05 Lydon 2005 Visiting Australina Colonial Monuments

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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05 Lydon 2005 Visiting Australina Colonial Monuments