Linda Young

Villages that Never Were: The Museum Village as a Heritage Genre

Villages of relocated buildings now constitute a phenomenon of the world’s repertoire of heritage. They go by a multitude of names depending on particular inflection: open air museum, folk museum, living history museum, heritage village, museum village and so forth. 1 This paper reviews the context of the form of the genre’s manifestation in Australia, where it is often known as the ‘pioneer village’. They are the fruit of a populist vision of national history which celebrates white rural settlement as its central theme. In practice, the villages manifest a deep commitment to collecting and saving old buildings as the meaningful construction of a favourite historical identity. But the generation that established Australia’s villages has been overtaken. Today, the intersection of museum villages with the managerialist pressures of local economy enhancement and modern professional standards of heritage management challenge most villages’ survival.

Museums, heritage, and things that fall in‐between

Abstract Australian museums and heritage agencies have bifurcated the management of cultural heritage material into the categories of artefacts and places. This paper argues that this is not only an unnecessary and undesirable separation, but one which misunderstands the essential concept of cultural heritage, as well as allowing some material to fall between the two authorities, with the result that it is often cared for by neither. As a postscript, it further suggests that since the skills required for the management of both resources are similar, cross‐over employment should be encouraged as a means of enlarging career paths for heritage professionals.

‘Extensive, economical and elegant’: The habitus of gentility in early nineteenth century Sydney

This paper challenges the modern expectation that mahogany furniture and silver cutlery were self‐evident indicators of gentry status in colonial Sydney through close analysis of a bundle of middle class household inventories of the 1840s. They are considered as evidence of habitus—the structuring interaction of mentality with the material world—in order to demonstrate the active principle of consumption in the claim or assertion of bourgeois standing, which was particularly lively in the colony. A range of competences can be seen in the practice of gentility, which suggests that the possession of rosewood rather than mahogany, or imitation silver rather than sterling, was a variation shaped not merely by wealth but by cultural capital. This exposes strands of contingency, competition and compromise in middle class expression.

Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition

the ‘indigenous’ that has been partly obscured by the ‘colonial’. She is alert to the possibility that her own account of these writings is itself another ‘over-writing’, and in her closing pages she declares that ‘all reading is inevitably colonising’ (373). She agrees with Marcia Langton that ‘Aboriginalities’ are imaginative constructs (66), and she is both reflexive about her own imagining of Nannup and Langford and confident that it will pass the assumed reader’s supposed ethical demands. My own experience of this text was to feel episodically mis-interpellated, credited with a post-colonial sensibility that I know I fail to inhabit. The construction of Nannup and Langford that Westphalen offers is persuasive and appealing. Drawing deftly on relevant ethnographies, regional histories and policy history, she turns their autobiographical words into threads in a vivid tapestry: the social histories of two Australian regions, each with representative figures (Nannup and Langford) vividly present. She thus shows that one of the ways that historical structures are present in our lives is the sense of self and the scope of individuated agency that they allow. Westphalen’s emplotment of her protagonists is heroic: her autobiographers are practitioners of resistance, each struggling to articulate and enact a consistently Indigenous agency in a world that seeks constantly to erase, obscure and demonise ‘Indigenality’. Like any film director’s decisions about focus, point of view and lighting, Westphalen’s narrative and exegetical decisions highlight some things and obscure others. Langford’s marriages and dealings with her children don’t interest Westphalen as much as Langford’s reclamation of her Bundjalung identity and heritage. Nannup’s adaptation to the world beyond the Pilbara interests Westphalen less than the ongoing reverberations of her removal and subjection. Proposing displacement of people such as Nannup and Langford as the fundamental move of colonial authority, Westphalen strives constantly to ‘bring them home’. This extended, historically illuminated and ethnographically buttressed reading of the lifewriting of Nannup and Langford works well not only as regional history and biography but also as the exemplary performance of a certain academic ethic. While Westphalen is perhaps too anxious to remind the reader of her unflagging respect for Nannup and Langford Ginibi as ‘Elders’ resisting patriarchal colonial power, the effect of her book, on this reader, was to amplify and enrich their stories*a tribute of real warmth and intelligence. Westphalen is also generous in her inter-disciplinary politics. After briefly musing about whether quoting Anthropology compromises her reading, she declares that discipline an ally in the decoding of her palimpsests: Anthropology gives ‘more depth to understanding those cultural beliefs, structures and practices which are present, but unexplained’ by Langford Ginibi and Nannup (371). However, as an argument about ‘Indigenous life-writing’ per se the book does not convince. In the following prescriptive/descriptive passage Westphalen seems to present ‘Country’ as the genre’s defining and justifying theme. Lifehistories ‘assert not only direct associations with Country, but also with Dreamings which sustain both Country and people. They also contain evidence of connection with and specific knowledge about Country’ (381). Well . . . some do, and some don’t; and those that don’t are valuable reminders of the diversity of Indigenous experience. Books such as Noel Tovey’s Little Black Bastard (2004) scurrilously upset our cherished models of (what Westphalen calls) ‘Indigenality’*life histories beyond our policy-conditioned and politically wholesome imaginations.

Correct Taste: the Material Conditions of Gentility

The genteel habitus required the right kind of environment in which to live, shaped by a battery of material goods to enable management of the self-controlled body and presentation of the self-conscious social person. Considered as performances both in private and in public, material goods constructed the stages on, and the props with which, to conduct the genteel life. To produce effective performances, the material appurtenances had to be the right kind, defined as correct taste, ‘the material counterpart of influence’.1 The precise calibration of setting, equipment and decoration could prove or disprove the middle-class person’s possession of the cultural capital of gentility. The assemblage of goods possessed presented messages about the actor to the audience, enabling others to classify the agent’s exact stratum within the possibilities that composed the nineteenth-century middle class.

Best Behaviour: Public Relationships

The genteel code of etiquette was dedicated to the control of the self in society, a subset of manners for use in particular circumstances among particular people. A key dimension of the cultural capital of gentility was therefore knowledge of etiquette and the confidence to use it easily. Etiquette was a dynamic, evolving, yet prescriptive, discourse, manipulated by the fluent to identify their like and exclude outsiders. Its forms were acknowledged, but never conclusively explained, notwithstanding the claims of the extensive etiquette literature. In this way, knowledge of correct etiquette defined the shifting borders of gentility. The critic T. C. Morgan wrote in 1838: ‘Etiquette … in its modern acceptation, refers to some line of conduct which has been ticketed with the approbation of the great leaders of society’1 The ticket analogy draws on the word’s French etymology, but its implication of a pass/fail approval process suggests more certainty than existed in practice, as does the common descriptor of etiquette as a code. Certainty was what those outside the magic circle of middle-class gentility craved. For those within, uncertainty blurred access to genteel exclusivity and protected their privileged knowledge; they could ascribe their own capacity to inherent good breeding.

In between: the Problem of the Middle Class

The formation of the middle class in Britain, the United States and the Australian colonies is easier to document than to define. So many definitions have been written that some commentators conclude that the ‘middle class’ should be determined by self-definition as those people who considered themselves middle class and were acknowledged as such by their community or even more simply as a heuristic device for the purposes of history or sociology1 Nonetheless, doubt remains in some quarters, expressed in a continuing lament for ‘the great difficulty in locating a self-referential value for the middle class.’2 In this field of shifting interconnections and fuzzy boundaries, E. P. Thompson’s view of class — that it is not a category but something which happens in human relationships, recognizable in relations between people — presents the way forward. This book analyses the expressive practices of self-control, consumption and performance to document a set of convergences which define a large but distinctive middle class.

Under Control: the Genteel Body

Self-control was the fundamental principle of the courtesy traditions that preceded the genteel revolution. Regulation of the body and its appetites, desires, effluvia and excrescences constituted the first step in the civilizing process, located in both the individual and society. Freud depicts resolution of the struggle between self-control and instinct as the repressive compromise between ‘civilisation and its discontents’, a phrase with special resonance in the discourse of gentility. In his own psychoanalytic terms, Freud traces self-control as the individual’s biologically grounded passage from infantile libidinous drive to adult establishment of the superego, expressed as a conscience, a sense of guilt and the capacity for remorse.1 This vision of natural stages of psychic growth frames the view that social development occurs at the expense of individual desire. Elias refers to Freud’s interpretation, but inverts it by historicizing the regulation of the body within the social order defined by different expressions of state power. The hypothesis that external power shapes the individual psyche according to evolving techniques of power is illustrated by the history of increasingly self-managed controls over the body2 Both theories illuminate the growth of human cultivation as the sublimation of animal instincts by order presented in rules imposed by the authority of kings, parents or teachers and naturalized as civil, adult behaviour.

Cultural Baggage: the Genteel World

Let us begin with three drawing rooms of the 1830s-1840s, images by amateur or vernacular artists. An extended family occupies each room. Older members sit, though in a horizontal hierarchy showing the least important characters at the margins of each family and its picture. All the characters wear up-to-date clothes and hair styles; the furniture varies in fashionability. With no further information it is impossible to locate any of these images to a particular geography other than the generalized ‘European’.