School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe work of conservation on Aboriginal lands : complex bandicoots and their transformations( 2006)In this thesis I account the lived work of environmental scientists by following bandicoots and other specimens from their generation in the field into various enterprises for conserving nature. The particular group of conservation scientists that are the focus of my study have their work enriched but also complicated by the fact that the estates in the Northern Territory that the scientists seek to conserve through their scientific work are owned by Aboriginal people. In 1993 conservation scientists found a trace of the golden bandicoot, Isoodon auratus, in dog faeces on Marchinbar Island; a remote and far flung island off the northern coastline of Australia that is owned by Aboriginal people. Until this finding, the conservation scientists had presumed the golden bandicoot to be extinct in the Northern Territory of Australia. The conservation scientists set about obtaining information about the golden bandicoot from the Aboriginal landowners, who in this region refer to themselves as the Yolngu, and followed this ethnozoological inquiry with field studies on the islands. In 1994 the golden bandicoot was reborn to conservation science using advice from the Yolngu owners of the island: to use charred native honey in their traps. Aboriginal people and their knowledge was crucial in these and subsequent episodes of conservation science fieldwork. But Aboriginal knowledge was an uneasy fit because of the assumption that bandicoots are a simple natural entity that can be universally known experientially, free of context and Yolngu traditions. Recounting this episode sets the scene for the central questions in this thesis: How do conservation sciences know entities like bandicoots? What is the nature of the entities that are known and worked with in the conservation sciences? In three separate sub-studies I examine in ethnographic detail the work conservation scientists do in field studies on Yolngu land. I describe how material transformations of bandicoots and other specimens are made in zoos, and finally, how discursive transformations are made in conservation science texts, and how these discursive bandicoots participate in institutional frameworks devised for supporting conservation work in Australia. By describing in detail the lived world, tools and traditions of scientists at work on islands, and tracing the transformations of the bandicoot and other specimens of the conservation sciences, I unsettle the notion that bandicoots are simple natural entities. I reveal entities such as bandicoots as complex social-natural entities, gaining their currency and potency as they are made mobile and transformed by the tools and traditions of conservation science. These entities are constituted in a chain of socio-material translations that give concepts in the conservation sciences particular meanings, meanings the scientists can be certain of. I show how entities are made as at once simple and complex by the assiduous work of the scientists: nourished in spaces for assembling knowledge about nature that required enormous work, resources and commitment of the scientists. In my conclusion I suggest how these insights into scientific entities might help imagine Aboriginal communities and their knowledge traditions participating more fully in conservation science.
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ItemThe Australian aboriginal collection in the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin and the making of cultural identity( 2002-05)This is an evaluation of the contribution of the Australian Aboriginal collection in the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Berlin to the current public perception of Aboriginal cultural identity both in Berlin and wider afield. It gives an account of the collection including the origins and the nature of the objects and some of the key people who have contributed to its assembly and its presentation since the Museum’s foundation. This provides evidence of significant scientific and cultural links between Australia and Germany from the earliest times of white settlement and exploration in Australia. It also reveals how the period of active collection of Australian Aboriginal material in the Museum coincided with the activities of several key collectors within Australia who have been more widely appreciated in Australia for their other achievements in the sciences or the arts. Assessed within a broad social and an historical context, why and how the collection was assembled, categorised, presented and received by scientists and the public over the years contributes to appreciating its role in the historical construction of a German view of Australian Aboriginal cultural identity. At the same time, the nature of institutional classifications of such cultural material is shown to contribute to the perceived gap in production of authentic Aboriginal art during the twentieth century within the Western account of art history. A comparative analysis of this information relative to other significant museum collections and presentations of Australian Aboriginal material in Germany, the UK, France and Australia contributes to a re-evaluation of the Berlin collection within a contemporary frame of reference involving both science and art. This work leads me to recommended changes to the management and presentation of the collection of Australian material that is cognisant of the traditional scientific status of the Museum while introducing new museological strategies. It includes devising new programs of activity related to the collection that will be appropriate to its historical context while having contemporary relevance both to the institution, its wider institutional context and especially to the contemporary Australian Aboriginal communities who have links to the collection.
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ItemBroken promises: Aboriginal education in south-eastern Australia, 1837-1937( 2008)This thesis is a comparative study of the education of Aboriginal children from 1837-1937 in the colonies (later states) of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, which together form the south-eastern, and most heavily settled, portion of the Australian continent. It explores early missionary education, the consolidation of colonial authorities' control over schools and the shift to government-run education and training for Aboriginal children of mixed-descent in particular, as part of wider ‘assimilation’ programs. It also pays attention to Aboriginal responses to, protests about, and demands for education throughout this period of rapid change. The thesis demonstrates that missionary, colonial and government attempts to educate Aboriginal people in the south-east constituted an attempt to transform Aboriginal people's subjectivity to suit various aims: for conversion to Christianity, for colonial control, or for training for ‘useful’ purposes. The thesis argues, however, that these attempts constituted a ‘broken promise’ to Aboriginal people. The promise was, that once educated, Aboriginal people might join and participate in colonial society. Instead, they were relegated to its economic and geographical fringes, dispossessed as settlers spread across their land and accorded only liminal positions in the settler-colonies and later, states of the Australian Commonwealth. Temporally, this thesis is bound by two government reports which were influential in the development of colonial and state governance of Aboriginal people. The first is the 1837 British Parliament's Select Committee on Aborigines: British Settlements report; the second, published exactly one hundred years later, is the Australian intergovernmental Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of State Aboriginal Authorities of 1937. The thesis also makes use of extensive missionary and government archival material from the south-east. As the first multi-state Aboriginal education history, this thesis offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-Aboriginal relations in Australia as well as interrogating the reasons for the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Aboriginal welfare policy. It places this study within a broader transimperial and transnational framework of colonialism, empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, demonstrating that the education of Aboriginal children was not a single project with a single aim. Rather, it constituted a multitude of approaches, sometimes disparate, formed in response to a broad rubric of colonisation and empire as well as local specificities and situations. In doing this, the thesis engages with the significant methodological challenge of historicising post-contact Aboriginal education, an aspect of the colonial project which was, for Aboriginal people in the south-east, both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously.
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ItemCollecting cultures for God: German Moravian missionaries and the British colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848-1908( 2007)The thesis focuses on six decades of German Moravian involvement in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, from the Moravian Church’s decision to send missionaries to the colony (then the Port Phillip District of New South Wales) in 1848, to the closure of the last Moravian mission in Victoria in 1908. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, which was known as the Brüdergemeine or Brüder-Unität in German, were heirs to a particular spiritual and cultural heritage, and brought to the colony a long and distinctive experience of evangelical missions. Their outreach was grounded in an emphasis on a lifelong commitment to conversion, and a special concern to bring Protestant Christianity and western ways of living and relating to peoples who appeared specially resistant to other denominational mission practices. Moravians prioritised humble living alongside their converts and sustained abroad as at home a distinct separation of church and state. They began their first mission station in Australia at Lake Boga in the north-west of Victoria with high hopes of sustaining their customary faith practices, and continued to work in distinctive ways in their expanding labours in the south-east of the colony. The Moravians were, however, ‘strangers in a strange land’, and it would prove to be not only their own pragmatic response to indigenous Victorians that shaped the fortunes of their mission. The Germans shaped their mission methods and goals to the demands of the governing authorities – not simply of distant British colonial officials, but, as the British swiftly granted a degree of self-government to the colonists, increasingly to a series of colonists’ regimes with their particular policies on the management of indigenous survivors. The mission objectives of German Moravians coincided in many ways with those of many humanitarian colonizers. They believed like other humanitarians that Aborigines were equal in the eyes of God, and that Christianity offered Aborigines the one true path to assuming their full humanity. Not only did the wider colonial community, however, sustain other narratives about Aborigines that dismayed the Germans, but colonial governments had other concerns – above all, saving money through swift assimilation of Aborigines into white society. Over a sixty-year period the Moravians found themselves transformed from evangelisers of indigenous people to keepers of institutions for a state government with little desire to continue funding indigenous affairs. Aborigines who did not leave the stations to make a life elsewhere found themselves subjected to mission surveillance and compulsion – a far cry from the original goals, and the continuing practices elsewhere in the world, of the respected Moravian Church.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.
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ItemColonizing concepts of Aboriginal rights in land in Port Phillip and South Australia in the 1830s( 2002)At a time when Anglo-Australian law purports to recognize Indigenous systems of land ownership through the doctrine of 'native title', it is pertinent to examine previous discourses of 'recognition' and their impact within the process of colonization. As Patrick Wolfe points out, the uncompensated Indigenous owner presents a discomforting obstacle to non-Indigenous claims over land and national belonging in Australia. Dealing with the 'problem' of the uncompensated Indigenous owner was therefore an important element of the colonization process in colonies of settlement such as South Australia and Port Phillip. While Some resolution of the outstanding 'rights of the Aborigines' was necessary for the completion of colonization, to enable the colonizers to 'settle', it also threatened to undo or prevent colonization, demanding a return of the resources appropriated during colonization. Through the techniques observed in this thesis, colonizers constantly balanced these two actions. Deborah Bird Rose describes these twin operations as the left and right hands of conquest: …the right hand of conquest is conceptualised as beneficent: it brings productivity, growth and civilisation where these had not existed before, transforming nature into culture.. . Indigenous Australia was not, and is not now, a series of absences ... The task of the left hand of conquest is to erase all this specit1c life. The left hand creates the tabula rasa which the right hand will then transform into growth and civilisation ... Finally, there is inevitably a great disjunction between the concept of progress, and the practice of destruction. There are many strategies whereby the right hand can deny what the left hand is doing. This thesis observes three discourses through which colonizers managed this dual task of ‘protectin’ Aboriginal rights and peoples while also appropriating Aboriginal lands - discourses of legal rights, econOl11ic concepts of ‘property’ and humanitarian obligation. The very delineation of these three discourses operated as an exercise of power by which colonizers c1aiIned to 'manage' Aboriginal rights in land while excluding Indigenous voices. The lines of distinction between these discourses - between 'ancient occupation' and 'proprietary right to the Soil, between 'a plain and sacred right' and 'some portion of their own land, - were the points at which colonizers strategically denied Indigenous systems of law as sovereign entities and Indigenous people as land-owning subjects.
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ItemTaking assimilation to heart: marriages of white women and indigenous men in Australia and North America, 1870s-1930s( 2001)This thesis examines marriages of white women and indigenous men which took place in Australia and the United States between the 1870s and 1930s. While this form of interracial marriage was unusual during this period, the instances which occurred are revealing of the policies of assimilation which operated in both nations during this period. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideology of assimilation, generated by a Christian humanitarian belief system, became increasingly popular among European settlers in Australia and the United States. This thesis demonstrates that "assimilation" could mean two very different things: biological absorption, in which indigenous identity would be dissolved through interracial relationships; and cultural assimilation, involving the alteration of indigenous people's lifestyle rather than their physical appearance. Although both forms of assimilation were current in Australia and the United States, I argue that they were weighted differently. Due to the absence of a powerful humanitarian reform movement and the presence of an ethnically more homogenous population, the Australian government put in place policies which emphasised biological absorption. By contrast the United States, h01ne to a larger non-white population as well as influential organisations interested in Native American reform, put in place policies which emphasised cultural assimilation. This difference is crucial to the understanding of respective attitudes towards interracial marriages between white women and indigenous men. In the United States emphasis on cultural assimilation led to an accent on education as a means to solving the "Indian problem." In boarding and reservation schools across the country attempts were made, by means which were often cruel and insensitive, to inculcate Native American children with white ways of living. A select few were encouraged to be "leaders" and "examples" to their people. Reformers assisted some Native American men to gain a tertiary education and enter middle-class professions. They often married white women, and it is these couples and their negotiations with mainstream American society that dominate the American section of this thesis. In Australia, on the other hand, the importance placed on segregating and controlling the Aboriginal population led to a lax system of indigenous education which produced no tertiary-educated Aboriginal men during the period encompassed by this study. Consequently the Australian marriages I discuss were between working-class white women and Aboriginal men whose attempts to acculturate were met with a distinct lack of interest by white authorities. The case studies of white women married to indigenous men discussed in this thesis, therefore, reveal the very different ways in which ostensibly similar ideas about indigenous people and assimilation were played out at a personal level in different national settings.
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ItemBrushing against the grain: excavating for aboriginal-European interaction on the colonial frontier in Western Victoria, Australia( 2000)This thesis demonstrates the possibility and value of a postcolonial archaeology of the contact period in Australia. To date, the major obstacle confronting Australian contact archaeology has been the inability to systematically locate contact sites. In order to overcome this difficultly, a model for contact period site location is developed for the pastoral frontier of western Victoria. Outstations (shepherd’s huts) are presented as a crucial resource for archaeologists seeking windows into the early contact period. These humble structures were the locus of a wide variety of Aboriginal-European interactions, ranging from violence to friendship, and functioned as a tangible incarnation of the frontier. Excavation of one of these structures (Campbell’s Outstation) is described with results confirming the presence of Aboriginal people around this structure during contact times. These results are compared with the excavations at two other frontier sites – a fringe camp (Carr’s Plain Mound) and a refuge site (Kinghorn 12 Stone Hut Site). Residue analysis of glass artefacts from all three sites furnishes details of indigenous technological and subsistence practices previously inaccessible to archaeological research. These analyses also provide the methodological breakthrough to authenticate the Aboriginality of these sites. The results of these analyses indicate the need for a reorientation in the ways archaeologists in Australia have approached the Aboriginal manufacture and utilisation of glass artefacts. Contact archaeologists must face the fact that many Aboriginal glass artefacts are no more than non-retouched shards. As such, it is argued that a whole range of sites previously unconsidered may well be Aboriginal sites of the contact period. The analysis of these three sites demonstrates the unique ability of archaeology to penetrate beyond the epistemological limit of the historical record and access aspects of the colonised’s life that are rarely if ever preserved. In particular, archaeological research forcefully highlights the need to consider ‘everyday resistance’ in our rewriting of the Australian past. Archaeology, it is suggested, can play a crucial role in the postcolonial endeavour to retrieve the effaced voice of the subaltern.