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Journal of Social Archaeology

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Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia


Denis R. Byrne
Journal of Social Archaeology 2003; 3; 169
DOI: 10.1177/1469605303003002003

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Journal of Social Archaeology ARTICLE

Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)


Vol 3(2): 169193 [1469-6053(200306)3:2;169193;032575]

Nervous landscapes
Race and space in Australia
DENIS R. BYRNE
New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Australia

ABSTRACT
The experience of being on the receiving end of racial segregation has
been fundamental to the way generations of Aboriginal people in
NSW view the landscape. Racial segregation was and is a spatial
system with a plenitude of dividing lines, but the lines were unmarked
more than marked, the conventions unvoiced more than spoken.
Historically, in the Australian case, it was a system that covered its
own tracks and left few marks apart from those it left on the lives of
its victims. The colonial, cadastral mapping of land was instrumental
in racial separation. In theory, the colonized were gridlocked by the
cadastra but there were always ways through it and ways of subvert-
ing it.

KEY WORDS
Aboriginal Australia colonialism heritage management
New South Wales racism segregation

169

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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, is
a spatial practice. It is about the separation of people in space and the rules
and 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 that
segregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonial
state had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. The article is
interested in the ways in which an indigenous minoritys presence in and
movement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or con-
strained by the colonizers. But it is also interested in the ways in which the
minority group subverted that system of spatial control, transgressing its
numerous finely drawn boundaries, poaching on its preserves, tweaking the
nerves of a spatial system which was inherently tense with racial foreboding,
paranoia, longing, and deprivation. A spatial regime that was always, to
borrow Michael Taussigs (1991) term, a nervous system.
The nervous system of racialized space seems to me to be a suitable
subject for social archaeology. It has to do with the question of how close
people are allowed to get to each other. At different times in Australias
past, governments have regulated that Aboriginal people be confined on
off-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 unspoken
rules made much finer discriminations. Aboriginal patients on the verandah
of a hospital, for instance, were kept at a distance of several metres from
white patients inside the hospital walls; a distance of only a metre or so
separated the row of Aboriginal pupils in certain NSW schools from the
white pupils in the adjacent rows and a similar small distance separated the
rows of Aboriginal patrons in a segregated NSW cinema from the rows of
white patrons behind them. Racial anxiety arguably becomes most intense
and acute when the separating space reduces to zero when black and
white bodies actually touch.
I suggest that archaeologists have the potential to bring something
unique to the study and understanding of the history of racial segregation.
Not because the spatiality of racism is inscribed on the ground, but because
so 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 a
trowel; they look for the behaviour behind the trace. They do not expect
the trace to speak its own name; in many ways they expect to be lied to.
This may give them a certain facility in locating racisms imprint. But there
is also what might be termed the vertical invisibility of segregation, the

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Figure 1 Map of study area

tendency for its historical presence to be, literally and figuratively, buried
by those minders of local history and heritage who now find it a civic
embarrassment. The practice of racism in Australia has always had a
censored, unnoticed aspect to it (Cowlishaw, 2000: 117), a low profile for
those 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, until
the 1960s, racism against Aborigines had as low a visibility in Australian
public 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 at
the vast disparity between the tens of thousands of pre-contact Aboriginal
archaeological sites recorded in NSW and the mere handful of post-contact
sites recorded. This situation tacitly affirms the essentialist position that
authentic Aboriginality is always prior or distant: away in the past or away
on the frontier (Byrne, 1996: 91). But it also reflects real difficulties in
detecting the archaeological traces of Aboriginal post-contact presence in
the landscape (Murray, 1996: 207). Like their ancestors, Aboriginal people
in NSW after 1788 lived fairly lightly on the ground. Their dwellings were

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172 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

also liable to be demolished, burned or removed by the authorities (Read,


1984, 1996; Rowley, 1970). Relatively speaking, where the white heritage
of the post-contact period is fabric-heavy (think homesteads and court-
houses), Aboriginal heritage is fabric-light and the odds are stacked against
it surviving into the archaeological and architectural heritage record. It has
this in common with other colonized people, even those who remained a
demographic majority. Orser (1996: 157) has this to say of the English
Protestant Ascendancy in eighteenth century Ireland: The net that land-
lords threw over the land was powerful and permanent. It was made of
brick walls, massive mansions, and granite archways. The peasants, with
their single-room mud cabins and their lazybed fields were erasable.
Another difficulty in detecting Aboriginal post-contact traces is posed
by the increasing Aboriginal use after 1788 of a material culture borrowed
from Europeans. Aboriginal people used teacups and spoons, hammers and
nails, bicycles and steel rabbit traps. While the objects themselves may not
be 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 the
logic that explains where Aboriginal people were in the colonial landscape
and 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 had


long possessed a developed (though not static) cadastral system that
divided the kingdom into counties, shires, parishes, and hundreds, down
to the level of individual agricultural fields. Many of the boundaries of this
system had been in place since Saxon times or earlier and had thus been a
recognized reality for thousands of years before the cartographic surveys
of 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, let
alone to any form of pre-existing Aboriginal land title. Rather, as part of
the imperial machinery, it assimilated colonial terrain to metropolitan
terrain by imposing the same generic grid of counties, parishes, and rectan-
gular holdings onto it. With Englands cartographic language inscribed
upon it, the landscape of colonial Australia would be in immediate dialogue
with the landscape of England (Carter, 1987). What made the cadastral grid
so ideal for the colonial project is that it could be applied with impartiality
to previously unknown terrain, which is to say that it would take a
landscape just as it found it, rolling over it as if it knew it in advance. In

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actuality, of course, it did not know it, and as time went on it was modified
by local conditions and local demands. It became a hybrid element of a
hybrid colonial culture (Gosden, 2001)2 and I will suggest later that its
hybridity owed something to Aboriginal contestation of it. My present
point, though, is that it was an instrument for bringing the global to the
local, for bringing regularity to perceived chaos (Hall, 2000: 45, 66).
Given the decisive role, argued here, for the rectangular cadastral grid
in racial segregation, it is interesting to note that the first inscription of a
racial separator on Australia soil was not a rectangle but a circle. In January
1788, during his first exploratory venture by boat into what would become
known as Sydney Harbour then the country of the Eora people Phillip
had drawn a circle in the sand surrounding the area where he and his party
were preparing lunch on the beach at Manly Cove. Finding to be a nuisance
the inquisitive Aboriginals who had gathered around them, I made a circle
around us; there was little difficulty in making them understand that they
were not to come within it, and they sat down and were very quiet.3 The
spore from this first circle, borne across the continent on the wind of
colonization, may be seen in the symbolic circles that white folk in Australia
would later draw around their country towns, circles that Aboriginal
people, living in fringe camps and on reserves, would be discouraged from
entering (Read, 1984).
The first stage of conventional mapping was carried out by explorers and
surveyors who radiated out from the point of British settlement at Sydney
Cove soon after 1788, sketching in the broad outlines of the terrain and
assessing its potential productivity for farming. The second stage of
mapping was that which accompanied or immediately preceded actual
white settlement (as opposed to white exploration) in any particular area
of the rapidly expanding colony. Land tenure surveys, carried out either by
government or freelance surveyors, enabled land to be granted and sold by
the Crown and for landholders to obtain title or leases. So emerged the
orthogonal grid of property boundaries. This cadastral grid made its
appearance at Sydney Cove in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived there
carrying convicts and officers and at least one surveyor (Bonyhady, 2000:
4255). Maps of the Sydney settlement produced in 1788, 17912, 1802,
1807 and thereafter show the first streets running inland from the cove, with
regular allotments laid out along them (Ashton and Waterson, 1977). In the
eyes of the British, not only were the native inhabitants of Australia a
savage people, the land itself was often seen as wild, savage, and
disordered. Governor Arthur Philip saw only disturbing tumult and
confusion and an almost sexually offensive promiscuous abundance
which 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 from
Sydney Cove and across the Cumberland Plain by 1800 (Lines, 1992: 1932;

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174 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

Figure 2 Ring-barked trees in the Manning Valley, early twentieth century


(courtesy of the Gloucester Historical Society)

Roberts, 1968: 342). It crossed the Blue Mountains in 1815 and spread
north 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 of
the Biripi, which, 300 km north of Sydney, will be the principle geographic
reference for the remainder of this article. What we see there in the mid-
1800s is the familiar orthogonal grid of white land holdings spreading along
the alluvial flats of the valley and then expanding into the grazing country
back from the river. It would be wrong, though, to visualize the farms in
the first few decades as an expanding pattern of neatly cleared rectangles
lying within the alluvial gallery rainforest and eucalypti woodland. Armed
only with axes and saws, until the 1860s the white farmers simply did not
have the technology to clear and fence more than a small paddock or two
around their homesteads. Though the white population of the valley grew
from 400 in the early 1840s to about 3000 by 1860, the valley still remained
substantially bush-covered and more or less accessible to the Biripi for
hunting and gathering (Birrell, 1987: 118; Ramsland, 1987: 29). Ring-
barking changed that (Figure 2). The technique of killing trees by stripping
a circle of bark from around the trunk was widely practised in the valley
from the 1860s (Birrell, 1987: 163). Over large parts of it as elsewhere in
the east of the continent (Bonyhady, 2000: 17881) the native tree cover
was wiped off the map, producing a clean slate for the lines that would be
drawn by the wire fences introduced from the 1870s.4 The fertile ground in
the valley was all taken up by the 1880s, by which time a continuous mosaic
of white farms (most smaller than 2000 acres) extended along the bottom
of the valley and over the lower foothills of the forested ranges aligned east-
west on either side.

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HOUSES, CUPBOARDS AND CAGES

Wire fences made the cadastral grid a visible, tangible reality on the ground
where, previously, it had existed for the most part only on paper and in the
minds of white settlers (Figure 3). It seems unlikely that Aboriginal people
fully understood the extent and nature of their dispossession until wire
fences fixed the grid onto the face of the land. It is worth remembering that
when the first trickle of white people arrived in the Manning Valley in the
1820s, the Biripi had no way of foreseeing that they would keep coming
and that they would take over. We should be wary of retrospectivity, of
projecting back into Aboriginal minds a foreshadowing of what was to
come; wary of imputing to Aboriginal culture at the time of contact a kind
of incompleteness or inadequacy that would open it to white penetration.
Cowlishaws (1999a: 55) observation, in relation to her field area in the
Northern Territory, seems pertinent: With the meaning of the country
already known, how could the Remberrnga have imagined what the whites
had in mind?
The cadastral grid was almost as blind and impartial to the topographic
particularity of the country of the Biripi as it was blind and impartial to the
way that they, the Biripi mentally, ritually, and by way of tree carvings
and other markers had previously mapped its social and spiritual par-
ticularity.5 In Caging the Rainbow, Francesca Merlan (1998: 73) describes
MAN
TAREE NI
NG

OXLEY ISLAND
RIVER

Sout h Arm

Purfleet
Aboriginal Farquhar
Reserve Inlet
1900

Public
Recreation
Reserve
Forest Reserve 1884
1898
A
SE
PACIFIC

Cr
ee
t
ha
ng
k
ai
or

N
Ko

MA
TAS

Saltwater
HIG

Village Reserve
HW

at
gh C reek 1899
AY

in
p

0 2 km
ap
Kh

LEGEND

Forest reserve Road reserve Water reserve Built roads

Figure 3 Map of Bohnock Parish showing cadastral grid and various


categories of Crown reserve land

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176 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

how the landscape of the Aboriginal Dreaming around the outback town
of Katherine, in the Northern Territory, was permeable in that it was
constituted in practice rather than in built structure. White settlers could
not 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: 5960) is always
there as part of the background of racial tension in Australia. The settlers
refusal to acknowledge the pre-existing integrity of Aboriginal social-
spiritual space arguably became a charter for Aborigines to flout the
niceties of white spatial order and property.
Another recurrent point of tension between Aboriginal and white ways
of living has been the importance of communality to the former and the
importance of private property, as the basis of its capitalist economy, to the
latter. The cadastral grid worked, indirectly, to train Aboriginal bodies to
function within the geometry of the new economic order. The grid prevailed
upon them to walk its straight lines and turn its 90-degree corners. This
geometric discipline continued on inside the rectangles of the grid. When
the Aboriginal Reserve at Purfleet was established in the valley in 1900,
Aboriginal people were encouraged to move there and to live on the 18
acre reserve in box-like wooden houses that were internally divided into
square or rectangular rooms. Their children would go to school and sit
within a grid of desks in a rectangular room, and when they died they would
be buried in rectangular graves (the precise dimensions of which were
stipulated in the Public Health Act) within a grid of other graves inside the
rectangular bounds of the cemetery (Byrne, 1997a).
Life on Aboriginal Reserves involved a contestation, played out on a
daily basis, between Aboriginal and white spatial regimes. Jane Lydons
(2003) account of spatial strategies and tactics at Coranderrk, in Victoria,
from the 1860s to the 1880s shows how Aboriginal residents there were, to
some extent, able to resist or temper the spatial discipline which the white
authorities sought to impose. Barry Morriss (1989) attention to the history
of domestic space on the Bellbrook Aboriginal Reserve in the Macleay
Valley, 100 km north of the Manning, is revealing of the importance given
by the white authorities to spatial discipline. When new two-room houses
were built on the reserve in 1913 a drawn-out tussle developed between the
authorities, who wanted the Dhan-Gadi to cook and eat in the kitchens of
the houses and sleep in the bedrooms, and the Dhan-Gadi themselves, who
wanted to cook and socialize around the camp fires outside and use the
houses for storage and for shelter when it rained. Cowlishaws observations
from Arnhem Land in Australias Northern Territory help us appreciate
how houses could obstruct Aboriginal sociality: watching people as they
come and go . . . being available to kinspeople, and communicating
directly with finger talk are all interrupted by buildings . . . (1999a: 266).
At Bellbrook, the internal fireplaces became the site of a particular

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attempt to privatize cooking and eating patterns by removing them from


the public sites of collective consumption (Morris, 1989: 81).6 The boxes-
within-boxes progression continued in the shape of cupboards even these
became a site of contestation or nervousness, as is seen in this account by
a non-indigenous man, Daryl Tonkin, who lived with Aboriginal people in
the Gippsland area of Victoria during the 1920s and 1930s:
Ive seen the Welfare myself walk into a persons house and go through the
cupboards looking for food, then making note of what they did or did not
find. It was these notes that gave them the right to walk in another day and
take the children away. This made the people keep whitefella food always in
the cupboards, even if they never ate it. In fact, they only had cupboards to
keep the whitefella food in. (Tonkin and Landon, 1999: 21617)
None of this should be taken to mean that houses have been rejected
outright by Aboriginal people; more that they are recontextualizing them
or, 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 longer


belongs to you? On what basis do you continue to exist inside the grid of
your own dispossession? This question goes partly to the issue of private
property. In the period between 1788 and the 1980s, when Land Rights
legislation allowed them to claim land back from the state, Aboriginal
people almost never owned recognized title to land in NSW and, thus,
theoretically were excluded from the cadastral grid. But in practice there
were 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 Australian
landmass for the British Crown, the colonial authorities began alienating
portions of it to private (white) landowners. But it was also the job of
government surveyors to retain, as Crown Reserve, areas of land for a
variety of perceived and anticipated public uses. Large and usually rugged
expanses on the margins of agricultural land were reserved for forestry;
smaller pockets within agricultural country were set aside as town
commons, as sites for future schools, churches, police stations and court
houses, for the grazing of travelling cattle and sheep, and for public recre-
ation. Distinct from these expanses and pockets were linear reserves set
aside for future roads and for the droving of stock. Other linear strips of
land along the margins of rivers and creeks were set aside to allow access
to water (Figure 3).

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178 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

Aboriginal use of these gaps or openings in the cadastral grid emerged


as a theme in the oral histories of contemporary Aboriginal people
recorded during 2000 and 2001 in the Manning Valley and at Forster, a
coastal town immediately to the south of the valley.7 It also emerged from
a survey of documentary historical sources, including published and unpub-
lished reminiscences by early white settlers in the area, local and state
government archives, and local news articles from the mid-nineteenth
century. While documentary references to Aborigines were generally frag-
mentary and often poor in spatial detail, they corroborate Aboriginal
memories and oral traditions of a pattern of camping and movement that
appropriated the reserve system for its own ends. In order to identify the
availability of gaps and openings at various points over the last 120 years,
a GIS was developed which incorporated a mapping of white landholdings
in the Manning Valley at various points during the nineteenth century
(Birrell, 1987). This was cross-referenced to information on several series
of 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 have
steadily diminished over the years as individual reserves were revoked by
the government and sold off. This was a response to increased demand for
land by a growing white population but it was also an acknowledgement
that many of the anticipated public uses for reserved land would never
eventuate. Early government surveyors in the mid-nineteenth century, for
instance, had drawn up plans for villages that never came to exist. One of
these became the site of the secluded coastal camping ground at Saltwater,
a place regularly used and greatly cherished by the residents of the Purfleet
Aboriginal Reserve (Figure 3). To some extent, then, Aborigines might be
said 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 been
designed for, neither for the most part was it illegal. It fits what the French
Situationalists of the 1960s called dtournement, an appropriation of the
elements or terrain of the dominant social order to ones own end, for a
transformed purpose (Ross, 1987: 116). It also clearly fits within the
concept of poaching as developed by Michel de Certeau (1984), a matter
that 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 providing
services to the surrounding farming population, had little need for a
Common on which to graze stock or raise crops of their own. The Wingham
Common appears to have been unused until the 1860s, when a large
Aboriginal fringe camp came to be located there. We know of this mainly
from a string of complaints about it, which appear in the minutes of the
Wingham Council (the local government), the Council finally forcing its
removal around 1915. There is a certain irony in the likelihood that many

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of the English migrants who took up land in the Valley (and elsewhere in
NSW), and who agitated for Aboriginal camps to be removed from local
Commons, may themselves have been descendants of rural folk displaced
by the enclosure of common agricultural land in the English countryside,
a trend that reached its peak in the eighteenth century as the capitalization
of Englands farm economy intensified (Williams, 1973).8 As Bender
observes, at the back of the colonial encounter lurked the unequal
encounter at home (2001: 14). At the level of spatial practice, the
situation of the Aborigines resonates with that of Europes nomadic
Gypsies and with the history of their exclusion from public space (Sibley,
1995: 10208).9 Thus, there were metropolitan precedents for spatial
exclusion just as there were precedents in the Tudor conquest of Ireland
(OSullivan, 2001), for instance for the deployment of cartography in the
colonial enterprise.
A mainstay of the Aboriginal economy in the Manning at the time of
first white settlement was the fishing carried out from bark canoes on the
river and its broad estuary. Later, Aboriginal people built wooden boats
and used their catch to supplement the meagre government rations, often
bartering the fish for meat and vegetables from white farmers along the
river. People on Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve (gazetted in 1900) used the
water reserves in the nearby Glenthorne area for shore-based line fishing,
for mooring the fishing boats some families owned (and still own), and as
sites for their net-drying racks. These uses continue into the present and
have been mapped as part of our project. Other water reserves along the
river enabled the river itself and its islanded estuary to become a zone of
free movement for those Aboriginal people with access to boats.
The cadastral grid stopped at the shoreline and, to an extent, the water
remained a neutral, unsegregated zone. I am referring here to the water
itself (and to being on the water) rather than the river as a geographical
feature. Often in Australia rivers have served as racial boundaries between
white towns and Aboriginal camps or reserves. This has been the case at
Brewarrina in Western NSW (Goodall, 1999) and Katherine in the North
Territory (Merlan, 1998: 10). It has certainly been true of the Manning
River, despite the presence of a major bridge, with pedestrian access, in the
zone where the 400 m wide river passes between Taree and the Purfleet
Aboriginal settlement. So, while Aboriginal movement along the river, by
boat, was neutral in terms of the racial signification of space, Aboriginal
movement across the river (in the direction of town via the bridge) directly
engaged this signification. Interestingly, this particular tract of river which
acts as a racial boundary is also a zone of relatively intense Aboriginal
activity, with people fishing from the banks and kids diving off the piers and
the bridge and swimming in the stream. It is as if they are flaunting their
presence there, on the doorstep of town; ratcheting up the tension, playing
on the nerves of the towns white residents.

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180 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

All this suggests that it is possible to think of the Aboriginal presence in


the colonized landscape in terms of an in-betweeness. As well as moving
through the openings between the private properties of the cadastral grid
there was some potential for them to negotiate their way through these
properties. This was possible by developing a web of tactical relationships
with 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 struck
by the extent of Aboriginal knowledge of white land ownership. As we
drove through the valley with people from Purfleet and elsewhere they
frequently noted, in passing, not just who a particular farm belonged to but
often who had owned it previously, the names of the parents and grand-
parents of the current owner, and so on. This knowledge was almost always
backed by information about how friendly or otherwise these white people
were to Aborigines (of their generation, or those of their parents, and even
grandparents).
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 who
planted extra vegetables specifically for them to come and pick. Or the shop
in Taree (the valleys main town) where in the 1950s you could always get
served and be spoken to decently, or the doctor who could be relied on to
treat you well. Here, evidently, was a mental map of the valley that was an
alternative to the official white map an alternative, for instance, to the
Central Mapping Authoritys 1:25,000 topographic survey map that I would
be holding and consulting as we drove along but to which they never
referred. The unpublished and undrawn Aboriginal map of everyday
practice was detailed and extensive. It was maintained and updated and
passed on from generation to generation. One answer to the question, How
do you live in a landscape that no longer belongs to you? appears to be
that you maintain your own map of that landscape.
That such maps are not drawn or published, that they do not acquire
substance in that sense, is in keeping with the fact that the thing they map
also has no substance. The in-betweenness of the Aboriginal situation is
seen in the way that their map does not take the form of an overlay (or
underlay) to the white map. Rather, it is a mapping of a space that lies in
and around white space, a space that is brought into being by Aboriginal
spatial practice but that has no place of its own. It is tempting to add to
the other reasons given for the under-recording of Aboriginal post-contact
heritage 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 fetishism
of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was to
consider things in isolation, as things in themselves . The trap, in the
present case, presumably lies in the heritage practitioners fixation on the

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(archaeological) trace as a thing in itself rather than as a trajectory


towards understanding things that have happened in the past. It has been
the object of post-processual archaeology, over the last two decades or so,
to extricate the discipline from this trap (Hodder, 1986) and to engage with
the complexity of social life in the past. In the present case, the need is to
be 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 this
is also the challenge taken up by both the archaeology of gender and queer
archaeology.

THE COUNTER-CADASTRAL

The Manning Valley over the last 150 or so years was a cultural landscape
that vibrated with the tensions set up not just by the strictures of racial
segregation and their enforcement but by the numerous ways that those
strictures were tested and undermined by people on both sides of the highly
unstable racial divide. I refer to the jumping of fences, the raiding of
orchards and corn fields, the short-cut across a hostile farmers lower
paddock in order to get to the river, the Aboriginal children sneaking into
a property to swim in a farmers dam. Historical records indicate that
incursions such as these were common across the whole of NSW and were
an ongoing source of inter-racial tension. Listening to the way our Abor-
iginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley recalled and narrated acts of
trespass, often carried out against the real threat of shotguns and dogs and
the 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. These
experiences and the relating of them are a significant part of Aboriginal
folklore, as are the stories, particularly from the 1970s, of how individuals
defied boundaries in segregated picture theatres and in the previously
racially 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 almost
of the status of a movement or philosophy. At one level it can be thought
of as anti-cadastral; insofar, for instance, as the fence, as a boundary, is as
much 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 grid
exists, a refusal that emulates the white settler failure to acknowledge the
existence of the spatiality of the Dreaming or of any Aboriginal native title
to country. There is certainly much that is tactical in these actions (De
Certeau, 1984). With a tactical, willful blindness, they appear to answer
negation with negation. It is the sort of negation that Stephen Muecke,

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182 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

citing Daisy Bates, so graphically illustrates in reference to the behaviour


of Fanny Balbuk, an Aboriginal woman of the country in south-western
Australia where the present-day city of Perth took root.

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

From another perspective, fence-jumping and orchard raiding were simply


new adaptations to the old pattern of living off the land, of availing oneself
of what the land had to offer. For people who still consider themselves to
be the rightful owners of their country the distinctions between fishing in
the river, trapping rabbits, raiding orchards, or even shoplifting may not be
especially meaningful. Suggestive of this are the words of George Brown,
an Aboriginal man of the NSW South Coast, as he reminisced about life in
the middle decades of the twentieth century: We knew every apple tree in
the district and where the best melons were and we were a bit wild, I
suppose. Not wild in a sense, just we liked melons and apples . . . (Chittick
and Fox, 1997: 64). Ella Simon, an Aboriginal woman born in the Manning
Valley in 1901, expressed it a little differently: as settlement spread and
fences went up, they couldnt get their food without going into paddocks.
They were always being punished for stealing but if they didnt steal,
theyd starve (Simon, 1978: 24). There is a tendency to discursively crimi-
nalize such behaviour by applying Western norms; there is also a tendency
to see the actions of the colonized as mostly reactive, imitative, disorgan-
ized. In an important counter to this, Birmingham (2000: 363) draws on
optimalization theory to propose we think of the quarrying of European
items by Aboriginal people in the contact period in Central Australia not
as casual pilfering but as a systematic economic strategy, indeed as a
continuation of traditional forager practices.
I find De Certeaus (1984) writing on such everyday practices as reading
and walking to resonate with Aboriginal spatial practices both literally and
figuratively. Where he writes of how the tactic must vigilantly make use of
the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the
proprietary powers (1984: 36), I am put in mind of the physical openings
in the cadastral grid as well as Aboriginal exploitation of weaknesses in the
white system of control. Or, again, the grid is comparable to a text inscribed
on the landscape and Aborigines are like readers, readers who are nomads
poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth
of Egypt to enjoy it themselves (Certeau quoted in Aherne, 1995: 171).
While it will always be difficult to archaeologically identify sites of poaching

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it is possible to map them, at least indicatively, through Aboriginal peoples


memories.
A technique developed for oral history recording sessions in our study
area 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 at
kitchen tables at Purfleet or out in the countryside, enlargements of aerial
photographs were provided for our interlocutors to mark up as they
recounted memories of places and pathways. These geobiographies, as we
have termed them, are obviously always partial, depicting only what people
can, or choose to, remember at a certain time. But they do evoke the idea
of a counter-cadastral, partly in the way the mapped trajectories take on
the aspect of an interlinear to the settler text-map. I mean by this the way
their pathways so often follow the river bank, or the railway cutting, or cut
down to the river through remnant corridors of bush. The trajectories
describe an avoidance of the white presence in the landscape and to this
extent they seem to inter-finger the white pattern of occupation the way
creeks and gullies might be said to inter-finger a pattern of ridges and spurs.
According to Orser and Funari (2001: 623), the work of James Scott
(1985, 1990) on the arts of resistance present in the relationship of
peasants and landowners in peninsula Malaysia has had a seminal influence
on the archaeology of New World slavery (see also Hall, 2000: 26). Scotts
work describes the often subtle, surreptitious, and everyday character of
acts 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 indigenous
minority in a settler colony. Their labour is, by and large, not essential to
the colonial economy; their very existence is surplus to the colonial enter-
prise (although the colonists have freely borrowed from their culture in
order to give a native gloss to emergent national-colonial identity). It is
probably true in most places in Australia through most of the last two
centuries that white people have simply wished that Aborigines would go
away. It might almost be said that the greatest act of resistance Aboriginal
people have offered white colonists has been the sheer obdurate persistence
of 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 white
people their belief in their superiority to you is conveyed in the way

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184 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

they look at you. They speak of the effect of living under this disapproving
gaze on a daily basis and what that does to you. We saw how, from the
1860s, through the practice of ring-barking, great tracts of the Manning
Valley lost their tree cover. The situation of the Aborigines was not just
that they were dispossessed of their land they also became visible in it in
a new and presumably quite disturbing way.
The term bush cover is normally used in Australia to refer to the way
trees and shrubs clothe parts of the terrain, but for Aboriginal people
exposed in the post-contact landscape it took on an added meaning of
providing refuge from the white gaze. In the frontier phase, the bush was
frequently a cause of white nervousness, partly in that it harboured Aborig-
ines and partly in the connotations of darkness, wildness, and untamed
immensity attributed to it by settlers. In this period, some Aboriginal
people withdrew into the bush-covered ranges on the periphery of agri-
cultural land and others withdrew into the bush when pursued by settlers
after preying on their sheep and cattle (Byrne, 1987: 1068; Reynolds, 1981:
834). This is the other side of segregation: the sense in which Aboriginal
people voluntarily withdraw themselves from the white presence. As an
aside, it is interesting to note that it was common for African slaves in
America to use the woodlands surrounding plantations as a place to
momentarily escape surveillance and to enact African-based rituals (Fitts,
1996: 65). In Australia in the early and mid-twentieth century, Aboriginal
parents often hid their children in the bush to prevent them being removed
to institutions by white welfare officers or the police. The bush continues
to offer shelter. One of our Aboriginal interlocutors in the Manning Valley,
described how he and his friends would head for the trees when caught
trespassing by white farmers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the farmers
saying of them: once they hit the bush, forget it, youll 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 en
masse at Christmas time every year during the first half of the twentieth
century (Davis-Hurst, 1996: 15662). We went every Christmas for six solid
weeks, Horrie Saunders recalled, and we went back to the natural state
(Gilbert, 1978: 36). People swam and fished, gathered berries, cooked in
the open and sat around the campfires in the evenings, singing and telling
stories. The remnant littoral rainforest at Saltwater with its big trees, vines,
and thick understorey was integral to the sense of privacy and refuge that
local Aboriginal people describe when they reminisce about the Christmas
camps. In the 1960s, the Shire Council turned Saltwater into a public
reserve 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 mourn
the exposure and the ruin. There is a sense in which a part of the colonial
project is still being accomplished in the Manning Valley as the civilizing

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mission reaches into the last pockets of country Aboriginal people might
still identify as theirs.10 Patricia Davis-Hurst, a Worimi elder who organizes
camps at Saltwater for Aboriginal single mothers and their children, sits on
a Council committee recently convened to administer Saltwater. The
Council, she told me, proposed that Aborigines would be allowed to
continue to camp there provided that they had properly numbered camp
sites that a surveyor would have to lay out at their own expense. I said to
them, You want to put us in boxes and then get us to pay for it? (from
an interview with Patricia Davis-Hurst, September 2002). So continues the
hegemony 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 its
own right. In the Australian countryside, it was a space quite specifically
racialized. Some of the same white men in country towns who would
discriminate against Aborigines by day, under the cover of darkness would
slip out to the Aboriginal Reserve or fringe camp looking for sex with
Aboriginal women. In speaking of the 1930s and 1940s, Myles Lalor, an
Aboriginal man from the tablelands adjacent to the NSW north coast,
records that: Some of the women have been known to say it at public
meetings: Yes, you say you dont like blacks, but were not black when it
comes to the bloody night-time (2000: 41). This ambivalence, the
jangling coexistence within the same individuals of aversion and attraction,
desire and repulsion, itself constitutes one of the raw nerves of race
relations. The boundary, in such cases, is a temporal rather than a topo-
graphic one: night falls and desire rules, day breaks and segregation is
reinstated. Which is not to say that desire and aversion cannot coexist in a
single act; that sexual desire has not been accompanied by the urge to
dominate black bodies. Nor should we forget that there were and are others
Aboriginal and white, men and women who have defied convention to
form relationships across the racial divide. Desire, friendship, openness,
love: these have always been there as a counter-current to racism.
Among the Manning Valleys sites of segregation was the Boomerang
Theatre. Situated in the centre of Taree, in the middle decades of the twen-
tieth century, the Boomerang was the town cinema. Aboriginal patrons
were restricted to the cinemas 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 heritage
architects, unlike Aboriginal pre-contact sites which are almost always
inventoried by archaeologists. Were the Boomerang Theatre to be given
heritage listing, the chances are it would be classified as an example of mid-
twentieth century entertainment architecture. From a heritage point of
view, there is some kind of presumption that a building will be self-
classifying; that its fabric will proclaim its identity or significance. Yet the
social practices that made the Boomerang a site of segregation left no

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186 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

Figure 4 Boomerang picture theatre, c. 1923, showing Aboriginal people


sitting in segregated seating in the front left rows (courtesy of Greater Taree
City Council)

obvious physical traces they rarely ever do. The traces of what happened
there are largely memory traces. When the Aboriginal people of the
Manning 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 to
heritage (Avrami et al., 2000; de la Torre, 2002), it is essential to balance
the social value or significance of places and landscapes against their
archaeological, architectural, and other values.

HERITAGE AND CONTAINMENT

In the USA, racial segregation and the Civil Rights movement have long
been the focus of heritage conservation and commemoration, activities that
are themselves now a subject of analysis and critique (Dwyer, 2000; Fitts,
1996; Weyeneth, 1995, 1996). In South Africa, Cape Towns District Six has
become a key site for a post-apartheid heritage of segregation (Hall, 2000:
15676; Malan and van Heyningen, 2001). After the forced removal of the
districts colored population, beginning in 1966, and the razing of the
terraced houses there, the only obvious trace of this former cosmopolitan
residential precinct (apart from a few public buildings standing in isolation)
was the grid of streets and lanes. The street grid later became a mnemonic
aid 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 the
museum, many former residents have inscribed their names, the locations

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Figure 5 Visitors at the District Six Museum, Cape Town (photograph by


Denis Byrne)

of their former homes, and other information on the map using marker
pens. The orthogonal grid that was originally inscribed on the landscape of
Cape Town by the Dutch as an instrument for regulating the space of the
colony, and hence its occupants (Hall, 2000), has become a means for the
dominated to symbolically recover a lost space and reinscribe themselves
in it.
In Australia, as yet, racial segregation barely registers as a subject for
heritage recording or conservation, a situation which I suggest resonates
with the invisibility or denial of segregation in public discourse during the
period in which it operated (Byrne, 2003: 7983). In country areas of NSW,
which is where most of the States Aboriginal population lived until the
1970s, cinemas, hospitals, and swimming pools were segregated by social
convention and intimidation; rarely were they segregated by local govern-
ment by-law or regulation. Other customary exclusions, such as that which
decreed that Aboriginal men should not be present in town at night, were
commonly maintained by police violence. Segregation was something
white communities in country towns were both hyper-conscious of, but also

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188 Journal of Social Archaeology 3(2)

self-censoring in regard to. This doubleness is evident in a Christian clergy-


mans comment about the picketing by university students of a segregated
ex-servicemans club in Walgett (Western NSW) in 1965: It is only stirring
up racial feelings which dont exist in the town . . . (Curthoys, 2002: 94).
In a landscape such as the Manning Valley, how would an archaeologist
map a racial tension that was and is at once so pervasive and so elusive? I
have suggested that the cadastral grid provides a partial roadmap of racial
separation. Segregation was to do with spatial containment and the
cadastral grid, with its extensions into domestic space, was the predominant
framework that determined the pattern of this containment. Containment,
however, was at least as much a settler fantasy as it was a reality on the
ground. I have tried to show in this article that what made the landscape
nervous was not the containment of Aboriginal people so much as the
failure of containment. Considering the extent of their dispossession, Abor-
iginal mobility remained remarkably high in the Australian post-contact
landscape.
Archaeology and archaeological heritage practice in Australia seem to
have their own fantasies of containment. I refer to the continued hegemony
of the site concept and its debilitating effect on the way the Aboriginal
past is represented as heritage. There was discussion during the 1970s and
1980s of siteless or off-site approaches to archaeological survey (e.g.
Binford, 1978: 48288; Dunnell and Dancey, 1983; Gallant, 1986). This
received at least some attention in Australia in relation to the relatively
high mobility of Aboriginal pre-contact hunter-gatherers as reflected in the
distribution of knapped stone artefacts (Byrne, 1991; Hiscock, 1989: 212).
However, the neatly circumscribed site remains as embedded in heritage
practice as ever, mainly because sites are seen as more manageable than
cultural landscapes. It is simpler to record and protect a limited number of
stone artefact concentrations, defined as sites, than it is a continuous scatter
of artefacts of variable density that may stretch for kilometres. Obviously
what suffers here is the behavioural context of the artefacts in the past: a
continuous pattern of activity is made to look like discontinuous pods of
activity; highly mobile pre-contact hunter-gathers are retrospectively
settled down into sites.
Turning to the post-contact period one finds an essentially similar
process of spatial containment. To date, the places that have been inven-
toried at a state and federal level under the Aboriginal post-contact
category have almost all been places identified primarily as Aboriginal.
These include Aboriginal Reserves, mission stations, massacre sites, and
institutional homes for Aboriginal children. Containment, here, works to
take the Aboriginal post-contact experience out of the larger colonial land-
scape and confine it to places where white people rarely went. And yet it
was precisely the presence of Aboriginal people in white space the space
of the town common, the river bank, the picture theatre, the swimming

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pool, the street that constituted the real and nervous space of race
relations. In moments of paranoia, it can seem as if heritage practice is a
mirror not so much for the history of racial segregation as for the urge
behind it.

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

Notes
1 The project has been carried out by Denis Byrne and Maria Nugent for the
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in collaboration with the Forster
and the Taree-Purfleet Local Aboriginal Land Councils and with the support
of the NSW Heritage Council.
2 See Hall (2000: 60, 67, 68) for instances where the cadastral grid was tailored
to 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 barrier
which 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 came
into common use in the 1890s (Jeans, 1972: 59) though the old style wooden
post-and-rail fences were for a long time also common in the core areas of
settlement.
5 In parts of Australia, however, white property boundaries and fences became
cultural markers for Aboriginal people. Harrison (2003) provides a fascinating
analysis of this process in relation to a pastoral property in the Kimberley area
of north-western Australia.
6 The shell midden and remains of native fauna excavated from two of the
cottages built by the British for Tasmanian Aborigines in the mid-nineteenth
century on Flinders Island in Bass Strait corroborate documentary evidence
that the problem was not that the Tasmanians were reluctant to use the
houses for food preparation but that they declined to behave in the cottages
differently to the way they were accustomed to behaving outside
(Birmingham, 1993: 1223).

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7 The oral history recording was mostly carried out by Maria Nugent and Denis
Byrne 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 peasant
and proletarian poaching from forests in Germany in the nineteenth century.
9 Sibley (1995: 105) makes reference to a 1908 British parliamentary debate in
which a certain Lord Farrer unfavourably compared the old-fashioned
Gypsies 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 Manning
Valley is still commonly described in terms of a loss of culture.
10 This is being countered by successful Aboriginal claims under the NSW Land
Rights Act and claims being made under the Federal Native Title Act.
Saltwater is itself subject to a Native Title claim by Worimi and Biripi
people.

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DENIS BYRNE manages the cultural heritage research unit at the New
South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service in Sydney. Topics of his
previous research and publications include the history and politics of
heritage management in Southeast Asia and Australia (the subject of his
PhD 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 interests
include the religious significance of heritage places and landscapes in
Asia and Australia.
[email: denis.byrne@npws.nsw.gov.au]

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