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ARTICLE

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(1): 108134 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305050150

Driving by
Visiting Australian colonial monuments
JANE LYDON
Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University, Australia

ABSTRACT
The tempo of the long-distance car journey and the locales constituted
by road-side monuments define the itinerary of this article, which visits
four widely-scattered examples of (post)-colonial Australian placemaking: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument near Mt Isa in Queenslands redneck deep north; Victorias Grampians/Gariwerd National
Park; the site of the Blacktown Native Institution in western suburban
Sydney; the Coniston Massacre Memorial in Central Australia. As
Australian society attempts to come to terms with its colonial past,
these places express public narratives structured by physical acts of
remembering and knowing. They reveal a profound shift from settler
assertions of the possession of landscape and history effected through
practical techniques of inscribing the land, to the acknowledgement of
the Aboriginal experience, opening new spaces for reconciliation
through harnessing the inertia and insistence of place.
KEYWORDS
Aboriginal Australia Blacktown Native Institution colonialism
Coniston Massacre Grampians-Gariwerd Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi
landscape memorialization

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INTRODUCTION
In Beneath Clouds (2002), Ivan Sens acclaimed teenage road movie, two
young Aboriginal people walk, ride and train through the landscape of
south-eastern Australia. They are attempting to escape the ugliness of
childhoods shaped by racism and poverty, but at every turn, their choices
and experiences are shown inevitably to be shaped by inherited disadvantage. Most clearly, the insistent past emerges by the roadside as a tyre is
changed: an elderly Aunty points to the mountain scarp looming above
them and tells the kids that this is the site of a terrible nineteenth century
massacre, where many innocent people were driven to their deaths by
White troops. The menace and fear of this memory place are evoked by
the cameras cautious glances up and back as they drive away. The vicarious knowledge of film is as close as non-Aboriginal people will come to
understanding place as visceral fear, marked by memories of dispossession
and violence. But this is certainly the way that most Australians experience
the country from the window of a car, or by the side of a road.
In this article, I explore the ways that public understandings of the
colonial past in Australia are structured by physical acts of remembering
and knowing, as settler possession of landscape and history is effected
through practical techniques of inscribing the land. I adopt the stance of
the driver: safe, mobile, passing through, rather than the locals more
intimate perspective, or even that of an expert observer, making claims to
comprehensive landscape survey. Australians are used to driving vast
distances, and travel across the landscape is governed by the rhythm of the
car journey, the dictates of petrol, food and drink and the need to stretch
ones legs. For the driver, signposts are the only visible clue as to what lies
beyond the road-line horizon historic markers, scenic routes, wineries,
picnic areas the footnotes to the linear narrative of the trip that add detail
and incident, relieving the monotony of slow-changing vistas. Our experience of monuments and tourist sights constitute the itinerary of the
journey, a structured, common, but individually navigated movement
across the map, steered by signboards and whims as much as maps. The
moments when we stop and emerge from the car to engage with these
places become our memories of Ballarat, Dimboola and Nhill.
When travelling across Australian country, historic monuments, as
physical traces of the past, assume a prominent position. Somewhere
between landscape and artefact, such places individualize collective
memory at the same time as they express a consensual narrative history.
Where some recent theorists concerned with diaspora have stressed the
dislocation and detachment of travel (Clifford, 1997), I emphasize particularized on-the-ground experience as Barbara Bender has argued (2001,
contra Aug, 1995: 86), the travellers space is not a non-space but rather
a locale inflected with specific, contextual meaning. The sights and

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embodied observations of the road trip shape Australians sense of identity

and the past, forming a particular kind of link between individuals and the
collective narratives constituted by road-side installations, monuments,
signs a discourse joining tangible, textual, visual and embodied experiences of place.
Solid, apparently self-explanatory, earnest messengers from the past,
they might be thought to have lost their meaning in an age of new media.
Who needs to visit such places when immediate and compelling narratives
such as Beneath Clouds may explain the past to us? Yet as many have noted,
the ever-swifter transformations of modernity might indeed have prompted
a sense of alienation from history, seemingly heralding the loss of historical
consciousness but at the same time they have generated materialist forms
of memory that fetishize tangible relics.1 Andreas Huyssen draws attention
to the paradox of post-modern memory as articulated through technological media, whose speed and simultaneity have erased the perception of
spatial and temporal difference, yet which is marked by a veritable obsession with the past, a memorial or museal sensibility (1995: 253). As he
argues, the spread of amnesia is matched by a relentless fascination with
memory and the past: the museum, the monument and the memorial have
taken on new life in part because they offer materiality, denied by the screen
image. Their permanence, formerly denounced as deadening reification,
now attracts a public dissatisfied with channel-flicking. These places are
created for consumption by the drive-by visitor, but their often-contested
meanings are determined by a larger, less tangible context of collective
narratives and practices constituted by diverse media and institutions.

VISIBILIT Y AND AT TENTION

Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.
Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the charges made against monuments is their sluggishness, their

stolid inability to hold our attention in the active, ever-moving present.
Robert Musil (1987: 61) famously drew attention to the paradox between
their ostensible function, to attract notice, and their impregnation with
something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like
water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment. They
remain self-contained and detached from our lives, absolving us personally
of the need to remember, simultaneously reminding, but also boring us like
a nagging parent. It is only when their seamless force-field is breached, for
example by defacement (a baseball cap turned backwards on Captain
Cook, a slash of paint through text), that they seize our attention again.
Where it is argued that there is a need to remember actively in the present

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as in the case of Holocaust memorials such inertia and displacement

becomes a problem. A large literature has emerged (e.g. Friedlander, 1992;
Neumann, 2000; Young, 1992, 1993) that addresses questions of collective
remembrance and forgetting, much of it focusing upon the Holocaust. To
overcome the inertia of the monument, German artists have deployed
tactics of ephemerality and interaction that re-activate the visitors attention; the painfully challenging space of the counter-monument probes the
very notion of a memorial, as in Jochin and Esther Gerz 1986 Hamburg
obelisk that visitors may cover with memorial graffiti. As the soft lead
surface is scored over, the monument slowly slips into the ground, so that
one day all will be buried except for a stone inscribed to the monument
itself. Defining itself in opposition to the traditional memorial by provoking, interacting, inviting desecration, forcing the burden of memory upon
the viewer, this installation illustrates concisely the possibilities and limitations of all memorials everywhere (Young, 1992: 277).
Yet archaeologists have revealed how the inertia of monumental landscape often shapes human affairs below the level of consciousness (Gosden
and Head, 1994; Hirsch and OHanlon, 1995; Tilley, 1994; Yamin and
Metheny, 1996). For example, Richard Bradley (1998: 71) has argued of
Neolithic megaliths that instead of seeing them as a result of a new, settled
way of life, we should understand a settled way of life as acceptable within
conditions created by monumental architecture. New configurations of the
landscape expressed a new attitude toward the natural world, and generated a new sense of time by representing a continuous relationship between
the living and the dead. Some have examined the role of isolable monuments within the larger, shifting horizons of landscape, seeking to dissolve
artificial distinctions of analytical scale between human interaction with
place (Knapp and Ashmore, 1999: 58). In their durability and constant
visibility, such monuments may remain in human consciousness whether or
not they are in active use. As Musil noted, their physical durability allows
us to forget about them as we go about our daily lives but this does not
mean that they have lost their power over us.
At the same time, however, their meanings are unstable, altering according to context and viewer. While monuments appear to represent massive
continuity, they are also capable of being given fresh meaning in accordance with societys new needs. Within contested landscapes physical traces
of the past are given meaning within larger narratives of self and nation
(Bender, 1993; Bender and Winer, 2001; Hall, 2001). Their significance is
articulated through present-day struggles and relationships. Such conflicts
are often about the desire for acknowledgement and remembrance, as the
foundations of identity in the present: the inclusion of the AfricanAmerican experience in memorials to the American Civil War (Shackel,
2003), or the priority of a Hindu temple over the Babri Masjid Mosque at
Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India (Colley, 1995; Gopal, 1993). The irony of

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material culture is that its very inertia lends it an objectivity and autonomy
that appears to evade ideology, seemingly reflecting the natural state of
things, yet its meaning is mutable, altering according to circumstance. Its
very durability allows its meanings to be interpreted and re-interpreted
over long periods of time, in processes of re-valuation and re-inscription.
The drive-by experience of Australias landscape stretches between
these poles of inattention and visibility, boredom and coercion, fluidity and
inertia. Seeing memorials within a larger landscape of practices and
relationships reveals the multiple perspectives that give them significance.
Australian colonial attempts to assert possession of the continent across its
vast and differentiated frontier have drawn upon this potential to naturalize power relations by creating statements of presence, displacing or erasing
traces of former occupation, and establishing spatial control over human
behaviour.

ABORIGINAL PLACE-MAKING
Australian colonial histories, often centred upon monuments and other
heavy tangible statements, have displaced or over-written a long history
of lighter Aboriginal place-making. Western monumentalizing practices
contrast with systems of knowledge in Aboriginal societies, which traditionally are land-based (Langton, 2002; Morphy, 1995; Rose, 1992, 1996; Taylor,
2000). Aboriginal understandings of the Australian landscape are structured by their relationship with the ancestral powers, or Dreamings, who
created the world as they walked the earth, making places, people and
culture and marking the signs of their activities into the earth (Rose, 2000:
42). Human-made rock-art is one form of Dreamings, as are many landscape features that appear natural to Europeans. Aboriginal people reunite with Dreamings and articulate relationships to people and place by
replicating the movements of the ancestral beings making these designs
on the body, in sand, or on canvas for the art market (Watson, 2003).
Following colonization, Aboriginal peoples relationship to land, as
expressed through their inscriptions upon it, sometimes took new or altered
forms. For example, rock-art paintings of White men were produced for
sorcery against Europeans, as at Emu Gallery, Cape York (Russell and
McNiven, 1998; Trezise, 1971). In other cases, rock-art re-affirmed territorial ownership: in Wardaman country, Northern Territory, land ownership was traditionally legitimated by association with specific Dreaming
identities expressed visually as rock paintings, linking specific places to
specific clans. Large paired anthropomorphs such as the Lightning Brothers
date mostly to the post-contact period when they increased in size, possibly
signalling the emergence of a specific form of territorial marker (David et
al., 1994). David and Wilson (2002: 445) liken certain forms of rock-art

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Darwin

NORTHERN
TERRITORY
Mt Isa

QUEENSLAND

Alice Springs

WESTERN
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH
AUSTRALIA

Brisbane

NEW SOUTH
WALES

Perth

3 Sydney

Adelaide

1
2
3
4

2 VICTORIA

Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, near Mt Isa, Queensland

Melbourne

Grampians-Gariwerd National Park, Western District, Victoria

Blacktown Native Institution, Western Sydney, New South Wales
Coniston Massacre Memorial, Yurrkuru (Brooks Soak), Northern Territory
0

200

400

Kilometres

TASMANIA
Hobart

Figure 1 Location plan showing places mentioned in the text: (1)

Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, near Mt Isa, Queensland. (2) GrampiansGariwerd National Park, Western District, Victoria. (3) Blacktown Native
Institution, Western Sydney, New South Wales. (4) Coniston Massacre
Memorial,Yurrkuru (Brooks Soak), Northern Territory
such as the Lightning Brothers to graffiti, as a mobilisation of the right to
be-in-place in a context of resistance.2
Less is known of Aboriginal inscription of place following colonization
in the south-east, where dispossession was earliest, most rapid, and had
more devastating effects than elsewhere. The distinction between the
densely settled regions of south-eastern Australia the states of New South
Wales and Victoria, with their coastal fringe of cities and what has often
been termed remote Australia the often hot, arid, sparsely settled
regions of the north and inland is both geographical and historical,
shaping very different attitudes and relationships in the present. For
example, although Sydney was the site of the first permanent White settlement in 1788, the colonization of Victoria, the most southerly mainland
state (Figure 1), began in 1835, when Melbourne was established and an
influx of pastoralists spread inland with disastrous consequences. A range
of strategies justified conquest and oppression, such as defining Aboriginality as primitive and static, and a blindness toward the indigenous
peoples history of transformation and survival.

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EUROPEAN PLACE-MAKING
The indigenous occupants became virtually invisible within the landscape,
until the emergence of the Aboriginal rights movement during the 1960s,
closely allied to the intellectual critique of colonialism. Between 1991 and
2001, reconciliation was a policy funded by the federal government
(http://www.reconciliationaustralia.org).3 These shifts in public discourse
about Australian history, and the relationship it constructs between White
settlers and Aboriginal people, are expressed in the material places that
shape our experiences of the present landscape as we drive across it. Some
monuments generally built before 1970 explicitly reflect colonialist
views of Aboriginality, in commemorating treacherous Aboriginal killers,
faithful Aboriginal guides of White explorers, or the death of the last of
their tribe, while a mere handful of monuments from this period record
Aboriginal artists, sportsmen or workers. This pattern reproduces the logic
of assimilation (Bulbeck, 1991), providing the unity needed for a national
foundation. By denying the conflict which characterized colonial history,
and conflating diverse perspectives, a singular monument reconciles
different, perhaps incommensurable experiences, obscuring the ambiguities
of the past (Bennett, 1993). By confining Aboriginal people to the period
before White settlement in these apartheid histories, they could be
enfolded into a monolithic national narrative beginning in deep-time and
unfolding into the future (Bennett, 1988: 13).
But during the 1990s, alternative, dissenting Aboriginal voices began to
be heard, reflected in debates over memorials. These monuments themselves have become the site of sometimes violent contestation in the
present, serving as an explicit focus of conflicting views about identity,
tradition and the past. Such conflict has been especially fierce in regions
where traditional links to land are under dispute, or where racism is an
overt element in daily social relations. I begin by visiting one particularly
clear example of a disputed monument in the deep north, where racial
tension often emerges into plain sight.

The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi monument, Mt Isa

If you happened to be driving along the Cloncurry Highway in far north
Queensland, approaching Mt Isa (a large redneck mining town) from the
east, about 7 km outside town you would notice a large signpost and
memorial. If you wanted a break, if you were a tourist, an archaeologist or
generally interested in local history, you might pull over and get out to have
a look (Figure 1). This is the Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi monument, which has
served as a highly visible site of contention among the local community
since its construction in 1988. The Kalkadoons (and Mitakoodi) were the

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Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, vandalized. (Ken Kippen, 2002)

areas traditional owners, who, unusually, were highly respected by Europeans for their military strength in resisting invasion, for example in a clash
at Battle Mountain near Kajabbi in 1884 (Armstrong, 1980; Bulbeck, 1991:
1756). One panel of the monument reads:
YOU WHO PASS BY
ARE NOW ENTERING THE ANCIENT
TRIBAL LANDS OF THE KALKADOON/MITAKOODI
DISPOSSESSED BY THE EUROPEAN
HONOUR THEIR NAME
BE BROTHER AND SISTER TO THEIR DESCENDANTS

The monument was built as part of the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations by

Dr David Harvey Sutton, a Cloncurry doctor who is well known in the area.
Visually and textually, the monument represents the Kalkadoon as noble
savages inevitably cut down in the path of European civilization (Furniss,
2000, 2001). It was built near the Corella River, which is said by some
observers to be the boundary of the Kalkadoon and Mitakoodi peoples.
During the 1990s, this monument was continuously subjected to vandalism
(Figures 2, 3). Archaeologist Ken Kippen spent much of 1996 in the Mount
Isa region conducting research, and recalls that the text was continuously
defaced with graffiti (you know the kind of thing: Black bastards, Black
cunts, etc.). Ken and Kalkadoon elder Alf Barton made a trip to the
monument every two or three weeks with a can of solvent to clean the sign.
He states (Kippen, 2003, personal communication) that:

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Figure 3

Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument, vandalized. (Ken Kippen, 2002)

This became an automatic task, a ritual I suppose, while I was there. Wed
drive out not even read the graffiti really expecting it to be there clean
the sign tend the monument have a cup of tea and have a discussion
about the research I was doing on the station . . . Of course, apart from any
other factors Native Title concerns were to the forefront in the region.4

As he implies, the perception of Native Title as a threat to White property

rights has been a source of heightened tension and distrust in rural Australia
since the 1992 Mabo decision overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius.
Although it has proved a challenge to Aboriginal groups to demonstrate
unbroken attachment to land to the satisfaction of the courts especially
in settled regions where disruption to traditional culture was most severe
(Lilley, 2000) popular fears of land claims became rife. That year (1992),
frictions literally reached flashpoint, when the monument was destroyed by
explosives (Furniss, 2000: 191, North West Star, 13 August 1992: 1), although
it was later re-built. Significantly, a monument to Burke and Wills, the first
European explorers in the region in 1861, stands untouched a mere 1 km
down the road.
Here community tensions have been played out around the monument
as an objectification of Aboriginal culture and dispossession. Kalkadoon
leaders have used this very traditional Western form of memorial to challenge the idea that they were destroyed at Battle Mountain, as well as to
assert a new status in Queensland society. The displacement of these people
from their traditional lands continues in the attempts by local opponents to
efface their memory through literal over-writing. While in a sense it could
be seen as an epitaph, reminiscent of the many memorials to the last of

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their race, the monuments explicit reference to colonial dispossession,

traditional ownership and the survival of the Kalkadoon has proved more
challenging, re-opening wounds rather than laying ghosts to rest. Fundamentally, the status of the Kalkadoon as warriors defeated in battle seems
to have provoked local opponents.
Many non-Aboriginal Australians find it hard to re-conceptualize
colonization as a war. Only during the 1970s did a now-substantial historiography begin to reveal the dimensions of conflict, including European
violence, Aboriginal resistance, and its continuing effects (Reynolds, 1990
[1981]; Rowley, 1972 [1970]). Such recognition fundamentally alters our
perception of this historical process, and points the way towards a salutary
new public conception of the Aboriginal people. You fight wars against
enemies, not helpless and unresisting victims. You defeat them, rather than
writing their struggles out of your history (Rothwell, 1998: 10). Currently,
a heated public and academic debate is being waged between those
(Windschuttle, 2002) who challenge Black Armband history (Blainey,
1993) with its emphasis on conflict and the Aboriginal casualties, and those
who defend it (Manne, 2003).
Suggestions that the Aboriginal fallen should be commemorated in the
same way as war heroes have been met with resistance and ridicule.
Historian Henry Reynolds first suggested that the Aboriginal dead should
be inscribed on our memorials, cenotaphs, boards of honour, and even in
the pantheon of national heroes (1981: 201), while intense disputation
surrounded the attempt to erect a memorial to Aboriginal guerilla fighter
Yagan in Western Australia (Bulbeck, 1991: 1734). In his study of
Australian war memorials, Ken Inglis (1998) controversially proposed that
the National War Memorial in Canberra should recognize war-like encounters between black and white. Despite widespread outrage expressed by
those who believed that such acknowledgement would undermine the
meaning of this national sacred place, the then-Governor-General, Sir
William Deane, known for his sympathy toward Aboriginal people, also
noted the lack of such memorials to the colonial conflicts of the nineteenth
century, certainly almost none, at least of an official kind, to the Aborigines who were slaughtered in the black wars of that period. This repudiation forms a sharp contrast with the trend among non-Aboriginal
Australians to commemorate the sacrifice of national war heroes. Celebrating Anzac Day on 25 April has never been more popular, and growing
numbers of young Australians with no direct experience of war attend local
Dawn Services, or make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli (Turkey) itself. As
bereavement turns to nostalgia, epitaphs are replaced by monuments which
glorify the old cause and the values of courage, sacrifice and strength it has
come to stand for (Shackel, 2003).
Again in 1989, a study of massacre sites was undertaken in western
Victoria for the Victorian Tourism Commission and this recommended six
sites where some form of monument could be placed but in 1991, the

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proposal was dropped. The consultant noted that At the time it was envisaged that the monuments could form some kind of trail where people could
embark on a personal pilgrimage and seek reconciliation through visiting
each massacre site in turn (Clark, 1995: 3). This refusal to acknowledge the
less palatable aspects of the Australian national past resonates with other
painful histories, such as the reluctance of the New Germany to acknowledge its role in the final solution (Neumann, 2000), or responsibility for
the bombing of Hiroshima, perceived very differently by pacifist, apologist
or nationalist Japanese and other participants in the Second World War
(Buruma, 1995; Okamoto, 1997). Of course, not all Aboriginal people may
wish to participate in such painful reconstructions: it is hard to celebrate
ones own defeat. Many approach reconciliation with generosity and good
will, preferring to forget aspects of the past and move forward together.

Western District Victoria: Over-writing

Western Victoria is a pleasant, green country, easily reached by car from
Melbourne, and very popular with tourists (Figure 1). In particular, the
Gariwerd/Grampians National Park contains a singular mountain
formation that emerges from the surrounding plain, home to many traces
of pre-colonial Aboriginal occupation. In the more covertly racialized landscape of Western Victoria, in the nations south-east, denial of a living,
historical indigenous presence has been effected in part through erection
of European monuments which lay claim to the land. In the act of identifying and textualizing places, deploying strategies of naming and mapping,
they are seized by Europeans (Carter, 1987; Hartley, 1988). As Denis Byrne
(2003) shows with respect to northern New South Wales, the imposition of
the cadastral grid defined the landscape of racial segregation, creating a
buried system that attempted to contain Aboriginal people. Koori5
scholar, Tony Birch (1996, 1999) has examined how the tourists experience
of the western districts of Victoria is fundamentally shaped by memorialization of the landscape. As he argues, gaps in settler history that undermine colonial authority and self-confidence are filled by monuments which
deny Aboriginal attachment to land or which overlook the violence of
attempted dispossession. The Giant Koala at Dadswells Bridge, for
example (Figure 4), displaces the presence of the Jardwadjali for whom it
was a meeting place and campsite, before their violent removal by squatters. Its dwindling European population erected this monument as an
attempt to attract visitors, but as Birch (1999: 65) notes,
when monuments such as the Giant Koala come to dominate the landscape
through the souveniring of itself and its attraction to the tourist camera
actual pasts are rendered an irrelevant nuisance. Dadswells Bridge no longer
has a history, European or Indigenous. It simply suffers from an acute case
of gigantism.

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Giant Koala at Dadswells Bridge, Western Victoria

He compares this erasure to the settler graffiti inscribed upon the Sisters
Rocks, a short way along the Western Highway. Here frenzied layers of
names and dates represent yet another attempt to claim land within a
European consciousness, enthusiastically supported by tourist operators
who have widely marketed the site and its image. When I took a group of
students to this site in September 2002 (Figure 5), they were disgusted by
the ugliness and heavy-handedness of this aggressively territorial practice,
particularly by contrast with the delicate rock-art we had just seen in the
Grampians. Like the Kalkadoon monument, the desire to possess the landscape has been expressed by literally over-writing it, inscribing a new claim
to ownership.

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Figure 5

The Sisters Rocks, Western Victoria (September 2002)

The lie of an empty land Perhaps the most fundamental strategy deployed
against the Grampians Aboriginal past has been to deny it altogether. This
is a strategy often used by colonists seeking to appropriate traces of the
human past (cf. Hall, 1996 with respect to South Africa). During the nineteenth century, for example, stone circles near Mount Elephant in Victoria
were argued to belong to a global tradition of megalithic architecture dominated by the West, rather than being seen within local Indigenous tradition;
these traces of an Aboriginal presence prior to colonization were construed
as evidence for an even earlier, since-lost, European heritage and so
justified colonial inheritance of the land (Russell and McNiven, 1998). In
the same way, the very presence of Aboriginal people in the Grampians
was long a matter for dispute, some asserting that the area had been taboo,
visited only for ceremonies. Recent archaeological research has shown this
to be erroneous, instead providing evidence for long and intensive occupation (Bird and Frankel, 1998a,b,c; Bird et al., 1998; Wettenhall, 1999).
Likewise, the authenticity of Grampians rock-art, perhaps the most
visible trace of an Aboriginal presence, has been persistently challenged.
Representing around 80 percent of the states total rock-art sites, this
corpus includes its most significant painting at Bunjils Shelter, showing the
figure of the great creator being, with two dog companions (Figure 6). This
painting is stylistically unique and occupies a relatively isolated location,
prompting scepticism from White observers regarding its Aboriginal

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Bunjils Shelter, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park, Victoria

authorship despite independent confirmation by the ethnographer Alfred

Howitt in 1884, on the basis of conversations with a Jardwadjali man, John
Connolly. During the 1970s, such doubts prompted site managers to seek
expert advice from the state archaeological agency, which undertook
pigment analysis. The results were used to pronounce the paintings fake
and the site was removed from the state register between 197983 when
a fresh analysis was the basis for its re-instatement (see Clark, 1998b: 3 for
an account of this process). In this case the scientific weight of archaeological discourse helped dislodge Koori meanings.
Re-inscriptions? Caging and disguise More recent attempts to re-inscribe
this landscape and to acknowledge the historical presence of Aboriginal
people within it have been hotly disputed. A 1989 tourism initiative to
restore Aboriginal names to places in the Grampians National Park, for
example, was rejected as denigrating the colonial achievements of the
regions explorers and settlers (Birch, 1996). The rock-art has been subject
to persistent attempts to obliterate it through vandalism since its discovery
by Whites in the 1850s. Heritage managers have had no choice but to
develop protective strategies of caging and disguise, irretrievably intervening in the original context and meaning of these places (Figures 7, 8).
Some managers argue that these enclosures actually improve the visitors
experience, marking out particular portions of the environment as

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Figure 7 Archaeological heritage management students inspecting Bunjils

Shelter, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park (September 2002)

Aboriginal rock-art and assuring the visitor of the authenticity of their

experience (Clark, 1998b; Gunn, 1994). As my students noted, they acted
as a signal to get out the camera, even though they simultaneously prevent
full engagement with the rock-art.
Re-naming has been another protective management technique: in 1984,
archaeologist Ben Gunn recommended that the names of several of the ten
(of approximately 110) sites promoted as tourist attractions should be
changed because their existing names, usually descriptive labels, were
Eurocentric and inaccurate as descriptions of the art. They were thought
to conjure up inappropriate expectations in visitors that led to disappointment, ridicule and vandalism (Clark, 1998a: 2; Gale and Gillen, 1987;
Gunn, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987). The Cave of Fishes for example, which
bears no fish motifs recognizable to European visitors, was subjected to
considerable graffiti, and has been re-named Larngibunja. The other
current management strategy to protect these vulnerable sites is simply to
omit them from maps and guides removing them from public consciousness. Sadly, these moves re-enact colonialist techniques of erasure, distancing these places as symbols of Aboriginal culture from the viewer,
de-contextualizing the rock-art from its original setting and alienating it
from the tourist visitor.

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Figure 8 Archaeological heritage management students inspecting

rock-art, Grampians-Gariwerd National Park (September 2002)

Stolen generations
But new forms of monument are also emerging, as changing social relations
allow Aboriginal meanings to be recognized within the colonial landscape.
A recent road-book guide to important Aboriginal sites in the Sydney
region (Hinkson and Harris, 2001) recommends the former Blacktown
Native Institution to car-borne tourists and those concerned with Aboriginal heritage. Those who make the trip to the citys western suburbs see an
open grassy paddock at the intersection of two busy roads, with no overt
clue to this places past. Yet this site has recently been recognized as an
important physical trace of Aboriginal child removal policies, marking the

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origins of the stolen generations and assuming an increasing significance

to the community as a whole.
Heritage managers are responding to a new public awareness of
historical processes such as the stolen generations the colloquial term
for the assimilationist policies which resulted in many Aboriginal children
being removed from their families to be raised by Whites. In 1997, the
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published its report
Bringing Them Home, the outcome of a 3-year inquiry into the separation
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. It
revealed a history of forcible removal and continuing trauma, and aroused
a popular response of sympathy and outrage on behalf of those indigenous
families affected. The strength of this public narrative has been demonstrated by high-profile political and media debate, a series of mainstream
publications (Bird, 1998), and a Hollywood film Rabbit Proof Fence, which
tells a story of Aboriginal oppression and survival. It has continued to be
controversial in some quarters, however, as critics focus on the empirical
and forensic status of the narrative (Lydon, 2004). While the attitudes and
policies of the early decades of the nineteenth century differ from those of
later periods, the establishment of the Native Institution may be understood in the context of continuing attempts to assimilate Aboriginal people
through the separation and education of their children.
In 2002, the Blacktown City Council in western Sydney decided to
commission a Conservation Management Plan (a basic heritage planning
tool) for the archaeological site of the Blacktown Native Institution, Sydney
(Figures 1, 9). This was the first school for Aboriginal children initially
established at Parramatta in 1814 by Governor Macquarie, who was beginning to encounter growing conflict with the local Daruk people. The school
played a central role in his larger programme of Aboriginal pacification,
which included land grants to Aboriginal farmers (Brook and Kohen, 1991).
It was removed to this site between 182329, and became part of a small
Aboriginal settlement, known by the 1820s as the Black Town today one
of the few Aboriginal colonial sites in Sydney never destroyed by redevelopment. Until recently, the history of the school has been written
within a colonial framework, shaped by concerns such as whether it was a
success or failure, and why concerns which echo those of the missionaries, and which structure documentary sources. The emergence of the
stolen generations narrative has shifted our attention to Aboriginal
responses, such as flight from the clergymen seeking pupils, the childrens
pattern of absconding, or the initial perception of the school as a means
of cultural negotiation (Godden Mackay Logan, 2002; Lydon, 2005).
The site is important not just because of its potential archaeological
evidence for the lifestyle and responses of the children and their families
(Bickford, 1981; Kohen, 1985, 1986). It also holds tremendous meaning as
a memorial for descendants who want to reclaim their heritage, reflect upon

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Figure 9 The archaeological site of the Blacktown Native Institution, Sydney.

(Courtesy of Griffin-nrm P/L)
their experience and build a strong future. Descendants have continued to
live near the site, perhaps in part because there are childrens burials near
Bells Creek and associations with the former Blacktown settlement area
adjoining the school site. Today, the suburb of Blacktown continues to have
one of the highest Aboriginal populations in the region.
Many members of the community tell stories about their own, or their
familys experiences of the school site. They feel a strong sense of obligation
to care for it. Darug man Colin Gales overt interest in the site focuses on
tangible features such as silcrete flakes, the line of the creek, and how they
reflect his and his fathers experiences (Figure 10). He is very concerned
about protecting the sites physical form as a reflection of historical events
(Discussion, 1 May, 2002, Blacktown Native Institution site). Similarly, for
Edna and Leanne Watson of the Darug Custodians Aboriginal Corporation the physical traces that survive are crucial (Discussion, 2 May, 2002,
Blacktown Native Institution site). For the Darug, the Blacktown Native
Institution embodies a range of memories, uses and meanings. It exemplifies their attachment, which has endured from before colonization into the
present. It has seen a lot happen not just the grand, momentous events
which make it into historical records, but also the mundane, quotidian
experiences which comprise a persons life. As a memorial it serves an
important symbolic role in cohering a range of associations and memories

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Figure 10

Colin Gale on site, Blacktown Native Institution, Sydney

a value now recognized by managers actively planning to conserve its

significance.
Places like the Blacktown Native Institution offer alternative views of
the past, focusing emotion and memories, acting as a trigger to the imagination, and calling upon the bodys intensely tactile ways of apprehending
experience. Places individualize collective experiences, but conversely, they
also stand as memorials to a shared past, condensing and giving physical
form to collective meanings and identity. As you emerge from the cars
warm cocoon to stride across the site, whipped by the wind, lifting your
knees high through the long grass, all the stories youve heard or read about
it escape the interior world of memory, expanding to infuse the landscape
but also allowing other people, other experiences, to enter it too. In their
long-term temporal trajectory, such places focus connections, loss and
transformation, spanning the attachment of the Darug to this site as well
as its significance to the broader community.

The Coniston Massacre Memorial

The last destination on this itinerary lies in Central Australia (Figure 1). In
September 2003, a large undressed rock was unveiled at Yurrkuru, or
Brooks Soak (Figure 11) at a commemoration conducted by senior
Warlpiri men and women. The monument marks the 75th anniversary of

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Figure 11
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Coniston Massacre Memorial. (George Serras, National Museum of

the Coniston Massacre, in which around 150 Warlpiri and Anmatyerre

people were killed by a punitive expedition. Following the discovery of the
body of white dingo-trapper Frederick Brooks on 7 August 1928, the news
was telegraphed to Alice Springs and received wide media coverage.
Mounted Constable Murray formed a party of vigilantes and over a period
of around 6 weeks travelled across the Landers River region attacking
numerous individuals and groups of Aboriginal people. The effects are still
vividly felt, and some of the survivors, scattered far to the north-east and
north-west, have never returned to their country (Central Land Council,
2003; Read, 2002; Wilson and OBrien, 2003). Elderly men and women who
had witnessed the events attended the 2003 anniversary, and as one spectator noted, the legacy of those terrible weeks endures 75 years later.

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People still talk of uncles, fathers, grandfathers who were killed along with
aunts, mothers and grandmothers. Representatives of Murrays family
spoke sorrowfully of profound regret and they apologized wholeheartedly.
The apology was accepted (Warden, 2003: v). A plaque reads in English:
In 1928 near this place the murder of Frederick Brooks led to the killing
of many innocent Aboriginal people across the region. We will remember
them always (Warden, 2003: vi).
Deep in Warlpiri traditional country, this monument bears witness; like
a headstone, it stands as a public statement of loss and grief. In the context
of the unveiling ceremony it has also become a symbol of reconciliation
between Aboriginal and settler. It serves a need to acknowledge as a basis
for equilibrium and stability in the present, understood teleologically,
within a trajectory of hope for the future. Now part of the landscape, the
communitys experience of the memorial constitutes it as both structure and
event. Such events convert knowledge into acknowledgement: as former
activist Albie Sachs, now a Judge of the South African Constitutional
Court, has concluded, Knowledge is cold data facts. Acknowledgment is
humanized, its personalized its real tears, real people, real voices, real
individuals. [The Truth and Reconciliation Commission] personalized and
individualized a terrible period of our existence . . . it prevents denial
(Sachs, 2003; see Boraine, 2000; Wilson, 2001, for an alternative view). In
post-apartheid South Africa, testimony has allowed victims of oppression
to make sense of their experiences, and so to come to terms with them. The
Commissions usefulness lies not in apportioning blame, but in the opportunities it has provided for former terrorists to explain what they did, when,
why, and to whom rendering hidden or forgotten trauma transparent. By
contrast with this forensic process, Australian Aboriginal descendants of
the Coniston Massacre have chosen to mark their sorrow and remembrance
through a physical marker that will endure within the landscape. In both
cases, naming makes the shadowy processes of colonial violence and its
agents manifest, and by making these phantoms visible, removes them from
the fearful unknown.

CONCLUSION
These four widely-spaced highway stops demonstrate some of the tensions
surrounding Australian societys shifting self-conceptualization. In the
context of Queenslands deep north, conflict surrounding Aboriginal
assertions of survival and continuity reached a climax when Native Title
became a national issue during the early 1990s, igniting local hostility. In
Western District Victoria, a more covertly racialized landscape has been
structured through the travellers experience of the Grampians-Gariwerd

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National Park; even now, strategies of containment re-enact colonial tropes

of dispossession and effacement. Yet, shifts in popular perceptions of the
relationship between Aboriginal and settler Australian are also becoming
evident as a new recognition of the Aboriginal experience of colonialism
has begun to be expressed through recognizing and managing places such
as the Blacktown Native Institution, associated with the historical process
of assimilation. Acknowledgement is a fundamental step toward reconciliation, and the recent unveiling of a memorial to those killed at Coniston in
1928 marks the open regret and forgiveness expressed by witnesses and
descendants of those involved in the tragedy. Here, monuments and sites
have the potential to bear witness, their inertia and solidity reminding us
insistently of the past, but also speaking of resistance and survival. In this
incarnation, the weight or inertia of monuments reminds us of what was
too conveniently forgotten by colonizers laying claim to the land.

Acknowledgements
For assistance in researching the Kalkadoon Memorial, thanks to Ken Kippen, June
Ross and Alice Gorman. I owe a great deal to La Trobe University students who
attended the Archaeology in the Real World field trip to the Grampians-Gariwerd
in 2002 for their enthusiasm, as well as staff at Brambuk Cultural Centre in Halls
Gap. For assistance in exploring the Blacktown site, I thank Darug people: Colin
Gale, Cheryl Goh, Edna Watson and Leeanne Watson. I am also grateful to Jack
Brook and Pamela Brook for their generosity; thanks also to Tracy Ireland, Richard
Mackay and Matthew Kelly at Godden Mackay Logan, and Lyn Morton at Blacktown City Council, Sydney. I am grateful to Jane Hodson of the Central Land
Council, Alice Springs and Mark Wright at the National Museum of Australia for
their assistance with investigating the Coniston Massacre Memorial. Finally, I thank
Lynn Meskell and JSAs reviewers for their constructive comments. All photographs
are mine, unless otherwise stated.

Notes
1 By contrast with more effective monumental (heroic) and critical forms,
Friedrich Nietzsche notably lamented this antiquarianism as a spirit of
reverence that uncritically severs a living history from the present, providing
the dubious happiness of knowing ones growth to be not merely arbitrary and
fortuitous but the inheritance, the fruit and blossom, of a past that does not
merely justify but crowns the present (1957: 18). David Lowenthal (1990: 384,
363, 399406) also traces the modernist breach between past and present,
suggesting that our attempts to re-forge links with history ironically distance us
from it as we freeze the past into a collection of relics and decontextualized
fragments.
2 David and Wilson (2002: 445) go so far as to argue that place-marking is
inherently about writing the self onto the land, and that all such inscription has a
political dimension: Place markings of all forms, not just graffiti, are territorial

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130

endeavours, inscribing the land with an identity that identifies the marker with
the place irrespective of the written message. . . It is the possibility of exclusion,
real or imagined, actual or potential, that is resisted in place marking, that
signals the territorial imperative.
3 In the decade of public debate leading up to Federation in 1901, Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples were largely ignored. In 1991, the Council for
Aboriginal Reconciliation was established to oversee a formal reconciliation
process, aiming for completion by the year 2001, the centenary of Federation.
Since then Reconciliation Australia, an independent non-profit body, has taken
up the role of advancing this cause.
4 He goes on to explain how local tension affected his research: We, i.e. Alf
Barton (the elder now deceased) and I, were pretty convinced that local
people were responsible for the graffiti (more or less same slogans, same type
and colour of paint etc.) and we became determined to wear them down. I
arrived in Mount Isa about mid-May 1996 and it was still happening when I left
about the end of November . . . The only reason I was able to do research on
Calton Hills Station was that it was owned by ATSIC. Other landholders in the
area were not happy (at the time) about having archaeologists (or Aborigines)
traipsing over their land (Ken Kippen, Doctoral candidate, University of New
England, email correspondence with author, 2003).
5 This is the term for the Aboriginal people of southern Australia.

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JANE LYDON has worked as a historical archaeologist on numerous

sites and projects around Australia, including the Rocks area of Sydney,
the Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House and
Norfolk Island. She developed a new heritage curriculum at La Trobe
University between 200103 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at
Monash University. A major project in collaboration with the Aboriginal
(Wotjobaluk and Goolum Goolum) communities of north-western
Victoria investigates the former Ebenezer Mission, exploring issues of
transformation and continuity, landscape and gender.
[email: jane.lydon@arts.monash.edu.au]