Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—firs... more Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 t... more The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 2 held in Brisbane from 30 November to 2 December 2005. SOAC 2 was hosted by the Urban Research Program at the South Bank campus, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. The principal intention of the conference was to lead a dialogue between leading researchers on the state of Australian cities and where they might be headed. SOAC 2 was designed to lead to a better understanding of the research needs of Australian cities and to provide those in the public and private sectors with a better appreciation of the current state and capacities of researchers. SOAC 2 brought together participants from a wide range of fields, including: academics, researchers, policy makers, private and public sector practitioners, leaders in government, social commentators and the media. Conference papers published fromSOAC 2 were subject to a peer review process prior to presentation at the conference, with further editing prior to publication
This paper explores the history of attitudes to European human remains among the settlers and cit... more This paper explores the history of attitudes to European human remains among the settlers and citizens of the Sydney region, focussing particularly on the long-dead. It presents four case studies of burial grounds in the Sydney region which were removed or drastically altered. Together these sites demonstrate the changes and continuities in attitudes to the dead and cemeteries. They trace the ebb and flow of spirituality, modernity, heritage and history over the past 160 years, offering a 'long view' over the historic/cultural context for those working in these areas today.
What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the... more What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the Sydney region? How do we interpret Philip in the light of his actions towards Aboriginal people? Looking closely at the colony's early years through the twin lenses of British and Eora perspectives and experiences banishes the notion that there can be only one story or way of interpreting Phillip's legacy.
Buildings were key indicators of the progress of New South Wales, the strange experimental colony... more Buildings were key indicators of the progress of New South Wales, the strange experimental colony founded by the British on the east coast of Australia in 1788. From the earliest days, artists and journal-keepers recorded the rapid growth of the town of Sydney, painstakingly depicting or listing every new structure erected by the government. Later, professional artists painted chocolate-box images of the neat, gleaming town basking in the antipodean sun, and of the increasing numbers of permanent, substantial houses nestled in romantic landscapes. Buildings were undeniable evidence of the colony’s rightful, inevitable place in the ‘Course of Empire’.
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the a... more In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country ‘beautiful and comfortable’, and so Australia was one vast ‘estate’, a giant ‘park’, a series of ‘farms without fences’. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage’s book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788. This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
To date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (178... more To date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (1788–1820) have meshed with colonial historiography rather than challenging it. Missing from these studies are problem-oriented questions about the behaviors of rivers and people alike. What were the specific histories and impacts of floods and freshes? How did settlers survive, conceptualize, and understand floods? Why did they stay on the riverbanks, even defying governors’ orders to move to higher ground, when they well knew the river’s destructive power? These are questions we might ask of all humans who live on floodplains. This article argues and demonstrates that a deep ethnographic and environmental approach can do more than graft new environmental research onto existing historical narratives. It can unlock the radical potential of environmental history to reveal past peoples more fully, more humanly, in a whole new light—in short, to change the way we think about them and their environments.
Christof Mauch, Helmuth Trischler, Lawrence Culver, Shen Hou and Katie Ritson (eds), Making Tracks: Human and Environmental Histories, Perspectives, Munich, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society pp. 9-12, 2013
Crossings: New histories from the old legends
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famo... more Crossings: New histories from the old legends
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—firs... more Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury–Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 t... more The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 2 held in Brisbane from 30 November to 2 December 2005. SOAC 2 was hosted by the Urban Research Program at the South Bank campus, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. The principal intention of the conference was to lead a dialogue between leading researchers on the state of Australian cities and where they might be headed. SOAC 2 was designed to lead to a better understanding of the research needs of Australian cities and to provide those in the public and private sectors with a better appreciation of the current state and capacities of researchers. SOAC 2 brought together participants from a wide range of fields, including: academics, researchers, policy makers, private and public sector practitioners, leaders in government, social commentators and the media. Conference papers published fromSOAC 2 were subject to a peer review process prior to presentation at the conference, with further editing prior to publication
This paper explores the history of attitudes to European human remains among the settlers and cit... more This paper explores the history of attitudes to European human remains among the settlers and citizens of the Sydney region, focussing particularly on the long-dead. It presents four case studies of burial grounds in the Sydney region which were removed or drastically altered. Together these sites demonstrate the changes and continuities in attitudes to the dead and cemeteries. They trace the ebb and flow of spirituality, modernity, heritage and history over the past 160 years, offering a 'long view' over the historic/cultural context for those working in these areas today.
What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the... more What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the Sydney region? How do we interpret Philip in the light of his actions towards Aboriginal people? Looking closely at the colony's early years through the twin lenses of British and Eora perspectives and experiences banishes the notion that there can be only one story or way of interpreting Phillip's legacy.
Buildings were key indicators of the progress of New South Wales, the strange experimental colony... more Buildings were key indicators of the progress of New South Wales, the strange experimental colony founded by the British on the east coast of Australia in 1788. From the earliest days, artists and journal-keepers recorded the rapid growth of the town of Sydney, painstakingly depicting or listing every new structure erected by the government. Later, professional artists painted chocolate-box images of the neat, gleaming town basking in the antipodean sun, and of the increasing numbers of permanent, substantial houses nestled in romantic landscapes. Buildings were undeniable evidence of the colony’s rightful, inevitable place in the ‘Course of Empire’.
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the a... more In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country ‘beautiful and comfortable’, and so Australia was one vast ‘estate’, a giant ‘park’, a series of ‘farms without fences’. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage’s book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788. This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
To date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (178... more To date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (1788–1820) have meshed with colonial historiography rather than challenging it. Missing from these studies are problem-oriented questions about the behaviors of rivers and people alike. What were the specific histories and impacts of floods and freshes? How did settlers survive, conceptualize, and understand floods? Why did they stay on the riverbanks, even defying governors’ orders to move to higher ground, when they well knew the river’s destructive power? These are questions we might ask of all humans who live on floodplains. This article argues and demonstrates that a deep ethnographic and environmental approach can do more than graft new environmental research onto existing historical narratives. It can unlock the radical potential of environmental history to reveal past peoples more fully, more humanly, in a whole new light—in short, to change the way we think about them and their environments.
Christof Mauch, Helmuth Trischler, Lawrence Culver, Shen Hou and Katie Ritson (eds), Making Tracks: Human and Environmental Histories, Perspectives, Munich, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society pp. 9-12, 2013
Crossings: New histories from the old legends
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famo... more Crossings: New histories from the old legends
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 13.2
Ideas and expectations about colonial space and the making and remaking of real places lie at the... more Ideas and expectations about colonial space and the making and remaking of real places lie at the heart of the early Australian colonies. Over the past forty years, and especially in the last decade, scholars have recovered much of that lost world, a world of polyglot diversity, constant movement, economic social and cultural expansion, cross-cultural encounters, relationships and appropriations, extraordinary adaptations, myriad connections and overlaid human geographies.
Yet in the later nineteenth century, the colonies were also profoundly shaped by discontinuities in memory, place and experience, as wave upon wave of new arrivals started new lives literally unaware of what had happened earlier, or how these places had come to be. The success of later settlers was built upon those earlier foundations, and yet false assumptions about ‘gaol colonies’ and ‘savages’, twinned with assertions of legitimate occupancy and entitlement, easily captured the narrative as well as the literal ground, and are still widespread in Australian historiography, popular history and heritage today.
Review of Alasdair McGregor's A Forger's progress: The Life of Francis Greenway and Luke Slatter... more Review of Alasdair McGregor's A Forger's progress: The Life of Francis Greenway and Luke Slattery's The First Dismissal
Review essay on Aboriginal contemporary artist Nicole Foreshew's installation work 'born in darkn... more Review essay on Aboriginal contemporary artist Nicole Foreshew's installation work 'born in darkness before dawn'. The essay uses the art work to explore the ways Aboriginal artists, culture and presence are radically changing mainstream assumptions about Australian history and heritage, and in particular Australian cities and urban history. Some thoughts are offered on the relationships between contemporary artists and history.
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The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
Papers
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
Yet in the later nineteenth century, the colonies were also profoundly shaped by discontinuities in memory, place and experience, as wave upon wave of new arrivals started new lives literally unaware of what had happened earlier, or how these places had come to be. The success of later settlers was built upon those earlier foundations, and yet false assumptions about ‘gaol colonies’ and ‘savages’, twinned with assertions of legitimate occupancy and entitlement, easily captured the narrative as well as the literal ground, and are still widespread in Australian historiography, popular history and heritage today.