Deep nation: Australia’s acquisition of an indigenous past

Abstract

Since at least the 1970s the concept of national heritage has been an inseparable p art of the practice of archaeology in A ustralia, and given that archaeology and cultural nationalism m arch hand in hand in virtually every country of the w orld, this is hardly surprising. N or is it surprising that a settler colony like A ustralia, in order to bond itself better to the exotic terrain by sending roots dow n into the continent's past, w ould at some stage w ant to appropriate to itself the tim e-depth represented by the archaeological rem ains of the indigenous m inority. Yet surely, on the face of it, there is som ething quite radical and extraordinary in the prospect of a settler culture w hich for so long had pronounced indigenous culture to be a savage anachronism suddenly turning to em brace the past of that culture as its own.My contention is that A ustralia's adoption of Aboriginal 'heritage' was, how ever, a radical dep artu re only in a lim ited sense. Preceding this act of appropriation and stretching back into the n ation's colonial origins there can be seen to be a series of other w ays in which the physical, 'archaeological' traces of the Aboriginal p ast had been actively colonised. This essay attem pts to delineate that series of colonial 'm oves'. My concern as an archaeologist w orking in the field know n as 'A boriginal heritage m anagem ent' is to trace the lineage of my ow n practice and thus, optim istically, break free to som e extent from its colonial complicity. As this implies, 1 believe that archaeology in A ustralia can only be post-colonial to the extent that its practitioners deconstruct its colonial underpinnings. Archaeology in A ustralia m ust decolonise itself before it can claim to be post-colonial.In w h at follows I develop the notion of two diam etrically opposed trends operating in southeastern A ustralia from 1788 onw ard. On the one hand Aborigines w ere engaged in transactional relationships w ith w hite settlers and w ere establishing a new cultural geography (i.e., ad d in g to the old cultural landscape new netw orks of significant places). On the other hand, settler society, while spatially m arginalising Aboriginal people and denying the authenticity of the em ergent Aboriginal culture of the southeast, w as also beginning to regard the archaeological rem ains of pre-contact Aboriginal culture as a benchm ark of authentic Aboriginality. At the sam e time that various m eans w ere being used to decrease the visibility of living Aboriginal people in the landscape of the southeast various other m eans w ere being em ployed to enhance the visibility of the archaeological rem ains w hich, in a sense, w ere replacing them there.

Race, citizenship and national identity in The School Paper, 1946-1968

“…Aboriginal culture could play another important role: by providing a mythology by which to make the land sacred (Byrne, 1996). Thus, stories from Aboriginal dreamings litter the pages of The School Paper.…”

Arqueologia Distópica: a implementação da lógica do capital na gestão do patrimônio

“…Seria mais fácil dizer: vamos ser uma ciência, por que uma ciência é objetiva! Por outro lado, vários arqueólogos australianos têm abraçado causas aborígines ou têm se voltado a analisar as implicações políticas de seu trabalho e as suas obrigações éticas com os aborígines (BYRNE, 1996;DAVID & BARKER, 2006;LILLEY, 2000;MURRAY, 1992;SMITH & WOBST, 2005). Na atual configuração da arqueologia em Vitória, no entanto, e apesar dos progressos realizados, são principalmente os arqueólogos brancos que "tripulam" as empresas de arqueologia e a AAV, uma situação política tensa que é prejudicial para a população aborígine (ZIMMERMAN, 2008:55-56).…”

The Ethics of Cultural Heritage

“…In the 1990s there were calls for the development of a historical archaeology of Indigenous peoples to assist in historicising their recent experiences, include them in national narratives and make their past visible as a counter to the dominant visibility of colonial heritage in the landscape (e.g. Byrne 1996Byrne , 2003Colley and Bickford 1996 ;Murray 1996 ). Such calls have been enthusiastically acted upon, and Indigenous historical archaeology is now a major component of Australia's historical archaeological research (e.g.…”