Académique Documents
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ARTICLE
Nervous landscapes
Race and space in Australia
DENIS R. BYRNE
New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Australia
ABSTRACT
The experience of being on the receiving end of racial segregation has
been fundamental to the way generations of Aboriginal people in
NSW view the landscape. Racial segregation was and is a spatial
system with a plenitude of dividing lines, but the lines were unmarked
more than marked, the conventions unvoiced more than spoken.
Historically, in the Australian case, it was a system that covered its
own tracks and left few marks apart from those it left on the lives of
its victims. The colonial, cadastral mapping of land was instrumental
in racial separation. In theory, the colonized were gridlocked by the
cadastra but there were always ways through it and ways of subverting it.
KEYWORDS
Aboriginal Australia colonialism heritage management
New South Wales racism segregation
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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 article is that
segregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonial
state had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. The article is
interested in the ways in which an indigenous minoritys presence in and
movement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or constrained by the colonizers. But it is also interested in the ways in which the
minority group subverted 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. A spatial regime that was always, to
borrow Michael Taussigs (1991) term, a nervous system.
The nervous system of racialized space seems to me to be a suitable
subject for social archaeology. It has to do with the question of how close
people are allowed to get to each other. At different times in Australias
past, governments have regulated that Aboriginal people be confined on
off-shore islands or that Aboriginal Reserves be located at least a few kilometres away from the edge of country towns (Bropho, 1980; Kabaila, 1995;
Rowley, 1970a, 1970b; Sansom, 1980). Other regulations and unspoken
rules made much finer discriminations. Aboriginal patients on the verandah
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 NSW schools from the
white pupils in 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 racisms imprint. But there
is also what might be termed the vertical invisibility of segregation, the
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Figure 1
Nervous landscapes
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 (Cowlishaw, 2000: 117), a low profile for
those not on the receiving end of it. This is not to suggest that the racialization of space in the colonized 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.
This article derives from a project begun in 1998 with the aim of encouraging and facilitating the recording of Aboriginal post-contact (post-1788)
heritage places in NSW (Figure 1).1 The project grew out of a concern 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 situation tacitly affirms the essentialist position that
authentic Aboriginality is always prior or distant: away in the past or away
on the frontier (Byrne, 1996: 91). But it also reflects real difficulties in
detecting the archaeological traces of Aboriginal post-contact presence in
the landscape (Murray, 1996: 207). Like their ancestors, Aboriginal people
in NSW after 1788 lived fairly lightly on the ground. Their dwellings were
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actuality, of course, it did not know it, and as time went on it was modified
by local conditions and local demands. It became a hybrid element of a
hybrid colonial culture (Gosden, 2001)2 and I will suggest later that its
hybridity owed something to Aboriginal contestation of it. My present
point, though, is that it was an instrument for bringing the global to the
local, for bringing regularity to perceived chaos (Hall, 2000: 45, 66).
Given the decisive role, argued here, for 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 then the country of the Eora people 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. Finding to be a nuisance
the inquisitive Aboriginals who had gathered around them, 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.3 The
spore from this first circle, borne across the continent on the wind of
colonization, 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 (Read, 1984).
The first stage of conventional mapping was carried out by explorers and
surveyors who 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 opposed to white exploration) in any particular area
of the rapidly expanding colony. Land tenure surveys, carried out either 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 (Bonyhady, 2000:
4255). Maps of the Sydney settlement produced in 1788, 17912, 1802,
1807 and thereafter show the first streets running inland from the cove, with
regular allotments laid out along them (Ashton and Waterson, 1977). In the
eyes of the British, not only were the native inhabitants of Australia a
savage people, the land itself was often seen as wild, savage, and
disordered. Governor Arthur Philip 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
(Goodall, 1996: 36).
Not always in an orderly fashion, the cadastral grid had spread out from
Sydney Cove and across the Cumberland Plain by 1800 (Lines, 1992: 1932;
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TAREE
NI
NG
RIVER
OXLEY ISLAND
Sout h
Arm
Purfleet
Aboriginal
Reserve
1900
Farquhar
Inlet
Public
Recreation
Reserve
1884
SE
Cr
ee
TAS
MA
Ko
or
ai
ha
PACIFIC
ng
Forest Reserve
1898
Saltwater
HIG
gh
at
C reek
Village Reserve
1899
0
Kh
ap
AY
HW
in
2 km
LEGEND
Forest reserve
Road reserve
Water reserve
Built roads
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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. 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 (Carter, 1987; Rose, 2000: 5960) is always
there as part of the background of racial tension in Australia. The settlers
refusal to acknowledge the pre-existing integrity of Aboriginal socialspiritual space arguably became a charter for Aborigines 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 the 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 was established in the valley in 1900,
Aboriginal people were encouraged to move there and to live on the 18
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 (Byrne, 1997a).
Life on Aboriginal Reserves involved a contestation, played out on a
daily basis, between Aboriginal and white spatial regimes. Jane Lydons
(2003) 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. Barry Morriss (1989) attention to the history
of domestic space on the Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve in the Macleay
Valley, 100 km north of the Manning, is revealing of the importance given
by the white authorities to spatial discipline. 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 socialize around the camp fires outside and use the
houses for storage and for shelter when it rained. Cowlishaws observations
from Arnhem Land in Australias 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 . . . (1999a: 266).
At Bellbrook, the internal fireplaces became the site of a particular
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None of this should be taken to mean that houses have been rejected
outright by Aboriginal people; more that they are recontextualizing them
or, put another way, still trying them out (Cowlishaw, 1999b: 19).
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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 capitalization
of Englands farm economy intensified (Williams, 1973).8 As Bender
observes, at the back of the colonial encounter lurked the unequal
encounter at home (2001: 14). At the level of spatial practice, the
situation of the Aborigines resonates with that of Europes nomadic
Gypsies and with the history of their exclusion from public space (Sibley,
1995: 10208).9 Thus, there were metropolitan precedents for spatial
exclusion just as there were precedents in the Tudor conquest of Ireland
(OSullivan, 2001), for instance for the deployment of cartography in the
colonial enterprise.
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, 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 NSW (Goodall, 1999) and Katherine in the North
Territory (Merlan, 1998: 10). 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 m wide river passes between Taree and the Purfleet
Aboriginal settlement. 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 is also a zone of relatively intense Aboriginal
activity, with people fishing from the banks and kids 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; ratcheting up the tension, playing
on the nerves of the towns white residents.
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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 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 farmers lower
paddock in order to get to the river, the Aboriginal children sneaking into
a property to swim in a farmers dam. Historical records indicate that
incursions such as these were common across the whole of NSW and were
an ongoing source of inter-racial 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 almost 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 colonizer) 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 (De
Certeau, 1984). With a tactical, willful blindness, they appear to answer
negation with negation. It is the sort of negation that Stephen Muecke,
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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 Aborigines 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 (Byrne, 1987: 1068; Reynolds, 1981:
834). 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 (Fitts,
1996: 65). 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. One of our Aboriginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley,
described how he and his friends would head for the trees when caught
trespassing by white farmers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the farmers
saying of them: once they hit the bush, forget it, youll never catch them.
Saltwater, referred to earlier, was a place on the coast that the Aboriginal residents of Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve, 10 km inland, withdrew to en
masse at Christmas time every year during the first half of the twentieth
century (Davis-Hurst, 1996: 15662). We went every Christmas for six solid
weeks, Horrie Saunders recalled, and we went back to the natural state
(Gilbert, 1978: 36). People swam and fished, gathered berries, cooked in
the open and sat around the campfires 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
local Aboriginal 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 Aborigines 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 civilizing
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mission reaches into the last pockets of country Aboriginal people might
still identify as theirs.10 Patricia Davis-Hurst, a Worimi elder who organizes
camps at Saltwater for Aboriginal single mothers and their children, sits on
a Council committee recently convened to administer Saltwater. The
Council, she told me, proposed that Aborigines 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? (from
an interview with Patricia Davis-Hurst, September 2002). 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
racialized. Some of the same white men in country towns who would
discriminate against Aborigines 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 dont like blacks, but were not black when it
comes to the bloody night-time (2000: 41). 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 the 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 counter-current to racism.
Among the Manning Valleys 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 cinemas front five rows of seats (Davis-Hurst, 1996:
45) and had to enter by the side door after the lights went down (Figure 4).
In Australia, built heritage sites are almost always inventoried by heritage
architects, unlike Aboriginal pre-contact sites which are almost always
inventoried by archaeologists. Were the Boomerang Theatre to be given
heritage listing, the chances are it would be classified as an example of midtwentieth century entertainment architecture. From a heritage point of
view, there is some kind of presumption that a building will be selfclassifying; that its fabric will proclaim its identity or significance. Yet the
social practices that made the Boomerang a site of segregation left no
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self-censoring in regard to. This doubleness is evident in a Christian clergymans comment about the picketing by university students of a segregated
ex-servicemans club in Walgett (Western NSW) in 1965: It is only stirring
up racial feelings which dont exist in the town . . . (Curthoys, 2002: 94).
In a landscape such as the Manning Valley, how would an archaeologist
map a racial tension that was and is at once so pervasive and so elusive? I
have suggested that the cadastral grid provides a partial roadmap of racial
separation. Segregation was to do with spatial containment and the
cadastral grid, with its extensions into domestic space, was the predominant
framework that determined the pattern of this containment. Containment,
however, was at least as much a settler fantasy as it was a reality on the
ground. I have tried to show in this article that what made the landscape
nervous was not the containment of Aboriginal people so much as the
failure of containment. Considering the extent of their dispossession, Aboriginal mobility remained remarkably high in the Australian post-contact
landscape.
Archaeology and archaeological heritage practice in Australia seem to
have their own fantasies of containment. I refer to the continued hegemony
of the site concept and its debilitating effect on the way the Aboriginal
past is represented as heritage. There was discussion during the 1970s and
1980s of siteless or off-site approaches to archaeological survey (e.g.
Binford, 1978: 48288; Dunnell and Dancey, 1983; Gallant, 1986). This
received at least some attention in Australia in relation to the relatively
high mobility of Aboriginal pre-contact hunter-gatherers as reflected in the
distribution of knapped stone artefacts (Byrne, 1991; Hiscock, 1989: 212).
However, the neatly circumscribed site remains as embedded in heritage
practice as ever, mainly because sites are seen as more manageable than
cultural landscapes. It is simpler to record and protect a limited number of
stone artefact concentrations, defined as sites, than it is a continuous scatter
of artefacts of variable density that may stretch for kilometres. Obviously
what suffers here is the behavioural context of the artefacts in the past: a
continuous pattern of activity is made to look like discontinuous pods of
activity; highly mobile pre-contact hunter-gathers are retrospectively
settled down into sites.
Turning to the post-contact period one finds an essentially similar
process of spatial containment. To date, the places that have been inventoried at a state and federal level under the Aboriginal post-contact
category have almost all been places identified primarily as Aboriginal.
These include Aboriginal Reserves, mission stations, massacre sites, and
institutional homes for Aboriginal children. Containment, here, works to
take the Aboriginal post-contact experience out of the larger colonial landscape and confine it to places where white people rarely went. And yet it
was precisely the presence of Aboriginal people in white space the space
of the town common, the river bank, the picture theatre, the swimming
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pool, the street that constituted the real and nervous space of race
relations. In moments of paranoia, it can seem as if heritage practice is a
mirror not so much for the history of racial segregation as for the urge
behind it.
Acknowledgements
This article is an off-shoot 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 two anonymous reviewers have helped me significantly improve
this article and I also thank Lynn Meskell for her encouragement. 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 The project has been carried out by Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent for the
2
3
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in collaboration with the Forster
and the Taree-Purfleet Local Aboriginal Land Councils and with the support
of the NSW Heritage Council.
See Hall (2000: 60, 67, 68) for instances where the cadastral grid was tailored
to local requirements elsewhere in the colonial world.
Phillip to Sydney, 15 May 1788, Public Record Office, London. See also Smith
(1992: 16) who describes the circle as both a physical and symbolic barrier
which segregated black and white at their first meeting in Port Jackson (i.e.
Sydney Harbour).
Fencing wire became available in Australia in the 1870s and barbed wire came
into common use in the 1890s (Jeans, 1972: 59) though the old style wooden
post-and-rail fences were for a long time also common in the core areas of
settlement.
In parts of Australia, however, white property boundaries and fences became
cultural markers for Aboriginal people. Harrison (2003) provides a fascinating
analysis of this process in relation to a pastoral property in the Kimberley area
of north-western Australia.
The shell midden and remains of native fauna excavated from two of the
cottages built by the British for Tasmanian Aborigines in the mid-nineteenth
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
(Birmingham, 1993: 1223).
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7 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.
8 Also, see Scott (1985: 35) for a discussion of the widespread nature of peasant
and proletarian poaching from forests in Germany in the nineteenth century.
9 Sibley (1995: 105) makes reference to a 1908 British parliamentary debate in
which a certain Lord Farrer unfavourably compared the old-fashioned
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.
10 This is being countered by successful Aboriginal claims under the NSW Land
Rights Act and claims being made under the Federal Native Title Act.
Saltwater is itself subject to a Native Title claim by Worimi and Biripi
people.
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DENIS BYRNE manages the cultural heritage research unit at the New
South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service in Sydney. Topics of his
previous research and publications include the history and politics of
heritage management in Southeast Asia and Australia (the subject of his
PhD at the Australian National University, 1993), the Aboriginal postcontact experience and the reasons for its neglect in heritage practice,
and the social significance of heritage places. Current research interests
include the religious significance of heritage places and landscapes in
Asia and Australia.
[email: denis.byrne@npws.nsw.gov.au]
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