School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemShadows on the landscape: memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road( 1999)Victoria's commemorative landscape is made up of a series of natural and constructed features comprising roads, bridges, memorial sculptures, avenues of honour, coastal fortifications and military memorabilia, yet their memorializing function is largely unrecognized by the general population. Some of these memorials have been linked with the scenic landscape and have become privileged as tourist sites. Their original meanings, however, have been blurred by twentieth century progress. This thesis examines one component of Australia's memorial landscape, the Great Ocean Road in South West Victoria, and questions whether there is a parallel between the Western concept of a memorial landscape and the notions of spirituality in the land which are a primary component of the belief structure of indigenous peoples. This leads to an examination of the local geographical landscape in relation to Aboriginal massacre sites, and a questioning of the congruence between such sites and the now memorialized battlefields of World War 1. Chapter One deals with the history of the Great Ocean Road and traces its development and construction from 1916 to 1932. Chapter Two examines the place of the Great Ocean Road in the overall scheme of post World War 1 memorialization, and questions why its original function has been so little recognized by the community. Chapter Three looks at the complex relationships between the physical and spiritual elements of the land as perceived by Aboriginal culture, investigates the Aboriginal massacre sites within close proximity to the Great Ocean Road, and questions why no memorials have been raised to Aborigines who died defending their land. The theoretical base of the thesis is supported by the notion that landscape is socially and culturally determined, and that place can be invested with spiritual potency. Finally, it is argued that for a place to retain its spiritual strength, regardless of the culture, the spiritual content must be recognized, ritualized and constantly refreshed within the culture.
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ItemSticking to the land: a history of exclusion on Kangaroo Island, 1827-1996( 1996)In 1827, English ex-sailor Nathaniel Walles (Nat) Thomas and Aboriginal Tasmanian Betty were living at Antechamber Bay, in what later became the Hundred of Dudley, Kangaroo Island. They were among the several pre-colonial settlers who had come through the Bass Strait opened up by sealing and whaling industries from the turn of the nineteenth century. When the South Australia Company landed on Kangaroo Island in 1836, there were approximately five Tasmanian Aboriginal men and eight European men, some of whom, like Nat, had small farms of crops and stock. Nat and Betty appear to have been the only parents within this population of 1836 and the only Kangaroo Island pre-colonists to whom the descendants can trace their genealogies today. Their two surviving children, Mary born 1833 and Hannah born c.1839, married South Australia Company settlers; Mary married William Seymour in 1849 and Hannah married Thomas Simpson in 1860. Mary and William remained living near Nat Thomas at Antechamber Bay with their son and two daughters. William worked as a third keeper at the near-by Sturt Lighthouse, Cape Willoughby from 1852-1858. By 1885, however, Mary, by then widowed, moved to Penneshaw. There her son Joseph, a stone-mason, was married and had three daughters, whilst her eldest daughter Emma was married to local labourer Frank Barrett and had four sons and two daughters. The year they married, Hannah and Thomas took up a small lease of land near Penneshaw, known pre-1883 as Hog Bay, and Thomas, previously a Lincolnshire butcher, became the district postmaster. They had seven surviving sons and three daughters. At the age of nineteen, their eldest son, Nathaniel, inherited fifty-one acres of freehold land from his grandfather on his death in 1879. He and his brothers William, Thomas and Stephen worked on increasing this holding and, by 1893, were partners in over eleven thousand acres of land spanning south from Antechamber Bay to Cape Hart. Stephen Simpson also owned one hundred and eighty acres of suburban blocks in Sapphiretown, a township further west, and a forty acre section in Penneshaw where he lived. Nathaniel was a Justice of the Peace and he and his brothers Thomas and William councillors for the District of Dudly. The Simpsons had become an established family; they had houses, land and positions of influence. They could not, however, marry into the other established families. The colonial pastoralist families who had taken up leases on the Hundred of Dudley, predominantly in the 1850’s and 60’s found the pre-colonial descendants unacceptable on the grounds of their Aboriginal ancestry. Having met the colonial families on every other front- acreage, power and respectability-marriage; the mixing of black and white blood, proved the ultimate boundary the pre-colonial descendants could not penetrate. Chapter two discusses the marital frontier between colonised and coloniser, a barrier which was suppressed in daily and mundane interaction but tacitly expressed in forbidden or broken engagements. As one colonial descendant explained, “no-one would make a fuss until you start [sic] to talk of marrying one’. It was not that the second and particularly third or filial pre-colonial looked black; it was that they carried a contaminant gene. Interviews with colonial descendants expose that there was fear that mixed blood would create the “throw-back”. Far less fantastic, however, was the feat that marriage into an Aboriginal pre-colonial descendant family would lead to their own exclusion. While blood expresses the basic contamination, however, it only operates within a place. When the third and filial generation of pre-colonial descendants left Kangaroo Island for the mainland, where their ancestry was not known, they were able to marry. It is, therefore, evident that race is defined not only genetically, but by place, a notion more fully developed in the discussions of pre-colonial descendants ownership and loss of land in chapter one.
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ItemGood men and true: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853( 1986)Good men and true is the phrase used by the Commandant of the 1842 Corps of Native Police in summing up for Superintendent LaTrobe the outcome of the first experimental expedition of the Corps to the Western District. It is the age-old Service accolade, bespeaking praise and affection and pride in the troops under the command. This is a history of those men. Since Stanner wrote over twenty years ago that the Aborigines had been left out of Australian history, much has been written about them. Perhaps impelled by emergent black nationalism, maybe running parallel with it, this generation of writing about the Australian past has been useful and necessary in raising Australian consciousness to the extent necessary to take seriously the Aboriginal part of our joint past. To a large extent though, it has been an ethnocentric discussion of white behaviour towards Aborigines producing the Aboriginal people as subjects who seem to stand stock still, as one reviewer has said, and allow things to happen to them. It has produced the cultural perception of past and dead Aboriginal people as mainly victims, or in a few exceptional cases as heroic figures of resistance. Broome's observation about one chapter in one book is capable of general extension - we have replaced an earlier historical falsehood of a non-violent frontier with a new stereotype of a violent one. It could be added - with clearly defined and allocated roles, and moral evaluation thrown in for good measure. There is much truth in these histories, but even taken together, they do not encompass truth: they do not take account of positive Aboriginal choices. Our models of explanation, Stanner wrote, have been based either on the dramatic secondary causes - violence, disease, neglect, prejudice, or on the structure of Aboriginal society or both, but they have not taken into account Aboriginal initiatives towards European society, their curiosity, their zest for living, their choices, their creations. This study concerns itself with one of their choices - it is a history of co-operation, an Aboriginal success story. Why it has not been told before is puzzling: a cursory glance at the secondary section of the Bibliography (which is select, noting only those works which specifically mention the Corps) is sufficient to demonstrate a widespread awareness in the past of the Native Police Corps of the Port Phillip District. Yet out of all those passing mentions, it could scarcely be said that our knowledge has been advanced; five attempts only have been made to constitute the Corps as a subject of knowledge, and none to understand the men. Spender's question must at least be asked here, though it cannot be answered - "Why do we know so little about ... blacks for example, and why is so much of what we do know about them false, negative or derogatory. Who has made this knowledge, on what basis, and for what reasons?” Shades of Foucault. The explanatory processes used by white historians (which black historians reject) still draw their inspiration from Elkin's work. The story of Aboriginal co-operation in policing resembles to some extent the adaptive response which Elkin has described as intelligent parasitism. It was more though than that. Parasitism, however intelligent might well be an accurate description of the actions of men who choose a way of life for what they can get out of it, and abandon it when they get a better offer; or simply abandon it when its attractions dim, but it does not come anywhere near explaining in this particular instance the evident bonds of affection and loyalty which developed between the men who joined and their European officers. In this story, feelings matter. The Government's initial aim in setting up a Native Police Corps in the Port Phillip District was two-fold: it wanted a policing force to deal with bushrangers, and at the same time, it hoped to "civilise" the men of the Corps. In this work, the civilising aim is ignored, except in so far as it was expressed in regulations for living, though it may be noted in passing that the Corps was described as the only success of all the Government's policy initiatives with regard to Aboriginal people. But success in European terms is not the issue. This enquiry is directed at the terms of existence for the men themselves; it seeks to tell the story of their choice, and to understand and explain it. The story and the explanation both turn around the dual consciousness of being Aboriginal and being a policeman.