School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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Item'Death is forgotten in victory': colonial landscapes and narratives of emptiness(Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005)In late 1998 I toured several sites of colonial ruination in the western district of Victoria. After writing about persistent attacks on Indigenous people and history in this region I was curious to see how colonial society provided legitimacy for its temporal occupation of Indigenous country. While (not unexpectedly) I visited places that attempted to deny the presence of Indigenous culture and evidence of ownership of land on my travels, I also discovered sites weird, wonderful and bizarre. Through these visits I came to realise that colonial commemoration of its past and contemporary identity is often contradictory and confusing, relying on heavy-handed mythologies and poorly-constructed fictions in an effort to authenticate its story. I visited places where whole towns and streets were signposted in the middle of the bush in order to locate a colonial site of occupation that never existed beyond an entrepreneur’s utopian imaginings. I spoke with farmers who relayed colonial fables disguised as historical truth - such as that it was ‘a widely known fact’ that Indigenous rock-art, carbon-dated at thousands of years in age, had actually been painted by a French artist in the late nineteenth century. While driving the roads of the western district I was confronted by giant Koalas, miniature Great Pyramids and Eiffel Towers, and even a rather puny Big Apple. I also consumed an oversupply of commemoration plaques, funereal cairns and ‘I was here’ anxieties that attempted to obliterate Indigenous life from both the landscape and historical consciousness.
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ItemThis is a true story: Rabbit-proof fence, 'Mr. Devil' and the Desire to forget( 2002)In February this year I attended a premiere of Rabbit-Proof Fence, a film directed by Phillip Noyce. The story deals with a journey, made in 1931, by three Aboriginal girls, sisters Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy Craig (Tianna Sansbury), and a cousin, Gracie Fields (Laura Monaghan). The girls escaped from the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement in the south of Western Australia and walked home, to their own community at Jigalong, some 1600 kilometres to the north, by following of the state’s three rabbit-proof fences. In telling the story of the children’s journey, Rabbit-Proof Fence addresses the history of the stolen generations, the historical experience of the removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, a history often subject to ridicule by those in white Australia unable to accept and own their story of oppression. The film also gives some attention to A.O. Neville (or ‘Mr Devil’ as he is referred to by one of the female inmates at Moore River), the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 until 1940, a man obsessed with issues of miscegenation and the (literal) purity of skin.
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Item'The first white man born': contesting the 'stolen generations' narrative in Australia(Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004)The Australian political landscape from the mid-1980s into the 1990s was periodically dominated by issues relating to contested versions of its colonial past in conjunction with a discussion on the legal and human rights of indigenous communities within the nation-state. Key moments within this discourse included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (established in 1987), the Bicentennial “celebrations” of 1988, the High Court’s Mabo land rights decision of 1992 (and subsequent Native Title amendments), and the reception of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which was the published outcome of a HREOC inquiry into the history of removing indigenous children from their families and communities during the twentieth century.
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ItemReturning to country(Scribe Publications, 2001)As this history began - with journeys - so it will end. In February 2001 Tony Birch, writer, historian and former senior curator with Museum Victoria, rode into Melbourne from the north west. His tram wound along a route once familiar to Wurundjeri people travelling to Mt William - traversing the plain just to the east of the Moonee Ponds Creek and Coonan’s Hill, before veering away towards the central city. Along the way, in Royal Park, still stand a few eucalypts old enough to bear witness to all these comings and goings.
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ItemLike a Paintbox( 2004)
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ItemThe last refuge of the 'un-Australian'( 2001)In 1860, with the establishment of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (BPA), the Victorian colonial government formalised, through the legislative process, the alienation of Aboriginal people from our country. To ensure that we would become non-citizens in our own land the government incorporated the independently established Christian missions with existing and proposed government stations into a system of centrally administered Aboriginal reserves.
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Item'Who gives a fuck about white society anymore': a response to the Redfern riot( 2004)On 17 February this year the Herald Sun informed readers that the ‘bitter ghetto’ of Sydney’s inner-city Redfern ‘had gone to war’ in a battle against both the NSW police and the nation. In the days after the riot, headlines and editorials condemned Redfern to the singular status of a drug-infested slum, absent of any social function beyond performing the role of the Other within the shadow of the corporately sanctified ‘globally informed and vibrant metropolis’ that is Sydney in 2004.
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ItemA paperback education: Atticus Finch, Camus and Kenneth Cook's Wake in fright( 2002)When I was a kid there wasn’t much that my older brother did not do better than me. He was good at almost everything, particularly sport. He won the school handball championships every year, captained the football team and never lost a game of marbles. He even excelled in business. When the school tuckshop was on its knees the headmaster put him in charge. Within a term the tuckshop was turning a profit, even after my brother had creamed a percentage so he could buy a friendship ring for his girlfriend. He was not quite as good at the books though.
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ItemTwo Kitchens( 2004)
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Item‘These children have been born in an abyss’: slum photography in a Melbourne suburb( 2004)This article is concerned with the role of photography as an agent of ‘social truth’, with a particular interest in the way that the technology was used by slum reformers in Melbourne from the 1930s into the postwar era. The article focuses its attention on the streets and people of the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and two ‘crusaders’, F.O. Barnett (founder of the Methodist Babies Home) and Father Gerard Tucker (of the Brotherhood of St. Laurence), who would use the propagandist value of the photograph to influence their social and moral interventions into the lives of Fitzroy’s poor.