Madeline Fowler

The ‘very stillness of things’: object biographies of sailcloth and fishing net from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) colonial archive, South Australia

ABSTRACT This article details the discovery of early twentieth-century sailcloth and fishing-net samples pertaining to the lives of Aboriginal peoples on Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana). Biographies for the samples are explored, from which it is argued that these objects may have many viewpoints assigned to them. The sailcloth and fishing-net samples allow the telling of complex stories from the past and present. These stories include the resilience, adaptability and strength of Narungga culture when exposed to colonial contextual risk. Indeed, these objects reveal the efforts of missions and government agencies to control the lives of Aboriginal peoples (through the lenses of ‘racism’, paternalism and self-interest), as well as agency and the involvement of Aboriginal peoples in capitalist economies. Objects as subjects can also reveal ongoing struggles for traditional and commercial fishing rights – with the aforementioned being informed by the traditional knowledge and lived experiences of Narungga peoples.

Collaboration, Collision, and (Re)Conciliation: Indigenous Participation in Australia’s Maritime Industry—A Case Study from Point Pearce/Burgiyana, South Australia

This chapter investigates maritime cultural landscapes of Point Pearce Mission/Burgiyana, in the Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda region of South Australia . Burgiyana is home to the Narungga peoples. This research investigates the participation of Aboriginal peoples in Australia’s maritime industry, an important component of Australian maritime heritage. Maritime activities at Point Pearce/Burgiyana have contributed to Australia’s maritime industry through engagements that include in-kind transactions, employment within the fishing economy, and shipping trade labor—both at sea and on land. This research uses a maritime cultural landscape framework to explore Indigenous themes previously rarely employed in archaeological research. In addition, most maritime archaeological studies have neglected Aboriginal missions as potential sites/landscapes for analysis and, similarly, archaeological research at missions has largely ignored maritime aspects. The outcomes of the project illustrate that Aboriginal maritime cultural landscapes are not only a prominent part of the Australian landscape, but also provoke reconsiderations regarding how archaeologists see the relationship between the maritime and Indigenous archaeological record. The findings propose that maritime archaeologists could employ a maritime cultural landscape framework within other themes of cultural contact that include missions situated on waterways.

Book review of "Please God Send Me A Wreck: responses to shipwreck in a 19th century Australian community" by Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs. New York, NY, USA, Springer, 2015. ISBN: 978-1493926411

The title of Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbss 2015 book, Please God Send Me a Wreck, rapidly conveys the contradiction between wrecks as crises and wrecks as boons— savior and salvor, altruism and opportunity. This third volume in the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (ACUA) and Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) series When the Land Meets the Sea represents the work of the state maritime archaeologist (New South Wales Heritage Branch) and a professor of Australian archaeology (University of New England), respectively. This Springer-published set covers archaeological work on single, or a collection of related, sites that encompass both underwater and terrestrial investigations. The recent addition, in the genre of anthropologically oriented archaeological essays, adopts the nineteenth- and twentieth-century communities of Queenscliffe, in the southern Australian state of Victoria, as a case study. It casts the community as the central protagonist in a landscape where shipping mishaps take center stage. Pilot, lighthouse, hydrographic, lifeboat, and customs services act as the key players, orchestrating responses to shipping mishaps encompassing stranding, wrecking, rescue, salvage, looting, caching, beachcombing, and souveniring.