03 byrne 2003 nervous landscapes race & space in australia

Nervous landscapesRace and space in Australia

DENIS R. BYRNE

New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Australia

ABSTRACTThe experience of being on the receiving end of racial segregation hasbeen fundamental to the way generations of Aboriginal people inNSW view the landscape. Racial segregation was and is a spatialsystem with a plenitude of dividing lines, but the lines were unmarkedmore than marked, the conventions unvoiced more than spoken.Historically, in the Australian case, it was a system that covered itsown tracks and left few marks apart from those it left on the lives ofits victims. The colonial, cadastral mapping of land was instrumentalin racial separation. In theory, the colonized were gridlocked by thecadastra but there were always ways through it and ways of subvert-ing it.

KEYWORDSAboriginal ● Australia ● colonialism ● heritage management ●

New South Wales ● racism ● segregation

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Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

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170 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

■ A NERVOUS SYSTEM

It almost goes without saying that racial segregation, by its very nature, isa spatial practice. It is about the separation of people in space and the rulesand devices that are set up to achieve this. A segregated society necessi-tates a segregated landscape and one of my premises in this article is thatsegregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonialstate had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. The article isinterested in the ways in which an indigenous minority’s presence in andmovement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or con-strained by the colonizers. But it is also interested in the ways in which theminority group subverted that system of spatial control, transgressing itsnumerous finely drawn boundaries, poaching on its preserves, tweaking thenerves of a spatial system which was inherently tense with racial foreboding,paranoia, longing, and deprivation. A spatial regime that was always, toborrow Michael Taussig’s (1991) term, a ‘nervous system’.

The nervous system of racialized space seems to me to be a suitablesubject for social archaeology. It has to do with the question of how closepeople are allowed to get to each other. At different times in Australia’spast, governments have regulated that Aboriginal people be confined onoff-shore islands or that Aboriginal Reserves be located at least a few kilo-metres away from the edge of country towns (Bropho, 1980; Kabaila, 1995;Rowley, 1970a, 1970b; Sansom, 1980). Other regulations and unspokenrules made much finer discriminations. Aboriginal patients on the verandahof a hospital, for instance, were kept at a distance of several metres fromwhite patients inside the hospital walls; a distance of only a metre or soseparated the row of Aboriginal pupils in certain NSW schools from thewhite pupils in the adjacent rows and a similar small distance separated therows of Aboriginal patrons in a segregated NSW cinema from the rows ofwhite patrons behind them. Racial anxiety arguably becomes most intenseand acute when the separating space reduces to zero – when black andwhite bodies actually touch.

I suggest that archaeologists have the potential to bring somethingunique to the study and understanding of the history of racial segregation.Not because the spatiality of racism is inscribed on the ground, but becauseso often it is ‘buried’. By this I mean that, at least in the Australian case,racism was and is a spatial order governed primarily by behavioural conven-tion and coercion, rather than by a specific physical infrastructure. Archae-ologists do not expect the past to be revealed to them at the stroke of atrowel; they look for the behaviour behind the trace. They do not expectthe trace to speak its own name; in many ways they expect to be lied to.This may give them a certain facility in locating racism’s imprint. But thereis also what might be termed the vertical invisibility of segregation, the

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171Byrne Nervous landscapes

tendency for its historical presence to be, literally and figuratively, ‘buried’by those minders of local history and heritage who now find it a civicembarrassment. The practice of racism in Australia has always had acensored, ‘unnoticed’ aspect to it (Cowlishaw, 2000: 117), a low profile forthose not on the receiving end of it. This is not to suggest that the racial-ization of space in the colonized landscape was somehow casual or off-hand.It was not. It was as fraught and ‘nervous’ as racism anywhere. Yet, untilthe 1960s, racism against Aborigines had as low a visibility in Australianpublic discourse as it now has in the commemorative landscape of heritage.

This article derives from a project begun in 1998 with the aim of encour-aging and facilitating the recording of Aboriginal post-contact (post-1788)heritage places in NSW (Figure 1).1 The project grew out of a concern atthe vast disparity between the tens of thousands of pre-contact Aboriginalarchaeological sites recorded in NSW and the mere handful of post-contactsites recorded. This situation tacitly affirms the essentialist position thatauthentic Aboriginality is always prior or distant: away in the past or awayon the frontier (Byrne, 1996: 91). But it also reflects real difficulties indetecting the archaeological traces of Aboriginal post-contact presence inthe landscape (Murray, 1996: 207). Like their ancestors, Aboriginal peoplein NSW after 1788 lived fairly lightly on the ground. Their dwellings were

Figure 1 Map of study area



also liable to be demolished, burned or removed by the authorities (Read,1984, 1996; Rowley, 1970). Relatively speaking, where the white heritageof the post-contact period is fabric-heavy (think homesteads and court-houses), Aboriginal heritage is fabric-light and the odds are stacked againstit surviving into the archaeological and architectural heritage record. It hasthis in common with other colonized people, even those who remained ademographic majority. Orser (1996: 157) has this to say of the EnglishProtestant Ascendancy in eighteenth century Ireland: ‘The net that land-lords threw over the land was powerful and permanent. It was made ofbrick walls, massive mansions, and granite archways. The peasants, withtheir single-room mud cabins and their lazybed fields were erasable’.

Another difficulty in detecting Aboriginal post-contact traces is posedby the increasing Aboriginal use after 1788 of a material culture borrowedfrom Europeans. Aboriginal people used teacups and spoons, hammers andnails, bicycles and steel rabbit traps. While the objects themselves may notbe distinctively Aboriginal, we can nevertheless assume that the distri-butional pattern of the objects at any one site will reflect distinctive behav-ioural patterns. But how do we find these sites? Our project looked for thelogic that explains where Aboriginal people were in the colonial landscapeand that logic, I contend, is the (highly illogical) logic of racial segregation.

■ ENTER THE CADASTRAL GRID

By 1788, at the beginning of the white invasion of Australia, England hadlong possessed a developed (though not static) cadastral system thatdivided the kingdom into counties, shires, parishes, and ‘hundreds’, downto the level of individual agricultural fields. Many of the boundaries of thissystem had been in place since Saxon times or earlier and had thus been arecognized reality for thousands of years before the cartographic surveysof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fixed them on paper (Bonney,1976: 74). In Australia, by contrast, the colonial cadastral grid made an‘instantaneous’ appearance in the Aboriginal landscape. It gave no recog-nition to pre-existing Aboriginal boundaries or spatial conventions, letalone to any form of pre-existing Aboriginal land title. Rather, as part ofthe imperial machinery, it assimilated colonial terrain to metropolitanterrain by imposing the same generic grid of counties, parishes, and rectan-gular ‘holdings’ onto it. With England’s cartographic language inscribedupon it, the landscape of colonial Australia would be in immediate dialoguewith the landscape of England (Carter, 1987). What made the cadastral gridso ideal for the colonial project is that it could be applied with impartialityto previously unknown terrain, which is to say that it would take alandscape just as it found it, rolling over it as if it knew it in advance. In



actuality, of course, it did not know it, and as time went on it was modifiedby local conditions and local demands. It became a hybrid element of ahybrid colonial culture (Gosden, 2001)2 and I will suggest later that itshybridity owed something to Aboriginal contestation of it. My presentpoint, though, is that it was an instrument for bringing the global to thelocal, for bringing regularity to perceived chaos (Hall, 2000: 45, 66).

Given the decisive role, argued here, for the rectangular cadastral gridin racial segregation, it is interesting to note that the first inscription of aracial separator on Australia soil was not a rectangle but a circle. In January1788, during his first exploratory venture by boat into what would becomeknown as Sydney Harbour – then the country of the Eora people – Philliphad drawn a circle in the sand surrounding the area where he and his partywere preparing lunch on the beach at Manly Cove. Finding to be a nuisancethe inquisitive Aboriginals who had gathered around them, ‘I made a circlearound us; there was little difficulty in making them understand that theywere not to come within it, and they sat down and were very quiet’.3 Thespore from this first circle, borne across the continent on the wind ofcolonization, may be seen in the symbolic circles that white folk in Australiawould later draw around their country towns, circles that Aboriginalpeople, living in fringe camps and on reserves, would be discouraged fromentering (Read, 1984).

The first stage of conventional mapping was carried out by explorers andsurveyors who radiated out from the point of British settlement at SydneyCove soon after 1788, sketching in the broad outlines of the terrain andassessing its potential productivity for farming. The second stage ofmapping was that which accompanied or immediately preceded actualwhite settlement (as opposed to white exploration) in any particular areaof the rapidly expanding colony. Land tenure surveys, carried out either bygovernment or freelance surveyors, enabled land to be granted and sold bythe Crown and for landholders to obtain title or leases. So emerged theorthogonal grid of property boundaries. This cadastral grid made itsappearance at Sydney Cove in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived therecarrying convicts and officers and at least one surveyor (Bonyhady, 2000:42–55). Maps of the Sydney settlement produced in 1788, 1791–2, 1802,1807 and thereafter show the first streets running inland from the cove, withregular allotments laid out along them (Ashton and Waterson, 1977). In theeyes of the British, not only were the native inhabitants of Australia a‘savage’ people, the land itself was often seen as wild, savage, anddisordered. Governor Arthur Philip ‘saw only disturbing “tumult andconfusion” and an almost sexually offensive “promiscuous” abundancewhich he desired to control by ordering it in regular, geometric patterns’(Goodall, 1996: 36).

Not always in an orderly fashion, the cadastral grid had spread out fromSydney Cove and across the Cumberland Plain by 1800 (Lines, 1992: 19–32;



Roberts, 1968: 3–42). It crossed the Blue Mountains in 1815 and spreadnorth to the Hunter River, which was thrown open for selection in 1822.By the early 1830s it had a foothold in the Manning Valley, the country ofthe Biripi, which, 300 km north of Sydney, will be the principle geographicreference for the remainder of this article. What we see there in the mid-1800s is the familiar orthogonal grid of white land holdings spreading alongthe alluvial flats of the valley and then expanding into the grazing countryback from the river. It would be wrong, though, to visualize the farms inthe first few decades as an expanding pattern of neatly cleared rectangleslying within the alluvial ‘gallery’ rainforest and eucalypti woodland. Armedonly with axes and saws, until the 1860s the white farmers simply did nothave the technology to clear and fence more than a small paddock or twoaround their homesteads. Though the white population of the valley grewfrom 400 in the early 1840s to about 3000 by 1860, the valley still remainedsubstantially bush-covered and more or less accessible to the Biripi forhunting and gathering (Birrell, 1987: 118; Ramsland, 1987: 29). Ring-barking changed that (Figure 2). The technique of killing trees by strippinga circle of bark from around the trunk was widely practised in the valleyfrom the 1860s (Birrell, 1987: 163). Over large parts of it – as elsewhere inthe east of the continent (Bonyhady, 2000: 178–81) – the native tree coverwas wiped off the map, producing a clean slate for the lines that would bedrawn by the wire fences introduced from the 1870s.4 The fertile ground inthe valley was all taken up by the 1880s, by which time a continuous mosaicof white farms (most smaller than 2000 acres) extended along the bottomof the valley and over the lower foothills of the forested ranges aligned east-west on either side.

Figure 2 Ring-barked trees in the Manning Valley, early twentieth century(courtesy of the Gloucester Historical Society)



■ HOUSES, CUPBOARDS AND CAGES

Wire fences made the cadastral grid a visible, tangible reality on the groundwhere, previously, it had existed for the most part only on paper and in theminds of white settlers (Figure 3). It seems unlikely that Aboriginal peoplefully understood the extent and nature of their dispossession until wirefences fixed the grid onto the face of the land. It is worth remembering thatwhen the first trickle of white people arrived in the Manning Valley in the1820s, the Biripi had no way of foreseeing that they would keep comingand that they would take over. We should be wary of retrospectivity, ofprojecting back into Aboriginal minds a foreshadowing of what was tocome; wary of imputing to Aboriginal culture at the time of contact a kindof incompleteness or inadequacy that would open it to white penetration.Cowlishaw’s (1999a: 55) observation, in relation to her field area in theNorthern Territory, seems pertinent: ‘With the meaning of the countryalready known, how could the Remberrnga have imagined what the whiteshad in mind?’

The cadastral grid was almost as blind and impartial to the topographicparticularity of the country of the Biripi as it was blind and impartial to theway that they, the Biripi – mentally, ritually, and by way of tree carvingsand other markers – had previously mapped its social and spiritual par-ticularity.5 In Caging the Rainbow, Francesca Merlan (1998: 73) describes

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Figure 3 Map of Bohnock Parish showing cadastral grid and variouscategories of Crown reserve land



how the landscape of the Aboriginal Dreaming around the outback townof Katherine, in the Northern Territory, was ‘permeable’ in that it wasconstituted in practice rather than in built structure. White settlers couldnot only easily insert themselves into this ‘invisibly’ structured landscape,they could also ignore the existence of any such structure. This ‘levelling’of the Aboriginal topography (Carter, 1987; Rose, 2000: 59–60) is alwaysthere as part of the background of racial tension in Australia. The settler’srefusal to acknowledge the pre-existing integrity of Aboriginal social-spiritual space arguably became a charter for Aborigines to flout theniceties of white spatial order and property.

Another recurrent point of tension between Aboriginal and white waysof living has been the importance of communality to the former and theimportance of private property, as the basis of its capitalist economy, to thelatter. The cadastral grid worked, indirectly, to train Aboriginal bodies tofunction within the geometry of the new economic order. The grid prevailedupon them to walk its straight lines and turn its 90-degree corners. Thisgeometric discipline continued on inside the rectangles of the grid. Whenthe Aboriginal Reserve at Purfleet was established in the valley in 1900,Aboriginal people were ‘encouraged’ to move there and to live on the 18acre reserve in box-like wooden houses that were internally divided intosquare or rectangular rooms. Their children would go to school and sitwithin a grid of desks in a rectangular room, and when they died they wouldbe buried in rectangular graves (the precise dimensions of which werestipulated in the Public Health Act) within a grid of other graves inside therectangular bounds of the cemetery (Byrne, 1997a).

Life on Aboriginal Reserves involved a contestation, played out on adaily basis, between Aboriginal and white spatial regimes. Jane Lydon’s(2003) account of spatial strategies and tactics at Coranderrk, in Victoria,from the 1860s to the 1880s shows how Aboriginal residents there were, tosome extent, able to resist or temper the spatial discipline which the whiteauthorities sought to impose. Barry Morris’s (1989) attention to the historyof domestic space on the Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve in the MacleayValley, 100 km north of the Manning, is revealing of the importance givenby the white authorities to spatial discipline. When new two-room houseswere built on the reserve in 1913 a drawn-out tussle developed between theauthorities, who wanted the Dhan-Gadi to cook and eat in the kitchens ofthe houses and sleep in the bedrooms, and the Dhan-Gadi themselves, whowanted to cook and socialize around the camp fires outside and use thehouses for storage and for shelter when it rained. Cowlishaw’s observationsfrom Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory help us appreciatehow houses could obstruct Aboriginal sociality: ‘watching people as theycome and go . . . being available to kinspeople, and communicatingdirectly with finger talk are all interrupted by buildings . . .’ (1999a: 266).

At Bellbrook, the internal fireplaces became the site of a particular



attempt ‘to privatize cooking and eating patterns by removing them fromthe public sites of collective consumption’ (Morris, 1989: 81).6 The boxes-within-boxes progression continued in the shape of cupboards – even thesebecame a site of contestation or ‘nervousness’, as is seen in this account bya non-indigenous man, Daryl Tonkin, who lived with Aboriginal people inthe Gippsland area of Victoria during the 1920s and 1930s:

I’ve seen the Welfare myself walk into a person’s house and go through thecupboards looking for food, then making note of what they did or did notfind. It was these notes that gave them the right to walk in another day andtake the children away. This made the people keep whitefella food always inthe cupboards, even if they never ate it. In fact, they only had cupboards tokeep the whitefella food in. (Tonkin and Landon, 1999: 216–17)

None of this should be taken to mean that houses have been rejectedoutright by Aboriginal people; more that they are recontextualizing themor, put another way, still ‘trying them out’ (Cowlishaw, 1999b: 19).

■ GAPS IN THE GRID

How, in a practical-spatial sense, do you live in a landscape that no longerbelongs to you? On what basis do you continue to exist inside the grid ofyour own dispossession? This question goes partly to the issue of privateproperty. In the period between 1788 and the 1980s, when Land Rightslegislation allowed them to claim land back from the state, Aboriginalpeople almost never owned recognized title to land in NSW and, thus,theoretically were excluded from the cadastral grid. But in practice therewere two ways that they penetrated it. The first was by inserting themselves,more or less legitimately, into the numerous areas of Crown reserve distrib-uted within the grid and adapting these to their own purposes. The second,which will be the subject of the next section, involved subverting the grid.As we have seen, almost immediately upon claiming the Australianlandmass for the British Crown, the colonial authorities began ‘alienating’portions of it to private (white) landowners. But it was also the job ofgovernment surveyors to retain, as Crown Reserve, areas of land for avariety of perceived and anticipated public uses. Large and usually ruggedexpanses on the margins of agricultural land were reserved for forestry;smaller pockets within agricultural country were set aside as towncommons, as sites for future schools, churches, police stations and courthouses, for the grazing of ‘travelling’ cattle and sheep, and for public recre-ation. Distinct from these expanses and pockets were linear reserves setaside for future roads and for the droving of stock. Other linear strips ofland along the margins of rivers and creeks were set aside to allow accessto water (Figure 3).



Aboriginal use of these gaps or openings in the cadastral grid emergedas a theme in the oral histories of contemporary Aboriginal peoplerecorded during 2000 and 2001 in the Manning Valley and at Forster, acoastal town immediately to the south of the valley.7 It also emerged froma survey of documentary historical sources, including published and unpub-lished reminiscences by early white settlers in the area, local and stategovernment archives, and local news articles from the mid-nineteenthcentury. While documentary references to Aborigines were generally frag-mentary and often poor in spatial detail, they corroborate Aboriginalmemories and oral traditions of a pattern of camping and movement thatappropriated the reserve system for its own ends. In order to identify theavailability of ‘gaps and openings’ at various points over the last 120 years,a GIS was developed which incorporated a mapping of white landholdingsin the Manning Valley at various points during the nineteenth century(Birrell, 1987). This was cross-referenced to information on several seriesof Parish Plans for the area, some of which extended back to the 1880s.

The extent of Crown reserve land in the valley can be seen to havesteadily diminished over the years as individual reserves were revoked bythe government and sold off. This was a response to increased demand forland by a growing white population but it was also an acknowledgementthat many of the anticipated public uses for reserved land would nevereventuate. Early government surveyors in the mid-nineteenth century, forinstance, had drawn up plans for villages that never came to exist. One ofthese became the site of the secluded coastal camping ground at Saltwater,a place regularly used and greatly cherished by the residents of the PurfleetAboriginal Reserve (Figure 3). To some extent, then, Aborigines might besaid to have impressed the reality of their presence into the ghostly dream-scape of an unfulfilled white optimism.

While Aboriginal use of these reserves was not what they had beendesigned for, neither for the most part was it illegal. It fits what the FrenchSituationalists of the 1960s called détournement, an appropriation of ‘theelements or terrain of the dominant social order to one’s own end, for atransformed purpose’ (Ross, 1987: 116). It also clearly fits within theconcept of ‘poaching’ as developed by Michel de Certeau (1984), a matterthat I will return to later.

In the Manning Valley, the village of Wingham (population 100 in 1866)was typical in that the villagers, most of whom were engaged in providingservices to the surrounding farming population, had little need for aCommon on which to graze stock or raise crops of their own. The WinghamCommon appears to have been unused until the 1860s, when a largeAboriginal fringe camp came to be located there. We know of this mainlyfrom a string of complaints about it, which appear in the minutes of theWingham Council (the local government), the Council finally forcing itsremoval around 1915. There is a certain irony in the likelihood that many



of the English migrants who took up land in the Valley (and elsewhere inNSW), and who agitated for Aboriginal camps to be removed from localCommons, may themselves have been descendants of rural folk displacedby the ‘enclosure’ of common agricultural land in the English countryside,a trend that reached its peak in the eighteenth century as the capitalizationof England’s farm economy intensified (Williams, 1973).8 As Benderobserves, ‘at the back of the colonial encounter lurked the unequalencounter “at home” ’ (2001: 14). At the level of spatial practice, thesituation of the Aborigines resonates with that of Europe’s nomadicGypsies and with the history of their exclusion from public space (Sibley,1995: 102–08).9 Thus, there were metropolitan precedents for spatialexclusion just as there were precedents – in the Tudor conquest of Ireland(O’Sullivan, 2001), for instance – for the deployment of cartography in thecolonial enterprise.

A mainstay of the Aboriginal economy in the Manning at the time offirst white settlement was the fishing carried out from bark canoes on theriver and its broad estuary. Later, Aboriginal people built wooden boatsand used their catch to supplement the meagre government rations, oftenbartering the fish for meat and vegetables from white farmers along theriver. People on Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve (gazetted in 1900) used thewater reserves in the nearby Glenthorne area for shore-based line fishing,for mooring the fishing boats some families owned (and still own), and assites for their net-drying ‘racks’. These uses continue into the present andhave been mapped as part of our project. Other water reserves along theriver enabled the river itself and its islanded estuary to become a zone offree movement for those Aboriginal people with access to boats.

The cadastral grid stopped at the shoreline and, to an extent, the waterremained a neutral, unsegregated zone. I am referring here to the wateritself (and to being on the water) rather than the river as a geographicalfeature. Often in Australia rivers have served as racial boundaries betweenwhite towns and Aboriginal camps or reserves. This has been the case atBrewarrina in Western NSW (Goodall, 1999) and Katherine in the NorthTerritory (Merlan, 1998: 10). It has certainly been true of the ManningRiver, despite the presence of a major bridge, with pedestrian access, in thezone where the 400 m wide river passes between Taree and the PurfleetAboriginal settlement. So, while Aboriginal movement along the river, byboat, was neutral in terms of the racial signification of space, Aboriginalmovement across the river (in the direction of town via the bridge) directlyengaged this signification. Interestingly, this particular tract of river whichacts as a racial boundary is also a zone of relatively intense Aboriginalactivity, with people fishing from the banks and kids diving off the piers andthe bridge and swimming in the stream. It is as if they are flaunting theirpresence there, on the doorstep of town; ratcheting up the tension, playingon the nerves of the town’s white residents.



All this suggests that it is possible to think of the Aboriginal presence inthe colonized landscape in terms of an in-betweeness. As well as movingthrough the ‘openings’ between the private properties of the cadastral gridthere was some potential for them to negotiate their way through theseproperties. This was possible by developing a web of tactical relationshipswith white landowners prepared to be friendly or, at least, not to be hostile,towards them. Early in our fieldwork in the Manning Valley, I was struckby the extent of Aboriginal knowledge of white land ownership. As wedrove through the valley with people from Purfleet and elsewhere theyfrequently noted, in passing, not just who a particular farm belonged to butoften who had owned it previously, the names of the parents and grand-parents of the current owner, and so on. This knowledge was almost alwaysbacked by information about how friendly or otherwise these white peoplewere to Aborigines (of their generation, or those of their parents, and evengrandparents).

Narratives about fence-jumping and orchard raiding had their counter-part in narratives about farmers who had always let them cross their fields,or who had given them fruit, or even, in one case, a white family whoplanted extra vegetables specifically for them to come and pick. Or the shopin Taree (the valley’s main town) where in the 1950s you could always getserved and be spoken to decently, or the doctor who could be relied on totreat you well. Here, evidently, was a mental map of the valley that was analternative to the official ‘white map’ – an alternative, for instance, to theCentral Mapping Authority’s 1:25,000 topographic survey map that I wouldbe holding and consulting as we drove along but to which they neverreferred. The unpublished and undrawn Aboriginal map of everydaypractice was detailed and extensive. It was maintained and updated andpassed on from generation to generation. One answer to the question, ‘Howdo you live in a landscape that no longer belongs to you?’ appears to bethat you maintain your own map of that landscape.

That such maps are not drawn or published, that they do not acquiresubstance in that sense, is in keeping with the fact that the ‘thing’ they mapalso has no substance. The ‘in-betweenness’ of the Aboriginal situation isseen in the way that their map does not take the form of an overlay (orunderlay) to the white map. Rather, it is a mapping of a space that lies inand around white space, a space that is brought into being by Aboriginalspatial practice but that has no ‘place of its own’. It is tempting to add tothe other reasons given for the under-recording of Aboriginal post-contactheritage traces the fact that these traces are not places in the normal sense.They are constituted by a poaching on white places. Lefebvre (1991: 90)described the ‘fetishis[ing] of space in a way reminiscent of the fetishismof commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was toconsider “things” in isolation, as “things in themselves” . The trap, in thepresent case, presumably lies in the heritage practitioner’s fixation on the



(archaeological) trace as a ‘thing in itself’ rather than as a trajectorytowards understanding things that have happened in the past. It has beenthe object of post-processual archaeology, over the last two decades or so,to extricate the discipline from this trap (Hodder, 1986) and to engage withthe complexity of social life in the past. In the present case, the need is tobe able to read the lives of the disempowered in traces of an infrastructure(the grid) that is ‘owned’ by the empowered. To a considerable extent thisis also the challenge taken up by both the archaeology of gender and queerarchaeology.

■ THE COUNTER-CADASTRAL

The Manning Valley over the last 150 or so years was a cultural landscapethat vibrated with the tensions set up not just by the strictures of racialsegregation and their enforcement but by the numerous ways that thosestrictures were tested and undermined by people on both sides of the highlyunstable racial divide. I refer to the jumping of fences, the raiding oforchards and corn fields, the short-cut across a hostile farmer’s lowerpaddock in order to get to the river, the Aboriginal children sneaking intoa property to swim in a farmer’s dam. Historical records indicate thatincursions such as these were common across the whole of NSW and werean ongoing source of inter-racial tension. Listening to the way our Abor-iginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley recalled and narrated acts oftrespass, often carried out against the real threat of shotguns and dogs andthe spectre of the police, one is inclined to think of them almost as a system-atic refusal of the boundaries of the cadastral system, a refusal to acknow-ledge its legitimacy, a constant prodding and testing of its resolve. Theseexperiences and the relating of them are a significant part of Aboriginalfolklore, as are the stories, particularly from the 1970s, of how individualsdefied boundaries in segregated picture theatres and in the previouslyracially bounded space of white bars and discos.

This theme of fence-jumping (‘trespassing’, in the language of the colon-izer) comes up so often that at a certain point it gels into something almostof the status of a movement or philosophy. At one level it can be thoughtof as anti-cadastral; insofar, for instance, as the fence, as a boundary, is asmuch the target of the act of ‘trespass’ as the orchard that lies beyond it.But there also seems implicit in it a refusal to accept that the cadastral gridexists, a refusal that emulates the white settler failure to acknowledge theexistence of the spatiality of the Dreaming or of any Aboriginal native titleto country. There is certainly much that is ‘tactical’ in these actions (DeCerteau, 1984). With a tactical, willful blindness, they appear to answernegation with negation. It is the sort of negation that Stephen Muecke,



citing Daisy Bates, so graphically illustrates in reference to the behaviourof Fanny Balbuk, an Aboriginal woman of the country in south-westernAustralia where the present-day city of Perth took root.

Balbuk had been born on Huirison Island at the Causeway, and from there astraight track had led to the place where she had once gathered jilgies andvegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway stationnow stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight path tothe end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings withher digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Muecke,1997: 183)

From another perspective, fence-jumping and orchard raiding were simplynew adaptations to the old pattern of living off the land, of availing oneselfof what the land had to offer. For people who still consider themselves tobe the rightful owners of their country the distinctions between fishing inthe river, trapping rabbits, raiding orchards, or even shoplifting may not beespecially meaningful. Suggestive of this are the words of George Brown,an Aboriginal man of the NSW South Coast, as he reminisced about life inthe middle decades of the twentieth century: ‘We knew every apple tree inthe district and where the best melons were and we were a bit wild, Isuppose. Not wild in a sense, just we liked melons and apples . . .’ (Chittickand Fox, 1997: 64). Ella Simon, an Aboriginal woman born in the ManningValley in 1901, expressed it a little differently: ‘as settlement spread andfences went up, they couldn’t get their food without going into paddocks.They were always being punished for stealing but if they didn’t “steal”,they’d starve’ (Simon, 1978: 24). There is a tendency to discursively crimi-nalize such behaviour by applying Western norms; there is also a tendencyto see the actions of the colonized as mostly reactive, imitative, disorgan-ized. In an important counter to this, Birmingham (2000: 363) draws onoptimalization theory to propose we think of the ‘quarrying’ of Europeanitems by Aboriginal people in the contact period in Central Australia notas ‘casual pilfering’ but as a systematic economic strategy, indeed as a‘continuation of traditional forager practices’.

I find De Certeau’s (1984) writing on such everyday practices as readingand walking to resonate with Aboriginal spatial practices both literally andfiguratively. Where he writes of how the tactic ‘must vigilantly make use ofthe cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of theproprietary powers’ (1984: 36), I am put in mind of the physical ‘openings’in the cadastral grid as well as Aboriginal exploitation of weaknesses in thewhite system of control. Or, again, the grid is comparable to a text inscribedon the landscape and Aborigines are like readers, readers who are ‘nomadspoaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealthof Egypt to enjoy it themselves’ (Certeau quoted in Aherne, 1995: 171).While it will always be difficult to archaeologically identify sites of poaching



it is possible to map them, at least indicatively, through Aboriginal people’smemories.

A technique developed for oral history recording sessions in our studyarea was to work at the level of individual lives lived in the local landscape,a move that attempts to bring to the heritage field a concern for individu-ality and subjectivity that informs the work of a growing number of archae-ologists (Conkey and Gero, 1997; Meskell, 1998). During interviews atkitchen tables at Purfleet or out in the countryside, enlargements of aerialphotographs were provided for our interlocutors to mark up as theyrecounted memories of places and pathways. These ‘geobiographies’, as wehave termed them, are obviously always partial, depicting only what peoplecan, or choose to, remember at a certain time. But they do evoke the ideaof a counter-cadastral, partly in the way the mapped trajectories take onthe aspect of an interlinear to the settler text-map. I mean by this the waytheir pathways so often follow the river bank, or the railway cutting, or ‘cutdown’ to the river through remnant corridors of bush. The trajectoriesdescribe an avoidance of the white presence in the landscape and to thisextent they seem to ‘inter-finger’ the white pattern of occupation the waycreeks and gullies might be said to inter-finger a pattern of ridges and spurs.

According to Orser and Funari (2001: 62–3), the work of James Scott(1985, 1990) on the ‘arts of resistance’ present in the relationship ofpeasants and landowners in peninsula Malaysia has had a seminal influenceon the archaeology of New World slavery (see also Hall, 2000: 26). Scott’swork describes the often subtle, surreptitious, and everyday character ofacts of resistance and the low likelihood of them leaving material traces.This rings true for Aboriginal lives in the colonized landscape of Australia.But there is something quite particular in the situation of an indigenousminority in a settler colony. Their labour is, by and large, not essential tothe colonial economy; their very existence is surplus to the colonial enter-prise (although the colonists have freely borrowed from their culture inorder to give a ‘native’ gloss to emergent national-colonial identity). It isprobably true in most places in Australia through most of the last twocenturies that white people have simply wished that Aborigines would goaway. It might almost be said that the greatest act of resistance Aboriginalpeople have offered white colonists has been the sheer obdurate persistenceof their presence in the landscape.

■ DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

This brings us to the issue of visibility, a critical factor in racial segregation.Aboriginal people often describe how effectively the disapproval of whitepeople – their belief in their superiority to you – is conveyed in the way



they look at you. They speak of the effect of living under this disapprovinggaze on a daily basis and what that does to you. We saw how, from the1860s, through the practice of ring-barking, great tracts of the ManningValley lost their tree cover. The situation of the Aborigines was not justthat they were dispossessed of their land – they also became visible in it ina new and presumably quite disturbing way.

The term ‘bush cover’ is normally used in Australia to refer to the waytrees and shrubs clothe parts of the terrain, but for Aboriginal peopleexposed in the post-contact landscape it took on an added meaning ofproviding refuge from the white gaze. In the frontier phase, the bush wasfrequently a cause of white nervousness, partly in that it harboured Aborig-ines and partly in the connotations of darkness, wildness, and untamedimmensity attributed to it by settlers. In this period, some Aboriginalpeople withdrew into the bush-covered ranges on the periphery of agri-cultural land and others withdrew into the bush when pursued by settlersafter preying on their sheep and cattle (Byrne, 1987: 106–8; Reynolds, 1981:83–4). This is the other side of segregation: the sense in which Aboriginalpeople voluntarily withdraw themselves from the white presence. As anaside, it is interesting to note that it was common for African slaves inAmerica to use the woodlands surrounding plantations as a place tomomentarily escape surveillance and to enact African-based rituals (Fitts,1996: 65). In Australia in the early and mid-twentieth century, Aboriginalparents often hid their children in the bush to prevent them being removedto institutions by white welfare officers or the police. The bush continuesto offer shelter. One of our Aboriginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley,described how he and his friends would head for the trees when caughttrespassing by white farmers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the farmerssaying of them: ‘once they hit the bush, forget it, you’ll never catch them’.

Saltwater, referred to earlier, was a place on the coast that the Aborigi-nal residents of Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve, 10 km inland, withdrew to enmasse at Christmas time every year during the first half of the twentiethcentury (Davis-Hurst, 1996: 156–62). ‘We went every Christmas for six solidweeks’, Horrie Saunders recalled, ‘and we went back to the natural state’(Gilbert, 1978: 36). People swam and fished, gathered berries, cooked inthe open and sat around the campfires in the evenings, singing and tellingstories. The remnant littoral rainforest at Saltwater with its big trees, vines,and thick understorey was integral to the sense of privacy and refuge thatlocal Aboriginal people describe when they reminisce about the Christmascamps. In the 1960s, the Shire Council turned Saltwater into a publicreserve for the enjoyment of ‘all’. The understorey vegetation was cleared,a (rectangular) toilet block was constructed, and Aborigines were discour-aged from camping there. Some continue to camp there but they mournthe ‘exposure’ and the ‘ruin’. There is a sense in which a part of the colonialproject is still being accomplished in the Manning Valley as the civilizing



mission reaches into the last pockets of country Aboriginal people mightstill identify as theirs.10 Patricia Davis-Hurst, a Worimi elder who organizescamps at Saltwater for Aboriginal single mothers and their children, sits ona Council committee recently convened to administer Saltwater. TheCouncil, she told me, proposed that Aborigines would be allowed tocontinue to camp there provided that they had properly numbered campsites that a surveyor would have to lay out at their own expense. ‘I said tothem, “You want to put us in boxes and then get us to pay for it?” ’ (froman interview with Patricia Davis-Hurst, September 2002). So continues thehegemony of the grid.

And then there is the landscape of the night. As Djuna Barnes (1936)so brilliantly demonstrates in Nightwood, the after hours is a space in itsown right. In the Australian countryside, it was a space quite specificallyracialized. Some of the same white men in country towns who woulddiscriminate against Aborigines by day, under the cover of darkness wouldslip out to the Aboriginal Reserve or fringe camp looking for sex withAboriginal women. In speaking of the 1930s and 1940s, Myles Lalor, anAboriginal man from the tablelands adjacent to the NSW north coast,records that: ‘Some of the women have been known to say it at publicmeetings: “Yes, you say you don’t like blacks, but we’re not black when itcomes to the bloody night-time” ’ (2000: 41). This ambivalence, thejangling coexistence within the same individuals of aversion and attraction,desire and repulsion, itself constitutes one of the raw nerves of racerelations. The boundary, in such cases, is a temporal rather than a topo-graphic one: night falls and desire rules, day breaks and segregation isreinstated. Which is not to say that desire and aversion cannot coexist in asingle act; that sexual desire has not been accompanied by the urge todominate black bodies. Nor should we forget that there were and are others– Aboriginal and white, men and women – who have defied convention toform relationships across the racial divide. Desire, friendship, openness,love: these have always been there as a counter-current to racism.

Among the Manning Valley’s sites of segregation was the BoomerangTheatre. Situated in the centre of Taree, in the middle decades of the twen-tieth century, the Boomerang was the town cinema. Aboriginal patronswere restricted to the cinema’s front five rows of seats (Davis-Hurst, 1996:45) and had to enter by the side door after the lights went down (Figure 4).In Australia, built heritage sites are almost always inventoried by heritagearchitects, unlike Aboriginal pre-contact sites which are almost alwaysinventoried by archaeologists. Were the Boomerang Theatre to be givenheritage listing, the chances are it would be classified as an example of mid-twentieth century entertainment architecture. From a heritage point ofview, there is some kind of presumption that a building will be self-classifying; that its fabric will proclaim its identity or significance. Yet thesocial practices that made the Boomerang a site of segregation left no



obvious physical traces – they rarely ever do. The traces of what happenedthere are largely memory traces. When the Aboriginal people of theManning Valley talk today about the old cinema, they speak not of archi-tecture but of humiliation and anger. The cinema has recently been used(Byrne et al., 2001) as an example of why, in a values-based approach toheritage (Avrami et al., 2000; de la Torre, 2002), it is essential to balancethe social value or significance of places and landscapes against theirarchaeological, architectural, and other values.

■ HERITAGE AND CONTAINMENT

In the USA, racial segregation and the Civil Rights movement have longbeen the focus of heritage conservation and commemoration, activities thatare themselves now a subject of analysis and critique (Dwyer, 2000; Fitts,1996; Weyeneth, 1995, 1996). In South Africa, Cape Town’s District Six hasbecome a key site for a post-apartheid heritage of segregation (Hall, 2000:156–76; Malan and van Heyningen, 2001). After the forced removal of thedistrict’s ‘colored’ population, beginning in 1966, and the razing of theterraced houses there, the only obvious trace of this former cosmopolitanresidential precinct (apart from a few public buildings standing in isolation)was the grid of streets and lanes. The street grid later became a mnemonicaid when it was reproduced as a map on the floor of the District Six Museum(opened in 1994, http://www.districtsix.co.za, Figure 5). During visits to themuseum, many former residents have inscribed their names, the locations

Figure 4 Boomerang picture theatre, c. 1923, showing Aboriginal peoplesitting in segregated seating in the front left rows (courtesy of Greater TareeCity Council)

JSA 3-2 03 Byrne (dm/d) 25/4/03 11:44 am 6


of their former homes, and other information on the map using markerpens. The orthogonal grid that was originally inscribed on the landscape ofCape Town by the Dutch as an instrument for regulating the space of thecolony, and hence its occupants (Hall, 2000), has become a means for thedominated to symbolically recover a lost space and reinscribe themselvesin it.

In Australia, as yet, racial segregation barely registers as a subject forheritage recording or conservation, a situation which I suggest resonateswith the invisibility or denial of segregation in public discourse during theperiod in which it operated (Byrne, 2003: 79–83). In country areas of NSW,which is where most of the State’s Aboriginal population lived until the1970s, cinemas, hospitals, and swimming pools were segregated by socialconvention and intimidation; rarely were they segregated by local govern-ment by-law or regulation. Other customary exclusions, such as that whichdecreed that Aboriginal men should not be present in town at night, werecommonly maintained by police violence. Segregation was somethingwhite communities in country towns were both hyper-conscious of, but also

Figure 5 Visitors at the District Six Museum, Cape Town (photograph byDenis Byrne)



self-censoring in regard to. This doubleness is evident in a Christian clergy-man’s comment about the picketing by university students of a segregatedex-serviceman’s club in Walgett (Western NSW) in 1965: ‘It is only stirringup racial feelings which don’t exist in the town . . .’ (Curthoys, 2002: 94).

In a landscape such as the Manning Valley, how would an archaeologistmap a racial tension that was and is at once so pervasive and so elusive? Ihave suggested that the cadastral grid provides a partial roadmap of racialseparation. Segregation was to do with spatial containment and thecadastral grid, with its extensions into domestic space, was the predominantframework that determined the pattern of this containment. Containment,however, was at least as much a settler fantasy as it was a reality on theground. I have tried to show in this article that what made the landscape‘nervous’ was not the containment of Aboriginal people so much as thefailure of containment. Considering the extent of their dispossession, Abor-iginal mobility remained remarkably high in the Australian post-contactlandscape.

Archaeology and archaeological heritage practice in Australia seem tohave their own fantasies of containment. I refer to the continued hegemonyof the ‘site’ concept and its debilitating effect on the way the Aboriginalpast is represented as heritage. There was discussion during the 1970s and1980s of ‘siteless’ or ‘off-site’ approaches to archaeological survey (e.g.Binford, 1978: 482–88; Dunnell and Dancey, 1983; Gallant, 1986). Thisreceived at least some attention in Australia in relation to the relativelyhigh mobility of Aboriginal pre-contact hunter-gatherers as reflected in thedistribution of knapped stone artefacts (Byrne, 1991; Hiscock, 1989: 21–2).However, the neatly circumscribed site remains as embedded in heritagepractice as ever, mainly because sites are seen as more manageable thancultural landscapes. It is simpler to record and protect a limited number ofstone artefact concentrations, defined as sites, than it is a continuous scatterof artefacts of variable density that may stretch for kilometres. Obviouslywhat suffers here is the behavioural context of the artefacts in the past: acontinuous pattern of activity is made to look like discontinuous pods ofactivity; highly mobile pre-contact hunter-gathers are retrospectively‘settled down’ into sites.

Turning to the post-contact period one finds an essentially similarprocess of spatial containment. To date, the places that have been inven-toried at a state and federal level under the Aboriginal post-contactcategory have almost all been places identified primarily as ‘Aboriginal’.These include Aboriginal Reserves, mission stations, massacre sites, andinstitutional ‘homes’ for Aboriginal children. Containment, here, works totake the Aboriginal post-contact experience out of the larger colonial land-scape and confine it to places where white people rarely went. And yet itwas precisely the presence of Aboriginal people in ‘white space’ – the spaceof the town common, the river bank, the picture theatre, the swimming



pool, the street – that constituted the real and nervous space of racerelations. In moments of paranoia, it can seem as if heritage practice is amirror not so much for the history of racial segregation as for the urgebehind it.

Acknowledgements

This article is an off-shoot of a larger project on the Aboriginal post-contact historyof the lower North Coast, which has benefited from the assistance of John Beattie,Chi-min Chan, Gabrielle Werksman, Peter Johnson, and Johanna Kijas. Specialthanks to my principal collaborator on this project, Maria Nugent, for sharing herknowledge of Aboriginal history and her insights on racism in its spatial guise. I amindebted to Vienna Maslin and Robert Paulson, representing the Taree-Purfleet andForster Aboriginal communities, for guiding us through the local landscape andopening our eyes to its many layers. Comments by Nick Shepherd, University ofCape Town, and two anonymous reviewers have helped me significantly improvethis article and I also thank Lynn Meskell for her encouragement. Finally, I amdeeply indebted to those Aboriginal people of the Taree-Forster area who werewilling to share their stories with me.

Notes

1 The project has been carried out by Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent for theNSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in collaboration with the Forsterand the Taree-Purfleet Local Aboriginal Land Councils and with the supportof the NSW Heritage Council.

2 See Hall (2000: 60, 67, 68) for instances where the cadastral grid was tailoredto local requirements elsewhere in the colonial world.

3 Phillip to Sydney, 15 May 1788, Public Record Office, London. See also Smith(1992: 16) who describes the circle as ‘both a physical and symbolic barrierwhich segregated black and white at their first meeting in Port Jackson’ (i.e.Sydney Harbour).

4 Fencing wire became available in Australia in the 1870s and barbed wire ‘cameinto common use’ in the 1890s (Jeans, 1972: 59) though the old style woodenpost-and-rail fences were for a long time also common in the core areas ofsettlement.

5 In parts of Australia, however, white property boundaries and fences becamecultural markers for Aboriginal people. Harrison (2003) provides a fascinatinganalysis of this process in relation to a pastoral property in the Kimberley areaof north-western Australia.

6 The shell midden and remains of native fauna excavated from two of thecottages built by the British for Tasmanian Aborigines in the mid-nineteenthcentury on Flinders Island in Bass Strait corroborate documentary evidencethat the ‘problem’ was not that the Tasmanians were reluctant to use thehouses for food preparation but that they declined to behave in the cottagesdifferently to the way they were accustomed to behaving outside(Birmingham, 1993: 122–3).



7 The oral history recording was mostly carried out by Maria Nugent and DenisByrne with the assistance of local Aboriginal community heritage officers,Vienna Maslin and Robert Yettica.

8 Also, see Scott (1985: 35) for a discussion of the widespread nature of peasantand proletarian poaching from forests in Germany in the nineteenth century.

9 Sibley (1995: 105) makes reference to a 1908 British parliamentary debate inwhich a certain Lord Farrer unfavourably compared the ‘old-fashionedGypsies’ who lived ‘in harmony with nature’ with the ‘tramps and nomads’who now ‘infested’ the commons of Surrey. Similarly, in Australia, the‘problem’ of contemporary Aboriginal people in places like the ManningValley is still commonly described in terms of a loss of culture.

10 This is being countered by successful Aboriginal claims under the NSW LandRights Act and claims being made under the Federal Native Title Act.Saltwater is itself subject to a Native Title claim by Worimi and Biripipeople.

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DENIS BYRNE manages the cultural heritage research unit at the NewSouth Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service in Sydney. Topics of hisprevious research and publications include the history and politics ofheritage management in Southeast Asia and Australia (the subject of hisPhD at the Australian National University, 1993), the Aboriginal post-contact experience and the reasons for its neglect in heritage practice,and the social significance of heritage places. Current research interestsinclude the religious significance of heritage places and landscapes inAsia and Australia.[email: [email protected]]


03 byrne 2003 nervous landscapes race & space in australia

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