Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History: Understanding Australians Consciousness of the Colonial Past

By Skye Krichauff

The written histories, built memorials and spoken narratives of settler descendants often reveal an absence of Aboriginal people in Australian settlers’ historical consciousness and a lack of empathy for those whose lands were taken over. This absence reflects an intellectual and emotional disconnect from Aboriginal people’s experiences and from recent national debates about reconciling contested pasts. The aim of ‘Memory, Place and Settler‒Aboriginal History’ is to understand the evolution and endurance of this disconnect. Drawing on archival research, interviews and fieldwork, Skye Krichauff fuses the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multifaceted processes through which current generations of rural settler descendants come to know the colonial era. Primarily focussing on analysing and comparing the historical consciousness of a specific group of settler descendants – namely those who have grown up on land in the mid-north of South Australia that was occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century – this book is additionally informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal descendants. In addition, as a fifth-generation settler descendant herself, Krichauff utilises her insider status to provide personal insights and reflections with her analysis.

Within spoken narratives and during site visits, settler descendants demonstrate that their consciousness of the colonial past has been formed by growing up in places surrounded by people and objects that provide continuous reminders and physical evidence of the lives of previous generations. This book argues that the primary and most powerful way through which this group knows the colonial past is through lived experience. A recognition that (and how) previous generations’ experiences transfer through the generations is crucial to any investigation into the past known and understood through lived experience. As such, this monograph investigates and contextualises the timing, speed and intensity with which rural districts were occupied, Aboriginal people were dispossessed, and the extent and nature of previous generations’ relations with Aboriginal people.

Included in this monograph is an analysis of public histories (local written histories and plaques, monuments and information boards) which demonstrates a settler-colonial historical epistemology that frames the way mid-northern settler descendants make sense of the past. Memories of personal lived experiences are remembered, understood and articulated – are composed and constructed – using the public language and the meanings available in the wider culture in which individuals live. Krichauff provides concrete examples which demonstrate how, amongst many settler descendants, the memories, family stories and lived experiences of Aboriginal presence and positive settler‒Aboriginal interaction (stories which fall outside the dominant epistemology) are ignored or neglected. While knowledge about the past learned through external sources (books, films, documentaries) can, to varying degrees, shape and inform settler descendants’ consiousness of the colonial era, Krichauff argues that it is the degree of connection with experience that is crucial to understanding the extent to which external knowledge is absorbed and remembered. By connecting Aboriginal people (past and present) with people and places known through everyday life, settler descendants are more likely to intellectually and emotionally connect their own histories with those of the victims of colonialism. This book concludes by demonstrating how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783086832

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Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History

Anthem Studies in Australian History

Anthem Studies in Australian History publishes new and innovative scholarship in Australian history, including work that is concerned with how the legacies of the past resonate in contemporary Australia. The series aims to showcase research in the Indigenous, social, cultural, political, media, environmental and economic histories of Australia. This includes Australian scholarship on the historical dimensions of visual and material cultures as well as relevant work in heritage, museum and memory studies. The series is particularly focused on approaches that locate the histories of Australia in broader postcolonial, transnational or comparative contexts, and examine Australia in the Asia-Pacific region and the world.

Series Editor

Kate Darian-Smith – University of Melbourne, Australia

Editorial Board

Tracey Banivanua Mar – La Trobe University, Australia

Frank Bongiorno – Australian National University, Australia

Anna Clark – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Martin Crotty – University of Queensland, Australia

Bridget Griffin-Foley – Macquarie University, Australia

Anna Johnston – University of Queensland, Australia

Jane Lydon – University of Western Australia, Australia

Chris McAuliffe – Australian National University, Australia

Amanda Nettelbeck – University of Adelaide, Australia

David Nichols – University of Melbourne, Australia

Maria Nugent – Australian National University, Australia

Fiona Paisley – Griffith University, Australia

Keir Reeves – Federation University, Australia

Penny Russell – University of Sydney, Australia

Anja Schwarz – University of Potsdam, Germany

Simon Sleight – King’s College, London

Agnieszka Sobocinska – Monash University, Australia

Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History

Understanding Australians’ Consciousness of the Colonial Past

Skye Krichauff

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2017

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Skye Krichauff 2017

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krichauff, Skye, author.Title: Memory, place and Aboriginal–settler history: understanding Australians’ consciousness of the colonial past / Skye Krichauff.Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2017. | Series: Anthem studies in Australian history | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017020559 | ISBN 9781783086818 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 1783086815 (hardback : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: South Australia – Colonization – Historiography. | South Australia – Race relations – Historiography. | Aboriginal Australians, Treatment of – Australia – South Australia – Historiography. | Pioneers – Australia – South Australia – Historiography. | Frontier and pioneer life – Australia – South Australia – Historiography. | Historiography – Social aspects – Australia – South Australia. | Memory – Social aspects – Australia – South Australia. | Place attachment – Social aspects – Australia – South Australia. | Reconciliation – Social aspects – Australia – South Australia. | Whites – Australia – South Australia – Interviews. | BISAC: HISTORY / Social History. | HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.Classification: LCC DU322 .K74 2017 | DDC 305.899/1509423—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020559

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-681-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-681-5 (Hbk)

The publication of this project has been assisted by grants from the Historical Society of South Australia and the South Australian History Fund

This title is also available as an e-book.

To those, past and present, whose land was taken over, and to those, past and present, who acted with decency and saw the humanity in others

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.Historical Inheritance: Tracing the Past

2.Dwelling in Place: Absorbing the Past

3.The Social Community: Networks of Memory and Attachment to Place

4.The Cultural Circuit: Making Sense of Lived History

5.‘Memory’ to ‘History’: From Verbal Transmission to Text

6.Settler Belonging, Victimhood and Trauma

7.Unsettling the Disconnect

Appendix 1: Interviewees

Appendix 2: Towns/Settlements Whose Public Spaces Were Surveyed

Appendix 3: List of Mid-Northern Written Histories Surveyed

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

0.1The mid-north of South Australia

0.2The Wirrabara and North-East Highland districts in the mid-north of South Australia

0.3Mid-northern South Australia – roads, towns and place names

0.4Hallett Institute

0.5Concrete animals, Hallett Institute

0.6Centenary plaque, Hallett Institute

0.7Cappeedee

0.8View of Booborowie Valley, looking south

1.1View from Dare’s Hill, looking south

1.2Ruins, Piltimittiappa

1.3Anna Dare’s gravestone, Piltimittiappa

1.4Booborowie homestead as seen from the main road

1.5Booborowie woolshed

1.6Fence post and dam, site of Malcolm Murray’s suicide, Avonmore

1.7Harold Gigney and Mabel Mahood, memorial to Alexander Murray, Wirrabara

2.1She-oak forest at Mackerode with the homestead in the background

2.2Mackerode

2.3Bottleneck lying under a tree, station neighbouring Woolgangi

2.4Close-up of bottleneck

2.5Chinese garden, east of Woollana

2.6Remains of Chinese oven, Burnside Farm, Wirrabara

2.7‘King Tree’, White Park, Wirrabara

4.1Members of the Cameron family referred to

4.2Heather and Ron Sizer, Charlton chimney

4.3Remains of timber trough, banks of Doughboy Creek

4.4Heather Sizer, ruins of Tom Long’s dairy, Yellowman Creek

4.5‘The Blacks’ camp’, Doughboy Creek

4.6Boomerang given to George Cameron

4.7Underside of boomerang given to George Cameron

6.1Memorial stone, Mackerode

7.1From left to right, Carlo Sansbury, Ian Warnes, Vincent Branson and Quenten Agius, Woolgangi

7.2Engravings, Ketchowla

PREFACE

How do people know or, more poignantly, make sense of events that precede their own lives? How are experiences passed down through the generations – and how does knowledge of our forebears’ experiences affect our understanding of both broader historical events and the world in which we currently live? What can be gained by distinguishing between different ways the past is known, for example, the past known through memory (by recalling an event, place or person that has been actually experienced) and the past known through abstract means (such as through lectures, books, information boards)? These are some of the rather vague and general questions I have grappled with while trying to understand how societies live with historical injustices or, more particularly, how non-Aboriginal Australians know, make sense of and relate to the historical injustice of Aboriginal dispossession.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence I was completely ignorant about the Aboriginal people who belonged to the land my forebears occupied in the 1870s and on which I grew up. It was not until I was at university in the early 1990s that I began to learn how Europeans came to be in this country. This newly acquired knowledge shook me and made me question everything I thought I knew about the world in which I lived. I was shocked and sickened: at the injustice and manner of the original owners’ dispossession; that our whole society, our whole legal and parliamentary system, was based on such a fundamental, massive immoral act which no one seemed to speak about; that I had remained completely unaware of this for the first 20 years of my life and had never had any cause to question or think about European presence here; that when I told others what I had recently learned, no one seemed particularly interested.

The general lack of discussion and concern about how Europeans came to be here which prevailed in Australia throughout much of the twentieth century has, in certain ways, been superseded. Now, in the twenty-first century there is greater awareness and acknowledgement of the violence of European occupation and the multifaceted injustices Aboriginal people suffered and continue to suffer as a result of colonialism. The walk for reconciliation in 1988, the history wars of the 1990s and 2000s, the Mabo decision and legislative recognition of Native Title, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generation, all signal that the nation as a whole is more alert and sensitive to our problematic history. There are now laws, policies, councils and committees to promote reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. But while this may make some Australians more alert and sensitive to some aspects of Aboriginal‒settler history, it does not necessarily translate into a widespread understanding or empathy for Aboriginal suffering, or to non-Aboriginal Australians making the connection between the violence of the past, the fundamental injustice of dispossession and their own lives.

In the pages that follow, I trace the path I have taken – my reflections on my personal experiences, the research I have conducted with numerous settler and Aboriginal descendants, the archival research I have completed and the work and insights of scholars who have informed and influenced my thinking – to gain a deeper understanding into what it is that inhibits settler descendants from connecting their own histories with those of Aboriginal people and from establishing a genuine and empathetic connection with Aboriginal people, past and present.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I acknowledge the people who so generously shared their time, stories and knowledge with me and unhesitatingly agreed to the recording of our conversations. Too numerous to thank individually, a list of everyone I met with appears in Appendix 1. I would like to thank all these people for their warmth and hospitality, openness and honesty. Several people I spoke with during the course of this project have since died. I am grateful for the chance to have met or reconnected with them and to have recorded their memories, reflections on life and insights.

The research for this study would not have been possible without an Australian Postgraduate Award. An additional grant was provided by the Australian Research Council for ‘Social Memory and Historical Justice’ Discovery Project DP0877630. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Historical Society of South Australia, History SA (through the South Australian History Fund), the institutional support of the University of Adelaide and mentoring support provided by Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow Joy Damousi during a research mentoring program held at the University of Melbourne. Christine Horn kindly compiled the three maps which appear in the introduction. Klaus Neumann and Ian McShane provided valuable insights and constructive criticism while this study was being undertaken. More recently, Amanda Nettelbeck has been a generous and encouraging unofficial mentor.

I would also like to acknowledge all the people ‘from home’ – from Hallett in particular but from the mid-north in general – who have been in my thoughts constantly over the past few years. The strong bonds formed during my childhood and adolescent years have influenced my research and thinking. The patience, laughter and enduring interest in my work shown by other friends has sustained me, as have my immediate family who constantly ground me, force me from my laptop and provide the best distraction from work needing to be done. To Henry and Mary Krichauff, Sam, Emily, Jemima and Hamish Crawford, thank you all for being there and for being you.

INTRODUCTION

I am driving up to Cappeedee, a sheep and wheat property situated in the Booborowie Valley, approximately two hundred kilometres north of the South Australian capital city of Adelaide and seven kilometres west of the township of Hallett. Cappeedee has been the home of my mother’s family for five generations. I am returning to Cappeedee to interview my cousin and uncle to further my understanding of how settler descendants who have close connections with land occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century are conscious of the colonial past. In particular, I’m interested to learn whether and how Aboriginal people feature in the narratives and understandings of this group.

I grew up on Popperinghi, a property which neighbours Cappeedee to the north. When I was young, Cappeedee was the home of my cousins (who were close in age to my brother and me) and my uncle and aunt. As my mother’s childhood home and a place which was part of our everyday lives, in many ways Cappeedee felt like our home too. We learned about our maternal family’s connection with Cappeedee as we went about our lives – through playing in the house, gardens and sheds when we were younger, and exploring the hills and creek lines and helping our fathers with the sheep work when we were older. We grew up absorbing stories and knowledge of Cappeedee through being in place and through listening to my mother’s, uncles’, grandparents’ and great-aunts’ conversations. My maternal family’s consciousness of the colonial past and deep attachment and sense of belonging to Cappeedee transferred to us.

My parents sold Popperinghi in the late 1990s. My uncle and aunt have semi-retired to Adelaide, and their son, Angus, has moved into the big house. I haven’t been home, back to Hallett, for almost ten years. I drive up the Mt Bryan Valley, between the towns of Burra and Mt Bryan, past the properties Three Trees, Woollana and Mackerode. Massive wind farms now cover the bare hills on the western side of the highway. Not long after I visited Cappeedee, a South Australian Museum employee told me that Ngadjuri descendants had concerns over the positioning of the wind farms. Ngadjuri (which translates to ‘we men’) is the name currently used to refer to the original owners of a vast country which extends over much of the mid-north and incorporates the Booborowie and Mt Bryan valleys.¹ No descendants of the original owners have lived in the North-Eastern Highlands for over a century (I discuss the historical absence of Ngadjuri from this district in Chapter 1). In 1995, a historian working at the South Australian Museum informed some descendants of Barney Waria of their Ngadjuri connections.² Since then other families with Ngadjuri ancestry have been identified. Some have begun the process of connecting with their ancestral land.

Figure 0.1 The mid-north of South Australia.

Figure 0.2 The Wirrabara and North-East Highland districts in the mid-north of South Australia.

Having learned of some murders that occurred in the vicinity of Mt Bryan during the colonial years, Ngadjuri descendants were worried the installation of the wind turbines would disturb what the museum employee referred to as a massacre site. I had come across references to these murders several years earlier while assisting in the compilation of a register of frontier violence in South Australia. Because the murders occurred in a district I knew well, I closely scrutinised every historical record I could find to learn all I could about the circumstances and those involved. The archival records are far from conclusive. Two hundred sheep from the flock of shepherd Charles Spratt (an employee of pastoralist John Hallett) were found in the possession of local Aboriginal people. Principal suspect William Moore Carter initially told the local justice of the peace that in recovering the sheep he had killed one man with a sword, set a dog on a pregnant woman and given the baby to the dog to eat.³ This shocking detail is not readily forgotten; it haunted those investigating the case in 1844 and it continues to haunt me. Six weeks later, Carter changed his statement, saying he saw ‘no dead natives’ nor believed any killed. Witness Pari Kudnutya (alias Paddy) provided an alternative account: a man wounded in four places with a sword died three days later, a woman wounded with a gun died one day later and two other men were wounded but recovered.⁴ The murdered man’s name was Nyunirra Bourka, and the woman was referred to as Maryann.⁵ A bureaucratic trail of orders, statements and reports indicate that those in senior positions of authority – the Protector of Aborigines, the governor and the attorney general – took these murders seriously. Carter absconded, but Spratt and four other shepherds who witnessed the attack were imprisoned while awaiting their Supreme Court trial.⁶

While a few museum staff, historians and Ngadjuri descendants are aware of these deaths and despite a description of Carter’s crime being included in a local history book published in 1985,⁷ they are not common knowledge or part of the social memory of those who live in the area I refer to as the North-Eastern Highlands.⁸ Unlike other areas across Australia, there are no local equivalents to Bluff Rock, Elliston or Coniston in this district.⁹ As a child, as a teenager and while researching this project, I never caught a whiff – from grandparents, neighbours, friends, pub talk or schoolyard gossip – of settler violence. No stories of poisonings, shootings or pushing off cliffs, no stories of Aboriginal ‘treachery’ – of shepherds’ heads in camp ovens, spearings, clubbings or dismemberings. Nor did I hear stories of nineteenth-century cross-cultural interaction and accommodation, of settler benevolence or of ‘amusing’, ‘childlike’ or ‘loyal’ Aboriginal people.

In seeking to learn how ubiquitous this lack of stories was and to further understand it, I conducted a series of interviews and site visits with settler descendants with generational connections to land in the mid-north, southern Flinders Ranges and the Yorke and Eyre peninsulas of South Australia. Regarding my use of the term ‘settler descendant’, I recognise the word ‘settler’ has a deceptively benign and domesticated ring.¹⁰ I respect the political act made by scholars who use the present tense by referring to all non-Aboriginal people who live in this land as ‘settlers’, ‘colonists’ or ‘invaders’ – I too see settler colonialism as a process which is ongoing and incomplete. However, I aim to employ terms which are specific and appropriate to the people, actions and the era being discussed. Without precision, distinctions between diverse groups of people (past and present) are subsumed and lost. Indiscriminately and uniformly referring to different groups who have distinct histories, inhabit diverse geographical districts and have different lifestyles and occupations under homogenising terms such as settlers, colonists or ‘white Australians’ inhibits nuanced and accurate analysis. I use the term settler descendant not unthinkingly nor because I seek to mask the politics or the power inherent in the occupation of another people’s land but because I perceive that it most succinctly describes the mindset, lifestyles, attitudes, ways of being and lived experiences of my interviewees. My interviewees’ forebears were a specific type of colonist – they occupied land for agriculture and settled on land they purchased from the colonial government. Their descendants (my interviewees, their parents and (for many) grandparents) did not settle but were/are settled.

In addition, I interviewed and went on site visits with people who identify as Ngadjuri and Nukunu. Regarding these terms, we do not know what nineteenth-century Aboriginal people called themselves. In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist Norman Tindale identified people from the mid-north as Nukunu and Ngaduri. These terms have slowly but increasingly been adopted since then. When referring to current descendants known to identify as Nukunu or Ngadjuri, I employ those terms. When quoting or referring to the sentiments of nineteenth-century settlers and their descendants, I adopt the terms of reference used by those I am referring to.

Figure 0.3 Mid-northern South Australia – roads, towns and place names.

Although interviews and site visits with Nukunu and Ngadjuri people and previous work conducted with other Aboriginal groups inform my perspective and analysis, this study analyses the historical consciousness of a specific group of non-Aboriginal people. For several reasons, I focus on people who grew up on or near land which was occupied and purchased by their forebears in the colonial era and which has been continually owned and inhabited by their family. First, because their connections to the places in which they grew up extend back to the nineteenth century, these settler descendants are presumably more likely to have stories and information about the district’s traditional owners. Second, because their families have continuously owned and made a living from the same piece of land, their implication in and benefit from Aboriginal dispossession is more obvious and direct than many other Australians. Third, as a member of this group, I can draw on my own experiences to demonstrate the implicit and often subconscious ways through which settler descendants are aware of the colonial past.

Place is crucial to this group of settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past. Although many South Australians have ties to rural districts, and although mid-northern public histories are typical of those across the state (and indeed Australia), the places and historical consciousness of the people of this study have not previously been the focus of a comprehensive or sustained scholarly investigation. I interviewed and went on site visits with many people living in rural South Australia, but, in order to provide the context and detail necessary to demonstrate and analyse the concrete workings of memory, in this monograph I contain my analysis to people who have connections with either of two specific geographical areas, namely the North-East Highland and Wirrabara districts (see figure 0.3) of South Australia’s mid-north.

In the Wirrabara district I principally draw on interviews and site visits conducted with six descendants of George Wauchope Cameron of Doughboy Creek, namely members of the Cameron, Sizer and Milne families (the Milne family property is White Park). In the North-East Highland district I focus primarily on interviews conducted with the following people: Melva McInnes of Three Trees; three descendants of Gustav Gebhardt of Mackerode; two descendants of Billy Dare, who occupied land Out-East of Mt Bryan; and five members of my maternal family of Cappeedee. Lest my study be interpreted as parochial and inward looking, I would like to make it clear that of these families, only my own and the Gebhardts were well known to me before I began my research (although I had heard of the Dares and met Geoff Dare several times in my youth). The remainder of those referred to throughout this monograph were unknown to me – as was the Wirrabara district. I have consciously chosen to include my family in my research as a means to demonstrate my awareness of my own and my family’s implication in the colonial process and to show that I do not distance myself from those I investigate. I feel more comfortable analysing and critiquing settler descendants’ historical consciousness knowing that my observations and comments are equally applicable to myself and my family.

Although my focus is on a specific group of settler-descended Australians, my findings regarding the concrete workings of memory and the importance of place, continuity of people in place, family stories and lived experiences (particularly during the formative childhood and adolescent years) can be usefully applied to a variety of groups living in diverse settings. In recognising and analysing the dynamic and dialectical relationship between knowledge of the past acquired through abstract, external means (through ‘history’) and knowledge of the past which is known internally and which has been acquired through everyday life (through family stories and dwelling in place), I build on existing scholarship while providing concrete and original examples which can be utilised by scholars working in the broad field of memory studies. My finding that the past which is most powerfully known and readily related to is the past that is known and understood through lived experience can be usefully applied to studies investigating the historical consciousness of people across the globe who dwell in the places of their forebears. This finding also provides a useful point of contrast or departure for studies investigating the historical consciousness of members of other perpetrator groups who likewise display an emotional and intellectual disconnect with the history and suffering of members of the victim group.

There is a tendency among some scholars to conflate and homogenise historical and current rural experiences by, for example, referring to all who occupied land in rural districts during the colonial period under the homogenous term settlers; understanding sparsely settled rural regions distant from the capital cities in the colonial period as ‘the frontier’; assuming those who have generational connections with rural districts are closer to the violence of the frontier than are other non-Aboriginal Australians; assuming that people living in rural areas are more likely to have contact with Aboriginal people than people living in urban areas.¹¹ However, the occupation of Australia varied from colony to colony, region to region, district to district. By focussing on two distinct geographical regions I can demonstrate how, just as foundation myths differ between settler-colonial nations and Australian states, they also differ between regions. Factors including the following: the historical era in which each colony was established and the political implications of such timing; regional variations in geography, topography, vegetation, water and food resources; distinctions in the timing, speed and intensity with which districts were occupied and settled; differences in the type of colonist (squatter, pastoralist or freeholder, selector or labourer, place of origin, reasons for emigrating, education levels and previous experiences); distinctions between different Aboriginal groups and individuals – all introduce significant contingencies which affect the historical consciousness of local residents. This study demonstrates why broad generalisations (apparent in fields such as settler-colonial studies, the memory of frontier violence, cross-cultural history and the social memory of Australian colonialism) which may be valid at the national level are not necessarily useful or accurate at the local or regional level.

By closely analysing and comparing Wirrabara and North-East Highlander settler descendants’ historical consciousness, I am able to highlight the diversity and complexity of historical and ongoing experiences of colonisation and, in doing so, to complicate and provide nuance to the findings and assumptions of scholars working in a variety of fields. This detailed study challenges misleading and inaccurate generalisations and assumptions that inhibit recognition of differences in the extent and calibre of historical cross-cultural relations and the remembrance of these relations among current generations. For example, contrary to scholars who have found non-Aboriginal Australians are becoming increasingly anxious about their presence in Australia and insecure and uncertain regarding their right to belong,¹² I found mid-northern settler descendants to have a firm sense of emplacement and belonging (I examine why this is so in Chapters 2, 3 and 6). Regarding the seemingly ubiquitous acceptance among scholars (generally from Australia’s eastern states) that a sense of victimhood prevails in white Australians’ historical consciousness (which supposedly has its origins in nineteenth-century settlers and their descendants’ perceptions of Australia as an alien and inhospitable land, the trauma of migration and a perceived battle with the land), I demonstrate (in Chapter 6) that there is no historical or current sense of victimhood or struggle with the land among my interviewees.

The Disconnect

Scholars investigating the history and memory of settler–Aboriginal relations in other areas of Australia have noted that Aboriginal people are frequently part of the social memory of small rural communities. Indeed, remembering or referring to the presence of Aboriginal people provides additional proof of the length of time a family has lived in the area.¹³ In some areas of the mid-north, Ngadjuri and Nukunu people’s presence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is recalled by local residents. Conducting research in the early 1970s, local historian Nancy Robinson recorded stories of Ngadjuri people regularly visiting Mannanarie, Hornsdale and Appila in the early twentieth century.¹⁴ Settler descendants with connections to Riverton and Watervale told me similar stories. In the Wirrabara area, I was informed of and shown sites where corroborees were held and where a group regularly camped until the early 1920s. People from this area spoke of ‘the Reserve’ (the Baroota Reserve) over ‘the other side of the range’. Thus, although sparse and fragmentary, I did not find a uniform absence of stories about Aboriginal people in mid-northern settler descendants’ narratives. What I did find pervasive and widespread during preliminary telephone conversations and early in interviews was a sense that certain aspects of the colonial past – namely cross-cultural interaction (violent or friendly) and the dispossession of Aboriginal people – were not relevant to my interviewees’ lives or histories nor to the histories of their families or districts.

In 1968, anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner highlighted the farcical nature of the assumption that the land of the Australian continent was disposable at the time of British occupation because, as ‘waste and desert’, it was unowned. Stanner pointed out that this assumption, ‘so large, grand and remote from actuality’, is one of the ‘barely acknowledged elements of the real structure of Australia’.¹⁵ Referring to the fable of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, Stanner described non-Aboriginal Australians’ continuing lack of acknowledgement of the enormous, ‘royal’, historical injustice of Aboriginal dispossession as ‘the great Australian silence’.¹⁶ Like the complicit crowd who perpetuated the sham of the Emperor’s naked parade, Stanner argued that the widespread inattention given to Aboriginal people was not a matter of ‘absentmindedness’ but of ‘averting of one’s gaze’; ‘what may well have begun as a simple forgetting […] turned into habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’.¹⁷ He was optimistic that recent and forthcoming research would break the lack of acknowledgement and concern evident among non-Aboriginal Australians.

Providing historical and scholarly context, Ann Curthoys and Mitchell Rolls point out that at the time of Stanner’s oft-referred-to Boyer lectures, numerous papers and books expressly concerned with Aboriginal people had been published and reissued, policies concerning Aboriginal people were being debated in parliament and the actions of Aboriginal advocacy groups and their non-Aboriginal supporters were being reported in the media through newspapers, journals, magazines and radio broadcasts.¹⁸ The visual and performing arts as