Wendy S. Shaw

ENCOUNTERING INDIGENEITY: RE‐IMAGINING AND DECOLONIZING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. In an era of postcolonialism and postcolonization, Indigenous struggles continue. Within ‘settler societies’ issues of dispossession—particularly of lands—remain largely unresolved. As part of the discipline of geographys active movement away from its colonizing project, this introduction to this special edition of Geografiska Annaler B seeks to (re)focus a disciplinary lens, and (re)open a dialogue—and potential research trajectory ‐ about ‘indigenous geographies’. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, new cultural geographies have begun a process of re‐engagement with issues of indigeniety through careful, sensitive, inclusive, representative and emancipatory research projects.

Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern

The inner Sydney Aboriginal settlement known as The Block has been monitored by police, the media and welfare organisations since its inception in the early 1970s. The Block is the subject of an ongoing commentary, a ‘discourse of decline’ about a place that is commonly considered to be Australias own Harlem-like ‘black ghetto’. In stark contrast, the predominantly non-Aboriginal suburbs of Darlington, Redfern and Chippendale, which surround The Block, are undergoing gentrification. Within this zone of gentrification there are complex and seemingly confused responses to the presence of The Block. The responses challenge and/or embellish the official (‘white’) narrative that The Block is imploding in a sea of drugs, crime and cultural inferiority.

Sydney's SoHo Syndrome? Loft living in the urbane city

In its ongoing search for a global identity, the city of Sydney, Australia, has looked to other cities for inspiration and direction. Like many of these cities, Sydneys Central Business District, and the former industrial areas that surround it, are being transformed through ‘apartment’ (condominium) development. Many are marketed as ‘New York–style lofts’ via a flurry of promotions that suggest a distinctly generic and global form of cosmopolitan urbanism. The essay details how this recent spate of Manhattanization rests not only on a cache of historically embedded Manhattan imaginaries, but on localized socio–cultural moments that are part of Sydneys particular experience of SoHo Syndrome. Tracing the pathways to Sydneys version of the global phenomenon of loft living has enabled a deeper understanding of the citys evolving built and cultural landscapes.

Riotous Sydney: Redfern, Macquarie Fields, and (My) Cronulla

This paper interrogates the reactions to three riotous events that occurred in 2004 and 2005 in neighbourhoods of Sydney, Australia. At Redfern and Cronulla, the riots appeared to be ‘race’ related, whereas the Macquarie Fields incidents represented an apparent ‘class war’. Parallels between Redfern and Macquarie Fields were also drawn because of the identification of similar circumstances of poverty and dispossession. By delving into the populist accounts of the three events and untangling their discursive threads, a different picture emerged. This paper unearths some of the strategies used to distinguish suburban Cronulla from the stigmatised Redfern and Macquarie Fields. I argue that this separation has served to reinforce the expectation that riotous activities remain the provenance of ‘marginal’ (racialised, and/or classed) groups. Through a process of remembering—utilising my personal experiences of place—I found an entry point to challenge this understanding about riotous domains by reflecting on some of the underlying tensions and manifestations of wider historical geographies of a city, and a society. This paper traces the production of a societal fabric(ation) that has worked to reinforce and consolidate existing entitlements to urban space and amenity, which have led to violent turf protection in the past and present.

Fibro Dreaming: Greenwashed Beach-house Development on Australia’s Coasts

New Urbanism has been appropriated in an Australia context and deployed in the marketing of a peri-urban housing development on the far north coast of New South Wales. Mimicking the ‘neo-traditional’ focus in the US, developers offered a resurrection of quintessential Australian beach house architecture ‘lost’ through the suburbanisation of the coast. Symbolic references to a more ‘authentic’ past, represented in the built form, were contemporised using tropes of environmental sustainability and integration with nature. The image of beach housing and a green lifestyle have successfully attracted buyers and housing price premiums. This paper demonstrates that the cultural capitals of ‘heritage’ and ‘greenness’ are valued as distinction to the suburban norm. It is concluded that, while this development appeals to the notion of an enlightened consumer, this new model of development ultimately offers little to challenge issues of environmental degradation associated with other versions of (sub)urban sprawl.

Limited by imagination alone: research methods in cultural geographies:

These are exciting times for cultural geography(ies),1 especially in the often-under-sung realm of methods: spurred by rapidly developing theoretical engagements and pursuit of creative opportunities, our research methods are now as varied as imaginations allow. Through challenges and innovations in methods, cultural geographies have flourished – cultural geographers have embraced not only a proliferation of tools and techniques, but profoundly also an active encouragement of diversity in the very ways we carry out our research, and an articulacy in how we talk and write about our research methods. From the early 20th century, cultural geography built a rich field-based tradition, but also a ‘just do it’ approach to research, where methods were seldom described, discussed, or interrogated. Some 25 years ago, it was still possible for novitiates to be introduced to landscape analysis with a slide of the famous proponent of (old) cultural geography, Carl O. Sauer, pipe in mouth and knapsack beside him, and the quote ‘The mode of locomotion should be slow, the slower the better, and be often interrupted by leisurely halts to sit on vantage points and stop at question marks’.2 At mid-century, while human geography as a whole was captivated by the quantitative revolution and the new methods it unleashed, cultural geography, lacking a well-developed tradition of discussing and engaging methods, stood on the sidelines of the discipline. But it was through reactions to the quantitative revolution that cultural geographies emerged anew, developing richer and more articulate approaches to methods. In so many ways, these arose most significantly from feminist geographies. Feminist geographers had found women’s voices and experiences missing in aggregated statistics, but also in field-based research where women were too-often overlooked; they responded with articulate critique that focused not just on women, but often more broadly on methods.3 Then came the maelstrom of the cultural turn,4 which challenged previous notions of theory-building and 572302 CGJ0010.1177/1474474015572302cultural geographiesShaw et al. research-article2015

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner-city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long-standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australias first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the authors personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.

Land-beach-risk-scape: deciphering the motivators of risk-taking at the beach in Australia

Abstract This article considers risk-taking associated with the popular leisure activity of beach going in Australia. It investigates the risk-taking proclivities and cultural protocols in Australian beach use which, to date, have received little research attention. Drawing on the testimonies of beachgoers, we provide a discussion on how risk can be both voluntary as well as accidental at the Australian beach. While accidental risk-taking can be attributed to a lack of beachscape safety or lack of hazard knowledge, it is often the result of peer, sociocultural and psychodynamic influences that result in the production and reproduction of a pervasive culture of risk-taking. This culture is explored via the influence of the enculturation of risk into Australian beach practices, the attenuation of safety perceptions among beachgoers, and the attraction to risky behaviours that affect those in the beach space. The reproduction of risk in Australian beach use and the feeling of attachment observed among research participants have been conceptualised as the embodied societal subject, as identified through geographic psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic geographic interpretation of participant attitudes and beliefs concerning risk-taking and beach use has been used to theorise how the prevailing discourses and fantasies of Australian beach use shape this site-specific culture of risk.

Measuring the Strength of Human–Animal Bonds in Zoos

ABSTRACT Repeated interactions within individual human and animal dyads can lead to the establishment of human–animal relationships (HARs), which may vary in quality from good to bad, defined in terms of the positivity (e.g., friendly contact, play) or negativity (e.g., aggression) of the interactions on which they are based. Particularly good HARs can be regarded as Human– Animal Bonds (HABs) if they are reciprocal and promote wellbeing in both parties. Although there is extensive evidence of the effects of HARs in agricultural animals and HABs in companion animals, there has been less investigation of these relationships in zoos, even though the development of HARs/HABs between zoo animals and their keepers could have important consequences for the welfare of both. Here we apply a modified version of the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS) in a zoo setting to quantify the strength of attachment of a sample of 22 keepers to the animals in their care at the zoo (ZA), in comparison with their attachment to their companion animals at home (PA). Results showed that mean PA scores (47.54 ± 3.6) were significantly higher than mean ZA scores (32.89 ± 2.6; t = –5.16, df = 13, p < 0.001), indicating stronger attachment to the companion animals. PA scores were lower in keepers who thought it inappropriate to have a bond with a zoo animal, compared with those who deemed it appropriate. Thus, HABs do appear to occur in the zoo context, though they are weaker than those developed in the home. This work also shows that a modified LAPS questionnaire is a suitable instrument for further investigation of HABs in zoos.