Micromobility, Space, and Indigenous Housing Schemes in Australia after World War II

Abstract

This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent scholarship on imperial networks and Indigenous mobilities, it explores Aboriginal people’s negotiation of those efforts through practices of both moving and staying put. We demonstrate the importance of micromobility—which we define as smallscale movements across short distances, in and out of buildings, along roads, and across townships—and argue that in order to fully appreciate the regulation of Indigenous mobility and Indigenous resistance to it, scholars must concentrate on the small, local, and seemingly insignificant as well as more drastic and permanent movement.

Westphalian sovereignty as a zombie category in Australia

“…Additionally, the movements of British soldiers and settlers across the Australian landmass spread settler sovereignty by performing political authority in a more material way than proclamations over imagined territories (Clarsen 2017b;Moreton-Robinson 2009;Palombo 2009). sovereignty as a zombie category 124The same British mobilities that established sovereignty destroyed Indigenous culture, infrastructure and settlements (Ellinghaus & Healy 2018;Pascoe 2018).…”

“…Hence, while the zombie notion of Westphalian sovereignty does not accurately describe how colonial Australian sovereignty was founded or is maintained, it has been a powerful discursive tool employed to disposes Indigenous Australians because of their symbolically constructed 'deviant mobilities' (Prout Quicke & Green 2018). Indeed, the notion of deviant nomadic indigenous mobilities became a self-fulfilling prophesy, with the actions of European settlers driven by (or in order to produce) the belief that Indigenous Australians were nomadic, destroying the farms, houses and food stores that supported the sedentary features of Indigenous Australian social and political life (Pascoe 2018;Ellinghaus & Healy 2018). Accordingly, the discursive and material deployment of Westphalian Sovereignty helped to build a bordering dichotomy between 'sedentary Australians' and 'mobile Indigenous outsiders.…”

“…Mimi Sheller (2018, p. 10) sees this as an intrinsic feature of mobilities since they exist and are interpreted within intersectional hierarchies, including those based on race, ethnicity and nationality. In Australia, the notion of deviant Aboriginal nomadism is made intelligible by a racist narrative that holds ideals of Westphalian European settlement to be the embodiment of worthy (im)mobility (Ellinghaus & Healy 2018;Pascoe 2018;Prout Quicke & Green 2018). The movement of indigenous Australians is accordingly another ground for, in the words of Alison Macoun (2011, p. 521), Aboriginality to be 'represented as sovereignty as a zombie category 132 savage or threatening and in need of settler control and discipline, as well as primitive and in need of development or erasure in the face of (inevitable and inescapable) modernity.'…”

“…For instance, across Europe local authorities and civic organisations often offer sanctuary to asylum seekers in contradiction to state policies partly because asylum seekers are seen 'as contributing to the social and cultural life of their "host" communities' (Darling 2017, p. 185). Likewise, Indigenous Australian populations express their political authority by engaging in acts of mobile resistance towards official state sovereignty and by forming and participating in local community activities (Ellinghaus & Healy 2018;Pitty & Smith 2011;Prout Quicke & Green 2018).…”

“The system of compulsory education is failing”

“…Emerging from the field of settler-colonial studies is a new area of scholarship on indigenous mobilities that pays attention to the many ways in which Indigenous people were mobile and what that meant for their experience of and resistance to settler colonialism (Carey and Lydon, 2014;Banivanua Mar, 2015;Ellinghaus and Healy, 2018). This paper draws on such scholarship to examine the ways that many Aboriginal Victorians were persistently mobile during a time when the assimilation policy sought to control social mobilities through institutions such as schooling and housing.…”