Telling country: Memory, modernity and narratives in rural Australia

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 159-190

  Goodall, Heather ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0000025217     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1999.47.160     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770 to 1972, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp. 1-22.
2. 'Squatters' derives from the pastoralists who took possession of the vast inland plains from 1813 to 1836, before there was any legislative basis for landholding there and who were therefore technically squatting. The name persisted after pastoral leases were devised because there continued to be undercurrents of resentment against those who had secured tenure over such large areas. 'Cookies' (after the cockatoos and other birds who feed off grain crops) were agriculturalists who took up smaller-scale holdings when the bigger grazing properties were 'broken up' in a long series of 'Closer Settlement' laws from the 1860s into the twentieth century, followed by military demobilization land settlements. The viability of these holdings was often compromised by their small size, undercapitalization and harsh poor climate, so the term 'cockies' conveys impoverishment as much as any rural idyll.
3. Goodall, Invasion to Embassy. 'Dual Occupation', pp. 57-74.
4. S. McHugh, Cottoning On: Stories of Australian cotton growing, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1996.
5. My project, 'Black Soil Country: Memory, Society and Sustainability' (BSC) has been funded by the Australian Research Council and has benefited from the committed assistance of researcher Damian Lucas. I am comparing the memories and perceptions of environmental change among grazing families, Aboriginal residents, irrigators, town residents and scientists (as researchers and/or public servants). I am then investigating the ways in which actual conflicts have been conducted, by following events on a number of the committees set up to negotiate change in water use. To date, in seven field trips, there have been over 200 interviews with members of each of the groups identified as 'stakeholders' (sixty formal, audio-taped interviews and 150 interviews recorded in the detailed note form). A discussion of methodology and early results can be found in Heather Goodall and Damien Lucas, '"Country" Stories: Oral History and Sustainability Research', Centre for Rural Social Research, Proceedings of the 1997 Conference of the Australian Association for Social Research, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.
6. P. Roe, S. Muecke and K. Benterrack, Reading the Country, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, W.A., 1984.
7. Ruth Lane, 'Local Environmental Knowledge and Perspectives on Change: a case study in the Tumut Region of New South Wales', Unpublished MA, Dept of Geography, Australian National University, 1995;
8. 'Oral histories and scientific knowledge in understanding environmental change', Australian Geographical Studies 35: 1, pp. 197-207, 1997;
9. 'Remembering past environments: identity, place and environmental knowledge in the Tumut region of NSW', Aboriginal History 22, 1998.
10. Veronica Strang, Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values, Berg, Oxford and New York, 1997.
11. William Cronon, 'A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative', Journal of American History 78: 4, 1992, pp. 1, 347-76.
12. B. Ching and G. Creed (eds), intro, to Knowing your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, Routledge, London, 1997, see Intro. pp. 1-38.
13. This has been a long-observed phenomenon, as Raymond Williams (The Country and The City, Chatto and Windus, London, 1973) and others have shown.
14. P. Milbourne (ed.), Revealing Rural 'Others': Representation, Power and Identity in the British Countryside, Pinter, London and Washington, 1997.
15. Terry Marsden, J. Murdoch, P. Lowe, R. Munton and A. Flynn, Constructing the Countryside, UCL Press, London, 1991, p. 28.
16. G. Lawrence and F. Vanclay, 'Agricultural Production and Environmental Degradation', in G. Lawrence, F. Vanclay and B. Furze (eds), Agriculture, Environment and Society, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1992, p. 34.
17. Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Environment, Sport and Territories, Draft National Strategy for Rangeland Management, Government Printer, Canberra, 1996.
18. Native Title is the name given to the property rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people which have been recognized (as having been always in existence) under the Australian High Court decision in Mabo versus Queensland, 1992. Ensuing federal legislation, the Native Title Act, 1993, potentially allowed claims over any remaining land, sea and cultural property which had not been alienated in any way by the British Crown or later the Australian government. This amounted to only a very small amount of land, although the potential to claim sea and cultural rights offered more benefits. The 1996 High Court decision in relation to the Wik people's claim over a grazing lease indicated that Native Title may continue to exist on pastoral leasehold land, although only under very narrow and stringent conditions of continuing cultural contact. This may allow Aboriginal people to claim for coexisting rights on the very large area of pastoral leased land, for outcomes such as access to cultural rites and compensation for loss of Native Title if their continuing property rights were to be extinguished. Graziers are currently contesting this possibility, and have won major amendments to the Native Title Act from a conservative government. Nevertheless, Aboriginal people still see some hope that the recognition of Native Title will offer them greater economic and cultural security.
19. For a number of perspectives on contested colonial constructions of the national in relation to ecology, land, and indigenous populations, see T. Griffith and L. Robins (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Keele University Press, Edinburgh, 1997.
20. There are important discussions of the racialization of landscape in Ching and Creed, Knowing your Place, especially A. Khan, 'Rurality and "Racial" Landscapes in Trinidad', pp. 39-70, on the relations between land and descendants of both Indian indentured labourers and African slaves;
21. and William J. Maxwell, '"Is it true what they say about Dixie?"', pp. 71-104, about African American rural and urban experiences.
22. Early Australian colonials (1850s-1900s) argued a new physical 'type' was being shaped by Australia's particular land and climatic conditions, which were said to 'generate' the unique physical attributes and personality-styles of resilience, tenacity and resourcefulness which Australian nationalists have claimed were characteristic. Australian soldiers' military characteristics were similarly attributed to their 'bush' experience.
23. Perry Share, '"Tickle it with a hoe and it will laugh with a harvest!": Discourses of closer settlement in Australia, 1898 to 1988', unpublished PhD, School of Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University, 1994.
24. Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915-1938, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987.
25. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996.
26. Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 205-216.
27. C. D. Rowley, The Remote Aborigines: Outcasts in White Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 1971.
28. 'Rouseabout' is a general labourer in a shearing shed whose work supports the more highly skilled shearers. 'Stickpicking' is the heavy labour involved in clearing poisoned and felled dead timber from land which has been deforested to prepare for intensive pasture or crop planting.
29. The 'Reconciliation process' was devised by a federal Labor government in the late 1980s, as a structured means to bring indigenous and non-indigenous Australians into a peaceful reconciliation for past injustices. Like the later South African Justice and Reconciliation Tribunal, the various projects and processes initiated under the 'Reconciliation' label were intended to allow the truth about past and present to be acknowledged. However, the Australian 'Reconciliation' structure has had far less commitment even from left-wing governments than the South African process, and the current conservative federal government has deeply undermined the process.
30. Alan O'Shea, 'English Subjects of Modernity', including discussion of Peter Osborne's distinctions, in Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. 9.
31. Helen Wheatley, 'Power Farming: A comparative study of modern cotton production in the United States and Australia', unpublished PhD, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1993.
32. Accounts of 'modernizing' economic and technological change in rural eastern Australia arc widespread, and supplemented here from my interviews with graziers, irrigators and public service observers. The work of the cultural geographer J. N. Powell has been useful, notably An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe, Cambridge University Press, 1988;
33. and Plains of Promise, Rivers of Destiny: Water Management and the Development of Queensland, 1824-1990, Booralong Publications, Bowen Hills, 1991.
34. The guesswork involved in applications of chemicals to cotton-growing bears comparison with the role of scientists in the British nuclear testing in Australia in the 1950s and '60s, when there was pretence of scientific precision and knowledge about optimum test conditions for safety, but where in each test most of the final decisions were based on guessing and luck. See Goodall, 'Colonialism and Catastrophe: Contested Remembrance of Measles and Bombs in a Pitjantjatjara Community', in Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth-century Australia, Oxford University Press, 1994.
35. Max Dupain was an Australian photographer whose images of workers tending monumental machines in urban factories became iconic of Australian industrial modernism.
36. Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Oct. 1997.
37. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991,
38. is discussed in Ching and Creed, Knowing your Place, 1997, Introduction.
39. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1997.
40. Joe Flick Senior, BSC Interview with Heather Goodall, July 1996.
41. As note 33.
42. B. Roberts, The Quest for Sustainable Agriculture and Land Use, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1995.
43. M. Alston, Women on the Land: the Hidden Heart of Rural Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, 1995.
44. N. C. W. Beadle, The Vegetation and Pastures of Western New South Wales, with special reference to soil erosion, Department of Conservation of New South Wales, Government Printer, Sydney, 1948;
45. A. D. Wilson, 'The Effects of Grazing on Australia's ecosystems', Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia 16, 1990, pp. 235-44;
46. A. D. Robson, 'The Effects of Grazing Exclusion and Blade Ploughing on semi-arid woodland vegetation in northwestern New South Wales over 30 months', Rangelands Journal 17: 2, 1995.
47. D. Lucas, 'Growing a "useful" history: narrative, ecology and resource management', in Public History Review 5/6, 1996/7, pp. 200-10.
48. D. Robson, National Parks and Wildlife Service, BSC interview with Heather Goodall, July 1996; M. T. Maher, 'A Thin Line: Should densities of coolibah and black box be controlled in the Western Division of New South Wales?', Report to Dept Conservation and Land Management, Dubbo, 1995.
49. Alan O'Shea, Intro., Nava and O'Shea (eds), Modern Times.
50. Commonwealth of Australia, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Sterling Press, Sydney.
51. See Bringing Them Home (previous note) for a wide range of family stories, but also the many Aboriginal-authored autobiographies and family histories, from Margaret Tucker's If Everyone Cared, 1975
52. and Phillip Pepper's You Are What You Make Yourself To Be, 1980,
53. to Sally Morgan's fictionalized family story, My Place, 1987,
54. and the more recent Ruby Ginibi Langford's Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town, 1988,
55. and Jackie Huggins and Rita Huggins' Auntie Rita, 1994.
56. Goodall, Invasion to Embassy.
57. This process has been an outcome for individuals in other western legal processes like Royal Commissions which interrogated Aboriginal memory (see Goodall, 'Colonialism and Catastrophe'), but the land matters at stake in Native Title strike at the heart of the most important cultural processes in both traditional and contemporary Aboriginal societies.
58. Ann Stephen and Jo Flick Junior, 'Wailwan Songs from Quambone', video, produced by Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 1997.
59. Murray Cod are a freshwater fish which in good conditions can grow very large; they are the prized eating fish of inland waters in Australia.