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Driving byVisiting Australian colonial monuments
JANE LYDON
Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University,
Australia
ABSTRACTThe tempo of the long-distance car journey and the
locales constitutedby road-side monuments define the itinerary of
this article, which visitsfour widely-scattered examples of
(post)-colonial Australian place-making: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi
Monument near Mt Isa in Queens-lands redneck deep north; Victorias
Grampians/Gariwerd NationalPark; the site of the Blacktown Native
Institution in western suburbanSydney; the Coniston Massacre
Memorial in Central Australia. AsAustralian society attempts to
come to terms with its colonial past,these places express public
narratives structured by physical acts ofremembering and knowing.
They reveal a profound shift from settlerassertions of the
possession of landscape and history effected throughpractical
techniques of inscribing the land, to the acknowledgement ofthe
Aboriginal experience, opening new spaces for reconciliationthrough
harnessing the inertia and insistence of place.
KEYWORDSAboriginal Australia Blacktown Native Institution
colonialism Coniston Massacre Grampians-Gariwerd
Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi landscape memorialization
Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN
1469-6053 Vol 5(1): 108134 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305050150
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109Lydon Driving by
INTRODUCTION
In Beneath Clouds (2002), Ivan Sens acclaimed teenage road
movie, twoyoung Aboriginal people walk, ride and train through the
landscape ofsouth-eastern Australia. They are attempting to escape
the ugliness ofchildhoods shaped by racism and poverty, but at
every turn, their choicesand experiences are shown inevitably to be
shaped by inherited disadvan-tage. Most clearly, the insistent past
emerges by the roadside as a tyre ischanged: an elderly Aunty
points to the mountain scarp looming abovethem and tells the kids
that this is the site of a terrible nineteenth centurymassacre,
where many innocent people were driven to their deaths byWhite
troops. The menace and fear of this memory place are evoked bythe
cameras cautious glances up and back as they drive away. The
vicari-ous knowledge of film is as close as non-Aboriginal people
will come tounderstanding place as visceral fear, marked by
memories of dispossessionand violence. But this is certainly the
way that most Australians experiencethe country from the window of
a car, or by the side of a road.
In this article, I explore the ways that public understandings
of thecolonial past in Australia are structured by physical acts of
rememberingand knowing, as settler possession of landscape and
history is effectedthrough practical techniques of inscribing the
land. I adopt the stance ofthe driver: safe, mobile, passing
through, rather than the locals moreintimate perspective, or even
that of an expert observer, making claims tocomprehensive landscape
survey. Australians are used to driving vastdistances, and travel
across the landscape is governed by the rhythm of thecar journey,
the dictates of petrol, food and drink and the need to stretchones
legs. For the driver, signposts are the only visible clue as to
what liesbeyond the road-line horizon historic markers, scenic
routes, wineries,picnic areas the footnotes to the linear narrative
of the trip that add detailand incident, relieving the monotony of
slow-changing vistas. Our experi-ence of monuments and tourist
sights constitute the itinerary of thejourney, a structured,
common, but individually navigated movementacross the map, steered
by signboards and whims as much as maps. Themoments when we stop
and emerge from the car to engage with theseplaces become our
memories of Ballarat, Dimboola and Nhill.
When travelling across Australian country, historic monuments,
asphysical traces of the past, assume a prominent position.
Somewherebetween landscape and artefact, such places individualize
collectivememory at the same time as they express a consensual
narrative history.Where some recent theorists concerned with
diaspora have stressed thedislocation and detachment of travel
(Clifford, 1997), I emphasize particu-larized on-the-ground
experience as Barbara Bender has argued (2001,contra Aug, 1995:
86), the travellers space is not a non-space but rathera locale
inflected with specific, contextual meaning. The sights and
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embodied observations of the road trip shape Australians sense
of identityand the past, forming a particular kind of link between
individuals and thecollective narratives constituted by road-side
installations, monuments,signs a discourse joining tangible,
textual, visual and embodied experi-ences of place.
Solid, apparently self-explanatory, earnest messengers from the
past,they might be thought to have lost their meaning in an age of
new media.Who needs to visit such places when immediate and
compelling narrativessuch as Beneath Clouds may explain the past to
us? Yet as many have noted,the ever-swifter transformations of
modernity might indeed have prompteda sense of alienation from
history, seemingly heralding the loss of historicalconsciousness
but at the same time they have generated materialist formsof memory
that fetishize tangible relics.1 Andreas Huyssen draws attentionto
the paradox of post-modern memory as articulated through
techno-logical media, whose speed and simultaneity have erased the
perception ofspatial and temporal difference, yet which is marked
by a veritable obses-sion with the past, a memorial or museal
sensibility (1995: 253). As heargues, the spread of amnesia is
matched by a relentless fascination withmemory and the past: the
museum, the monument and the memorial havetaken on new life in part
because they offer materiality, denied by the screenimage. Their
permanence, formerly denounced as deadening reification,now
attracts a public dissatisfied with channel-flicking. These places
arecreated for consumption by the drive-by visitor, but their
often-contestedmeanings are determined by a larger, less tangible
context of collectivenarratives and practices constituted by
diverse media and institutions.
VISIBILIT Y AND AT TENTION
Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in
memory.Friedrich Nietzsche
One of the charges made against monuments is their sluggishness,
theirstolid inability to hold our attention in the active,
ever-moving present.Robert Musil (1987: 61) famously drew attention
to the paradox betweentheir ostensible function, to attract notice,
and their impregnation withsomething that repels attention, causing
the glance to roll right off, likewater droplets off an oilcloth,
without even pausing for a moment. Theyremain self-contained and
detached from our lives, absolving us personallyof the need to
remember, simultaneously reminding, but also boring us likea
nagging parent. It is only when their seamless force-field is
breached, forexample by defacement (a baseball cap turned backwards
on CaptainCook, a slash of paint through text), that they seize our
attention again.Where it is argued that there is a need to remember
actively in the present
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as in the case of Holocaust memorials such inertia and
displacementbecomes a problem. A large literature has emerged (e.g.
Friedlander, 1992;Neumann, 2000; Young, 1992, 1993) that addresses
questions of collectiveremembrance and forgetting, much of it
focusing upon the Holocaust. Toovercome the inertia of the
monument, German artists have deployedtactics of ephemerality and
interaction that re-activate the visitors atten-tion; the painfully
challenging space of the counter-monument probes thevery notion of
a memorial, as in Jochin and Esther Gerz 1986 Hamburgobelisk that
visitors may cover with memorial graffiti. As the soft leadsurface
is scored over, the monument slowly slips into the ground, so
thatone day all will be buried except for a stone inscribed to the
monumentitself. Defining itself in opposition to the traditional
memorial by provok-ing, interacting, inviting desecration, forcing
the burden of memory uponthe viewer, this installation illustrates
concisely the possibilities and limi-tations of all memorials
everywhere (Young, 1992: 277).
Yet archaeologists have revealed how the inertia of monumental
land-scape often shapes human affairs below the level of
consciousness (Gosdenand Head, 1994; Hirsch and OHanlon, 1995;
Tilley, 1994; Yamin andMetheny, 1996). For example, Richard Bradley
(1998: 71) has argued ofNeolithic megaliths that instead of seeing
them as a result of a new, settledway of life, we should understand
a settled way of life as acceptable withinconditions created by
monumental architecture. New configurations of thelandscape
expressed a new attitude toward the natural world, and gener-ated a
new sense of time by representing a continuous relationship
betweenthe living and the dead. Some have examined the role of
isolable monu-ments within the larger, shifting horizons of
landscape, seeking to dissolveartificial distinctions of analytical
scale between human interaction withplace (Knapp and Ashmore, 1999:
58). In their durability and constantvisibility, such monuments may
remain in human consciousness whether ornot they are in active use.
As Musil noted, their physical durability allowsus to forget about
them as we go about our daily lives but this does notmean that they
have lost their power over us.
At the same time, however, their meanings are unstable, altering
accord-ing to context and viewer. While monuments appear to
represent massivecontinuity, they are also capable of being given
fresh meaning in accord-ance with societys new needs. Within
contested landscapes physical tracesof the past are given meaning
within larger narratives of self and nation(Bender, 1993; Bender
and Winer, 2001; Hall, 2001). Their significance isarticulated
through present-day struggles and relationships. Such conflictsare
often about the desire for acknowledgement and remembrance, as
thefoundations of identity in the present: the inclusion of the
African-American experience in memorials to the American Civil War
(Shackel,2003), or the priority of a Hindu temple over the Babri
Masjid Mosque atAyodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India (Colley, 1995; Gopal,
1993). The irony of
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112 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
material culture is that its very inertia lends it an
objectivity and autonomythat appears to evade ideology, seemingly
reflecting the natural state ofthings, yet its meaning is mutable,
altering according to circumstance. Itsvery durability allows its
meanings to be interpreted and re-interpretedover long periods of
time, in processes of re-valuation and re-inscription.
The drive-by experience of Australias landscape stretches
betweenthese poles of inattention and visibility, boredom and
coercion, fluidity andinertia. Seeing memorials within a larger
landscape of practices andrelationships reveals the multiple
perspectives that give them significance.Australian colonial
attempts to assert possession of the continent across itsvast and
differentiated frontier have drawn upon this potential to
natural-ize power relations by creating statements of presence,
displacing or erasingtraces of former occupation, and establishing
spatial control over humanbehaviour.
ABORIGINAL PLACE-MAKING
Australian colonial histories, often centred upon monuments and
otherheavy tangible statements, have displaced or over-written a
long historyof lighter Aboriginal place-making. Western
monumentalizing practicescontrast with systems of knowledge in
Aboriginal societies, which tradition-ally are land-based (Langton,
2002; Morphy, 1995; Rose, 1992, 1996; Taylor,2000). Aboriginal
understandings of the Australian landscape are struc-tured by their
relationship with the ancestral powers, or Dreamings, whocreated
the world as they walked the earth, making places, people
andculture and marking the signs of their activities into the earth
(Rose, 2000:42). Human-made rock-art is one form of Dreamings, as
are many land-scape features that appear natural to Europeans.
Aboriginal people re-unite with Dreamings and articulate
relationships to people and place byreplicating the movements of
the ancestral beings making these designson the body, in sand, or
on canvas for the art market (Watson, 2003).
Following colonization, Aboriginal peoples relationship to land,
asexpressed through their inscriptions upon it, sometimes took new
or alteredforms. For example, rock-art paintings of White men were
produced forsorcery against Europeans, as at Emu Gallery, Cape York
(Russell andMcNiven, 1998; Trezise, 1971). In other cases, rock-art
re-affirmed terri-torial ownership: in Wardaman country, Northern
Territory, land owner-ship was traditionally legitimated by
association with specific Dreamingidentities expressed visually as
rock paintings, linking specific places tospecific clans. Large
paired anthropomorphs such as the Lightning Brothersdate mostly to
the post-contact period when they increased in size,
possiblysignalling the emergence of a specific form of territorial
marker (David etal., 1994). David and Wilson (2002: 445) liken
certain forms of rock-art
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such as the Lightning Brothers to graffiti, as a mobilisation of
the right tobe-in-place in a context of resistance.2
Less is known of Aboriginal inscription of place following
colonizationin the south-east, where dispossession was earliest,
most rapid, and hadmore devastating effects than elsewhere. The
distinction between thedensely settled regions of south-eastern
Australia the states of New SouthWales and Victoria, with their
coastal fringe of cities and what has oftenbeen termed remote
Australia the often hot, arid, sparsely settledregions of the north
and inland is both geographical and historical,shaping very
different attitudes and relationships in the present. Forexample,
although Sydney was the site of the first permanent White
settle-ment in 1788, the colonization of Victoria, the most
southerly mainlandstate (Figure 1), began in 1835, when Melbourne
was established and aninflux of pastoralists spread inland with
disastrous consequences. A rangeof strategies justified conquest
and oppression, such as defining Aborigi-nality as primitive and
static, and a blindness toward the indigenouspeoples history of
transformation and survival.
Figure 1 Location plan showing places mentioned in the text:
(1)Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, near Mt Isa, Queensland. (2)
Grampians-Gariwerd National Park, Western District, Victoria. (3)
Blacktown NativeInstitution, Western Sydney, New South Wales. (4)
Coniston MassacreMemorial,Yurrkuru (Brooks Soak), Northern
Territory
0 200 400Kilometres
Mt Isa1
Darwin
Perth
Adelaide
Brisbane
Sydney
Melbourne2
3
Alice Springs
Hobart
4
1 Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, near Mt Isa, Queensland2
Grampians-Gariwerd National Park, Western District, Victoria3
Blacktown Native Institution, Western Sydney, New South Wales4
Coniston Massacre Memorial, Yurrkuru (Brooks Soak), Northern
Territory
WESTERNAUSTRALIA
NORTHERNTERRITORY
SOUTHAUSTRALIA
NEW SOUTHWALES
QUEENSLAND
VICTORIA
TASMANIA
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EUROPEAN PLACE-MAKING
The indigenous occupants became virtually invisible within the
landscape,until the emergence of the Aboriginal rights movement
during the 1960s,closely allied to the intellectual critique of
colonialism. Between 1991 and2001, reconciliation was a policy
funded by the federal
government(http://www.reconciliationaustralia.org).3 These shifts
in public discourseabout Australian history, and the relationship
it constructs between Whitesettlers and Aboriginal people, are
expressed in the material places thatshape our experiences of the
present landscape as we drive across it. Somemonuments generally
built before 1970 explicitly reflect colonialistviews of
Aboriginality, in commemorating treacherous Aboriginal
killers,faithful Aboriginal guides of White explorers, or the death
of the last oftheir tribe, while a mere handful of monuments from
this period recordAboriginal artists, sportsmen or workers. This
pattern reproduces the logicof assimilation (Bulbeck, 1991),
providing the unity needed for a nationalfoundation. By denying the
conflict which characterized colonial history,and conflating
diverse perspectives, a singular monument reconcilesdifferent,
perhaps incommensurable experiences, obscuring the ambiguitiesof
the past (Bennett, 1993). By confining Aboriginal people to the
periodbefore White settlement in these apartheid histories, they
could beenfolded into a monolithic national narrative beginning in
deep-time andunfolding into the future (Bennett, 1988: 13).
But during the 1990s, alternative, dissenting Aboriginal voices
began tobe heard, reflected in debates over memorials. These
monuments them-selves have become the site of sometimes violent
contestation in thepresent, serving as an explicit focus of
conflicting views about identity,tradition and the past. Such
conflict has been especially fierce in regionswhere traditional
links to land are under dispute, or where racism is anovert element
in daily social relations. I begin by visiting one
particularlyclear example of a disputed monument in the deep north,
where racialtension often emerges into plain sight.
The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi monument, Mt Isa
If you happened to be driving along the Cloncurry Highway in far
northQueensland, approaching Mt Isa (a large redneck mining town)
from theeast, about 7 km outside town you would notice a large
signpost andmemorial. If you wanted a break, if you were a tourist,
an archaeologist orgenerally interested in local history, you might
pull over and get out to havea look (Figure 1). This is the
Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi monument, which hasserved as a highly visible
site of contention among the local communitysince its construction
in 1988. The Kalkadoons (and Mitakoodi) were the
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areas traditional owners, who, unusually, were highly respected
by Euro-peans for their military strength in resisting invasion,
for example in a clashat Battle Mountain near Kajabbi in 1884
(Armstrong, 1980; Bulbeck, 1991:1756). One panel of the monument
reads:
YOU WHO PASS BYARE NOW ENTERING THE ANCIENTTRIBAL LANDS OF THE
KALKADOON/MITAKOODIDISPOSSESSED BY THE EUROPEANHONOUR THEIR NAMEBE
BROTHER AND SISTER TO THEIR DESCENDANTS
The monument was built as part of the 1988 Bicentennial
celebrations byDr David Harvey Sutton, a Cloncurry doctor who is
well known in the area.Visually and textually, the monument
represents the Kalkadoon as noblesavages inevitably cut down in the
path of European civilization (Furniss,2000, 2001). It was built
near the Corella River, which is said by someobservers to be the
boundary of the Kalkadoon and Mitakoodi peoples.During the 1990s,
this monument was continuously subjected to vandalism(Figures 2,
3). Archaeologist Ken Kippen spent much of 1996 in the MountIsa
region conducting research, and recalls that the text was
continuouslydefaced with graffiti (you know the kind of thing:
Black bastards, Blackcunts, etc.). Ken and Kalkadoon elder Alf
Barton made a trip to themonument every two or three weeks with a
can of solvent to clean the sign.He states (Kippen, 2003, personal
communication) that:
Figure 2 Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, vandalized. (Ken Kippen,
2002)
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This became an automatic task, a ritual I suppose, while I was
there. Weddrive out not even read the graffiti really expecting it
to be there cleanthe sign tend the monument have a cup of tea and
have a discussionabout the research I was doing on the station . .
. Of course, apart from anyother factors Native Title concerns were
to the forefront in the region.4
As he implies, the perception of Native Title as a threat to
White propertyrights has been a source of heightened tension and
distrust in rural Australiasince the 1992 Mabo decision overturned
the legal fiction of terra nullius.Although it has proved a
challenge to Aboriginal groups to demonstrateunbroken attachment to
land to the satisfaction of the courts especiallyin settled regions
where disruption to traditional culture was most severe(Lilley,
2000) popular fears of land claims became rife. That year
(1992),frictions literally reached flashpoint, when the monument
was destroyed byexplosives (Furniss, 2000: 191, North West Star, 13
August 1992: 1), althoughit was later re-built. Significantly, a
monument to Burke and Wills, the firstEuropean explorers in the
region in 1861, stands untouched a mere 1 kmdown the road.
Here community tensions have been played out around the
monumentas an objectification of Aboriginal culture and
dispossession. Kalkadoonleaders have used this very traditional
Western form of memorial to chal-lenge the idea that they were
destroyed at Battle Mountain, as well as toassert a new status in
Queensland society. The displacement of these peoplefrom their
traditional lands continues in the attempts by local opponents
toefface their memory through literal over-writing. While in a
sense it couldbe seen as an epitaph, reminiscent of the many
memorials to the last of
Figure 3 Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, vandalized. (Ken Kippen,
2002)
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their race, the monuments explicit reference to colonial
dispossession,traditional ownership and the survival of the
Kalkadoon has proved morechallenging, re-opening wounds rather than
laying ghosts to rest. Funda-mentally, the status of the Kalkadoon
as warriors defeated in battle seemsto have provoked local
opponents.
Many non-Aboriginal Australians find it hard to
re-conceptualizecolonization as a war. Only during the 1970s did a
now-substantial histori-ography begin to reveal the dimensions of
conflict, including Europeanviolence, Aboriginal resistance, and
its continuing effects (Reynolds, 1990[1981]; Rowley, 1972 [1970]).
Such recognition fundamentally alters ourperception of this
historical process, and points the way towards a salutarynew public
conception of the Aboriginal people. You fight wars againstenemies,
not helpless and unresisting victims. You defeat them, rather
thanwriting their struggles out of your history (Rothwell, 1998:
10). Currently,a heated public and academic debate is being waged
between those(Windschuttle, 2002) who challenge Black Armband
history (Blainey,1993) with its emphasis on conflict and the
Aboriginal casualties, and thosewho defend it (Manne, 2003).
Suggestions that the Aboriginal fallen should be commemorated in
thesame way as war heroes have been met with resistance and
ridicule.Historian Henry Reynolds first suggested that the
Aboriginal dead shouldbe inscribed on our memorials, cenotaphs,
boards of honour, and even inthe pantheon of national heroes (1981:
201), while intense disputationsurrounded the attempt to erect a
memorial to Aboriginal guerilla fighterYagan in Western Australia
(Bulbeck, 1991: 1734). In his study ofAustralian war memorials, Ken
Inglis (1998) controversially proposed thatthe National War
Memorial in Canberra should recognize war-like encoun-ters between
black and white. Despite widespread outrage expressed bythose who
believed that such acknowledgement would undermine themeaning of
this national sacred place, the then-Governor-General, SirWilliam
Deane, known for his sympathy toward Aboriginal people, alsonoted
the lack of such memorials to the colonial conflicts of the
nineteenthcentury, certainly almost none, at least of an official
kind, to the Aborig-ines who were slaughtered in the black wars of
that period. This repudi-ation forms a sharp contrast with the
trend among non-AboriginalAustralians to commemorate the sacrifice
of national war heroes. Cele-brating Anzac Day on 25 April has
never been more popular, and growingnumbers of young Australians
with no direct experience of war attend localDawn Services, or make
the pilgrimage to Gallipoli (Turkey) itself. Asbereavement turns to
nostalgia, epitaphs are replaced by monuments whichglorify the old
cause and the values of courage, sacrifice and strength it hascome
to stand for (Shackel, 2003).
Again in 1989, a study of massacre sites was undertaken in
westernVictoria for the Victorian Tourism Commission and this
recommended sixsites where some form of monument could be placed
but in 1991, the
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proposal was dropped. The consultant noted that At the time it
was envis-aged that the monuments could form some kind of trail
where people couldembark on a personal pilgrimage and seek
reconciliation through visitingeach massacre site in turn (Clark,
1995: 3). This refusal to acknowledge theless palatable aspects of
the Australian national past resonates with otherpainful histories,
such as the reluctance of the New Germany to acknowl-edge its role
in the final solution (Neumann, 2000), or responsibility forthe
bombing of Hiroshima, perceived very differently by pacifist,
apologistor nationalist Japanese and other participants in the
Second World War(Buruma, 1995; Okamoto, 1997). Of course, not all
Aboriginal people maywish to participate in such painful
reconstructions: it is hard to celebrateones own defeat. Many
approach reconciliation with generosity and goodwill, preferring to
forget aspects of the past and move forward together.
Western District Victoria: Over-writing
Western Victoria is a pleasant, green country, easily reached by
car fromMelbourne, and very popular with tourists (Figure 1). In
particular, theGariwerd/Grampians National Park contains a singular
mountainformation that emerges from the surrounding plain, home to
many tracesof pre-colonial Aboriginal occupation. In the more
covertly racialized land-scape of Western Victoria, in the nations
south-east, denial of a living,historical indigenous presence has
been effected in part through erectionof European monuments which
lay claim to the land. In the act of identi-fying and textualizing
places, deploying strategies of naming and mapping,they are seized
by Europeans (Carter, 1987; Hartley, 1988). As Denis Byrne(2003)
shows with respect to northern New South Wales, the imposition
ofthe cadastral grid defined the landscape of racial segregation,
creating aburied system that attempted to contain Aboriginal
people. Koori5
scholar, Tony Birch (1996, 1999) has examined how the tourists
experienceof the western districts of Victoria is fundamentally
shaped by memorial-ization of the landscape. As he argues, gaps in
settler history that under-mine colonial authority and
self-confidence are filled by monuments whichdeny Aboriginal
attachment to land or which overlook the violence ofattempted
dispossession. The Giant Koala at Dadswells Bridge, forexample
(Figure 4), displaces the presence of the Jardwadjali for whom
itwas a meeting place and campsite, before their violent removal by
squat-ters. Its dwindling European population erected this monument
as anattempt to attract visitors, but as Birch (1999: 65)
notes,
when monuments such as the Giant Koala come to dominate the
landscape through the souveniring of itself and its attraction to
the tourist camera actual pasts are rendered an irrelevant
nuisance. Dadswells Bridge no longerhas a history, European or
Indigenous. It simply suffers from an acute caseof gigantism.
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He compares this erasure to the settler graffiti inscribed upon
the SistersRocks, a short way along the Western Highway. Here
frenzied layers ofnames and dates represent yet another attempt to
claim land within aEuropean consciousness, enthusiastically
supported by tourist operatorswho have widely marketed the site and
its image. When I took a group ofstudents to this site in September
2002 (Figure 5), they were disgusted bythe ugliness and
heavy-handedness of this aggressively territorial
practice,particularly by contrast with the delicate rock-art we had
just seen in theGrampians. Like the Kalkadoon monument, the desire
to possess the land-scape has been expressed by literally
over-writing it, inscribing a new claimto ownership.
Figure 4 Giant Koala at Dadswells Bridge, Western Victoria
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The lie of an empty land Perhaps the most fundamental strategy
deployedagainst the Grampians Aboriginal past has been to deny it
altogether. Thisis a strategy often used by colonists seeking to
appropriate traces of thehuman past (cf. Hall, 1996 with respect to
South Africa). During the nine-teenth century, for example, stone
circles near Mount Elephant in Victoriawere argued to belong to a
global tradition of megalithic architecture domi-nated by the West,
rather than being seen within local Indigenous tradition;these
traces of an Aboriginal presence prior to colonization were
construedas evidence for an even earlier, since-lost, European
heritage and sojustified colonial inheritance of the land (Russell
and McNiven, 1998). Inthe same way, the very presence of Aboriginal
people in the Grampianswas long a matter for dispute, some
asserting that the area had been taboo,visited only for ceremonies.
Recent archaeological research has shown thisto be erroneous,
instead providing evidence for long and intensive occu-pation (Bird
and Frankel, 1998a,b,c; Bird et al., 1998; Wettenhall, 1999).
Likewise, the authenticity of Grampians rock-art, perhaps the
mostvisible trace of an Aboriginal presence, has been persistently
challenged.Representing around 80 percent of the states total
rock-art sites, thiscorpus includes its most significant painting
at Bunjils Shelter, showing thefigure of the great creator being,
with two dog companions (Figure 6). Thispainting is stylistically
unique and occupies a relatively isolated location,prompting
scepticism from White observers regarding its Aboriginal
Figure 5 The Sisters Rocks, Western Victoria (September
2002)
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authorship despite independent confirmation by the ethnographer
AlfredHowitt in 1884, on the basis of conversations with a
Jardwadjali man, JohnConnolly. During the 1970s, such doubts
prompted site managers to seekexpert advice from the state
archaeological agency, which undertookpigment analysis. The results
were used to pronounce the paintings fakeand the site was removed
from the state register between 197983 whena fresh analysis was the
basis for its re-instatement (see Clark, 1998b: 3 foran account of
this process). In this case the scientific weight of
archaeo-logical discourse helped dislodge Koori meanings.
Re-inscriptions? Caging and disguise More recent attempts to
re-inscribethis landscape and to acknowledge the historical
presence of Aboriginalpeople within it have been hotly disputed. A
1989 tourism initiative torestore Aboriginal names to places in the
Grampians National Park, forexample, was rejected as denigrating
the colonial achievements of theregions explorers and settlers
(Birch, 1996). The rock-art has been subjectto persistent attempts
to obliterate it through vandalism since its discoveryby Whites in
the 1850s. Heritage managers have had no choice but todevelop
protective strategies of caging and disguise, irretrievably
inter-vening in the original context and meaning of these places
(Figures 7, 8).Some managers argue that these enclosures actually
improve the visitorsexperience, marking out particular portions of
the environment as
Figure 6 Bunjils Shelter, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park,
Victoria
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122 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
Aboriginal rock-art and assuring the visitor of the authenticity
of theirexperience (Clark, 1998b; Gunn, 1994). As my students
noted, they actedas a signal to get out the camera, even though
they simultaneously preventfull engagement with the rock-art.
Re-naming has been another protective management technique: in
1984,archaeologist Ben Gunn recommended that the names of several
of the ten(of approximately 110) sites promoted as tourist
attractions should bechanged because their existing names, usually
descriptive labels, wereEurocentric and inaccurate as descriptions
of the art. They were thoughtto conjure up inappropriate
expectations in visitors that led to disappoint-ment, ridicule and
vandalism (Clark, 1998a: 2; Gale and Gillen, 1987;Gunn, 1983, 1984,
1985, 1987). The Cave of Fishes for example, whichbears no fish
motifs recognizable to European visitors, was subjected
toconsiderable graffiti, and has been re-named Larngibunja. The
othercurrent management strategy to protect these vulnerable sites
is simply toomit them from maps and guides removing them from
public conscious-ness. Sadly, these moves re-enact colonialist
techniques of erasure, distanc-ing these places as symbols of
Aboriginal culture from the viewer,de-contextualizing the rock-art
from its original setting and alienating itfrom the tourist
visitor.
Figure 7 Archaeological heritage management students inspecting
BunjilsShelter, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park (September
2002)
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123Lydon Driving by
Stolen generations
But new forms of monument are also emerging, as changing social
relationsallow Aboriginal meanings to be recognized within the
colonial landscape.A recent road-book guide to important Aboriginal
sites in the Sydneyregion (Hinkson and Harris, 2001) recommends the
former BlacktownNative Institution to car-borne tourists and those
concerned with Aborigi-nal heritage. Those who make the trip to the
citys western suburbs see anopen grassy paddock at the intersection
of two busy roads, with no overtclue to this places past. Yet this
site has recently been recognized as animportant physical trace of
Aboriginal child removal policies, marking the
Figure 8 Archaeological heritage management students
inspectingrock-art, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park (September
2002)
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124 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
origins of the stolen generations and assuming an increasing
significanceto the community as a whole.
Heritage managers are responding to a new public awareness
ofhistorical processes such as the stolen generations the
colloquial termfor the assimilationist policies which resulted in
many Aboriginal childrenbeing removed from their families to be
raised by Whites. In 1997, theHuman Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission published its reportBringing Them Home, the outcome of a
3-year inquiry into the separationof Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander children from their families. Itrevealed a history of
forcible removal and continuing trauma, and arouseda popular
response of sympathy and outrage on behalf of those
indigenousfamilies affected. The strength of this public narrative
has been demon-strated by high-profile political and media debate,
a series of mainstreampublications (Bird, 1998), and a Hollywood
film Rabbit Proof Fence, whichtells a story of Aboriginal
oppression and survival. It has continued to becontroversial in
some quarters, however, as critics focus on the empiricaland
forensic status of the narrative (Lydon, 2004). While the attitudes
andpolicies of the early decades of the nineteenth century differ
from those oflater periods, the establishment of the Native
Institution may be under-stood in the context of continuing
attempts to assimilate Aboriginal peoplethrough the separation and
education of their children.
In 2002, the Blacktown City Council in western Sydney decided
tocommission a Conservation Management Plan (a basic heritage
planningtool) for the archaeological site of the Blacktown Native
Institution, Sydney(Figures 1, 9). This was the first school for
Aboriginal children initiallyestablished at Parramatta in 1814 by
Governor Macquarie, who was begin-ning to encounter growing
conflict with the local Daruk people. The schoolplayed a central
role in his larger programme of Aboriginal pacification,which
included land grants to Aboriginal farmers (Brook and Kohen,
1991).It was removed to this site between 182329, and became part
of a smallAboriginal settlement, known by the 1820s as the Black
Town today oneof the few Aboriginal colonial sites in Sydney never
destroyed by re-development. Until recently, the history of the
school has been writtenwithin a colonial framework, shaped by
concerns such as whether it was asuccess or failure, and why
concerns which echo those of the mission-aries, and which structure
documentary sources. The emergence of thestolen generations
narrative has shifted our attention to Aboriginalresponses, such as
flight from the clergymen seeking pupils, the childrenspattern of
absconding, or the initial perception of the school as a meansof
cultural negotiation (Godden Mackay Logan, 2002; Lydon, 2005).
The site is important not just because of its potential
archaeologicalevidence for the lifestyle and responses of the
children and their families(Bickford, 1981; Kohen, 1985, 1986). It
also holds tremendous meaning asa memorial for descendants who want
to reclaim their heritage, reflect upon
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125Lydon Driving by
their experience and build a strong future. Descendants have
continued tolive near the site, perhaps in part because there are
childrens burials nearBells Creek and associations with the former
Blacktown settlement areaadjoining the school site. Today, the
suburb of Blacktown continues to haveone of the highest Aboriginal
populations in the region.
Many members of the community tell stories about their own, or
theirfamilys experiences of the school site. They feel a strong
sense of obligationto care for it. Darug man Colin Gales overt
interest in the site focuses ontangible features such as silcrete
flakes, the line of the creek, and how theyreflect his and his
fathers experiences (Figure 10). He is very concernedabout
protecting the sites physical form as a reflection of historical
events(Discussion, 1 May, 2002, Blacktown Native Institution site).
Similarly, forEdna and Leanne Watson of the Darug Custodians
Aboriginal Corpora-tion the physical traces that survive are
crucial (Discussion, 2 May, 2002,Blacktown Native Institution
site). For the Darug, the Blacktown NativeInstitution embodies a
range of memories, uses and meanings. It exempli-fies their
attachment, which has endured from before colonization into
thepresent. It has seen a lot happen not just the grand, momentous
eventswhich make it into historical records, but also the mundane,
quotidianexperiences which comprise a persons life. As a memorial
it serves animportant symbolic role in cohering a range of
associations and memories
Figure 9 The archaeological site of the Blacktown Native
Institution, Sydney.(Courtesy of Griffin-nrm P/L)
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126 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
a value now recognized by managers actively planning to conserve
itssignificance.
Places like the Blacktown Native Institution offer alternative
views ofthe past, focusing emotion and memories, acting as a
trigger to the imagin-ation, and calling upon the bodys intensely
tactile ways of apprehendingexperience. Places individualize
collective experiences, but conversely, theyalso stand as memorials
to a shared past, condensing and giving physicalform to collective
meanings and identity. As you emerge from the carswarm cocoon to
stride across the site, whipped by the wind, lifting yourknees high
through the long grass, all the stories youve heard or read aboutit
escape the interior world of memory, expanding to infuse the
landscapebut also allowing other people, other experiences, to
enter it too. In theirlong-term temporal trajectory, such places
focus connections, loss andtransformation, spanning the attachment
of the Darug to this site as wellas its significance to the broader
community.
The Coniston Massacre Memorial
The last destination on this itinerary lies in Central Australia
(Figure 1). InSeptember 2003, a large undressed rock was unveiled
at Yurrkuru, orBrooks Soak (Figure 11) at a commemoration conducted
by seniorWarlpiri men and women. The monument marks the 75th
anniversary of
Figure 10 Colin Gale on site, Blacktown Native Institution,
Sydney
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127Lydon Driving by
the Coniston Massacre, in which around 150 Warlpiri and
Anmatyerrepeople were killed by a punitive expedition. Following
the discovery of thebody of white dingo-trapper Frederick Brooks on
7 August 1928, the newswas telegraphed to Alice Springs and
received wide media coverage.Mounted Constable Murray formed a
party of vigilantes and over a periodof around 6 weeks travelled
across the Landers River region attackingnumerous individuals and
groups of Aboriginal people. The effects are stillvividly felt, and
some of the survivors, scattered far to the north-east
andnorth-west, have never returned to their country (Central Land
Council,2003; Read, 2002; Wilson and OBrien, 2003). Elderly men and
women whohad witnessed the events attended the 2003 anniversary,
and as one spec-tator noted, the legacy of those terrible weeks
endures 75 years later.
Figure 11 Coniston Massacre Memorial. (George Serras, National
Museum ofAustralia)
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128 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
People still talk of uncles, fathers, grandfathers who were
killed along withaunts, mothers and grandmothers. Representatives
of Murrays familyspoke sorrowfully of profound regret and they
apologized wholeheartedly.The apology was accepted (Warden, 2003:
v). A plaque reads in English:In 1928 near this place the murder of
Frederick Brooks led to the killingof many innocent Aboriginal
people across the region. We will rememberthem always (Warden,
2003: vi).
Deep in Warlpiri traditional country, this monument bears
witness; likea headstone, it stands as a public statement of loss
and grief. In the contextof the unveiling ceremony it has also
become a symbol of reconciliationbetween Aboriginal and settler. It
serves a need to acknowledge as a basisfor equilibrium and
stability in the present, understood teleologically,within a
trajectory of hope for the future. Now part of the landscape,
thecommunitys experience of the memorial constitutes it as both
structure andevent. Such events convert knowledge into
acknowledgement: as formeractivist Albie Sachs, now a Judge of the
South African ConstitutionalCourt, has concluded, Knowledge is cold
data facts. Acknowledgment ishumanized, its personalized its real
tears, real people, real voices, realindividuals. [The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission] personalized andindividualized a
terrible period of our existence . . . it prevents denial(Sachs,
2003; see Boraine, 2000; Wilson, 2001, for an alternative view).
Inpost-apartheid South Africa, testimony has allowed victims of
oppressionto make sense of their experiences, and so to come to
terms with them. TheCommissions usefulness lies not in apportioning
blame, but in the oppor-tunities it has provided for former
terrorists to explain what they did, when,why, and to whom
rendering hidden or forgotten trauma transparent. Bycontrast with
this forensic process, Australian Aboriginal descendants ofthe
Coniston Massacre have chosen to mark their sorrow and
remembrancethrough a physical marker that will endure within the
landscape. In bothcases, naming makes the shadowy processes of
colonial violence and itsagents manifest, and by making these
phantoms visible, removes them fromthe fearful unknown.
CONCLUSION
These four widely-spaced highway stops demonstrate some of the
tensionssurrounding Australian societys shifting
self-conceptualization. In thecontext of Queenslands deep north,
conflict surrounding Aboriginalassertions of survival and
continuity reached a climax when Native Titlebecame a national
issue during the early 1990s, igniting local hostility. InWestern
District Victoria, a more covertly racialized landscape has
beenstructured through the travellers experience of the
Grampians-Gariwerd
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129Lydon Driving by
National Park; even now, strategies of containment re-enact
colonial tropesof dispossession and effacement. Yet, shifts in
popular perceptions of therelationship between Aboriginal and
settler Australian are also becomingevident as a new recognition of
the Aboriginal experience of colonialismhas begun to be expressed
through recognizing and managing places suchas the Blacktown Native
Institution, associated with the historical processof assimilation.
Acknowledgement is a fundamental step toward reconcili-ation, and
the recent unveiling of a memorial to those killed at Coniston
in1928 marks the open regret and forgiveness expressed by witnesses
anddescendants of those involved in the tragedy. Here, monuments
and siteshave the potential to bear witness, their inertia and
solidity reminding usinsistently of the past, but also speaking of
resistance and survival. In thisincarnation, the weight or inertia
of monuments reminds us of what wastoo conveniently forgotten by
colonizers laying claim to the land.
Acknowledgements
For assistance in researching the Kalkadoon Memorial, thanks to
Ken Kippen, JuneRoss and Alice Gorman. I owe a great deal to La
Trobe University students whoattended the Archaeology in the Real
World field trip to the Grampians-Gariwerdin 2002 for their
enthusiasm, as well as staff at Brambuk Cultural Centre in
HallsGap. For assistance in exploring the Blacktown site, I thank
Darug people: ColinGale, Cheryl Goh, Edna Watson and Leeanne
Watson. I am also grateful to JackBrook and Pamela Brook for their
generosity; thanks also to Tracy Ireland, RichardMackay and Matthew
Kelly at Godden Mackay Logan, and Lyn Morton at Black-town City
Council, Sydney. I am grateful to Jane Hodson of the Central
LandCouncil, Alice Springs and Mark Wright at the National Museum
of Australia fortheir assistance with investigating the Coniston
Massacre Memorial. Finally, I thankLynn Meskell and JSAs reviewers
for their constructive comments. All photographsare mine, unless
otherwise stated.
Notes
1 By contrast with more effective monumental (heroic) and
critical forms,Friedrich Nietzsche notably lamented this
antiquarianism as a spirit ofreverence that uncritically severs a
living history from the present, providingthe dubious happiness of
knowing ones growth to be not merely arbitrary andfortuitous but
the inheritance, the fruit and blossom, of a past that does
notmerely justify but crowns the present (1957: 18). David
Lowenthal (1990: 384,363, 399406) also traces the modernist breach
between past and present,suggesting that our attempts to re-forge
links with history ironically distance usfrom it as we freeze the
past into a collection of relics and decontextualizedfragments.
2 David and Wilson (2002: 445) go so far as to argue that
place-marking isinherently about writing the self onto the land,
and that all such inscription has apolitical dimension: Place
markings of all forms, not just graffiti, are territorial
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130 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1)
endeavours, inscribing the land with an identity that identifies
the marker withthe place irrespective of the written message. . .
It is the possibility of exclusion,real or imagined, actual or
potential, that is resisted in place marking, thatsignals the
territorial imperative.
3 In the decade of public debate leading up to Federation in
1901, Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander peoples were largely
ignored. In 1991, the Council forAboriginal Reconciliation was
established to oversee a formal reconciliationprocess, aiming for
completion by the year 2001, the centenary of Federation.Since then
Reconciliation Australia, an independent non-profit body, has
takenup the role of advancing this cause.
4 He goes on to explain how local tension affected his research:
We, i.e. AlfBarton (the elder now deceased) and I, were pretty
convinced that localpeople were responsible for the graffiti (more
or less same slogans, same typeand colour of paint etc.) and we
became determined to wear them down. Iarrived in Mount Isa about
mid-May 1996 and it was still happening when I leftabout the end of
November . . . The only reason I was able to do research onCalton
Hills Station was that it was owned by ATSIC. Other landholders in
thearea were not happy (at the time) about having archaeologists
(or Aborigines)traipsing over their land (Ken Kippen, Doctoral
candidate, University of NewEngland, email correspondence with
author, 2003).
5 This is the term for the Aboriginal people of southern
Australia.
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JANE LYDON has worked as a historical archaeologist on
numeroussites and projects around Australia, including the Rocks
area of Sydney,the Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government
House andNorfolk Island. She developed a new heritage curriculum at
La TrobeUniversity between 200103 and is currently a Postdoctoral
Fellow atMonash University. A major project in collaboration with
the Aboriginal(Wotjobaluk and Goolum Goolum) communities of
north-westernVictoria investigates the former Ebenezer Mission,
exploring issues oftransformation and continuity, landscape and
gender.[email: [email protected]]
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