progress, for apart from anything else, they emptied Indigenous social spaces. National parks, and their enclosure of bounded wilderness, were spatial institutions distinctive to settler colonialism, which manifested converging doctrines of dispossession and notions of wilderness.14 This chapter poses two arguments. First, I argue that the early national parks – or reserves of vast areas of scenery and wilderness – occupied a chronological and ideological position at the apex of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ land rush in settler colonies. They were the products of a matrix of legal, philosophical and artistic doctrines that governed and compelled the hunger for Indigenous lands in this period. Apart from having a functional role as timber reserves, living monuments or the means of democratising recreation, national parks were necessarily symbols of the landed affluence of settler nations. The second and interrelated argument is that the enclosure and reservation of land in its apparently natural state did not mark a shift in settler colonial spatial strategies, but rather suggests an underlying consistency in the political geographies of settler colonialism. The production of wilderness such as national parks participated in the erasure of Indigenous social spaces, manufacturing untouched nature, in order to preserve it. Wilderness, in other words, had a spatiality that was ideologically, physically and socially produced.15 But while the advent of national parks symbolised a kind of triumph of settler colonial appropriation, at the same time in Queensland Indigenous owners ensured that they have remained negotiated spaces of ownership.

The Bunya Mountains and the unsettling of terra nullius The Bunya Mountains span the overlapping territories of the Jarowair, Wakka Wakka and Barunggam peoples and are part of a wider Indigenous network that linked what is now Queensland and northern New South Wales. The region was well known amongst Queensland settlers because of the unique bunya pine that grows exclusively in the region. Settler representations of the uniquely indigenous pine during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resonated with the themes of noble and fallen savagery familiar to representations of Indigenous peoples, and as an element of settler culture, it became an icon of settler gardens.16 Appearing in gardens throughout Queensland and



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the Australian colonies, it was also exported to botanical gardens in Trinidad, the Sarasota Jungle Gardens in Florida, and of course Kew Gardens in London.17 In late nineteenth-century London, bunya pine nuts were something of a colonial novelty, and according to Constance Petrie, were sold at Covent Garden for ten guineas each.18 Bunya pine’s resonant popularity with settler society also stemmed from its centrality to one of the most iconic events and social activities for Indigenous peoples of the region – the Bunya Festivals. These were held every three years when the pine produced nuts that were harvested in festivals attended by thousands of people from territories and language groups throughout the wide region of central Queensland and northern New South Wales. By facilitating exchanges of ceremonies and trade the festivals were socially, economically and spiritually important to attending communities both before and after settler occupation.19 From the earliest days of settlement the bunya gatherings were central to the way in which the region was opened up to settler occupation. As Raymond Evans has written, some of the earliest British explorers, such as Andrew Petrie in the 1830s, travelled with festival-goers to gain access to northern and western regions. Likewise, the traffic of Indigenous peoples to and from the mountains established the roads and tracks that explorer and missionary Karl W. E. Schmidt followed in the 1840s when he went in search of fertile mission ground.20 Far from the ideal of discovering the Australian legal fiction of terra nullius, therefore, European visitors like Schmidt and Petrie travelled established paths and roads to explore land that was clearly spoken for.21 In accounts of the region’s early occupation settlers were explicit in describing Indigenous peoples as the ‘proprietors’ who ‘owned’ the mountains and the trees.22 Authors frequently laboured to convey the complexity of systems by which the ownership of individual trees and the spaces they grew in was organised and marked; they marvelled at the Balds and their evidence of management by fire; and wondered at the use of smoke-signalling to communicate harvest time across distances of hundreds of miles.23 Those who wrote of the Bunya Mountains, in other words, wrote of the signs that in the authors’ own estimations, amounted to qualitative proprietary rights amongst Indigenous peoples. This deeply contradicted settler doctrines that positioned Indigenous peoples’ social organisation and cultivation as being too minimal to amount to a qualitative dominion. The Bunya Mountains therefore deeply unsettled doctrines of settlement.24 As British occupation haltingly encroached on the mountain sites of the bunya festivals into the 1860s, and as the festivals themselves continued





to operate despite widespread devastation, the proprietorial claims of new settlers were contested by Indigenous landowners. Like northern New South Wales, the area of southeast Queensland saw lengthy, organised and strategic resistance to settler encroachment on and beyond the fertile plains of the Darling Downs.25 Amidst the conflict of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s the bunya gatherings were critical to Indigenous peoples’ communication, planning and coordination, and Raymond Evans has argued that the region was popularly viewed as a ‘base for terrorism’.26 It thus became a central point of targeted conflict. By the 1860s and 1870s, the rapid spread of private selections and the legal enforcement of settler laws of trespass increasingly blocked the means of access to the festivals for Indigenous peoples.27 The conflict on and around the Bunya Mountains was part of a wider context in Queensland where violence against Indigenous landowners was talked about with a disarming matter-of-factness. George Carrington, who travelled to Queensland in the 1860s, wrote extensively of the normalised presence of violence throughout the colony. In 1871, he wrote of one of Queensland’s frontier roads, ‘for more than a mile the air was tainted with the putrefaction of corpses, which lay all along the ridges, just as they had fallen’, and ‘large pits, covered with branches and . . . secured by a few stones, and the pits themselves were full of dead blackfellows, of all ages and of both sexes’.28 The banality of violence against Indigenous peoples was something that also seeped into the private letters and diaries of settlers. Exemplary was one settler’s letter, written in 1866 to his fiancée in Melbourne, stating that when Aborigines were euphemistically ‘dispersed’ during boundary runs, the ‘beggars . . . don’t rot; they dry like mummies and precious queer looking articles they look too: dry and grinning . . . they dont [sic] cost me a moments [sic] uneasiness’.29 In public and private discourses therefore, the violence of the frontiers was openly discussed as the regrettable but necessary means of emptying, taming and settling the land. As one member of the Queensland Parliament put it in 1880, ‘the white man had come . . . and the blackfellows had to go, and go they must’.30 By the 1880s, the large bunya gatherings of the early nineteenth century had all but ceased, although radically smaller gatherings continued well into the twentieth century. While unsuitable for settlement, the mountains themselves were briefly logged, although in the earliest days of the industry traditional owners appear to have maintained some control. J. C. Bennie, the son of one of the region’s first loggers, recounted an incident in the 1860s when a pine was felled during



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a festival, and as a result ‘all timber getters were ordered off the mountains’ by Indigenous festival-goers.31 Despite early prohibitions on the felling of the bunya pine, imposed by both Indigenous owners and the colonial governor, the colony’s insatiable need for timber began to strip the foothills of the oldest, tallest and straightest pines in the 1870s and 1880s. By the turn of the century, however, the ruggedness of even the foothills of the mountains made logging unprofitable, and the industry was abandoned.32 By this time, however, logging, violence and the gradual but unstoppable encroachment of private land selection in the 1880s and 1890s meant that the access of traditional owners and Indigenous visitors to the mountains was significantly interrupted. During the second half of the nineteenth century the Bunya Mountains symbolised a qualitative Indigenous presence and unsettled doctrines of emptiness on which settler society built its legal and moral claim. This symbolism intensified towards the end of the nineteenth century when the Bunya Mountains became a familiar feature of emerging histories of Queensland written by Archibald Meston, Henry Stuart Russell and Constance Petrie. At this time memories of the patterns and nature of violent occupation in the Australian colonies, a memory that would all but disappear in the post-Federation period, still formed part of the narrative of settlement. In their accounts of the progress of the colony, the Bunya Mountains and equivalent sites that symbolised Indigenous ownership were enshrined in historical narratives that bemoaned the violence of providence, mourned the fall from grace and disappearance of once noble and proprietorial savages, and instilled emptied lands with a melancholy silence. Archibald Meston, for example, wrote of the past nobility of ‘the aboriginal in his wild condition, living the life of the noble savage, uncontaminated by civilisation’. But his celebration of noble savagery prefaced the tragedy of extinction. ‘The wild savages . . . have vanished for ever’, he wrote, for little ‘did the wild Stone Age children of the woods think . . . [that] there would come a vampire civilisation to drain the life-blood of their race without even pretending to soothe them with the flapping of its deadly wings’.33 The erasure Meston lyrically portrayed in his geographic history of Queensland was a narrative of extinction familiar to settler colonies, and which was reflected in the emptiness Board perceived in 1903.34 The creation of a National Park five years later, along with legislation that introduced a regime of control and surveillance of Indigenous peoples which Meston himself helped to design, would naturalise and enforce this emptiness.




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The world’s first national parks were created in settler colonies on the lands of Indigenous peoples. The first national park, Yellowstone, was created in California in 1872. In 1880 the New South Wales government gazetted the National Park south of Sydney; in 1885 the Rocky Mountains National Park (Banff National Park) was created in Canada; the Tongariro National Park was created in New Zealand in 1887; and the Australian colonies followed suit with South Australia in 1891, Victoria in 1892, Western Australia in 1900, Queensland in 1908 and Tasmania in 1916.35 While each of these parks was created under locally specific conditions, common to the rhetoric surrounding all of them was the desirability of preserving national scenery and resources for the benefit of, and as a monument to, the settler nation. While it may well be the case that national parks were originally a settler colonial phenomenon because of a combination of emerging new nationalisms and the availability of acquired lands, this explanation points to a deeper coalescence. For the fifty years or more that preceded the emergence of national parks, the occupation, utility and cultivation of Indigenous land had been the principal preoccupation of colonial lands offices. Indeed, in Queensland the Lands Office was dominated in the late nineteenth century by the mantra of closer settlement, an approach heavily influenced by developments in neighbouring New Zealand. There, a passionate commitment to closer settlement had been pursued in conscious opposition to the vast pastoral leaseholds of the early Australian colonies. This movement was led by people like John, or Jock, Mackenzie, New Zealand’s Minister of Lands and Agriculture, whose passion was influenced by his own experience of the Scottish clearances and famines during the 1830s–1850s. Amidst the Scottish diaspora in New Zealand, Mackenzie gained popular support for his deep commitment to facilitating closely settled family farms on secure and individual tenure. He was also known for his disdain for what was perceived as the native landlordism of Ma- ori communal land ownership, and his vehement commitment to stamping out large areas of uncultivated land (particularly those held by Ma- ori iwi).36 In the early 1900s, the Queensland government commissioned reports and inquiries into the operation of New Zealand’s Closer Settlements policies in the drafting of new land legislation.37 These inquiries reflected an approach to land management in Queensland’s



Carving wilderness: creating the Bunya Mountains National Park, 1898–1906

Public Lands Office and Surveyor-General’s Office that was deeply perfunctory and utilitarian, and focused on the filling up of empty spaces on survey maps. Since 1842, when the Waste Lands Act granted New South Wales the Crown authority to sell and dispose of Indigenous peoples’ land in the Australian colonies, the vast ‘outside’ or unsettled districts had been figuratively treated as a blank sheet awaiting the grids, fences, roads, stock and agriculture that would turn it into something and somewhere.38 While this was not new to settler colonialism, what emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, in Queensland at least, was a heightened concern to project the outward signs of national maturity, development, civilisation and the completion of the colonial era. In the discourses of lands offices, this manifested in a language where ownership of land was to be proven by its aggressive and comprehensive development and cultivation, and the new enemies of civilisation were the ‘land sharks’ and ‘dummy’ selectors who left land sparse and undeveloped.39 In such an environment any argument for the conservation or preservation of nature was framed by those who opposed it as a suggestion that land should deliberately be left undeveloped and unsettled. As Vincent Lesina, the member for Clermont put it in 1906, ‘one settler on the land is worth forty trees’.40 Moreover, land that could not be developed represented something of a destabilised title of ownership. The problem was ‘waste’. While Lockean notions equating cultivation with ownership had long justified occupations of unused land for resettlement in Europe, intensified population pressures, famines and agrarian revolutions, along with the rising dominance of utilitarian philosophies and economies, heightened sensitivities to the apparent wastage of a range of customary land ownership and usage. From the bitter land reforms in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the erosion of Indigenous peoples’ treaty and property rights, therefore, waste resonated in land debates and developed a notorious history of destabilising and weakening the ownership of those soon to be dispossessed.41 Against this background, where the wastage of land held such resonance, how was it that the preservation of wilderness was embraced by settler colonial governments still busy filling empty spaces on halffinished survey maps? In Queensland creating wilderness was pitched by supporters such as Robert Martin Collins as an active form of land use that could both inscribe and institutionalise Crown title over ‘waste’ land that had proven resistant to other spatial strategies and inscriptions. Collins, the son of a settler based in the hinterlands of Brisbane, visited the





Yellowstone National Park in 1878, and returned to Queensland deeply affected by both its beauty and the radical form of land use that it represented.42 What struck him about the national park idea, he would later argue, was that it reframed wilderness and a lack of cultivation as an active form of development – as land for the ‘benefit and enjoyment of the people’.43 He was not alone in seeing this. In Canada, New Zealand and New South Wales, wilderness and nature parks were promoted as providing health and recreational benefits to emerging cities. They were also defended as providing a means of access to and protection of nationally significant scenery, flora and fauna, and to regulate the natural resources contained within park borders. Even in New Zealand, where Jock Mackenzie led his zealous charge against apparently ‘uncultivated’ Ma- ori lands, the creation of Tongariro National Park, and other nature reserves compulsorily obtained from Ma- ori lands, was enthusiastically embraced. For national parks were widely framed as progressive creations consistent with strategies of converting Indigenous lands into resources and private property. In 1898 Collins began his push for the reservation of the Macpherson ranges as a national park to be ‘reserved for Public Purposes, as it is a very pretty spot, and should not be alienated’.44 He described the Lamington Plateau, in the heart of the ranges, as a place that would ‘serve excellently as deer-parks’ or a ‘health resort’.45 At the time, areas such as the Macpherson ranges and the Bunya Mountains were simply blank spaces on the colony’s survey maps, thereby lacking the arsenal of knowledge that could convert Indigenous peoples’ land into settler property. Surveyor John Bagot put it best when he described geological surveys as replacing the aesthetic and ‘scant information of the few explorers who . . . penetrated [the] wilds’ with scientific knowledge of its utility, ‘of its configuration, soil, timbers, and waters’.46 With regard to the Macpherson ranges, a number of surveys had been attempted and failed, and in 1901 the Surveyor-General reported to the UnderSecretary that the land was ‘so rough and precipitous’ that two separate survey attempts had been abandoned.47 A survey was eventually completed in 1903 and in the report to the Lands Department the plateau was described as being supplied by water ‘clear as crystal’; as having soil that could not ‘be surpassed for depth and richness’ with land that ‘is easily cleared’ and well suited to the fattening of pigs or the cultivation ‘of any kind of farm produce’.48 The Macpherson ranges, in other words, were not ‘waste’ land, but could be made agriculturally productive. Collins would never see the Macpherson ranges converted to National Park. A road was built to the plateau in 1905 and in 1908 pink



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and green lines on a survey map marked the land that was to be opened to selection. It would not be until 1915, following the campaigns of another devotee of the Macpherson ranges, Romeo Watkin Lahey, that they would be declared a National Park. But their story is instructive. Unlike the Bunya Mountains, the Macpherson ranges, with their accessible fertile lands, ensured that their conversion to National Park lands would be controversial until a rigorous process of excising good land had been completed. Uninhabited wilderness, in order to be acceptable to the overall spatial organisation of land in Queensland, would have to earn its keep. In 1906 Queensland’s Parliament passed the State Forest and National Parks Act. The Bill had been introduced to Parliament as following ‘in the wake of the southern States and the United States of America’ whose lead made it very desirable . . . that some of the natural features of our country should be retained as a place of amusement and recreation . . . and for the preservation of timber.49 In the debates that followed, national parks were pitched by their supporters as all things to all people. They made good use of the ‘very large area of waste land in this State’, while also providing health resorts and timber reserves for future wealth.50 The only controversy was over the potential to reduce the amount of land that could be settled. As one member of the Legislative Assembly put it, there was already not enough land available for the number of people seeking selections. Nature reserves were an effective ‘means of attracting large bodies of tourists’, but any land that was remotely suitable for selection ‘should be applied to settlement instead of . . . the growth of trees’.51 In this context, therefore, there was little reference in debates to the aesthetic value of land, and conservationist sentiments were carefully expressed in terms of economic utility. Nature could not only be well managed, they argued, it could also be enclosed, harnessed to progress, and protected as symbolic of a new nation’s affluence. In this context, the National Parks legislation passed with few amendments. Queensland’s first National Park at Tamborine Mountain was created in 1906. Two years later, with no discussion or debate in Parliament, the Bunya Mountains National Park was also gazetted. There was little that was controversial about the Bunya Mountains, for as far as most were concerned, it was land that was otherwise going to waste. Surveyors and forestry inspectors found it exceedingly difficult to gain adequate





access to the inner recesses of the mountains for the purpose of marking trees for boundaries, or to ‘tell the contents or the location on a map’.52 Survey maps of the mountains, like those of the Macpherson ranges, were empty; their slopes had proven impossible to settle and logging, while possible, had been dangerous and not very lucrative. As a result, maps of the mountains recorded the cadastral marks of encroaching settlement, perhaps an occasional water-catchment detail, but little else. Moreover, in the late 1880s the Under-Secretary for Lands had been advised that ‘the blacks’ were no longer there, and as Board put it in 1903, ‘the mountains are deserted’.53 In 1903, when Board recommended that this ‘bit of scenery’ be claimed and protected he also advised that it be properly surveyed so that farmable land could be excised from the final borders of wilderness.54 This was duly done, and land carved out of the eventual boundaries was sold in London in 1906.55 From that point, the conversion to national parks was an administrative process of rewriting land as colonised spaces of uninhabited ‘bits of scenery’. The defining moment was marked by an unsurprisingly perfunctory statement in the Government Gazette announcing the park’s boundaries: Commencing at the south-east corner of portion 462, parish of Maida Hill and bounded thence by portions 176 and 175 and by a line bearing north-west 118 chains . . . thence by the western side of a road 3 chains wide along part of the western boundary of portion 175 . . .56 Today, satellite images of the borders of the Bunya Mountains National Park show in physical reality the superimposed tracings of early twentieth-century survey maps. The straight lines, expediently drawn and measured in government offices in Brisbane or land sales offices in London, produced a physical and lasting presence that still bears little relevance to the topographical character of the mountains themselves. In the articulation of private, and now public, property the dispassionate and distanced excision and abstraction of land brought colonial possession into being as a spatial reality. Every inch of land, even waste, could thus be spoken for, mapped, rated, surveyed and evaluated in ways that were approached by the Lands Department, and in much surrounding public discourse, as the production of ownership. The significance of the creation of national parks is that rather than simply leaving land empty, vacant or wasted, parks carved an abstracted wilderness, and imposed institutional boundaries of spatial management to police even more abstract assertions of Crown title.



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Settler-colonialism’s carving out of wilderness areas was an act of dispossession that physically, symbolically and legally emptied lands of Indigenous ownership. In her discussion of notions of wilderness in Australia, Marcia Langton claimed that there is no such thing. All land, she argued, was and is managed, cultivated, named, mapped, sung and known by Indigenous peoples.57 In the context of the history of settler colonialism and national parks, it is possible to argue further that wilderness is a destructive concept, and one that developed in concert with colonialism’s secular, religious and legal doctrines of dispossession. Discourses of wilderness necessarily paralleled those on humanity, and just as ideas of wild lands developed in relation to wild men and women, so too ideas of nature developed in relation to and were frequently defined by natives.58 Moreover, dominant Enlightenment notions that uncultivated land subjectively in its natural state is empty of qualitative ownership was foundational to the legal and philosophical framework of Europe’s colonial endeavours. Such doctrines lay at the heart of the Australian legal fiction of terra nullius which marked a land full of people as empty of possession. Moreover, in order for the claim that lands were empty of ownership – a legal wilderness – to withstand the obvious occupation by human societies, discourses asserting the inferiority, sub-humanity and primitiveness of human groups became intimately engaged with discourses of wilderness and nature. Wilderness, in other words, developed in the context of colonialism as a racialised concept that was tightly entwined with colonial reconstructions, and erasures, of Indigenous spaces. In ways that drew on the colonial experience, European notions of wilderness evolved under the influence of Enlightenment and later romantic and transcendental movements from being simply a forbidden and dangerous place of waste, imbued with biblical or philosophical compulsions to settle, civilise and tame, to being also a restorative and transcendental paradise where untouched nature existed in sublime isolation, always threatened by encroaching humanity. As scholars like William Cronon and Mark Spence have explored, in the early nineteenth century the presence of generic natives in wilderness sceneries was not uncommon. Indeed the noble savage, often as a single and lonesome figure, frequently confirmed or completed the wilderness status of many a colonial landscape.59 But while the nineteenth-century transformation of ideas of wilderness was influenced by the visions of transcendental romanticism in Europe, the nationalist fervour for



Destructive wilderness and settler colonial dispossession


manifest destinies and an intensifying nostalgia for colonialism’s receding frontier were also deeply influential outside Europe. In the context of intensified land hunger of the late nineteenth century, earlier romantic visions of wilderness that had been completed by the presence of noble savages began to be imagined as aggressively exclusive of human habitation. In the settler colonies, as Indigenous peoples were increasingly framed, both imaginatively and in legislation, as remnants in the way of progress, so too the pristine nature of wilderness came to be imagined and predicated on their exclusion.60 Moreover, as John Noyse and Mary Louise Pratt have argued in relation to strategies of imagining colonial lands, this shift was also reflected in a separation of Enlightenment disciplines in ways that manifested geopolitically. The separation of the sciences of nature and sciences of man in distinct imaginative spaces, for example, was neatly reflected in the appearance of nature reserves and native reservations.61 National parks therefore emerged from these evolving notions of wilderness as spaces that aggressively and destructively manifested empty and untouched nature in places that had never historically been uninhabited by human societies. The first Yellowstone National Park, for example, was created on land over which a number of Native American bands and nations claimed diverse ownership rights. The enclosure of the park, whose borders were initially policed and defended by the military, eventually redefined these rights as ‘poaching’ and ‘trespass’ as Native American bands became trespassers.62 This context reminds us that, as Spence so deftly put it, ‘wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved’.63 The manifested fantasies of virgin forest, pristine nature and untouched, undiscovered, wilderness, in other words, were premised on erasure. In Queensland, national parks and wilderness areas were created in a historical context where dispossession was legally assumed, but needed to be socially produced. The gazetting of a bordered wilderness created the power to limit physical access, and prohibit the harvest or removal of any natural products, thereby rendering any Indigenous peoples’ management of their land illegal.64 Moreover, in a convergence of strategies, the reservation of nature in national parks conferred with legislative and administrative changes in the state management of Indigenous peoples. The Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897) heralded the creation of a comprehensive legal web in Queensland that brought many Indigenous peoples under state control and surveillance on reserves and missions. Caught in the crossover the ability of Jarowair, Wakka Wakka or Barunggam peoples to



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reside autonomously in and around their mountains was removed. In the early twentieth century Aboriginal families were relocated from the Bunya Mountains to the former Deebing Creek Mission near Ipswich, as well as to what was then called the Barambah reserve or Cherbourg Mission.65 For it was not the case in 1903 that the mountains were deserted, and despite limits traditional owners continued to visit, use and inhabit the mountains. They continued to do so well into the twentieth century, but often against legislative requirements. Paddy Jerome, a Jarowair elder, for example, spoke in 2002 of the ongoing use of the mountains throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Jarowair people maintained, as much as was possible, an ongoing relationship with the area and the bunya tree.66 This relationship continued despite the web of legislation on the one hand, and the physical and administrative inscriptions of settler ownership on the other, which rendered the Jarowair almost powerless to continue practising their ownership and property rights.

Conclusion: negotiating ownership The creation of national parks as bordered wilderness and nature reserves represents the pinnacle of settler colonialism’s rush for land. Whether gained by treaty and subsequent treaty breaches as with Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains National Parks, or via gift, purchase and compulsory acquisition as was the case in New Zealand, or simply by rezoning land that had already been claimed via dubious legal fictions, the emergence of national parks, or the production of new wilderness, became central to the imagined completion of settler colonial land projects. In Queensland, national parks were chosen both for their utility and their display of nation-defining sceneries of lofty mountains, deep gorges and spectacular views from which timeless expanses of wilderness could be viewed. As such, not only did these carved spaces of wilderness physically empty land that was occupied and under an existing dominion. In addition, they operated as spatial inscriptions of the kinds of historical narratives that wrote Indigenous peoples out of settler nations. Reimagined as uninhabited, national parks were literally and figuratively scrubbed of their human past. The trails and roads that Indigenous peoples used were left to grow over, and the signs of maintenance and cultivation were left to decay. In the Bunya Mountains, the Balds were infested with timber growth and the forests grew unruly and wild. In addition to rewriting the surface of the country these wilderness areas as Cronon put it came to represent ‘the very beginning of the





national historical epic’.67 In the case of both the Macpherson ranges and Bunya Mountains, for example, Indigenous peoples by the early to mid twentieth century were acknowledged as previous owners or inhabitants, but with exclusively spiritual relations to land that represented a less than cultivated, less than human, ownership. The reinsertions of Indigenous peoples into national parks as memories, have tended simply to appropriate a depth of time that settler history does not have. Arthur Groom’s 1949 history of the national parks movement in the Macpherson ranges, for example, wrote in detail of the original owners of the region, but positioned them at the same time as the vanishing missing link that bridged a deep geological past of wilderness, with the human history of the settlers that protected it.68 Today’s visitors to the Bunya Mountains can enjoy hot showers, coin-operated barbecues, a kiosk, craft shop, viewing platforms and all manner of accommodation. Visitor information sheets for the park state that visitors must keep to walking tracks, roads and designated camping grounds, and must leave their ‘pets, chainsaws and firearms at home’.69 Visitors are informed that the park is a ‘wildlife refuge’ and are asked not to ‘remove plant material, living or dead’. In 1969 this caused a minor disruption, for the prohibition extends to the bunya nut. A revival of the Bunya Festival was organised for that year in which a Festival Queen, an ugly-man competition, and a demonstration of ‘Festival Corroborees’ were on the bill. The biggest challenge the committee faced, after working out how to cook the nut, was how to get a permit to allow tourists and visitors to remove nuts from the park.70 Owners of nearby farms supplied the nuts instead and the festival went ahead. In advertising the event, which was designed to revive tourist interest in the mountains, the organising committee of long-established settlers gave great emphasis to the history of the festivals, the sacredness of the mountains, and the appropriateness of reviving the festivals in a new age. Residents from nearby Cherbourg ensured there was an Indigenous presence at the revived festivals, but festival organisers limited their involvement to presenting corroborrees and boomerang-throwing demonstrations.71 But their presence marks a moment in a longer history during which Jarowair, Wakka Wakka or Barunggam peoples have continued to maintain the social relations to space, and emotional connections to place, that anthropologist Marcia Langton has argued constitute the systems of ownership that land law in Australia is illequipped to deal with.72 In more recent years, these Indigenous owners have begun the long process of having their ongoing custodianship and



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ownership recognised in Australian law through a range of strategies including land use agreements, and Native Title claims. To do so they must prove that settler colonial strategies were ineffective in a legal framework derived from the same doctrines discussed above.73 Negotiations are therefore limited. This serves as a reminder that the inscription of ownership over the Bunya Mountains by settler colonial scripts is so complete in a legal sense, that the boundaries of custodianship continue to be defined on settler terms. But in the end, it is a positive irony of the creation of national parks, as well as a product of Indigenous peoples’ resistive strategies, that by remaining as Crown land in settler law, these spaces remain available for ongoing negotiations of ownership.74 For the emptiness that Board imagined in 1903 carved crucial blank spaces on Queensland’s land maps, which today may enable a remapping of space, or counter-mapping, in an initial first step to reclaiming wilderness. Notes 1. Report from Inspector of Forests to Department of Public Lands, 6 November 1903. ASA, Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 4. Report from Inspector of Forests to Department of Public Lands, 6 November 1903. ASA, Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 5. Ibid. 6. John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 7. For a sweeping overview of the settler colonies of the Pacific basin see Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoples from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007); John C. Weaver, ‘Beyond the Fatal Shore: Pastoral Squatting and the Occupation of Australia, 1826 to 1852’, American Historical Review 101, 2 (1996): 981–1007; Weaver, The Great Land Rush. For genealogies of international European law relevant to settler colonial land strategies see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, ed. Quentin Skinner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1989); Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 8. The body of scholarship considering strategies of dispossession in the Anglophone settler colonies is vast. In addition to material cited in this collection, overviews that develop a sense of the evolution of strategies are as follows. For the Australian colonies see Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987); for Aotearoa/New Zealand see I. H. Kawharu, Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (Oxford: Oxford University




9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Appropriating Emptiness Press, 1977); David V. Williams, ‘Te Kooti Tango Whenua’: the Native Land Court 1864–1909 (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 1999); Grant Young, Michael Belgrave and Tom Bennion, Native and Maori Land Legislation in the Superior Courts, 1840–1980, ed. Graeme Macrae and Jenny Lawn, vol. VI: Social and Cultural Studies (Auckland: School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2005); for North America see Robert Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: the Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: the Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). For Canada, particularly British Columbia, see Jean Barman’s article in this collection and Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003). Melissa Harper and Richard White, ‘The “Nationalisms” of the First National Parks: Was the Australian Model Different?’, conference paper for ‘Civilising nature: national parks in transnational historical perspective’ conference (German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 2008); chapters by Jane Carruthers, ‘Nationhood and National Parks: Comparative Examples from PostImperial Experience’, and Thomas Dunlap, ‘Ecology and Environmentalism in the Anglo Settler Colonies’, in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History in Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997). On environmental thought and action, see Martin Mulligan and Stuart Hill, Ecological Pioneers: a Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Wendy Goldstein (ed.), Australia: 100 Years of National Parks (Sydney: National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1979); and on national parks as monuments to national character see Roderick Nash, ‘The American Invention of National Parks’, American Quarterly 22, 3 (1970): 726–35; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Alfred Runte, National Parks: the American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Some notable exceptions include Georges Erasmus, ‘A Native Viewpoint’, in Endangered Spaces: the Future of Canada’s Wilderness, ed. Monte Hummel (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1989); Theodore Binnema and Melanie Niemi, ‘“Let the Line Be Drawn Now”: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada’, Environmental History 11, 4 (2006): 724–50; Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Giselle Byrnes, ‘Surveying Space: Constructing the Colonial Landscape’, in Fragments: New Zealand Social and Cultural History, ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Bronwyn Labrum (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), p. 60; Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001); Ross Gibson in this collection. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 6–9. On exploration and mapping: John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Ryan, The Cartographic Eye; Diane Collins, ‘Acoustic Journeys: Exploration



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14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

and the Search for an Aural History of Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 128 (2006): 1–17. On naming and place: Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Essay in Spatial History (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987); Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). On ritual inscriptions: Tom Griffiths, ‘The Outside Country’, in Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, ed. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), pp. 223–44; Chris Ballard, ‘The Signature of Terror: Violence, Memory, and Landscape at Freeport’, in Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Places, ed. Meredith Wilson and Bruno David (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), pp. 13–26. Anun Shah, The Economics of Third World National Parks: Issues of Tourism and Environmental Management (Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1995), pp. 1–11; Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 10–14. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 120. Glenn Cook, ‘Representing the Bunya Pine’, Queensland Review 9, 2 (2002): 83–94; Belinda McKay and Patrick Buckridge, ‘Literary Imaginings of the Bunya’, Queensland Review 9, 2 (2002): 65–79. Anna Haebich, ‘Assimilating Nature: the Bunya Diaspora’, Queensland Review 10, 2 (2003): 50–2. Constance Campbell Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland (Brisbane: Watson, Ferguson & Co., 1981), p. 255. Paddy Jerome, ‘Boobarran Ngummin: the Bunya Mountains’, Queensland Review 9, 2 (2002): 1–5; Raymond Evans, ‘Against the Grain: Colonialism and the Demise of the Bunya Gatherings, 1839–1939’, Queensland Review 9, 2 (2002): 39–46; Kevin Tibbett, ‘Risk and Economic Reciprocity: an Analysis of Three Regional Aboriginal Food-Sharing Systems in Late Holocene Australia’, Australian Archaeology 58 (June 2004): 7–10. 3522/1 and 3522/2 Queensland State Library, Heritage Collection, Karl W. E. Schmidt, ‘Report on an Expedition to the Bunya Mountains in search of a suitable site for a mission station’, 1842; and Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences. Evans, ‘Against the Grain’, p. 49. Archibald Meston, Geographic History of Queensland: Dedicated to the Queensland People (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1895), p. 82. J. C. Bennie, ‘The Bunya Mountains: Early Feasting Ground of the Blacks; Commencement of the Sawmilling Industry; an Authentic Story of Gertrude’s Grave’, Dalby Herald, 13 January 1931, p. 2; entry for 4 January 1850 in Donald Charles Cameron, ‘Transcript of a Journal Kept by Donald Charles Cameron in 1850’, Cameron Family Papers (Brisbane: Heritage Collections, State Library of Queensland, 1850); Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences, pp. 15–16. Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Reading the Shadows of Whiteness: a Case of Racial Clarity on Queensland’s Colonial Borderlands, 1880–1900’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The classic studies of frontier conflict in Queensland and northern New South Wales include Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal European Relations




26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

Appropriating Emptiness on the North Queensland Frontier, 1861–1897 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982); Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1981); Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987). J. Mackenzie-Smith, Evan Mackenzie: Pioneer Merchant Pastoralist of Moreton Bay, Master of Arts, History, University of Queensland, p. 89; Cited in Evans, ‘Against the Grain’, p. 52. Jerome, ‘Boobarran Ngummin’, p. 3; Evans, ‘Against the Grain’, pp. 51–4. A University Man [George Carrington], Colonial Adventures and Experiences by a University Man (London: 1871), pp. 152–3. Letter from George Cain to Rebecca Miles, 7 May 1866, in News from Nulla: Correspondence of Rebecca and George Cain, 1866–71, ed. B. J. Dalton (Townsville: Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, 1991), p. 4. Queensland Parliamentary Debates 32 (1880), 1141. Bennie, ‘The Bunya Mountains’, p. 2. Erica Long, ‘A History of the Timber Industry in the Pine Rivers District’, Access History 2, 1 (1998): 55–73; Evans, ‘Against the Grain’, pp. 57–9. Meston, Geographic History of Queensland, pp. 218–19, 20. Bill Thorpe, ‘Archibald Meston and Aboriginal Legislation in Colonial Queensland’, Historical Studies 21, 82 (1984): 52-67; Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: the Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), pp. 71, 92–3. Sweden was the first European country to establish a national park when Sarek National Park was created on Sami grazing lands in 1909. Although not generally thought of as a settler colony, Sweden’s relationship to the Sami of the Lapland province mirrors that of other settler colonies, and arguably continues the settler colonial characteristic of early national parks. On Jock Mackenzie see Tom Brooking, Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1996), pp. 81–6. Closer Settlement Bill. Proposed Amendments by Hon. E. J. Stevens. Comparisons with Acts in New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand. QSA. Item ID: 22305 Closer Settlement Bill, Series ID: 13805 Draft Legislation. Australian Colonies, Waste Lands Act 1842 (Imp) (5 and 6 Vict c 36). See also Griffiths, ‘The Outside Country’. Public Lands Office, Townsville to Under-Secretary for Lands, 1 September 1899. QSA. Item ID: 22781, Letters Received, Lands Department, Series ID: 6363, General Correspondence. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 97 (1906), 1546. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, pp. 152–90; Frederika Hackshaw, ‘Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi’, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. I. H. Kawharu (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 92–121; Weaver, The Great Land Rush, pp. 25–8. Arthur Groom, One Mountain after Another (London: Angus and Robertson, 1949), pp. 58–72; David Mayocchi, ‘Lamington National Park: a Political History to 1915’, Bachelor of Arts thesis, University of Queensland, 1981.



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43. Citing the Bill establishing Yellowstone National Park. Tony Groom, The Scenic Rim: the Mountains Surrounding Brisbane (Adelaide: Rigby, 1979), p. 62. 44. W. M. Watts, Land Commissioner to the Under-Secretary of Public Lands, 3 January 1898. QSA, Item 22763, Letters Received, Lands Department, Series 6363, General Correspondence; Groom, The Scenic Rim, pp. 58–72; Mayocchi, ‘Lamington National Park’, pp. 2–3. 45. R. M. Collins to the Minister for Lands, 22 October 1900. QSA, Item 22763, Letters Received, Lands Department, Series 6363, General Correspondence. 46. John M. Bagot, surveyor to the Surveyor-General, Brisbane, 12 November 1900. QSA, Item 22763, Letters Received, Lands Department, Series 6363, General Correspondence. 47. Surveyor-General to Under-Secretary for Public Lands, 15 February 1901. QSA, Item 22763, Letters Received, Lands Department, Series 6363, General Correspondence. 48. Gilbert Burnett, Forest Ranger to Inspector of Forests, Lands Department, Brisbane, 11 February 1903. QSA Item 864102, Kerry, Series 5416, National Park Reserve Files. 49. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 97 (1906), 1930. 50. Ibid., 1552. 51. Ibid., 1547. 52. Land Commissioner, Public Lands Office, Toowoomba, 18 April 1889 to Under-Secretary for Lands, Brisbane. QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 53. In order of citation: Toowoomba to Under Secretary of Lands, 1881; and Report from Inspector of Forests, Department of Public Lands, 6 November 1903. QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107), Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 54. In order of quotation: Report from Inspector of Forests, Department of Pubic Lands, 6 November 1903. QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files; Report from Inspector of Forests, Department of Pubic Lands, 6 November 1903. QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 55. Notice of the sale of land on 9 August 1906 at the Office of the Agent General for Queensland in London contained in QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 56. Government Gazette, 1 August 1908. QSA Item 141832, Reserve File (81-107, Part 1), Series 17925, Reserve Files. 57. Marcia Langton, ‘What Do We Mean by Wilderness? Wilderness and Terra Nullius in Australian Art’, The Sydney Papers, Summer (1996): 10–31. See also Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996). 58. William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 69–90; Judith Adler, ‘Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 1 (2006): 4–37. 59. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, pp. 9–15; Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’.





60. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, pp. 20–3. 61. John Noyse, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915 (Poststrasse: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992), p. 196. For her work on the emptying of landscapes by imagining Indigenous peoples as temporally relocated, Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country: Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 119–43. 62. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, pp. 55–61, 7–70. For the Canadian context see Yorke Edwards, ‘Wilderness Parks: a Concept with Conflicts’, in Endangered Spaces: the Future of Canada’s Wilderness, ed. Monte Hummel (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1989), pp. 21–9; Erasmus, ‘A Native Viewpoint’; Niemi, ‘“Let the Line Be Drawn Now”’. 63. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, pp. 4–5. 64. Queensland’s national parks legislation and restrictions referenced relevant legislation in New South Wales, as well as New Zealand’s Scenery Protection Act 1903. Information derived from the annual report of the New Zealand Lands Department. QSA. Item ID: 22303 National Parks Legislation. Series ID: 17925 Draft Legislation. Brooking, Lands for the People?, pp. 179–80. 65. Anna Haebich, ‘Assimilating Nature: the Bunya Diaspora’, Queensland Review 10, 2 (2003): 47–57. 66. Jerome, ‘Boobarran Ngummin’, 67. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, p. 79. 68. Groom, One Mountain after Another, pp. 21–36. 69. Bunya Mountains National Park Visitor Information, Queensland Government, Environmental Protection Agency. Available at http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/ publications/p01224aa.pdf/Bunya_Mountains_National_Park.pdf 70. Series 5416 National Park Reserve File, Item 864067, Haly ‘J’ – Bunya Mountains National Park/Bunya Nut Festival. Premier to Minister for Lands, 5 September 1969. 71. Item 4 on the planned bill was ‘Demonstration of Festival Corroborees by Cherbourg Aborigines’. Series 5416 National Park Reserve File, Item 864067, Haly ‘J’ – Bunya Mountains National Park/Bunya Nut Festival. Premier to Minister for Lands, 5 September 1969. 72. Marcia Langton, ‘The Edge of the Sacred, the Edge of Death: Sensual Inscriptions’, in Inscribed Landscapes, ed. Wilson and Bruno, pp. 253–69. 73. Native Title claims to areas including the Bunya Mountains National Park have been made under the Native Title Act. This legislation requires Indigenous peoples to prove unbroken physical and cultural connections to land against a high threshold, in order for the Australian legal system to recognise the survival of their Native Title. Native Title was not recognised in Australian common law until 1992 in Mabo v. Queensland [No 2] (1992) 175 CLR 1. Literature on the limitations of the Native Title regime to deliver land rights is vast. For one of the earliest and most succinct analyses see Michael Mansell, ‘The Court Gives an Inch but Takes Another Mile’, Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2, 57 (1992): 4. 74. Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent, Mapping Attachment: a Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-Contact Heritage (Sydney: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2004), pp. 55–72.



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‘The Clay Maiden’

The clay maiden’s the guardian of the bay. She resides beneath a pohutakawa teetering on the edge of a cliff that’s almost succumbed to the persistent talons of the rising sea. Most of the tree’s roots, once firmly embedded in clay, now dangle in a void. Very soon it will tumble from the cliff top and crash onto the rocks below. When this happens, the clay maiden will be dislodged from the earth, blown into dust by the wind and washed away by the waves. She feels helpless. One by one the sentinels of the long, ragged coast are falling from their citadels and the song-keepers who understand the patterns of the land, sea and sky are few and scattered. She’s grieved that some of the patterns have been mutilated beyond recognition – polluted, filled in, sliced up, dammed or excavated. For centuries her song has enticed and guided sailors into the safe anchorage of the bay. She’s saved numerous seafarers from the malicious currents that contort the open sea into tentacles, snaring the unwary and sucking out their life force. Her song, like others that wrap around the motu and its waters, is bound by threads as strong, yet as fragile as a spider’s web. Sometimes the clay maiden observes spiderlings carried by wind currents to the ledge near the foot of the cliff. They perch silently, connected to their nests by silky harnesses and watch as elders draw maps for children in the lip of sand beneath them. The children place pebbles on their ancestral mountains, add rivers and other significant features to the drawings, and feel themselves connecting to the worlds about them. On other days the elders draw sand maps of the universe, describing the patterns of inner and outer space and everything that is in between 95



Serie Barford


and beyond them. And the memories of these patterns are sung into the children and the land. On such days the clay maiden is recognised and greeted as an honourable guardian, but it’s been a long time since she’d basked in the warmth of acknowledgement or heard the names of the houses of heaven whispered into squares drawn on the sand. And it’s been just as long since children have come to the bay to learn that they are linked to the spirit of the starhouse whose doors were open when they took their first breath. Times have changed. These days people mistake her song for bird calls, or even worse, don’t hear her song at all. Not even the Department of Conservation understands her perilous position. They regularly check the cliff for subsidence and monitor the stability of the viewing platform they constructed just centimetres away from her head – without realising she was there. Tourists gaze safely across the bay towards the ancestral mountain while she struggles to maintain her footing and stay at her post. The clay maiden has noticed that every year the spiders build their nests a little higher in the flax and grasses clinging to the cliff than the year before. And she’s also felt the high tide mark scratching and eating its way further up the cliff face with each new moon. The cliff itself has scars where portions of clay and its mantle of vegetation have cascaded into the sea. Soon the clay maiden’s song will be lost to the waves and many will drown within sight of land. Early one morning, on a low tide, a man in a khaki shirt hammered DANGER – STAY AWAY signs into the rock pools near the cliff. That evening the local children painted over the ‘D’ and laughed at the ANGER warning posted between starfish. Then they stood on the starfish, grinding them into the sea lettuce with their boots before running home in the rain, laughing and yahooing all the way. The next day the khaki-shirt man supervised the removal of the viewing platform from the top of the cliff. It was replaced by an oversized picture frame erected near the car park. People aimed their cameras at the vista defined by the fake brass rectangle, capturing the beauty of the bay and the ancestral mountain, without hearing the maiden’s voice. The clay maiden knows that the next high tide will topple the pohutakawa and expose her to the wind and rain. She sees the flooded river running heavy and the sluggish eels struggling to breathe in a waterway choked with mud and rubbish.



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Some have already drowned. Their limp bodies are caught in the steel bars of dumped shopping trundlers. Plastic bags entangle terrified ducklings. They fight to stay afloat as the bags fill with water and drag them downstream. Then suddenly, their fluffy smallness is lost as mud slides down the eroded river bank, where gulping eels have dragged their weary, sludge-filled bodies. ‘Are you all that’s left of our ancestors’ dream?,’ she keens, as bored and spiteful children spill out of their houses, picking up sticks and stones along the way in order to batter the eels and ducklings. The children chortle with delight. Their shuttered hearts and minds take pleasure in the urgency of the dirty, overflowing water and the slow dying of the battered creatures of the river. And that’s the last thing the clay maiden sees as the cliff crumbles, the tree falls, and she slips into the sea. At the foot of the ancestral mountain the khaki-shirt man hears the wail of a newborn child. He thinks it’s the neighbour’s cat. Brushes his teeth. Swallows the pills that are meant to keep the stray voices out of his head and put him to sleep at night. But they don’t work. He keeps hearing someone telling him to gather leaves from the tree outside his window and spread them around the rock pool beneath the cliff. The khaki-shirt man turns on the radio. Lights a cigarette. Listens to the whining voices and the vitriol of talkback callers. Sinks into an uneasy slumber. And in a house with mouldy walls, empty cupboards and a landlord who ‘won’t raise the rent as long as youse don’t complain’, a baby is welcomed into the world by her grandparents. The stars shine brightly. And there is hope.



‘The Clay Maiden’ 97





Part II Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces





‘Don’t Read Under a Coconut Tree’

coconuts impact like mortar shells onto this remnant of Gondwanaland dirt spurting onto the eyewitness accounts of terror on the hill of Margada sometimes only the killing fields hold memories of the double-dead imprints of people evaporate first they’re murdered then their deaths denied survivors hushed discounted as liars or completely ignored how to ethnically cleanse territory rope families with strangers push them sick and starving into a river then economically fire a single shot to deadweight the sinker the one whose body will drag everyone beneath currents of bloody water how to nonchalantly alter maps when a river’s so choked with corpses it migrates one kilometre to the east 101



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Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

intent and bayonets fixed it was flesh for all except those who lost it in pits, rivers or forced marches cholera or asphyxiation in desert caves and the children who survived all of this were blinded by water in orphanage baths



how to block out screams when horsemen fling women and children over saddles

4 Denis Byrne

A nervous system It almost goes without saying that racial segregation, by its very nature, is a spatial practice. It is about the separation of people in space and the rules and devices that are set up to achieve this. A segregated society necessitates a segregated landscape and one of my premises in this chapter is that the policies and practices of segregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonial state had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. This chapter is interested in the ways in which an Indigenous minority’s presence in and movement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or constrained by the colonisers. But it is also concerned with ways in which Indigenous people have been able to subvert that system of spatial control, transgressing its numerous finely drawn boundaries, poaching on its preserves, tweaking the nerves of a spatial system which was inherently tense with racial foreboding, paranoia, longing and deprivation. The colonial landscape in Australia was a spatial regime that was always, to borrow Michael Taussig’s term, a ‘nervous system’.1 The nervous system of racialised space has to do with the question of how close people are allowed to get to each other. At different times in Australia’s past, governments have regulated that Aboriginal people be confined on offshore islands or that Aboriginal Reserves be located at least a few kilometres away from the edge of country towns.2 Other regulations and unspoken rules made much finer discriminations. Aboriginal patients on the veranda of a hospital, for instance, were kept at a distance of several metres from white patients inside the hospital walls; a distance of only a metre or so separated the row of Aboriginal pupils in certain New South Wales schools from the white pupils in 103



Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia


the adjacent rows and a similar small distance separated the rows of Aboriginal patrons in a segregated NSW cinema from the rows of white patrons behind them. Racial anxiety arguably becomes most intense and acute when the separating space reduces to zero – when black and white bodies actually touch. I suggest that archaeologists have the potential to bring something unique to the study and understanding of the history of racial segregation. Not because the spatiality of racism is inscribed on the ground but because so often it is ‘buried’. By this I mean that, at least in the Australian case, racism was and is a spatial order governed primarily by behavioural convention and coercion rather than by a specific physical infrastructure. Archaeologists do not expect the past to be revealed to them at the stroke of a trowel; they look for the behaviour behind the trace. They do not expect the trace to speak its own name; in many ways they expect to be lied to. This may give them a certain facility in locating racism’s imprint. But there is also what might be termed the vertical invisibility of segregation, the tendency for its historical presence to be, literally and figuratively, buried by those minders of local history and heritage who now find it a civic embarrassment. The practice of racism in Australia has always had a censored, ‘unnoticed’ aspect to it, a low profile for those not on the receiving end of it.3 This is not to suggest that the racialisation of space in the colonised landscape was somehow casual or off-hand. It was not. It was as fraught and ‘nervous’ as racism anywhere. Yet, until the 1960s, racism against Aborigines had as low a visibility in Australian public discourse as it now has in the commemorative landscape of heritage. In 1999 historian Maria Nugent and I undertook a project to record Aboriginal post-contact (post-1788) heritage places and histories on the lower north coast of North South Wales (NSW).4 We were concerned at the vast disparity between the tens of thousands of pre-contact Aboriginal archaeological sites recorded in NSW and the mere handful of post-contact sites recorded. This disparity seemed to give tacit affirmation to the essentialist position that authentic Aboriginality is always prior or distant: away in the past or away on the frontier.5 But it also reflected real difficulties in detecting the archaeological traces of Aboriginal postcontact presence in the landscape.6 Like their ancestors, Aboriginal people in NSW after 1788 lived fairly lightly on the ground. Their dwellings and camps were also liable to be demolished, burned or removed by the authorities.7 Relatively speaking, where the white heritage of the post-contact period is fabric-heavy (think homesteads and courthouses), Aboriginal heritage is fabric-light and the odds are stacked against it



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surviving into the archaeological and architectural heritage record. It has this in common with the heritage record of other colonised people, even those who remained a demographic majority. Orser, for instance, has this to say of the English Protestant ascendancy in eighteenth-century Ireland: ‘The net that landlords threw over the land was powerful and permanent. It was made of brick walls, massive mansions, and granite archways. The peasants, with their single-room mud cabins and their lazybed fields were erasable.’8 Another difficulty in detecting the archaeological footprint of Aboriginal post-contact settlement is posed by the increasing Aboriginal use after 1788 of a material culture borrowed from Europeans. Aboriginal people used teacups and spoons, hammers and nails, bicycles and steel rabbit traps. The objects in themselves were thus not distinctively ‘Aboriginal’ although we can assume the distributional pattern of the objects at any one site will reflect behavioural patterns that were distinctively Aboriginal. Yet how would one identify these sites on the ground, given their close similarity to the sites of white settlers? Our project looked for the logic that explains where Aboriginal people were in the colonial landscape and that logic, I contend, is the (highly illogical) logic of racial segregation.

Enter the cadastral grid By 1788, at the beginning of the white invasion of Australia, England had long possessed a developed (though not static) cadastral system that divided the kingdom into counties, shires, parishes and ‘hundreds’, down to the level of individual agricultural fields. Many of the boundaries of this system had been in place since Saxon times or earlier and had thus been a recognised reality for thousands of years before the cartographic surveys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fixed them on paper.9 In Australia, by contrast, the colonial cadastral grid made an instantaneous appearance in the Aboriginal landscape. It completely ignored pre-existing Aboriginal boundaries and spatial conventions, even where these were known, let alone any form of preexisting Aboriginal land title. Rather, as part of the imperial machinery, it assimilated colonial terrain to metropolitan terrain by imposing the same generic grid of counties, parishes and rectangular holdings onto it. With England’s cartographic language inscribed upon it, the landscape of colonial Australia would be in immediate dialogue with the landscape of England.10 What made the cadastral grid so ideal for the colonial project is that it could be applied with impartiality to previously



Race and Space in Australia


unknown terrain, which is to say that it would take a landscape just as it found it, rolling over it with indecent familiarity, as if it knew it in advance. In actuality, of course, it did not know it, and as time went on it was modified by local conditions and local demands. The landscape became a hybrid element of a hybrid colonial culture and I will suggest later that this hybridity owed something to Aboriginal contestation of space.11 My present point, however, is that the cadastral grid was an instrument for bringing the global to the local, for bringing regularity to perceived chaos.12 Given the decisive role of the rectangular cadastral grid in racial segregation, it is interesting to note that the first inscription of a racial separator on Australia soil was not a rectangle but a circle. In January 1788, during his first exploratory venture by boat into what would become known as Sydney Harbour – the country of the Eora people – Governor Arthur Phillip had drawn a circle in the sand surrounding the area where he and his party were preparing lunch on the beach at Manly Cove. Irritated by the inquisitive Aborigines who had gathered around them, Phillip noted: ‘I made a circle around us; there was little difficulty in making them understand that they were not to come within it, and they sat down and were very quiet.’13 The spore from this first circle, borne across the continent on the wind of colonisation, may be seen in the symbolic circles that white folk in Australia would later draw around their country towns, circles that Aboriginal people, living in fringe camps and on reserves, would be discouraged from entering.14 The conventional project of cartographic mapping got under way as explorers and surveyors radiated out from the point of British settlement at Sydney Cove soon after 1788, sketching in the broad outlines of the terrain and assessing its potential productivity for farming. The second stage of mapping was that which accompanied or immediately preceded actual white settlement (as distinct from white exploration) in any particular area of the rapidly expanding colony. Land tenure surveys, carried out by government or freelance surveyors, enabled land to be granted and sold by the Crown and for landholders to obtain title or leases. So emerged the orthogonal grid of property boundaries. This cadastral grid made its appearance at Sydney Cove in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived there carrying convicts and officers and at least one surveyor.15 Maps of the Sydney settlement produced in 1788, 1791–2, 1802, 1807 and thereafter, show the first streets running inland from the cove, with regular allotments laid out along them.16 In the eyes of the British, not only were the native inhabitants of Australia a ‘savage’



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people, the land itself was often seen as wild, savage and disordered. Governor Phillip ‘saw only disturbing “tumult and confusion” and an almost sexually offensive “promiscuous” abundance which he desired to control by ordering it in regular, geometric patterns’.17 Not always in an orderly fashion, the cadastral grid had spread out from Sydney Cove and across the Cumberland Plain by 1800.18 It crossed the Blue Mountains in 1815 and spread north to the Hunter River which was thrown open for selection in 1822. By the early 1830s it had a foothold in the Manning Valley, the country of the indigenous Biripi peoples, which, 300 kilometres north of Sydney, will be the principal geographic reference for the remainder of this chapter (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

Map of the Manning Valley Region, New South Wales.





What we see there in the mid-1800s is the familiar orthogonal grid of white landholdings spreading along the alluvial flats of the valley and then expanding into the grazing country back from the river. It would be wrong, however, to visualise the farms that appeared in the first few decades as an expanding pattern of neatly cleared rectangles lying within the alluvial ‘gallery’ rainforest and eucalypt woodland. Armed only with axes and saws, until the 1860s the white farmers simply did not have the technology to clear and fence more than a small paddock or two around their homesteads. Although the white population of the valley grew from 400 in the early 1840s to about 3,000 by 1860, the valley still remained substantially bush-covered and more or less accessible to the Biripi for hunting and gathering.19 The ring-barking of trees changed that. The technique of killing trees by stripping a circle of bark from around the trunk was widely practised in the valley from the 1860s.20 Over large parts of the landscape, as elsewhere in the east of the continent, the native tree cover was wiped off the map, producing a clean slate for the lines that would be drawn by the wire fences introduced from the 1870s.21 The fertile ground in the Manning Valley was all taken up by the 1880s, by which time a continuous mosaic of white farms (most smaller than 2,000 acres) extended along the bottom of the valley and over the lower foothills of the forested ranges aligned east–west on either side. As Tracey Banivanua Mar has argued, those parts of the colonial landscape that were too rugged to be farmed were not left outside the cadastral grid.22 By the late nineteenth century such areas, unproductive in agricultural terms, were being reserved as Crown forests or national parks. The surveying of their boundaries can be understood as completing the grid. Their reservation of wilderness can be seen to have ‘emptied land of social space’, which is to say the social space of pre-colonial Aboriginal people, just as effectively as did the layering of rectangular settler farms over land with agricultural potential.23

Houses, cupboards and cages Wire fences made the cadastral grid a visible, tangible reality on the ground, where previously it had existed for the most part only on paper and in the minds of white settlers. It seems unlikely that Aboriginal people fully understood the extent and nature of their dispossession until wire fences fixed the grid onto the face of the land. It is worth remembering that when the first trickle of white people arrived in the Manning Valley in the 1820s, the Biripi had no way of foreseeing that



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they would keep coming and that they would take over. We should be wary of retrospectivity, of projecting back into Aboriginal minds a foreshadowing of what was to come; wary of imputing to Aboriginal culture at the time of contact a kind of incompleteness or inadequacy that would open it to white penetration. Cowlishaw’s observation, in relation to her field area in the Northern Territory, seems pertinent: ‘With the meaning of the country already known, how could the Remberrnga have imagined what the whites had in mind?’24 The cadastral grid was almost as blind and impartial to the topographic particularity of the country of the Biripi as it was blind and impartial to the way that they, the Biripi – mentally, ritually and by way of tree carvings and other markers – had previously mapped their country’s social and spiritual particularity. In some parts of Australia, however, European property boundaries and fences became cultural markers for Aboriginal people. Rodney Harrison illustrates such a scenario in relation to a pastoral property in the Kimberley area of northwestern Australia.25 Francesca Merlan has described how the landscape of the Aboriginal Dreaming around the outback town of Katherine, in the Northern Territory, was ‘permeable’ in that it was constituted in practice rather than in built structure.26 White settlers could not only easily insert themselves into this ‘invisibly’ structured landscape; they could also ignore the existence of any such structure. This ‘levelling’ of the Aboriginal topography is always there as part of the background of racial tension in Australia.27 The settler’s refusal to acknowledge the pre-existing integrity of Aboriginal social-spiritual space arguably became a charter for Aborigine people, in turn, to flout the niceties of white spatial order and property. Another recurrent point of tension between Aboriginal and white ways of living has been the importance of communality to the former and the importance of private property, as a basis of its capitalist economy, to the latter. The cadastral grid worked, indirectly, to train Aboriginal bodies to function within the geometry of the new economic order. The grid prevailed upon them to walk its straight lines and turn its 90-degree corners. This geometric discipline continued on inside the rectangles of the grid. When the Aboriginal Reserve at Purfleet (see Figure 4.1) was established in the valley in 1900, Aboriginal people were ‘encouraged’ to move there and to live on the eighteen-acre reserve in box-like wooden houses that were internally divided into square or rectangular rooms. Their children would go to school and sit within a grid of desks in a rectangular room and when they died they would





be buried in rectangular graves (the precise dimensions of which were stipulated in the Public Health Act) within a grid of other graves inside the rectangular bounds of the cemetery.28 Life on Aboriginal reserves involved a struggle, played out on a daily basis, between Aboriginal and white spatial regimes. Jane Lydon’s account of spatial strategies and tactics at Coranderrk, in Victoria, from the 1860s to the 1880s shows how Aboriginal residents there were to some extent able to resist or temper the spatial discipline which the white authorities sought to impose.29 Barry Morris’ attention to the history of domestic space on the Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve in the Macleay Valley, 100 kilometres north of the Manning Valley, is revealing of the importance given by the white authorities to spatial discipline.30 When new two-room houses were built on the reserve in 1913 a drawn-out tussle developed between the authorities, who wanted the Dhan-Gadi to cook and eat in the kitchens of the houses and sleep in the bedrooms, and the Dhan-Gadi themselves who wanted to cook and socialise around the camp fires outside, using the houses only for storage and for shelter when it rained. Cowlishaw’s observations from Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory help us appreciate how houses could obstruct Aboriginal sociality: ‘watching people as they come and go . . . being available to kinspeople, and communicating directly with finger talk are all interrupted by buildings’.31 At Bellbrook, the internal fireplaces became the site of a particular attempt ‘to privatize cooking and eating patterns by removing them from the public sites of collective consumption’.32 The boxes-within-boxes progression continued in the shape of cupboards. Even these became a site of contestation or nervousness, as is seen in this account by a nonindigenous man, Daryl Tonkin, who lived with Aboriginal people in the Gippsland area of Victoria during the 1920s and 1930s: I’ve seen the Welfare [Board] myself walk into a person’s house and go through the cupboards looking for food, then making note of what they did or did not find. It was these notes that gave them the right to walk in another day and take the children away. This made the people keep whitefella food always in the cupboards, even if they never ate it. In fact, they only had cupboards to keep the whitefella food in.33 None of this should be taken to mean that houses have been rejected outright by Aboriginal people; rather, they have recontextualised them or, to put it another way, they are still ‘trying them out’.34



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How, in a practical-spatial sense, do you live in a landscape that no longer belongs to you? On what basis do you continue to exist inside the grid of your own dispossession? Those questions go partly to the issue of private property. In the period from 1788 up until the 1980s, when Land Rights legislation allowed them to claim land back from the state, Aboriginal people almost never held recognised title to land in NSW and, thus, theoretically were excluded from the cadastral grid. But in practice there were two ways that they penetrated it. The first was by inserting themselves, more or less legitimately, into the numerous areas of Crown reserve distributed within the grid, adapting these to their own purposes. The second, which will be the subject of the next section, involved subverting the grid. As we have seen, almost immediately upon claiming the Australian landmass for the British Crown, the colonial authorities began ‘alienating’ portions of it to private (white) landowners. But it was also the job of government surveyors to retain, as Crown Reserve, areas of land for a variety of perceived and anticipated public uses. Large and usually rugged expanses on the margins of agricultural land were reserved for forestry; smaller pockets within agricultural country were set aside as town commons, as sites for future schools, churches, police stations and court houses, for the grazing of travelling cattle and sheep, and for public recreation. Distinct from these expanses and pockets were linear reserves set aside for future roads and for the droving of stock. Other linear strips of land along the margins of rivers and creeks were set aside to allow common access to water. Aboriginal use of these gaps or openings in the cadastral grid emerged as a theme in the oral histories of contemporary Aboriginal people recorded during 2000 and 2001 in the Manning Valley and at Forster, a coastal town immediately to the south of the valley.35 It also emerged from a survey of documentary historical sources, including published and unpublished reminiscences by early white settlers in the area, local and state government archives, and local newspapers from the midnineteenth century. While documentary references to the activities of Aboriginal people were generally fragmentary and often poor in spatial detail they corroborate Aboriginal memories and oral traditions of a pattern of camping and movement that appropriated the reserve system to its own ends. In order to identify the availability at various points over the last 120 years of gaps and openings in the cadastral grid, a Geographic Information System (GIS) was developed that incorporated a mapping of nineteenth-century white landholdings in the Manning



Gaps in the grid


Valley which had been carried out by the geographer, W. K. Birrell.36 This was cross-referenced to information on several series of Parish Plans for the area, some of which extended back to the 1880s. The extent of Crown Reserve land in the valley could be seen to have steadily diminished over the years as individual reserves were revoked by the government and sold off. This was a response to increased demand for land by a growing white population but it was also an acknowledgement that many of the anticipated public uses for reserved land would never eventuate. Early government surveyors in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, had drawn up plans for villages that never came to exist. One of these became the site of the secluded Aboriginal coastal camping ground at Saltwater, a place regularly used and greatly cherished by the residents of the Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve. To some extent, then, Aboriginal people might be said to have impressed the reality of their presence into the ghostly dreamscape of an unfulfilled white optimism. Aboriginal uses of these reserves differed from the ways that authorities had intended, but they were not illegal. Aboriginal use of such reserves fits what the French Situationalists of the 1960s called détournement, an appropriation of ‘the elements or terrain of the dominant social order to one’s own end, for a transformed purpose’.37 It also clearly fits within the concept of ‘poaching’ as developed by Michel de Certeau, a matter that I will return to later.38 In the Manning Valley, the village of Wingham (population 100 in 1866) was typical in that the villagers, most of whom were engaged in providing services to the surrounding farming population, had little need for a common on which to graze stock or raise crops of their own. The Wingham Common appears to have been unused until the 1860s when a large Aboriginal fringe camp came to be located there. We know about this camp mainly from a string of complaints about it which appear in the minutes of the Wingham Council (the local government), the Council finally forcing its removal around 1915. There is a certain irony in the likelihood that many of the English migrants who took up land in the valley (and elsewhere in NSW), and who agitated for Aboriginal camps to be removed from local commons, may themselves have been descendants of rural folk displaced by the ‘enclosure’ of common agricultural land in the English countryside, a trend that reached its peak in the eighteenth century as the capitalisation of England’s farm economy intensified.39 As Bender observes, ‘at the back of the colonial encounter lurked the unequal encounter “at home”’.40 At the level of spatial practice, the plight of Aboriginal people in NSW over



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the last two centuries resonates with that of Europe’s nomadic Gypsies and with the history of their exclusion from public space.41 There were thus metropolitan precedents for spatial exclusion just as there were precedents – in the Tudor conquest of Ireland, for instance – for the deployment of cartography in the colonial enterprise.42 A mainstay of the Aboriginal economy in the Manning at the time of first white settlement was the fishing carried out from bark canoes on the river and its broad estuary. Later, Aboriginal people built wooden boats and used their catch to supplement the meagre government rations they received, often bartering the fish for meat and vegetables from white farmers along the river. People on Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve (gazetted in 1900) used the water reserves in the nearby Glenthorne area for shore-based line fishing, for mooring the fishing boats some families owned (and still own), and as sites for their net-drying ‘racks’. These uses continue into the present and have been mapped as part of our project. Other water reserves along the river enabled the river itself and its islanded estuary to become a zone of free movement for those Aboriginal people with access to boats. The cadastral grid stopped at the shoreline and, to an extent, the water remained a neutral, unsegregated zone. I am referring here to the water itself (and to being on the water) rather than the river as a geographical feature. Often in Australia, rivers have served as racial boundaries between white towns and Aboriginal camps or reserves. This has been the case at Brewarrina in Western NSW43 and Katherine in the North Territory.44 It has certainly been true of the Manning River, despite the presence of a major bridge, with pedestrian access, in the zone where the 400-metre-wide river passes between Taree and the Purfleet Aboriginal settlement to the south. So, while Aboriginal movement along the river, by boat, was neutral in terms of the racial signification of space, Aboriginal movement across the river (in the direction of town via the bridge) directly engaged this signification. Interestingly, this particular tract of river which acts as a racial boundary remains a zone of relatively intense Aboriginal activity, with people fishing from the banks and children diving off the piers and the bridge and swimming in the stream. It is as if they are flaunting their presence there, on the doorstep of town; deliberately ratcheting up the tension, playing on the nerves of the town’s white residents. All this suggests that it is possible to think of the Aboriginal presence in the colonised landscape in terms of an in-betweenness. As well as moving through the ‘openings’ between the private properties of the cadastral grid there was some potential for Aboriginal people





to negotiate their way through these properties. This was possible by developing a web of tactical relationships with those white landowners prepared to be friendly or, at least, not to be hostile, towards them. Early in our fieldwork in the Manning Valley I was struck by the extent of Aboriginal knowledge of white land ownership. As we drove through the valley with people from Purfleet and elsewhere they frequently noted, in passing, not just who a particular farm belonged to but often who had owned it previously, the names of the parents and grandparents of the current owner, and so on. This knowledge was almost always backed by information about how friendly or otherwise these white people were to Aboriginal people of their generation, or to their parents, and even grandparents. Narratives about fence-jumping and orchard raiding had their counterpart in narratives about farmers who had always let them cross their fields, or who had given them fruit, or even, in one case, a white family who planted extra vegetables specifically for them to come and pick. Or the shop in Taree (the valley’s main town) where in the 1950s you could always get served and be spoken to decently, or the doctor who could be relied on to treat you well. Here, evidently, was a mental map of the valley that was an alternative to the official ‘white map’ – an alternative, for instance, to the Central Mapping Authority’s 1:25,000 topographic survey map that we would be holding and consulting as we drove along but to which our Aboriginal interlocutors never referred. The unpublished and undrawn Aboriginal map of everyday practice was detailed and extensive. It was maintained and updated and passed on from generation to generation. One answer to the question, ‘How do you live in a landscape that no longer belongs to you?’ appears to be that you maintain your own map of that landscape. That such maps are not drawn or published, that they do not acquire substance in that sense, is in keeping with the fact that the ‘thing’ they map also has no substance. The ‘in-betweenness’ of the Aboriginal situation is seen in the way that their map does not take the form of an overlay (or underlay) to the white map. Rather, it is a mapping of a space that lies in and around white space, a space that is brought into being by Aboriginal spatial practice but that has no ‘place of its own’. It is tempting to add to the other reasons given for the under-recording of Aboriginal post-contact heritage traces the fact that these traces are not places in the normal sense. They are constituted by a poaching on white places. Henri Lefebvre described the ‘fetishiz[ing] of space in a way reminiscent of the fetishism of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange,



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and the error was to consider “things” in isolation, as “things in themselves”’.45 The trap, in the present case, presumably lies in the heritage practitioner’s fixation on the (archaeological) trace as a ‘thing in itself’ rather than as a trajectory towards understanding things that have happened in the past. It has been the object of post-processual archaeology, over the last three decades or so, to extricate the discipline from this trap and to engage with the complexity of social life in the past.46 In the present case, the need is to be able to read the lives of the disempowered in traces of an infrastructure (the grid) that is ‘owned’ by the empowered.

The counter-cadastral The Manning Valley over the last 150 or so years was a cultural landscape that vibrated with the tensions set up not just by the strictures of racial segregation and their enforcement but also by the numerous ways that those strictures were tested and undermined by people on both sides of the highly unstable racial divide. I refer to the jumping of fences, the raiding of orchards and corn fields, the short-cut across a hostile farmer’s lower paddock in order to get to the river, the Aboriginal children sneaking into a property to swim in a farmer’s dam. Historical records indicate that incursions such as these have been common across the whole of NSW, constituting an ongoing source of interracial tension. Listening to the way our Aboriginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley recalled and narrated acts of trespass, often carried out against the real threat of shotguns and dogs and the spectre of the police, one is inclined to think of them as a systematic refusal of the boundaries of the cadastral system, a refusal to acknowledge its legitimacy, a constant prodding and testing of its resolve. These experiences and the relating of them are a significant part of Aboriginal folklore, as are the stories, particularly from the 1970s, of how individuals defied boundaries in segregated picture theatres and in the previously racially bounded space of white bars and discos. This theme of fence-jumping (‘trespassing’, in the language of the coloniser) comes up so often that at a certain point it gels into something almost of the status of a movement or philosophy. At one level it can be thought of as anti-cadastral; insofar, for instance, as the fence, as a boundary, is as much the target of the act of ‘trespass’ as the orchard that lies beyond it. But there also seems implicit in it a refusal to accept that the cadastral grid exists, a refusal that emulates the white settler failure to acknowledge the existence of the spatiality of the Dreaming or





of any Aboriginal native title to country. There is certainly much that is ‘tactical’ in these actions.47 With a tactical, wilful blindness, they appear to answer negation with negation. It is the kind of negation that Stephen Muecke, citing Daisy Bates, so graphically illustrates in reference to the behaviour of Fanny Balbuk, an Aboriginal woman of the country in southwestern Australia where the present-day city of Perth took root: Balbuk had been born on Huirison Island at the Causeway, and from there a straight track had led to the place where she had once gathered jilgies and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight path to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms.48 From another perspective, fence-jumping and orchard raiding were simply new adaptations of the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle in which one lived off what the land had to offer. For people who still consider themselves to be the rightful owners of their country the distinctions between fishing in the river, trapping rabbits, raiding orchards, or even shoplifting, may not be especially meaningful. Suggestive of this are the words of George Brown, an Aboriginal man of the NSW South Coast, as he reminisced about life in the middle decades of the twentieth century: ‘We knew every apple tree in the district and where the best melons were and we were a bit wild, I suppose. Not wild in a sense, just we liked melons and apples.’49 Ella Simon, an Aboriginal woman born in the Manning Valley in 1901, expressed it a little differently: ‘as settlement spread and fences went up, they couldn’t get their food without going into paddocks. They were always being punished for stealing but if they didn’t “steal”, they’d starve.’50 From the perspective of the government, such behaviour was nevertheless unambiguously criminal (it was for behaviour like this that many of the poor of the British Isles had been sentenced to be transported as convicts to Australia). It was also mostly seen as behaviour that was reactive, imitative and disorganised. In an important counter to this, Birmingham draws on optimalisation theory to propose we think of the ‘quarrying’ of European items by Aboriginal people in the contact period in Central Australia not as ‘casual pilfering’ but as a systematic economic strategy, indeed as a ‘continuation of traditional forager practices’.51 I find de Certeau’s writings on such everyday practices as reading and walking resonate with Aboriginal spatial practices both literally and



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figuratively.52 Where he writes of how the tactic ‘must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers’53 I am put in mind of the physical openings in the cadastral grid as well as Aboriginal people’s exploitation of weaknesses in the white system of control. Again, when de Certeau likens readers to ‘nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves’, I can’t help thinking of the cadastral grid as a text that has been inscribed on the landscape, and thinking of Aboriginal people as active readers of that text.54 While it will always be difficult to find archaeological evidence for sites of poaching it is possible to map such sites, at least indicatively, through Aboriginal people’s memories. In our study, the priority we gave to oral history recording reflected our desire to work at the level of individual lives lived in local landscapes, a concern for individuality and subjectivity that informs the work of a growing number of archaeologists.55 During interviews at kitchen tables at Purfleet or out in the countryside, enlargements of aerial photographs were provided for our interlocutors to mark up as they recounted memories of places and pathways. These ‘geobiographies’, as we have termed them, are obviously always partial, depicting only what people can, or choose to, remember at a certain time.56 But they do evoke the idea of a counter-cadastral, by which I mean they bring into focus a map which is an alternative to the colonial map.57 The Aboriginal pathways that were mapped, for instance, very often make their way through parts of the colonial landscape least frequented by or visible to white settlers. They take on the aspect of an interlinear to the settler text-map. They follow the river banks, or the railway cuttings, or proceed through remnant corridors of bush. In avoiding the white presence in the landscape, they seem to ‘inter-finger’ the white pattern of occupation the way creeks and gullies might be said to inter-finger a pattern of ridges and spurs. According to Orser and Funari, the work of James Scott on the ‘arts of resistance’ practised by peasants in peninsula Malaysia in relation to the power held over them by their landlords has had a seminal influence on the archaeology of New World slavery.58 Scott’s work describes the often subtle, surreptitious and everyday character of acts of resistance and the low likelihood of these acts leaving material traces. This rings true for Aboriginal lives in the colonised landscape of Australia. But there is something quite particular in the situation of an Indigenous minority in a settler colony: their labour is, by and large, not essential to the colonial economy; their very existence is surplus to the colonial





enterprise (although the colonists have freely borrowed from their culture in order to give a ‘native’ gloss to emergent national-colonial identity). It is probably true in most places in Australia through most of the last two centuries that white people have simply wished that Aboriginal people would go away. It might almost be said that the greatest act of resistance Aboriginal people have offered white colonists has been their refusal to fade out of the picture; their great achievement has been the sheer obdurate persistence of their presence in the landscape.

Darkness on the edge of town This brings us to the issue of visibility, always a critical factor in racial segregation. Aboriginal people often describe how effectively the disapproval of white people is conveyed in the way they look at you. They speak of the effect of living under this disapproving gaze on a daily basis and what that does to you. We saw how, from the 1860s, through the practice of ring-barking, great tracts of the Manning Valley lost their tree cover. The situation of the Aboriginal people of the valley was not just that they were dispossessed of their land – they also became visible in it in a new and presumably quite disturbing way. The term ‘bush cover’ is normally used in Australia to refer to the way trees and shrubs clothe parts of the terrain, but for Aboriginal people exposed in the post-contact landscape it took on an added meaning of providing refuge from the white gaze. In the frontier phase, the bush was frequently a cause of white nervousness, partly in that it harboured Aborigines and partly in the connotations of darkness, wildness and untamed immensity attributed to it by settlers. In this period, some Aboriginal people withdrew into the bush-covered ranges on the periphery of agricultural land and others withdrew into the bush when pursued by settlers after preying on their sheep and cattle.59 This is the other side of segregation: the sense in which Aboriginal people voluntarily withdraw themselves from the white presence. As an aside, it is interesting to note that it was common for African slaves in America to use the woodlands surrounding plantations as a place to momentarily escape surveillance and to enact African-based rituals.60 In Australia in the early and mid-twentieth century, Aboriginal parents often hid their children in the bush to prevent them being removed to institutions by white welfare officers or the police. The bush continues to offer shelter. Interviewed about his experience of growing up in the Manning Valley, Russell Saunders described how he and his friends would head for the trees when caught trespassing by white farmers in the late 1950s and



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early 1960s, the farmers saying of them: ‘Once them blackfellows hit the bush, you may as well give up! Forget it! You won’t catch ’em.’61 Saltwater, referred to earlier, was a place on the coast that the Aboriginal residents of Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve, ten kilometres inland, withdrew to en masse at Christmas time every year during the first half of the twentieth century.62 ‘We went every Christmas for six solid weeks,’ Horrie Saunders recalled, ‘and we went back to the natural state.’63 People swam and fished, gathered berries, cooked in the open and sat around the camp fires in the evenings, singing and telling stories. The remnant littoral rainforest at Saltwater with its big trees, vines and thick understorey was integral to the sense of privacy and refuge that people describe when they reminisce about the Christmas camps. In the 1960s the Shire Council turned Saltwater into a public reserve for the enjoyment of ‘all’. The understorey vegetation was cleared, a (rectangular) toilet block was constructed, and Aboriginal people were discouraged from camping there. Some continue to camp there but they mourn the ‘exposure’ and the ‘ruin’. There is a sense in which a part of the colonial project is still being accomplished in the Manning Valley as the civilising mission reaches into the last pockets of country Aboriginal people might still identify as theirs.64 Patricia Davis-Hurst, a Worimi elder who organises camps at Saltwater for Aboriginal single mothers and their children, sits on a Shire Council committee recently convened to administer Saltwater. The Council, she told me, proposed that Aboriginal people would be allowed to continue to camp there provided that they had properly numbered camp sites that a surveyor would have to lay out at their own expense. ‘I said to them, “You want to put us in boxes and then get us to pay for it?”’65 So continues the hegemony of the grid. And then there is the landscape of the night. As Djuna Barnes (1936) so brilliantly demonstrates in Nightwood, the after hours is a space in its own right. In the Australian countryside, it was a space quite specifically racialised.66 Some of the same white men in country towns who would discriminate against Aboriginal people by day, under the cover of darkness would slip out to the Aboriginal Reserve or fringe camp looking for sex with Aboriginal women. In speaking of the 1930s and 1940s, Myles Lalor, an Aboriginal man from the tablelands adjacent to the NSW north coast, records that: ‘Some of the women have been known to say it at public meetings: “Yes, you say you don’t like blacks, but we’re not black when it comes to the bloody night-time”.’67 This ambivalence, the jangling coexistence within the same individuals of aversion and attraction, desire and repulsion, itself constitutes one of the raw nerves





of race relations. The boundary, in such cases, is a temporal rather than a topographic one: night falls and desire rules, day breaks and segregation is reinstated. Which is not to say that desire and aversion cannot coexist in a single act; that sexual desire has not been accompanied by an urge to dominate black bodies. Nor should we forget that there were and are others – Aboriginal and white, men and women – who have defied convention to form relationships across the racial divide. Desire, friendship, openness, love: these have always been there as a countercurrent to racism. Among the Manning Valley’s sites of segregation was the Boomerang Theatre. Situated in the centre of Taree, in the middle decades of the twentieth century the Boomerang was the town cinema. Aboriginal patrons were restricted to the cinema’s front five rows of seats and had to enter by the side door after the lights went down68 (see Figure 4.2). In Australia, the recording and inventorying of built heritage sites is almost always carried out by heritage architects, unlike Aboriginal precontact sites which are almost always inventoried by archaeologists. Were the Boomerang Theatre to be given heritage listing, the chances

Figure 4.2 Boomerang picture theatre, Taree, New South Wales, 1923. Aboriginal patrons are sitting at the front rows on the left and had to enter by the side door when the lights went down.



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are it would be classified as an example of mid-twentieth-century smalltown entertainment architecture. From a heritage point of view there is some kind of presumption that a building will be self-classifying; that its fabric will proclaim its identity or significance. Yet the social practices that made the Boomerang a site of segregation left no obvious physical traces – they rarely ever do. The traces of what happened there are largely memory traces. When the Aboriginal people of the Manning Valley talk today about the old cinema they speak not of architecture but of humiliation and anger. The cinema has recently been used as an example of why, in a values-based approach to heritage, it is essential to balance the ‘social value’ of places and landscapes against their archaeological, architectural and other values.69

A way back into the landscape In the US, racial segregation and the Civil Rights movement have long been the focus of heritage conservation and commemoration, activities that are themselves now a subject of analysis and critique.70 In South Africa, Cape Town’s District Six has become a key site for a post-apartheid heritage of segregation.71 After the forced removal of the district’s ‘coloured’ population, beginning in 1966, and the razing of the terraced houses there, the only obvious trace of this former cosmopolitan residential precinct (apart from a few public buildings standing in isolation) was the grid of streets and lanes. The street grid later became a mnemonic aid when it was reproduced as a map on the floor of the District Six Museum, opened in 1994.72 During visits to the museum, many former residents have inscribed their names, the locations of their former homes, and other information on the map using marker pens. The orthogonal grid that was originally inscribed on the landscape of Cape Town by the Dutch as an instrument for regulating the space of the colony, and hence its occupants, has become a means for the dominated to symbolically recover a lost space and reinscribe themselves in it.73 In Australia, as yet, racial segregation barely registers as a subject for heritage recording or conservation, a situation which I suggest resonates with the invisibility or denial of segregation in public discourse during the period in which it operated.74 In country areas of NSW, which is where most of the state’s Aboriginal population lived until the 1970s, cinemas, hospitals and swimming pools were segregated by social convention and intimidation; rarely were they segregated by local government by-law or regulation. Other customary exclusions, such as that which





decreed that Aboriginal men should not be present in town at night, were commonly maintained by police violence. Segregation was something white communities in country towns were both hyper-conscious of but also self-censoring in regard to. This doubleness is evident in a Christian clergyman’s comment about the picketing by university students of a segregated ex-serviceman’s club in Walgett (Western NSW) in 1965: ‘It is only stirring up racial feelings which don’t exist in the town.’75 The poor showing of segregation sites in Australian heritage registers reflects the celebratory nature of heritage discourse, its function of presenting the past in a form that encourages national consensus. One needs to look elsewhere for a happy ending to the narrative of exclusion related in this chapter. The potential for such an ending may be found, I suggest, in a number of developments over the last few decades which have enabled Aboriginal people in NSW to re-enter parts of the colonised landscape they have long been excluded from and allowed them to have their legitimate presence in other parts of the landscape recognised. Under the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1983 Aboriginal people have gained title to hundreds of blocks of ‘vacant’ Crown land across the state. Most of this is bushland, often in rugged country, which does not have productive potential for farming or potential to benefit Aboriginal communities in other ways. It is often, however, used for ‘culture camps’ and other ‘back to country’ activities. Much of it also has high biodiversity conservation value which has made the Aboriginal owners of this land significant stakeholders in the environmental conservation movement.76 There is every indication that involvement in the work of natural resource management (NRM) is emerging as a ‘third way’ for Indigenous development in Australia, acting as an alternative to the ‘false choice’ between welfare dependency and engagement in the free market economy.77 Increasing numbers of Aboriginal people in NSW are finding employment in federal- and state-funded NRM programmes to control noxious weeds (whose invasion of the landscape has been a corollary of colonial settlement) and regenerate degraded land by planting and nurturing native species. This work is taking Aboriginal NRM staff onto privately owned land, not as poachers or fence-jumpers but, somewhat ironically, as conservation practitioners striving to return it to some semblance of the state it was in when they were ‘managing it’ (that is, prior to colonisation). Aboriginal involvement in NRM is occurring in the larger context of public alarm over global warming, rapid loss of biodiversity and the degradation of rivers. All of this is stimulating a renewed interest in



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‘the commons’ as Rowe has noted,78 a sense that private property rights should not trump the right of non-human species to exist or the right of future human generations to a liveable environment. Another development, beginning in NSW in the 1990s, has seen a significant number of Aboriginal people employed as field staff in national parks. Title to a limited number of national parks has been transferred to Aboriginal traditional owners, the parks being leased back to the government to be managed jointly by the owners and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.79 All of this might be taken to indicate that racial nervousness in the colonised landscape is being eclipsed by a nervousness about the environmental damage wrought by white settlement. Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a larger project on the Aboriginal post-contact history of the lower North Coast which has benefited from the assistance of John Beattie, Chi-min Chan, Gabrielle Werksman, Peter Johnson and Johanna Kijas. Special thanks to my principal collaborator on this project, Maria Nugent, for sharing her knowledge of Aboriginal history and her insights on racism in its spatial guise. I am indebted to Vienna Maslin and Robert Paulson, representing the Taree-Purfleet and Forster Aboriginal communities, for guiding us through the local landscape and opening our eyes to its many layers. Comments by Nick Shepherd, University of Cape Town, and Lynn Meskell, Stanford University, helped me significantly improve an earlier version of this chapter. Finally, I am deeply indebted to those Aboriginal people of the Taree-Forster area who were willing to share their stories with me. Notes 1. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1991). 2. Robert Bropho, Fringedweller (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1980); Peter Kabaila, Wiradjuri Places (Canberra: Black Mountain Projects, 1995); Charles Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970); Charles Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970); Basil Sansom, The Camp at Wallaby Creek (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1980). 3. Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘Censoring Race in “Post-Colonial” Anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology 20 (2000): 101–23. 4. Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent, Mapping Attachment: a Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-Contact Heritage (Sydney: Department of Environment and Conservation NSW, 2004); Maria Nugent, ‘Mapping Memories: Oral History for Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in New South Wales, Australia’, in Oral History and Public Memories, ed. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 47–63. The project was carried out for the Department of Environment and Conservation, New South Wales (now the




5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces Department of Environment and Climate Change, NSW) in partnership with the Forster and Taree-Purfleet Local Aboriginal Land Councils with funding support from the NSW Heritage Council. Denis Byrne, ‘Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past’, Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82–107, p. 91. Timothy Murray, ‘Contact Archaeology: Shared Histories? Shared Identities?’, in Sites: Nailing the Debate: Archaeology and Interpretation in Museums (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1996), pp. 199–213, p. 207. Peter Read, ‘“A Rape of the Soul so Profound”: Some Reflections on the Dispersal Policy in New South Wales’, in Terribly Hard Biscuits, ed. Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 202–14; Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society; Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia. Charles E. Orser, A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), p. 157. Desmond Bonney, ‘Early Boundaries and Estates in Southern England’, in Medieval Settlement, ed. B. H. Sawyer (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 72–82. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). Christopher Gosden, ‘Postcolonial Archaeology: Issues of Culture, Identity, and Knowledge’, in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder (London: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 241–61. For instances where the cadastral grid was tailored to local requirements elsewhere in the colonial world, see Martin Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 60, 67, 68. Ibid., pp. 45, 66. Governor Phillip to Sydney, 15 May 1788, Public Record Office, London. See also Keith Vincent Smith, Bennelong (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1992), p. 16, for this idea of the circle in the sand as ‘both a physical and symbolic barrier which segregated black and white at their first meeting in Port Jackson’ (now known as Sydney Harbour). Peter Read, ‘“Breaking up the Camps Entirely”: the Dispersal Policy in Wiradjuri Country 1909–1929’, Aboriginal History 8 (1984): 45–55. Timothy Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. 42–55. Paul Ashton and Duncan Waterson, Sydney Takes Shape: a History in Maps (Brisbane: Hema Maps, 1977). Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 36. John D. Lines, Australia on Paper (Box Hill, Victoria: Fortune, 1992), pp. 19–32; Stephen H. Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788–1920 (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968 [1924]), pp. 3–42. W. K. Birrell, The Manning Valley: Landscape and Settlement 1824–1900 (Sydney: Jacaranda Press, 1987), p. 118; John Ramsland, The Struggle Against Isolation: a History of the Manning Valley (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1987), p. 29. Birrell, The Manning Valley, p. 163. Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, pp. 178–81. According to D. N. Jeans, An Historical Geography of New South Wales to 1901 (Sydney: Reed, 1972), p. 59, fencing wire first became available in Australia in the 1870s and barbed wire,



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26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

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invented in America in 1873, ‘came into common use’ in NSW in the 1890s though for a long time the old-style wooden post-and-rail fences remained widespread in the core areas of settlement. Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Chapter 3, this volume. Ibid. Gillian Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: a Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 55. Rodney Harrison, ‘Ngarranggani, Ngamungamu, Jalanijarra (Dreamtime, Old Time, This Time): “Lost Places”, Recursiveness and Hybridity at Old Lamboo Pastoral Station, Southeast Kimberley, WA’ (PhD, Centre for Archaeology, University of Western Australia, 2003). Francesca Merlan, Caging the Rainbow (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), p. 73. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Tropical Hundreds: Monoculturalism and Colonisation’, in Race, Colour and Identity, ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), pp. 59–78, pp. 59–60. Denis Byrne, In Sad But Loving Memory: Aboriginal Burials and Cemeteries of the Last 200 Years in NSW (Sydney: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1997). Jane Lydon, ‘Seeing Each Other: the Colonial Vision in Nineteenth-Century Victoria’, in Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600–1945, ed. Susan Lawrence (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 174–90. Barry Morris, Domesticating Resistance: the Dhan-Gadi Aborigines and the Australian State (Oxford: Berg, 1989). Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas, p. 266. Morris, Domesticating Resistance, p. 81. See Judy Birmingham, ‘Engendynamics: Women in the Archaeological Record at Wybalenna, Flinders Island 1835–1840’, in Women in Archaeology, ed. Hillary du Cros and Laurajane Smith (Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Australian National University, 1993), pp. 121–8, who argues that the shell midden and remains of native fauna excavated from two of the cottages built by the British for Tasmanian Aborigines in the midnineteenth century on Flinders Island in Bass Strait corroborate documentary evidence that the ‘problem’ was not that the Tasmanians were reluctant to use the houses for food preparation but that they declined to behave in the cottages differently to the way they were accustomed to behaving outside. Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon, Jackson’s Track (Ringwood, Victoria: Viking/Penguin, 1999), pp. 216–17. Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘Black Modernity and Bureaucratic Culture’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1999): 15–24, p. 19. The oral history recording was mostly carried out by Maria Nugent and Denis Byrne with the assistance of local Aboriginal community heritage officers, Vienna Maslin and Robert Yettica. Birrell, The Manning Valley. Kristin Ross, ‘Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space’, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 104–20, p. 116. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated from the French by Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).





39. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New York Press, 1993); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). Also, see James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) for a discussion of the widespread nature of peasant and proletarian poaching from forests in Germany in the nineteenth century. 40. Barbara Bender, ‘Introduction’, in Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, ed. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1–18. 41. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 102–8. Sibley makes reference to a 1908 British parliamentary debate in which a certain Lord Farrer unfavourably compared the ‘oldfashioned Gypsies’ who lived ‘in harmony with nature’ with the ‘tramps and nomads’ who now ‘infested’ the commons of Surrey. Similarly, in Australia, the ‘problem’ of contemporary Aboriginal people in places like the Manning Valley is still commonly described in terms of a loss of culture. 42. Aidan O’Sullivan, ‘Crannogs: Places of Resistance’, in Contested Landscapes, ed. Bender and Winer, pp. 87–101. 43. Heather Goodall, ‘Talking about Country’ (paper presented to the National Museums Negotiating Histories conference, Canberra, 1999); Heather Goodall, ‘Indigenous Peoples, Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustice’, in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, ed. Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier and Heather Goodall (Oxford: Lexington, 2006), pp. 73–95. 44. Merlan, Caging the Rainbow, p. 10. 45. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated from the French by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 90. 46. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 47. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 48. Stephen Muecke, No Road (Bitumen all the Way) (Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1977), p. 183. 49. Lee Chittick and Terry Fox, Travelling with Percy: a South Coast Journey (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), p. 64. 50. Ella Simon, Through My Eyes (Adelaide: Rigby, 1978), p. 24. 51. Judy Birmingham, ‘Resistance, Creolization or Optimal Foraging at Killalpaninna Mission, South Australia’, in The Archaeology of Difference, ed. Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 363. 52. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 53. Ibid., p. 36. 54. De Certeau cited in Jeremy Aherne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 171. 55. Margaret Conkey, M. W. Gero and Joan M. Gero, ‘Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 411–37; Lynn Meskell, ‘Intimate Archaeologies: the Case of Kha and Merit’, World Archaeology 29 (1998): 363–79. 56. Nugent, ‘Mapping Memories’. 57. Denis Byrne, ‘Counter-Mapping in the Archaeological Landscape’, in Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, ed. Bruno David and Julian Thomas (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), pp. 609–16.



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58. Charles Orser and Pedro P. A. Funari, ‘Archaeology and Slave Resistance and Rebellion’, World Archaeology 33 (2001): 61–72, pp. 62–3; Scott, Weapons of the Weak; James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, p. 26. 59. Denis Byrne, The Aboriginal and Archaeological Significance of the New South Wales Rainforests (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1987), pp. 106–8; Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Townsville: University of North Queensland, 1981), pp. 83–4. 60. Robert K. Fitts, ‘The Landscapes of Northern Bondage’, Historical Archaeology 30 (1996): 54–73. 61. Byrne and Nugent, Mapping Attachment, p. 170. 62. Patricia Davis-Hurst, Sunrise Station (Taree: Sunrise Publications, 1996), pp. 156–62. 63. Kevin Gilbert, Living Black (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1978), p. 36. 64. This has been countered by successful Aboriginal claims under the New South Wales Land Rights Act and claims made under the Federal Native Title Act. Saltwater has itself been subject to a Native Title claim by Worimi and Biripi people; an Indigenous Land Use Agreement now recognises their right to use it for camping. 65. Patricia Davis-Hurst, September 2002, interview with the author. 66. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). 67. Myles Lalor, Wherever I Go, ed. Jeremy Beckett (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), p. 41. 68. Davis-Hurst, Sunrise Station, p. 45. 69. Denis Byrne, ‘Heritage as Social Action’, in The Heritage Reader, ed. Graham Fairclough, Rodney Harrison, John H. Jameson and John Schofield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 152–3. Erica C. Avrami, Randall Mason and Marta de la Torre (eds), Values and Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2000); Marta de la Torre (ed.), Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2002). 70. Owen J. Dwyer, ‘Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict’, Professional Geographer 52 (2000): 660–71; Fitts, ‘The Landscapes of Northern Bondage’; Robert R. Weyeneth, ‘Historic Preservation and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s: Identifying, Preserving, and Interpreting the Architecture of Liberation: a Report to Preservation Agencies, part 1’, CRM Bulletin 18 (1995): 6–8; Robert R. Weyeneth, ‘Historic Preservation and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s: Identifying, Preserving, and Interpreting the Architecture of Liberation: a Report to Preservation Agencies, part 2’, CRM Bulletin 19 (1996): 26–8. 71. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, pp. 156–76; Antonia Malan and Elizabeth van Heyningen, ‘Twice Removed: Horsley Street in Cape Town’s District Six, 1865–1982’, in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes, ed. Allan Mayne and Timothy Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 39–56. 72. District Six Museum, http://www.districtsix.co.za (accessed December 2002). 73. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World. 74. Denis Byrne, ‘The Ethos of Return: Erasure and Reinstatement of Aboriginal Visibility in the Australian Historical Landscape’, Historical Archaeology 37 (2003): 73–86.





75. Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: a Freedom Rider Remembers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002), p. 94. 76. Michael Adams, ‘Redefining Relationships: Aboriginal Interests and Biodiversity Conservation in Australia’ (PhD, University of Wollongong, 2001); Michael Adams, ‘Negotiating Nature: Collaboration and Conflict between Aboriginal and Conservation Interests in New South Wales, Australia’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education 20 (2004): 3–11. 77. Jon Altman, Geoff Buchanan and Libby Larsen, The Environmental Significance of the Indigenous Estate: Natural Resource Management as Economic Development in Remote Australia (Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, 2007). 78. Jonathan Rowe, ‘The Parallel Economy of the Commons’, 2008 State of the World (Washington, DC: The Worldwatch Institute, 2008), pp. 138–242. 79. Department of Environment and Climate Change NSW, http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/comanagement/ ParkReserveReturnToAboriginalOwnership.htm (accessed October 2008).



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The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces around Early Melbourne Penelope Edmonds During the 1840s many Aboriginal people moved in and out of the new settlement of Melbourne, and lived and camped along the Yarra River and Merri Creek, which run through the northeastern stretches of the city. Yet, in 1841 newly arrived Englishwoman Sarah Bunbury could walk the same river and see an entirely different settler space. ‘I am charmed with Australia dear Mama and Papa’, she wrote in a letter home. Sarah described the houses of Europeans along the banks of the Yarra River in this early settlement as ‘very pretty English cottages’, and ‘at the back of the house was a pretty plantation of gum trees and mimosas . . . thinned out enough to make it look like an English park’.1 Although Sarah’s husband, Hanmer Bunbury, freely registered his own hostile adjudications of Aboriginal people in letters home, in her many letters Sarah never mentioned sighting or encountering a single Aboriginal person, until at last Hanmer took her to view an Aboriginal corroboree in 1843. The town of Melbourne, in the Port Phillip Bay area of southeastern Australia, was officially founded by Governor Richard Bourke in 1837. This colonial outpost, first settled in 1835 by entrepreneurial overstraiters from Van Diemen’s Land seeking new pastoral lands, sat uneasily at the edge of Britain’s empire and largesse. It was also sited on Aboriginal land, in the midst of the confederacy of cultural-linguistic groups in the Port Phillip Bay region now referred to as the Kulin Nation, comprising the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wathawurrung, Djadjawurrung and the Daungwurrung. These groups had lived around the greater Port Phillip Bay area for around 40,000 years, constantly adapting to its changes.2 In 1839 the ‘miam.miam or huts’ of the Aborigines, wrote Chief Aboriginal Protector Augustus Robinson, were ‘scattered over a beautiful eminence at the north east corner of the township’.3 In this year Robinson reported that the Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) and Boonwurrung clans 129



5


around Melbourne comprised around 230 people.4 Many hundreds from other groups also came in and out of the town every year for ceremonial reasons. For a period of at least fifteen years Aboriginal peoples were present in the streets of early Melbourne. Pushed off their traditional lands by settlers, and frequently starving, Aboriginal peoples began to replace traditional subsistence practices by bartering goods and engaging in itinerant labour in the town. By the early 1840s, with increasing numbers of European immigrants moving into Melbourne, efforts were gradually made to push Aboriginal people out of developing town space, with the index of the Town Council minutes noting on several occasions the ‘evils’ and ‘Inconvenience and Immorality of the Blacks being in the town’.5 There has been a striking absence of historical work on Indigenous presence in developing settler colonial cities. Many studies, especially in Australia, have ignored the dynamic, interactive contact histories of the colonial cityscape, as if Indigeneity stopped at the urban. Much international literature on colonial cities has regularly privileged franchise colonial over settler colonial formations, and metropolitan concerns are usually foregrounded, largely omitting the lived realities and gendered and racialised contours of settler cities. Little attention has been paid to the dynamic histories of intimate and mixed relations for Indigenous peoples and newcomers in such urbanising colonial spaces.6 Settler colonial cities are places of the most thoroughgoing extinguishment of native title today.7 It is no coincidence that in much traditional Australian historiography colonial cities and the racialised dimensions of the nineteenth-century urbanising frontier have been rarely debated and largely under-scrutinised. Indeed, this phenomenon tends to amnesia. Although a growing body of work has begun to address Australia’s postcolonial cities and consider Aboriginality and the urban, Australia’s nineteenth-century colonial cities and urban development have been largely depicted and studied in traditional and triumphalist terms of infrastructural and imperial progress.8 Further, studies by historians and geographers of gender and Indigenous women in such cities are woefully scant, thus constituting a doubly neglected area of scholarship. Neglect of the settler colonial city in much scholarly endeavour has also largely led to its excision from considerations and reformulation of what constitutes the ‘frontier’, with all its racialised and gendered contours. For too long historians of Australia have imagined the colonial frontier as a problem only of the bush or borderlands, as places of conflict where European pastoralists encroached on Aboriginal lands.



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The frontier of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been inaccurately conceptualised as a linear, expansionist phenomenon, marking civilisation from savagery, a clear divide about which they can record ‘official’ martial-style engagements between males as a reflection of colonial relations. Astoundingly, Beverley Nance’s article (1981) on European and Aboriginal violence in Port Phillip asserted that ‘personal relations between white and black were almost non-existent’.9 Nance’s study, like many others, focused on official incidents of violence and combat, denying the crucial interpersonal dimensions of racialised relations, and especially the dynamics of gendered and sexualised power inherent in and foundational to the colonial process. Gratifyingly, in the last decade or so there has been an extensive reconsideration and problematisation of the frontier as a more complex, shifting and intimate phenomenon, largely the product of an encounter between postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Jan Critchett, writing on the Western Districts of Victoria, southeastern Australia in the 1830s and 1840s, noted that rather than a linear frontier, it was ‘local, shifting, and inescapable’. Contested land was the ‘very land each settler lived on’, with the other side of the frontier being ‘just as easily the bed shared with an Aboriginal women’.10 As a range of Australian and international scholars of empire have now begun to explore, the settler colonial frontier was not an outward-moving linear abstraction, but was often domestic, local and personal.11 The ‘contact zone’ first articulated by Mary Louise Pratt, in particular, helped to extend conceptions of the frontier, making it transactional, and emphasising ‘co-presence’ and ‘interaction’, within of course radically uneven schemas of power.12 In line with such propositions, this chapter argues that early towns and cities were developing urban frontiers, equally charged and often-violent contact zones of racialised spatial contestations. Such urbanising frontiers were mosaic-like, mercurial, transcultural and, importantly, intimate and gendered.13 Sarah Bunbury’s lack of awareness and recognition of Aboriginal presence in developing Melbourne, and of the intense and at times brutal interactions between Aboriginal and Europeans, perhaps a wilful not-seeing, is reflective of the differing experiences of European men and women in the new settler space. Crucially, it also reveals the bifurcated space of the colonial encounter, and the markedly different lives of middle-class white women as compared to Aboriginal women, who lived in the many encampments around the town, and along more remote waterways, and for whom often violent, sexualised contact with white men was an everyday occurrence in the developing urban frontier.



Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 131


This chapter is therefore centrally concerned with empire, gender and the emergent settler colonial urban space of Melbourne, a place commonly depicted as thoroughly homosocial in culture, between the late 1830s and the 1850s. It examines the lives of Aboriginal women and immigrants in the new settler cityscape and surrounds, and the simultaneous development of three new spaces or zones of settler colonialism: town space, ‘native camps’ or fringe camps around the perimeter of Melbourne, and the more distant pastoral frontier. Native camps were hidden spaces, often left unmentioned in official archives, yet these places were often sites of intense contact between white men and Aboriginal women, intimate and frequently conflicted frontiers. New considerations of the interpersonal, lived dimensions of the colonial city, as an equally racially charged and violent frontier, are thus brought together in this chapter along with recent thinking on the intimate, gendered dimensions of empire. Lastly, the chapter reflects on settler colonialism’s rapid reorganisation and creation of new bodies and spaces across this array of frontier zones, and argues that such spaces functioned together and had more in common with each other than is at first apparent, namely a continuum of colonial violence operating through various modalities that were gendered and raced.

Double vision along the Yarra River: colonial space, gender and intimacy Sarah Bunbury lived with her husband first on a farm in Newton or ‘new town’, outside the main settlement of Melbourne, and her married life in their cottage was one of confinement.14 As her husband Hanmer wrote, ‘My sally [sic] is very well indeed and the most industrious little body in the world; while I am in Town every day worrying myself to death trying to effect sales, she sits at home drawing; poor girl she hardly ever gets a ride or sees anything of the pretty country about us.’15 It has long been acknowledged that white women, along with male settlers, were significant actors in the process of settlement in Aboriginal territories and complicit in the dispossession of Aboriginal lands. Yet, as residents of the ‘private sphere’, white women’s contact with Aboriginal peoples was often limited or brokered by white men.16 Nevertheless, some white women were keen, if partial, observers, and sometimes defied Victorian conventions. Others failed to perceive, or seemed wilfully to omit details in their record of events that were part of the new settlement. In the early 1840s the diarist and painter Georgiana McCrae described Aboriginal people in Melbourne lining up



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at the abattoirs for meat, wrote of crossing the Yarra River on the punt with two Aboriginal men and a woman, and of her own children playing with Aboriginal children who camped along the Yarra River.17 Her writings on Aborigines, however, were scant and remained within the bounds of gentility, usually omitting or obscuring any hint of conflict or colonial violence. Georgiana McCrae did not write that her brotherin-law, Dr Farquhar McCrae, had tied up and flogged an Aboriginal man, Nunupton, in the street, whom he claimed had robbed him.18 She did not mention the many Aboriginal people with syphilis, contracted from European men, who were living in desperate state on the outskirts of the town. Nor did she chronicle the nefarious activities of European men in the native camps that existed around the town precinct at this time. Aborigines seemingly did not exist for some Europeans, but others, including missionaries, wrote much of Aboriginal presence and plight. The words of Sarah Bunbury and Georgiana McCrae reveal this double vision, the strange bifurcated space of the colonial encounter, where Aborigines were at once absent and present to the colonial eye. They tell us of the intimacy and distance of the colonial encounter, although that intimacy was sometimes forced, and the distance at times wilful. In a critical examination of theoretical work on gender and space, Sara Mills has observed that the confinement of European women has often been viewed as the ‘determining factor in women’s sense of their position within spatial frameworks’.19 Yet, reflecting on the colonial experience, the ‘complexity of gendered spatial relations’ cannot be encompassed simply within the ‘notion of confinement’. As Mills rightly notes, often the experience of white women, especially women travellers, in the colonial sphere was characterised by new freedoms unavailable within spatial strictures at home. Yet, for colonised Indigenous women in British colonies such as in Africa and India, their freedom was limited ‘not by their own families within the harem of purdah, but through fear of attack or rape by British soldiers’.20 Likewise, glimpses in the archives, as well as more recent oral and written testimony from Aboriginal women, tell us that in the settler colonies of Australia, sexualised, racist violence was often the operative factor in many colonised Aboriginal women’s daily spatial considerations.21 Despite this, Aboriginal women in Australian colonial towns and cities of the early to mid-nineteenth century have typically received little more than fleeting mentions in much visual and literary material of the period, often much less so than their male counterparts. When they are mentioned, it is frequently in the language of highly sexualised binary stereotypes, as ‘ugly wretches’, or desirable temptresses, terms that pivot on their perceived





attractiveness to European heterosexual men. In this chapter I argue that the urbanising frontier was an intimate frontier, a place of shared domestic and collaborative moments, as well as conflict, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The study of colonial urban space, sex, race and fears of miscegenation provides an essential contour of settler colonial urban relations, which should not be overlooked. In settler colonies such intimate relations were not merely ‘reflective of but were constitutive of colonialism’.22 Further, these intimate relations, as Ann Stoler has maintained, are formative in the ‘making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule’.23 Such interactions were an implicit part of the long colonial encounter, and as I will argue, were foundational to the building of colonial cities on Indigenous land.

Urbanising space, gaps in the grid, and Aboriginal surveillance and removal In 1841 a property boom swept through Melbourne as Aboriginal lands were ‘opened’ for pastoralism in the southeastern reaches of the Colony of New South Wales. As the spread of this newly created private property moved outwards into Aboriginal lands, it was in the unallotted spaces, such as river banks, road reserves and swamps near the town where Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples could remain safely. As Denis Byrne writes evocatively, since the cadastral spread halted at the shorelines, the rivers and swamps became unallotted zones or ‘gaps in the grid’ allowing freer movement for Aboriginal people who had boats or canoes.24 Swamp areas on the opposite side of the Yarra River from the main town, referred to as the south bank, were therefore some of the few remaining sanctuaries or gaps between an increasingly allotted network of private property in the town and an uneven but burgeoning cadastre of fenced paddocks in the surrounding pastoral lands. Such spaces along the rivers and creeks were transitional within the process of colonisation, nervous spaces that were not yet property. For even as Aboriginal people lived along its banks, the Aboriginal lands of the Merri Creek area were being auctioned off lot by lot with no mention of their owner’s existence. In 1840 the Port Phillip Gazette announced the public auction of 150 acres of land along the Merri Creek.25 To the ‘capitalist and speculator of land’ it exclaimed ‘very little need be said of the profits of such a speculation . . . [as] the smiling faces and well lined pockets amply testify’. The advertisement appealed to the ‘Settlers, Tradesmen, Yeomanry’, and others of Port Phillip and assured that they would be ‘laying the stepping stone of a fortune for their offspring’.26



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The process of invasion and colonisation swiftly reordered bodies and spaces. New spaces were forming, and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal lives were altered in this transactional contact zone. In 1842 the inhabitants of the town of Melbourne became a corporation, administered by the Melbourne Town Council (to become the Melbourne City Council in 1847).27 The Council sought to regulate and order urbanising settler space, and attempted to fashion this unruly frontier town as a grided new world city, a place of white civility. The surveillance and regulation of Aboriginal peoples was central to such a desired order. Although some Aboriginal men were indentured to short-term labour contracts in this early period, increasingly the Council sought to push Aboriginal peoples from town space. Residents often used outright violence and dogs to deter Aboriginal people from entering the town. As William Adeney wrote in 1843, shortly after his arrival from England, ‘These poor creatures wander through accosting passers by with “give me black money” and various other similar expressions begging bread, etc. . . . We are not much troubled by them as my host keeps a great black dog which is quite furious.’28 Sarah Bunbury’s husband, Hanmer Bunbury, was in no doubt about Aboriginal presence in town, remarking ‘Never trust a native and never allow them near your house.’29 In town, physical attacks on Aborigines by Europeans were commonplace. For example, a young Aborigine named ‘An.note’ complained to the Chief Aboriginal Protector George Augustus Robinson that a ‘white man had struck him and knocked him down with his fist near MacNall’s, the butcher, because he asked for bread’.30 While Robinson was in the street, two Aboriginal men came to him to complain that a ‘white person’ had assaulted them by ‘striking him with a stick and kicking him’. Karngrook and Bulbegunner, two Aboriginal women, were in Little Collins Street, near the butchers, probably in the hope of receiving some meat, when the butcher’s assistant ‘set a large dog on them’. Two white witnesses ‘willingly offered to appear and give evidence against the brutal conduct of the man’, wrote William Thomas, Aboriginal Protector of the Melbourne area. Yet the Police Magistrate ‘refused to grant a Summons, stating that he would have nothing to do with Aboriginal affairs’. Thomas made out a legal summons and served it himself, as the Police Magistrate would not. His calls for constabulary assistance to defend Aboriginal people in the street were regularly ignored.31 Such reprisals for begging, and the treatment meted out to the Aboriginal man, Nunupton, who was bound up and flogged in the street by Dr Farquhar McCrae reveal a particular form of disciplinary violence in the streetscape, which Europeans believed it was their entitlement to administer.32





Shared spaces and amenities in town became sites of contestation. Restrictions were placed on Aboriginal people swimming near the town, the use of the river punt and town pumps, and their dogs. Often such ‘problems’ were left to the Aboriginal Protectors; however, the ‘evils’ of Aborigines in the town were raised intermittently in the Town Council minutes. In 1845 it was moved that the ‘Mayor be requested to address his Honour the Superintendent and the Chief Protector of the Aborigines, on the increasing inconvenience and demoralisation attendant on the presence of the Blacks within the Town’.33 Later in the same month a letter was read to the Council ‘from His Honour the Superintendent in reply to the Mayor’s communication on the evils resulting from the presence of the Aborigines within the Town’.34 The index of the Council minutes noted the ‘immorality’ of Aborigines in the settlement and ‘Bathing within prescribed limits by Aborigines – disallowed’.35 In 1844 the punt operator reported the ‘bad conduct of the Aborigines at the punt’, depositing a long report with the authorities.36 Newspapers complained of the ‘hordes of mangy dogs’ in the train of Aboriginal women, and the ‘inconvenience’ of their habit of washing their dogs at town water pumps. The Port Phillip Gazette reported that the ‘Chief constable complained to the bench that the aboriginal women were constantly in the habit of taking their wretched mangy hounds to the banks of the Yarra’ close to the pumps to the ‘infinite annoyance of the inhabitants’. The Police Magistrate directed that ‘if any of them should be found so offending that they should be taken into custody’.37 The municipal surveillance of dogs was an indirect way of proscribing the presence of Aboriginal women in town. The new Dog Act of 1844 ensured that the ‘hordes’ of diseased dogs, if unregistered, were routinely killed in the streets, with dogs ‘tailed’, hung from trees and beaten to death. ‘Each police constable received 2s. 6d. for every tail brought to the police office.’38 William Thomas wrote in his journal that Aboriginal women in one of the town camps ‘cried for their dogs’, but later the women were given meat by the butchers, unobserved by the constables. Such official actions that targeted the dogs of Aboriginal women may be viewed as violence by proxy, and they had the desired effect. A week later this Aboriginal group left the settlement ‘on account of their dogs being killed’.39 In Melbourne, town incorporation and early efforts at sanitation were used in the surveillance and segregation of Aboriginal peoples. Foot police and the constant violence of settlers were also used to move Aborigines on. Vagrancy laws were also specifically aimed at segregating Europeans from Aborigines. Any Europeans found ‘lodging or wandering in company with any of the black natives’ were to



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be punished with imprisonment and hard labour for three months.40 These concerted official efforts to segregate Europeans and Aborigines were quite different from the various physical and discursive strategies that promoted assimilation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and therefore give greater meaning to them. In the minutes of the Town Council, in settler accounts and in newspapers, Aboriginal peoples were increasingly described as ‘inconvenient’, ‘wanderers’ and ‘nuisances’, impediments to the development of urbanising settler space. Likewise, European travel narratives of the growing city often depicted Aboriginal people as ridiculous and misplaced, implying that Aboriginal presence in cities was anomalous and illegitimate. Indeed, in this new spatial order Aborigines came to signify displacement itself for many Europeans. As William Adeney noted in his diary after he had seen an Aboriginal man and woman in a Melbourne street, ‘Met two of the poor Aborigines looking almost like the inhabitants of another world.’41

The intimate urban: native camps, ‘mixed-race’ relations and ‘unwholesome’ places There were at least six camps around the Melbourne precinct in the early to mid-1840s. Despite official attempts to remove them, these small camps shifted around on the outskirts of the growing town grid until the early 1850s. In 1845, Protector William Thomas visited six encampments around the town. There were 72 ‘Yarras’ at the east camp; the south camp held ‘130 Barrabools and Western Port’; the north camp held ‘36 Barrabools’; and another camp north of the grid held ‘176 Mount Macedon and Bonnyongs’. Another to the east held ‘138 Mogoollumbeek and Devils River Goulburns’; and yet another to the east, ‘62 Goulburns’.42 Further out, Aborigines continued to camp along the Merri Creek, at St Kilda along the bay foreshore, and northwest of the town beyond Sydney Road at Keilor.43 Despite increasing attempts at segregation in the streetscape, the six or so Aboriginal camps at the edges of Melbourne were visited constantly by prying visitors throughout the 1840s. Europeans ventured across the Yarra River on the punt or by boat to the south bank, to view the main camp near the mission tents for amusement, or for far more pernicious reasons. Sailors often went to the camp at night, anticipating drunken festivities, and other men appeared regularly at night or day seeking sexual relations with Aboriginal women and girls. Aboriginal camps were far more than mere spectacle; for Europeans they were liminal spaces of powerful allure.





In the midst of European town creation and attempts to regulate urban space and impose colonial order, these other spaces – native camps or fringe camps – were forming. The Aboriginal camp on the south side of the Yarra River was an unpoliced site, outside of the emerging city grid, and perceived by Europeans as a place of entertainment, drunkenness, gunfire, violence and of interracial sex. Aboriginal or native camps at the perimeters of the town were counter-sites to city space, which was increasingly regulated by police and municipal orders. For some new arrivals from Britain, strolling through the Aboriginal encampment was akin to a titillating tour of the dark slums of London where the inquisitive observer could be thrilled and appalled by the daily lives of the lower orders. Despite the attempts of authorities, and vagrancy laws, it was impossible to stop contact between newcomers and the Aboriginal camps.44 As Protector Thomas despairingly wrote in his journal in 1844, on the main camp across the Yarra River, ‘So many whites in the camp today it was like a regular promenade.’45 The widespread sexual abuse of Australian Aboriginal women on the wider colonial pastoral frontier has been explored, and the association between lands to be colonised and Aboriginal women’s bodies has long been established.46 As I have argued, the settler colonial frontier was not an outward-moving linear abstraction, but local and internal, a sexual and psychic transactional space, frequently in fringe or town camps at the edge of towns and cities, but nevertheless equally violent. Yet, in Australia’s mid-nineteenth-century urban landscape, such urban frontiers were also hidden spaces, often left unmentioned in official municipal archives and settler accounts, or politely glossed over. It is only in records pertaining directly to Aboriginal peoples such as mission archives that such relations are at times revealed. In all the Australian colonies, as Larissa Behrendt has noted, prevailing notions deemed Aboriginal women ‘easy sexual sport’, and Aboriginal women were frequently portrayed as ‘cheap or low class prostitutes’.47 In Melbourne, an extreme imbalance between white men and few white women, and an associated perception of a lack of good society regulated by the presence of bourgeois white womanhood was apparent. There was a prevailing perception of shame in sleeping with a black woman, along with the notion that ‘lying with a black woman would eventually lead to a whiteman’s impotence with white women’, that is, the perceived emasculation of white men.48 For some white men, however, the colonies provided new and heady freedoms. On the Queensland frontier, as Nikki Henningham has noted, young men wrote home to Britain reporting that they were ‘picking up colonial experience’, often a euphemism for the sexual



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exploitation of Aboriginal women.49 Marilyn Lake in her consideration of these ‘marauding white men’ has observed that the frontier came to be understood as the ‘paradigmatic experience’ in the later shaping of the Australian male character. Sarah Bunbury may have been confined to her home space near town, but white men moved readily between the zones of town space, native camps and pastoral frontier. On these pastoral borderlands, freed of moral constraints, squatters and stockmen told Chief Protector Robinson that ‘we are on the border and can do as we like’.50 It is also clear that such brutal liberties could take place in townships, settlements and associated fringe camps. Contact zones are typically conceived as spatial sites, but in the colonial past women’s raced and classed bodies were also vital contact zones.51 It is productive to consider the conflation of bodies, spaces and sex in colonial schema, for settler colonialism not only concerns the collapse of space, the taking of land, but also concerns the creation of new spaces and identities. Such thinking is in line with the propositions of feminist geographers’ work on bodies, gender and space. As Judith Butler has rightly observed, bodies and spaces are mutually imbricated.52 Echoing Butler, Ceridwen Spark writes on bodies and spaces and their mutual relations, where ‘the body of the “other”’ has been essentialised, marginalised and constituted through a ‘set of violations’ through colonialism.53 Aboriginal people were increasingly viewed as anomalous in urbanising precincts, their bodies coming to signify displacement, ‘flashpoints’ in the growing logic of a new colonial modernity or order. They were seen to embody the tensions and ambiguities of the frontier itself.54 Such colonial discourses concerning the presence of Aboriginal people could spontaneously provoke a typical, and rehearsed, frontier violence from Europeans, and when it came to Indigenous women, that violence was often sexualised. Aboriginal Protector William Thomas frequently recorded in his journals the instances of white men venturing into the main Aboriginal camp on the south bank of the Yarra River in search of the contact zone: ‘found a gentleman in an Aboriginal woman’s tent’, he wrote.55 On a night visit to the camp Chief Protector George Robinson recorded, ‘[I] gave two frocks to two little girls. On going away one of the girls said “good night my dear” [I then] . . . turned a drunken man away from them.’56 Thomas related the events of another evening in his journal: Just as I was getting to bed I was interrupted by another apparent gentleman, who came boldly up to one miam [bark hut] saying, ‘I want [an Aboriginal woman], here’s white money.’ I despatched him,




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Thomas’ diary entry reveals the prevailing idea that in and around colonial Melbourne Aboriginal women were synonymous with prostitution. A lack of agency has been attributed to Aboriginal women in much archival material, and on the frontier their ‘assent to sexual relations [was] perpetually assumed’.58 As the night visitor to the camp perversely opined to suit his own ends, prostitution was the ‘right’ of Aboriginal and European woman alike, only highlighting the naturalisation of prostitution and its inherent violence against both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women. Further, many authors deemed the widespread occurrence of venereal disease in Aboriginal peoples on the frontier and around towns to be evidence of the wantonness of Aboriginal sexuality. Aboriginal Protectors, who were clearly aware of the conduct of European men, nevertheless described Aboriginal women as ‘contributing to their plight because they appeared to have within their own cultural system sexual practices which deviated from those of British Victorian practices which the protectors upheld as proper behaviour’.59 Clearly, however, in the native camps around Melbourne not all women were willing to accommodate such intrusions. Another night at the south bank camp, as William Thomas was about to go to bed, he heard an Aboriginal woman cry out ‘“oh oh, hurt no hurt” [and] . . . I heard a white man say “Be quiet, white money”’.60 He investigated and found that it was the same white man, who several days earlier had pleaded that his night stay in the camp was innocent, that he had come over to the camp to see the corroboree and missed the last punt back.61 Ann Stoler has observed that sexuality was a ‘dense transfer point of power’ in colonial relations.62 For Aboriginal women, this resulted in multiple violations. Sexual violence and explosive physical attacks on Aboriginal women by white men in the camp were frequent occurrences. As William Thomas recorded, ‘In the afternoon a drunken fellow came into the encampment and commenced in the most brutal manner insulting the [women]. He knocked one [woman] down with an infant in her arms. We took him and I clapped him in the watch house, where he had to remain till Monday.’ Later Thomas went to the police office and identified the drunken man who had assaulted the women. ‘As the assault was seen only by blacks . . . he was acquitted of assault and fined five shillings for being drunk. The blacks got 2s. 6d. of it, which pleased



who said that a black [woman] had a right to be a whore as well as a white one, and I am sorry to say that the blacks are willing to accommodate him. What can be done with these people under such circumstances and what power have I? None.57

them very much.’63 As a white witness did not see this crime, and as Aboriginal people could not give testimony, the man was fined only for being drunk. The violent assault was not punished, only underscoring the official sanction and legitimation of racialised and gendered violence in the camps, and also in town. Although William Thomas observed the tenderness that Aboriginal wives had for their husbands and children, Aboriginal women were also victims of violence by Aboriginal men. As Thomas reported, ‘a black man had beaten his wife and her life was despaired of’.64 Aboriginal men also traded their wives for sexual favours to white men. In 1841 Thomas wrote, ‘found that Jack Weatherly was lending his [wife] to the Splitters &c who are scatter’d about & inviting them to Encampment at night’.65 Aboriginal women may also have brokered such relations with white men on their own terms when they could. Often starving, as food sources became scarce, and in search of ‘white money’ women did trade sex for food, and cohabited with white men around the town. Moving between worlds, Aboriginal women had some political power, albeit within the confines of colonial asymmetries. Thomas wrote of a young white man living with two Aboriginal women who ‘often entic’d [other] young [women] to his home’. Aboriginal men in the camp complained to Thomas of their wives in white men’s beds. Thomas gave a detailed account of a search for the Aboriginal man Ninggollobin’s (‘Captain Turnbull’s’) wife in the settlement. The Police Magistrate Lonsdale again refused Thomas any police aid on the Aborigines’ behalf. 66 Evidence of such relations presents a marked disjuncture or dislocation between the imagined and fictive ideas of racial containment, purity and white settler space promoted by town boosters and bourgeois metropolitans. Instead, early towns themselves were borderlands, and mixed-race relations in settler colonies would produce new colonial subjects as well as new, transitional spaces. Thomas wrote of a white man who returned his mixed-race child to the camp in 1844, noting that a ‘white Settler allowed his illegitimate child to live with her mother and the Aborigines’.67 Yet, such incidents were rarely mentioned in the official records of the colonial urban. On such issues William Westgarth opined in 1846: There are no instances, the Newcastle bench states, of the union of whites with the female Aborigines, but the labouring classes are in the constant practice of cohabiting with these females, and there appears to be no repugnance on either side.68





In genteel company, however, such relations were barely spoken of, and the Town Council and other official city archives are often silent, or speak only in euphemism of certain spaces in ‘unwholesome’ states. European diseases, particularly syphilis, took a great toll on the Aboriginal population. Walking around the town as early as August 1839, Chief Aboriginal Protector Robinson saw an Aboriginal family and summoned the doctor. As he put it he had seen a ‘man, his wife and a little boy. The man was extremely ill and had the venereal.’ The wife and son were also ill with other diseases.69 In the native camps around the town, Aboriginal peoples were also in a state of distress. The camp on the south side of the Yarra River was beset with illness. Robinson recorded that five Aborigines had died from dysentery, and ‘one little girl of tender years, supposed eight years, was grievously afflicted with venereal’.70 After visiting the camp the next day Robinson wrote in his journal of ‘each abode of misery and famine’, comparing the state of dispossessed Aboriginal people with Europeans benefiting from the escalating prices of town and pastoral lands: Land has sold in Melbourne for £1200 per acre . . . yet the original occupiers of the soil are perishing with disease, want and the extreme of wretchedness. This is a disgrace to humanity. How much more reprehensible for a British government and for a Christian people to depict the languishing look, the outstretched arm of the patient to examine the pulse.71 With their aim to promote unqualified optimism town officials rarely mentioned the disease and starvation of the expropriated Aboriginal population and their constant segregation and surveillance in the streetscape. Further, the anxieties of town promoters were only heightened by the emergence of native camps, other ‘unwholesome’ places in the townscape, and mixed-race relations. The camps and the town precinct were, however, relational and interdependent sites. The camps were lures for whites, just as the white town was a lure for Aboriginal people. New forms of conceiving social space inspired by ideas of the ‘contact zone’, ‘heterotopia’ or ‘other’ spaces, and of hybridised space, are productive ways of understanding the lived, local socio-spatial relations of the colonial city. Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’, or ‘other space’, has been described as a way forward in apprehending ‘contested heterogeneous social space’.72 As Foucault noted, such sites have the ‘curious property of being in relation to all the other sites in such a way as to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen



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to designate, mirror or reflect’.73 They are not necessarily sites of resistance. Here, I suggest that Aboriginal camps were powerful ‘heterotopia’ or ‘other spaces’ within the nineteenth-century array of new sites created by the processes of settler colonialism. Such camps were countersites, which transgressed and undermined the imaginary coherence of the British settler colonial city in the antipodes, promoted by town officials as spaces of civility, progress, control and racial purity. The main Aboriginal camp on the south bank of Melbourne was also next to a large swamp, a place designated in the European imagination as representing all things bad. Swamps have been typically viewed as liminal, dystopian spaces, not picturesque, or useful, but wasteland. Exploring the iconography and phenomenology of wetlands and swamps, Rodney Giblett has noted their naming as ‘black water’, with ‘all its incipient racist associations’, and the persistent draining of wetlands by Europeans.74 Such ‘black waters’ have been seen as horrific places, associated with death and disease. Swamps cannot be easily transgressed, measured or allotted. They were gaps in the grid and could not be easily converted into propertied, commodified space. Yet, swamps were a place of plenitude for Aboriginal people, a great source of food. No matter how they were configured in the European imagination, the camps near these swamps were the homes of Aboriginal people, in-between spaces created through the process of colonisation, however temporary or violent. Sitting unsettlingly at the edges of the Melbourne town grid, and across the river, the Aboriginal camp for Europeans was depicted as the urban demi-monde. Such places were viewed as sites of licentiousness, entertainment and illicit desire, but they were also relational counter-sites, implicitly part of and required by the settler colonial project. Settler colonialism may be a project of extraterritorialism, that is, the expropriation of Aboriginal peoples from their lands, as traditionally characterised by the pastoral frontier, but it has also been a rapacious project of ‘gendered territorialism’.75 Both processes occurred simultaneously, revealing the twin operations of the settler colonial project: the removal of Indigenous peoples and their replacement through the bodies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women. As Adele Perry has suggested, drawing attention to the mutuality of immigration and colonisation processes, dispossession and resettlement were deeply intertwined, and ‘gender is where the abiding bonds between dispossession and colonisation become most clear’.76 As new settlers moved into town space and its surrounds, such processes were writ large in the colonial city and its associated native camps.





Accordingly, the south bank of the Yarra River near the swamp was not only reserved for Aboriginal people. It was also designated as place for the lower orders, and the site of ‘tent city’, where excess loads of immigrants were relegated. In October 1839 Chief Protector Robinson wrote of the latest 250 immigrants, ‘all Scotch’, who had arrived on the ship David Clark. They camped in fifty tents, and the ‘natives are camped next to them’.77 That same night Robinson noted that Aboriginal people held a ‘grand corobery [sic]’, frequented by local settlers and a large party of the Scottish immigrants, ‘men and women’ related Robinson, and ‘one Scotch man played the bagpipes’.78 Although Governor Charles La Trobe had written specifically to the Chief Protector with instructions to ‘keep natives from the immigrants’, at night large parties of newly arrived immigrants would congregate near the camp to watch Aboriginal corroborees, ceremonies which Aboriginal people allowed visitors to view.79 The immigrants’ camp on the south bank of the river was a transient space, a counter-site to permanent allotments of the propertied town space for dislocated Europeans. Shared and crosscultural moments notwithstanding, Aboriginal people had very little in common with these boatloads of newcomers, except displacement. The south bank then functioned as a site of both dispossession and resettlement. In these ways, the Aboriginal town camp at the south bank was not a ‘natural’ entity, but was constituted in relation to other spaces of colonisation. In this sense, native camps cannot be read simplistically as sites of resistance, or as inherently underworld. Such fringe camps could not have existed outside the relations of settler colonialism. Instead, they were new, hybridised and uneasy spaces shaped as much by Indigenous peoples as by newcomers. The spectacle of the native camp resonated through colonial culture in multiple ways. Sketches and pamphlets describing Aboriginal people, sometimes in harsh terms, were sold to new arrivals, and often circulated back to the metropole or were included in colonists’ accounts of their journey to ‘Australia Felix’. As late as 1849, several native camps shifted constantly around the edge of the Melbourne city grid, and in the same year Ernst Bernhardt Heyne wrote home to Dresden from Melbourne: I can relate something about the Aborigines of the District, because I have succeeded not only in getting some brochures about them, but also because there was a large camp of them quite close to our park. I visited them nearly every night. Probably there is scarcely a more miserable folk living on the earth than these.80



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By the mid-1840s the Melbourne Town Council had begun to pass bylaws ‘to suppress and prevent certain nuisances which now may or may hereafter exist by reasons of certain places within the town which are or may become in an unwholesome state’.81 Were these ‘certain nuisances’, and ‘certain places’ of an ‘unwholesome’ nature the Aboriginal camps? In 1846 ‘canvas town and tent nuisances’ on the south bank and the ‘removal of canvas town’ were listed as items for discussion in the Council minutes.82 Later, in line with Victorian fears of disease borne by breezes and noxious ‘miasma’, and referring to the area between the beach and town, the swampy area where the main Aboriginal camp was located, the councillors ‘Resolved . . . to write to his Excellency the Governor suggesting the necessity of clearing the land of trees between the City of Melbourne and the Beach so that the obstructions of the free access of pure sea air may be removed.’83 After the dismantling of the Aboriginal Protectorate in Port Phillip in 1849 William Thomas was the only Aboriginal Protector to be retained, and was given the title ‘Guardian of the Aborigines’. While his statement of duties was detailed, in practice one of his main roles was to ride the town boundary to prevent Aboriginal people from coming into Melbourne through the provision of free rations outside its boundaries at the behest of Governor La Trobe.84 The discovery of gold in 1851 spurred many tens of thousands of immigrants to travel to southeastern Australia, and within a few years they swelled Melbourne’s population to vast proportions, only visiting further devastation upon Aboriginal peoples in the region.85 By 1852 remaining Aboriginal people in the area had increased their demands for land of their own, and this led to the granting of two reserves for Aborigines 25 kilometres away from Melbourne.86 By the 1860s in Victoria, many southeastern Aboriginal peoples had been placed in remote mission stations, and relatively few were permitted into Melbourne. By the late 1860s and 1870s many Aboriginal people from the Coranderrk Aboriginal station near Healesville were afraid to come into the city of Melbourne. As Richard Broome notes, by 1863, only ‘7 reserves . . . and 23 handkerchief-sized camping places and ration depots were in place, creating the most comprehensive reserve system in nineteenth century Australia’.87

Interrelated frontiers It is instructive to view frontier Melbourne and its town camps in the 1840s against the backdrop of extreme frontier violence and Aboriginal





resistance on the pastoral frontier. Whilst town promoters at this time were invoking a vision of ‘stately buildings rearing to the skies’, Aboriginal people of the Port Phillip region and groups beyond were engaged in a sustained and at times effective guerrilla warfare throughout southeastern Australia until the mid-1840s.88 European reprisals were often swift and vicious. In 1839, after a visit to outlying stations, Charles Seivright, Protector of the Western district, related the pervasiveness of settler violence to William Thomas: the state of Society in the interior towards the poor Aborigines is awful, out of sixteen stations he visited he found but one (Mr. Airy) humanely disposed to the Aborigines, 2 out of 16 he visited had skulls of Aborigines placed over the door of their huts.89 Such symbols of death were no doubt mounted to induce terror and to send signals of the assuredness of reprisal to Aboriginal peoples. An estimate in 1844 of all officially recorded conflicts in the Port Phillip area revealed that ‘since 1836, 40 whites and 113 Aborigines had been killed’.90 Obscuring the high rate of Aboriginal deaths and their under-reportage was commonplace, however. As one Police Magistrate remarked in 1839, ‘A murder committed by the black is paraded in the papers, and everybody is shocked; but there have been hundreds of cold-blooded murders perpetrated by the whites on the outskirts of the Colony, which we have never heard of.’91 Back in Melbourne, rumours of frontier violence on pastoral lands and concerns regarding the ‘Aboriginal problem’ circulated constantly. William Adeney, a man humanitarian in sentiment, wrote of this settler violence, noting ‘our half savagised country men . . . are often guilty of dreadful wrongs’. Stories of perverse and extreme acts of brutality on the pastoral frontier were related freely between settled and pastoral zones, such as when Adeney related an incident in his diary of an Aboriginal women’s skull being used as a shaving box.92 These acts occurred simultaneously to the everyday brutality of other precincts or frontier zones. Partitions between the urbanising and the pastoral frontiers in many historical accounts are artificial, and often overstated. Information, people and entrenched discourses of violence circulated between the two. As demonstrated, the urban frontier was equally violent for Aboriginal people although this violence was of a different tenor. Settler narratives of gender as well as race were also played out powerfully in pastoral and outer frontier zones. While European men went to the native camps around Melbourne seeking out Aboriginal



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women, a cultural hysteria amongst the European population grew over the story of the captive and ravished ‘White woman of Gippsland’, a controversy that raged throughout the 1840s in Melbourne’s newspapers. This woman, supposed to be a shipwreck survivor, was rumoured to have been abducted and held captive by Kurnai people, an Aboriginal group in the remote reaches of Gippsland, beyond the pastoral frontier, to the far southeast of Melbourne.93 This story of the white woman taken beyond the reach of civilisation functioned as a compelling narrative in the settler imagination. The white woman was a ‘potent symbol’ representing the fears ‘underlying the experiences of travel to and colonisation of alien lands . . . enslavement . . . miscegenation, and severance from and loss of Christian European culture’ writes Kate Darian-Smith.94 Significantly, orthodox colonial hierarchies of race and gender were dangerously inverted by the white woman story. As Darian-Smith observes, the order of civilisation was ‘displaced when a Christian white female was placed in sexual servitude to a heathen black male’. The spectre of the captured white woman lost beyond the pastoral frontier thus represented a striking discursive counterpoint to the figure of Christian colonial womanhood, embodied by women such as Sarah Bunbury, safely confined in the town setting, her honour protected and preserved out of the reaches of Aboriginal men, and privy only to what her husband would have her see and experience. The captive woman’s whiteness, Christianity, comportment and chastity were markers of settler civilisation. And, just as Aboriginal people were deemed anomalous to or incompatible with town spaces of settler progress, the ‘white woman’ was a displaced creature, inimical and anomalous to the outer frontier and the supposed brutalities of the ‘Blacks’. Two expeditions, one unofficial and one official, were sent to find the white woman of Gippsland. In town white women were petitioned to contribute money to assist in her rescue.95 While in the camps around Melbourne’s fringe some white men abused Aboriginal women with savage brutality, it was imagined that the lost white woman, out of her sphere, was subject to the most savage Aboriginal depredations and habits. The potent rescue narrative of searching for the white woman, and thus redeeming settler civilisation, was, however, used to mobilise a land grab. The search for her became a call to arms against the Kurnai.96 Much Aboriginal country was surveyed and ‘opened’ and many Kurnai people were killed in service of the idea of the forsaken white woman.97 In these various frontier zones race, gender and space came together in shifting and indexical ways, and sexuality was indeed a dense transfer point of power.




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As with the pastoral frontier, colonial Melbourne between the late 1830s and the early 1850s, with its transient town camps was an urbanising frontier. It was a vital contact zone, a place of gendered and racialised violence and should be viewed as a continuum, part of an array of violent spaces of settler colonialism. Fictive metropolitan ideas of a contiguous imperial urban space and of racial purity were constantly subverted by the lived lives and mixed relations of Aboriginal people and newcomers in this urbanising colonial landscape. Despite concerted official efforts to segregate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in and around Melbourne, contact with and abuse of Aboriginal women was an implicit contour of colonial relations, where Aboriginal women’s bodies were also configured as contact zones. Operating within the bounds of middle-class, female gentility, white women such as Sara Bunbury and Georgiana McCrae did not see, or chose not to record or acknowledge, such relations. The presence and movements of Aboriginal women in and around the town, the political strategies they employed to survive, and the relations they had with white men were also constitutive of these new social spaces. It is productive at this point to pause and reflect on the mutual violation of bodies and spaces described earlier, and the embeddedness of colonial violence inherent in and across the array of new spaces created by settler colonialism and its particular manifestation in gendered ways. As Tracey Banivanua Mar has pointed out in her exposure of the violent structures of colonialism and its manifestation in multiple and fluid modalities through the Pacific Islander sugar trade in colonial Queensland’s frontier and settled districts, there was a ‘logic of force’ where ‘violence was considered a legitimate form of discipline, particularly for savages, and to discipline was to civilise. Violence, in other words, was a civilizing force.’98 Banivanua Mar points to the ‘structural assumption of violence in the assertion of the civilising influences of colonial discipline and order’.99 Such a statement speaks saliently to the notion of developing urban spaces as ordered and civilised, where in town Aboriginal people were disciplined through police, municipal and settler violence that was authorised or tacitly condoned and deemed to be civilising. In the new precincts fashioned through settler colonialism, an array of spaces may be observed, both imagined and constructed in various ways, but nevertheless interrelated. Developing city space was increasingly constructed as a civil, urbanising cognate space of empire, where civil codes, sanitation, policing, municipal by-laws and notions of racial homogeneity, features of colonising modernity, were established. Within such



Conclusion

urbanising environments, an apparently rational, civilising and authorised disciplinary violence towards Indigenous peoples was enacted. In associated native camps, where civility may have been partly suspended, other kinds of violence, other modalities, were thus enabled. Viewed by Europeans as alternative, illicit spaces, and places of mixed-race relations and degradation, town camps were entirely constructed by the relations of colonialism itself, and they were also the necessary homes of expropriated Aboriginal peoples. Here racialised violence was gendered, and Aboriginal women were its target. Meanwhile, the pastoral frontier, operating simultaneously, was deemed outside the rule of law, an uncivil borderland. This was a place where often extreme forms of terror and violence operated towards Aboriginal peoples, an apparently irrational violence seemingly carried out in an unauthorised manner but nevertheless tacitly condoned. It was also a fearful, imaginative space where Europeans believed a white woman would be forsaken. In such a schema, constructed ideas of unruly pastoral frontier and civil city space collapse; the city was not a civilised centre to an otherwise hostile periphery. Instead, these sites, the gridded city spaces, the liminal fringe and native camps, and the pastoral frontier, with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples moving between them, were relational and facilitated each other’s operations in the carrying though and transformation of aggression. Here we see settler colonialism’s various modalities operating throughout multiple, interrelated frontiers, underlying which was a basic structural assumption of settler violence. Within all such modalities gendered violence was not merely a symptom, it was a systemic, motivating force. Notes 1. Sally Bunbury to R. C. Sconce, 26 April 1841, Letter 7, PA 96/126, State Library of Victoria (henceforth SLV). 2. See Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: an Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900 (Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, 1990), p. 20; Richard Broome, ‘Introduction’, Aboriginal Victorians: a History Since 1800 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005). 3. Ian D. Clark (ed.), The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, vol. 1, 1 January 1839 – 30 September 1840. Wednesday, 27 March 1839 (Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998), p. 22. 4. George A. Robinson, 20 November 1839, Public Records Office Victoria (henceforth PROV), 4467. 5. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, May 1845, 566, VPRS 8910/ P0001 and Melbourne City Council Indexes, 1845, vol. I, VPRS 8947/P0001. 6. For an extended analysis of the reasons for such scholarly neglect, which tend to be reflective of imperial hegemonies themselves, see Penelope Edmonds,




7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). Here I use the term ‘native title’ to mean a common law attempt to encapsulate Indigenous title. See Marcia Langton, ‘Urbanising Aborigines: the Social Scientists’ Great Deception’, Social Alternatives 2 (1981): 16–22; Tim Rowse, ‘Transforming the Notion of the Urban Aborigine’, Urban Policy and Research 18, 2 (June 2000): 171–90; Kay Anderson and Jane Jacobs, ‘Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography’, Australian Geographical Studies 35, 1 (March 1997): 12–22; Kay Anderson, ‘Sites of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race Polarity’, in Cities of Difference, ed. Ruth Fincher and Jane Jacobs (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 201–5; John Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City: Urban Aboriginality, Ambivalence and Modernity’, Boundary 221 (1994): 65–83. Beverley Nance, ‘The Level of Violence: Europeans and Aborigines in Port Phillip’, Australian Historical Studies 19 (October 1981): 532–49, p. 544. Jan Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1990); quoted in Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1996), p. 109. The complexities and intimacies of the settler colonial frontier across several continents have been considered in the literature, for examples see: Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (2nd edn) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: the Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, 3 (2001); Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, Studies in Imperialism Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6, quoted in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). See, for example, Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers, ‘Introduction’. On Newton see Miles Lewis, ‘The First Suburb: the Melbourne Fringe’, in Fitzroy: Melbourne’s First Suburb, Cutten History Committee of the Fitzroy History Society (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1991), pp. 6–31. Hanmer Bunbury to his father Henry Bunbury, Letter 12, 18 December 1841, PA 96/126, SLV. Patricia Grimshaw and Julie Evans, ‘Colonial Women on Intercultural Frontiers: Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock, and Katie Langloh Parker’, Australian Historical Studies 106 (1996): 79–95. Brenda Niall, Georgiana (Carlton: Melbourne University at the Meigunyah Press, 1994), pp. 135, 155.



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18. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 26 September 1839, p. 85. 19. Sara Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: a Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 692. 20. Ibid., p. 698. 21. Penelope Andrews, ‘Violence Against Aboriginal Women in Australia: Possibilities for Redress within the International Human Rights Framework’, Albany Law Review 60 (1997): 917–41. 22. See Adele Perry, ‘The Autocracy of Love and the Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy, Power and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century Metlakahtlah’, Gender and History 16, 2 (August 2004): 261–8, p. 261. 23. Ann Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties’, p. 830. 24. Denis Byrne, Chapter 4, this volume. 25. Port Phillip Gazette, 12 February 1840. 26. Ibid. 27. The Town Councils of Melbourne and Sydney were made by order of an Act of the Legislative Council of New South Wales in 1842. 28. William Adeney, Diary, La Trobe manuscript collection, SLV, MS 8520A, 296–7, 27 January 1843. 29. Hanmer Bunbury to his father Henry Bunbury, Letter 8, 27 April 1841, PA 96/126, SLV. 30. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 19 May 1839, p. 45. 31. William Thomas, Journal, New South Wales State Library (henceforth NSWSL), MS MLMSS214, microfilm CY2604, 17 and 19 October 1839 (frames 36, 37). 32. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 26 September 1839, p. 85. 33. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, Meeting, 9 May 1845, 560, VPRS 8910/P0001. 34. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, Meeting, 30 May 1845, 566, VPRS 8910/P0001. 35. Melbourne City Council Indexes, vol. I, VPRS 8947/P0001. 36. Thomas, Journal, 31 October 1844. 37. Port Phillip Gazette, 15 February 1843. 38. Ibid., 28 October 1843. VPRS 3622, unit 1, G. A. Robinson, 28 November 1844. See also Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing/Museum Victoria, 1998), pp. 68, 69. 39. Thomas, Journal, 16–21 May, 21–22 May 1845. 40. Aboriginal peoples were repeatedly described as vagrant, but the charge of vagrancy could not in fact be applied to them. Instead, it was applied to Europeans. The Act for the Prevention of Vagrancy (1835) specifically targeted non-Indigenous people. It stated that ‘every person not being a black native or the child of any black native found lodging or wandering in company with any of the black natives of this Colony shall . . . give a good account to the satisfaction of such Justice that he or she hath a lawful fixed place of residence in the Colony and lawful means of support and that such lodging or wandering hath been for some temporary and lawful occasion only and hath not continued beyond such occasion . . . shall be deemed an idle and disorderly person’. Such persons were to be incarcerated in ‘His Majesty’s nearest gaol or house of correction there to be kept to hard labour for any time not exceeding three calendar months’. No. VI ‘An Act for the




41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces Prevention of Vagrancy and for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds and Incorrigible Rogues in the Colony of New South Wales, 25th August, 1835’, The Public General Statues of New South Wales from 5th GEO.IV to 8th WILL.IV inclusive (1824–37). William Adeney, Diary, SLV, Friday 27 January 1843. Thomas, Journal, 1–9 May 1845. Ibid., January 1849. The Vagrancy Act 1835 targeted non-Indigenous people as a means to curtail the mixing of Europeans with Aboriginal people. No. VI, ‘An Act for the Prevention of Vagrancy’. Thomas, Journal, 8 December 1844. For example, Larissa Behrendt traced the extreme, sexualised violence against Aboriginal women in colonial Australia and discussed such patriarchal operations as antecedents to contemporary violence visited upon Aboriginal women. Larissa Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society: Aboriginal Women as Sexual and Legal “Other”’, Australian Feminist Studies 15, 33 (2000): 353–67; Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, ‘Inducements to the Strong to be Cruel to the Weak: Authoritative White Colonial Male Voices and the Construction of Gender in Koori Society’, in Australian Women Contemporary Feminist Thought, ed. Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994); Nikki Henningham, ‘Picking Up Colonial Experience: White Men, Sexuality and Marriage in North Queensland, 1890– 1910’, in Raiding Clio’s Closet: Postgraduate Presentations in History, ed. Martin Crotty and Doug Scobie (Melbourne: Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1997), pp. 89–104; Marilyn Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man’, in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 123–36. Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society’, pp. 354, 364. Ibid., p. 356. Henningham, ‘Picking Up Colonial Experience’, p. 92. Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 52. Also cited in Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism’, p. 124. Pickles and Rutherdale (eds), Contact Zones, p. 1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. ix, 33. Ceridwen Spark, ‘Home on “The Block”: Rethinking Aboriginal Emplacement’, New Talents 21C, Journal of Australian Studies, API Network, St. Lucia Queensland, (1999): 56–63, p. 58. Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City’, p. 67. Thomas, Journal, 6 November 1839 (frame 115). Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 May 1839, p. 44. Thomas, Journal, 13 November 1839, cited in Historical Records of Virginia (HRV), vol. 2B, 560. Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society’, p. 355. Grimshaw and May, ‘Inducements to the Strong’, p. 100. Thomas, Journal, cited in HRV, vol. 2B, 559. Ibid. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, p. xii. Thomas, Journal, 16 November 1839, cited in HRV, vol. 2B, 562.



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64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

Thomas, Journal, 14 May 1839 (frame 84). Ibid., March 1841 (frame 24). Ibid., 26 August 1840 (frame 72) and 15–17 November 1839. Ibid., 9–11 July 1844 (frame 205). William Westgarth, A Report on the Condition, Capabilities, and Prospects of the Australian Aborigines (Melbourne: Printed by William Clarke, 1846), p. 12 (emphasis mine). Journals of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 1, 5 May 1839, p. 73. Ibid., 25 December and 4 May 1839, p. 39. Ibid, 5 May 1839, p. 40. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, cited in B. Genocchio, ‘Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: the Question of “Other Spaces”’, in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 36. Ibid., p. 24. Rodney James Giblett, ‘Where Land and Water Meet’, Post Modern Theory: Postmodern Wetlands Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 3, 4. ‘Gendered territorialism’ is a phrase used by Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis 36 (October 1994): 93–152, p. 95. Perry, On the Edge of Empire, p. 19. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, vol.1, 29 October 1839, p. 97. Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. Ernst Bernhardt Heyne, letter from Melbourne, 8 March 1849, in Hamburg to Hobson’s Bay: German Emigration to Port Phillip Australia Felix, 1848–51, ed. Thomas Darragh and Robert N. Wuchatsch (Melbourne: Wendish Heritage Society, 1999), p. 155. Minutes of the Melbourne Town Council, 17 December 1846, 754 (years 1845–9) (emphasis mine). Ibid., item 2246–82, 76, vol. 1. Ibid., 967, 968. Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), p. 138. During this first gold rush year, 1851, Melbourne’s population was estimated to be between 23,000 and 29,000, and by 1861 it had grown to between 125,000 and 140,000. See Peter McDonald on ‘Demography’ in Encyclopaedia of Melbourne (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The reserves were at Warrandyte and the Wurundjeri were given 782 hectares on both sides of the Yarra. The Boonwurrung selected 340 acres on Mordialloc Creek. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 107. Ibid., pp. 126, 144, 145. Port Phillip Herald, 7 January 1840. Such guerrilla warfare reached a peak in the Western Districts in the 1840s. Throughout southeastern Australia, from the western district to Gippsland in the east, Aboriginal groups made surprise attacks on shepherds’ huts and squatters’ homes, sometimes burning them and taking goods. They often murdered hut keepers, especially those who were known to have abused Aboriginal women. They disrupted stock




89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

98. 99.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces routes, and drove flocks of sheep off and in some cases carolled them in the same way that whites did, using them for food. Often they simply broke their legs. It was a clear message to the invaders who were seeking to take Indigenous land. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, pp. 64, 63. Thomas, Journal, April 1839, MLMSS214/1 (frames 44–46, 14). Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Legislative Council New South Wales, 1833, 1844, 1844, vol.1, 718–19. Report of the Committee on Police and Gaols, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, 1839, vol. II, 75 in W. R. H. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974), p. 24. William Adeney, Diary, Melbourne, 3 and 4 January 1843, pp. 307, 309. Sydney Herald, 28 December 1840. See also Julie Carr, The Captive White Woman of Gippsland (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 4. The territories of the Kurnai/Gurnai people encompass much of central and western Gippsland in southeastern Australia. Kate Darian-Smith, ‘Capturing the White Woman of Gippsland: a Frontier Myth’, in Captive Lives: Australian Captivity Narratives, Working Papers in Australian Studies, Nos 85, 86, 87, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Rosyln Poignant and Kay Schaffer, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1993), p. 16. Ibid., pp. 14–34. Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Frontier: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 48. Captain William Dana’s official search party was accused of massacres of Kurnai peoples after De Villiers and Warman, leaders of the unofficial party, found ‘a great many skulls and bones’ at the Gippsland Lakes. See Kate Darian-Smith, ‘“Rescuing” Barbara Thompson and Other White Women: Captivity Narratives on Australian Frontiers’, in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 106. Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 122. Ibid., pp. 122, 136.



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Race, Greed and Something More: the Erasure of Urban Indigenous Space in Early Twentieth-Century British Columbia Jean Barman British Columbia was one of the last areas of North America to be caught up in the land grab we know as settler colonialism.1 The Canadian province’s location on the northwest edge of the continent kept it isolated until the late 1700s. Another two-thirds of a century passed before newcomers began marking out land as their own.2 Despite a virtual absence of treaties with Indigenous peoples, as was the practice elsewhere across North America, from the 1860s they began to be shunted onto reserves which might include the core of their traditional territory, but in no way encompassed all of it. The process was messy, often following rather than preceding newcomers’ claiming the most desirable stretches as their own. On British Columbia’s shift in 1871 from a British colony to a Canadian province, the federal government assumed authority over ‘Indians’, defined in the Indian Act as deriving legal status through an ‘Indian’ father. As historical geographer Cole Harris details in Making Native Space, Indians received a tiny fraction of the huge province.3 The extent to which Indigenous peoples got a breathing space had to do with the physical character of British Columbia. The province is one of the largest political units in North America, but also one of the most difficult for outsiders to negotiate spatially. Unlike Indigenous peoples who made use of the entire province, settlers preferred the southwestern corner distinguished by a mild climate and ready access to the outside world. As a consequence, reserve-making was less devastating than it might have been, but, at the same time, Indigenous peoples who happened to live in urban areas were increasingly targeted. Most newcomers resided either on southern Vancouver Island in the colonial and provincial capital of Victoria, whose origins harked back to the 1840s, or in the mainland city of Vancouver brought into being on the south shore of Burrard Inlet in the mid-1880s as the western 155



6


terminus of a transcontinental rail line. While the more sedate Victoria grew modestly from 21,000 to 32,000 people between 1901 and 1911, bustling Vancouver skyrocketed from 27,000 to 100,000. No other urban centre approached their numbers. Not just British Columbia, but the world was becoming more urban during these years. With it came, as David Sibley among others has elaborated, a strong sense of entitlement by those identifying with this major shift.4 In Canada as elsewhere, many of the arrivals were entrepreneurs whose real or potential fortunes they linked to their city being formed in the image most profitable to themselves. As the urban historian Robert A. J. McDonald has explained, the men in charge thought they were ‘the boss of everything.’5 Their ambition frequently verged on greed – for profit and for the formation of urban space in their own image. In both Victoria and Vancouver it became unacceptable that Indigenous peoples should live among newcomers, even on the modest reserves to which they were confined. The spaces they occupied had to be erased. The erasure of urban Indigenous space speaks to colonial perspectives on race, a concept that was at the time firmly anchored in human biology, most often skin tones. In an analysis that still resonates as strongly as when it was published in the mid-1990s, the Australian scholar Nicholas Thomas perceptively observes that, ‘in retrospect, the most striking feature of colonialism in the nineteenth century seems to be its overt, pervasive, and extraordinarily confident racism’.6 As the century wore on, the perception grew, in the words of anthropologist George Stocking, that ‘savages were not simply morally delinquent or spiritually deluded, but racially incapable’.7 Such thinking had profound implications for the spatial entitlements of Indigenous peoples in and around British Columbia’s urbanising spaces. While race-based reasoning was repeatedly evoked in the two erasures, greed also drove them. The first half of this chapter traces the ways in which race and greed interacted with, and reinforced, each other in the removal of the Songhees people from their Victoria reserve in 1911 and of the Squamish from their Vancouver reserve in 1913. However powerful these two motives were, when we parse all the factors, something more emerges in respect to the Songhees erasure in particular than is usually considered in the scholarship.8 The second half of this chapter returns to events in Victoria from the perspective of those being acted upon. While some of the Songhees were wholly Indigenous, others, including the leadership, occupied a liminal space by virtue of having Songhees mothers but newcomer fathers. Their mixed descent gave them tools to mimic the dominant society to their material advantage.9



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While the sources on which this essay is based all originate within the dominant society and reflect a colonial perspective, they are so unselfconsciously self-confident as to make it possible to intuit, at least in part, the perspectives of those being acted upon as well as those who considered themselves the actors. The pride taken in outmanoeuvring Indigenous people caused the two principal and independent accounts of events – newspaper stories and the inward and outward correspondence of the federal Department of Indian Affairs – to be remarkably coherent and consistent. The story they tell is persuasive. The erasure of Indigenous space occurred in several stages. While Victoria’s origins preceded those of Vancouver in time, the interdependence that initially linked Indigenous peoples with newcomers was similar. The Songhees, also known as the Lekwungen, welcomed the first outsiders to their territory in 1843 by, according to one account, offering them a site for their proposed trading post in exchange for three blankets.10 Its location encouraged the 700 or so Songhees who lived in the area to congregate just across the harbour from Fort Victoria, creating what a fur trader’s son arriving in 1850 termed an ‘Indian village, consisting of a double row of large houses, the shores being lined with innumerable canoes’.11 That year the Songhees signed a treaty with the governor of the newly established British colony of Vancouver Island, which became one of a handful to be negotiated in British Columbia. The Songhees agreed to give up areas of land wanted by the newcomers, in exchange for which ‘our village sites and enclosed fields are to be kept for our own use, for the use of our children, and for those who may follow after us’.12 The Songhees reserve, 119 acres in size, came into being. Although the city of Vancouver originated only with the completion of a rail line in the mid-1880s, the first newcomers arrived in the area two decades earlier. Just as the Songhees realised the benefits to be had from the fur trade, employment opportunities in Burrard Inlet sawmills caused some nearby Squamish seasonal sites to become permanent villages. Alongside several on the north shore of Burrard Inlet was Snauq, located south of the inlet on a parallel body of water known as False Creek. While no treaties were negotiated, Snauq was the basis for a reserve of thirty-seven acres requested in February 1868 by the fortytwo persons living there under the leadership of Chief Chipkayum and established the next year.13 As with the other reserves, residents did not hold land in fee simple but rather had the use of it. Half a dozen years later a reserve commission expanded what became known as the False Creek or Kitsilano reserve to eighty acres.14



The Erasure of Urban Indigenous Space 157


The mutual advantage that structured relations between Indigenous peoples and newcomers disappeared in Victoria when a gold rush broke out on the adjacent mainland in 1858. Upwards of 30,000 miners arrived that year, mostly through Victoria, many thousands more over the next half-dozen years. With them came hardening attitudes toward the Indigenous population. While the Squamish were relatively unaffected, due to their territory lying off the routes to the gold fields, Victoria went virtually overnight from a sleepy village to a bustling emporium seeking to emulate its counterparts elsewhere in the British colonial world in its standards of propriety. This first stage on the pathway to erasure of urban Indigenous space reflected sentiments across the colonising word towards Indigenous peoples. A Royal Navy officer stationed in Victoria reported in 1862 how ‘the close contiguity of these Indians to Victoria is seriously inconvenient’.15 In line with the supposed benevolence so much a part of racist rhetoric, removal was construed as being for the Songhees’ own good: ‘In consequence of their intercourse with the whites – chiefly, of course, for evil – this tribe has become the most degraded in the whole island, having lost what few virtues the savage in his natural state possesses, and contracted the worse vices of the settlers.’16 As Renisa Mawani and Penelope Edmonds elaborate in their studies of the Songhees, this argument became a favoured rationale.17 Newcomers repeatedly asserted with a straight face that Indigenous peoples should not live in proximity to themselves because some of their fellow colonials, never themselves, were bad influences. A second justification for erasing Indigenous space also came into play. The fears of sexuality so central to colonialism were repeatedly used to justify racist perspectives.18 Songhees women were almost inherently suspect by virtue of not accommodating to newcomers’ expectations for them. Women in the public domain, considered the purview of men, must be engaged in illicit behaviour that was, by definition, sexual in nature. ‘The majority of the Indian women who, in consequence of the vicinity of the Reserve, are daily seen in our streets’ were perforce possessed of ‘vicious customs’.19 In line with such thinking, ‘this tribe should therefore be removed’.20 The sharp sexual imbalance among newcomers due to the gold rush, and earlier the fur trade, meant that many Songhees and other Indigenous women did indeed partner with newcomer men, in some cases for the moment, in others for a lifetime.21 Despite the decline of the gold rush by the mid-1860s, and with it the reduction of Victoria’s ambitions for urban grandeur, the Songhees



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reserve was never out of sight, either literally or in the local press which found fodder in any event there for a deprecating story.22 The consequence was several more efforts at erasure, all of which stalled. As Jeannie Kanakos has described, although both the federal and provincial governments favoured erasure, they disagreed on who had rights of ownership and thereby responsibility to negotiate.23 One of the most determined initiatives saw local entrepreneurs seeking to acquire the reserve for a rail terminus. The economic benefit that would ensue persuaded federal authorities to authorise erasure so long as the 130 Songhees living there agreed to their proposed relocation. This they did not do. The unwillingness of Songhees to be erased was paralleled in Vancouver. As was the case with the gold rush with Victoria in 1858, the arrival of the transcontinental railway in Vancouver in 1886 transformed a village into a city. Since almost everyone came from somewhere else, they brought with them strong preconceptions of what a proper city should be like. Much of the enthusiasm had a ‘boosterish’ or self-promotional quality. Residents recognised that their own wellbeing was directly linked to Vancouver’s appeal to prospective settlers. Increasingly, Robert A. J. McDonald explains, the ‘people of Vancouver came to view the False Creek reserve as critical to the city’s continued growth’.24 The reserve was eagerly sought by railway developers, and part of it was alienated despite the opposition of residents. These actions paled before the growing determination to snatch the reserve itself, an action the Squamish living there resisted as strongly as did the Songhees in Victoria.25 As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, two critical factors tipped the balance towards erasure. The first was changing leadership on the two reserves. Chief Chipkayum, who had headed the False Creek reserve since at least 1868, and his counterpart Chief Sqwameyuqs, in charge of the Songhees reserve since 1864, each viewed the land in more than economic terms. On Sqwameyuqs’ death in 1892 Victoria’s Colonist newspaper described him as overseeing a ‘little kingdom . . . from which he declared, less than a year ago, he would never be carried alive’. The article related how ‘the old chief refused to see the question in the light the city people wanted him to, and the tribesmen stood by their ruler’.26 An official of the federal Department of Indian Affairs described how the elders were ‘to a man determined not to vacate the Songhees reserve which was land held and occupied by their forefathers from time immemorial and consequently dearer to them than anything they could possess’.27 Chief Chipkayum, who died in 1907, had





a similar commitment to place. The local Indian Agent reported: ‘Chief says that he does not want to sell the land because it belonged to his Grandfather . . . He didn’t want to leave this place where he was born and it is the place where his dead relatives are buried – none of the men on the place want to sell it – the Queen gave him and his people the land.’28 The two chiefs’ successors would be younger men of a different generation. The second critical factor leading to erasure was good economic times encouraging the tendency towards greed that in any case never lurked far below the surface. Indicative of the general attitude, the Victoria City Council expressed amazement to the federal Minister of the Interior in 1901 that the reserve located as it is almost in the centre of the city for many years and within a stone’s throw of the business section and of some of the best business blocks, presents a contrast so marked and repellent as to excite the wonder of every one that such a relic of barbarism should be allowed to exist in the midst of the civilized conditions of a modern city.29 In a debate in the Canadian Senate in 1905, the senator for Vancouver Island described the reserve’s residents as ‘demoralized and depraved’.30 ‘Prominent business men’ in Vancouver were similarly determined to put the False Creek reserve to ‘a practical use’. Such a goal was consistent with the self-confident boosterism grounded in real estate speculation that marked the rapidly growing city during these buoyant years. The initial goal of using the reserve ‘for public exhibition and other purposes for the general good of every citizen’ became more self-interested the more it was described.31 The refined plan for ‘a midsummer fair and carnival’ complete with ‘railway, tram and water facilities’ was a mildly disguised economic venture wherein ‘business men would reap a harvest each year from the throngs that would be visiting’.32 In the final stage of the pathway to erasure, first in Victoria and then in Vancouver, the province’s activist premier Richard McBride played a central role. Convinced that the terms by which British Columbia joined Canada in 1871 gave it reversionary rights to reserve lands no longer being used for that purpose, he pushed for negotiations.33 In doing so, he reflected larger sets of attitudes across Canada. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier pronounced in Parliament in April 1911 that, ‘where a reserve is in the vicinity of a growing town, as is the case in



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several places, it becomes a source of nuisance and an impediment to progress’.34 A month later the Indian Act was amended so that the residents of any ‘Indian reserve which adjoins or is situated wholly or partly within an incorporated town or city having a population of not less than eight thousand’ could be legally removed without their consent if it was in ‘the interest of the public and of the Indians of the band for whose use the reserve is held’.35 By the time the Indian Act was amended the push for erasure had come to fruition in Victoria. Protracted negotiations had stalled on the question of a new reserve acceptable to the Songhees, who also held out for each family receiving a cash payment.36 Considering that the city of Victoria and the federal government were not forceful enough to resolve matters, in the spring of 1910 Premier McBride took the lead, being joined sometime thereafter by the other two levels of government. The resulting agreement included a cash settlement of $10,000 per family. Lest there be any second thoughts, the 41 family heads were shown the bankbooks to be handed over once they had physically moved to their new reserve, which they all did by the end of April 1911.37 The agreement was speedily approved in the federal parliament. In the case of Vancouver the provincial government also took the lead but overshot the mark by acting wholly on its own volition. The impetus lay in an American railway company offering the federal government $1.5 to $2 million for the reserve, which it sought for a terminal and docks. About the same time the federal Harbour Commission was eyeing it for the same purpose. The Department of Indian Affairs put the offers on hold until a Commission on Indian Reserves that was then underway reported, whereupon provincial authorities acted.38 As William Zaharoff has outlined, due process played no role, nor was federal approval sought.39 In April 1913 the intermediary acting on behalf of the province organised a closed meeting on the reserve at which he read over a draft sale agreement which all those present signed, almost all with their mark.40 The amount, $11,250 per family head, was modestly higher than that paid to the Songhees.41 However, unlike the Songhees, they were not allocated a new reserve, but rather expected to move to one of the other Squamish reserves, located on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. Before the sale could be finalised, news leaked of much larger offers – about $50,000 per family head – supposedly being entertained by federal authorities. Fearful of the Squamish changing their minds, the AttorneyGeneral, who represented Vancouver in the provincial legislature, took no chances. At a meeting with heads of families, he proffered cheques





with the warning, according to one of the Squamish present, to ‘take it or you’ll never get a cent’.42 Another reported ‘the Provincial Government’ making ‘threats that they would be driven off by the Police if they did not consent to sell’.43 A week later the Squamish capitulated. The AttorneyGeneral met the twenty family heads at a downtown bank where each was shown a bank book with a balance of $11,250 to be his in exchange for putting ‘his mark to a receipt’ relinquishing any interest in the reserve. By ‘the stroke of 12 o’clock noon’, according to a newspaper account, ‘the last of the band’ had ‘accepted their bank book’.44 The roles played by race and greed were caught in parallel events the press reported on that fateful day. The first is captured in the image of ‘a squaw with a baby in her arms who stood waiting for her husband to come out of the manager’s room with his bank account’. Despite her looking ‘longingly at the comfortable seats in the bank for the use of the customers’, no one invited her to sit down and ‘she took her baby and went and crouched for rest on the hard edge of the base of a marble pillar’, whereupon ‘the passing throng looked down on her’.45 About the same time this mother was being relegated to the past, the provincial Attorney-General held a press conference looking to the future. He proclaimed how this ‘eyesore to the citizens of Vancouver for many years and hindrance to the development of the city’ would now make ‘as much profit as possible for the entire province’.46 Later in the day he described in virtually the same breath how the Squamish would now be ‘away from the temptations of the city’ and ‘this very valuable property . . . should net us a million dollars profit’. The Attorney-General was gleeful over what he termed ‘one of the best real estate transactions ever carried out in the province’.47 Greed had become a point of pride even before the Squamish actually departed. Within two days they were moved out, and their houses burned to the ground. Unlike the Songhees erasure, title over the False Creek reserve long remained in dispute due to the province’s precipitous action infringing on federal responsibility for Indians.48 Apart from small parcels being alienated during the 1930s for the Burrard Street Bridge and an armoury, the former reserve remained vacant apart from passing squatters. The Squamish, who amalgamated politically in 1923, argued they all needed to agree to surrender for the transfer to be legitimate, and in 1947 they did so. The province then formally conveyed the land to its federal counterpart, which much as happened in Victoria subdivided it into parcels for sale.49 The similarities between the erasure of urban Indigenous space in early twentieth-century Victoria and Vancouver, both grounded in a



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mixture of race and greed, obscure something more. The surrender of the Squamish reserve was based on the Songhees precedent, with the exception that the Squamish did not get a new reserve in addition to a substantial cash payout. Parsing the Victoria case, this something more comes into view. The dominant society’s insistence on stereotyping Indigenous people as all the same, in line with the racism of the day, obscured a fundamental shift occurring on the Songhees reserve from the late nineteenth century onwards. When we probe beyond the newspaper headlines as to why the Songhees did so well, compared to what might have been the outcome, we discover a counter-narrative with considerable explanatory power. The outcome rested on two interlinked factors. The first was the identity of the Songhees chief from 1894 onwards, the second the larger context out of which he emerged. Michael Cooper’s accession to leadership harked back to the independent character of Songhees women that for so long distressed outsiders. Unlike the Squamish who were bypassed by the fur trade and the gold rush, the Songhees, and in particular Songhees women, had been at the centre of these phenomena. Cooper and a growing proportion of reserve residents were part of a second generation living between two worlds, that of their Songhees mothers and also that, even if only indirectly, of their newcomer fathers. Michael Cooper had been baptised Catholic in Victoria on 28 April 1866, aged six months, as the son of ‘Cooper native of England or Scotland [he was not present himself, so it is not possible to be sure of the place of his birth] and of Catherine S-kuvanit-nar, Indian woman of the Songhees tribe’.50 His father was a lieutenant in a British military unit stationed on San Juan Island adjacent to Victoria following a fracas with the Americans in 1859.51 However the arrangements were made, perhaps by his father, young Michael attended Catholic St. Louis College in Victoria where he received an education not unlike many of his newcomer counterparts. Shortly after being elected chief in 1893, Cooper solidified his Songhees credentials by marrying Sara, the niece of the first Songhees chief, Freezy. Like Cooper born to an English father and Songhees mother, Sara was the widow of a Victoria sea captain from Greece named Frank Albany by whom she had five children. She would have two more with her new husband. Cooper’s election coincided with other families also of mixed descent moving onto the Songhees reserve. Almost everyone listed on reserve censuses compiled in 1876 and 1881 had wholly Songhees names, indicating Indigenous paternal origins.52 The Indian Agent commented in 1898 on an increase in ‘youths and children, who, though having





Songhees mothers, had white fathers who had practically deserted them’.53 This movement likely encouraged the repeated observations as to how well residents were doing. Although concerned ‘they live so near the temptations of a town’, federal authorities considered it would be ‘difficult to induce them to agree to the sale of this reserve, however good the terms offered may be’, for ‘several have regular employment in the city’.54 The Victoria Colonist noted in 1898 that ‘throughout the Songhees reservation new fences, fresh paint and substantial additions are the order of the day’ and the number of gardens was greatly increasing.55 A year later the newspaper headlined, ‘Songhees Indians Better Off in the Way of Homes Than Most People’.56 At this point in historical time, by the terms of the federal Indian Act, only persons with status were permitted to live on reserves, and the acquisition of status demanded an Indian father, which none of these mixed descent Songhees possessed.57 The silence in the annual reports of the Department of Indian Affairs suggests that virtually everyone simply looked the other way. One of the reasons may have been that, as the reports emphasised, reserve residents were prospering, which reflected well on the Department of Indian Affairs. In the 1901 Canadian census, which required individuals to disclose mixed descendancy, at least half of the thirty-one families enumerated on the reserve contained such persons.58 Their diversity in backgrounds contrasted sharply with the singular inheritance that had energised Sqwameyuqs and his generation to protect land they considered to be theirs from time immemorial. The Fridays and Kamais were in the tradition of the first Songhees chief Freezy, named for the frizzy hair he inherited, it was said, from his Hawaiian father, one of several hundred hired to work in the fur trade.59 Thus it was not surprising that in 1870 longtime Hawaiian fur trade employees Peter Friday and Kama Kamai wed Songhees women.60 The Fridays settled down on San Juan Island, the Kamais on Coal Island off southern Vancouver Island. It was likely following her husband’s death in 1894 that Mary Friday returned to the Songhees reserve along with two adult children. By then two Kamai sons were living there with their wives and children. So were members of the Fallardeau family, whom the Fridays knew from San Juan Island. Mary Fallardeau, a Songhees woman on the reserve with her two sons, was the widow of a French Canadian employed in the fur trade.61 The others – August Gabriel, Johnny Golledge, Charles Gunion, Jimmy St. Louis and Johnny Silva – had similar inheritances. Golledge



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was almost certainly the son of an establishment Englishman who was a government official before being dismissed for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, whereupon he lived for many years on the Songhees reserve where he died destitute in 1887.62 Gabriel’s French Canadian father had married Cooper’s mother, making the two half-brothers.63 Gunion’s father also came from Quebec, Silva’s from the Azores. Gunion and Silva had like Cooper been educated at Catholic St. Louis College.64 The situation on the Songhees reserve came to public attention when the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs visited in 1906 in the hopes of securing an agreement for residents to give up their reserve. He subsequently asked the local Indian Agent for ‘the status of Indians residing on the Songhees Indian reserve’, who responded that of ninetyfive persons living there, sixty-three ‘claim descent through the father, a person of Indian blood belonging to the band’, whereas thirty-two ‘trace their descent through their mother belonging to the band but whose father was or is not of Indian blood or if Indian blood not a member of the band’.65 In other words, a third, including the chief and his extended family, should not have been there by a strict interpretation of federal regulations. By then residents were becoming even more fully integrated into the dominant economy. ‘Fishing, hunting, stevedore-work, farming and working in saw-mills and factories are the chief occupations’, the Indian Agent noted in 1906, adding that ‘these Indians are industrious and many of them well-off’.66 Chief Cooper exemplified the changing times, occupying a managerial position in a large Victoria company.67 With his neatly trimmed moustache, customary dress of suit, tie and overcoat, and educated signature, he personified a new generation of leadership consciously replicating the dominant society, by so doing gazing back at it almost as if through a mirror.68 Due in part certainly to his appearance, Cooper gained the trust of those seeking to acquire the reserve, which gave him a much stronger negotiating position than he would otherwise have had. He and thereby the Songhees were treated with more respect than ever were the Squamish on the False Creek reserve, who were almost all solely Indigenous by descent.69 At the various meetings Cooper was front and present, sometimes ‘speaking in his own language’ to assert his Indigenous credentials. Residents’ blunt refusals in 1906 of an initial offer of $1,000 and in 1908 of an upgraded $2,000 per family by a unanimous vote attest to their understanding of the dominant society and its workings.70 For some contemporaries, including the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs who had visited Victoria in 1906, another solution came





into view. The Songhees were just as rational as, or more so than, those negotiating on the other side. ‘They were independent of and were receiving very little assistance, if any, from the government’ and so considered quite logically that ‘the Reserve was their own and they should be allowed to do as they pleased with it’.71 An enfranchisement act was drafted, whereby the Songhees themselves, rather than their reserve, would be erased: ‘Owing to their long proximity to civilization and the adoption by them of the manners, customs and means of obtaining a livelihood generally prevalent amongst persons other than Indians, the members of said band are well qualified to assume the status of white men.’ The reserve would be ‘subdivided by survey into lots and allotted to the individual members of the band’ in fee simple with suitable allowance being ‘made for necessary streets and public places’. In return the Songhees and their unmarried minor children ‘shall cease in every respect to be Indians’ within the meaning of the Indian Act.72 As to the reasoning, the Deputy Superintendent pointed out to his superior how ‘most of the members of the band, as far as I was able to discover from personal observations and also from the records, are not by any means of full blood, but in a great many cases are scarcely distinguishable from the white population’. Reserve residents were ‘for all practical purposes evidently capable of performing the duties of ordinary citizenship’. There was in his view ‘no good and valid reason why they should not be placed in practically the same position in the state as white people are’. Provided with the franchise and home ownership, they would become even ‘more self-reliant, energetic and independent’.73 Needless to say, the Songhees did not become white. The proposal ran absolutely counter to the sentiments of the Victoria City Council, which a month later exploded in outrage. Just across the harbour from ‘millions of dollars worth of buildings and stocks, paved streets, electric cars, and all the appurtenances of modern city lives’ stands ‘a row of unsightly, tumble-down, smoke-covered wood shacks . . . hardly removed from its primitive condition of a hundred years ago’. So far as the city fathers were concerned, ‘this incongruity, deformity, and impediment to the growth and commercial progress and prosperity of the City should be removed once and forever’.74 The city of its imagination came first, last and always. Cooper oversaw the agreement negotiated later in 1910 which swapped the Songhees reserve for another of virtually the same size, at just over 160 acres, fronting on the harbour in nearby Esquimalt and also a much higher $10,000 payment per family than had been offered



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previously. The Songhees essentially exchanged urban space for suburban space and, by so doing, received a windfall of investment capital equivalent to $265,000 per family in today’s dollars.75 Cooper observed sometime later that the erasure succeeded whereas its predecessors had failed because the government ‘snowed that amount of money’.76 It was Cooper who determined eligibility for the monetary payout and relocation. Among the forty-one family heads on a list finalised with his approval, seventeen were of mixed descent, being Cooper himself, three Fallardeaus, three Kamais, two Albanys, two Jacksons, and Friday, Gabriel, Golledge, Gunion, St. Louis and Silva.77 Each of these mixed-descent family heads received a settlement that many of them, particularly those who walked in two worlds, must have viewed primarily in economic terms. Events were not lost on contemporaries. Among those querying them was the mixed-descent daughter of the colonial governor who in 1850 arranged the treaty creating the Songhees reserve: ‘How is it that Chief Cooper, who was born on San Juan Island, and whose father was a soldier, does not become a white man? . . . How do the Albany boys, whose father was a Greek fisherman, after whose death the boys’ mother married Cooper and the boys were taken to the reserve and each receive $10,000? Are they Greeks or Songhees?’78 In an attempt to get payouts, ten self-described ‘fullblooded Songhees Indians’ hired a lawyer, who detailed the non-Songhees inheritance of those receiving money, including the Cooper–Albany clan and the Fallardeaus, Gollidges, Silvas, Gabriels, Gunions and Kamais.79 Yet another group who lost out claimed quite accurately that the Albany sons were ‘quarter breeds only, yet they are reported to have received the $10,000 payment and a portion of the new reserve’ and that Chief Cooper ‘appears not to be an Indian at all’, but was nonetheless permitted ‘to act as the arbiter of the rights of the individual Indians’.80 Needless to say, Cooper’s will prevailed. From the perspective of most outsiders, the Songhees continued to be Indians. Even as the payments were being distributed, federal officials waxed stereotypically that, ‘no matter to what use some of them may ultimately put their money or how they may let it dwindle away, their families will always have a good home’.81 An account of a few years later ran: ‘The Siwashes [Indians in the Chinook trading jargon] had never seen so much money before, and didn’t know what to do with it. Shortly afterwards some of them were seen driving about the city in their own autos!’82 In reality the money was put to good use. Two years after the erasure, the Department of Indian Affairs collected receipts and examined bank





accounts in order to determine just what had happened to its largesse. About 40 per cent had gone into material assets and 20 per cent each into interest-bearing deposits or loans; the remainder was cash in hand, or had been used for expenses or given to relatives. The audit concluded that, although a few had ‘squandered their money’, overall the Songhees ‘have done as well, if not better, with their money than the same number of white people, at a much higher stage of civilization, would have done’.83 Our perspectives on the past depend in good part on the approach we take. Our gaze determines what we see. With the erasures of urban Indigenous space in early twentieth-century British Columbia, the advantages to be had from a comparative perspective are balanced by parsing events. These two approaches give us complementary ways of seeing. Each approach has its merits. The comparative approach leads us to realise just how broadly pervasive were race and greed in erasing Indigenous space in British Columbia’s two major cities. Looking more closely, we glimpse the important role played by Indigenous women in the larger course of events. Their mixed-descent offspring facilitated the good deal made in Victoria that was then echoed in Vancouver. They understood how to mimic the dominant society in dress and actions, and did so. As literary critic Homi Bhabha explains, ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’.84 Granted, urban Indigenous space was erased, but not as a wholly one-sided event. This achievement did not equate with acceptance within the dominant society. Bhabha reminds us that ‘the object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’.85 When the possibility arose that the Songhees might become legally white, it was quickly rejected at the local level. Theirs was perforce a liminal location characterised by ambivalence and ambiguity. ‘The ambivalence of mimicry’ meant that over time they might become ‘almost the same but not quite’.86 Mixed-descent British Columbians living on the Songhees reserve acted nonetheless. They used their education, understandings of the ways of the dominant society, and realisation of just how much their land was coveted to make the best possible deal they could for their families and for themselves. In doing so, they were not necessarily any less driven by self-interest, even perhaps by greed, than were their counterparts in the dominant society, nor should they have been. By acting, they accomplished something it was not easy to do within the



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Notes 1. On British Columbian history, see Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: a History of British Columbia, 3rd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 2. It became possible to acquire land from 1859 onwards on Vancouver Island and from 1860 on the British Columbian mainland by marking out up to 160 acres not being used by Aboriginal peoples or otherwise designated by the colonial government, registering the claim, making certain improvements, and then paying a smallish amount per acre once it had been surveyed. See Robert E. Cail, Land, Man, and the Law: the Disposal of Crown Lands in British Columbia, 1871–1913 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974), pp. 1–18. 3. Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002). 4. David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Societies and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. Robert A. J. McDonald, ‘“He thought he was the boss of everything”: Masculinity and Power in a Vancouver Family’, BC Studies: the British Columbian Quarterly 132 (Winter 2001/02): 6–30. 6. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 77. 7. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 237. 8. See John Sutton Lutz, Makúk: a New History of Aboriginal–White Relations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), p. 102; Grant Keddie, Songhees Pictorial: a History of the Songhees People as seen by Outsiders, 1790–1912 (Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 2003), pp. 146–9; Renisa Mawani, ‘Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregation in British Columbia: the Making and Unmaking of the Songhees Reserve’, in Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, ed. Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 173–90. 9. There is no single most appropriate terminology for persons combining Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent. The terms ‘half-breed’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘mixed race’, ‘interracial’, and ‘hybrid’ can have both biological and socially negative connotations. The Canadian term Métis, originating in the fur trade, has acquired an ethnogenesis flavour limiting its relevance to particular historical, geographical and cultural settings. The broader term, ‘mixed descent,’ is increasingly being used by Canadian scholars. 10. See Colonist, 22 August 1901. 11. J. R. Anderson, ‘Vancouver in 1850’, typescript in British Columbia Archives, Add. Ms. 1912, box 15/18, file 4. 12. See Dennis Madill, British Columbia Indian Treaties in Historical Perspective (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs 1981), pp. 67–73; also ongoing correspondence in Department of Indian Affairs [DIA], Black series, RG 10, vol. 3689, file 13,886,



racial confines in which they found themselves. They gazed back at the dominant society in a fashion beneficial to themselves and others on the Songhees reserve and also, a couple of years later, to their Squamish cousins.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces microfilm reel C-10121, Library and Archives Canada, especially Alex C. Anderson, Archibald McKinlay and G. M. Sproat to Victoria Superintendent of Songish Indians, Decision of 4 May 1878, and Memo entitled Songhees Indian Reserve Question, Ottawa, 2 December 1906, which recounts the history of events from 1843 onwards from a government perspective in considerable detail. For a summary, see ‘Reasons for Judgment from the First Phase of the Trial’ in Squamish Indian Band v. Canada, court file T-1636-41, 5 October 2000: 20–22, 46. Another reserve, occupied by the Musqueam people, was created along the Fraser River at a location becoming part of Vancouver on the city’s expansion in 1929 to encompass the adjacent municipalities of South Vancouver and Point Grey. Thus, while the Musqueam reserve is now within the boundaries of the city of Vancouver, it was not a consideration during the time period of this essay. R. C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island (London: John Murray, 1862, repr. 1969), p. 30. Ibid. Mawani, ‘Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregation in British Columbia’; and Penelope Edmonds, ‘From Bedlam to Incorporation: Whiteness and the Racialisation of Settler-Colonial Urban Space in Victoria, British Columbia, 1840s–1880s’, Exploring the British World: Identity – Cultural Production – Institutions (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2004), online. The classic study is Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). ‘The Removal of the Indians’, Victoria Gazette, 24 February 1859. Editorial, Victoria Gazette, 24 February 1859. This topic is discussed in Jean Barman, ‘Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Engendering Transgressive Sexuality during the Gold Rush’, in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Myra Rutherdale and Katie Pickles (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), pp. 205–27; and Jean Barman ‘Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850–1900’, BC Studies: the British Columbian Quarterly 115–16 (Fall–Winter 1997–8): 237-66, reprinted in Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks (eds), Women and Gender in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), pp. 210–35; and in Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend (eds), In the Days of Our Grandmothers: a Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 270–300. See, for instance, Colonist, 17 September 1880. Jeannie L. Kanakos, ‘The Negotiations to Relocate the Songhees Indians, 1843–1911’ (unpublished MA thesis, Department of History, Simon Fraser University, 1982), pp. 51–2. Robert A. J. McDonald, Making Vancouver 1863–1913 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), p. 217. On the False Creek reserve, see Jean Barman, ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver’, BC Studies: the British Columbian Quarterly 155 (Autumn 2007): 3–30. ‘Scomiak no More’, Colonist, 12 September 1892.



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27. A. W. Vowell to L. Van Koughnet, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 3 May 1890, DIA, RG 10, vol. 3688, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10120. 28. R. C. McDonald, Indian Agent, quoted in ‘Reasons for Judgment’, p. 42. 29. City Clerk, City of Victoria, to Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, 23 April 1901, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3689, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 30. William John Macdonald in Senate debate, 23 February 1906, in Senate Debates, First Session, Tenth Parliament: 77. 31. ‘Want a Grant of the Reserve’, Province, 28 May 1902. 32. ‘Indian Reservation May Be Lost to Vancouver’, Province, 7 June 1903. 33. Patricia Roy, ‘Sir Richard McBride’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, online at http://www.biographi.ca/EN/index.html 34. Wilfrid Laurier in House of Commons debate, 19 April 1911 in House of Commons Debates, 1910–11: 7249. 35. ‘An Act to amend the Indian Act’, assented to 19 May 1911, online at http:// epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/ic/cdc/aboriginaldocs/m-stat.htm 36. See the detailed correspondence in DIA, RG 10, vols 3688–3690, file 13,886, microfilm reels C-10120 and C-10121. The sequence of events is summarised in Kanakos, ‘Negotiations’, pp. 66–75. 37. ‘Songhees Shown Money is in Bank’, Victoria Daily Times, 4 April 1911; ‘Passing of the Songhees Reserve’, Victoria Daily Times, 5 April 1911; and W. E. Ditchburn, Indian Inspector, to Inspector of Indian Agencies, Southwestern Inspectorate, Victoria, 26 April 1911, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 38. ‘Offered Indians One and a Half Million Dollars’, Vancouver World, 4 April 1913; telegram from Deacon, Deacon & Wilson to Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Vancouver, 30 April 1913, and Memo from W. R. White to the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, 25 March 1913, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3741, file 28835, microfilm reel C-10121; also ‘Militia Want Indian Lands at Kitsilano’, Vancouver World, 9 April 1913; ‘Kitsilano Indian Reserve Bargain’, Vancouver World, 11 April 1913. 39. William Zaharoff, ‘Success in Struggle: the Squamish People and Kitsilano Reserve No. 6’ (unpublished MA thesis, Department of History, Carleton University, 1978). 40. ‘Red Men Took Cash From Mr. Bowser This Morning’, Province, 9 April 1913; ‘Offered Indians One and a Half Million Dollars’, Vancouver World, 4 April 1913. 41. W. E. Ditchburn, Inspector of Indian Agencies, to Secretary of Department of Indian Affairs, Victoria, 26 April 1913, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3741, file 28835, microfilm reel C-10121. 42. W. J. Bowser, quoted in ‘Indians Decline Bowser’s Cheques’, Victoria Daily Times, 3 April 19l3. 43. Joseph Cole to W. E. Ditchburn, Indian Inspector, Vancouver, 18 May 1913, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3741, file 28835, microfilm reel C-10121. 44. ‘Red Men Took Cash’; one individual received $5,000 only. 45. ‘Red Men Took Cash’. 46. Attorney-General W. J. Bowser, quoted in ‘Red Men Took Cash’. 47. ‘An Act of Greatest Benefit to Vancouver’, Province, 9 April 1913. 48. House of Commons debate, 24 April 1913, in House of Commons Debates, 1912–13: 8669–8764. In 1916 the Harbour Commission expropriated the




49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces property for development, which it legally had authority to do, and held it for a decade before abandoning its interest in it. ‘Reasons for Judgment’, p. 76. Half of the land became the present Vanier Park containing the Vancouver Museum, Planetarium and Maritime Museum; the other five parcels became private commercial and housing developments. On this later time period see Jordan Stanger-Ross, ‘Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928–1950s’, Canadian Historical Review 89, 4 (December 2008): 541–80. Church records, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, Victoria, 1849–1934, in British Columbia Archives, Add. Ms. 1. ‘Obsequies to be Held’, Colonist, 12 January 1936. See Keddie, Songhees Pictorial, 103, and Supplement to Songhees Pictorial (online on the Royal BC Museum website at http://www.bcarchives.bc.ca/Content_ Files/Files/songhees_supplement.pdf), n.p. The census was enclosed with reports of the British Columbia Reserve Commission in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3645, file 7936, microfilm reel C-10113. DIA, Annual Report, 1898: 215. DIA, Annual Report, 1887: 107. Colonist, 13 May 1897. Editorial, Colonist, 20 December 1898. See Jean Barman, ‘At the Edge of Law’s Empire: Aboriginal Interraciality, Citizenship, and the Law in British Columbia’, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 26, 1 (2006): 3–22. Songhees Band, Cowichan Agency, in 1901 manuscript Census, available online through Library and Archives Canada. The exact number is impossible to determine, given that some individuals who other information indicates were wholly Songhees were enumerated as of mixed descent and vice versa, due likely to the enumerator. This topic is explored in Jean Barman and Bruce Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). Church records, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, Victoria, 1849–1934. Ibid. Colonist, 7 September 1887. Schedule B enclosed in Smith & Johnston, barristers and solicitors, to J. D. McLean, Secretary, Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, 18 January 1911, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. See the information in Census of the Songhees Band on Songhees Reserve Made 21–25 November 1910, and Schedule B to Smith and Johnston to Frank Oliver, Ottawa, 18 January 1911, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. W. R. Robertson, Indian Agent, to A. W. Vowell, Indian Superintendent for British Columbia, Duncan’s Station, 20 December 1906 and 19 January 1907, in DIA, Black series, RG 10, vol. 3689, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10120. DIA, Annual Report, 1906: 203. Kanakos, ‘Negotiations’, p. 103. According to Lutz, Makúk, p. 100, a leading salmon cannery regularly employed Cooper ‘to secure labour and look after the Indian help’.



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68. See the images in Keddie, Songhees Pictorial, pp. 147, 150–3. 69. This conclusion is based on surnames and other information in Department of Indian Affairs files and on J. S. Matthews (comp.), Conversations with Khahtsahlano 1932–1954 (Vancouver: City Archives 1955). Certainly some Squamish women had families with newcomer men, a topic explored in Jean Barman, Stanley Park’s Secret: the Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch, and Brockton Point (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2005). 70. Meetings of 13 October 1906 and 28 October 1908, held on the Songhees reserve, in DIA, Black series, RG 10, vol. 3689, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121; and ‘At Deadlock Over Songhees Reserve’, Colonist, 8 November 1906. 71. Frank Pedley, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to Frank Oliver, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, 17 December 1906, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3689, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10120. 72. ‘An Act for the Enfranchisement of the Songhees Band or Indians, of the City of Victoria, in the province of British Columbia’, February 1909, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 73. Frank Pedley to Frank Oliver, Ottawa, 19 February 1906, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 74. Lewis Hall, Mayor, and Vancouver City Council, to the Right Honourable Earl Grey, Governor General, and to the House of Commons, Victoria, 24 March 1909, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 75. See Lutz, Makúk, pp. 51–2. 76. Michael Cooper, quoted in ‘Bargain Made was Excellent’, Colonist, 22 March 1916. 77. See Census of Songhees Indians, 12 March 1910; H. Dallas Helmcken, legal council for the Songhees, to Premier Richard McBride, Victoria, 26 October 1910; and Census of the Songhees Band on Songhees Reserve Made 21–25 November 1910; and ‘Complete List of Payments re Songhees Reserve’. 78. Martha Douglas, letter quoted in Keddie, Supplement to Songhees Pictorial, n.p. 79. Smith & Johnston, barristers and solicitors, to J. D. McLean, Secretary, Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, 18 November 1910 and 18 January 1911, in DIA, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 80. Huntington & Jackson to W. R. Ross, 19 July 1911, and Huntington & Jackson to the Minister of the Interior, Victoria, 22 August 1911, in DIA, Black series, RG 10, vol. 3690, file 13,886, microfilm reel C-10121. 81. DIA, Annual Report, 1912: 209, 274. 82. C. F. J. Galloway, The Call of the West: Letters from British Columbia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916), p. 82. 83. W. E. Ditchburn to Duncan C. Scott, 11 December 1913, in DIA, Black series, RG 10, vol. 11,060, file 33-3. 84. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 88. Italics in original. 85. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 70. 86. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, pp. 91, 86. Italics in original.








Part III Making and Unmaking Places





‘Has the Whole Tribe Come Out from England?’

ask the Aurora, the Duchess of Argyle, Jane Gifford, ask ask ask ask ask ask ask ask ask ask ask

the Westminster, the Bangalore, the Ramilies Sir Robert Sale, William Bryan, Amelia Thompson, the Timandra, the Blenheim, the Whitby Will Watch, the Arrow, the Fifeshire Lord Auckland, Mary Anne, the Victory the overcrowded Lloyd where 65 perished St Paul, the Skiold, Phillip Laing, John Wickliffe Bludell and Bernicia, the Cheldra Charlotte Jane, Randolph, Sir George Seymour, the Cressy, the Fly, the Castle Eden Isabella Heras, the Travacore

ask the 12,000 miles of sea ask the dead babies

*

The names used are those of the first settler ships to arrive in New Zealand, mainly from England. Ma- ori at the time, unaware of the real terms of the settlement being negotiated with the British government, and the degree and permanency of colonial migration, were said to have asked the question in the title. My great-great-grandfather, John Miles, was on board the Aurora which left London in 1839 and arrived in Wellington, January 1840, three weeks before the signing of the Treaty. 177



Selina Tusitala Marsh*

178

Making and Unmaking Places

ask the new ones

and ye shall receive a year and 9,000 settlers later Wellington is no longer a question



ask

7 Lorenzo Veracini

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A global analysis of the imagined geographies of settler colonialism could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 remark that the ‘need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe’, and that it ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’.1 ‘Nestle’, ‘settle’, ‘establish connections’: Marx and Engels were effectively articulating what had become a transnational system of diversified colonial intervention. It was a typology of colonial action that depended on local circumstances and opportunities: there were different colonial empires, and there were different modes of empire, each necessitating a set of specific circumstances and each supported by a network of loosely organised metropolitan lobbies and local agents.2 Settler colonialism, ‘the colonies proper’, as Engels would put in an 1892 letter to Kautsky underscoring an analytical distinction, was one such mode of colonial action.3 Sometimes capable of ultimately displacing previously established colonial traditions, more rarely giving way to other colonial forms, settler colonialism operated autonomously in the context of developing colonial discourse and practice.4 Colonialism and settler colonialism are both essentially concerned with the making and unmaking of places. The anticipatory geographies of settler colonialism, however, are unique to it.5 This chapter is concerned with the geographical imaginary of what I have elsewhere defined as the ‘settler archive’ of the European imagination.6 Drawing from secondary sources and without attempting a comprehensive survey, it delineates a transnational overview of the geographical imagination of settler colonialism as structurally distinct from its colonial counterpart. 179



The Imagined Geographies of Settler Colonialism


Highlighting a structural distinction, however, does not imply that the two are not mixed in practice: this chapter also suggests that a genuinely global anatomy of settler colonialism’s geographical imagination should refer to areas beyond the current geography of anglophone settler societies.7 The first part of this chapter outlines settler colonialism’s global reach; the second part sketches the ways in which settler collectives have approached these transformations. In the context of a literature that acknowledges the distinction between colonial and settler colonial phenomena but does not systematically address them as structurally separate, there is still a need to elaborate specific interpretive categories.

Settler colonialism as a global project The study of colonialism has recurrently needed to confront colonialism’s simultaneously localised and transnational nature, and to discuss whether colonial phenomena are intractably specific, or whether they constitute a body of systemic relations. Regional specialists, ‘area studies’, and colonial and postcolonial literatures have debated these issues providing different scholarly and methodological approaches. In an attempt to emphasise shared traditions of colonial ideology and practice, and in order to explain an extraordinary resonance ultimately unaffected by rivalries generating from a diversity of centres, Edward Said, for example, referred to what he defined as colonialism’s ‘structures of attitudes and reference’: there was virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that they are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own domain . . . It is perhaps embarrassing that sectors of the metropolitan cultures that have since become vanguards in the social contests of our time were uncomplaining members of this imperial consensus. With few exceptions, the women’s as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire.8 Domestic consistency notwithstanding, as Nicholas Thomas has noted, by foregrounding nationally centred histories of colonialism, the traditional narratives of empire that Said was attacking have also generally underrated sometimes clamorous contradictions between colonial imaginings and practices: not only did imperialisms compete with each other, colonial forms also had to contend with alternative projections of colonial rule within each specific imperial context.9



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On the other hand, separating distinctive colonial domains and different modes of colonial practice was always a fundamental feature of colonialism’s imagined geographies.10 As different colonial projects were often imagined and practised in direct and sometimes urgent competition, the reciprocally exclusive character of each colonial form with regard to the others should be emphasised. There were trading companies and their commercial and administrative legacies, there were colonies run according to the principles of various humanitarian lobbies, an array of settler ‘neo-Europes’; careers in the colonial service, for example, reflected this classification.11 In the end, a multiplicity of interacting and intersecting colonial traditions contributed to what could be described as a loosely organised and yet competitive division of colonial labour whereby a number of colonial imaginings in tension against others were allowed specific areas of intervention. Priorities, of course, differed, and whereas missionary concerns always privileged the deliverance of Indigenous souls, settler collectives had an inclination to ‘redeem’ land instead. This contradiction is as old as European colonialism.12 Geographical knowledge underpinned the pattern of expansion of both colonialism and settler colonialism; this point is now sustained by an extensive literature.13 Historical geographer Daniel Clayton has noted how mapping informed the global process of colonial appropriation: Many scholars, including geographers, have focused on the techniques of representation that exemplified and fuelled the West’s proprietary vision. Cartography was an important tool of imperial expansion and technology of abstraction. Maps captured far-flung places on a grid of latitude and longitude, enabled politicians and merchants to visualize imperial and commercial prospects, and featured names and vignettes that domesticated foreignness and conveyed distant places to the West.14 Land acquisition in settler contexts – what John Weaver has referred to as the ongoing process of transformation of ‘frontiers into assets’, and what Stuart Banner has systematically explored in Possessing the Pacific – was based on appraisals of climates, ‘natural’ fertility or infertility, available sea lanes and, crucially, on knowledge about Indigenous peoples and their assumed social organisation.15 Often the urgency of establishing communities of settlers on the ground did not allow for a thorough consideration of actually existing conditions. Colonists enlisted by the New Zealand Company departed Britain thinking they would grow



The Imagined Geographies of Settler Colonialism 181


bananas in their suburban gardens.16 A century later, the fascist regime organised the Spedizione dei Ventimila to Libya (the expedition of the twenty thousand), which was supposed to establish viable agricultural communities in the desert and ensure that Italy would permanently retain its quarta sponda (the fourth shore).17 Commercial geography, its capacity for classifying and constructing taxonomies of territories, climates and peoples, is an essential feature in the understanding of settler colonial expectations. According to the imaginative geographies produced in this context, it was generally understood that the temperate regions of the globe would be the domain of self-sustaining exclusivist settler collectives.18 There were stubborn disputations: areas that would be included in some circles within what can be understood as a developing ‘settler sphere’ were perceived as unsuitable in other milieus (there were, of course, also contrasting assessments regarding the human material appropriate for these undertakings).19 Other crucial factors were the presence of ‘non-state peoples’, where colonial state-building could not be carried out through the establishment of colonial successor states (Hegel’s influential notion that in history ‘only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state’ was indeed taken seriously), a relatively low cost of landed property, and accessibility (jungles, thickets, their impenetrability, and most of all the lack of ‘visibility’ of some ‘adverse’ environments have a special place in colonial constructions of settler failure).20 The anticipatory geographies of settler colonialism were therefore especially based on the perceived possibility of ultimately transforming existing environmental conditions. Wherever they went, Said noted, European settlers immediately began to change the local habitat; their conscious aim was to transform territories into images of what they had left behind. This process was never-ending, as a huge number of plants, animals, and crops as well as building methods gradually turned the colony into a new place, complete with new diseases, environmental imbalances, and traumatic dislocations for the overpowered natives.21 A recurring and powerful transformative capacity, in turn, had become one important ideological vehicle sustaining settler discourse and expectations. Alfred Crosby has observed that the ‘success of European ecological imperialism in the Americas was so great that Europeans began to take for granted that similar triumphs would follow wherever the climate and disease environment were not outright hostile’.22



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Indeed, the expectation that technology would eventually provide solutions for overcoming environmental and other constraints, and that settlement could be expanded indefinitely was a long-lasting feature of this imagination. The belief that ‘rain would follow the plough’ held widespread currency for a very long time and defied sustained contrary evidence. South Australia’s Goyder Line, for example, envisaging the permanent impossibility of settling areas characterised by unpredictable or insufficient rainfall, was bitterly attacked because it undermined the possibility of unlimited settler expansion.23 As Adrian Howkins in this volume and others have elaborated, even Antarctica could eventually become the site for some settler colonial imagining.24 Discontinued settler experiences, however, should also be the focus of a genealogy of settler colonialism interested in an analysis that is autonomous from the current geography of settler colonial forms. Indeed, as settler colonialism was for a long time a global project that operated well outside the current limits of today’s white (anglophone) settler liberal democracies, a global approach should integrate a historical literature that has focused on the colonial polities that eventually consolidated into settler nations. The imaginative geographies of settler colonialism changed over time. Areas that were the object of settler colonial activity eventually became redefined as ‘non-settler’. However, the reverse could also happen, and regions that were initially perceived as unsuitable eventually became locales where the permanent settlement of self-supporting communities of Europeans could be imagined and projected onto the future. The spectacular expansion of settler colonial forms during the nineteenth century in Australia, southern South America, the North American prairies and West, and areas of East Africa resulted from a crucial shift in colonial practice.25 As noted by Donald Denoon, the regions where this expansion took place had been neglected by previous colonising endeavours.26 The notion that for a long time settler colonialism was not the preferred colonising option is crucial to a genealogy of settler colonialism. Despite nationalist historiographies that would consistently emphasise the progressive nature of settler undertakings as opposed to other colonial forms (and frequently mention an array of ‘Providential’ designs), settler projects were often actually born in a lack of colonising options, and were generally activated where other colonising enterprises could not be sustained (where, for example, predatory trading patterns could not be imposed, production could not be organised by way of importing chattel labour, where subsuming local polities and/or exacting tribute proved inexpedient, and where





the primary resources that had sustained previous colonial regimes were finally exhausted).27 Unsurprisingly, the geographical imagination of settler colonialism was shaped by foundational episodes of success and by equally foundational failures. Historian of colonial Jamaica Trevor Burnard has proposed the notion of ‘failed’ settler society, and Robert Bickers has convincingly narrated the history of a long-lasting settler community located in the heart of an Asian metropolis.28 The Scottish attempt to settle Darien (1698–1700) and its failure entered the settler ‘archive’ of the European imagination with images of tropical inaccessibility, disease, treacherous natives and ultimate financial ruin (the Bank of Scotland suspended payments to its creditors after the Darien disaster in 1704).29 And yet this had been a sustained and well-funded effort which had enjoyed widespread support and positive publicity (William Paterson, a prominent leader of the enterprise, had called Panama ‘the door of the seas, and the key of the universe’).30 In the long run, and this would have astonished most observers half a century ago, Africa also ended up as a settlerless setting: as Mahmood Mamdani remarked, post-apartheid political processes constitute a development of ‘epochal significance [that] has set the political trajectory of the African continent on a course radically different from that of the Americas’. ‘The Americas’, he concludes, ‘is the continent of settler independence. The South African transition means that nowhere on this continent has a settler minority succeeded in declaring and sustaining the independence of a settler colony.’31 On the other hand, with the emergence and consolidation of a global system of independent white settler polities, a settler colonial network of ‘white men’s countries’ became established.32 It ended up including (but definitions could vary and different circles of inclusion and exclusion could apply) the North American continent, southern and eastern Africa, and parts of South America and Australasia (these are extreme generalisations, but this was a generalising imagination). A late 1920s Foreign Affairs essay entitled ‘The Pioneer Fringe’ advocated ‘the science of settlement’ (it was nearly a century since Edward Gibbon Wakefield had espoused the ‘art of colonisation’: ‘science’ had replaced ‘art’ but ‘colonisation’ had remained).33 The essay identified the pioneering regions of the age – ‘the Canadian Northwest, Rhodesia, West Australia, where white men lead in settlement’ – and identified who was a ‘pioneer’: ‘a young man bent upon winning from the wilderness with strong hands and the hope of youth a homestead for himself and an inheritance for his children’.34 Its map – this article demanded a global map – highlighted



184

the ‘Pioneer Belts’: areas in northern Canada and Alaska, Patagonia and the Brazilian hinterland, Central Southern Africa, internal Australia and northern Asia.35 As the map was also implicitly identifying regions where colonisation had by then been accomplished – the pioneer ‘cores’ – and areas where it would not be possible or advisable, colonisation could be coherently deployed as a fully fledged interpretive paradigm sustaining a comprehensive vision of the world. And yet, the article was specifically focusing on a ‘fringe’, and its analysis was acutely conscious of inexorably diminishing possibilities. Not only was pioneering becoming less practicable in increasingly marginal areas, the growing appeal of urban life was also making it less and less appealing. Even if ‘scientific’ methods were to be applied, and they were being applied, pioneering would eventually and necessarily come to an end. It was the end of an era; the narrative was shaped in an elegiac mode.

Population economy and settler collectives Areas earmarked for settler colonial enterprises would be typically characterised by what historian of Israeli colonialism Baruch Kimmerling defined as ‘high frontierity’, a situation where the occupation and transformation of territory is facilitated by a low level of Indigenous population density.36 Indigenous demographic vulnerability – high frontierity circumstances, including the perception of empty spaces – would facilitate the establishment of an exclusivist settler collective, what Jürgen Osterhammel defines as the ‘New England’ type of colonialism.37 However, despite settler colonial wishful thinking, and one result of the possibility of militarily subjugating Indigenous populations, many settler communities did not establish high frontierity conditions. As well as being premised on cheap access to land, settler colonial expansion could also be based on the availability of forced or cheap Indigenous or imported labour (indeed, rather than for the purpose of settlement, at times, seizure of Indigenous land was primarily designed to force Indigenous people to sell their labour). While the question of the settler ‘conquest of labour’ is crucial to any analysis of settler mentalities, in areas where high frontierity conditions could not be produced through ethnic cleansing and a widespread process of substitution of local biota, a demographically weak community of Europeans ended up supervising a complicated and hierarchically structured population economy.38 In some areas, exclusivist stances yielded to co-opting strategies, as in the case of the Angolan assimilados, for example, or in the case of a long-lasting French colonial tradition of franchise for emancipated





creoles and blacks in the Antilles and around Dakar. At times, reliance on Indigenous labour could be rationalised as temporary, a ‘temporary exploitation’, as in the case of early Zionist stances vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabs.39 Elsewhere, demographic balances produced a situation in which the community of settlers would envisage a permanent ‘racial partnership’, as long as, as one prime minister of the settler-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland put it, it entailed the partnership of ‘European rider and African horse’.40 In the long run, however, as ‘trusteeship’ consolidated into a fully fledged body of colonial practice during the first decades of the twentieth century, anti-settler discourse, a strand of colonial attitudes that had never been completely silenced, gained renewed strength.41 In British Central and Eastern Africa, because of the incapacity of establishing demographic balances that could be determined as appropriate for a settler collective, the evolutionary progression from Crown Colony to Dominion status (after access to representative government, a practice that had been the expected constitutional itinerary characterising all the settler polities within the British Empire since the 1830s) was put to the test. In Kenya, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia – South Africa during this phase was proceeding in an autonomous fashion – a settler presence would have required eventual devolution of substantive political control. British oscillations and 1950s attempts to differentiate between Western African colonies and Central and East African ones were influenced by the presence of established communities of settlers. While British Prime Minister Macmillan had become ‘keenly anxious about the possibility of a Central African Boston tea party’, in the end, independence and black majority rule were conceded despite extraordinary and intense settler lobbying.42 In these cases, a contradiction between two long-lasting political traditions – trusteeship and the expected evolution of settlers’ political rights – had to be administratively resolved. Ultimately, East and Central African British colonial polities largely referred to a domain of the colonial imagination devoid of settler prophecies. Elsewhere, the need to impose substantive sovereignty had guided the politics of the settler collectives. A surviving autonomous capacity of controlling local developments, including an ability to influence the extent, quality and timing of settler land acquisition, was a cause of great concern and went beyond the need to ensure ongoing availability of real estate. Mid-nineteenth-century Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand is one example of a settler enterprise facing low frontierity conditions and resorting to military escalation in order to establish its substantive sovereignty, a trait that had become an essential prerequisite



186

for the ultimate viability of the settler community.43 In some cases, high frontierity circumstances could and were established via the ‘transfer’ of Indigenous peoples. Israel/Palestine is a case in point: whereas the initial (pre-state) expansion of Zionist settlement had happened in a context of low frontierity, after the war of 1948, high frontierity was artificially created with the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the expulsion of the Palestinian population.44 After 1967, with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, low frontierity conditions re-emerged (the Palestinian peoples of the Occupied Palestinian Territories could not be expelled) and the settlement enterprise could only be pursued in the context of low frontierity circumstances. In the consolidating settler ‘Angloworld’, even if the timing of Indigenous disappearance and/or assimilation varied, and this would make no little difference, the ultimate results of settler colonialism were thought to be inherently comparable, a matter of local variation on a common theme. Patrick Brantlinger has compellingly analysed this type of discursive production and the interplay of different perceptions in various colonial contexts. His comparative study included the North American, Australian and New Zealand frontiers during the nineteenth century and uncovered an extraordinary convergence of attitudes and expectations.45 The specific circumstances of each settler colonial experience may be intractably exceptional, not so the expectation of settler domination that underwrote them. Following Indigenous erasure, a typically settler narrative of adaptation, struggle against a harsh environment, economic development, and integration of migrants was generally established.46 Indigenous peoples, their survival, resistance, sovereignty and grievances, were inevitably considered as temporary, marginal, and by and large unsuitable for the historical narratives of a nationalising settler polity. Even when treaties with Indigenous peoples had been negotiated, these could be retroactively reinterpreted as provisional acknowledgement of an impermanent sovereignty.47 In any case, initial accommodations with Indigenous peoples could be unilaterally denounced at a time when the balance of power had shifted in favour of the local settler community, and a ‘second dispossession’ often followed the first one.48 (Eventually, however, settler collectives had to face the prospect of rearranging a number of paradigmatic expectations of their specific version of settler imagining. In Aotearoa/New Zealand the myth of a unique colonisation and a very special Indigenous constituency was reactivated in the 1970s and progressively given meaning in the 1980s and 1990s.49 Most Anglophone settler societies have by now approached ‘reconciliation’ processes with Indigenous peoples.)





On the other hand, faced with the need to police large Indigenous populations and their insurgencies, some settler states developed policies concerned with the need to constrain Indigenous mobility and unilaterally established hierarchically constituted and compartmentalised Indigenous entities. Bantustanisation could be understood as one stage of a transfer-based type of settler colonialism, a course of action which is attempted when prophecies of white settler demographic conquest have been disqualified and when fantasies of an ultimate population transfer have also been abandoned.50 There was, of course, yet another option, when failed prophecies of exclusivist settler domination produced outright genocidal accelerations, as in the case of early twentiethcentury German southwest Africa. As the construction of the colonial landscape had initially envisaged a continuing reliance on Herero and Nama workforce, the systematic liquidation of the Indigenous population that followed the Herero rebellion of 1904 resulted in the opposition between local colonists and General von Trotha. When the governor of the colony protested on behalf of the colonists against unrestrained mass murder (on the assumption that Indigenous labourers would be needed in the future), von Trotha replied that southwest Africa had to be a colony ‘in which the European himself can work in order to support his family’ (as good a definition as any of a settler colonial project).51 Jürgen Zimmerer has emphasised the link between the establishment in colonial contexts of a ‘population economy’ based on race and space and genocide.52 His archaeology of genocide (where the colonial precedent becomes a prerequisite for successive practices) identifies the tension between a colonial practice of exploitation of colonial labour and a settler imagination demanding that the developing frontiers comply with an established ideal-type of exclusivist settler colonial expansion.53 Progressively, during the twentieth century the geographies of colonialism and settler colonialism became more strictly defined and colonial and settler colonial forms expunged each other from their respective imaginative geographies. As the settler societies lost a number of ‘colonial’ determinants (for example, achieved national independence), the colonies or former colonies lost their settlers. The League of Nations Mandates following the First World War, for example, had a specific anti-settler determination. Mandatory Tanganyika was managed as a country that ‘will always remain a predominantly native country’, and ‘primarily a Black man’s country’, and this was hailed by the post-First World War Permanent Mandates Commission as a standard in the application of indirect rule and trusteeship.54 If British African policy



188

could be praised for being sufficiently anti-settler, South Africa’s de facto annexation of southwest Africa was criticised (Palestine, however, also a Mandate, was not treated like the others: as far as the Commission was concerned, Palestine was a white man’s country). Ultimately, indirect rule and trusteeship carried inherent expectations of eventual Indigenous sovereignty and decolonisation: influential colonial advocate Margery Perham commented, for example, that ‘it was like scaffolding around a building . . . the impermanent external planks European, the permanent structure African. One day, the core having proved capable of standing on its own, the scaffolding would be removed.’55 Like its pro-settler counterpart, anti-settler discourse eventually contributed to shaping extremely powerful imaginative geographies. Inheriting a tradition of Mandatory colonialism, after the Second World War, the United Nations compiled a list of non-self-governing territories presumably scheduled for ultimate decolonisation. Even US-administered Hawai’i was initially included, and this prompted US federal authorities to remove barriers preventing its formal accession to the Union.56 New Caledonia also occupied for a long time an ambiguous position in this context, prompting French authorities to eventually accede to negotiations that would lead to the Matignon Accords of 1988, which were crucial in envisaging for the first time the possibility of negotiating a French indivisible sovereignty. Where settlers had the upper hand, in the consolidating network of anglophone settler societies, decolonisation was never on the agenda. While the geographical imagination of colonialism and settler colonialism are distinct but could overlap, the geographical imagination of settler colonialism and decolonisation remain irreconcilable.57 Significantly, where decolonisation takes the form of a settler collective exodus, as happened in Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, North and South Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, southwest Africa/Namibia and, more recently, in the Gaza Strip (evacuated of Israeli settlers, but not yet of Israeli control), the decolonisation of territory is not matched, even symbolically, by an attempt to build decolonised relationships. In these cases, settler departure conceptually mirrors and reinforces settler colonialism’s inherent exclusivism, confirming a ‘winner takes all’ settler colonial frame of mind that demands that settler sovereignties entirely replace Indigenous ones (or vice versa).58 By denying the very possibility of a relation between coloniser and colonised after the discontinuation of a settler colonial regime, settler departure produces a circumstance where decolonisation cannot even conceptually be construed as a relationship between formally (yet not substantively) equal subjects.




190


Settler colonialism is traditionally attributed an excess of geography and a corresponding paucity of history. Historical geography as a scholarly field has explored the ‘changes in the land’ and the reorganisation of space that follow the appropriation and reallocation of tenure that is constitutive of settlement processes.59 The geographical analysis of settlement patterns, however, focuses on environmental factors and on economic development and can disregard settler colonialism as an interpretive category. As ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ are often used interchangeably, and as ‘settlement’ is used to refer both to the communities of Indigenous and exogenous peoples, these scholarly approaches see the movement of peoples but risk neglecting the sovereign entitlements that settlers carry with them and are able to enforce. On the other hand, the historians of colonial phenomena have reconstructed the imbrications of empire and geographical knowledge, but have been reluctant to consider settler colonial phenomena as systematically autonomous from colonial ones. And yet, colonialism and settler colonialism produce radically different geographies: as colonial forms generally rely on detailed inventories of colonial peoples, commodities and the possibility of their mobilisation and integration within international markets, settler colonialism usually proceeds by ‘emptying’ the landscape before it is thoroughly reorganised. Geographer Brian Harley perceptively noted that European cartographers dispossessed Amerindians ‘by engulfing them with blank spaces’, and in another context, Norman Etherington has even referred to ‘genocide by cartography’.60 We should attend to settler colonialism’s geographical specificity. If the spatial geography of colonialism is about an ‘otherness’ that needs to be appropriated, subjugated and mobilised, the spatial geography of settler colonialism, on the contrary, represents a void that needs to be filled.61 Ultimately, Mary Louise Pratt’s unpacking of the ‘imperial eyes’, eyes that ‘passively look out and possess’, should be integrated by noting that these eyes are also busy imagining important transformations, that they possess in different ways: on the one hand, they can see Indigenous people transformed, resettled, becoming productive and conducting themselves morally; on the other (and sometimes in conjunction), they can display an inclination to empty the landscape of an Indigenous presence.62 There is, moreover, a further, structuring difference. In A Letter from Sydney Edward Gibbon Wakefield – an indefatigable and ultimately very influential promoter of the possibility of establishing self-sustaining communities of Europeans overseas – imagines his departure from



Conclusion


‘Why’, she [… said], ‘it is terribly out of the way – down in the very right hand corner of the world.’ The chart being mine, I cut it in two through the meridian of Iceland, transposed the parts laterally, and turned them upside down. ‘Now’, I asked, ‘where is England?’ ‘Ah! Boy’, she replied; ‘you may do what you like with the map; but you can’t twist the world about in that manner, though they are making sad changes in it.’63 Australian historian Alan Atkinson has perceptively highlighted the ‘cartographic literacy’ that enables Wakefield’s manipulation.64 Though they share an anxious perception of the world surrounding them, the grandmother espouses the geographical imagination of colonialism: her world remains hierarchically centred on England. Wakefield, on the contrary, espouses a fully developed settler colonial geographical imagination. His rendition is designed to convince his audience of the advisability of this transition: there is ‘great difference, in short, between looking to a place and looking from it’, he concludes.65 This is one crucial difference separating the geographical imagination of colonialism and settler colonialism: the latter, unlike its counterpart, is ultimately a recentring act, where an anxious perception of growing contradictions produces a drive to escape. Wakefield’s explanation, however, is crucially premised on a self that is willing to ‘remove’ and yet remains stationary. The representation of the world – the map – is disarticulated, rearticulated and then turned upside down, but the perceiving subject remains stationary. Likewise, the fantasy of a happy, timeless and ultimately classless yeoman England (which is perceived as threatened by overpopulation and growing social strife) is relocated untouched. Colonialism retains a circular narrative structure where an outward movement is conceived with the intention to eventually return; settlers, on the contrary, move out in order to remain unaffected. Notes 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), p. 39. 2. See, for example, Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–48. 3. Quoted in M. I. Finley, ‘Colonies: an Attempt at a Typology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976), p. 186.



England and faces the task of explaining the whole enterprise to his grandmother:


4. See, for example, John L. Comaroff, ‘Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa’, American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989), especially pp. 671–7. 5. On the ‘anticipatory geographies’ of colonialism, see, for example, J. Brian Harley, ‘Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 522–42, and Daniel Clayton, Islands of Truth: the Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000). See also Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 6. See Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Colonialism and Genocides: Notes for the Analysis of a Settler Archive’, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 148–61. On geographical imaginations, see Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 7. As Penny Edwards convincingly demonstrates, a clear ‘bifurcation between settler colonialism and its hypothetical antithesis – the presumed conundrum of a colonialism without settlers’ must be qualified with an appraisal of a complicated pattern of overlapping practices involving ‘settler’ and ‘non-settler’ locales. Penny Edwards, ‘On Home Ground: Settling Land and Domesticating Difference in the “Non-settler” Colonies of Burma and Cambodia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, 3 (2003). Available at http://muse.jhu. edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/ v004/4.3edwards. html 8. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 62. 9. See Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially pp. 21–7. 10. On the geographies of colonialism, see, for example, Felix Driver, Geographies Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), and Alan Lester, ‘Historical Geographies of Imperialism’, in Modern Historical Geographies, ed. Brian Graham and Catherine Nash (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 100–17. 11. ‘Neo-Europes’ is Alfred W. Crosby’s definition of a settler society. See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially pp. 2–3, 6–7, 146–9 and 302–8. On imperial careers, see David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Imperial Careering: Colonial Lives across the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), especially pp. 23–66. 12. On Bartolomé de Las Casas’ sixteenth-century advocacy for the rights of American Indians, see, for example, Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), especially pp. 146–82. 13. On mapping as a technology enabling Indigenous dispossession, see, for example, Cole Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, 1 (2004): 165–82, especially pp. 175–6. For an entry to the literature of geography and imperialism, see Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: a Century



192

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review 102, 2 (1997), especially p. 409, note 81. Daniel Clayton, ‘The Creation of Imperial Space in the Pacific Northwest’, Journal of Historical Geography 26, 3 (2000), p. 529. John C. Weaver, ‘Frontiers into Assets: the Social Construction of Property in New Zealand, 1840–65’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27, 3 (1999): 17–54, and Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). James Belich, Making Peoples: a History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1996), p. 281. See, for example, Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia: dal fascismo a Gheddafi (Rome: Laterza, 1994). The high grounds in tropical settings occupied an ambiguous position in this taxonomy and were often represented as especially suitable locales for settled/ settler enterprise. On colonial hill stations as ‘settled’ locales, see, for example, Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998); S. Robert Aitken, Imperial Belvederes: the Hill Stations of Malaya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Concerns about Zionist capacity for developing a settler colonial enterprise, for example, can be gauged in a 1902 conversation with a member of the Rothschild family reported in Theodor Herzl’s diary: ‘I moved my chair round to the side of his better ear, and said: “I want to ask the British government for a colonization charter.” “Don’t say ‘charter’. This word has a bad sound”, Rothschild replied. “Call it what you please”, I replied. “I want to found a Jewish colony in a British possession”.’ Quoted in Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. 120. For Rothschild, a ‘charter’ was improper for people who could not be immediately recognised as colonisers in their own right, and could, at best, only aspire to be migrants in someone else’s colonial domain. A few generations of Zionist settlement would prove him wrong. The inescapable contradiction between two interpretations of a specific colonial enterprise (settler prophecies of domination on the one hand, and the expectation of migrant integration and readiness to submit to the policy of the colonial Mandatory administration on the other) would eventually precipitate an open conflict between settler and British forces. Quoted in E. H. Carr, What is History?, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 126. For an assessment of ‘visibility’ as a necessary condition for the establishment of a settler gaze (and how the open landscapes of Australia were an especially conducive location for the development of a settler project), see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 230–60. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 271–2. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, p. 297. See D. W. Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: the South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869–1884 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1970). Adrian Howkins, Chapter 1, this volume. After the Second World War, the Antarctic Colony Associates (ACA) of Jacksonville, Florida – it can get quite




25.

26. 27.

28.

Making and Unmaking Places warm down there – proposed that nuclear technology be utilised in the colonisation of Antarctica: ‘ACA is a small group of individuals interested in solving the problems and in developing the techniques that will enable them to construct self-supporting colonies on the Antarctic continent . . . It appears probable that scattered through the American population today are many individuals who possess that specific combination of hereditary traits which, less than a dozen generations ago, brought our ancestors to colonize this continent. The probable size of this group who possess either latent or active “pioneer” drives will become evident soon after the ACA program receives publicity. As might be expected, men with scientific background have also responded to the ACA appeal. It is safe to assume that our contemporary generation of scientists and engineers (some of whom manned the Manhattan project) can devise machinery for living successfully under the severe conditions of the Antarctic. ACA has begun the process of bringing these two groups together – the explorer-pioneer and the scientist-engineer – men able to accept the challenge that comes blasting out of the high south. There at the nadir of the world a wealth of opportunity lies waiting to be claimed by men able to fashion the equipment necessary for self-sufficient colonies and make them thrive in that barren frozen wasteland’ (US National Archive. State Department Central Decimal Files, 1950–54 702.022/9-150). Adrian Howkins kindly suggested I check this document. See John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the New World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Donald Denoon, ‘Understanding Settler Societies’, Historical Studies 18, 73 (1979), p. 512. For a recent rehearsing of the idea that settler colonial forms are inherently preferable to other colonising activities, see Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: an Empirical Investigation’, American Economic Review 91, 5 (2001): 1369–1401. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate a direct correlation between settler mortality, the possibility of establishing colonial settlements with early representative institutions respectful of private property rights, and current economic performance. The authors, however, systematically exclude data that would contradict their thesis: for example, they omit Zimbabwe (a test case characterised by little settler mortality and abysmal current economic performance), do not distinguish between the different regional histories of what would become the US (Virginia had a very high settler mortality for quite a while), and ignore the fact that the British Caribbean had very early representative institutions which were very respectful of property rights (in slaves, especially), but had high mortality rates. Trevor Burnard, ‘A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica’, Journal of Social History 28, 1 (1994): 63–82; Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: the Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai, 1843–1937’, Past and Present 159 (1998): 161–211. See also P. J. Marshall, ‘The Whites of British India, 1780–1830: a Failed Colonial Society?’, International History Review 12 (1990): 26–44.



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29. See John Prebble, Darien: the Scottish Dream of Empire (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000). 30. Quoted in Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 33. While a similar rhetoric would be mobilised during French attempts to build a passage two centuries later, the collective memory of settler failure would survive: in the 1930s Archibald Grenfell Price was ‘scientifically’ testing the community of US expatriates living in the Panama Canal Zone for possible signs of racial or other degenerations. See A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers in the Tropics (New York: AMS Press, 1978 [1939]). 31. Mahmood Mamdani, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa’, Inaugural Lecture as A. C. Jordan Professor of African Studies, University of Cape Town, 13 May 1998. Available at http://www.bard.edu/hrp/resource_pdfs/ mamdani.settler.pdf 32. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 33. Isaiah Bowman, ‘The Pioneer Fringe’, Foreign Affairs: an American Quarterly Review 6, 1, 4 (1927–8): 49–66. 34. Ibid., pp. 49, 50. 35. Ibid., p. 54. 36. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: the Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), especially pp. 4–8. 37. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: a Theoretical Overview (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), p. 7. 38. For an argument emphasising the importance of coerced labour in the expansion of colonial forms, see Yann Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat: Économie historique du salariat bride (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 39. Israeli historian of colonialism Gherson Shafir distinguished no less than six successive policies devised in order to enact the ‘conquest of labour’ in pre-state Israel/Palestine. See Gherson Shafir, ‘Zionism and Colonialism: a Comparative Approach’, in The Israel/Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappe (London: Routledge, 1999), especially p. 86. On settler ethnic cleansing, see, for example, Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially pp. 70–110. 40. Quoted in D. A. Low, Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 230. 41. Lorenzo Veracini ‘“Emphatically Not a White Man’s Colony”: Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Colonial Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History 43, 3 (2008): 189–205. 42. Low, Eclipse of Empire, p. 243. 43. See James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1988). 44. See Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially pp. 123–41. On ‘transfer’ and




45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

Making and Unmaking Places Zionism, see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1984 (Washington: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1991). Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Anthony D. Smith, for example, distinguishes four different patterns of nation-formation: the Western, the immigrant (‘where small part-ethnie are beneficiaries of a state of their own, with or without a struggle, and they then seek to absorb and assimilate waves of new immigrants from different cultures into what becomes increasingly a territorial nation and a political community, as in America, Argentina, Australia’), the ethnic, and the colonial. Anthony D. Smith, ‘State-Making and Nation-Building’, in States in History, ed. John A. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 241. See Michael Craufurd-Lewis, ‘Treaties with Aboriginal Minorities’, Aboriginal History 19 (1995): 41–78, and Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power of the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), especially pp. 104–14 and 125–48. See, for example, James Belich, ‘Myth, Race and Identity in New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History 31, 1 (1997): 6–22. See Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid: State, Power, and Space in South African Cities (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995), and Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006), especially pp. 25–40. Quoted in Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2000), p. 62. Italian genocidal activities in Libya were also crucially linked to the need to establish self-supporting settler communities. As noted by Eric Salerno, the newly developed counter-insurgency techniques were designed to repress the nationalist resistance and free lands suitable for settler communities at the same time. General Graziani’s concentration/re-education/elimination camps (for example: el Agheila) were a logical consequence of this double need. See Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia: Le atrocità nascoste dell’avventura coloniale italiana, 1911–1931 (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2005), especially pp. 10, 89. See Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide’, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 49–76. Quoted in Susan Pedersen, ‘Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations’, in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, ed. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 123. Quoted in John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: the Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 249. Hawaiian accession as a pre-emptive move is emphasised, for example, in J. Kehaulani Kauanui, ‘Colonialism in Equality: Hawaiian Sovereignty and the Question of US Civil Rights’, South Atlantic Quarterly 107, 4 (2008), p. 643.



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57. See Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation’, borderlands e-journal 6, 2. Available at http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/ veracini_settler.htm 58. See Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: the Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 163. 59. See William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983). 60. Brian Harley, ‘Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, 2 (1992), p. 531; Norman Etherington, ‘Genocide by Cartography: Secrets and Lies in Maps of the South-Eastern African Interior, 1830–1850’, in Disputed Territories: Land Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, ed. David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), pp. 207–32. On colonialism’s foundational ‘cosmography of riches’, see Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), especially p. 42. 61. On spatial strategies and settler society, see, for example, Sherene H. Razack (ed.), Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (London: Between the Lines, 2002). 62. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 24–36. 63. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ‘A Letter from Sydney: the Principal Town of Australasia’, in The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M. F. Lloyd Prichard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), p. 140. 64. Alan Atkinson, ‘Conquest’, in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 36. 65. Wakefield, ‘A Letter from Sydney’, p. 141.




The Politics of ‘Periodical Counting’: Race, Place and Identity in Southern New Zealand Angela Wanhalla

The historic relationship between Nga- i Tahu, the predominant Ma- ori tribe of the South Island of New Zealand, and the census-taking process over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one fraught with material, spatial and political implications for the tribe.1 Census taking provided evidence for the erasure of Nga- i Tahu land ownership and territorial rights, while enumerators also reconstructed the tribal population as ‘white’. ‘Periodical counting’ played an important role in the progress of settler colonialism, as well as the spread of colonial authority, and of course, underpinned the production of knowledge so crucial to the imperial project of expansion. Indeed, the ‘census represents a model of the Victorian encyclopaedic quest for total knowledge’.2 But the gathering of statistics involved more than the production of knowledge to fix, bound, control and intervene; periodical counting also pointed to erasures upon many indigenous populations in former colonies through law and violence. Throughout the nineteenth century the census was resisted, engaged with, and sometimes accommodated by indigenous peoples in settler societies. Indeed, the census was not merely just an act of counting people. As this chapter explores, it also embodied indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, as demonstrated by Nga- i Tahu leaders during the Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission (1890). During this Commission, and by the 1890s more generally, Nga- i Tahu leaders drew a link between land loss and counting, and sought to redefine the enumeration process, by establishing a ‘census’ that has become the basis for tribal membership, participation and identity today. I trace Nga- i Tahu resistance to the census in this chapter, and the emergence of a tribal register, or ‘census’, as a result of Nga- i Tahu critique of settler colonialism and its impact, particularly the erosion of tribal land. 198



8

Race, Place and Identity in Southern New Zealand 199

Following a series of land purchases between 1844 and 1864, a number of colonial officials gathered information about southern New Zealand’s indigenous population for the purpose of setting aside reserve land under the terms of these purchases. Population counts were central to the process of settling new lands, and of most significance to Nga- i Tahu were the censuses of Walter Mantell undertaken in 1848 and 1852.3 Mantell’s undercounting of the Nga- i Tahu population in the Canterbury, Otago and Southland regions had significant material implications for Nga- i Tahu communities because the number and extent of native reserves within purchase blocks were determined on the basis of population size. By the 1890s, over 90 per cent of the Nga- i Tahu population was landless. Mantell’s census, and its economic consequences, was constantly referred to by Nga- i Tahu leaders throughout a series of commissions of inquiry and official investigations into land grievances from the 1870s to the 1890s. Walter Mantell, who acted simultaneously as a surveyor and an enumerator, embodies the link between race and place in the census taking process during the mid-nineteenth century, primarily because his 1848 and 1852 censuses shaped and influenced the development of Nga- i Tahu politics and identity into the twentieth century. Rob Watts has argued that ‘colonial censuses became a central part of the governmentality used to mark the “progress” of colonial “settlement” and to trace out the unsettling of the Aboriginal peoples’.4 Colonial censuses mark the progress of European settlement and ‘worked in parallel with the cartographic processes of surveying the land and drawing boundaries’.5 Mantell embodies these parallel processes of erasing indigenous peoples from the land. During the mid-nineteenth century Nga- i Tahu territory was emptied for reoccupation and boundaries of traditional settlement and resource use was severely restricted through the processes of counting and boundary marking.6 This historical relationship between Nga- i Tahu and the census taking process underlines ‘the authority of the state to divide, count, mark, and erase’.7 New Zealand’s earliest censuses were conducted by missionaries who had spread throughout the country by the 1840s, and by employees of the Aborigines Protection Society, but these were not nationwide in their reach or very comprehensive. Local authorities conducted partial censuses of the Ma- ori population within their boundaries throughout the 1850s, but, again, these were imprecise.8 Nga- i Tahu were subject to periodical counting from the 1840s, beginning in 1843 and 1844



The census and cartography


with Edward Shortland, the Sub-Protector of Aborigines, who undertook a journey through the southern regions of New Zealand recording the population of each settlement visited.9 Walter Mantell, recently appointed Commissioner for Extinguishing Native Title, followed Shortland. Mantell’s 1848 census of Canterbury Nga- i Tahu and his 1852 census of the Murihiku (Otago and Southland) population took place immediately after systematic colonisation of these regions by British settlers. His census work took place at a time when colonial officials were eager to gain access to Nga- i Tahu land, and was undertaken with specific instructions to mark out native reserves within the boundaries of certain purchase blocks. Population counts continued to be taken of Nga- i Tahu prior to the introduction of the first nationwide Ma- ori census in 1874, by Alfred Chetham Strode and Alexander Mackay, in addition to Francis Dart Fenton’s imprecise 1858 census.10 Of all these enumerations, it was Mantell’s censuses that had the most serious material effects upon the tribe, fixing them to a place and erasing their occupancy of land. In the years prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840 interactions and encounters in southern New Zealand took place on Nga- i Tahu terms. With the arrival of the New Zealand Company, a private British land purchase company based on the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Nga- i Tahu embarked on a new phase of encounter, one that led to the systematic British settlement of the southern region. The New Zealand Company purchased large tracts of the South Island in the 1840s, before representatives of the British Crown completed the purchase of Nga- i Tahu territory in 1864. These ‘sales’ enabled the peaceful settlement of the South Island and began the ‘gentle occupation’ of Nga- i Tahu land.11 A total of ten deeds pertaining to the purchase of Nga- i Tahu territory from 1844 until 1864 exist, but my central concern are the Kemp’s Purchase (1848) and the Murihiku Purchase (1851–4), because Mantell played a leading part in applying Governor George Grey’s native land purchase policy in these regions. Blocks of reserved land were set aside as part of the New Zealand Company and Crown purchases. The ways in which native reserves were understood and managed in the period from 1844 to 1864 are complex and differ depending on the policy in force at the time of their creation. In the Otago Purchase of 1844, for instance, lands excluded from purchase were denoted as ‘reserves’, and not included in the Crown Grant to the New Zealand Company. At the time of the Kemp’s Purchase, negotiated between Nga- i Tahu and the Crown, as well as the New Zealand Company in 1848, the manner in which reserves were dealt with was very different. In that year Governor Grey’s policy on



200

native reserves encompassed their inclusion within the boundaries of a purchase block thereby extinguishing native title to that land.12 By 1848 ‘native reserves’ were to be promised at purchase, but not allocated until later, unlike the Otago case, where the ‘reserves’ were marked out and boundaries agreed to between the two parties at the time of the purchase. In 1848 Henry Tacy Kemp, acting for the Crown, negotiated the purchase of twenty million acres of land encompassing modern-day Otago, Westland and Canterbury, for £2,000. Kemp vigorously pursued Grey’s new purchase policy of securing a block of land first and then allocating promised reserves at a later date. Walter Mantell was sent to Canterbury to complete Kemp’s Purchase. His tasks were to mark out native reserves, and while doing so he was also to take a census of the population. While Mantell was issued official instructions by the LieutenantGovernor of New Munster (as the South Island was then known) to complete negotiations and set aside liberal reserve lands, he instead followed Grey’s verbal instructions to restrict the reserves to a small acreage in compliance with the wishes of the New Zealand Company which was to colonise the purchase block with British settlers. Mantell followed Grey’s instructions to the letter, eventually allocating a total of 6,309 acres for a population of 637, amounting to ten acres per head. But as Harry Evison states, ‘Mantell did not count everybody.’ He failed to traverse the entire purchase block and enumerate the total population, which amounted to twice the figure of his 1848 return.13 Impressed with Mantell’s ability to quickly and quietly ‘complete’ the Kemp’s Purchase, Grey appointed him Commissioner of Crown Lands for New Munster in late 1851. One of his first tasks was to undertake the purchase of the Murihiku block, an area of land comprising modern Otago, Southland and Fiordland. Yet another new purchase and native reserve policy was pursued by Mantell for Murihiku. Instead of pursuing the purchase of the block first, he fixed reserves before the purchase was completed. In order to carry out this policy Mantell took a census of twenty-four settlements ‘so as to record who would be entitled to share in the reserves’. Seven reserves were marked out, totalling 4,875 acres, for 140 people, but again, Mantell undercounted the total population.14 Throughout his sojourn in the South Island Mantell encountered persistent opposition to his surveying work, and in order to gain the compliance of the residents he promised them further reserves in the future. This promise never eventuated. It was not just Nga- i Tahu who challenged Mantell’s authority; white men married to Nga- i Tahu women also caused him some difficulty. In order to allay their fears about land




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there were resident a number of families of halfcastes, whose fathers it was naturally supposed might, unless reassured to their prospects after the cession of the land to government, throw obstacles in the way of its acquisition: so when I was sent in August to persuade or compel those natives who had not joined in Kemp’s deed to acknowledge that their land was sold to the Crown, and with the rest to permit the survey of Reserves within the Block, I was instructed to promise these people, that when the land belonged to the Crown provision in land under Crown Title would be made for their wives and children. To have included this provision within the Native Reserves would have, it was held, subjected the Natives therein to undue domination on the part of the White’s and half-castes of their families.15 Mantell’s job was to keep these men off the reserve, and to prevent further discontent by promising them land grants.16 The small reserves Mantell set aside, the vague boundaries of the purchase blocks, as well as the unfulfilled promises of schools, hospitals and future reserves became the basis of Nga- i Tahu grievances. In 1876 Nga- i Tahu leaders pressed for the investigation of the purchases and the adequacy of the reserves set aside by colonial officials. A fighting fund called Te Kereme (The Claim) was established and contributions were received from all Nga- i Tahu families to press for an official investigation into the land purchases. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s government commissions and inquires were conducted into the ‘land question’ in the South Island, but little was achieved.17 One of the first inquiries was the Smith-Nairn Commission (1879–80) in which a census of Nga- i Tahu was compiled. This would be repeated in commissions that followed. Between 1888 and 1890 three joint committees were established by the government with little result, and in 1890 a Royal Commission was set up to further inquire into Nga- i Tahu grievances, but many leaders complained that its parameters were too narrow. Their complaint was well founded, as we shall soon see.

The census as a racial document Not only did colonial censuses count the Ma- ori population, they were also racial documents employed to trace the biological assimilation of



rights, Mantell promised those men residing with their Nga- i Tahu wives and children within the boundaries of the purchase blocks a land grant under individual Crown title. According to Mantell, in 1848

Ma- ori into the mainstream population. A history of extensive crosscultural contact and interracial marriage has resulted in a tribal identity that is sometimes questioned as non-authentic, and has shaped the modern perception of Nga- i Tahu as the ‘white tribe’.18 Cultural contact in this region began in the 1790s with the establishment of the sealing industry on offshore islands. This was a short-term form of contact that eventually gave way to shore whaling on the coast of southern New Zealand from 1829 to 1850. Whaling stations were economic, social and cultural spaces of interaction where male newcomers and indigenous women entered into a wide range of interracial relationships, including interracial marriage. During the whaling era, 140 male newcomers founded mixed-descent families in southern New Zealand.19 While the link between Nga- i Tahu and ‘whiteness’ has its antecedents in a history of sustained interracial marriage, it was consolidated by colonial population counts undertaken from the 1840s. By the 1890s census reports positioned Nga- i Tahu as the most ‘European’ of the Ma- ori tribes, based on genetics, their ‘way of living’, the use of English, as well as their Western dress and appearance. But southern Nga- i Tahu did not accept the racial classifications and categories employed in the census, and, in fact, used the census to assert Nga- i Tahu standards of identity formation and inclusion. By the late nineteenth century persons of mixed descent were active participants in tribal politics, and their everyday lives undermined any official attempt to categorise them racially. Census reports were one of the key sites in which official views about ‘race’ were expressed and where state anxieties were articulated.20 During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century the national census was a racially informed document, and census enumerators were active participants in the formation of racial ideas, the construction of racial categories and the definition of ethnic identities. By the 1890s officials employed a ‘language of fractions’ to classify the Nga-i Tahu population.21 In the New Zealand census racial terminology – notably ‘half-caste’ – was used to quantify and measure the changing ethnic dimension of the indigenous population, and was employed at a time when social scientists were interested in the implications of the crossing of ‘races’. Significantly, the ‘language of fractions’ – ‘three-quarter caste’, ‘quarter-caste’ and ‘one-eighth caste’ in addition to the regular use of ‘half-caste’ in the census – was first applied by a government official to Nga-i Tahu in 1890, but did not enter the official lexicon of the national census until 1926. Ma- ori were ‘periodically counted’ in multiple ways. The first nationwide census of the Ma- ori population was undertaken in 1874. Although





regional censuses had been taken prior to this date, the 1874 census set the pattern for their enumeration on a national basis. Notably, the Ma- ori census was held separately to that of the general population and was not comprehensive, with officials initially preferring estimates rather than precision.22 Carried out by sub-enumerators, these officials reported on their district to the Native Department, the contents of which were framed by the instructions issued by the Registrar-General. Information was requested on the health and welfare of Ma- ori; the size of the population; any increase or decrease in the population of ‘half-castes’; and the extent to which those of mixed descent were ‘living as Maori’ or ‘living as European’.23 At the same time, district native officers reported annually to the Native Department on the nature of the Ma- ori population of their given area, passing on information that was similar to that generated by the enumerators, but on a more regular basis. Native Officers reported annually, while the Ma- ori census was undertaken initially every four, then five, years. Interracial marriage was investigated in the census, and noted in general reports, as was the increase or decrease in the mixed-descent population. But the ‘language of fractions’ employed in the official census was restricted to the term ‘half-caste’, which was employed in the first official general census of Ma- ori in 1874. The question of who was Ma- ori and who was not was established within a variety of statutes. Under native land legislation, a ‘Native’ was defined as anyone of 50 per cent or more ‘blood’. A person of less than 50 per cent Ma- ori ‘blood’ was enumerated as European. In addition, the Census Act 1877 distinguished the mixed-descent population through the categories ‘half-castes living as European’ and ‘half-castes living as Maori’. As a result, the decision to categorise an individual as ‘half-caste’ was not evenly applied by census officials, who often based classification on living conditions and visual appearance. In 1891 persons of mixed descent in Otago were, the enumerator decided, not ‘living as members of a Maori tribe’ and were omitted from the Ma- ori census and instead included in the general one.24 In 1906 ‘as a rule, the sub-enumerators show no discretion in separating the half-castes who are living as members of Native tribes from those who are, to all intents and purposes, living on exactly the same footing as the Pakeha [Europeans]’.25 Moreover, it was ‘quite impossible to check their work in this respect’.26 By 1921 ‘census practice included the classing of all those nearer in blood to European than half-caste as full-blooded European, and vice versa, as Maoris’.27 Graduated ‘blood’ categories were first formally utilised to classify the Ma- ori population in 1926, when Ma- ori filled out census forms by individual household



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for the first time – following the pattern of the general census – even though they did not answer the same questions as the general population until 1951.28 In 1936 the classification of ‘half-castes’ according to mode of living was discontinued because of confusion over classification as well as inconsistency of categorisation. Despite the difficulties of classification, politicians and government agents used the census to make claims about the success of assimilation policy in the early twentieth century. Physical and cultural absorption was regarded as the key to Ma- ori survival in the twentieth century, and its success was judged in the form of interracial marriage and the production of the embodied hybrid.29 The Registrar-General noted in 1906 that the census provided an insight into the widely held idea that the ‘ultimate fate of the Maori race is to become absorbed in the European’ and ‘any tendency [that] is shown in this direction must be gathered from the increase or decrease in the number of half-castes’.30 In the 1901 census report the fate of the Ma- ori population was linked to physical and cultural hybridity. According to the report, the ‘ultimate destiny [of Ma- ori] must remain a matter of speculation. The pessimist sees a remnant of beggars wandering over the land their ancestors once possessed, while the optimist looks forward to a complete fusion of the two races.’31 By 1916, William Herries, the Minister for Native Affairs, argued that the ‘policy of the Government has been to encourage the blending of the two races’.32 The result, predicted one commentator, was that Ma- ori ‘will become extinct, but not in the sense of dying out, but by reason of amalgamation with our people’.33 From the 1870s, at a time when Ma- ori became subject to national census enumeration, Nga- i Tahu were claimed as the most ‘European’ of the Ma- ori tribes. James West Stack, district officer for the Canterbury region, reported in 1877 that, in ‘dress, food, and house accommodation, there is very little to distinguish the Maoris in the South Island from their European neighbours’.34 By 1886, it was claimed that Nga- i Tahu resident in the towns of Geraldine and Waimate had ‘adopted the European mode of living, dress in the same manner, eat the same food, and live in cottages not very unlike those occupied by their white neighbours of the labouring class’.35 Census enumerators and native officers attested to this transition. In the 1906 national census report the living conditions of Nga- i Tahu were noted as ‘particularly European in manner’. In that year Nga- i Tahu had largely ‘separate holdings and separate homes, although the areas they hold and cultivate are much smaller than are usually owned by Europeans’.36 The belief that Ma- ori ‘in the South Island now live in European fashion’ was commonly




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The Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission, 1890 In 1890 the erasures of ‘race’ carried out in the national census, and space, carried out by Mantell, collided in a Royal Commission led by Alexander Mackay, the Commissioner of Native Reserves. The Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission investigated the adequacy of the reserves set aside for Nga- i Tahu between 1844 and 1864 for their maintenance and support. Mackay visited all Nga- i Tahu settlements in 1890 to take evidence. Obtaining a correct list of residents at each settlement, and the land owned by them, was central to realising the core aim of assessing the sufficiency of the land held in Nga- i Tahu hands. Mackay did not find this an easy task, because Nga- i Tahu believed the Commission was yet another government tactic designed to delay investigation of the land purchases and the settlement of their claim. Census taking was implicated in this strategy. Mackay encountered the same attitude to the census, and, by extension, to his request for a list of residents, at every settlement: namely that inquiries of this nature were designed, according to Nga- i Tahu leader Hoani Matiu merely to pacify and amuse the people until they all died out. Probably this was the object of the periodical counting (taking the census): [the] Government appeared to be desirous of ascertaining how long it would be before the race became extinct.39 Nga- i Tahu viewed ‘periodical counting’ as evidence of government delays, because each ‘showed a marked decrease’ in the population.40 Much suspicion was attached to the process of ‘periodical counting’. Leaders everywhere commented upon the material implications of inaccurate census taking, linking it explicitly with their economic survival. Mackay understood the significance of population counts to Nga- i Tahu. In a supplementary report, he advised the government on the issues that were raised at the inquiry but which sat outside its parameters – namely the omissions of 1848 and 1852. In his 1848 census, for example, Mantell failed to account for those who were absent for seasonal food gathering or visiting relatives in Otago and Southland.41 In failing to enumerate on an inclusive basis not all Nga- i Tahu who were entitled, gained land,



attributed to early and widespread interracial marriage.37 Living conditions, in combination with their level of education and visual appearance, saw Nga- i Tahu enumerated as part of the general census from 1916, meaning they were no longer counted as Ma- ori.38

leaving those who were enumerated to provide for their relatives. The power of the 1848 population count was thus outlined. Statistics reinforced the erasure enacted through the early population counts and the extent of the loss experienced by Nga- i Tahu. Mackay found that Mantell had omitted 843 people, and on the basis of the ten acres per person he set aside, this equated to a loss of 8,430 acres in 1848.42 Mackay found the reserves set aside for Nga- i Tahu were inadequate for their maintenance and implicated the census taking process in the widespread landlessness experienced by 90 per cent of the tribe in 1890. The inquiry of 1890 was designed to obtain information on landholdings through a ‘list of names of all the Native population, inclusive of half-castes and quarter-castes residing amongst the Europeans’.43 Mackay’s object ‘in including all the descendants of Natives, irrespective of whether they were living amongst the European community or not, was to make the return as full as possible’.44 Ironically, Mackay hoped that a census return could assist in rectifying earlier erasures. The outcome of the Commission was a thirty-page list naming every person of Nga- i Tahu descent, and most significantly, classified the population by ‘race’.45 But the ‘return’ was very different to the national census in one important way. The terms employed to denote ethnicity – ‘three-quarter caste’, ‘half-caste’, ‘quarter-caste’ and ‘one-eighth caste’ – represent the first time these categories were employed in a census in New Zealand, and were being used at a time when colonial societies elsewhere were increasingly employing the census to classify, measure and quantify indigenous populations.46 The purpose of the 1890 return was not to define Nga- i Tahu ‘racially’. Rather, the appellation of ‘fractions’ to each individual served to reinforce the view held by officials that Nga- i Tahu were ‘white’. Racial terms were not used in the list in aid of racial science, but employed to denote a much more inclusive view of tribal identity and participation: one that followed Nga- i Tahu structures and processes. Mackay emphasised throughout his report that the return was to be thorough, and that all descendants whether living as European or not, unlike the Ma- ori census, which required inclusion on the basis of residence in a Ma- ori settlement, were included as Nga- i Tahu. Mackay held a thorough and efficient inquiry, and the result was a report sympathetic to the tribe. He adopted an interpretation of Ma- ori identity that contrasted to official views embodied in the national census and native land legislation, and which was not as broad or inclusive of persons of mixed descent. As a ‘return’, Mackay’s list did not conform to an official census, despite being regarded as such by the man who undertook it. The return,





claimed Mackay, included ‘all persons of the Native race and its descendants, residing either at the settlements . . . or in the adjacent localities, whose parents or relatives belong to such settlements’.47 Critical of the recently returned nationwide Ma- ori census, Mackay claimed it did not ‘exhibit all the population, inclusive of persons descended from Natives’, unlike his return.48 While it was a ‘return’, many aspects of the process – identification of age, ethnic status and marriage status – did conform to census taking practice in 1890s New Zealand. In every Nga- i Tahu community the lists Mackay would compile were generated in the same fashion, despite initial reluctance on behalf of many community leaders. At each settlement the purpose of the list was explained, and it was impressed upon community members that their wish that the government know the extent of their landlessness depended upon the provision of the fullest information possible, which ‘was a matter that would rest with themselves’.49 A committee was formed to prepare the list of residents at each settlement, which was read out to ‘afford an opportunity for any persons who were omitted to apply to have their names included’.50 The problems encountered with Mantell’s early population counts were to be prevented, and to ‘ensure accuracy each head of family present was questioned whether all names were included’.51 This approach was taken at all settlements, even if many had to be convinced to do so, like the residents at Moeraki, who initially refused to make a list because this kind of ‘information had been frequently furnished, and nothing had come of it’.52 Many Nga- i Tahu used the inquiry of 1890 to make statements about the inaccuracy of earlier census lists, and attempted to use the process to gain acknowledgement of those previously omitted so that their descendants could be provided for. In short, they wished Mantell’s censuses to be updated and the omissions acknowledged, because, as the people of Bluff noted, erasures resulted in serious losses for the relatives of these people. No land was set apart for them, and thus their descendants experienced landlessness as a result of incorrect enumeration.53 Census taking was ultimately involved in the process of erasure in this instance, and Nga- i Tahu leaders used the opportunity presented by the inquiry and Mackay’s need for a ‘correct list’ to rectify the invisibility enacted in 1848 and 1852. The people of Temuka pointed out the omissions of Mantell’s 1848 list, while at Kaiapoi a list of those omitted in 1848 was read out, and only after this was the return requested by Mackay favoured upon him.54 The 1890 return makes a powerful statement about the complicity of the census process in enacting erasures of people from place. Mackay’s



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investigation generated a list of 2,212 people, which ‘embraces all the Native population together with their descendants irrespective of the degree of consanguinity’55 compared to the 1,231 returned as Nga- i Tahu in the national census of the same year. In this respect Mackay’s list followed Nga- i Tahu views of identity, seen in the process through which the lists were generated. At each settlement Mackay ‘requested the parties to furnish a list of names of the present residents’.56 The inclusion of persons as Nga- i Tahu was left to the communities to decide upon, and was based on residence, tribal participation and descent. The result was a list of names that followed Nga- i Tahu custom, with genealogy, or whakapapa, employed as the basic criterion of Nga- i Tahu membership. Amongst Nga- i Tahu, and in Ma- ori society generally, whakapapa denotes descent and kinship links and is the foundation of identity, encompassing tribal origins and embodying links with other tribal entities. Whakapapa is recited to validate a given social order, to make claims to political territories, its boundaries, as well as claims to land and resources.57 The 1890 list reflects a Nga-i Tahu interpretation of the census taking process. Identity was constructed around whakapapa rather than ‘race’, and this was not necessarily bound to a place. Some individuals appear twice in the return, reflecting their rights and kinship ties to multiple places, even if they did not reside there. Louisa Barrett, for instance, is listed at the settlement of Taieri in Otago, where she was born, and also at Kaiapoi, in Canterbury, where she resided. Because Nga-i Tahu ways of recording identity were operating in the 1890 return, persons of mixed descent, many of less than ‘half-caste’ status and, therefore not Ma-ori as understood within New Zealand Pa-keha- law, were named and claimed as Nga-i Tahu by community leaders. Mackay attempted to prevent multiplicity by reading the lists of names generated at all settlements at the final sitting of the inquiry at Kaiapoi ‘to enable them to be identified, with a view to prevent the names being duplicated’.58 Multiplicity could not be prevented because those resident in the settlement as well as ‘relatives at a distance’ were included in the list, making duplication inevitable.59 Nga- i Tahu also defied attempts to categorise and fix their population to one place through other means. By the late nineteenth century surnames of European origin had become widespread amongst Nga- i Tahu. European names and their Ma- ori transliterations disrupted the scientific and objective census process. Multiple names translated into a multiplicity of representation in the census list, especially when Nga- i Tahu communities had a measure of control over the census process. Importantly, multiplicity disrupted interpretation of the 1890 list as a meaningful





guide to the success of assimilation. For example, the Palmers were a large and prominent mixed-descent family living at Taieri in the 1890s, but in the return family members are listed as Palmer but also by the transliteration, Paama. The Palmer/Paama family was exercising one strategy to increase their access to land, and rectify, to some extent, Mantell’s erasures. Success in generating multiple listings of the same name required Nga- i Tahu communities to have a measure of control over the census taking process, the complicity of the community, and Mackay’s unfamiliarity with the kinship ties of Nga- i Tahu families. The 1890 return of Nga- i Tahu settlements points to the ability of Ma- ori, especially those of mixed descent, to disrupt the census taking process through a variety of strategies. They did so because the question of land rights was a fraught issue amongst Nga- i Tahu, at a time when the tribe was grappling with the inadequacy of reserved lands to accommodate a growing population, one increasingly of mixed descent. The 1890 return was not the first instance of Nga- i Tahu resistance to the census taking process. In 1878 James West Stack remarked that he ‘should have sent it [the census return] in earlier, but for the senseless opposition offered by the elder Maoris, who in every place hindered my obtaining the desired information, and forced me to get it secretly from anyone I could induce to give it’ because ‘they persist in thinking that the numbering of the people is some way meant to injure them’.60 Resistance to the census was also widespread amongst Ma- ori communities at this time, especially in North Island settlements where the land wars (1860–72), and the resulting confiscation of three million acres of ‘rebel’ tribes, were part of recent memory.61 Resistance to large-scale government purchases of Ma- ori land in the Taranaki and Waikato regions began in the 1850s, and eventually led to the formation of a peaceful pan-tribal Ma- ori political movement in 1858, known as the Kingitanga, to prevent further purchases and to retain land in Ma- ori hands, or, at the very least, to moderate and control the extent of the purchases. In part, the success of the Kingitanga in halting purchases, and claims by colonial officials that this group was intending war against settlers, led to twelve years of interracial conflict in the North Island, known collectively as the New Zealand wars. During the period of the conflict census taking was suspended in ‘rebel’ areas, and decades after the wars ended, census enumerators found it exceedingly difficult to gain access to Ma- ori settled districts, especially the King Country or Kingitanga region. It was here that the Kingitanga leaders and followers resided after their lands were confiscated. They lived there on the goodwill of the Nga- ti Maniapoto tribe,



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who had established a boundary line, which was not to be crossed by Pa- keha- . The Registrar-General noted the ‘partial success’ of the 1886 census in his report that year, as well ‘as the suspicion entertained by very many of the Maoris as to the motives of the Government for taking the census (especially as to the return of cultivations and stock) [which] is still a powerful factor against a complete enumeration’.62 Most resistant to the census were the ‘King Natives’ and the followers of Te Whiti, a prophetic and pacifist leader located in Taranaki. It is not surprising census enumerators could not gain access to the very places where the wars had the most material impact on Ma- ori communities. When officials did gain access to North Island communities after the wars, they encountered numerous obstacles to the gathering of correct information. While conducting the Ma- ori census on the east coast of North Island during 1878 Frederick Ormond found the population scattered in small settlements, and in order to prevent returning ‘the same person twice’ it was necessary to ‘see every individual’, but even these visits could not prevent previous problems encountered including chiefs claiming ‘the same man and also that many men had two or three names’.63 While multiple names presented a problem to European enumerators like Ormond, by the 1911 census Ma- ori enumerator Erueti Hohepa argued that ‘strange enumeration’ could be negated if the enumerator was ‘acquainted with individual natives, [and] their homes’.64 Nga- i Tahu fears about ‘periodical counting’ were not limited to that tribe or to the nineteenth century, but continued to be expressed throughout Ma- ori society, whose leaders associated the gathering of statistics with land loss. Hohepa stated in 1911 that ‘The Maori thinks that if – for instance – he truly said that he owned a 1000 acre block, and that he worked only 30 acres of it, that the balance would be taken from him.’65 Ma- ori had a complex relationship with the census process. While the collection of data was often viewed as the catalyst for government intervention and potential land loss, Ma- ori leaders were also aware of the consequences if their community was not enumerated. Many Ma- ori valued loyalty to the Crown, and submission to census taking can be interpreted as an acceptance of that authority. Inia Ranginui, for example, wrote to the Native Department in 1911 because the enumerator had failed to visit his community, as well as three others nearby. As he put it, ‘our complaint is that our names were not entered in his papers, neither were our cultivations nor our extensive land-clearing operations for farming recorded, to say nothing of our stock. Our desire is to show this year that we are proceeding along Pakeha [European] industrial lines and that we are doing real good work.’66




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Nga- i Tahu have reworked and reinvented census taking to account for culturally appropriate ways of understanding tribal identity. As Stephanie Kelly has remarked, Nga- i Tahu have used the census to construct a modern form of identity. A list of Nga- i Tahu alive in 1848, known as the Blue Book, was completed under the leadership of tribal elders in the early twentieth century.67 The ability to trace descent from those listed in the Blue Book is the basis for inclusion of an individual as a member of Nga- i Tahu. Ironically, the Blue Book, also known as the beneficial register, is based in part on Mantell’s 1848 and 1852 returns. The beneficial register is a result of historical circumstances. Its existence ‘derives from early land purchases and reluctance of the Crown to fulfil promises’, which led to the establishment of Te Kereme in 1876 to push for the recognition of these promises and a resolution of the Nga- i Tahu land claim. As part of the claims process leaders recognised the need to identify every individual alive at 1848, when the Kemp’s Purchase took place, as well as their descendants.68 In 1925 the Ma- ori (formerly Native) Land Court undertook an investigation to establish a list of individuals entitled to share in benefits of a future settlement of the Nga- i Tahu claim. People were asked to prepare their whakapapa evidence and submit an application to the Court for consideration. The Court’s work, however, had a narrow focus, and limited its investigation to establishing the beneficial owners of the Kemp’s Purchase. The criteria for judging succession was occupancy and ancestral ties, and on that basis the Court determined that 1,551 individuals were entitled to be declared beneficiaries.69 The 1925 Court sitting was problematic because it limited investigation to the boundaries of the Kemp’s Purchase and excluded all other Nga- i Tahu, thereby redefining the extent of Nga- i Tahu territory and its membership. Secondly, the main historical evidence referenced by the judge was Mantell’s 1848 list, which many Nga- i Tahu leaders of previous generations had already claimed was incomplete.70 Again there were omissions from the process and applications to be recognised as beneficiaries were sent to the Court. The present beneficial register, which is the basis of tribal membership and therefore claims to benefit from the Nga- i Tahu settlement reached with the New Zealand Government in 1998, requires proof of descent from one or more ancestors alive in 1848. This list was prepared in 1929 by the Nga- i Tahu Census Committee, which was established to rectify omissions from the 1925 Land Court list. In 1945 the Nga- i Tahu Maori Trust Board was established under the Nga- i Tahu Claim Act to represent



Nga- i Tahu and the census in the twentieth century

beneficiaries established in 1925 by the Court. The 1929 list was not given legal validity until the passage of the Ma- ori Purposes Act 1966, giving the Trust Board the right to admit new applicants to the roll.71 In the 1970s the Nga- i Tahu Whakapapa Unit, under the sole direction of Terry Ryan, worked from that time to establish a comprehensive tribal register at a time when the legal definition of the term ‘Ma- ori’ was redefined in 1975 as inclusive of all those of Ma- ori descent.72 Additions to the register continue to take place.

Conclusion Between 1844 and 1864 Nga- i Tahu lost the majority of their territory and were left with small reserves on marginal and uneconomic land. As a consequence, by 1890 Nga- i Tahu experienced widespread poverty, with 90 per cent recorded as living without sufficient land to sustain the economic and social fabric of family and community life. Nga- i Tahu were engaged in subsistence living and existed on the economic margins by the turn of the twentieth century. Census taking played a central part in positioning Nga- i Tahu as economically peripheral, but the communities and their leaders did not passively accept the consequences of erasure, and fought to have their grievances heard within official circles. While census taking can be viewed as underpinning the dispossession of Nga- i Tahu, erasing them as a tribal entity in official eyes, the evidence of the 1890 Commission in fact illustrates Nga- i Tahu persistence in the face of colonial practices. Nga- i Tahu resisted the census, critiqued the process, engaged in population counts when necessary and, in 1890, forced officials to rework the census process to account for cultural practices. By the early twentieth century, census taking amongst Nga- i Tahu had evolved in response to their needs, eventually becoming the basis of the beneficial register. Despite this remarkable story of survival and resistance, the history of the Nga- i Tahu beneficial register proves that Walter Mantell’s census lingers in Nga- i Tahu politics, because its erasures are still being rectified. Notes 1. I would like to acknowledge the support of a University of Otago Humanities Division Research Grant and a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fast Start Grant, which allowed me to complete the research for this chapter. A version of this chapter was presented at the 2007 Annual Ethnohistory Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I thank the audience and my copanelists for their favourable comments. This paper is much improved as a result of the comments of the two anonymous readers, and the feedback




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10.

11.

Making and Unmaking Places provided by my colleagues at our departmental Work in Progress Seminar Series. I would like to particularly thank my colleagues, Mark Seymour, Tony Ballantyne and Barbara Brookes for their advice and support. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 8. Also see Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. S. E. Stockwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 177–98, and M. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ‘Census of the Middle Island Natives made by Mr Commissioner Mantell in 1848 and 1853’, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR), G-16, 1886. For a broad overview of Nga- i Tahu history see Angela Wanhalla, ‘Nga- i Tahu Historiography’, History Compass 5, 3 (2007): 805–17. Rob Watts, ‘Making Numbers Count: the Birth of the Census and Racial Government in Victoria, 1835–1840’, Australian Historical Studies 34, 121 (2003), p. 27. Ibid., p. 46. On the spatial politics of surveying in New Zealand see Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonization of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001). For a discussion of undercounting and its repercussions for populations and space, see S. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Martha Hodes, ‘Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890’, in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 240–70, p. 258. For a concise summary of the administration of census statistics in New Zealand, as well as the great variety of statistics collected by colonial authorities, see David Green, Statistics Count: an Illustrated History of Statistics New Zealand (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand, 2002). Edward Shortland, The Southern Districts of New Zealand: a Journal with Passing Notices of the Customs of the Aborigines (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. v. ‘Return of Natives in the Otago and Southland Provinces 1852, showing those who have died since 1864’, in Alexander Mackay, A Compendium of Official Documents Relative to Native Affairs in the South Island Volume II (Wellington: Government Printer, 1873), p. 142; Table 2, ‘Aboriginal Native Population of New Zealand, in the year 1857’, Statistics of New Zealand for 1857 (Auckland: Government Printer, 1858); ‘Reports of Commissioners of Native Reserves’ (1858) AJHR, E-4, 17; Appendix C, Statistics of New Zealand for 1867 including the results of a Census of the Colony taken in December of that year (Wellington: Government Printer, 1869). Also see ‘Reports on the State of the Natives of Various Districts at the time of the arrival of Sir George Grey’ (1861), AJHR, E-7, 38; F. D. Fenton, Observations on the State of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New Zealand, Auckland (Auckland: W. C. Wilson, 1859). Ken Coates, ‘The “Gentle” Occupation: the Settlement of Canada and the Dispossession of the First Nations’, in Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, ed. Paul Havemann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 141–61. M. P. K. Sorrenson, ‘How to Civilize Savages: Some



214

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

“Answers” from Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History 9, 2 (1975): 97–110. George Grey to Earl Grey, 15 May 1848, Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1847–50, 25; Harry C. Evison, Te Wai Pounamu: the Greenstone Island. A History of the Southern Maori during the European Colonization of New Zealand (Christchurch: Aoraki Press, 1993), p. 178. Harry C. Evison, The Ngai Tahu Deeds: a Window on New Zealand History (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2006), pp. 105–6. Ibid., pp. 154–5. Evidence of Walter Mantell before the Public Petitions Committee, 20 July 1869, MA 13/20 12[e] Part 5, Archives New Zealand, Wellington, hereafter ANZ-W. For a more detailed discussion of these grants to newcomers in southern New Zealand see Angela Wanhalla, In/visible sight: the Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2009), and Kate Stevens, ‘“Gathering Places”: the Mixed Descent Families of Foveaux Strait and Rakiura, 1824–1864’ (BA (Hons) Research essay, University of Otago, 2008). Atholl Anderson, When All the Moa Ovens Grew Cold: Nine Centuries of Changing Fortune for the Southern Maori (Dunedin, NZ: Otago Heritage Books, 1983); Atholl Anderson, The Welcome of Strangers (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1998); Bill Dacker, The Pain and the Love = Te mamae me te aroha: a History of Kai Tahu Whanui in Otago, 1844–1994 (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1994); Evison, Te Wai Pounamu; Harry Evison, The Long Dispute: Maori Land Rights and European Colonisation in Southern New Zealand (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 1997). See Hana O’Regan, Ko Tahu, Ko Au (Christchurch, NZ: Horomaka Press, 2001). See Atholl Anderson, Race against Time (Dunedin, NZ: Hocken Library, 1991), and Stevens, ‘“Gathering Places”’. Melissa Nobles, ‘Racial Categorization and Censuses’, in Census and Identity: the Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses, ed. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 43. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Hodes, ‘Fractions and Fictions’. Also see N. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Kate Riddell, ‘“Improving” the Maori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage’, New Zealand Journal of History 34, 1 (2000), p. 88. Ibid., p. 84. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1891) AJHR, G-2, 8. New Zealand Government, Results of a Census of the Colony of New Zealand taken for the night of the 31st of March 1906 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1907), 1v. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1911) AJHR, H-14a, 19. New Zealand Government, Results of a Census of the Dominion of New Zealand taken for the night of 17th April Census 1921, Appendix A (Wellington: Government Printer, 1922), 2.





28. Riddell, ‘“Improving” the Maori’, p. 85; Green, Statistics Count, p. 43. 29. M. P. K. Sorrenson, Maori and European since 1870: a Study in Adaptation and Adjustment (Auckland: Heinemann, 1967), p. viii. 30. Results of a Census of the Colony of New Zealand taken for the night of the 31st of March 1906, 1v. 31. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1901) AJHR, H-26b, 3. 32. M. P. K. Sorrenson, Integration or Identity? Cultural Interaction: New Zealand since 1911 (Auckland: Heinemann, 1977), p. 14. 33. Cited in Angela Ballara, Proud to be White? A Survey of Pakeha Prejudice in New Zealand (Auckland: Heinemann, 1986), p. 88. 34. ‘Reports from Officers in Native Districts’ (1877) AJHR, G-1, 1877, 23. 35. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1886) AJHR, G-12, 14. 36. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1906) AJHR, H-26a, 1. 37. ‘Census of the Maori Population’ (1911) AJHR, H-14a, 2. 38. Results of a Census of the Dominion of New Zealand taken for the night of the 15th October, 1916 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1917), 172. 39. ‘Report by Mr Commissioner Mackay relating to Middle Island Native Claims’ (1891) AJHR, G-7, 2. 40. Ibid., 54. 41. ‘Further Reports by Mr Commissioner Mackay relating to Middle Island Native Claims’ (1891) AJHR, G-7a, 3. 42. Ibid. 43. ‘Report by Mr Commissioner Mackay’ (1891) AJHR, G-7, 5. 44. Ibid. 45. See ‘Return of Native Residents in 1891 at the South Island Native Settlements’ (1892) AJHR, G-1. 46. See Deborah Posel, ‘A Mania for Measurement: Statistics and Statecraft in the Transition to Apartheid’, in Science and Society in South Africa, ed. Saul Dubow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 116–42; and Renisa Mawani, ‘In Between and Out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor, and the Law in British Columbia, 1850–1913’, in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Society, ed. Sherene H. Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), pp. 47–70. 47. ‘Further Reports by Mr Commissioner Mackay’ (1891) AJHR, G-7a, 7. On census-taking ‘on the ground’ and in communities see R. Saumarez Smith, ‘Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 19 (n.s. 1985): 191–220. 48. ‘Further Reports by Mr Commissioner Mackay’ (1891) AJHR, G-7a, 7. 49. ‘Report by Mr Commissioner Mackay’ (1891) AJHR, G-7, 33. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 45. 53. Ibid., 35. 54. Ibid., 54. 55. Ibid., 5. 56. Ibid., 36 and 55. 57. Peter Munz, ‘The Purity of Historical Method: Some Skeptical Reflections on the Current Enthusiasm for the History of Non-European Societies’, New Zealand Journal of History 5, 1 (1971), p. 3.



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58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

‘Report by Mr Commissioner Mackay’ (1891) AJHR, G-7, 54. Ibid., 55. J. W. Stack to Native Department, 28 June 1878, MA 23/17, ANZ-W. These resistances can be traced in MA 23/17, ANZ-W. New Zealand Government, Results of a Census of the Colony of New Zealand, taken for the night of the 28th March 1886 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1887), 33. Frederick Ormond to the Native Office, 14 August 1878, MA 23/17, ANZ-W. Erueti Hohepa to James Carroll, 27 February 1911, MA 23/18, ANZ-W. Ibid. Inia Ranginui to Minister of Native Affairs, 29 March 1911, MA 23/18, ANZ-W. The official title of the Blue Book is Ngai Tahu Alive in 1848 as established by the Maori Land Court in 1925 and the Ngai Tahu Census Committee in 1929, and it is regularly republished as a result of the frequent additions made to the list. Russell Caldwell, Whakapapa Ngai Tahu: a Guide to Enrolment and Research (Christchurch: Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, 1996), p. 3. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid.




‘Fantastic Dreaming’: Ebenezer Mission as Moravian Utopia and Wotjobaluk Responses Jane Lydon1

Introduction In 1836 the explorer-surveyor Thomas Mitchell penetrated into the region later named ‘Victoria’ and was delighted by what he saw: crossing the Wimmera River as it flowed strongly past the mountains of Gariwerd he observed that ‘Every day we passed over land which for natural fertility and beauty could scarcely be surpassed; over streams of unfailing abundance and plains covered with the richest pasturage. Stately trees and majestic mountains adorned the ever-varying scenery of this region, the most southern of all Australia and the best.’ An empty Arcadia, he emphasised its potential for colonisation: ‘This territory, still for the most part in a state of nature, presents a fair blank sheet for any geographical arrangement whether of county divisions, lines of communication, or sites of towns.’2 The existing inhabitants were seemingly invisible, intimated only by distant spires of camp-smoke, or by the ‘camp litter’ they had left behind. But for the Wotjobaluk people, far from being a ‘fair blank sheet’, the landscape was already filled with social and ecological meaning. Although they also saw the land as a flat plane, over which arched the sky, the Wotjobaluk oriented themselves according to relations between people, the natural world, and specific localities that were dynamic but indubitable. They divided the whole universe, including humankind, into either ‘Gamutch’ (black cockatoo) or ‘Krokitch’ (white cockatoo) and links to particular places and ‘totems’ created further allegiances, each of which had a particular ancestral home.3 So in the 1890s two elderly Wotjobaluk men spent two hours laying out their own map of this landscape with sticks on the ground, showing anthropologist Alfred Howitt in diagram form the ‘space-names’ and directions of the totems 218



9

and classes, ‘all fixed with reference to the rising sun’ (Figure 9.1). These determined the direction that a person faced when they were buried, and the spatial as well as social relationships between people – so that a person could speak ‘of some as being “nearer to him” than others’.4 The palimpsest created by overlaying these two spatial systems in the process of colonisation shaped human interaction in the region, as the invaders erased, redrew or glimpsed something of the Indigenous world order.

Figure 9.1 Wotjobaluk map showing the space-names and directions of the totems and classes. From A. W. Howitt [1904], The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London and Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996, Figure XXX, p. 454.



Ebenezer Mission as Moravian Utopia and Wotjobaluk Responses 219


This chapter argues that in establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the southeastern colony of Victoria around 1860, missionaries were guided by a culturally specific imagined geography that demanded the creation of idealised landscapes intended to teach through example and performance. Central to their conception of these settlements, and their vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the Indigenous population within modern settler society. Their utopian vision differed in key respects from that of the settlers, whose imagined landscape held no place for the Indigenous inhabitants. It also clashed fundamentally with Indigenous perspectives. The spatial and material history of the former Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola, in northwestern Victoria, reveals the disjunction between Moravian missionaries’ attempts to create an idealised didactic landscape that would inculcate order among the residents, and the actual complexity of Aboriginal–European cultural exchange.

The Moravian utopian tradition Two decades after Mitchell, the Moravian missionaries walking into this region had the more specific intention of transforming its Indigenous residents, then suffering the effects of two decades of white invasion. When an Australian fund was established at their Saxony headquarters in 1844, to ‘go to the most remote, unfavourable, and neglected parts of the surface of the earth’, a group of young Moravians was motivated to form an Australian Association to pray for ‘these poor outcasts of the great human family’.5 Under the sponsorship of Governor Charles Joseph La Trobe, scion of Britain’s most prominent Moravian family,6 they chose a shallow grassy ridge encircled by the Wimmera River: a site that had long been significant to the Wotjobaluk for camping and ceremony, and known to them as Bunyo-budnutt.7 The missionary F. W. Spieseke later remembered that ‘It may appear like fantastic dreaming, but it seemed to us almost as if we could see in spirit, the rows of cottages, the church, the school, the fields and gardens and the poor Aboriginals flocking to hear the Word of Life.’8 Like Mitchell, they imagined what this place might become, seeking to recreate it in the godly image of Moravian settlements around the world. They named it Ebenezer, ‘rock of the Lord’. There, the Moravians would be successful in converting the colony’s first Aboriginal person, Nathaniel Pepper – an achievement that was widely celebrated. The Moravian programme, as exemplified by Ebenezer and their second settlement, Ramahyuck, was to be influential in shaping the colony of Victoria’s Aboriginal policy.



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The Moravians brought with them preconceptions of how to create an environment that would teach Aboriginal people how to live and behave like Europeans. They had a long tradition of expressing the principles of faith through the design of their settlements, in a utopian vision shaped by the experience of persecution and displacement. Originating in Moravia, a province of what is now the Czech Republic, in the early fifteenth century, their founder Jan Hus preached church reform, suffered excommunication and in 1415 was burnt at the stake. His followers established the Moravian Church (later known as the Unitas Fratrum) in 1457, eventually finding refuge from persecution on the Saxony estate of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf in 1722, where they established their headquarters, Herrnhut. Over the next century, the construction of a succession of European Congregation Towns or Ortsgemein provided the model for settlements built by the Moravian diaspora around the globe. Ebenezer’s founder Spieseke himself came from the archetypal Gnadenburg, one of the towns providing an immediate precedent for New World imitations.9 Characteristic features of these planned towns as exemplified by European prototypes include their central open square, grid street pattern, and homes that fronted streets and were adjoined by work yard and gardens. The square was dominated by the church or Gemein Haus, placed along one side. The overall effect was of openness, expressing the ‘outward-directed mission’ of the doctrine of diaspora that allowed members to travel and establish communities across the globe.10 The choir system embodied the Moravian emphasis on unity, and imposed the structure of the family upon the community as a whole. In 1859 Moravian traveller James Henry described how at Herrnhut Zinzendorf had erected a house for single Brethren and one for single Sisters. He divided his congregation into ‘Choirs’, or classes: the younger girls, the elder girls, the sisters, the married brethren and sisters, the widows, widowers, the younger boys, the elder boys, the single brethren, all constituted distinct ‘Choirs’ and had their stated and special meetings.11 This principle was allied to the custom of pooling resources, as every member of community worked for all: this pre-Marxist communism Henry termed the ‘village system . . . bringing together a community of people, whose whole life and pursuits, trades, occupations, professions, pleasures, pastimes, were all to be regulated and characterized by one religious impulse’.12 These spiritual and social principles were expressed




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spatially, creating everyday patterns of work and worship that naturalised their social order.

Scholars across several disciplines have drawn attention to the privileged status assigned to visual and spatial forms of knowledge in the Western intellectual tradition.13 As Johannes Fabian argues, this ‘visualism’ equated the ‘knowable with that which can be visualized, and logic with orderly arrangements of pieces of knowledge in space’.14 A range of feminist and postcolonial scholars have shown that this imagined topography has been complicit with colonialism, implicated in constructing racial, class and gender hierarchies within these new societies.15 In addition, the important role of environment in shaping character became a widely accepted idea over the course of the eighteenth century and prompted the emergence of new forms of remedial planning. This development is most famously associated with the shift outlined by Michel Foucault, from punishment and exhortation through spectacle, to the creation of a sense of personal responsibility by means of surveillance and discipline. The new disciplinary architecture was intended to impose corrective technologies of hierarchical observation and normalising judgement upon the inmates, in which transgression was judged only as it was seen.16 While Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is usually cited as the emblem of this new paradigm, particularly in the Australian colonies where it has been seen as the model for a range of penal institutions, Foucault also examined the influence of Quaker ideals in shaping Samuel Tuke’s asylum, in which the family, work and self-restraint became governing principles.17 The ordered approach to town planning of the Quakers’ and Moravians’ religious communities at a time when this was almost unknown has left a legacy of distinctive sites around the world, while in Britain the Moravian centres of Fulneck and Fairfield provided living examples of successful ideal communities.18 In addition, Moravian influence upon the emerging British evangelical movements of the late eighteenth century was considerable, and their missionary activities in particular inspired the new missionary societies.19 The incorporation of a range of spatial and visual practices into Australian missionisation can be closely linked to the widely admired Moravian example. Historians have recently re-evaluated the extent to which missionaries’ objectives overlapped with those of colonists, pointing out the resistance offered to missionisation by many imperial officials and settlers, and the critical attitude of many missionaries towards colonisation.20



Didactic landscapes

From 1835, the remarkably rapid pastoralist invasion of Port Phillip (known as Victoria from 1850) resulted in a brutal struggle for land, and during this decade humanitarians strove to ameliorate the worst effects of invasion upon Indigenous peoples. The British evangelical lobby applied the tactics of the recently successful campaign to abolish slavery to the treatment of Aboriginal people, arguing that it was important for colonists to redeem their misconduct towards Indigenous peoples by introducing Christianity and ‘civilizing’ them.21 Nonetheless, in a broader sense, Elizabeth Elbourne suggests that the humanitarian lobby at this time gave colonists a belief in their own moral authority and justified cultural dispossession on the grounds of uplift and redemption.22 In particular, Moravians and their British admirers acknowledged the important role missions played in pacifying Indigenous peoples and making them economically productive. Both during its initial phase in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as over the second half of the nineteenth century, a particularly close relationship developed between missionaries and the colonial government of Victoria.23 In this context Moravian precedents were invoked from the earliest policy-making for Port Phillip’s Aboriginal people. For example, Moravian success at the Cape of Good Hope, where they had established missions under Dutch rule (Genadendal in 1738) and subsequently at the invitation of the British (at Groene-kloof [Mamre] in 1806) provided an influential model for American and British mission work. By 1815, Genadendal comprised a village of 1,215 Christian Khoikhoi and had become an international symbol of missionary success. However, its very attainments in educating and converting the Khoikhoi were annoying to colonial administrators and ultimately nurtured Indigenous claims to identity and land under such leaders as Khoikhoi pastor Jan Paerl.24 When in 1835 Governor Bourke consulted with Mr Justice Burton regarding his plan to establish ‘black villages’ under the supervision of George Langhorne, Burton’s advice, based on his earlier colonial experience, noted ‘Let the missionary institutions at the Cape witness, which all (except those of the Moravians) miserably languished.’25 Bourke’s ideas were also shaped by Owenism, a utopian movement that in some ways paralleled, and even intersected with the Moravians’ tradition.26 Earlier efforts to establish Australian missions (all of which were considered to have ‘failed’) had also sought to confine the Indigenous inhabitants on reserves where they would be ‘civilised’ – in which process housing and material consumption were held to play an integral part – but these initiatives lacked the coherence and formality of the Moravian vision.27 Such ambitions perhaps reached their apogee in




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a regular plan or system of operation . . . a general Station plan which forms the centre of the whole and into which fall the parts, from the Mission house, the School house, and native houses and finally the order of every individual black from the old man down to the child, so that each one knows his place and work.28 The Foucauldian resonance of this scheme did not escape historian Bain Attwood, who showed how this ‘machinery’ was designed to inculcate a new sense of time and space within the Aboriginal residents. Attwood’s approach typifies the ethnographic approach towards missionisation of anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, who explored how missionaries introduced new notions of space, time, community, work and personhood to the Tswana of Africa, in particular through ‘the shapes and connotations of built form and organized space’.29 By the mid-1870s Ramahyuck was considered the most successful of the colony’s stations and ‘the highest regarding discipline and management’.30 As at Ebenezer, Hagenauer’s mission-house occupied a central and dominant position, allowing for close monitoring of and intervention in the residents’ activities. The model Ramahyuck was, however, exceptional rather than typical of the mission and reserve settlements built in Victoria from the 1860s, which tended to reflect adaptation to local topography and needs. For example, at Coranderrk, established by Taungerong and Wurundjeri people in the early 1860s, the settlement was laid out according to traditional clan affiliation, an orientation that continued into the 1870s.31 Throughout the reserves’ operation, missionaries and officials carefully represented settlements such as Ebenezer in ways that promoted their efficient management, the residents’ conversion to Christianity and their successful adoption of Western culture, all expressed in the orderly appearance of their physical setting.32

The (moral) high ground Some have continued to emphasise the success of Aboriginal stations as carceral institutions, and the capacity of spatial organisation and landscape to shape human behaviour and legitimate power relationships. However, just as the Comaroffs somewhat overplayed the efficacy of the



the Moravian missionary Friedrich Hagenauer’s design for Ramahyuck, which he established in 1863, just a few years after helping to found Ebenezer. Eight years after the mission was established he wrote to the Reverend W. E. Morris that he intended to form

concrete mission regime in transforming Indigenous values, the missionaries’ own accounts of their effect upon the Indigenous residents cannot be unquestioningly accepted.33 Postcolonial analysis has shifted our attention to the instability of the colonisers’ own accounts, and the multiplicity of viewpoints concerned.34 Just as Foucault’s analysis has been criticised for exaggerating the efficacy of inscriptive bodily practices, so the Comaroffs’ emphasis on the power of environment to determine subjectivity has been overstated. It has been shown, for example, that life within European institutions often provided opportunities for Aboriginal people to maintain or even elaborate aspects of traditional practice.35 Rather than assuming any subject’s experience to be determined by spatial frameworks, more recent approaches argue for a concept of space ‘not as a given, but . . . as many social spaces negotiated within one geographical place and time’.36 Although power is spatialised, and shapes gender and racial relations, space is also constituted within social relations, and therefore assumes dynamic and multiple forms. Within the Australian colonies particularly, the social order was constantly created anew, and was always subject to uncertainty, instability and challenge. Investigation of the concrete, material circumstances that prevailed at Ebenezer reveals both the missionaries’ and the Indigenous peoples’ experience in a less mediated fashion than written accounts. This testifies to the Moravian ‘civilising’ programme but also to the creative ways that Aboriginal residents found to evade or disregard surveillance. Some aspects of the Ebenezer settlement followed Moravian precedents, complementing visual and textual representations: buildings symbolising the settlement’s core values were constructed along the top of a shallow ridge. Alongside the mission-house, girls’ dormitory and school, the church occupied the highest ground, its tower pointing towards the heavens to symbolise God’s glory. Social categories defined according to gender, age and marital status (the ‘choir system’), were embodied in distinct living and sleeping spaces and practices within the settlement. Other features of the settlement, however, testify to the limitations of the missionaries’ regime. A 1904 surveyor’s plan (Figure 9.2) produced at the end of the mission’s life hints at these disjunctions. For example, Moravians intended to erect huts to ‘form three sides of a square’, facing inwards towards the church and missionaries’ house, but it is apparent that this vision was never realised, and that the west side of the settlement always remained open.37 This plan also points to the dominant location of the mission-house along the north side of the square, marking a departure from Moravian models in displacing the church from its central position.





Figure 9.2 1904 Survey plan of Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola (Yearly fieldnotes 1903–36), Plan B762.

Archaeological investigation of the former mission-house in 2003 confirmed its enhanced role within the mission’s operation. Prior to excavation it was known that this was the first limestone rubble building constructed on the station, in June 1860. It was home to the successive missionaries supervising the settlement and their families, as well



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as a married Aboriginal couple, probably Phillip and Rebecca Pepper, who occupied two rooms.38 Excavation allowed reconstruction of the building’s plan and provided substantial evidence for its use and demolition. Significantly, the pattern of construction and additions indicates that the missionaries chose to extend their communal household rather than construct new buildings. While the limestone church was given greater prominence in visual and textual accounts of the settlement, the archaeological evidence shows that the mission-house was its symbolic and functional heart.39 This shift from Moravian precedent marks the enhanced spiritual and practical importance of the missionary’s role as overseer, guide and father of the community in the Australian field. At Ebenezer the mission-house became the settlement’s public face, and the site of the hospitality for which the missionaries were known. In this respect it formed a substitute for the inn that had been a feature of the Ortsgemein. Its commanding aspect, located along the top of a ridge and dominating the central public space, was intended to allow the missionaries to monitor the Aboriginal residents and their movements between their dwellings, communal buildings such as the church and school, and across the wider landscape. This arrangement symbolised the missionaries’ paternalistic relationship with the Aboriginal residents, positioning the former as watchful guardians whose benign discipline was sanctioned by God. In the apparently natural and non-violent affiliation between father and children, the trope of the family appeared to naturalise hierarchy within unity. But, as Anne McClintock points out, domesticity is both a space and a relationship of power.40 For missionaries Aboriginal people were part of the family of man by virtue of their conformance to civilised practices, but at the same time, as a race they were regarded as children. The mission-house also served as an ‘object lesson’ – a concrete example of a Christian, ‘civilised’ household occupied by the nuclear family, with husband, wife and children enacting their roles within the setting of European domesticity, before their Aboriginal audience.41 The archaeological evidence for the residents’ lifestyle reflected the habits and tastes of European bourgeois domesticity – including diet, recreation, household furnishings, personal grooming and comportment. Through the material structures of family life, the missionaries sought to impose new ideas of order and time-discipline upon the residents.42 In concrete and visual ways, the Moravians were successful in creating key elements of a European landscape and lifestyle within an alien environment, and their apparent achievement of fundamental goals in the




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over by the indefatigable Moravian Missionaries, who have there taken up their abode among the blacks . . . Not to speak of the religious impressions produced by these teachers the moral effect of having pious and devoted men to watch over the interests of the Aborigines is so great, that every endeavor should be made to foster and encourage the self-denying efforts of the enlightened missionary.43 The baptism of Nathaniel Pepper in August 1860 offered the first glorious proof that Aboriginal people were capable of conversion, and he became a celebrity in evangelical circles, representing a giant milestone for missionaries.44 As the Board noted, the Moravian mission ‘afford[ed] an example from which most useful lessons can be drawn . . . One of the young men under [Spieseke’s] care, who lately visited Melbourne, showed by his conduct and conversation that the Aborigines under favourable circumstances are capable of acquiring the habits of civilization.’45 However, these attainments must be seen in the context of instabilities that discredit their claims to successful governance.

The limits of colonialism Moravian missionaries were undermined by their own uncertainties as well as by Aboriginal opposition and evasion, founded in a very different cultural orientation. In the years before white settlement spread to this remote corner of the colony, the traditional owners saw no need to settle on the reserve or adopt European customs. Personal diaries of the newly arrived German Moravian missionaries at Ebenezer Mission during the early 1860s reveal that their lives were fraught with anxiety and self-doubt, if not despair, as they struggled with putting doctrine into practice. Three years after Ebenezer was established, Spieseke wrote, ‘It seems as though we will not be successful in forming a comparatively large congregation from this deeply sunken people.’46 Even after they gained a more secure foothold, it is clear that Ebenezer focused a range of very different meanings for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. While the disciplinary regime of the reserves established some parameters for social relations, it did not fully determine them. Rather they must be understood in terms of the heterogeneous, multiple experiences of differently positioned Indigenous subjects.



colonial programme of transforming Aboriginal people was recognised by contemporaries. In 1861 the Board’s first report noted with approbation that the new Wimmera station was

Moravian missionaries’ Western visual regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the Aboriginal residents’ profoundly different culture, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition and the evasion of control in the pursuit of Aboriginal objectives. Aboriginal residents maintained sometimes unrecognised forms of collective identity, or practices such as a camp lifestyle.47 Moreover, at Ebenezer there is evidence that Aboriginal people evaded scrutiny through movement and concealment, escaping or undermining the spatial apparatus of the reserves. They deployed strategies of mobility and evasion to pursue their own objectives, played out across different levels and scales of colonial space. Despite the establishment of six reserves, for example, up to half the colony’s Indigenous population was able to live elsewhere, or moved in and out of these communities, instead choosing to work for European employers, or to receive rations from Honorary Correspondents’ depots.48 Unlike Aboriginal people in Victoria’s more settled southern fringe, those in the northwest remained mobile and dispersed, moving on and off Ebenezer for work with relative ease. Such freedom was frustrating for the missionaries. For example, Spieseke reported in July 1871 that I endeavoured to get the Aborigines to remain as much as possible at the Mission Station at Ebenezer during the season . . . They occasionally take a few weeks or months, as the case may be, here for a change. There is only one man here for the last six weeks, Sandy; he informs me that about eight are coming to remain for some time.49 In this sparsely settled area Aboriginal labour was a useful resource for pastoralists, and men worked as shepherds, shearers, stockmen and casual labourers, while women worked as servants, sometimes establishing long-lasting relationships with particular pastoralist families. Some chose to live in camps in traditional country, utilising traditional food sources where possible – such as along the Murray and Darling Rivers – and some supplemented their income through fishing, shooting and begging. The actual experiences of Aboriginal women exemplify this negotiation of diverse social spaces. The life of Augusta ‘Minnie’ Logan-Nichols illustrates this process, as Dja Dja Wurrung elder Gary Murray’s research has shown.50 Murray’s great-great-great grandmother Augusta raised her son Herbert with de facto husband Robert (Bobbie) Nichols, until her death in 1886. Augusta took the name Nichol from 1882, but Augusta





and Bobbie were forced to live in separate houses at Ebenezer, despite repeated requests that they be allowed to marry. As a result, while they chose to live on the mission at certain times, they also moved off it for periods in order to achieve freedom from its restrictions. Around 1879 they went to live on nearby Towanninnie Station where they worked for the Finley family, who wrote to the Board on their behalf, again urging that they be given permission to marry. During this time at Towanninnie their son was educated with the Finley’s own children by their governess.51 Bobbie worked as a shearer, requiring that he travel great distances away from Augusta and her son, and in 1881 she returned to Ebenezer for a while. Participation in the western labour market and good relations with local station-owners allowed some freedom from the constraints of reserve life. Other women, such as Agnes Edwards (‘Queen Aggie’) and Eleanor Stewart of Swan Hill, lived their lives beyond the purview of white managers, their independence construed as a link with a disappearing culture.52 These women’s lives were characterised by mobility and a degree of independence that defines some of the limitations of the European reserve system.

The river The Moravians’ focus upon life within their new settlement as a process of transformation contrasts with the longer-term attachment that prevailed between the Wotjobaluk and the landscape. In this cosmology, people, place and totemic ancestors were closely linked in a dynamic relationship, popularly glossed as ‘Dreaming’. This identification constituted a mutual possession and belonging between land and people that entailed obligations to follow ancestral precedent by keeping stories and country alive, and by caring for country. As John Morton has noted, in its eternal balance, Aboriginal religion has ‘no myth of a past or future Golden Age, no utopian vision, and no hint of an outcast devil’.53 This affiliation was altered by colonialism, but was not destroyed, as shown by evidence of the Wotjobaluk’s shifting relationship with the Wimmera River. Given the rich food resources once offered by the wetlands of the Wimmera River, it is not surprising that archaeological evidence for Wotjobaluk life shows a preponderance of camp sites around water sources – and especially the Wimmera. Rising in the Pyrenees mountain range, the Wimmera flows through Jardwardjali territory, north through the open plains of Wotjobaluk country (the Middle Wimmera Basin)



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into Lake Hindmarsh, which in turn drains north through Outlet Creek into Lake Albacutya. As Mitchell had noted in such lyrical terms in 1836, near Gariwerd the river resembled the well-defined, steep-banked streams of England. But as it turned north its multiple shallow courses, which sometimes ceased altogether, became less admirable in European eyes. Reconstructions of the riverine ecosystem at this time depict a series of shallow intermittent rivulets linked to billabongs, lagoons and reed-fringed marshes, following a finely balanced cycle that retained silts, filtered salts, replenished groundwater and maintained environmental health.54 When the pastoralists arrived the creeks were then all fringed with reeds and rushes, undevoured by hungry cows and gaunt working bullocks. These reeds and rushes formed a beautiful edging to the dark solemn pools overhung by the water-loving gum-trees, where wild fowl abounded, as the plains did with quails and turkeys.55 The invaders noticed many traces of Aboriginal use of the river’s rich resources. Charles Hall, for example, remembered that ‘Heaps of muscle [sic] shells were also found abounding on the banks, and old mia-mias where the earth around was strewed with the balls formed in the mouth when chewing the farinaceous matter out of the bulrush root.’56 The bulrush, or cumbungi, was just one of the staples of the Aboriginal diet, its potato-like rhizomes eaten while its tough fibres were used for making nets. The vast array of available foods was sustained by Aboriginal resource management practices, including fire regimes and murnong (yam) harvesting.57 Colonisers altered this balance, introducing hardhooved sheep and cattle, clearing the plains, and building artificial channels and water storage to service their economic exploitation of the landscape. Among other effects, they gradually encouraged the river to flow in one clearly defined channel, losing many of the lagoons and wetland swamps that had supported abundant plant and animal life. When Friedrich Hagenauer arrived at Ebenezer he noted the devastating consequences for the Wotjobaluk, observing that where ‘the land is good there are no blacks, or the few remaining are in the deepest submersion and are close to dying out’.58 Archaeological surveys indicate that the river’s importance to Aboriginal people only increased following invasion, in a pattern that suggests a contraction from the region’s wetlands to the Wimmera itself as a result of clearing and agriculture. More than half the sites recorded along the Wimmera between Natimuk and Jeparit date to the colonial period, and most of these are scarred





trees made with steel axes – a practice which continued throughout the twentieth century, according to the late elder Uncle Jack Kennedy (personal communication). A large proportion (over 20 per cent) are scatters of stone artefacts, and freshwater shell middens containing Europeanmade materials.59 Such a shift was the result of several factors, including the destruction of former wetland habitats, the pressure of white settlers actively driving away the Aboriginal people, and the attraction of the new resources offered by missionaries. Ironically, by defining the fringes of major watercourses as ‘Crown’ land, reserved for public use and so protected from private exploitation, colonisers created a refuge to which Aboriginal people resorted in their time of hardship, something which Denis Byrne has also noted.60 A particularly high density of post-contact sites within a six-kilometre radius of the mission, almost all on the Wimmera River and its anabranch Datchak Creek, indicates intensified use of the area following Ebenezer’s establishment, pointing to the continuation and transformation of traditional customs.61 In 2006, for example, elder Nancy Harrison described how the river offered a private space for her ancestors, and how ‘most of the women would go out on the river bank and have their babies – that’s what my grandmother did . . . They didn’t want the white people touching them – touching the babies.’62 Even today the narrow fringe of bush along the river remains a refuge from the glaring ploughed paddocks; its meandering bends, reedy sandbanks and shelving margins screen visitors to Ebenezer who wander down here, away from the manicured heritage complex that stands exposed on higher ground. The shelter of the river banks offers seclusion and privacy. Sitting unobserved in the shade by the quiet water, it is easy to watch the settlement and its activities, reversing the gaze of the missionaries. The close and enduring link between the Wotjobaluk people and the river were recognised in December 2005, when after a decade of negotiations, they were successful in obtaining the first consent determination of Native Title in southeastern Australia. The determination recognises native title rights to hunt, fish, gather and camp for personal, domestic and non-commercial communal needs along approximately 153 kilometres of the length of the Wimmera River, as well as freehold title to three parcels of land, and other rights.63 In his judgment, Justice Merkel quoted the late elder Uncle Jack Kennedy whose testimony concluded: I am looking forward to getting some of my country back before I die so I can die knowing I have done what the elders expected of me. The Beal trees are dying at Lake Albacutya because they are not



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Conclusion Within a colonial regime of management for Victoria’s Indigenous peoples that became increasingly repressive over the course of the nineteenth century, the Moravians’ utopian vision of transformation and uplift contrasted strongly with that of mainstream settler society. The Moravians sought to establish Aboriginal Christian villages that would recreate the best of the Old World within a new environment; in carving out these settlements within the colonial cadastral grid they challenged the pastoralists’ aim of securing their own tenure through erasing that of the Indigenous inhabitants. The Moravians’ future-oriented ideal landscape – Spieseke’s ‘fantastic dreaming’ of progress and redemption – also contrasted with Indigenous ‘Dreaming’, with its rhythmed balance, and its seamless union of past and present. The Moravians’ long, global and respected tradition of evangelising provided them with an influential model for establishing Aboriginal settlements, centred upon embodied and spatial practices designed to teach residents how to live like Europeans. Their programme was particularly congenial to British colonisers familiar with the collectivist utopian ideas prompted by industrialisation and the labour movement. At Ebenezer, this programme was successfully inaugurated, as demonstrated by evidence for the settlement’s design and for the enhanced function of the mission-house. The pre-eminence of the missionhouse in the Australian colonies marked a departure from Moravian precedent, symbolising the enhanced authority of the missionaries and their successful recreation of a European landscape and way of life. Viewing this household within the wider context of the mission’s operations, however, suggests the limits of the Moravians’ programme, marked by the missionaries’ uncertainties; their ongoing battle to maintain control over the residents; the relative mobility and freedom of many residents; and the maintenance as well as the transformation of traditional culture around Ebenezer. In sum, without denying the sometimes harsh restriction of Aboriginal peoples’ rights entailed by the mission regime, it is important to view the missionaries’ accounts of their work alongside evidence for the persistence of a very different Aboriginal orientation.



getting enough water. If we look after the river properly it will run clear again, run all the way to the Teardrop Lakes. If the Wotjobaluk continue to follow Bunjil then things will go on as the old people would want.64

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1. I wish to thank project partners Alan Burns at Goolum Goolum Aboriginal Cooperative and Peter Kennedy and Gail Harradine at Barengi-gadjin Land Council, as well as the community participants in fieldwork. I am also grateful to members of the archaeological team for their hard work and enthusiasm, especially Zvonkica Stanin and Alasdair Brooks, and to the local community including the Dimboola and District Historical Society. I thank Dja Dja Wurrung elder Gary Murray for sharing his research with me. I also thank Martin Thomas for comments on sources. This project was funded by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Grant (DP0346645). 2. T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia: With Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1965 [1838]). 3. A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001 [1904]), pp. 454–5. 4. Ibid., pp. 453–5. 5. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren (London: The Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathen, 1849), pp. 19, 156. 6. R. Kenny, ‘La Trobe, Lake Boga and the “Enemy of Souls”: the First Moravian Mission in Australia’, La Trobe Journal 71 (2003): 97–113; J. C. S. Mason, ‘Benjamin and Christian Ignatius La Trobe in the Moravian Church’, La Trobe Journal 71 (2003): 17–27. 7. M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), p. 161; P. Pepper and T. De Araugo, You Are What You Make Yourself to Be: the Story of a Victorian Aboriginal Family 1842–1980 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1980), p. 15; for tribal affiliation see Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 54; I. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: an Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Monash Publications in Geography No. 37 (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 1990), p. 358. 8. F. W. Spieseke quoted in S. Robertson, The Bell Sounds Pleasantly: Ebenezer Mission Station (Doncaster, Victoria: Luther Rose Publications, 1992), p. 35. 9. C. Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 137; C. E. Hendricks, ‘Building “Villages of the Lord”: the Birth and Development of the Moravian Congregation Town’, paper presented to the Symposium ‘German Moravians in the Atlantic World’, Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, North Carolina, April 2002. Such settlements, however, were not uniform – Fulneck for example was a notable exception, being constructed on a series of terraces carved into a Yorkshire Hillside: R. Southern, ‘Going Home: the Moravian Settlement of Fulneck, 1750–1760’ (PhD thesis, School of Archaeological and Historical Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne 1997). 10. Hendricks, ‘Building “Villages of the Lord”’; M. Büttner, ‘Religion and Geography’, Numen 21 (1974): 163–96. 11. J. Henry, Sketches of Moravian Life and Character (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1859), p. 41.



Notes

12. Ibid., p. 39. 13. See, for example, P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Exploration of Landscape and History (Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1987); H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 14. J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 116. 15. G. Rose, Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 16. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1967); M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 17. M. Bosworth, Convict Fremantle: a Place of Promise and Punishment (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2004); J. S. Kerr, Design for Convicts: an Account of Design for Convict Establishments in the Australian Colonies During the Transportation Era (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1984); I. Brand, Penal Peninsula: Port Arthur and its Outstations 1827–1898 (Tasmania: Jason Publications, 1978). 18. Currently a ‘serial transboundary transcontinental nomination’ of a number of settlements to the UNESCO World Heritage List is in progress, including Christiansfeld, Zeist (Holland), Bethlehem (USA), Elim (South Africa) and Gracehill (UK). http://www.gracehillvillage.org/Index.asp?id=39 (accessed 4 November 2008). 19. J. C. S. Mason, The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England 1760–1800 (Rochester, NY: The Royal Historical Society, 2001), p. 16; D. Schattschneider, ‘William Carey, Modern Missions and the Moravian Influence’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22, 1 (1998), p. 9; W. H. Edwards, Moravian Aboriginal Missions in Australia 1850–1919 (Adelaide: Uniting Church Historical Society, 1999), p. 31. 20. See, for example, N. Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in Missions and Empire, ed. N. Etherington, The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–18; J. Samson, ‘Landscapes of Faith: British Missionary Tourism in the South Pacific’, in Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Mission, ed. J. S. Scott and G. Griffiths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 89–109; A. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 21. Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: the 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, 3 (2003), p. 24. Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/4.3elbourne.html (accessed 4 November 2008); see also A. Lester, ‘Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Etherington, pp. 64–85. 22. Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’, p. 24. 23. Mason, The Moravian Church. 24. R. S. Viljoen, Jan Paerl: a Khoikhoi in Cape Colonial Society 1761–1851 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 130; B. Krüger, The Pear Tree Blossoms: a History of the Moravian Mission Stations in South Africa, 1737–1869 (Genadenal: Moravian Book Depot, 1966); T. Keegan, Moravians in the Eastern Cape, 1828–1928: Four




25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

Making and Unmaking Places Accounts of Moravian Mission Work on the Eastern Cape Frontier (Paarl: Paarl Print, 2004). Burton to Bourke, 22 November 1835: Historical Records of Victoria (HRV), vol. 2A: The Aborigines of Port Phillip 1835–1839 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office), p. 155. Instructions to Langhorne, Colonial Secretary, draft memorandum, 9 December 1836: HRV, vol. 2A, pp. 161–2. For a review of the trope of failure see H. Carey, ‘“Attempts and Attempts”: Responses to Failure in Pre- and Early Victorian Missions to the Australian Aborigines’, in Mapping the Landscape: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity, ed. S. Emilsen and W. W. Emilsen (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 45–61. 27 April, Hagenauer, Letterbook 1865–72, cited in B. Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 8. J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, ‘Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa’, American Ethnologist 13, 1 (1986): 1–22; J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); J. Comaroff, ‘Missionaries and Mechanical Clocks: an Essay on Religion and History in South Africa’, Journal of Religion 71, 1 (1991): 1–17. Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines. D. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk (Canberra: Aboriginal History Monograph 5, 1988), pp. 118–19; J. Lydon, ‘Seeing Each Other: Colonial Photography in Nineteenth-Century Victoria’, in Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600–1945, ed. S. Lawrence, One World Archaeology Series (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 174–90. For a study of this process of visual representation see J. Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); J. Lydon, ‘Watched Over by the Indefatigable Moravian Missionaries: Colonialism and Photography at Ebenezer and Ramahyuck’, La Trobe Journal 76 (2005): 27–48. J. Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming: the Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009). J. Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992); A. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For criticism of Foucault’s monologic, monolithic conception of modernity as defined by social control and total surveillance see, for example, M. Jay, ‘In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought’, in Foucault: a Critical Reader, ed. D. C. Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 175–204. For studies that have cast doubt on the effectiveness of institutional control see, for example, D. Trigger, Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); T. Rowse, After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), pp. 34–41; S. L’OsteBrown, L. Godwin, with G. Henry, T. Mitchell and V. Tyson, Living Under the Act: Taroom Aboriginal Reserve 1911–1927 (Brisbane: Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage, 1995).



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36. S. Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: a Reader, ed. R. Lewis and S. Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 692–719. 37. Robert Gillespie MP, quoted in Robertson, The Bell Sounds Pleasantly, pp. 44–5; Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren (London: The Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathen, 1870). 38. M. Fels, A History of the Ebenezer Mission, Occasional Report No. 51 (Melbourne: Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, 1998), p. 20; Melbourne Association in Aid of the Moravian Mission to the Aborigines of Australia, Further Facts Relating to the Moravian Mission in Australia. Second Paper (Melbourne: Wm. Goodhugh, 1861), p. 5. 39. For a more detailed account of the archaeological results see Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming. 40. A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 45. 41. D. Langmore, ‘The Object Lesson of a Civilised, Christian Home’, in Family and Gender in the Pacific, ed. M. Jolly and M. Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 84–94. 42. There is a vast literature within historical archaeology that addresses the relationship between documentary, visual and material sources of evidence. I argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relationship between different classes of evidence: see J. Lydon, Many Inventions: the Chinese in the Rocks 1890–1920 (Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 1999). For key reviews of these issues see contributions to M. Hall and Stephen W. Silliman (eds), Historical Archaeology (Malden and London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), and Charles E. Orser, Jr., A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (New York: Springer, 1995). 43. First Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1861), p. 5, and see Appendix 1, p. 23; Second Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1862), p. 5; ‘Missionary Success among the Aboriginals’: a Sermon and Reading to Christians (Melbourne: Wm. Goodhugh and Co., 1860). 44. ‘Notice of a public meeting, held at St. Paul’s school-room, Melbourne, together with a copy of correspondence read thereat’ (1860), in Missionary Success among the Aborigines, pp. 4–5; for a detailed exploration of this event in the context of contemporary ideas and arguments see R. Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World (Melbourne: Scribe, 2007). 45. Third Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1864), p. 6; Thirteenth Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1877), p. 5. 46. Der australische Christenbote 1862: 11, 62, cited in F. Jensz, ‘The Moravian-Run Ebenezer Mission Station in North-Western Victoria: a German Perspective’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1999), p. 75. Jensz notes the persistently despairing theme of these accounts.





47. Lydon, ‘Seeing Each Other’. 48. J. Penney, ‘Victorian Honorary Correspondent Supply Depots: Final Report’ (Report to Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Melbourne, 1997). 49. Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, Seventh Report of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1871), p. 21. 50. See, for example, G. Murray (Wryker Milloo), ‘Sacred to the Memory of Augusta: the Lake Hindmarsh Clothing Distribution Book 1882–1903’ (2003) (manuscript in author’s possession), p. 25. 51. Ibid. 52. J. Penney, ‘Queen Aggie: the Last of Her Tribe’, in Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, ed. M. Lake and F. Kelly (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 102; S. Flagg and S. Gurciullo, Footprints: the Journey of Lucy and Percy Pepper (North Melbourne: Public Record Office Victoria; Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2008). 53. J. Morton, ‘Aboriginal Religion Today’, in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, ed. S. Kleinert and M. Neale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 15. 54. For a reconstruction see R. Vincin, ‘What If There Was No River System?’, paper delivered to Murray-Darling Workshop, Wagga Wagga, September 1995, cited in J. Tacon, ‘The River and the Town’, in Struggle Country: the Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. G. Davison and Marc Brodie (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2005), pp. 1–19. 55. Charles Browning Hall, 6 September 1863, in Letters from Victorian Pioneers, ed. T. F. Bride (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1969), p. 268. 56. Ibid., p. 271. 57. N. Zola and B. Gott, Koorie Plants, Koorie People: Traditional Aboriginal Food, Fibre and Healing Plants of Victoria (Melbourne : Koorie Heritage Trust, 1992), pp. 8–9. 58. Hagenauer to Reichel, 11 November 1860, in Jensz, ‘The Moravian-Run Ebenezer Mission Station’. 59. Archaeological Consulting Services, ‘The Wimmera River Cultural Heritage Study. Stage II: The Middle Wimmera Basin’ (Melbourne: Report prepared for Goolum Goolum Aboriginal Cooperative, 1998), p. 51. 60. Denis Byrne, Chapter 4, this volume. 61. One survey recorded 246 sites within a six-kilometre radius around the mission: B. Raworth and D. Rhodes, ‘An Archaeological and Architectural Report on the Ebenezer Mission Station’ (Melbourne: Report to Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, 1998), pp. 10–12; C. Bird, Aboriginal Sites in the Horsham Region (Melbourne: Victoria Archaeological Survey, 1990), p. 22. 62. N. Harrison interview with J. Lydon, 13 October 2006. 63. Clarke on behalf of the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagulk Peoples v. Victoria [2005] Federal Court of Australia 1795 (13 December 2005). 64. Ibid.



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Part IV Thirdspace and Middle Grounds





‘Acoustic Shadows’

there are wider narratives than glossy brochures indigenous children smiling on postcards maps constructed from satellite images or state approved versions of events just wallow in acoustic shadows my friend and disrupted narratives will seep in deftly shift factual survey pegs recolour heroes and timelines transform the intellectual terrain you’ve confidently navigated for years you’ll no longer gush at vantage views signposted for the one-eyed tourists for the channel where your thoughts travel will be dredged to include other realities and the earth, the sea and the sky will call to patterns in your blood that glimmer in our sacred shadows

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Serie Barford

10 Ross Gibson

In January 1788 Lieutenant William Dawes came to Botany Bay, on Australia’s southeastern coast, with the First Fleet Marines. Lately he has loomed into contemporary awareness in Australia. This emergence has occurred after he had just about disappeared from accounts having completed his four-year Sydney sojourn in December 1791. For almost two hundred years Dawes missed out on close historical attention because his papers and effects had been assumed destroyed in family disputes and by a hurricane in Antigua during the nineteenth century. But in 1972 his two ‘language notebooks’ were discovered at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.1 Amounting to eighty small pages of spacious handwriting, the notebooks are a vital trace of the first four years of British colonisation in Australia, and since their retrieval growing numbers of scholars have been appreciating not only the timbre of Dawes’ intellect but equally the boldness and wit of the Indigenous people with whom he conversed.2 During his time in Sydney, Dawes set himself apart – in character and activity – from the prisoners and the rest of the troops. Installed at the astronomer’s observatory which Governor Arthur Phillip had commissioned soon after the First Fleet landed, he worked late into the night, sometimes accompanied by Indigenous acquaintances.3 Often his nocturnal work came after a full day of land-survey duties alongside his friend Watkin Tench, the urbane chronicler of the colony’s formative years.4 Dawes was avid for knowledge. Resourcefully he investigated the dimensions of the land, the potential yields of animals, vegetables and minerals, the flukey dynamics of the water and air. Furthermore, as part of his quest to appreciate the country, he examined the nuances of Indigenous cultures and the ways the local people – called ‘Eora’ in the notebooks – cared for the place that evidently defined them, even 242



Patyegarang and William Dawes: the Space of Imagination

as the place and the Eora were assailed by unprecedented diseases and military armament. Dawes’ notebooks catch this phase when the colonial incursion was beginning to wrench the country into new shapes and rhythms. Studying the threatened world of the Eora, Dawes strove to truncate the space between himself and his new surroundings, and in doing so he began to know the place in modes that were partly intellectual, partly emotional, partly spiritual. Despite his surveyor’s vocation, he found New South Wales was more than a typical colonial domain. Not only a geographical tract to be staked out in the middle distance, nor just a property to be apprehended with gridded coordinates, the Port Jackson terrain was also a space in, of and for his imagination. The notebooks show how Dawes became fascinated by some distinctive scenes – intimate and imaginative – that developed between himself and a cohort of Eora whom he named in his notebooks, and respected. These scenes put a bodily dimension into the imperial scale of the New South Wales venture. In his readiness to learn from the Eora and in the way he sought to incorporate the country, Dawes was an exception to the colonial rule. He used the notebooks to describe spaces that were defined more by consent than conquest, spaces measured not by amplifying technologies (guns, sextants, telescopes) but by basic looks and conversations exchanged in campsites, rooms, harbourside coves and bathing beaches. These personal-scale spaces were markedly different in dimension and value from the military and agricultural territory that he was charged with securing. The paradox of his role – he was a conquistador as well as a collaborator – was not lost on him. Indeed, as he grew more knowledgeable about Indigenous peoples’ consciousness, his strengthening interest in an immersive, ever-altering mode of knowing people and places would eventually set him at odds with the colonial enterprise worldwide. In the first instance, this tension between the personal and the governmental would alienate him from the systems of power in the Sydney garrison, the result being that he was sent home in December 1791 even though he had petitioned to stay.5 In the longer run, his doubts about the moral authority of colonialism would compel him to spend the last forty years of his life working in anti-slavery contexts in Africa and the West Indies.6 Between 1788 and 1791, the Sydney garrison was shaped by a conviction that Watkin Tench expressed succinctly: ‘confusion’ had to be confronted till it ‘gave place to system’7. Being a surveyor and scientist, Dawes was adept at systematic arraignments, but he grew increasingly



The Space of Imagination 243

Thirdspace and Middle Grounds

attracted to confusion, especially to the complexities he glimpsed as he became better informed about the Eora. For Dawes, ‘confusion’ would not necessarily have been a pejorative word. Unmoored from many standard European prejudices, he took to conducting idiosyncratic investigations and ritual activities, some of them meditative almost to the point of being transcendental, which seemed designed to intensify the mysteries so that he could lose himself in the flux rather than stand to one side dispassionately itemising and analysing the regimented life. For example, he developed the habit of pausing for five intermissions every day, to record the weather conditions. He jotted these meteorological observations in a separate journal, noting special qualities in the shifting wind, describing the sky, the pressured weight of the air, sensing and saying what type of heat or cold was glossing every moment.8 His fieldwork was thus part of an interpretive process that immersed him night and day in a welter of mutable information that prompted him to select, combine and narrate the more telling portions of his unfolding circumstances in such a way that he gradually came to know, from the inside, the organising tendencies or relational grammar of the world he was infiltrating. So Dawes began to comprehend the world as a dynamic system rather than as something with hierarchies of status. During the long hours when Dawes wondered in darkness, his sense of space was subjected to extraordinary contractions and expansions. Imagine him gazing up at the southern stars, hearkening to the nightbirds, watching the enormous Port Jackson bats blot the moonlit aperture of his observatory. Consider the flitting rhythm of his scribal work as he looked up, looked down, looked up, and then put intricate calculations into incrementally expanding tallies. From the close space of the page he would have scanned far out past the walls of the trim observatory, to the enormity of the sky scintillating above the uncertain colony. This span of space – from the intimate to the cosmic – reconfigured him as he made a bridge in his mind, gathering the measure of vastness in his hand-sized ledger, connecting the stars to this scratched bit of earth, and then projecting himself back out to the revolving planets while he repeatedly considered whatever these far-flung worlds represented as integers of abstract space and time in the expansive press of imperial history. Dawes searched out grammars everywhere he looked, not only in the sky. For example, whenever he went into Indigenous country, he counted every step taken and he used his survey charts to ascribe measured significance to all the tracts of land he traversed.9 This was procedural mapping, perhaps, but it represented more than standard



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duty. It seems clear that Dawes was the first European to begin to grasp an Indigenous Australian notion of ‘country’, the utterly local varietal of space that has seeped slowly into non-Indigenous consciousness over the past two centuries. When Dawes went out on his bivouacs, he was involved in minute, pulsing rituals of apprehension, bringing the place into himself – incorporating it – the place that he was beginning to consider as home, the place that was defining him there and then. When he was out on his surveys, each footfall, each ledger entry was a little acknowledgement, as if he was chanting himself into the land’s extensive, overlapping spaces, as if he was auguring some psychic and spiritual depths in these southern spaces even while he was spanning and analysing them so rationally. The most compelling of Dawes’ activities was his investigation of the local language, which he learned in much the same way he learned the weather – in the midst of it but also critically distanced and reflective, narrating its shifts as a participant preparatory to recollecting it in moments of tranquillity, awaiting the emergence of its comprehensible patterns, tendencies and rules. As Keith Smith observes in his canny study, Bennelong: the Coming in of the Eora, the notebooks ‘show Dawes trying to break down the language and cultural barriers between himself and the Eora’.10 While the language-research unfolded, a relationship flourished between Dawes and a young Aboriginal woman known as Patyegarang, or Patye as he sometimes called her less formally in the notebooks. Antipodal as they were, this pair still managed to converse regularly, often intimately, studying each other’s utterances, feeling a trust grow that can fairly be called affection. The relationship was the mainstay of Dawes’ linguistic research.11 Almost as soon as he began recording the language (probably in November 1790 when the Eora routinely started to come into the garrison in significant numbers), Dawes seemed to lose enthusiasm for the neat nouns-versus-verbs structure that he first planned. Instead of naming things in one list and describing the actions that could be exerted upon them in the other, he began the more heuristic and complex grammar section (in Notebook B), where his note-taking loosened methodologically as he recorded dozens of intensified dramas in the form of narrative miniatures or event-fragments that were set down, page by page, almost like mosaic shards or elements of montage. Dawes was in his mid-twenties at this time. Very little is known about him. Patyegarang seems to have been fifteen or so. Even less is known about her. She was most likely from the north-shore Cammeray people. Her name, which was probably not uncommon for young women in





the region, refers to the local grey kangaroo. Dawes notes that she carried other names too (Tagaran, Tuba and Kanmangnal)12 and she may well have changed her affiliations to the kangaroo at some later phase of her life.13 Clearly her elders permitted her to associate with Dawes and she may have been strategically important to investigating the motives and plans of the newcomers. There is no doubt Patyegarang was remarkable. Young as she was, she was Dawes’ intellectual equal, and she was not averse to carrying complex political messages to the British, even as she also negotiated the intricacies of her friendship with Dawes. For example, late in Notebook B there are conversations in which Patyegarang informs Dawes that the Eora have grown angry because it is evident now that the British have settled. ‘Inyám ngalawí white men’, she declares. Before Dawes can respond to this candour she goes on to say that fear prevails too. ‘Gun-in’, she tells him, ‘because of the guns’.14 A conversation asserting that anger and fear are on the rise – it sounds like a warning. Perhaps Patyegarang drew close to Dawes because she was curious. Perhaps generous. Perhaps she was a kind of spy. Perhaps she knew how to use sexual allure in such a mission, to distract Dawes and win secrets from him. Perhaps she used their friendship just for her own entertainment, say, to escape tedium or to redirect what he could see looming as her own constrained destiny. Or perhaps the friendship she orchestrated was feigned to fool Dawes first and then to fool dozens of commentators, myself included, down the decades. It is truly impossible to say much that is conclusive about Patyegarang. We have to speculate about her. We have to make a space in our imaginations to support an array of debatable interpretations, some of them encouraging, some dispiriting, some offensive. This imaginative space has to be made because the evidence is so partial, so inconclusive, and because the best chance for adaptability in cross-cultural circumstances, then and now, depends on the maintenance of discursive realms where contention and disputation can make their arguments and put their claims on everyone’s conceptions about what might be possible, for good or bad, in scenes of social and political collision. By holding open a space for all speculations, even some that might be uncivil but not endorsed, one can also hold open a space that might eventually host civility. As Inga Clendinnen asserts so precisely: Inquiry into our confused beginnings suggests that the possibility of a decent co-existence between unlike groups must begin from the critical scrutiny of our own assumptions and values as they come



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The space for contentious conversation that was made by Patyegarang and Dawes was a space they kept open, where they investigated each other by exercising their imaginations. Founded on intimacy but extensive in the way it enabled the interlocutors to project a new world of possibility, this imaginative space is something to keep open two centuries later. We do this when we wonder what occurred between these two people, when we envisage the sense of possibility that might have loomed when they conversed during those few years before relations devolved into the closed and mainly hopeless exploitation and ignorance that have defined encounters between Indigenous and incursive cultures during most of the subsequent decades. In using the collective pronoun ‘we’ here, I refer to everyone indebted to Patyegarang and Dawes, everyone caught in the aftermath of colonialism, Indigenous and incursive. I suspect the conversations were intimate, inventive, principled and brave, but I cannot assert this conclusively, and I have to be ready to entertain arguments otherwise. I have to make a space in my own imagination, allowing many contradicting interpretations some play in there. Examined from almost every possible standpoint (such as sexual politics, linguistics, pedagogy, historiography, or contemporary and subsequent theories of race and culture) the transactions between Patyegarang and Dawes were venturesome and somehow lawless – not illegal or illicit so much as beyond the guidance of precedents. I imagine that when Patyegarang and Dawes conversed, they were both in a swirl of needs, fears and desires much larger than their own individual selves. Perhaps it is better to speak not of desire but of urges, of worldly compulsions, of feelings involving obligation flush with intensity, connectedness, creativity and animistic flow. These tendencies that I am trying to evoke are contingencies that are difficult now to interpret with the right amount of nuance, not least because everyone who has ever imagined Patyegarang and Dawes conversing (including myself, of course) has brought their own particular urges to the scene and because needs, fears, desires and associated actions are felt and made manifest in different ways in different cultures during different phases of history. What occurred in the physical space that held Patyegarang and Dawes so close? What was breathed across? The questions pour out of the tiny



under challenge. We might then be able to make informed decisions as to which uncomfortable differences we are prepared to tolerate and which we are not, rather than to attempt the wholesale reformation of what we identify as the defects of the other.15


notebooks. What scene, what relationship in space and time was staged between these two people? What degree of trust? What preparedness to risk and alter? What held them in relationship, what allowed their experiments, their research into each other? And what can be imagined beyond the clichés of popular romance which, contextually considered, do not seem the least bit germane to their paradoxically delicate yet cosmic drama? Here is one answer: vast issues transpired, founded on moral nimbleness and venture. To illustrate the intimate scale of the knowledge he was gaining, Dawes recorded Indigenous words signifying the extinguishment of a candle late at night (Notebook B, p. 33, l. 17); he learned words meaning ‘to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person’ (Notebook B, p. 21, l. 10); he learned what it meant to wink and to take notice of eyelashes and eyebrows (Notebook B, p. 18, l. 13). Extrapolating from the glints of evidence in the notebooks, one can imagine Patyegarang and Dawes as creative people, heroic even, and fallible, likely to succumb to slow disillusionment. My guess is they were erotic people too, but the erotics were probably careful, part of some vigilant and reverent system of proximity and ramification governed by rules of giving and receiving, respectful of cosmic powers of increase, immeasurably more complex than the salacious riffs that jolt modern popular culture.16 Everyone who reads the notebooks has to make their own decision about this, and I have decided it is unlikely the intimacy between Patyegarang and Dawes was principally carnal, though the flesh was a part of their dramaturgy, simply because it was a topic of real concentration for them when they used their bodies to feel the most direct way through to translation. In the notebooks, for example, Dawes preserves the verb ‘to embrace . . . to hug’, and there are observations concerning skin complexion, eyes, hands, fingernails, snot, hair, sores, wounds, procedures for washing various body parts, and the way fire and the night air affect a naked body. Courteous rather than lascivious in tone, the urges discernible in the notebooks bespeak a spirited feeling that moves across spaces, through people and amidst objects. These urges often seem to organise the space where Patyegarang and Dawes encountered each other. Many entries in the notebooks imply the prevalence of some forceful influence that builds when one concentrates on relations between interdependent elements rather than on the self-motivated sovereignty of singular entities. Individualist appetites and self-serving actions are not prevalent in the notebooks.



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This is borne out strongly in the grammar sections, where Dawes recorded his growing realisation that there was a function in the language that called for particular pronouns to be wrapped around with subtle nuances of parsing, depending on how many people (and perhaps which particular people from which rank or totemic alliance) were included in any scene of utterance. For example, Dawes developed an awareness of different ways of speaking in first-person-plural, depending on whether the speaker was referring to ‘we two’ or to ‘we all’. What is more, the laws seemed to be emphatically strict, demanding that the speaker invoke the collectivity in exactly the right way. To emphasise this point, at one stage Dawes describes Patyegarang taking pains to adjust the record of her speech, when she realised that she had not noticed that someone extra (an Eora named Pundul) had been in the scene when she had been talking earlier.17 Paul Carter has described how sound must have spurred Dawes into fresh cogitation: ‘[Dawes] paid attention to the process of language acquisition: the fluid nature of speech patterns, the baffling capacity of sounds to change their meaning from context to context became for him not a frustration but a source of revelation.’18 As Carter has explained elsewhere, in work such as The Sound in Between, historical sound is definitively lost and can only be remade and analysed in the historically informed imagination.19 Like the exact meaning of a moment in history, sound is an evanescence that has to be described retrospectively, brought to reality in cogitation and disputation. But it is remarkable how seldom chroniclers paused to describe acoustic spaces, to evoke the sounds of places and events. The history of colonial assertions in space is partly a history of sound. And sound wastes in a second or two. It occurs relationally in phenomenal space but it has to be retrieved contingently, as a resonance in noumenal space, in the imagination. Therefore a history of meaningful sound needs to be speculative and spatial. And the speculators need to be unfazed by the degrees to which such a history is nebulous, contentious, inconclusive, despite how site-specific the sound would have been. Sound is an event worth evoking and analysing historiographically because it defines a scene. More than that, sound fills and makes the scene – fills it with cultural force and contingent meanings and feelings. Sound gets resonance from the human assertions in a place, letting people know their relative proximity and influence as a space is made into a place by the blending of nature and culture whenever human action plays upon the physical environment. So sound measures the relationships between people and the limits of their setting. Engaged





in a scene, or analysing it even while immersed in it, an audience asks: how loud, how sharp, how close or far, how warm, how aggressive, how orientational, how soothing or significant are the noises that are being manipulated by the actors in this scene? Sound emits and envelops, buffets and connects bodies to environing objects. Sound travels to the edges of a scene, marking a temporary boundary when silence asserts, a boundary that can be maintained only through constant reiteration. Thus sound can organise time in a space too, through the rhythms being made with reiteration. In this way a space can be altered into a place, be it in the physical or the imagined world. And conversations, such as those that transpired between Patye and Dawes, are intimate versions of such scenography. Manipulating the space between people, conversations can be semantic – making sense – but they can also be somatic – making sensual the relationships entangling people and objects out to the edges of their setting. How significant a sound is when it is principally conversation! Not only what is said, but how it is said: the scenography and the somatics, the bodily impact of the saying. In this accumulation of sense and the senses we divine the full significance of a conversation. Such realisations spring out of Dawes’ notebooks. His notations are full of prompts for the reader to imagine how he and Patyegarang made some lively and convivial zone between them, how they made space for possibility, depending on how they placed each other and called each other close, how they addressed and mutually obliged each other and how they repeatedly organised the entire world to hold and carry them even as the world pushed back around and into them. The local language that was being gathered and finessed via the imaginative conversations between Patyegarang and Dawes, it must be conjured now in the modern imagination. The language of the Eora can be grasped only inconclusively, speculatively, endlessly. Across the pages of the notebooks one can see the Sydney language always emerging and retreating from Dawes, just as English was always shifting for Patyegarang. As they delved into the other’s language, sense was always folding back and adjusting in the simultaneously speculative and reflective space between them. One could fairly say they had little interest in each other’s status. Rather, a strong sense of dynamics defined the space where they encountered each other. In line with this liveliness, the notebooks indicate that the Sydney language was not principally nominalist. It seems nouns and verbs were less distinctly separate and autonomous than they tend to be in English. It is plausible to assert that the Sydney language was concerned more with the collective than with



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the individual. Moreover it was not only the case that people related to people in this manner; things were probably part of the same system. People related to things. Things to things. All of this pertained with a sense of some powerful influences transacting while everything and everyone was consorting. As Patyegarang and Dawes felt their mentalities constantly adjusting when speaking and listening into each other’s intelligence, they must have been suffused with the sense of an entire world animated by mutability. (Patyegarang, of course, was learning English at least as quickly as Dawes was gathering her language.) The notebooks show Dawes divining a kind of differential linguistic energy that causes systems of meaning and feeling to arise amidst things and that also causes things to alter and meld constantly, depending on their proximity to other things arrayed within space, time and communal authority. The grammar of the language seems to have shadowed a grammar of the world. Unlike many of his colonial comrades, Dawes was not especially interested in a simple language-capture exercise that fixated on a vocabulary tally hoarding a retinue of solid objects into an inventory of valuable commodities. 20 His New South Wales was a good deal more slippery, quick and humbling than that. For example, just as Patyegarang was the name of a person who was somehow also a kangaroo, just as Bennelong was several people with several other names in different moments and placements, so the notebooks register an entire harbourside world of shifting valence. Dawes took note of a world that was made up of named things (hence the vocabulary notations) which changed their qualities and changed their very names depending on how they were charged with a power deriving from the way the particular, named things related to everything else in the larger world’s extensive system (hence the grammar notations). Therefore, neither of Dawes’ books of language notes (the one for vocabulary and the one for event-grammar) makes much sense without the other. In their mutual proximity, in their interweaving and inseparable involvement, the vocabulary and grammar make a world. This world coheres only if one understands how all elements can relate and interfuse and even vaporise in space and time. To give some nuance to this abstract proposition, linguist Jakelin Troy has drawn on the notebooks and several other partial accounts of the Sydney language to list at least fifteen different utterances that might help a listener think of the phenomenon that in English gets called ‘wind’. Among these terms are expressions referring to: something in the air coming from the sun; something with a strong smell; something cold; something associated





with a special island; or something emanating from a particular time of year when certain botanical or zoological factors prevail.21 In such a quick world, each named thing is not simply a separate entity; rather each thing exists within a system of intervalent elements partaking of each other in ways that challenge notions of a solid physics and of trigonometric space staked by permanent coordinates of surveyance. Imagine a European scientist – a student of matter and fundamental principles – dropping into such a shape-shifting world. Imagine him sensing some fellow-feeling with this world. And now imagine Patyegarang figuring so quickly how to lead him into this world and what to do with him once he was there! It was never likely that such a dynamic, relational mode of being in and of a place would inform the English colony in New South Wales. And certainly Dawes was in a minority of one when it came to his appreciation of Indigenous language and consciousness. Before long, Dawes was refused an extension to his stay in Sydney; walls and fences began to sequester the country; diseases assailed not only the Eora but every other Indigenous group that endured a frontier when the colony blotched out further into the continent; and the tyranny of property deeds and cadastral mapping locked the country into a new mode of possession. One could say that a different, antipathetic kind of ‘landgrammar’ was laid over the Indigenous country, one that segmented the place into portions of resource, making a large, objective realm of commodity where once there was something more like a live thing, something like a complex of mutually informing and adjusting influences and urges that supported the vigilant, careful behaviour of the people who earned their livelihood from the dynamic system of country and consciousness that Dawes tried to survey and parse. The fact that Dawes glimpsed and asserted the value of something outside the colonial conventions of spatial conquest probably led to his eviction. Even so, there’s no denying the extreme value of the close work he and Patyegarang performed together (along with the contributions of the dozen other Eora who permitted him a view into their thinking). This work has bequeathed us the collaborative wonderment of the notebooks through which people from later generations can imagine – in vital and definitively contentious glimpses – a consciousness of land, of language and of mutual obligations that bind people to people, things to things, things to people to country. With the collapse of many Australian eco-systems looking evermore imminent, there seems no way around an avowedly polemical conclusion: the vitality of the aftermath-country called Australia seems to



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depend on whether the present and coming generations can make a space in the collective imagination, a space like the one that Patyegarang and Dawes offered each other, a curious and respectful domain where an ever-altering, collective and relational intelligence might burgeon in such a way that land could be understood anew not as a commodity or a territory but as a live thing. In short, the fragmented lessons of history indicate that imagination is prerequisite for making a well-tended place, an animated and animating entity that contains everything lively and always altering. Notes 1. The original notebooks remain in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Microfiche copies are held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney. The SOAS is negotiating to post the complete facsimile of the notebooks online as soon as possible. 2. See G. A. Wood, ‘Lieutenant William Dawes and Captain Watkin Tench’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society 10, 1 (1924): 1–22. See Jakelin Troy’s Australian Aboriginal Contact with the English Language in New South Wales: 1788 to 1845 (Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1990); Jane Rogers, Promised Lands (London: Faber and Faber, 1995); Paul Carter’s imaginative sound installation and book, The Calling to Come, for the Museum of Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust, 1996); and Jeremy Macdonald Steele’s remarkably comprehensive linguistic analyses in his MA thesis, ‘The Aboriginal Language of Sydney’ (University of Sydney, 2005). See Kate Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant (Melbourne: Text, 2008). Finally, see the Australian SBS TV series The First Australians (2008, produced by Darren Dale and Rachel Perkins). 3. Although this chapter concentrates on the relationship between Dawes and the young woman named Patyegarang, Dawes’ notebooks show that he collaborated closely with more than a dozen named Indigenous people during over two years of active and mostly congenial research. 4. See Watkin Tench, 1788 comprising A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, ed. Tim Flannery (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1996). First published 1789 and 1793 respectively. 5. Notoriously, Dawes challenged one of Arthur Phillip’s orders to conduct a punitive military foray amongst the Eora. After first refusing to take part, he eventually acquiesced and joined an ineffectual (perhaps deliberately ineffectual) mission led by Tench. Brilliant and strategically useful as Dawes obviously was, his standing with Phillip never recovered. 6. Deirdre Coleman’s Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) gives a lucid view into these issues. 7. Tench, 1788, p. 43. 8. Robert J. McAfee (ed.), Dawes’s Meteorological Journal (Canberra: Department of Science and Technology, 1981), p. 19. McAfee asserts on page 1 that Dawes’ weather journal is probably the most comprehensive account of meteorological patterns anywhere in the world at the time.





9. Tench, 1788, p. 187. 10. Keith Smith, Bennelong: the Coming in of the Eora, Sydney Cove 1788–1792 (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 2001), p. 108. 11. The relationship between Patyegarang and Dawes, peculiar as it was, can be considered as another of the contentious histories of colonial intimacy that Ann Stoler has been investigating in books such as Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Haunted by Empire, ed. Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 12. As part of an MA thesis, Jeremy Macdonald Steele (cited in note 2, above) has compiled a database of all Dawes’ entries. This database is by far the most authoritative register of all Sydney language citations. With gratitude, I use Steele’s citational method throughout this chapter. The alternative names of Patyegarang, for example, can be found in Notebook B, p. 4, l. 6. 13. Smith, Bennelong, p. 108. 14. See Notebook B, p. 33, ll. 3–10. See also Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language (Canberra: AIATSIS and Australian Dictionaries Project, 1993), p. 14. 15. Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003), p. 288. 16. Keith Smith suggests there was an Eora economy of exchange – exchange of words, of goods, perhaps of selves – that registers in spiritual as well as social contexts. Expanding this notion, I would say that when the highly charged exchanges associated with erotics get considered, they have to be understood to be laced with the incursive and predatory power of colonialism, of course: but erotics should also be considered in an Indigenous context involving gift-giving, encompassing an ethical system that reveres the powers of yield and productivity that always seem to be pushing through the cosmos. In this regard Smith observes that ‘linguistic evidence points to the existence of reciprocal gift giving among the Indigenous people of Port Jackson in the late eighteenth century. In the language spoken by the Eora, as understood by those compiling the word lists and language notebooks, wea-je-minga meant “relating to giving anything”, a word very close to wyanga or mother. Damuna meant exchange and damoly or tamooly was the act of exchanging a name with a friend . . . the pejorative term damunalung, someone who refused to give, was translated into English by Dawes as “a churl”’ (see Smith, Bennelong, p. 149). 17. Dawes noted it this way in Notebook B, p. 34, l. 8: ‘The difference of speaking of we two and we three as above expressed was obtained 27 Nov. [1791] by Patyegaráng first speaking to me mark’d #1 and afterwards as mark’d #2, when on asking her why she did not speak in the same way the 2d. time as the 1st., she said it was because she had forgot that Pündül was with them, and explained herself very clearly.’ 18. Paul Carter, The Calling to Come (Sydney: MoS Publications, 1996), p. 3. 19. Paul Carter, The Sound in Between: Voice, Space, Performance (Kensington: New Endeavour Press, 1992). 20. Several of the other First Fleeters such as Arthur Phillip, Philip Gidley King, Watkin Tench, William Bradley and Thomas Watling made brief lists of words, but none folded himself inside the systems of the language as Dawes did. 21. Troy, The Sydney Language, p. 50.



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11 Crystal McKinnon

Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant.1 James Scott In the late 1970s in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne, such as Fitzroy, Carlton and Richmond, Indigenous peoples often had problems getting into local pubs, bars, general nightlife and music venues. As Uncle Alf Bamblett states: ‘we finished off being barred from all the places around, purely on the base of race’.2 Not content with this situation he, along with others such as Tony Lovett, approached the Eastern Hill Public Bar, and stated they wanted to put a night on themselves, ‘somewhere for our own mobs to go and enjoy themselves’.3 They ‘scratched together a band’, with members including at the time Uncle Alf Bamblett, Tony Lovett, Tony Gorrie and Janice Johnstone.4 What they would create through their music was more than a band. Rather, their performance, the places they performed, and the spaces they and their audience created when they performed would generate critical sites of Indigenous resistance. At the time Uncle Alf Bamblett’s band was called Just Us, and they performed once every two weeks on a Thursday night. Though the Eastern Hill Public Bar closed, the night was such a success that it moved around various venues in the inner-city, eventually finding its most well-known home at the John Curtin (JC’s) in Lygon Street, Carlton.5 The night became a gathering place for Indigenous people from across Australia who came to Melbourne. As Uncle Alf tells us, ‘any blackfellas that came from interstate, [they would say] is JC’s on tonight, where do we go? Where do we go?’6 For Uncle Alf the night was about ‘people getting together, time to yarn, time to catch up, you know a real social 255



Indigenous Music as a Space of Resistance


activity’ and ‘it really was a creation of space for us for the night’.7 After discovering another band in Ballarat of the same name whilst they were there performing, the band settled on changing their name to The Stray Blacks. It continues to exist today, performing not only in Melbourne, but also across the country. Primarily the band plays at community events, celebrations and fundraisers, and over its many years of existence has consisted of a rotating ensemble of musicians, including Sean Moffat, Ray Ahmat, Casey Atkinson, Nicky Moffat, Desie Smith, Peter Hood, Gary Saunders and many others. Along with Tony Lovett, Uncle Alf Bamblett has been a continuing member of the band. The story of the Stray Blacks shows an active pursuit and creation of Indigenous space by these people, who sought a way for the Indigenous community to gather in spite of the racism expressed by Melbourne venues and the wider enduring forces of settler colonialism. In settler colonial societies, Indigenous peoples have survived despite an often relentless onslaught from invading colonial forces.8 Our survival has necessarily been through the practice of multiple forms of resistance because Indigenous peoples who live in societies where the settler ‘comes to stay’ face a pervasive and systemic form of oppression in their own homelands.9 Being systemic this power is exerted through multiple avenues, both informally through social actions and formally through explicit and state-sanctioned practices. These permeate all realms of Indigenous peoples’ lives and communities including, and perhaps most insidiously, through our daily lived and social spaces. As has been elaborated in the current collection by Jane Lydon, Denis Byrne and Penelope Edmonds in particular, such social spaces in the past have been located on missions, reserves and throughout the mainstream public realm, where they have served the purposes of control, surveillance and the attempted assimilation of Indigenous peoples.10 The reclamation and creation of social spaces through which an autonomous sense of Indigeneity can be created, continued and expressed has therefore been central to the ongoing survival of Indigenous peoples and cultures in Australia and elsewhere. In this chapter I consider the ways Indigenous autonomous spaces have been asserted within a settler colonial world. I use the example of contemporary Indigenous music, and the notion of musical resistance. I am interested in discussing and exploring the ideas, possibilities and concepts of autonomous and alternative political spaces, how such spaces might be used and what the use of these spaces might achieve. The role that music can play as a vehicle of resistance has been well explored by scholars such as Eugene Genovese, Mark Mattern and others, who have shown in other contexts of systematic oppression the



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rich histories of music as a cultural form peculiarly well positioned to provide a vehicle for community expressions of identity, resistance and endurance.11 Although the matrix of settler colonialism structures Australian society, Indigenous communities have found and created within it independent and private political spaces. It is within these spaces that resistance to oppression has flourished. They are actively resistive spaces where politics are communicated, discussed and articulated, where culture evolves, is maintained and reinvented, and where a liberated world is dreamed of and imagined. This chapter therefore considers Indigenous musical practices in Australia as specific sites or social spaces that illustrate such resistive politics. As Michel Foucault has observed, powers and spaces – political, geographic and imaginary – are intimately connected and there is still much to be written about their histories: A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.12 An exploration of strategies through which Australian Indigenous communities fought for survival is also necessarily a discussion of the history of power and its relationship to spaces in the nominally ‘post’-colonial Australia. Adopting Foucault’s vision, I argue that the ‘little tactics’ of resistance, and the ‘great strategies’ are inextricably entwined. For, as many of the essays in this collection have already explored, the ways in which settler societies colonise, both through the implementation of structures and institutions, and the occupation of space, are of the utmost importance to their project. Geographical space – the land – is of course central to its scheme, but it is the underexamined endurance of Indigenous social spaces through which Indigenous cultures and identities have fought displacement and assimilation that also remain threatened. These are the sites of political, cultural and social colonisation where the settler’s language, behaviours, beliefs, values and ideas are hegemonic, and where Indigenous peoples continue to resist. These impositions of settler cultural norms and ways of being have historically been central to the success of one vital arm of the settler colonial project in Australia, namely the absorption and assimilation of Indigenous people. That a primary aim of settler colonialism has been, and arguably is, to assimilate Indigenous peoples and eradicate Indigenous cultural forms is well established in Australian and



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international scholarship.13 Indeed the explorations of Angela Wanhalla and Jay Johnson in this collection have explored parallel processes in Aotearoa New Zealand.14 Within the context of Australian scholarship, however, it remains necessary not just to explore the how and why of colonial programmes of assimilation, but also the particularity of strategies deployed in social space. For it is only with such a background that the subtleties and continuity of Indigenous resistance and survival can be properly illuminated.

The spatiality of power and the spatiality of resistance In Australia, the settler state has effected a domination of Indigenous existences in multiple ways, impacting our economic, political and subjective realities. And yet, as Kenyan writer Ngûgî wa Thiong’o argued, ‘economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control’.15 As we know, culture is a vital site of oppression, and to achieve such ‘mental’ control settler society must also colonise cultural and social spaces in ways that seek totality. That is, forcing, enforcing and influencing ways of being and ways of valuing onto Indigenous communities, whilst simultaneously overwriting Indigenous differences. Further, as an expanding body of scholarship on whiteness has begun to illuminate, such processes are most powerfully achieved through the assertion and deployment of normativity within which settler society invisibly occupies the centre. As Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued, ‘public discourse promotes the idea that Australia as a nation, has become race-blind, inclusive and tolerant’.16 Presented as non-racial, popular notions of ‘being Australian’ remove the demarcation of a white settler way of being, and rather asserts a universal way of being, for everyone. This normalises settler colonial agendas, simultaneously marginalising Indigenous cultures, ideas and existences as alternative. This intensely social and political process is necessarily located in social and political spaces. As has been well explored in this collection, without the spatial dimension, the settler project could not with any hope of success generate and disseminate assimilationist discourses and ideas. For the transmission and normalisation of ideas, beliefs and cultural norms into a people’s collective mind and way of being is naturalised by the physical, or spatial, environment. If settler colonialism’s potential for rigorous oppression plays out spatially in the everyday nature of institutional and social practices of the settler world, as observed in the experiences of Uncle Alf Bamblett above, policing and the regulation of public space is a critical means of doing so.



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embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumption underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms.17 These oppressions operate in ‘unquestioned’ and ‘unconscious’ ways, and within commonly accepted social and cultural norms. They are difficult to identify, even more so to address and fight. They are inextricable from structural oppression and both are necessary to the production of settler space. Thus, structural oppression cannot be overcome without the elimination of these accompanying subjugating practices, particularly as they are spatially manifested. Theorist Edward Soja brings a crucial spatial dimension to studies of the everyday nature of structural oppression. He tells us that we ‘must be insistently aware of . . . how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of human life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology’.18 While reminding us of the apparent innocence of normalised power, he speaks of it as dispersed throughout human geographies and the everyday existences of people within them. Social spaces, he reminds us, are incessantly political. With an awareness of how power produces social space – geographic, imaginative or political – the formation of autonomous space or alternative spatiality becomes inherently resistive. While resistive modes are at times embedded within the interstitial spaces of an oppressive settler colonial world, they are nevertheless sites of liberation. This runs contrary in some ways to the claims of postcolonialist theorists such as Robert Young, who have insisted that it is impossible to write about separate subaltern narratives.19 Such metropolitan theorising which claims that autonomous Indigenous spaces within a settler colonial society cannot exist, only serve to recolonise the everyday lived experiences of Indigenous individuals. Such claims appear to be focused upon the structural and geographical nature of settler colonialism, and forget the social and cultural elements and the lived experiences of the



Political theorist Iris Marion Young has argued in relation to such everyday oppression that it is:


people themselves. Though these autonomous spaces are not always entirely geographically separate from settler colonialism, they are more importantly socially separate. It is the social separation that enables an independent Indigenous spatial area. It is within these areas where a separate Indigenous identity is strengthened, nurtured and maintained, and along with an identity independent to that of the coloniser come the separate subaltern narratives. Moreover, the very creation of these alternative social spaces by Indigenous peoples within the geography of settler colonialism testifies to the inherently resistive nature of such spatiality. As contributions to this collection have shown us, such spaces have historically existed by choice and necessity, on the physical and legal margins of mainstream settler societies in Australia. Such marginality has inherent strengths. As James Scott reminds us: subordinates in such large-scale structures of domination nevertheless have a fairly extensive existence outside the immediate control of the dominant. It is in such sequestered settings where, in principle, a shared critique of domination may develop.20 In the context of the historical surveillance that has accompanied Australia’s absorption and assimilation strategies, such sequestered spaces offered a certain privacy. This has allowed Indigenous people, whilst navigating everyday lives often within the spaces of the dominant settler society, to exist in insistently marginal ways, in ways that allow identity and culture to be nourished and maintained or politics and ideology to be shared and expressed. Key, and now highprofile examples that merge physical and political ‘sequestered spaces’ can be found in the establishment of such bodies as the Aborigines Advancement League in Melbourne or the Tranby Aboriginal College in Sydney.21 Along with these more formal, organisational spaces, other informal urban spaces include sites of gathering at Victoria Square in Adelaide or Musgrave Park in Brisbane. Within, and because of marginal spaces, Indigenous peoples have consciously resisted assimilation. African-American scholar bell hooks offers a particularly potent analysis of the condition of marginality and marginal spaces that remains relevant to the Australian experience. Groups in these positions, such as Indigenous communities, she argues, use marginality to their advantage. She tells us how groups cannot only be relegated to the margins by mainstream societies, but in actively seeking such marginality may create new prospects for resistance and liberation. Marginality, she tells us, ‘offers the possibility of radical



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perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternative, new worlds’.22 It is within the spaces of marginality then, that Indigenous people escape the pervasiveness of settler colonialism, to create revolutionary new approaches that maintain Indigenous cultures and lives, and perhaps ultimately, freedom. It is not simply the case in Australia that Indigenous communities are relegated to the outskirts and margins of settler society to do the best with what we are given. These spaces, like the public sites of Victoria and Musgrave parks mentioned above, are often actively sought out and maintained, and are resymbolised, reterritorialised and reinvigorated for Indigenous purposes. In this way, space is an active political agent, and marginal spaces are produced for the purpose of Indigenous organisation and control. In other words, such spaces exist wherever, and fundamentally because, Indigenous peoples hold community gatherings, concerts, meetings, celebrations, mourning or reunions there. They can be in the city or in the country, at a community organisation or at a council hall. Crucially, it is not necessarily the physical and geographical location that is important, but the people who organise and the people who gather there. The people produce the space. It is also important to note that for Indigenous peoples, these spaces are indeed not ‘marginal’ at all. They are the spaces in which we exist and live everyday – they are normalised spaces. As Foucault has reminded us, we gain crucial understandings of the workings of power and its subtleties by looking at resistance to it. As he put it, ‘in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance’.23 Before moving onto such a discussion, however, a historical survey of the spatial oppressions Indigenous communities in Australia have faced situates the notion that resistance has a spatiality that is not only geographical, but is also located politically and imaginatively in the mind. As has been explored with more specificity in this collection, control and surveillance of Indigenous peoples in settler colonies most appropriately begins with issues of land. In Australia, Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land through the legal fiction of terra nullius from 1788.24 The resulting onslaught resulted in discrete Indigenous groups being physically displaced and dispossessed at varying points in time.25 Simultaneous to the violence of the frontier, reserves and missions were often established nominally as sites of protection but many became merely sites of displacement where Indigenous peoples were subjected to varying levels of control and regulation, often away from traditional lands and familial ties.26 Governed separately in each





Australian colony from 1869, extensive legislative schemes of protective custody emerged ‘in which Indigenous communities were forced into concentrated “asylums” or “total institutions” otherwise known as settlements or missions’.27 Statutory provisions were created that enabled authorities on impulse to shift Indigenous peoples between these reserves with little justification. Such control extended beyond the monitoring of physical movement, and necessarily extended into political life on the missions and reserves. Government officials or missionaries living or visiting these places monitored conversations, cultural practices and languages.28 Surveillance therefore frequently invaded the inner recesses of Indigenous peoples’ lives. Control and surveillance of Indigenous peoples’ movement and spatial occupation has been a dominant and persistent feature of relations between black and white Australia from the nineteenth century until today. Historical continuities of the regulation of nineteenth-century urban space, for example, may be found in the ongoing branding of Indigenous youth as criminally or socially deviant when moving freely within mainstream settler spaces.29 As Chris Cuneen’s extensive studies have shown, the experience of being watched and branded as ‘criminal’ if one has to venture into dominant spaces persistently haunts Indigenous people and youth across Australia.30 When aimed at youth, such expressions of control target the next generation who will lead resistance in the future. As studies like Cuneen’s show, such racially or culturally based surveillance and labelling impacts negatively on self-esteem and identity. This impact also reaches beyond the subjective manifestations for individuals. For such surveillance monitors and implicitly controls social and political space, potentially limiting movement – both geographic and imaginative. The exertion of mental, cultural and spatial oppression therefore makes crucial the development of spaces of alterity and autonomy, spaces that Indigenous peoples create in which we can freely move, communicate and exist. These autonomous spaces, when protected, provide the means though which Indigenous peoples can escape surveillance and control to actively pursue the creation and maintenance of selfrepresentation that thwarts the negative images so frequently imposed.

Indigenous music as political space In exploring Indigenous musical production as a site of alternative or autonomous space, I work with two primary forms of resistance: that which is actively directed externally towards an oppressor, and that which occurs within and for a community, where resistance becomes



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a means to maintain a separate identity and culture. Indeed ‘resistance is not necessarily directed at the immediate source of appropriation’.31 Music, I argue, belongs most effectively to the latter and is a tool by which resistance is articulated, communicated and discussed. Those forms of resistance directed externally from a resisting community towards an oppressor have traditionally been the forms of resistance most readily recognised as historically significant.32 In the context of pervasive control exerted by colonial states, Indigenous people developed many and varied forms of less overt and less confrontational resistance. Thus the traditional definitions of resistance as insurrection and direct political action ‘have only a limited usefulness and quickly lose their force’.33 With this in mind, I utilise a theory of resistance which is more extensive and includes a variety of methods and actions in a variety of forms and spaces. Moreton-Robinson offers us a succinct and relevant definition of Indigenous resistance: there is no single, fixed or monolithic form of Indigenous resistance; rather than simply being a matter of overtly defiant behaviour, resistance is re-presented as multifaceted, visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, explicit and covert, intentional and unintentional.34 When this kind of dynamic definition is utilised to think about resistance, it may further our understandings of the social and spatial ways that it is practised. Rather than incorporating a dynamic definition of resistance, however, many scholars have only perceived the resistance strategies of Indigenous communities through relatively narrow and traditional paradigms. Their histories often privilege the explicit, confrontational and oppositional actions carried out by Indigenous people against the settler state.35 Protest marches, sit-ins, letters, petitions and violence are usually the focal point of historical studies concerned with Indigenous resistance movements. Examples include the valorisation of the Yirrkala Bark Petition of 1963, written by the Yolngu people to the federal government exerting and asserting their ownership of their lands, and objecting to the granting of mining rights on their land; or the celebration of the Barunga Statement of 1988 which presented the federal government with a statement of national Indigenous political objectives.36 Similarly, the Tent Embassy occupation of Parliament House in Canberra, continuous since 1972, and the Gurindgi ‘Wave Hill’ walk-off in the fight for land rights are just a few of the many protest marches, petitions and sit-ins that are frequently cited as prime illustrations of Indigenous resistance.37





I do not mean to suggest that these are not significant feats that are both important and central to the survival of Indigenous people and communities. But it is crucial to acknowledge that these types of protest and opposition to settler oppression were levelled at the oppressing group in such a way that they were next to impossible to ignore, or misunderstand. They thus dominate, and potentially exclude from our popular understandings, other forms of protest and resistance that function to ensure the continual cultural survival of Indigenous communities. That is, the resistance practices that fall outside the narrow categories of resistance as direct protest action, and exist for the Indigenous community, have been largely left out of history books and discussions of Indigenous survival. This is despite the fact that strategies of resistance that build communities, from within communities, are critical and ongoing foundations for direct action. That is, one of the essential achievements of inner community resistance lies in its ability to create the foundations for direct action to occur. Like James Scott’s notion of the hidden transcripts which underpin the ‘onstage’ performance of resistance through direct confrontation, it is this kind of resistance which has supported and made possible the long history of staged Indigenous protest.38 Music, in Australia and internationally, has been an important site for recording and transmitting Indigenous peoples’ hidden transcripts. Perhaps because of its vernacular nature music enables cultural beliefs, traditions and identity to be expressed, shared and built upon. As a vehicle for resistance it is driven by community-building, solidarity and cultural identity. It is not that these musical resistance mechanisms will eventuate in liberation and freedom. It represents a form of, as Ronald Wendt put it, ‘fighting not to win, but to fight again’.39 The importance of this is that the struggle for Indigenous rights is unrelenting within the structures and spaces of settler colonialism. So the musical practices continuously build and bind communities providing the strength to persist. The history of Indigenous musical production has incorporated a variety of different genres, including country and western, reggae, blues and more recently hip-hop. These contemporary music practices are not simply the mimicking of the culture and politics of the chosen genres. Rather, as numerous scholars have explored, Indigenous musicians have utilised these musical styles to immerse Indigenous-specific politics and culture.40 Indeed the methods provided by other musical genres have been infused with Indigenous cultures, experiences and identities, and a style has been created which is distinctly Indigenous. For example,



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one popular Indigenous reggae band is No Fixed Address. Although they use the styles and beats of Afro-Caribbean reggae, the lyrics to their many songs are distinctly Indigenous, exemplified in songs such as ‘We Have Survived’ telling of Indigenous survival and resilience: ‘We have survived the white mans ways, and you know, they can’t change that!’41 Another example is the Melbourne-based hip-hop artists Tjimba and the Yung Warriors, who take the distinctly African-American musical forms and instil in them their own Indigeneity. In their song ‘Warrior for Life’ they sing: I’ve got my culture to hold I’ve got my people to show and I’ll never deny who I am when I walk this land.42 In such music we can see how imported musical genres, themselves steeped in a history of resisting oppressions, are used by Indigenous musicians to connect specifically Indigenous politics, values, cultures and world-views to a global conversation. In these ways, Indigenous identities and politics are verbalised and communicated, and thus affirmed, strengthened and maintained. The story of Melbourne-based Indigenous band The Stray Blacks is an enduring example of Indigenous peoples creating autonomous political and physical spaces, and maintaining them in the long term. Asked what he thought the role of The Stray Blacks was for the Indigenous community, Uncle Alf told me that it was: ‘a binding agent, the role has been about providing some entertainment, providing a place for people to come together to meet people . . . and come together as Aboriginal people, and I think that’s the really important one’.43 We can see in this statement how music was viewed as enabling community strengthening and communication within demarcated Indigenous places, producing a spatiality that was at once physically and politically generated from within the community. That Uncle Alf and Tony not only created an Indigenous space, but also formed the band to provide the entertainment, shows both how Indigenous people consciously resist oppressive forces, and how we vigorously ensure that these spaces are successful and utilised by Indigenous people. This example is part of a longer historical tradition. From as early as the 1900s many different genres of music toured Indigenous missions and reserves, including choirs, gospel singers and string quartets. As Jane Lydon discusses in her chapter in this volume,





missionaries often brought these genres to Indigenous communities, and encouraged their dissemination. These genres were joined by other formations such as the Gumleaf orchestras. The Wallaga Lake Gumleaf orchestra, formed in 1917, for example, toured missions and reserves across the south of Australia.44 The wider context of segregation and control of the majority of Indigenous communities during this period makes the touring of these musicians significant. Importantly, this was a way for Indigenous people to physically get off the mission and become mobile. These touring musicians personified a freedom of movement that many other Indigenous people did not have. Their movement facilitated communication between segregated groups of people, and provided a vehicle that enabled a critical transfer of knowledge, news and information.45 This movement historically formed Indigenous spaces that were both physical and intellectual in their resistance against the most difficult of circumstances. For, although the spaces on reserves and missions were physically created and controlled as settler colonial spaces, Indigenous people actively used them and recolonised them, to create social spaces where Indigeneity could be expressed in ways (however limited) that actively infused space with resistance, aboard the critical vehicle of music.46 Along with these more formal touring musicians, for the Indigenous people living on missions and reserves music was a central way to voice dissent. The totality of the surveillance and the living restrictions on missions and reserves often meant that alternative ways to direct action had to be found in order to continue to resist the oppressive forces of settler colonialism. Where speeches, meetings and discussions were more likely to be regulated by missionaries, music and singing were potentially less censored and controlled and less likely to be under surveillance. This is because ‘music was a part of missionary life, as training and entertainment’.47 Indigenous musician Leila Rankine, for example, states that ‘in my generation we found it much easier to sing about a problem because we were less likely to get punished’.48 This early beginning of musical resistance as a distinct and dynamic set of Indigenous spaces has continuity in the present. Recent hip-hop workshops and festivals are particularly salient. Vibe 3 on 3 and Crocfest, for example, took, and take, place within Indigenous communities and organisations across Australia and are good examples of the way in which alternative spaces have been created by Indigenous communities to resist the ongoing pressures faced by them. The Vibe 3 on 3 festival travels to many large rural towns across Australia such as Geraldton, Port Augusta and Alice Springs, where they draw large numbers of



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Indigenous people, and particularly Indigenous youth. The festivals have a focus on music via hip-hop workshops, where Indigenous youth are mentored by established artists to create their own songs. Vibe 3 on 3 includes basketball and break-dancing, which are two activities closely linked and associated with hip-hop.49 The people involved in the festival are all Indigenous appointed role models, such as Brotha Black, and Isaac Parsons who is an Indigenous break-dancer.50 The Vibe 3 on 3 mission statement tells us that the festival is ‘an excellent means of motivating Indigenous young people to believe in themselves, learn about and respect their culture, and fully realise their potential’.51 In relation to the subjective impacts of surveillance in public spaces, there is a pressing need to instil things such as self-esteem and pride amongst Indigenous youth. The autonomous spaces that the festivals and workshops provide are crucial to effecting this. These workshops and festivals are modern examples of a long historical formation of political spaces in which music is produced within the community and for the community. The youth and mentors participating do not record the music for mainstream commercial distribution. Rather, music is used in the moment of the festival to create a framework through which politics and culture can be communicated, discussed and articulated. The festival also illustrates how through Indigenous organisation, involvement and participation, alternative and autonomous spaces for the active pursuit of Indigenous inner community endurance can be found, and are flourishing. One of the most important productions of Indigenous musical spaces is the continuation and recreation of Indigenous identities. Within mainstream non-Indigenous culture, negative and racist representations and stereotypes continue to plague Indigenous communities.52 These representations of Indigenous people saturate wider society with distressing and dire consequences for individuals and communities. Historically, oppressive representations have been a critical means by which colonial powers sought to limit resistance and colonise Indigenous bodies and spaces. Enduring and debilitating representations affecting Indigenous youth in particular are those that criminalise them, or impose the stigmatism of low academic achievement, alcohol abuse and drug abuse.53 In such a context, festivals like Vibe 3 on 3 critically oppose such stigmatisation and provide a forum for the creation of alternative representations. They collectively contribute to what Ian Anderson stated was a need to ‘develop strategies that undermine those forms of representation which deny our ability to develop identities that are both coherent and sustaining’.54 This can only be done through





the generation of distinctly Indigenous spaces of knowledge, ideas and communication, through which Indigenous resistance ‘in all its forms confronts all understandings of Aboriginality articulated and extant in the wider environment, at the very least, of Australian society’.55 As the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate, artists have used music to address the social and political issues that affect their communities, and have done it in ways that have particular meaning to them. Arguably, music has been part of an ongoing and conscious creation and recovery of an Indigenous world-view where Indigenous people and communities occupy central prominence, displacing and disrupting the normativity of settler dominance. In other words, alternative Indigenous spaces are not marginal at all, but for us, are central and normative. Here, the creative expression of music transmits dreams and visions of what a liberated world for Indigenous people may look like, and what an ideal future for Indigenous communities may hold. bell hooks tells us of the importance of creative expressions in the fight against oppression and domination. She writes: [i]f one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of concrete reclamation.56 Here hooks expresses the ways that creative actions of Indigenous people are both resistive against oppressing forces, and also both ‘concrete’ and conscious. She touches on an earlier point of this chapter. If Indigenous people do not actively and consciously resist every day, then the settler colonial project will achieve one of its ultimate aims – our assimilation and absorption. In Australia, settler forces have sought to suppress the cultural, artistic and creative practices of Indigenous people, all of which flourish within Indigenous autonomous spaces. But the cultural and artistic practices of Indigenous people have lived on. The continued survival of Indigenous people attests to the success of our resistive practices; our communities have survived through multiple forms of resistance, many of which generate, demarcate and assert a physical and political spatiality. From the marginal spaces of Australian society, resistance efforts are being mounted within communities and beyond the invasive gaze of structurally and spatially persistent settler colonialism. The strength and power of Indigenous music lies in its capacity to build community, culture and identity as Indigenous musicians communicate across, between and within their communities. Indigenous music is a critical



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Notes 1. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xii. 2. Alf Bamblett, Interview conducted between Crystal McKinnon and Alf Bamblett, Tape Number 3, 5 November 2008, recording in possession of the author. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. This hotel was named after the popular Labour Prime Minister John Curtin. 6. Interview with Alf Bamblett. 7. Ibid. 8. I intend to use the term ‘Indigenous’ to include Torres Strait Islanders and the many nations of Aboriginal people existing within Australia. For the purposes of this chapter, I am situating the 500 diverse and distinct Indigenous communities as one community of people. Despite their diversity and different experiences of colonialism, racism and oppression, similarities can be drawn in order to effectively discuss space and resistance. 9. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999). 10. See Jane Lydon, Chapter 9, this volume, Penelope Edmonds, Chapter 5, this volume. 11. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Mark Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 12. Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 149. 13. The list of people who look at this aspect of settler colonialism is long. Some of them include Tim Rowse and Richard Nile (eds), Contesting Assimilation (Perth: API Networks, 2005); Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008); and Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 14. Angella Wanhalla, Chapter 8, this volume, and Jay Johnson, Chapter 12, this volume. 15. Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), p. 16. 16. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: the High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision’, Borderlands 3, 2 (2004).



foundation for the larger schema of Indigenous resistance and protest practices. It is ‘fighting not to win, but to fight again’57 amidst a perpetuated state of oppression. Finally this testifies to the power of Indigenous peoples’ assertions of spatial autonomy across Australia, that we are still here today, and that our culture and future endure.


17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 41. 18. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso Books, 1989), p. 6. 19. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 20. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. xi. 21. See, for example, Victims or Victors? The Story of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (South Yarra: Hyland House, 1985); Melinda Hinkson, Aboriginal Sydney: a Guide to Important Places of the Past and Present (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001). 22. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 152. 23. Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: the Subject and the Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Drefus and P. Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 211. 24. Terra nullius is a Latin term that literally translates as ‘land of no one/no one’s land’. This was one of the ways British colonising powers were able to take possession of ‘new’ lands through their own laws; the others being cessation and conquering. Though the myth of terra nullius was disposed of in the now infamous Mabo v. Queensland [no. 2] (1992) case it continues to plague the battle for Indigenous land rights. For discussion of the case and its consequences see, for example, Peter Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title: the Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Nonie Sharp, No Ordinary Judgment: Mabo, the Murray Islanders’ Land Case (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996); M. A. Stephenson and Suri Ratnapala (eds), Mabo, A Judicial Revolution: the Aboriginal Land Rights Decision and its Impact on Australian Law (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993). 25. For further discussion see Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788 (Sydney: New Holland Publishers, 2003); Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1982); Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989); Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1982); Ian Clark, ‘That’s My Country Belonging to Me’: Aboriginal Land Tenure and Dispossession in Nineteenth Century Western Victoria (Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998); Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002). 26. For discussion of reserve and missions, and the impact these had on Indigenous people see C. D. Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1972); Jan Petmann, Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992); and also Elder, Blood on the Wattle and Reynolds, Dispossession. 27. David Roache-Turner, ‘“Thinking” about Genocide: Australia and the Political Discourse of Denial’, Polemic 12, 1 (2001), p. 33.



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28. For further discussion see, for example, National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Australia), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Their Families (Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997); Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs – The Untold Story (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997); and Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989). 29. For discussions of the production of racially contoured urban space in Victoria and British Columbia see Penelope Edmonds, Chapter 5, this volume, and Jean Barman, Chapter 6, this volume. 30. Chris Cuneen, A Study of Aboriginal Juveniles and Police Violence (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1990). 31. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 35. 32. See, for instance, Lorna Lippmann, Generations of Resistance: the Aboriginal Struggle for Justice (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981); and Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: a Documentary History (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999). 33. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 598. 34. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation’, in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), p. 128. 35. See, for instance, Lippmann, Generations of Resistance; Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights; Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier; Pat Grimshaw, Creating a Nation (Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1994); and also Verity Burgmann, Power and Protest: Movements for Change in Australian Society (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993). 36. The Yirrkala Bark Petition of 1963 and the Barunga Statement of 1988 are reproduced in full in Irene Moores (ed.), Voices of Aboriginal Australia: Past, Present, Future (Sydney: Butterfly Books, 1995), pp. 70–1 and 332–3. See also Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 202–3. 37. For particularly good accounts of these movements see Alessandro Cavadini producer, Ningla a-na: Hungry For Our Land (Australian Film Institute, 1972) and Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996). 38. James Scott, ‘Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, 3 (1987): 417–52. 39. Ronald Wendt, ‘Answers to the Gaze: a Genealogical Poaching of Resistances’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996), p. 261. 40. See, for example, Clinton Walker, Buried Country: the Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2000) and Chris Gibson and Peter DunbarHall, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004). 41. No Fixed Address, ‘We Have Survived’, From My Eyes, Rough Diamond Records, 1982. 42. Tjimba and the Yung Warriors, ‘Warrior for Life’, Warrior for Life, Sound Vault Records, 2007.





43. Ibid. 44. Gumleaf ensembles were represented in film by Squatters Daughter (1933) and Rangle River (1936) and also marched at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 20 March 1932. See Walker, Buried Country, p. 25 and Robin Ryan, ‘Jamming on the Gumleaves in the Bush “Down Under”: Black Tradition, White Novelty?’ Popular Music and Society (October, 2003). 45. A good source of oral history to illustrate this point can be found in Alec Morgan and Gerry Bostock (producers), Lousy Little Sixpence (Sydney: Sixpence Productions, 1982). This tells the story of the history and lead-up to the 1938 protests against the Aborigines Protection Board in New South Wales. 46. Vine Deloria in Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: the Postcolonial Politics of US–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 47. Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places, p. 42. 48. Leila Rankine quoted in Marcus Breen (ed.), Our Place, Our Music, Aboriginal Music: Australian Popular Music in Perspective Volume 2 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989), p. 4. 49. For more information on the association of break-dancing and hip-hop see Sally Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); and Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994). For more information on the links between basketball and hip-hop see, for instance, Todd Boyd, Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: the Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Randy Martin and Toby Miller (eds), SportCult (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and George Nelson, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998). 50. Vibe 3 on 3, ‘Looking Solid Feeling Deadly’, available at http://3on3.vibe. com.au/3on3_new/hiphop/index/asp 51. Ibid. 52. See, for example, Michael Meadows, Voices in the Wilderness: Images of Aboriginal People in the Australian Media (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); Andrew Jakubowicz et al., Racism, Ethnicity and the Media (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994); and David Hollinsworth, Race and Racism in Australia (South Melbourne: Thomson/Social Science Press, 2006). 53. For a particularly insightful discussion on media portrayals of Indigenous youth identities see Howard Sercombe, ‘The Face of the Criminal is Aboriginal: Representations of Aboriginal Young People in the West Australian Newspaper’, in Cultures of Crime and Violence: the Australian Experience, ed. Judith Bessant et al. (Bundoora: Latrobe University Press, 1995), pp. 76–93. 54. Ian Anderson, ‘Black Bit, White Bit’, in Blacklines, ed. Michele Grossman, p. 51. 55. Roberta James, ‘Rousseau’s Knot: the Entanglement of Liberal Democracy and Racism’, in Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), p. 75. 56. bell hooks, Art on Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), p. xv. 57. Wendt, ‘Answers to the Gaze’, p. 261.



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Indigeneity’s Challenges to the Settler State: Decentring the ‘Imperial Binary’ Jay T. Johnson

Newcomer governments claim to be forging historic new relationships with indigenous nations, relationships based on mutual respect, sharing, sovereignty, and our inherent rights. Economic development, modern treaties, self-government, compacts, revenue-sharing, and co-management have become the watchwords of the ‘post-colonial’ age. But beyond the words, is the promise holding? Taiaiake Alfred1

Introduction The struggle for Indigenous self-determination within the context of settler states continues to strain the liberal democratic ideals and supremacy of European cultural values upon which states such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were founded, and to which other states within Latin America have more recently aspired.2 Moreover, multiculturalism has more recently developed to offer the status of ethnic minority to all non-majority cultural groups within these states, constrained by the limits of an individual rights rhetoric. The quest by Indigenous peoples to find workable alternatives to ethnic minority status within their own homelands has led some to seek group rights within their own settler states.3 However, many liberals consider the collective rights proposed by Indigenous rights activists as antithetical to the supremacy of individual rights within liberal democracies.4 This search for an avenue through which Indigenous rights might be expressed must push us beyond multiculturalism towards other options. 273



12


The first aim of this chapter is to briefly investigate multiculturalism with specific regard to contemporary criticisms of its effectiveness in relation to Indigenous peoples’ rights. While multiculturalism’s efforts to recognise the rights of minorities within polyethnic states offer the appearance of supporting the group rights sought by Indigenous activists, their inevitable failure in the face of liberal democratic opposition to addressing the needs of national minorities has become apparent. With the failure of multiculturalism to provide a foundation for Indigenous rights, some, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand, have affirmed a biculturalism that might recognise the unique relationship between Indigenous nations and various settler groups. The second aim of this chapter is to explore biculturalism in New Zealand as an, albeit incomplete, alternative to the failures of multiculturalism in addressing the sovereignty claims of Indigenous peoples as national minorities. Whereas liberal multiculturalism restricts minority rights to the protection of cultural differences, biculturalism (and its stauncher successor binationalism) recognises Indigenous peoples as partners with colonisers in the exercise of sovereignty within settler states and thus recognises the rights of Indigenous peoples to the exercise of self-determination in the areas of cultural preservation, resource management and the protection of land. It is primarily this final aspect of biculturalism that is having an observable effect on the physical and political landscape of New Zealand and offers the greatest opportunity to enhance the struggles of other Indigenous peoples around the world. As Augie Fleras and Paul Spoonley observe in Recalling Aotearoa, ‘only the exercise of tino rangatiratanga [Indigenous self-determination] provides tangible evidence of its existence’.5 This exercise of Indigenous self-determination does not occur in metaphoric ‘sites of resistance’ but instead within ‘a politics of place “on the ground”’.6 By reading the landscape for evidence of the exercise of Indigenous self-determination, it is possible to glimpse places outside of the hegemonic control of the settler state. These landscapes lie somewhere between the coloniser and colonised, creating ‘thirdspaces’, holes in the fabric of the state that sit outside, or decentre this underlying ‘imperial binary’.7 The third aim of this chapter will be to discuss how the exercise of Indigenous self-determination, observed in specific places, holds the possibility of transforming New Zealand society into the long-promised bicultural and binational partnership, altering the meaning of citizenship for both Ma-ori and Pa-keha(white New Zealanders).



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Decentring the ‘Imperial Binary’ 275

Over the past several decades, liberal democratic settler states like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, have struggled to cope with increasing calls for civil rights by various ethnic minority groups. The political and cultural concerns of these diverse communities are no longer silenced under the hegemonic din of settler majority culture and political structures. Calls for equal political rights and for the recognition and respect of cultural differences for various groups have, as a result, coalesced under the common banner of multiculturalism. Within multiculturalism, the calls for civil rights by both national minorities and ethnic groups have coalesced with similar calls by women, the queer community and the disabled. Political theorists have examined the effectiveness of multiculturalism in representing the civil rights concerns of these various groups, primarily though, from within the constraints of liberal theory. Will Kymlicka has been the most effective at critiquing multiculturalism broadly and more specifically with regard to Indigenous peoples’ rights. Kymlicka’s criticism of multiculturalism is two-fold: first, that multiculturalism attempts to address the issues of too many groups with vastly different agendas and needs; second, that addressing the individual rights of members of these groups may be sufficient for ethnic minorities, but collective rights may be necessary to address the needs of national minorities, including Indigenous peoples.8 The primary critique of multiculturalism I focus on here is the struggle between individual and collective rights. This struggle between the collective rights called for by Indigenous communities and the individual rights supported by liberal multiculturalism is perhaps the greatest hindrance to Indigenous self-determination. Mary Ellen Turpel, writing specifically about Canada, observes that the ‘collective or communal base of Aboriginal life does not really, to my knowledge, have a parallel to individual rights: the conceptions of [Canadian and Aboriginal] law are simply incommensurable’.9 If it is true that the conceptions of rights based in Western and Indigenous conceptual frameworks are incommensurable, than what hope does liberal multiculturalism hold for Indigenous self-determination? Several Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have addressed this question with responses that vary from a redefinition of liberalism to an embrace of wholly Indigenous models of political philosophy.10 Richard Day describes many of the same critiques concerning multiculturalism. The central question raised in the title to one of his articles,



Multiculturalism


‘Who is This We That Gives the Gift?’, hits upon the central issue concerning who has the power to grant self-determination to a people and who qualifies under international law as a politically recognised group capable of holding such a right.11 Day recognises that many Indigenous peoples continue to assert, and have maintained an assertion of, their self-determination through the many centuries of European colonialism. These Indigenous nations, such as the Mohawk that Day mentions and several iwi (tribes) and hapu- (sub-tribes) in Aotearoa New Zealand assert ‘a path to self-determination that involves neither a recovery of a partial remnant of a sovereignty lost in the past, nor a futural project of a totalising nation-state’.12 These nations assert that they had sovereignty over their territories when Europeans arrived and have continued to assert their sovereignty ever since. Certainly whether or not Indigenous nations have continued to assert their sovereignty, Day recognises that they continue to have the right to assert their self-determination. One of the primary arguments articulated through liberal multiculturalism is a support for cultural pluralism. This pluralism recognises that while there is a cultural core to the state there are also numerous other groups requiring recognition by the bureaucracy of the state. Through pluralism these groups may find recognition within the structure of the state. Day observes that many Indigenous authors have moved beyond pluralism to envision parallel expressions of selfdetermination allowing the settler state and Indigenous nations the right to form separate institutions to govern their lands and citizens even where overlapping claims exist.13 Day draws upon the material depiction of the historical agreements between the Mohawk nation and European settlers known as the Gus-Wen-Teh, or Two Row Wampum, which symbolises the Mohawk understanding of the treaty agreements signed between the tribe and European nations. As described by Grand Chief Michael Mitchell, Gus-Wen-Teh has two rows of purple shells separated by three beads: symbolis[ing] peace, friendship, and respect. These two rows will symbolise two paths or two vessels, travelling down the same rivers together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian people, their laws, their customs and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people and their laws, their customs and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.14 This description of parallel and separate systems is common not only in the writings of Native American authors but can also be found



276

among Ma- ori writing on issues of self-determination in Aotearoa New Zealand.15 The bicultural and binational nature of the description of the two rows of Wampum and its implicit critique of liberal multiculturalism leads to a discussion of one particular option that has gained an upper hand in discussions of cultural difference and Indigenous selfdetermination in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Biculturalism The growth of a global Indigenist movement and the related sharing of information between various Indigenous leaders at a variety of international forums have contributed to the articulation of various national schemes geared towards the resolution of internal Indigenous rights challenges.16 Each settler state has adopted a different approach towards dealing with their domestic Indigenous rights movements as well as evolving rights for Indigenous peoples within international law. Canada has adopted a treaty federalism approach that, like its national policy for accommodating the Francophone minority, exists separate from its official multicultural policy for ethnic minorities.17 Australia’s reconciliation programme is attempting to quiet Aboriginal claims by addressing historical wrongs but has been strongly criticised for its failure to acknowledge the need for justice along with reconciliation. The United States, while officially following a treaty federalism model, has over the past decade devolved much of the federal government’s responsibility to tribal administration. This devolution of responsibility, while appearing to embrace self-determination, has frequently left smaller tribes without the necessary capacity to adequately deal with their health, welfare, employment and environmental issues. Like most states in the world, the nation of New Zealand faces the dual challenge of governing a national minority as well as incorporating various ethnic minorities. Aotearoa New Zealand’s multinational status is based on the founding treaty relationship between Ma- ori and the British Crown through the Treaty of Waitangi, which at the time of its signing in 1840 was considered a contract between two sovereigns. In 1835, the Crown encouraged the Ma- ori chiefs of the northern regions of Te Ika a Maui, or the North Island, to declare their independence and to adopt a national flag, primarily for the purposes of commerce. Five years later when the Crown decided to annex the islands, they continued to recognise the Ma- ori as sovereign, but constrained this self-determination within European political ideology. The Treaty of Waitangi, while granting the right of government to the Crown, reserved





the right of self-determination to Ma- ori chiefs over their lands, peoples and treasured resources. Ma- ori retained the right to control and own their lands, although they were encouraged to begin selling their lands to accommodate newly arrived British settlers. Citizenship, on par with British nationals, was also granted to Ma- ori through the treaty. This foundational treaty partnership between the British Crown and Ma- ori chiefs (although it is important to note that not all Ma- ori chiefs agreed to sign the treaty) acknowledged two sovereign nationalities, British (Pa- keha- ) and Ma- ori. Over the centuries following the signing of the treaty, immigration brought many different non-English ethnic minorities to the country, particularly Pacific Islanders and in the last few decades East Asians, creating an increasingly polyethnic state. It has only been with the immigration of large numbers of East Asians that there has been much public discussion concerning the need to incorporate (or ostracise) ethnic minorities. For the first 100 years of the New Zealand state, the focus was on shifting control over the land and resources out of the hands of Ma- ori and into the control of the Crown, either through negotiation or warfare. The treaty partnership between the Crown and Ma- ori began with the Ma- ori as a numerical majority with sui generis as well as de facto sovereignty. As British (and other European) immigrants became the numerical majority, the self-determination guaranteed by the treaty fell away, along with any acknowledgement of the treaty as a legally binding document, and the Crown was able to assert its sovereignty over most (although never all) of the land. Ma- ori diminished numerically, reaching a nadir around 1910, but as with Indigenous populations in North America, their numbers began to rebound and by the 1960s the need for a renewed dialogue was acknowledged. The first use of the term ‘biculturalism’ in reference to New Zealand society has been credited to Erik Schwimmer’s introduction to a 1968 text, The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties.18 Schwimmer, who was adapting a Canadian model used to describe the relationship between anglophone and francophone Canadians, acknowledged that the use of the term in describing a new conceptual framework for relations between Ma-ori and Pa-keha- required a dramatic redefinition. Schwimmer recognised that ‘[t]o a significant extent, there are in New Zealand two distinct social groups and two distinct cultures in frequent intensive contact with one another’.19 Schwimmer married his reworking of Canadian biculturalism with a concept developed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons: inclusion. Biculturalism, defined as a conscious joining of Pa-keha--European society with aspects of Ma-ori culture,



278


The first of these are equal civil rights. The second is a full sharing in the pursuit of collective goals of the society – in the processes of government and the exercising of power. The third requirement is equality of the resources and capacities necessary to make ‘equal rights’ into fully equal opportunities.20 Schwimmer’s article perceived the beginnings of a civil rights movement in New Zealand similar to the civil rights movement driven by African-Americans in the United States. Indeed much of the Ma- ori protest that took place over the decade following the book’s publication did bear a resemblance to civil rights protests in the United States. But Schwimmer envisioned something more than just civil rights. He envisioned an alteration to New Zealand society, beginning with ‘a basically European one which has been given a Polynesian twang by the adoption of certain variants which are still reconcilable with the main lines of European development’.21 Biculturalism then would begin to incorporate the full sharing of the collective goals of society and the resources and capacities necessary to turn equal rights into equal opportunity. This initial stage of biculturalism described by Schwimmer, of an incorporation of ‘a Polynesian twang’ to the cultural (European) core of the state, unfortunately illustrates the extent to which many Pa- kehaNew Zealanders are willing to become bicultural, merely by incorporating or assimilating some Ma- ori cultural traditions. The ebb and flow of the discussion surrounding biculturalism in New Zealand has taken the term from its largely academic beginnings to the level of a nationwide political debate. A reference to biculturalism became official government policy through the State Sector Act 1988, in which section 56 requires that chief executives within government agencies recognise the aims, aspirations and employment requirements of Ma- ori.22 Wilson and Yeatman observe that, although biculturalism ‘is inevitably contested territory, it has found official acceptance and become the policy of government departments and publicly funded institutions, including universities’.23 Defining what biculturalism means in present-day New Zealand is much more complicated than simply returning to Schwimmer’s 1968 definition. Table 12.1 illustrates the multiple definitions of biculturalism currently being supported and debated across Aotearoa New Zealand. This



could not succeed, in his opinion, without the full inclusion of Ma-ori into New Zealand society. He envisioned this inclusion, borrowed from Parsons, as including three basic requirements:

A bicultural commitment: goals and structures ‘Soft’ -

‘Moderate’

‘Inclusive’

‘Strong’

‘Hard’

Goals

Celebrating Maoritanga (Ma- ori culture)

Improving race relations

Partnership

Separate but Tino rangatiratanga: equal challenging the system

Structures

Removal of discriminatory barriers and prejudice

A Ma- ori perspective

Active Ma- ori involvement and special treatment

Parallel institutions

Ma- ori models of self-determination

Policy outcomes

Mainstreaming

Te taha Ma- ori (incorporating Ma- ori perspectives)

Responsiveness

Devolution

He Putahitanga (the merging of two into one)

Source: Adapted from Fleras and Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa: Indigenous Politics and Ethnic Relations in New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press).



280

Table 12.1

multiplicity of biculturalisms contributes to a confusion regarding which manifestation any individual or group is supporting in their particular discourse. The table shows the breadth of meanings that continues to be supported and debated by different segments of New Zealand society. Unfortunately, however, biculturalism rarely lives up to the standards that many Ma- ori and Pa- keha- have ascribed to it. As Fleras and Spoonley state, ‘biculturalism may mean a lot of things, but it seldom means Ma- ori claims for tino rangatiratanga [self-determination] rights’. Without a strong commitment to Ma- ori self-determination and an honest reworking of colonial institutions, biculturalism ends up as little more than a revamped multiculturalism with a particularly ‘Polynesian twang’. It should be remembered, however, that not all New Zealanders support biculturalism, even in its ‘softest’ version, and that there continues to be a conservative segment of the country maintaining the Crown’s unimpeded sovereignty and cultural hegemony. As Malcolm MacLean observes, the ‘Maori advocacy of biculturalism is premised on a notion of power sharing which Pakeha simply do not or can not accept.’24 Based upon the liberal democratic principles expressed through multiculturalism, ‘Pakeha ideology holds that equality [already] exists.’25 The creation of a bicultural society requires the participation of both Ma- ori and Pa- keha- at the individual, community and national levels.26 Being bicultural has increasingly been required of Ma- ori since the beginning of British colonialism in New Zealand. Survival was often predicated on the collective and individual understanding by Ma- ori of the hegemonic colonial discourse. Because British sovereignty was established over New Zealand through the Treaty of Waitangi and several wars were fought to assert that sovereignty by force, Pa- keha- have been in a position to also assert cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony has been one of the tools used by the British to gain political power and influence over Ma- ori.27 Today’s Pa- keha- have no need either to articulate their own culture or to gain any understanding of Ma- ori culture because their cultural, political and economic power is perceived to be absolute. Arguably, however, as some Ma- ori groups pursue cases before the Waitangi Tribunal, they increase their political, cultural and economic power in their own and wider New Zealand society.28 This increase in Ma- ori power is perceived by Pa- keha- to come at the expense of their own hegemonic control. It is perhaps this perception of their decline in power that brings more Pa- keha- to appreciate a need for a bicultural sharing of the resources of Aotearoa/New Zealand and an increased dialogue with Ma- ori.





The political discourse surrounding biculturalism is perhaps best defined as ‘One Nation, Two Partners, Many Peoples’, a phrase used by Jim Anderton, current leader of the Progressive Party of New Zealand and Deputy Prime Minister from 1999 to 2002.29 This seemingly simple phrase guided the fifth Labour government’s policies towards Ma- ori early in their term.30 Let us take a moment to break down the phrase into its three components. ‘One Nation’ by itself appears to be a simple reference to the obvious: New Zealand is one nation or state within the international state system. But this phrase stands in counterpoint to some calls by Ma- ori and others for overlapping sovereignties and binationalism within the territory of New Zealand. Discussions of overlapping and/or parallel jurisdictions in the criminal system have been put forward by Moana Jackson in an effort to allow Ma- ori customary law and legal institutions to deal with the problems faced by Ma- ori.31 Calls for binationalism have been articulated by Paul Spoonley and Augie Fleras, a concept I will return to briefly.32 By pronouncing ‘One Nation’, the government confines its articulation of biculturalism to the current system of one national sovereignty expressed through the Crown, its laws, parliament and institutions, and for many this limitation means that biculturalism will never fulfil the goal of acknowledging and incorporating Ma- ori epistemologies and political theories within the state. It is through the second phrase, ‘Two Partners’, that New Zealand governments articulate the vision for official biculturalism. The government generally supports the view that Pa- keha- and Ma- ori became partners through signing the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. In the intervening years the importance of this partnership was lost and wrongs were committed against the Ma- ori partners by Pa- keha- settlers and officials. While the treaty itself has not been fully resurrected from those ‘lost years’, the government has enacted the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which articulates the ‘Principles of the Treaty’ and uses these principles as guiding values within government ministries and several subsequent parliamentary acts, including the Resource Management Act. The fundamental principle of the treaty is that it is upon this partnership between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- that the foundation of the nation is based, but as discussed above, this partnership is to be contained within European political thought (i.e. liberalism). Without a full recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi as a living document, little hope exists for a full treaty partnership between the Crown and Ma- ori. Since the signing of the treaty, many non-British settlers have immigrated to New Zealand and these new immigrants have further challenged the boundaries of the partnership between the Crown and Ma- ori.



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The final phrase in Anderton’s title, ‘Many Peoples’, brings us, and New Zealand, back to the topic of multiculturalism. If Aotearoa New Zealand is envisioned primarily as a bicultural partnership between Pa- keha- and Ma- ori then where do Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Indians, Pakistanis and South Africans fit into this society? While biculturalism is founded on the treaty partnership between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- , with the incorporation of immigrants from across Europe, Asia and the Pacific, the founding partnership and biculturalism itself has been forced to recognise the political clout these immigrants hold. It is within the recognition of this clout that multiculturalism has begun competing with biculturalism for attention within New Zealand society. Unfortunately multiculturalism’s focus on individual rights frequently places all minorities in the same basket, failing to recognise the unique political status held by Indigenous peoples. Ranginui Walker voices this concern for Ma- ori: The Pakeha in-word ‘multi-culturalism’ has negative connotations for Maoris because it denies the basic reality of biculturalism. New Zealand is a bicultural country. The primary task of the Maori is to convert the Pakeha to recognise that reality and modify the country’s social institutions to incorporate compatible Maori values.33 Fleras and Spoonley also criticise biculturalism’s failures primarily because of its inclusion of multiculturalism and suggest a new term and focus for the debate: binationalism. ‘In many ways, bi-nationalism in New Zealand is what biculturalism would have been had the latter not become multiculturalised (“depoliticised”) as a form of institutional accommodation for Ma- ori.’34 They go on to more directly criticise multiculturalism, stating that the ‘bi-nationality at the heart of New Zealand society, which involves two founding nations and Treaty partners, must supersede the multicultural rights of immigrants. Otherwise there is a perceived danger of conflating Ma- ori collective rights with the rights of immigrants while reducing their status as original occupants to the same level as recent arrivals.’35 This brings us back to the central issue discussed in the previous section on multiculturalism: how can liberal democracies accede to the recognition of collective rights by Indigenous peoples within the existing individual rights regime? Collective rights have been invoked in certain situations where minorities have been mistreated not specifically as individuals but because of group characteristics related to gender, race or ethnicity. Finding equal footing for both collective rights and individual rights is then the challenge before liberal democracies, not only in relation to





Indigenous populations but also for all minority groups. Paul McHugh describes the group and intergroup relations created in liberal democracies as existing within a structuralist theoretical framework. He observes that this framework ‘constructs identity and relations through membership of structures – nation, state, tribe, family . . . [o]nce membership is established, relations are described in terms of encounter, usually of a binary and oppositional character: the “family” versus the “state”, the “group” versus the “individual” and, in the context of this paper, the “tribe” versus the state and the “tribe” versus the “individual”.’36 As Fleras and Spoonley have observed, the protection of Ma- ori rights in exercising self-determination in the areas of cultural preservation, resource management and the protection of land requires a recognition of Ma- ori collective rights.37 It is in recognition of this necessity of negotiating collective rights for Ma- ori that Fleras and Spoonley put forward a binational framework based on what they perceive to have been the original intent of biculturalism. They define this binationalism ‘as the formal acknowledgement of two fundamentally different peoples (or “nations”) as equal and autonomous, each of which is sovereign in its own right yet shares societal sovereignty by way of multiple but interlocking jurisdictions’.38 Within the framework of Table 12.1, the binationalism described by Fleras and Spoonley would be described as a ‘hard’ version of biculturalism and more in keeping with Schwimmer’s original definition of the term. The primary criticism of biculturalism I want to convey here is not that biculturalism is inherently flawed but that it has failed to live up to the intrinsic binational treaty partnership between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- . Binationalism seeks to fully integrate Ma- ori tino rangatiratanga rights, collective rights to self-determination of jurisdiction related to land, identity and political voice.39 Some have argued that this type of response to the current liberal democratic institutions of New Zealand is post-structuralist in nature. The political situation faced by Indigenous peoples in Australasia and North America has become increasingly open to ‘process, contingency, and negotiation’.40 It is within an increasingly post-structural, post-liberal framework that collective and individual rights can be negotiated, accommodating both the needs of Indigenous peoples to self-determination while continuing to protect the basic tenets of human rights. It is by challenging the liberal democratic framework that Indigeneity, through its demands for self-determination, is recreating the core conceptualisations of settler state citizenship. Whether we choose to conceptualise Indigeneity within a redefined and stretched liberal democratic framework as the work of Dale Turner



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describes, or to move entirely beyond liberalism towards envisioning an Indigeneity which incorporates anarchistic elements which are ‘fundamentally anti-institutional, radically democratic, and committed to taking action to force change’, as Taiaiake Alfred describes, I believe that the ‘hard’ interpretation of biculturalism from Fleras and Spoonley provides a tenable vision for one possible end result even if they fail to describe the means for achieving this binational biculturalism.41 The strongest expressions of biculturalism (see Table 12.1) recognise that Ma- ori are the Tangata Whenua (‘people of the land’/original inhabitants) of Aotearoa New Zealand and that they continue to hold the intrinsic right to self-determination. Likewise, Indigeneity is founded on the principle that Indigenous peoples, as the original inhabitants of colonised lands, hold customary title to the land and through this the right to self-determination. This right to self-determination can be defined as encompassing three specific areas: autonomy rights, identity rights and resource and land rights. I will focus on the last of these, resource and land rights, for they are exercised by Indigenous peoples within place and space, grounded in local politics, and inextricably connected to global forces.42 It is within the exercise of Indigenous selfdetermination, especially through land and resource rights, that the landscape of the settler state is being altered.

Thirdspace The primary aim of biculturalism, as defined in this chapter, is a full realisation of Ma- ori self-determination within Aotearoa New Zealand. Biculturalism is a discourse, manifest predominately in its texts, and while it endeavours to provide Ma- ori with the ‘full sharing in the pursuit of collective goals of the society’, I recognise that its implementation has missed this mark, leaving Ma- ori to pursue various means of resistance through which to exercise their self-determination.43 The relationship between Pa- keha- and Ma- ori has frequently been reduced to its primary ‘imperial binary’: coloniser/colonised. This binary relationship is not a simple opposition. Rather it consists of several relations, some more oppositional than others, but the primary relationship is one of domination.44 This fundamental dialectical view of relations between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- is based in a structuralist understanding of group identity and relations, and as McHugh has stated, these ‘relations are described in terms of encounter, usually of a binary and oppositional character’.45 Over the last two decades within the social sciences, much has been written that is critical of structuralist understandings of power relations





and group dynamics. It is within this criticism of structuralism that one finds several theoretical, post-structuralist discussions concerning power relations outside of a dualised interrogative.46 Henri Lefebvre was perhaps the first to make this a spatial discussion in his work, The Production of Space.47 For him, structuralist reductionism created binary relationships that compacted meanings into ‘a closed either/or opposition between two terms, concepts, or elements’.48 Lefebvre’s work seeks to crack open this binary relationship and introduce a third possibility which is something more than a simple combination or in-between position but is radically open to all possible relations. It is this thirding that has been adopted by other authors to postulate options to specific dialectical relationships. Lefebvre’s spatialisation of this post-structuralist discussion begins with the recognition that ‘every society . . . produces a space, its own space’.49 Lefebvre’s thirdspace is born when his principle of breaking apart the dualised interrogative is transformed into a spatial directive; as he observes, ‘new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa’.50 This thirding introduced by Lefebvre has led other social scientists, including geographers, to employ thirdspace as a spatial construct through which the infinite possibilities of Lefebvre’s thirding are played out.51 Some of these authors, like bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua, use spatial metaphors in their writing to speak about the location of their identities, communities and projects of resistance. They speak of margins, borderlands and peripheries, spaces that lie outside of the binary relationship between men/women, black/white, chicano/anglo, gay/ straight. Some other authors speak of thirdspace as ‘an epistemological terrain for interrogating those foundational dualisms that . . . underpin the social constitution and policing of rigidly bounded cultural identities . . . and that underwrite the naturalisation of domination and subordination’.52 Homi Bhabha’s work renders space, as Gillian Rose observes, as a ‘central problematic of [cultural] politics’.53 For Bhabha, ‘[t]hese “in-between” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’.54 While Bhabha’s work focuses on the hybrid nature of cultural identity, exploring the interstitial spaces and enunciative sites of this hybridity, this chapter will follow in Donald Moore’s footsteps, choosing to ‘grapple with Bhabha’s “third space” of “cultural practices and historical narratives” insofar as it represents a point from which to engage contemporary accounts of power and resistance in cultural



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studies’.55 Bhabha’s work only implies using thirdspace to describe a politics of place. I, however, see thirdspace more as a ‘descriptor for particular spaces that have been produced from particular types of discourses and social interactions’.56 While appreciating the usefulness of thirdspace as a metaphorical spatial tool, it is as a descriptor of actual places and their power dynamics that it will provide this chapter with a theoretical underpinning of the local politics of Indigenous self-determination, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand. While others have used thirdspace as a technique for cultural/spatial critique, such as Edward Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places and Michel Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, I wish to focus on those employing the concept of thirdspace within a politics of place as a number of radical geographers writing about the Third World, Indigenous communities and feminism have attempted.57 Butz and Ripmeester’s decision to utilise thirdspace theory in discussions of their research site is based on a belief that ‘a Third Space sensibility can allow the radically disempowered to discursively reconstruct actual spaces in ways that allow them to engage more productively in directly oppositional resistance’.58 This employment of critical theory in the politics of place allows for theoretical and discursive examination of resistance as it manifests in particular places, but it must avoid the temptation to overly rely on spatial metaphor. As Caren Kaplan warns, ‘any exclusive recourse to space, place, or position becomes utterly abstract and universalising without historical specificity’.59 Conversely, discussions of the politics of place have often failed to employ critical theories. Donald Moore bemoans this situation; despite ‘studies of the historically, geographically, and culturally specific struggles over territory, rarely do the politics of place occupy critical ground’.60 This chapter, like the works of other geographers such as Moore, Butz, Ripmeester, Law and Pile, endeavours to marry critical theory in the form of thirdspace with the politics of place and specific exercises of resistance, with the hope of ‘connect[ing] the metaphoric site “in theory” with a politics of place “on the ground” [and] retrieving from habitual invisibility the spatiality of local politics’.61 Refocusing this discussion to the specific history and politics of Aotearoa New Zealand, let us return to the work of Fleras and Spoonley. As stated above, the failure to implement biculturalism by providing for the full sharing of the resources of society has left Ma- ori to exercise their self-determination largely through various forms of resistance. With the increasing accommodation of Ma- ori values within New Zealand’s legal and institutional frameworks, much of this resistance has taken on





more direct forms. Nevertheless, it is largely through acts of resistance that Ma- ori self-determination is currently exercised. Fleras and Spoonley state that self-determination, like thirdspace, ‘is an intangible, which cannot be seen or touched, much like the nature of power or sovereignty’.62 They go on to state that only ‘the exercise of tino rangatiratanga [Ma-ori self-determination] provides tangible evidence of its existence’.63 I am asserting that the evidence of the exercise of Indigenous self-determination can be seen on the landscape of the specific places in which it is exercised. Further, that the exercise of self-determination by an Indigenous individual or community varies in scale depending upon the specific act of resistance. The exercise of self-determination by Ma-ori, or any other Indigenous people, does not happen against an inert backdrop but is grounded in the local politics and history of a place. From research work with Ma-ori in various parts of Aotearoa New Zealand, I have seen the evidence of their self-determination on various parts of the landscape; sometimes as small in scale as the protection of a Ma-ori schoolhouse threatened with closure, to as large a scale as the guardianship of the resources contained on a forty-kilometre stretch of beach. One example of how this exercise of self-determination is enacted on the landscape of the nation is seen in how Ma- ori activists and elders have worked to protect important stretches of beach in Wha- ingaroa (Raglan Harbour). When faced with continual erosion, exacerbated by storm damage, the Ma- ori community, led by their elders, began building erosion barriers using posts driven into the sand and interlaced with rope and evergreen branches. This beach revitalisation project was conducted against the advice of the District Council who believed that the erosion barriers produced an unreasonable risk to safety on the beach. The Council requested that the Ma- ori community submit to the resource consent process, a process likely to take months if not years. The land and homes at risk from the erosion were predominately Ma- ori and the Ma- ori community chose to ignore the ‘authority’ of the District Council and asserted their own self-determination over their lands and resources. As such, this was an act of resistance, but at the same time this act of self-determination left evidence of its exercise by preserving not only the beach but also the adjacent marae (Ma- ori meeting hall) and houses. As the Ma- ori elders knew from knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years of occupying this beach, their technique for mitigating the erosion would be successful. Following a series of storms, sand accumulated and buried the erosion barrier, producing no safety hazard while preserving the beach, land and homes from further destruction. If the Ma- ori community had waited for the District Council to enact its authority, bowing to the sovereignty of the state, their



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homes and resources would likely have been lost. In scenarios echoed in Serie Barford’s narrative in this collection, Ma- ori around the nation have witnessed the dramatic decline of treasured coastal resources. In some areas, such as Kaiko- ura on South Island, communities have decided to work with the Ministry of Fisheries to incorporate Ma- ori concepts of conservation within the government’s management regime. Other communities and individuals have taken direct action to protect local beaches and fisheries by enacting their own self-determination. Sometimes this includes confronting and intimidating poachers. One research collaborator has confided that he sometimes uses his truck to push poachers’ vehicles out into the tide. He could alert the ministry to the poachers’ presence on the beach he guards but he knows the great distances covered by the ministry’s officers would prevent a rapid enough response. His quick actions, while illegal, mean that the poaching is stopped immediately. For Ma- ori, the ability to preserve and protect their ocean resources is a matter of preserving their mana; the ability to manage their resources well is crucial to demonstrating their effective guardianship. These specific acts of self-determination by Ma- ori are not only leaving evidence of their exercise on the landscape of the state, they are also creating thirdspaces that operate as holes in the fabric of the state, challenging the frequently unquestioned settler sovereignty. Currently, these holes in the fabric of the state represent only scattered evidence of the exercise of Ma- ori self-determination, but even the smallest successful act of autonomy is altering the landscape of the New Zealand state. Some of these thirdspaces are being created through court cases and some are being created through fundamentally anti-institutional and radically democratic acts of resistance to state power. Through various techniques they are reasserting and renegotiating their treaty-based and sui generis rights to protect self-determination over their lands and resources. Radical biculturalism seeks, like thirdspace theory, to decentre the dialectical relationships colonial systems of domination have wrought between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- . Through the incorporation of Ma- ori concepts into legal and institutional frameworks, biculturalism creates avenues through which Ma- ori can engage, albeit not yet as fully sovereign partners, but at least as direct resisters to colonial power structures. Moreover, where the legal and institutional frameworks of the state fail to recognise Ma- ori self-determination, Ma- ori are resorting to anti-institutional acts of resistance, transgressing the frameworks provided by the state and at times being labelled as terrorists because of these trangressions.64 Thirdspace also offers a means for critical post-structuralist interpretations of the politics involved in the exercise of Indigenous





self-determination within any given place within the settler state. By investigating the holes in the fabric of settler states created by the exercise of Indigenous self-determination, we can glimpse landscapes where state sovereignty has been transformed and is evolving beyond the binary relationship between coloniser and colonised. It is in the midst of these thirdspaces that settler nationalism is forced to come to terms with not only the dispossession of Indigenous communities but also the costs involved in maintaining hegemonic settler sovereignty.65

Conclusion ‘One Nation, Two Partners, Many Peoples’ has, until recently, been one of the guiding forces of official government biculturalism in New Zealand. This discourse, grounded in multiculturalism, with a specific commitment to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, is seeking to create a partnership between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- within the limits of the New Zealand state. This bicultural partnership, as yet unfulfilled, holds the promise of changing the settler state into a more equal partnership. But the exercise of Ma- ori self-determination is threatening to break apart the binary and oppositional relationship that the colonial ‘contact zone’ has wrought between Ma- ori and Pa- keha- . The exercise of Ma- ori self-determination is decentring the ‘imperial binary’, problematising the boundaries the settler state continually imposes.66 The increasingly direct resistance that Ma- ori are employing against the hegemonic construct of the New Zealand state, working from both within and without state structures, is evident on the landscape of the specific places in which it is exercised. These landscapes of resistance are creating thirdspaces within specific places in the settler state, holes in the fabric of settler state hegemony. As the exercise of Ma- ori selfdetermination alters more landscapes, slowly the state is being remade and perhaps the bicultural partnership, the full and equal sharing of the resources of the state promised by Schwimmer, may yet become a reality, even as the state struggles to reassert its hegemony. Notes 1. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: an Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xiii. 2. For a complete discussion of Latin American aspirations towards becoming a white settler society see Richard Gott, ‘Latin America as a White Settler Society’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, 2 (2007): 269–89. 3. Terms such as Indigenous and Native are capitalised following various publishing precedents; see Jay T. Johnson, Garth Cant, Richard Howitt and Evelyn



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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Peters, ‘Creating Anti-Colonial Geographies: Embracing Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights’, Geographical Research 45, 2 (2007): 117–20. See Cindy L. Holder and Jeff J. Corntassel, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Multicultural Citizenship: Bridging Collective and Individual Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 24, 1 (2002): 126–51. Augie Fleras and Paul Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa: Indigenous Politics and Ethnic Relations in New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 27. Donald S. Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance: “Ground for Struggle” and the Politics of Place’, in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 87–106, p. 101. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies, Key Concepts Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 23–7. See Jeff J. Corntassel and Tomas Hopkins Primeau, ‘Indigenous “Sovereignty” and International Law: Revised Strategies for Pursuing “Self-Determination”’, Human Rights Quarterly 12, 2 (1995): 343–65; Mason Durie, Constitutional Elements of the Ma-ori Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Moana Jackson, ‘The Nature of Knowing: Self-Determination, Land and the Double Helix’, in Indigenous Peoples, Environment and Development, ed. Silvia Büchl, Christian Ernl, Luzia Jurt and Christoph Rüegg (Zurich, Switzerland: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 1995), pp. 347–51; Roger Maaka and Augie Fleras, ‘Engaging with Indigeneity: Tino Rangatiratanga in Aotearoa’, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ani Mikaere, Ma-ori and Self-Determination in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Working Paper No. 5 (Hamilton, New Zealand: University of Waikato, 2000), pp. 4–26; and Sharon Helen Verne, Our Elders Understand Our Rights: Evolving International Law Regarding Indigenous Rights (Penticton, British Columbia: Theytus Books, 1998). Mary Ellen Turpel, ‘Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter: Interpretive Monopolies, Cultural Differences’, Canadian Human Rights Yearbook (1989–90), p. 30. See Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough, Ontario and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2005); Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Richard J. F. Day, ‘Who is This We That Gives the Gift? Native American Political Theory and the Western Tradition’, Critical Horizons 2, 2 (2001): 173–201; Cindy L. Holder and Jeff J. Corntassel, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Multicultural Citizenship: Bridging Collective and Individual Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 24 (2002): 126–51; Will Kymlicka, ‘American Multiculturalism and the “Nations Within”’, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Ivison, Patton and Sanders; Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–74. Day, ‘Who is This We That Gives the Gift?’ Ibid., p. 184.





13. Ibid., p. 187. 14. Ibid., p. 190. 15. For interesting discussions of legal parallelism within the Aotearoa/New Zealand context see Moana Jackson, ‘Justice and Political Power: Reasserting Maori Legal Processes’, in Legal Pluralism and the Colonial Legacy: Indigenous Experiences of Justice in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ed. Kayleen M. Hazlehurst (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), pp. 243–63; Moana Jackson, ‘Understanding from Which Justice Comes’, PPTA Journal 1 (1990), p. 2; Moana Jackson and New Zealand Ministry of Justice, The Maori and the Criminal Justice System: a New Perspective – He Whaipaanga Hou (Wellington: Policy and Research Division Department of Justice, 1987); Mikaere, Ma-ori and Self-Determination in Aotearoa/New Zealand. 16. For a discussion of the history of the Indigenist movement and its effect on Indigenous communities refer to Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Holder and Corntassel, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Multicultural Citizenship’. 17. Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 18. Jeffrey Sissons, ‘Tall Trees Need Deep Roots: Biculturalism, Bureaucracy and Tribal Democracy in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Cultural Studies 9, 1 (1995): 61–73; Erik Schwimmer, ‘The Aspirations of the Contemporary Maori’, in Erik Schwimmer (ed.), The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: a Symposium (London and New York: C. Hurst & Humanities Press, 1968). 19. Erik Schwimmer, ‘The Aspirations of the Contemporary Maori’, p. 9. 20. Ibid., p. 11. 21. Ibid., p. 19. 22. Jane Kelsey, ‘From Flagpoles to Pine Trees: Tino Rangatiratanga and Treaty Policy Today’, in Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley, David Pearson and Cluny Macpherson (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1996), pp. 177–201, p. 185. 23. Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman, ‘Introduction’, in Justice & Identity: Antipodean Practices, ed. Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995), pp. vii–xvi, pp. vii–viii. 24. Malcolm MacLean, ‘The Silent Centre: Where are Pakeha in Biculturalism?’, Continuum 10, 1 (1996): 108–20, p. 114. 25. Ibid. 26. Andrew Sharp, ‘Why Be Bicultural?’, in Justice & Identity, ed. Wilson and Yeatman, p. 125. 27. See MacLean, ‘The Silent Centre’. 28. In 1975 the Treaty of Waitangi Act established the Waitangi Tribunal to hear cases by Ma- ori against the Crown. In 1985 the mandate of the Tribunal was expanded to hear claims against the Crown since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. For a full history of the Tribunal and its impacts on New Zealand society see Giselle Byrnes, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 29. Jim Anderton, ‘One Nation, Two Partners, Many Peoples’, in One Nation, Two Partners, Many Peoples, ed. Adrian Bell (Porirua, New Zealand: Whitireia Publishing, 1996).



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30. The commitment of the fifth Labour government to biculturalism has shifted in recent years, most noticeably since the government introduced and passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, severing Ma- ori claims to customary title over areas between the spring high tide mark and the limits of New Zealand’s territorial seas. The Ma- ori Party was formed in 2004 as a response to this shift by Labour away from biculturalism and treaty partnership. 31. Jackson and New Zealand Ministry of Justice, The Maori and the Criminal Justice System. 32. Fleras and Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa. 33. Ranginui Walker, ‘Capitalism v. Tangata Whenua’, in Nga Tau Tohetohe: Years of Anger, ed. Jacqueline Amoamo (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 221. 34. Fleras and Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa, p. 240. 35. Ibid. 36. Paul G. McHugh, ‘Aboriginal Identity and Relations in North America and Australasia’, in Living Relationships: the Treaty of Waitangi in the New Millennium Ko-kiri Nga-tahi, ed. Kenneth Coates and Paul G. McHugh (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998), p. 111. 37. Fleras and Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa, p. 243. 38. Ibid., p. 240. 39. Ibid., p. 239. 40. McHugh, ‘Aboriginal Identity and Relations in North America and Australasia’, p. 112. 41. Dale A. Turner, This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Alfred, Wasáse, p. 45. 42. Arturo Escobar, ‘Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization’, Political Geography 20, 2 (2001): 139–74. 43. Erik Schwimmer, ‘The Aspirations of the Contemporary Maori’, p. 11. 44. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 26–7. 45. McHugh, ‘Aboriginal Identity and Relations in North America and Australasia’, p. 111. 46. See Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 47. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 48. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 60. 49. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 31. 50. Ibid., p. 59. 51. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinster/Aunt Lute Press, 1987); Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. xiii, 285; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21; David Butz and Michael Ripmeester, ‘Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures’, Invisible Culture: an Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, Winter (1999) (online at http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue2/butz.




52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

Thirdspace and Middle Grounds htm); bell hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, in Yearning, ed. bell hooks (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 145–54; Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance’; Steve Pile, ‘Introduction’, in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Pile and Keith; Steve Pile, ‘Masculinism, the Use of Dualistic Epistemologies and Third Spaces’, Antipode 26 (1994): 255–77. Butz and Ripmeester, ‘Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures’. Gillian Rose, ‘The Interstitial Perspective: a Review Essay on Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995), p. 369. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 217; Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance’, p. 102. Butz and Ripmeester, ‘Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures’. Soja, Thirdspace; Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7; Butz and Ripmeester, ‘Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures’; Lisa Law, ‘Dancing on the Bar: Sex, Money and the Uneasy Politics of Third Space’, in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Pile and Keith, pp. 107–23; Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance’; and Pile, ‘Masculinism, the Use of Dualistic Epistemologies and Third Spaces’. Butz and Ripmeester, ‘Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures’. Caren Kaplan, ‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Practice’, in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), cited in Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance’, p. 87. Moore, ‘Remapping Resistance’, p. 87. Ibid., p. 101. Fleras and Spoonley, Recalling Aotearoa, p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. On 15 October 2007, the New Zealand police raided the homes and arrested dozens of Ma-ori and environmental activists under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. These activists have been jailed under charges that they were planning violence against the Crown. Anthony Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, 6 (2002): 1013–42. See Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: the Postcolonial Politics of US–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).



294

‘Whakatangi’


Mua Strickson-Pua

to cause to create sound passion heart space ears eyes sensory Indigenous landscape Tane Mahuta Tawhirimatea Tangaroa Aotearoa Samoa to Waiheke Malaela to Onetangi heart beats breathe dissipates whai korero whakatauki mythology history oratory poetry For this mere moment 295


296


Manu fly away to be free forever Whakatangi



we have shared a life time

Index

Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NSW) 122 Aboriginal Protectors 63, 136, 140, 200 Aboriginal Reserves 103, 119 Barambah 87 Bellbrook 110 Central Australian 63, 64 Purfleet 109, 112−14, 117, 119 Aborigines Advancement League 260 Aborigines Protection Board (APB) 63 Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897) 86 Aborigines Protection Society 199 ‘Acoustic Shadows’ (Barford) 241 Adelaide 54 Adeney, William 135, 137, 146 Advertiser (newspaper) 62 Africa 186, 188, 189 Ahmat, Ray 256 Albany, Frank 163, 167 Alfred, Taiaiake 285 America (Baudrillard) 57 Amery, Leopold 37 Amsterdam (island) 40 Amundsen, Roald 33, 38, 39 Anderson, Ian 267 Anderton, Deputy Prime Minister Jim 282 Antarctic Colony Associates 46 Antarctic imperialism 29−52 ‘Antarctic Dream’ 44 British 29−32, 32−7 opposition 40−5 overview 8 postcolonial present 45−8 sub-imperialisms 29, 37−9 territorial claims 30 Antarctic Treaty (1959) 46, 49 Antarctic Treaty System 32, 47

Antarctica: Land of Machos (1971 Argentine publication) 43 Antikarinya 55 Anzaldua, Gloria 286 Aotearoa see New Zealand archaeologists 14−15, 226, 227 Arctic Regions 31 Argentina, Antarctic imperial opposition 29, 32, 34, 40−5, 46−7 Arnhem land 110 asylums 262 asylum-seeker policy 54 Atkinson, Ann 191 Atkinson, Casey 256 atomic testing programme 53, 58−9, 61−6, 66−8 Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee (AWTSC) 63 Attorney-General (British Columbia) 161−2 Attwood, Bain 224 Austin, Emily Munyungka 57, 61 Australia Antarctic sub-imperialism 29, 32, 37−9 Japan and 33 reconciliation programme 277 see also Dawes, William; Ebenezer Mission, Victoria; national parks, Queensland; nuclear issues, Australia; race and space, Australia ‘Australia Felix’ 144 Australian Association 220 autonomous spaces 267 Bagot, John 82 Balbuk, Fanny 116 Balcombe, Jim 59 Balds (hills) 73

297



NB: Page numbers in bold refer to figures and tables

Index

Ball, Robert 62 Bamblett, Uncle Alf 255−6, 258, 265 Bank of Scotland 184 Banner, Stuart 181 Barambah Reserve 87 Barford, Serie 95, 101, 241, 289 Barnes, Djuna 119 Barrett, Louise 209 Barunga Statement (1988) 263 Barunggam people 76, 86, 88 Bates, Daisy 116 Baudrillard, John 57 Beadell, Len 58−9, 61 Behrendt, Larissa 138 Belgium 30, 45 Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve 110 Bender, Barbara 112 Bennelong: the Coming in of the Eora (Smith) 245 Bennie, J. C. 78−9 Bentham, Jeremy 222 Bergen conference 39 Bhabha, Homi 168, 286−7 Bickers, Robert 184 biculturalism 274, 277−85, 289 definitions 280 Billabong (Nickolls) 7 binationalism 282, 283−4 Biripi people 107, 108−9 Birmingham, Judy 116 Birrell, W. K. 112 Black, Brotha 267 ‘black villages’ 223 Blast the Bush (Beadell) 59 Blue Book 212 Blue Mountains 107 Bluff 208 Board, G. L. 73−5, 84 Bogotá Pan-American conference 41 bombs, nuclear 61−6 Boomerang Theatre 120−1, 120 Boonwurrung people 129, 134 Bourke, Governor Richard 129, 223 Brantlinger, Patrick 187 Brewarrina 113 Brisbane 73

British Columbia see urban space, British Columbia Broome, Richard 145 Brown, Eileen Kampakuta 62 Brown, George 116 brutality 140, 147 Buchanan, Ian 56 Bumyo-Budnutt see Wimmera River Bunbury, Hanmer 129, 132, 135 Bunbury, Sarah 129, 131, 132−3, 135, 139, 148 Bunya Festivals 77 Bunya Mountains 73−5 terra nullius 76−9 Bunya Mountains National Park 80−4 Burnard, Trevor 184 Burrard Inlet 155, 157, 161 Burton, Justice 223 ‘bush cover’ 118−19 Butler, Judith 139 Butz, David 287 Byrd, Richard E. 31 Byrne, Denis 134, 232 Byrnes, Giselle 75 cadastral grid 105−8 gaps in 111−15, 134−7 wire fencing 108−10 Cammeray people 245 Canada 273, 275, 277, 278 national parks 80, 82 see also urban space, British Columbia Cañas, General Ramón 43 Canberra 263 Canterbury 199, 200, 205, 209 Cape of Good Hope 223 Cape Horn 34 Cape Town 121 Captain Cook 29, 67−8 Carrington, George 78 Carter, Paul 249 cartography ‘cartographic literacy’ 191 census and 199−202 genocide by 190 see also mapping



298

census Canadian 164 see also periodical counting, New Zealand Census Act (1877) 204 Central Australian Aboriginal Reserve 63, 64 Central Mapping Authority 114 Charcot, Jean-Baptiste 40 Cherbourg Mission 87, 88 Chile, Antarctic imperial opposition 29, 32, 40−5, 46−7 Chipkayum, Chief 157, 159−60 choir system 225 Christianity 223, 224 see also Ebenezer Mission, Victoria cities see entries beginning urban space civil rights 121, 275, 279 civilising programme 223, 225, 233 ‘Clay Maiden’ (Barford) 95−7 Clayton, David 181 Clendinnen, Inga 246−7 Clifford, Sir Miles 36 Closer Settlements policy (New Zealand) 80 Coal Island 164 Cold War 46, 63 collective (group) rights 273−4, 275−6, 283−4 Collins, Robert Martin 81−2 Coloane, Francisco 45 Colonist (newspaper) 159, 164 Comaroff, Jean 224−5 Comaroff, John 224−5 commercial geography 182 Commission on Indian Reserves 161 Commissioner for Crown Lands for New Munster 201 Commissioner for Extinguishing Native Title 200 Commissioner of Native Reserves 206 ‘conquering nature’, concept of 42 Conquerors of Antarctica (Coloane) 45 ‘contact zones’ 131, 139, 142 control and surveillance 134−7, 261−3, 266 Coober Pedy 54−6, 61, 64

299

Cook, Captain 29, 67−8 Cooper, Chief Michael 163, 165−7 Cooper, Sara 163 Coranderrk Aboriginal station 110, 145, 224 counter-cadastral 115−18 Cowlishaw, Gillian 109, 110 Critchett, Jan 131 Crocfest 266 Crombie, Eileen Unkari 55, 57 Cronan, William 85, 87 Crosby, Alfred 182 Crown forests 108 Crown Reserve 111−12 Crozet 40 Cumberland Plain 107 Cundeelee 65 Cuneen, Chris 262 Dalby plains 73 Darian-Smith, Kate 147 Darien 184 Darling Downs 78 Darling River 229 Datchak Creek 232 David Clark (ship) 144 Davis-Hurst, Patricia 119 Dawes, William 242−54 imagined space 246−7, 248, 250 local language and 245, 248−52 notebooks 242, 244−6, 250−1 overview 15 Patyegarang and 245−52 Day, Richard 275−6 de Certeau, Michel 112, 116−17 Deebing Creek Mission 87 Denoon, Donald 183 Department of Indian Affairs (British Columbia) 157, 159, 161, 164, 167 detention, mandatory 54, 57 détournement 112 Dhan-Gadi people 110 Diaz, Admiral Emilio 43 dingo scalps 60−1 Discovery Expeditions 36 District Six Museum (Cape Town) 121 Dja Dja Warrung 229



Index

Index

Djadjawurrung people 129 Dog Act (1844) 136 ‘doggers’ 60 domesticity 227 ‘Don’t Read Under a Coconut Tree’ (Barford) 101−2 Drake Passage 35, 37 dreaming ‘fantastic’ 220−2, 233 indigenous 109, 115, 230 d’Urville, Jules Dumont 40 Eastern Hill Public Bar (Melbourne) 255 Ebenezer Mission, Victoria 218−38 colonialism, limits of 228−30 moral high ground 224−8 Moravian utopian tradition 220−2 origins 222−4 overview 14−15 survey plan 226 Wimmera River 230−3 Eckermann (Lutheran pastor) 65 economic imperialism 41 Edmonds, Penelope 158 Edwards, Agnes (Queen Aggie) 230 Elbourne, Elizabeth 223 elders 53, 60, 87, 119, 229, 232, 246, 288 ‘empty lands’ 29 Emu Fields 53, 61, 62, 64 Endurance (ship) 37, 38 Engels, Friedrich 179 Enlightenment 85−6 Eora people 106, 242−6, 249−50, 252 Ernabella 64, 65 Escudero, Julio 45 Esquimalt 166 Etheringham, Norman 190 ethnic cleansing 187−8 ethnic minorities 273, 277−8 Evans, Raymond 77, 77−8 Evison, Harry 201 Fabian, Johannes 222 Fairfield 222 Falkland Islands 35−6, 41 Islas Malvinas 34, 41

Falkland Islands Dependencies 34−5, 39, 40, 41 Fallardeau, Mary 164, 167 False Creek 157, 159, 160, 162, 165 ‘fantastic dreaming’ 220−2, 233 fencing, wire 108−10 fence-jumping 114, 115−16 Fenton, Francis Dart 200 festivals 266−7 Finley family 230 First Fleet Marines 242 First World War 35, 36, 37, 188 post- 40, 188 fishing 113 ‘flashpoints’ 139 Fleras, Augie 274, 281−5, 287−8 ‘follies of empire’ 37 Foreign Affairs (publication) 184 Forster (town) 111 Fort Victoria 157 Foster, Robert 60 Foucault, Michel 56, 142−3, 222, 224−5, 257, 261, 287 France 189 Antarctic imperial opposition 29, 32, 39, 40−5 Freestone, Robert 1 Freezy, Chief 163, 164 French Situationalists 112 Friday, Mary 164, 167 Friday, Peter 164, 167 Fulneck 222 Funari, Pedro P. A. 117 fur trade 157, 158, 163, 164 Gabriel, August 164−5, 167 Gariwerd mountains 218 Garrard, Apsley Cherry 34 Gaza Strip 189 gender 146−7 and space 132−4 ‘territorialism’ 143 genocide 188 by cartography 190 Genovese, Eugene 256 Geographic Information System (GIS) 111 geographical knowledge 181



300

geographical spaces 257, 260 Geraldine (town) 205 German Ritscher expedition (1938−9) 39, 43 Germany 34 Giblett, Rodney 143 Gibson, Ross 75 Gippsland 110, 147 Glenthorne 113 global settler colonialism 179, 180−5 gold rush 158, 163 Golledge, Johnny 164−5, 167 Goodall, Heather 67 Gorrie, Tony 255 Government Gazette 84 Goyder Line 183 ‘great land rush’ 74 Great Victoria Desert 63 Great White South (Ponting) 33 Grey, Governor George 200−1 Groom, Arthur 88 group rights 273−4, 275−6, 283−4 Guatemala 41 Gumleaf orchestras 266 Gunbarrel Construction Party 58 Gunbarrel highway 58 Gunion, Charles 164−5, 167 Gurindgi ‘Wave Hill’ walk-off 263 Gus-Wen-Teh 276 ‘Guys Like Gauguin’ (Marsh) 25−6 Hagenauer, Friedrich 224, 231 Hains, Brigit 38 Hall, Charles 231 hapu¯ tribes 276 Harbour Commission (British Columbia) 161 Harley, Brian 190 Harris, Cole 155 Harrison, Nancy 232 Harrison, Rodney 109 ‘Has the Whole Tribe Come Out from England?’ (Marsh) 177−8 Hawai’i 189 Haynes, Roslyn 58 Hegel, G. W. F. 182 Henningham, Nikki 138 Henry, James 221 ‘hereditary traits’ 46

301

Herero rebellion 188 Herries, William 205 Herrnhut 221 ‘heterotopia’ 142 Heyne, Ernst Bernhardt 144 ‘high frontierity’ 185, 187 ‘highest phase’ settler colonialism 31 Hillary, Edmund 38 Hitler, Adolf 43 Hohepa, Erueti 211 Home of the Blizzard (Mawson) 38 Hood, Peter 256 hooks, bell 260−1, 268, 286 Howard, Prime Minister John 53, 54 Howitt, Alfred 218 Howkins, Adrian 183 Hunter River 107 Hurley, Frank 38 Hus, Jan 221 Hyam, Ronald 37 ‘ideal settler colony’ 32 identities, indigenous 267 imagined geographies 179−97 global settler colonialism 179, 180−5 overview 13 population economy 185−90 imagined space 246−7, 248, 250 immorality 136 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1957−8) 38 India 46, 47 Indian Act (1909) 155, 161, 164, 166 Indian Affairs, Deputy Superintendent of 165−6 Indian Agent 163, 165 Indian reserves 166 Indians 162, 166 indigenous rights movement 277 indigenous self-determination 273−4, 275−7, 277−8, 284−5, 288−90 indigenous spaces 265, 268 individual rights 273, 275 infrastructure, roads 57−61 International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957−8) 30, 32, 40, 45, 46 Irati Wanti campaign 55, 61, 67, 68 ‘Irish Problem’ 34



Index

Index

Irmangka Irmangka 57 Islas Malvinas 34, 41 Falkland Islands 35−6, 41 Israel 185, 187 Italy 182 iwi tribes 276 Jackson family 167 Jackson, Moana 282 Jacksonville 46 James Caird (lifeboat) 37 Japan 30, 33, 45 Jarowair people 76, 86, 87, 88 Jerome, Paddy 87 John Curtin (JC’s) 255−6 Johnstone, Janice 255 Just Us (band) 255 Kaiapoi 208, 209 Kamais, Kama 164, 167 Kanakos, Jeannie 159 Kaplan, Caren 287 Katherine (town) 109, 113 Kautsky, Karl 179 Kelly, Stephanie 212 Kemp, Henry Tacy 201 Kemp’s Purchase 200−1, 212 Kennedy, Uncle Jack 232−3 Kerguelen 40 Khoikhoi, Christian 223 Kimberley 109 Kimmerling, Baruch 185 King Country 210−11 Kingitanga movement 210 Kitsilano (False Creek) reserve 157 Kjellén, Rudolph 42 Kokatha 55, 65 Kooniba Mission 65 Kulin Nation 129 Kungka Tjuta, Kupa Piti 55, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67 ‘Statement of Opposition’ 55−6, 61 Kunmanara of Ernabella 67 Kurnai people 147 Kymlicka, Will 275 La Trobe, Governor Charles Joseph 144, 145, 220

labour 188, 229 ‘conquest of’ 185−6 migration 3−4 Lahey, Romeo Watkin 83 Lake, Marilyn 139 Lalor, Miles 119 Lamington Plateau 82 land acquisition 181 appropriation 4−5, 6 communal ownership 80, 109 dispossession 4−5, 6, 85−7, 187 purchases 199−202 tenure surveys 106 Land Court 212−13 Land Office (Brisbane) 73−4, 81 Land Rights legislation 111 Lands Department (Queensland) 82, 84 Langhorne, George 223 Langton, Marcia 85, 88 language local 245, 248−52 ‘of fractions’ 203−4, 207, 209 Laurier, Prime Minister Wilfred 160−1 Law, J. 287 League of Nations 40, 188 Lefébvre, Henri 5, 56, 114−15, 286 Lekwungen (Songhees) 156−9, 162−9 Lennon, Jessie 60 Lennon, Jim 61 Lesina, Vincent 81 Lester, Yami 60, 61−2, 63 Letter from Sydney (Wakefield) 190 Locke, John 81 Logan-Nichols, Augusta ‘Minnie’ 229−30 Logan-Nichols, Herbert 229 logging 78−9 Long Range Weapons Organisation (LRWO) 58, 59, 63, 64 Lonsdale, Police Magistrate 141 Lovett, Tony 255−6, 265 ‘low frontierity’ 187 Lutheran missionaries 65 see also Ebenezer Mission, Victoria Lybia, Spedizione dei Ventimila 182 Lydon, Jane 110



302

MacDougall, Walter 63−5 Mackay, Alexander 200, 206−9 MacKenzie, John (Jock) 80, 82 MacLean, Malcolm 281 Macleay Valley 110 Macmillan, Prime Minister Harold 186 Macpherson ranges 82−4, 88 Making Native Space 155 Malaysia 47 Mamani, Mahmood 184 mandatory detention 54, 57 Manly Cove 106 Manning River 113 Manning Valley 107−8, 107, 111−14, 115−16, 118−21 Mantell, Walter 199−202, 206−8, 210, 212 ‘Many Peoples’ (Anderton) 283 Ma¯ori People in the Nineteen-Sixties (Schwimmer) 278 Ma¯ori Purposes Act (1966) 212 Ma¯ori tribe biculturalism and 277−84 census and 202−6, 207−11 defined 213 land ownership 80 thirdspace and 285, 287−9 see also Nga¯i Tahu mapping 59, 113 Bunya Mountains 73−5, 82−3, 89 mental 114 procedural 244−5 Sydney Harbour 106 see also cartography Mar, Tracey Banivanua 108, 148 ‘Maralinga lockout’ 65, 66 Maralinga Range 53, 63, 65 Maralinga Tjarutja 66 marginal spaces 260−1, 268 Marsh, Selina Tusitala 25, 177 Marx, Karl 179 Matignon Accords 189 Mattern, Mark 256 Matui, Hoani 206 Mawani, Renisa 158 Mawson, Douglas 38−9 Mawson Station 39 McBride, Premier Richard 160−1

303

McClelland, Jim 63 McClintock, Anne 227 McCrae, Dr Farquhar 133, 135 McCrae, Georgiana 132−3, 148 McDonald, Robert A. J. 156, 159 McHugh, Paul 284, 285 medicine, bush 57 Melbourne 255−6, 260, 265 City Council 135 Town Council 135, 137, 142, 145 see also urban space, Melbourne Menzies, Prime Minister Robert 62 Merkel, Justice 232−3 Merlan, Francesca 109 Merri Creek 129, 134 Mertz, Xavier 39 Meston, Archibald 79 Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission (1890) 198, 206−12 Mills, Sarah 133 mining rights 263 Ministry of Fisheries (New Zealand) 289 Ministry of the Interior (British Columbia) 160 Ministry of Lands and Agriculture (New Zealand) 80 Ministry for Native Affairs (New Zealand) 205 Mitchell, Grand Chief Michael 276 Mitchell, Thomas 218, 220, 231 mixed race issues 137−45, 156, 163−9, 201−2, 206, 210 language of fractions 203−4, 207, 209 Moeraki 208 Moffat, Nicky 256 Moffat, Sean 256 Mohawk tribe 276 Monte Bello Islands 53 Moore, Donald 286, 287 Moravian utopian tradition 220−2 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 258, 263 Morris, Barry 110 Morris, Rev W. E. 224 Mowbullan mountain 74 Muecke, Stephen 58, 59, 61, 116 multiculturalism 273−4, 275−7, 283



Index

Index

Murihiku Purchase 200−1 Murray, Gary 229 Murray River 229 music, indigenous 255−72 musical spaces 267 overview 15−16 as political space 262−9 spatiality of power and resistance 258−62 Nama workforce 188 Nance, Beverley 131 national parks 108 national parks, Queensland 73−89 Bunya Mountains National Park 75, 80−4 land dispossession 85−7 negotiating ownership 87−9 overview 9 terra nullius 76−9, 85 National Parks and Wildlife Service 123 Native Americans 86 native camps, urban 132, 137−45 Native Department 204, 211 Native Land Courts 75 Native Officers 204 Native Patrol Officer 63 Native Title 232 Claims 89 natural resource management (NRM) 122 New South Wales see Dawes, William; race and space, Australia New World slavery 117, 118 New Zealand 273−4 Antarctic sub-imperialism 29, 32, 37−9 biculturalism and 278−9, 281−5 multiculturalism and 275−7 national parks 74, 80, 82 thirdspace and 285, 287−9 see also periodical counting, New Zealand New Zealand Company 181, 200, 201 Nga¯i Tahu 198, 199−202, 203, 205−6, 206−11 census and 212−13 Census Committee 212

Ma¯ori Trust Board 212−13 settlement 212 Whakapapa Unit 213 Nga¯i Tahu Claim Act 212 Nga¯ti Maniapoto 210−11 Nichol, Robert (Bobbie) 229−30 Nickolls, Trevor 7 Nightwood (Barnes) 119 Ninggollobin (Aborigine) 141 Ninnis, Belgrave Edward Sutton 39 No Fixed Address (band) 265 normalised spaces 261 North American national parks 74 Norway Antarctic sub-imperialism 29, 32, 33, 37−9 whalers 35 Noyse, John 86 nuclear issues, Australia 53−72 atomic testing programme 53, 58−9, 61−6, 66−8 infrastructure, roads 57−61 nuclear waste dump 53, 54−6, 68 overview 8−9 Nugent, Marie 104 Nullabor 66 Nunupton (Aborigine) 135 Of Other Spaces (Foucault) 287 Ooldea 64 Ooldea Mission 65, 66 Ormond, Frederick 211 Orser, Charles E. 105, 117 Ortsgemein (Congregation Towns) 221, 227 Osterhammel, Jürgen 185 Otago 199, 200, 204, 206, 209 Otago Purchase 200−1 ‘other’ spaces 142−3 ‘otherness’ 190 Owenism 223 ownership, land 4−5, 81 indigenous 85, 263 Ma¯ori communal 80 negotiating 87−9, 189 Paerl, Jan 223 Palestine 186, 187, 189 Palmer, Kingsley 6, 65



304

Palmer/Paama family 210 Panama Canal 35 Parish Plans 112 Parsons, Isaac 267 Parsons, Talcott 278−9 Patagonia 42, 45 Paterson, William 184 Patyegarang 245−52 Penney, Richard 64 Pepper, Nathaniel 220, 228 Pepper, Phillip 227 Pepper, Rebecca 227 Perham, Margery 189 periodical counting, New Zealand 198−217 cartography and 199−202 Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission 198, 206−12 Nga¯i Tahu and 212−13 overview 13−14 as racial document 202−6 Permanent Mandates Commission 188−9 Péron, President Juan Domingo 41, 43, 44 Perry, Adele 143 Petrie, Andrew 77 Petrie, Constance 77, 79 Phillip, Governor Arthur 106−7, 242 Pile, S. 287 pine trees/nuts trade 76−7 Pioneer Belts 185 pioneer drive 46 ‘Pioneer Fringe’ (essay) 184 Pitjantjatjara 65−6, 67 Council 62, 63 place-names 58, 75 pluralism 276 police violence 122 political spaces 258−60, 262−9 politics of place 287 Ponting, Herbert 33 population economy 185−90 Port Jackson 243, 244 Port Phillip 131, 146, 223 see also Victoria (Australia) Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate 145

305

Port Phillip Bay 129 Port Phillip Gazette 134, 136 Possessing the Pacific (Banner) 181 power domesticity and 227 of environment 225 relations 285−6 settler 187 spatiality of 257, 258−62 state 289 Pratt, Mary Louise 86, 131, 190 private property 109, 123 private sphere 132 Production of Space (Lefébvre) 286 Progressive Party (New Zealand) 282 prostitution 140 protective custody 262 Public Health Act 110 Public Lands Office 81 public space 227, 258 Pujato, Hernán 31, 43, 44 Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve 109, 112−14, 117, 119 Quaker ideals 222 Queen Maud Land 39 Queensland see national parks, Queensland race 3−7 census and 202−6 racial partnership 186 see also mixed race issues race and space, Australia 103−28 cadastral grid 105−8 counter-cadastral 115−18 gaps in grid 111−15 ‘nervous system’ 103−5 new developments 121−3 overview 10 visibility 118−21 wire fencing 108−10 ‘race for bases’ 45 radioactive contamination see nuclear issues, Australia Raglan Harbour 288 Ramahyuck 220, 224 Ranginui, Inia 211



Index

Index

Rann, Mike 54−5 Ratzel, Friedrich 42 Recalling Aotearoa (Fleras & Spoonley) 274 reconciliation processes 187 programme 277 Registrar-General (New Zealand) 205, 211 Relatos Antárticos (Diaz) 43 Remberrnga people 109 resistance ‘arts of’ 117 indigenous 7, 145−6, 268−9, 287−9 Ma¯ori tribe 285 music as vehicle of 256−7, 266 spatiality of 258−62 theory of 263−4 Resource Management Act 282 rights 273−4 civil 121, 275, 279 collective (group) rights 273−4, 275−6, 283−4 indigenous 277 individual 273, 275 land 111, 122 mining 263 ring-barking of trees 108 Ripmeester, M. 287 roads, infrastructure 57−61 Robinson, George Augustus 129, 135, 139, 142, 144 Rocky Mountains National Park 87 Roco, Julio 41 Roediger, David 5 Rose, Deborah Bird 54, 67 Rose, Gillian 286 Ross Ice Shelf 33 Ross Sea 33, 38 Rowe, Jonathan 123 Royal Commission (1890) 202, 206−12 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests (1984) 59, 61−3, 65, 66−7 Russell, Henry Stuart 79 Russia 29 Ryan, Terry 213

Said, Edward 180, 182 St. Louis, Jimmy 164, 167 Saint Paul (island) 40 Saltwater 112, 119 San Juan Island 164, 167 Saunders, Gary 256 Saunders, Horrie 119 Saunders, Russell 118 Schmidt, Karl W. E. 77 Schwimmer, Erik 278−9, 284, 290 scientific methods 184−5 Scott, Captain Robert Falcon 32−4, 36, 37, 38, 39 Scott, James 117, 255, 260 Scottish immigrants 35, 144 ‘Scramble for Antarctica’ 48 sealing industry 36 Second World War 39, 40, 42, 44, 189 Seeking the Centre (Haynes) 58 segregation see race and space, Australia Seivright, Charles 146 self-determination, indigenous 273−4, 275−7, 277−8, 284−5, 288−90 ‘sequestered’ spaces 260 Serrano, Miguel 43−4 ‘settler sphere’ 182 sexual abuse 138−42 sexuality Patyegarang 248 Songhees women 158 Shackleton, Ernest 36−7, 38 Shortland, Edward 200 Sibley, David 156 Silva, Johnny 164−5, 167 Simon, Ella 116 Situationalists, French 112 Siwashes (Indians) 162, 166 S-kuvanit-nar, Catherine 163 slavery 117, 118 Smith, Adam 20n Smith, Desie 256 Smith, Keith 245 Smith-Nairn Commission (1879−80) 202 Snauq 157 social relations 6, 225



306

social spaces 5, 6, 108, 142, 229, 256−7, 258−60, 266 social-spiritual space 109 Soja, Edward 259, 287 Songhees 156−9, 162−9 Sound in Between (Carter) 249 sound, meaningful 249−50 South Africa 30, 45, 121, 186, 189 South America 37 South American Antarctica 41, 42 South Australian Aborigines Act 63 South Georgia 35, 37 South Polar Plateau 33 South Pole 33 South Shetland Islands 47 Southern Ocean 36 sovereignty 186−7, 189 Soviet Union 40, 45−6 ‘space names’ 218−20, 219 Spark, Ceridwen 139 Spedizione dei Ventimila to Libya 182 Spieseke, F. W. 220, 221, 228−9, 233 Spoonley, Paul 274, 281−5, 287−8 Squamish 156−9, 161−3, 165, 169 Sqwameyuqs, Chief 159, 164 Stack, James West 205, 210 stadial theories, human development 2, 20n State Forest and National Parks Act (1906) 83 State Sector Act (1988) 279 ‘Statement of Opposition’ 55−6, 61 Stewart, Eleanor 230 Stewart, Ivy Makinti 60 Stocking, George 156 Stoler, Ann 134, 140 Stray Blacks (band) 256, 265 Strickson-Pua, Mua 285 Strode, Alfred Chetham 200 Stuart highway 58 success 182−3, 184 surveillance 134−7, 261−3, 266 Surveyor-General (Queensland) 81, 82 swamps 134, 143−4, 145 Sydney 242−3, 252, 260 language 250−1 Sydney Cove 106−7 syphilis 142

307

Taieri 210 Talking Straight Out (Kungka publication) 56 Tamborine Mountain National Park 83 ‘taming the wilderness’ 36 Taranaki 186, 210, 211 Tarcoola 65 Taussig, Michael 103 Te Kereme (The Claim fighting fund) 202, 212 Te Whiti 211 technology 183 Temuka 208 Tench, Watkin 242, 243 ‘tent city’ 144 Tent Embassy 263 terra nullius 76−9, 85, 261 Terre Adélie 40 ‘testing racial fitness’, concept of 43 Thiong’o, Na¯ua¯i wa 258 Third World 46−7 thirdspace 274, 285−90 overview 16−17 Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Soja) 287 Thomas, Nicholas 156, 180 Thomas, William 135−8, 139−41, 145−6 Tietkins Plain 63 Titterton, Ernest 62 Tjimba 265 Tongariro National Park 80, 82 Tonkin, Daryl 110 ‘total institutions’ 262 Totem One (bomb) 59, 61−6, 67 Totem Two (bomb) 62, 63−4 touring musicians 265−6 Towanninnie Station 230 Tranby Aboriginal College 260 Transcontinental Railway Line 63 transfer-based settler colonialism 188 transferring title 4−5, 6 Treaty of Waitangi 200, 277−8, 281, 282, 290 Treaty of Waitangi Act 282 trespass 115



Index

Index

Troy, Jakelin 251 trusteeship 186, 188−9 Tuke, Samuel 222 Turner, Dale 284−5 Turner, Graeme 66 Turpel, Mary Ellen 275 Two Row Wampum 276−7 Umoona Aboriginal Aged Care Centre 55 United Aborigines’ Mission (UAM) 65 United Nations 47, 189 United States of America (USA) 29, 34, 45−6, 83, 121, 189 reconciliation 273, 275, 277 urban space 260 urban space, British Columbia 155−73 mixed race issues 156, 163−9 overview 12−13 race and greed 156−63 urban space, Melbourne 129−54 Aboriginal removal 134−7 interrelations 145−7 native camps 132, 137−45 overview 10−11 Yarra River 129, 132−4, 136, 137−9, 142, 144 vagrancy laws 136−7 Van Diemen’s Land 129 Vancouver 155−7, 159, 160−2 Vancouver Island 155, 157, 160, 164 Vibe 3 on 3 (festival) 266−7 Victoria (Australia) 165, 218, 223 City Council 160, 166 Victoria (British Columbia) 155−9, 160−3, 165 Victoria River region 67 Videla, President Gonzalez 41−2 Villa de las Estrellas settlement 47 village system 221−2 violence 148−9 Aboriginal 131 frontier 145−6 police 122 racial 135, 139 sexual 140−1

visibility, segregation and 118−21, 182 ‘visualism’ 222 von Trotha, General Lothar 188 von Zinzendorf, Count Nicholas 221 Waikato 210 Waimate 205 Waitangi Tribunal 281 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 184, 190−1, 200 Wakka Wakka people 76, 86, 88 Walgett 122 Walker, Ranginui 283 Wallaga Lake Gunleaf orchestra 266 Wallatinna 62, 63 Wantjapita 62 ‘War of the Desert’ (Argentina) 42 ‘Warrior for Life’ (song) 265 Waste Lands Act (1842) 81 water reserves 113 Wathawurrung people 129 Watson, Myra Tjunmutja 66 Watts, Rob 199 Weatherly, Jack 141 Weaver, John 181 Weddell Sea 34 Welbourne Hill 63 Wendt, Ronald 264 Westgarth, William 141 Whakapapa 209, 213 ‘Whakatangi’ (Strickson-Pua) 285−6 whaling industry 35−6 ‘white money’ 140, 141 ‘White woman of Gippsland’ 147 Wilson, Margaret 279 Wimmera River 218, 220, 230−3 course of 230−1 Wimmera station 228 Wingfield, Mrs Ivy Wani 60 Wingham Common 112 wire fencing 108−10 fence-jumping 114, 115−16 Wirungu 65 women 33−4 Aboriginal 54, 55−8, 60−2, 66−7, 133, 146−7, 229−30 sexual abuse 138−42



308

Songhees 158−9, 163−4 white 132−3, 138, 147 Wonga, Angelina 62 Woomera 54, 57, 58, 64 Woomera Research Establishment 58−9 Worimi people 119 workshops, music 266−7 Wotjobaluk people 218−19, 219, 230−3 Wimmera River and 220 Wurundjeri people 129, 134 Yalata 65−6 Yankunytjatjara 55, 60, 62, 64

309

Yarra River 129, 132−4, 136, 137−9, 142, 144 Yarralin 67−8 Yeatman, Anna 279 Yellowstone National Park 80, 82, 86, 87 Yirrkala Bark Petition (1963) 263 Young, Iris Marion 259 Young, Robert 259 Yung Warriors 265 Zaharoff, William 161 zeitgeist 41 Zimmerer, Jürgen 188 zones of settler colonialism 132



Index

Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity

Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?

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Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

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Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan

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The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

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My Place in Space

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Place and the Politics of Identity

Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller

Soundtracks: Popular Music,Identity and Place

Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies

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Race, Ethnicity And Nation: International Perspectives On Social Conflict

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Soundtracks : Popular Music, Identity and Place

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African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity

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Constructing place: Mind and the Matter of Place-Making

Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity

Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?

The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space

Shopping, Place and Identity

Space, Place, and Gender

Ethnicity, race, and crime: perspectives across time and place

Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

Making European Space: Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity

Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan

Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan

The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

My Place in Space

Israel and Settler Society

Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture

Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities

Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities

Place and the Politics of Identity

Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller

Soundtracks: Popular Music,Identity and Place

Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies

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Race, Ethnicity And Nation: International Perspectives On Social Conflict

Women & others: perspectives on race, gender, and empire

Soundtracks : Popular Music, Identity and Place

Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity

African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity

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