Lynette Russell

Monumental Colonialism Megaliths and the Appropriation of Australia's Aboriginal Past

Colonizers often subjugate the colonized Other as an inferior form of humanity. In the Euro-Australian settler-colonial context such ethnocentric views legitimated the acquisition of indigenous lands. An important element of this process of dispossession was the appropriation of indigenous heritage and the (re)presentation of indigenous archaeological sites as dimensions of European prehistory. In America and Africa last century, interpretations of indigenous sites frequently invoked the prior occupation of an advanced race who had close affinity with the European colonizers. Nineteenth- century representations of stone circles in Australia reveal similar attempts to dissociate Aboriginal people from their past. The stone circles near Mt Elephant in Victoria provide an extreme example of this process wherein a fallacious depiction of indigenous sites as European megalithic structures ensured Aboriginal dispossession and subsequent European (re)possession. The Mt Elephant representations subsequently gave rise to hyper-diffusion ist claims early this century that Aboriginal stone circles reflected cultural influences from Egypt. Within the Australian context the processes of dispossession and (re)possession were part of a more encompassing paradigm which held Aborigines to be the living Stone Age ancestors of modern Europeans.

Kangaroo Island sealers and their descendants: Ethnic and gender ambiguities in the archaeology of a creolised community

Abstract Our understandings of the European-Aboriginal contact period are restricted by our limited engagement with and interrogation of the categories used for analysis. Dividing the past into Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and invader and so on, fails to reveal the complexity and nuances of cross-cultural, negotiated encounters and the emergence of new social formations and identities. Furthermore the ascription of ethnicity to historical actors generally relies on late twentieth (early twenty-first) century conceptions of what it means to be Aboriginal which are not necessarily valid for the period under consideration.

'Soliciting sixpences from township to township' : moral dilemmas in mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract In the middle of the nineteenth century, as a nascent ‘public sphere’ took shape in Port Phillip and then Victoria, a set of questions emerged about the past, present and future relationship between Aboriginal people and British colonizers in the colonys imaginative and intellectual life. In the context of urban developments best considered explosive in speed and transformation, a group of Melbourne thinkers were forced to consider the relationship between dispossession, violence and the apparent historical progress of settler society itself. Unlike other settler colonial cities, where the flowering of a truly ‘urban’ political and intellectual culture was far removed from the brute violence of the frontier (in both historical and geographic terms), in Melbourne the accident of the gold rush condensed historical development in ways that threw this violence and cultural development into the same historical frame. How could a settler colonial city and its community imagine itself when the moral problems of dispossession were politically, culturally and materially present? This article traces how an emerging urban intellectual elite discursively and morally managed the problem of Aboriginal survival (and the haunting of theft and violence it always implied). In so doing, this article offers a new reading of the 1869 ‘Protection Act’ as an attempt to deflect, remove and contain the problem that a swindled and exploited Aboriginal population posed in a city understood by many as a beacon of progress and development.

Remembering and Forgetting: Discovering the “Secret History” of Tasmania

I come to this forum on Nick Brodie’s The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion as a historian and Indigenous Studies scholar. Within Indigenous Studies discourses, there is a focus on both historical and contemporary Aboriginal agency and viewpoints. My own focus on the colonial era has been to attempt to see over to the “other side” of the frontier, and to uncover, consider, and analyse Aboriginal people’s engagements, responses, and reactions to European presence, dispossession, and violence. Epistemologically married to this focus has been my career-long commitment to training, collaborating, and facilitating Aboriginal voices and perspectives. Thus, my context for engaging with Nick Brodie’s new book was laden with anticipation, and it was very specific and heavily layered. Brodie’s previous academic work had been widely published. I hoped this new book, as the advertising had claimed, would produce new insights into Tasmania’s “Black Wars” and would discuss hitherto unstudied archival materials. The key term in the title, it seemed to me, was “secret history.” A secret must be kept, it must be formulated and protected, it requires complicity and intention. This was the term that writer’s festivals and radio hosts seemed to focus on. Who would not be intrigued by the notion of “secret history”? Brodie had been extremely energetic of late, averaging a book a year with the publisher Hardie Grant, all to popular acclaim. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio national “Late Night Live” host Phillip Adams declared Brodie’s previous book, Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation, a “10 out of 10.” For me, having spent more than a decade considering the complexities of Tasmanian colonial history, I was astounded to think there could be such an untapped secret. Tasmanian historiography has had decades of complex and sophisticated research from the very early works of Clive Turnbull, to Brian Plomley, and on to Vivienne Rae Ellis, Lyndall Ryan, Henry

Affect in the archive: trauma, grief, delight and texts. Some personal reflections

Abstract Historians, as users of archives, often discuss the thrill and emotion of their ‘discoveries’. We can form romantic attachments or be repulsed across the decades. Archives containing the physical remains of the past can transport us, we can move beyond the here and now. Before the Museum of Melbourne digitised Alfred Howitt’s correspondence, I once opened a letter written to him on classic nineteenth-century blued paper. As I pulled the missive from its envelope, I could smell tobacco smoke. I was immediately in the room with him. Recently, after completing an article on the topic of frontier violence, my co-author and I both described a feeling of stress and trauma that came from reading colonial records of ‘skirmishes’ and ‘dispersals’. In this paper, I want to reflect on the experience of Affect in the archive.

Darwin, a city on the edge

Darwin is the final book in the popular NewSouth cities series; previous authors have tended to be creative writers, which for the most part really suits the series’ style. While Tess Lea writes with deep personal local knowledge and an enthusiastic fervour and creativity, the book might have enjoyed novelists’ flair and insight. Other books in the series are, as intended, true literary non-fiction. Paul Daley’s Canberra illustrates the National Capital’s utter constructed otherness, its importance and its paradoxical disconnections from the polis. Matthew Condon’s offering on Brisbane depicts a metropolis that palpably transforms on the page, shifting from country town to big city with all the pretensions of sophistication and modernity. The production standards for these books are extremely high and quite rightly they have been lauded and applauded for the richness, diversity and simple yarn spinning. These are quintessentially Australian books geographically fixed but nationally transformative. Seen together in its entirety this is the series that I would recommend to travellers, and others curious about the land down under and her odd two legged creatures. While Tess Lea’s Darwin struggles to find the poetics of Daley or Condon, in part that struggle is a consequence of the city itself. The city of Darwin is for many southerners the enigmatic signifier of northern Australia. This is the iconic tropical metropolis. The people, climate and cultures that infuse this settlement of a mere 130,000 somehow seem to make it appear and feel much bigger and perhaps important than it actually is. Lea’sDarwin is a loving ode to her hometown written with the keen insight of an insider with a desire to make outsiders familiar with the unique history and circumstance of Australia’s smallest capital city. Perhaps because there is such deep authorial affection that the stultifying heat and oppressive humidity that greets and halts visitors is all but invisible. Thematically Lea weaves the stories of disaster and renewal; threats real and imagined; being and thriving and finally what might the future hold. These themes are tightly written with four chapters structuring the story telling. These are ‘Building from the ruins’; ‘Dangerous Proximities’; ‘Living it’ and ‘Future Darwin’. Pleasingly, as you would expect from a respected academic writer, there are comprehensive endnotes and bibliography, allowing for deeper or shallower reads as are required. The first half of the book is a hard read because it is demonstrates how tenuous are our relationships to nature and in particular the unpredictable and unforgiving weather. It is in her descriptions and exploration of disasters and rebuilding that Darwin really sings. For many of my generation or older our understandings of Darwin are marked by the almost tangible and omnipotent presence of cyclone Tracey and the Christmas destruction. I recall Bill and Boyd’s mournful tones of ‘Santa Never Made it into Darwin’ bleating out of my radio and usurping my Postcolonial Studies, 2016, Vol. 19, No. 1, 97–99

Fifty Years On: History’s Handmaiden? A Plea for Capital H History

This article considers the discipline of historical archaeology as it reaches its 50-year milestone. A call to integrate history and archaeology more closely and, in particular, to think about methods for exploring interdisciplinarity is proposed. Through the conceptual frameworks of hybridity and bricolage a material approach is discussed and suggestions offered for ways to integrate history and archaeology, and consider “Capital H History.” With an Australian settler/colonial focus, the article ponders the relationships, similarities, and schisms between historical archaeology and indigenous or community archaeology through a discussion of early European contact sites, artifacts, and conceptual categories. It is argued that the study of the past emerges from the intersection between words and things. Here, in the realm of the tangible and intangible, where images, artifacts, and ephemera all provide evidence of the past—a synthesized history is possible.

Review of Colliding Worlds: First Contact in the Western Desert 1932–1984, Melbourne Museum

Lynette Russell of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University, reviews curator Philip Batty’s Colliding Worlds: First Contact in the Western Desert 1932–1984 , Melbourne Museum, Melbourne Carlton Gardens. July – September 2006.