Difference

Chapter 21 Difference Denis Byrne 21.1 Introduction: In the Forest I spent much of 1981 in the eucalypt forests of the far south coast of New South Wales, Australia, looking for laked stone artefacts. hese forests cover a band of ridges which are the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and which along this part of the coast reach eastward to within a few kilometres of the Paciic Ocean. he stone artefacts were almost all found along the top of ridgelines in surface concentrations that I took to represent ‘moments’ in the precolonial past when Aboriginal people had stopped to camp or perform activities associated with hunting and gathering forays they had made into this steeply dissected country from base camps on the coast or in the big coastal valleys. On many of my own archaeological forays I was accompanied, or should I say led, by Uncle Ted homas (1909–2002),1 an Aboriginal man who was in his early seventies at the time but who had the vitality of a much younger man. Uncle Ted lived in the Aboriginal settlement situated on a spur overlooking Wallaga Lake which itself was immediately adjacent to the ocean. he settlement had been established by the Aborigines Protection Board in 1891 and had been home to people drawn from this part of the coast as well as further aield.2 During the early and mid-twentieth century these people had ished for a living as well as working for local farmers clearing bush and building fences. hey frequently walked through the forested hills to get to local towns or to visit other Aboriginal settlements and many of them also worked in the local timber industry, cutting railway sleepers and mine props. Uncle Ted had done that kind of work when he was younger. He had also worked on road gangs, been employed in commercial ishing, and had harvested vegetables during the picking season. 1 He had recently adopted the name Guboo but since I called him Uncle Ted I will use that name here. In Aboriginal English in south-east Australia, ‘Uncle’ is used as a respectful term of address for older men regardless of their relationship to you. 2 For a history of this Aboriginal community see: <http://www.daa.nsw.gov.au/publications/ BGinalreport05.pdf> (accessed June 2011). 290 Denis Byrne It was peaceful up on the ridges, in the forests. We walked along looking at the ground, alert for the angular shapes of small stone lakes and cores exposed between the dead leaves and fallen bark. If our eyes weren’t on the ground we were looking through the trees at the view of a neighbouring ridge or perhaps the more distant vista down to the farmed coastal lats and the sea beyond. When it was nearly time to sit down to drink milky tea from our hermoses we naturally sought out a spot with a view and quite oten the view then inspired Uncle Ted to tell stories about the Koori side of the history of the area we were looking at (the term Koori is widely used by Aboriginal people in that part of south-east Australia as a collective term for themselves). In the 1830s white pastoralists had arrived in the area with their cattle, this representing the furthest extension of the white invasion of Aboriginal land which had begun with the establishment of a British penal colony in 1788 at Sydney, 370 kilometres to the north. Uncle Ted’s stories ranged from the time he was a schoolboy at Wallaga Lake in the 1910s through the 1920s when, among other things, he was a member of the local Aboriginal gum leaf band, to the late 1970s when he began campaigning to protect Aboriginal sacred sites from commercial logging operations. On the lower slopes of Mumbulla Mountain, a topographic landmark that had been a male initiation site last used in the late nineteenth century, he had stood his ground in front of a forestry bulldozer, a deed he was intensely proud of. ‘If looks could kill’, he would say, laughing, ‘I’d have been a dead man.’ Up on the forest ridges I walked along with a topographic survey map and stone artefact recording sheets in hand (see Figure 21.1). For me, each new day meant a few more artefact scatters to add to the pattern of sites which I was beginning to propound into a model suggesting that Aboriginal people in the past had moved through the forests by following the ridgelines, carrying out their activities—those at least that resulted in the discard of laked stone artefacts—mostly on the lat saddles and summits of the ridges (Byrne 1983). I assumed Uncle Ted was engaged in this same project of archaeology. He was certainly an avid searcher for stone artefacts and had developed an astonishingly sharp eye for them. ‘Another one!’ he would call out. ‘So they were here too!’, referring to his ancestors, as I plotted one more location onto the map. But I realize now that he and I were really not engaged in quite the same project. For him, it seems clear in retrospect, these stone artefacts were important partly because they were material proof that his ancestors had been all over this landscape in the past. Why this had assumed such importance to him now was because generations of non-Indigenous settlers had gotten used to thinking of Aborigines as people who lived in generally poor quality housing in country towns and city suburbs or in former Aboriginal Reserves, like the one overlooking Wallaga Lake. In the 150 years since Aboriginal people in this part of New South Wales had been dispossessed, the settled landscape had been illed up with white people and their projects—even the eucalypt forests were populated by the conlicting visions of loggers and conservationists whose natural habitat it had, in a sense, become. And yet, for someone like Uncle Ted, it was critical to somehow be able to show that his people had been there irst. Why archaeological remains like stone artefacts were perfect for this purpose was that they had physical presence on and in the land and that presence had an insistence that text in a history book could never quite match. he Aboriginal people of New South Wales had been dispossessed of their land, and yet to be Indigenous means to be of the land. Landlessness cuts the ground out from under Aboriginal people’s status as Indigenous. It is partly in this context that stone artefacts and other ‘archaeological’ traces have taken on such importance for Aborigines: they act as quasi land deeds, or land titles Difference 291 Figure 21.1 Site of stone artefact scatter in the South Coast forests, 1981 (photograph: Denis Byrne) (Byrne 2003a: 74). By the early 1980s tens of thousands of Aboriginal archaeological sites had already been recorded all across New South Wales. For people like Uncle Ted this vast dispersion proclaimed that ‘we’ had once been everywhere. 21.2 Rendering Deep Pasts Contemporary So up in the forests Uncle Ted and I were not quite on the same team. In a sense we were actually in competition. With my graph paper and my artefact recording sheets I was engaged in rendering stone artefacts as the archaeological heritage of the colonial nation. Via the discourse of archaeology, I was identifying these bits of stone as things belonging to a precolonial Aboriginal past while, at the same time, via the discourse of heritage, I was making them over as Australia’s patrimony. Courtesy of these discursive moves, the artefacts came to belong as much to me as to Uncle Ted. Looking back, I think that for Uncle Ted the ancientness of the stone artefacts was neither here nor there. He always spoke of them as being personally connected to him; it was never a matter of these things belonging to his precolonial forebears. He collapsed duration whereas my ieldwork seemed intent on emphasizing it. For him, this was an archaeology of the contemporary past. It seems safe to assume that Uncle Ted’s ancestors never spoke or thought of these artefacts (which, ater all, they had thrown away) in the way he did. Even in the 1950s, as far as 292 Denis Byrne I know, Aboriginal people were not referring to these objects as their ‘heritage’. he heritage discourse was emerging in Australia around that time—iltering down from the north Atlantic—but Aboriginal people did not begin hijacking it until the 1970s (Byrne 1996: 103). At that time they began deploying heritage discourse in the struggle for land rights, oten asserting the spiritual signiicance of particular areas of land where archaeological assessments failed to demonstrate heritage signiicance (Byrne 1993: 220–5). Heritage discourse was born of nationalism: it functioned to convert old things into a form of cultural capital for the national state. he use of heritage discourse by contemporary Aboriginal people to lay claim to pieces of land—fragments of the national ‘geobody’ (hongchai 1994)—and to bolster their claim to a separate cultural identity, efectively turned heritage discourse back on the nation-state. If nation-states seek to inesse an abiding and almost religious ainity with the national soil, a move that Jean-Pierre Warnier (2011) has referred to as ‘territorialization’, this is a territorialization that oten seems to entail removal of certain minority or local groups from the soil. Michael Herzfeld documents instances of this in the Monti district of Rome (2009) and the Pom Mahakan residential enclave in Bangkok (2006). In the case of the Pom Mahakan enclave, residents have boned up on heritage discourse and used it ‘back at’ the hai heritage authorities who are trying to orchestrate their eviction. Such counter-deployments would seem akin to the subaltern practice of writing back to the centre using the colonizer’s own language (Ashcrot et al. 2002). Heritage professionals appear reluctant to credit Aboriginal people in places like New South Wales with a creative remaking of heritage discourse (Byrne 2003a; Harrison 2010). A rat of professional ‘best practice’ guidelines as well as national and international protocols and charters serve to lend a sense of stability to heritage discourse. here are widely accepted conventions, for instance, guiding the way stone tools are spoken about in Australia by archaeologists and heritage practitioners and also by environmental regulators, the media, and others who look to archaeology and heritage discourse for their cues. But if the ‘authorised discourse’ (Smith 2006) on stone tools can be learned, equally it can be creatively reworked and redeployed; it cannot easily be policed. I suggest that the heritage discourse of colonizers can be reworked by the colonized much the way the latter have reworked the former’s material culture. Rodney Harrison’s (2002a) analysis of early to mid-twentieth-century archaeological assemblages from Aboriginal camp sites on a pastoral property in north-western Australia led him to an appreciation of how a range of European objects had taken on diferent forms and functions in Aboriginal hands: fencing wire was used for pressure-laking stone and for making ishhooks, toy cars were made from tobacco tins, drinking vessels and oil lamps were made from food tins (2002a: 71–3). Such objects ‘are not what they were made to be, but what they become in the process of creative recontextualisation’ (Harrison 2002a: 74). Working with Native American archaeological assemblages from the colonial period, Stephen Silliman (2005, 2010) similarly critiques archaeology’s failure to engage with the materiality of cross-cultural entanglement. Both Harrison and Silliman are alert to the extent to which most of us are, as it were, overcome by the ‘original’ identity of the objects; it is what jumps out at us; it is what seems to constitute the inherent identity of objects. Our minds hasten to say ‘tobacco tin’ when we see the rusted tin pierced by a piece of wire lying on the ground, even though we see it has been reinvented as a toy car. his ‘privileging of material origins’ (Silliman 2010: 36) is related to the history of ‘origins research’ (Silliman 2010: 35) in archaeological practice Difference 293 which has been exposed to critique by archaeologists alert to the way this discourse can negate or underplay agency and creativity on the part of those who use objects others have ‘originally’ created. It privileges makers over users. In the south coast forests in 1981, I was overwhelmed by the precolonial origins of the stone artefacts I was measuring and was oblivious to the way Uncle Ted was recontextualizing them; the way he was incorporating them into contemporary Aboriginal culture to serve a very contemporary political role (see Byrne 2003a for a general discussion of this role; also Harrison 2010: 538–40). I now want to relect more closely on Uncle Ted’s ield methods in the forests. 21.3 Classificatory Slippage Many of the precolonial artefacts we found in the forests were small quartz lakes. A particular aspect of Uncle Ted’s archaeology was his special interest in quartz crystals. He had an extraordinarily sharp eye for stone artefacts in general but his facility in inding quartz crystals bordered on the uncanny. I think he himself believed this facility said something about who he was as an Aboriginal elder, someone spiritually attuned to his country. hese crystals were uncommon—we couldn’t expect to ind one every day up on the ridgelines— and while some of them showed signs of percussion laking most did not. I regarded the unlaked ones as ‘non-artefactual’. Uncle Ted, though, believed they might have been associated with the activities of Aboriginal ‘clever men’ and, indeed, there is ethnographic evidence for this in the late nineteenth century in this part of the south coast of New South Wales. he amateur anthropologist A. W. Howitt (1904: 357–8) recorded that quartz crystals for sorcery were carried by the ‘medicine men’ of the Yuin tribe in bags made from the hair of deceased relatives. Surely, though, such ‘clever’ crystals would be vastly outnumbered by naturally occurring ones, especially in the ridge country. My view that the crystals were a natural occurrence in this geological region, and that they were non-artefactual, was never a matter of contention between Uncle Ted and I—he would show them to me and then quietly pocket them. I have no idea what happened to them later, but it seemed clear from the way he handled them that he regarded them with a degree of reverence. Looking back, though, I am struck by my failure to engage with the cultural dimension of what Uncle Ted was doing. I still believe the unlaked crystals had almost certainly not been artefacts in the precolonial past but I can now see that they were very much a part of Uncle Ted’s contemporary Aboriginal material culture. He appeared to see them as continuous with his own cultural being. hey held what Harrison (2010: 536) refers to as an ‘intense poignancy’ for him. Luke Godwin and James Weiner (2006) have criticized the constraints imposed by a heritage regime which dichotomizes the material and ‘metaphysical’ dimensions of culture. In Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, material traces such as laked stone artefacts are dealt with by archaeologists while the metaphysical ‘traces’—such as sacred Dreaming sites (typically consisting of natural landscape features without archaeological traces)—are dealt with by anthropologists (Godwin and Weiner 2006: 129). he problem with this approach is that contemporary Aboriginal people, in practice, are liable to interpret archaeological remains metaphysically. For them, in the words of Godwin and Weiner (2006: 135), such traces ‘are a physical demonstration that their “old people” 294 Denis Byrne have been there, and continue to be there: in this sense, the sites are their footprints’. In Lynn Meskell’s words, these things have ‘residual aterlives in living communities’ (2010: 448; see also Schifer, this volume). By any conventional measure, contemporary Aboriginal people on the far south coast of New South Wales possess less traditional knowledge than their central and northern Queensland counterparts and have been exposed to a much more intensive history of colonization, but I cannot see how Uncle Ted’s situation difers in essence from what these authors describe. Godwin and Weiner (2006: 128) maintain that Aboriginal people, ‘are free to interpret and re-interpret their prehistorical record in line with the changing conditions of the present’. Insofar as I simply ignored Uncle Ted’s engagement with the crystals, this was not a freedom my 1981 self was ready to extend to him. Harrison (2004: 199–201, 2010: 536) refers to contemporary Aboriginal people in western New South Wales treating precolonial laked stone artefacts, as well as artefacts at archaeological sites from the recent past, as extensions of, and as links to, the persons of the ancestors who were associated with them. In this context, he sees how the objects have ‘material agency’ (2010: 529). He cites the account of a Muruwari woman who described the feeling of the ancestor’s spirits coming into your body when you rubbed stone artefacts on your skin (Harrison 2004: 199). his very graphic dissolution of the classiicatory boundary between the secular and sacred, as well as between the artefactual and the corporeal, provides a depiction of past materiality being ‘updated’ as it is folded into the afective present of contemporary people. Similarly, Shelley Greer (2009: 40–3, 2010: 53) has shown that Cape York shell middens which archaeologists have classiied as secular rather than sacred, are approached by their Aboriginal custodians as ‘portals’ or ‘gateways’ not just to the spirits of past occupants which are still present there but to the past of the Dreaming (or bifortaim). She shows how this spiritual framing of the middens is not one that excludes archaeology; it is open to an archaeology willing to be ‘interactive’ with local values, a far cry from those situations in which communities can only respond in a ‘reactive’ way to an ‘expert-driven agenda’ (Greer 2010: 46). As Jane Lydon (2006, 2008) has shown, European visuality contributed signiicantly to the way Aboriginal people were apprehended and ‘managed’ in colonial Australia. he primacy enjoyed by visuality in Western modernity, described by Jay (1993) as ‘ocularcentricism’, can be said also to have profoundly shaped the way archaeology has represented the Aboriginal material past and contemporary Aboriginal engagements with that materiality. he archaeological eye has been privileged as providing access to the objective, universal truth of what objects ‘are’—they are, in other words, what they are seen to be (Moser 2001). It seems clear, now, that Uncle Ted was responding to afective and spiritual qualities in the stone artefacts and crystals found lying on the forest loor, qualities that I had passed over. 21.4 On not Seeing the Archaeology of the Aboriginal Contemporary Past One day in 1981 I was driving down the Princes Highway from Sydney to the south coast forests in the company of a young Aboriginal man who lived down there. He mentioned there had ‘always’ been a lot of movement of Aboriginal people up and down this coast and, Difference 295 looking at the cars approaching us on the other side of the road, he assured me he could tell a ‘Koori car’ (Aboriginal car) from a couple of hundred metres away just by the look of it. Over the next hour or so he did exactly that, which mystiied me because I could see nothing peculiar about them. Sure, they tended to be family-sized cars and generally not new, but that applied to half the cars on the road. Yet as the ones he indicated passed us by, sure enough I saw Aboriginal faces in the front and back seats. here must, I realized, be ‘Aboriginal cars’ moving along other roads in the landscape, on the way to visit relatives, attend meetings and football games, weddings and funerals. hey would be moving between nodes of rural Aboriginal settlement and between these and the suburbs of Sydney, like Redfern and Mount Druitt where Aboriginal Sydneysiders were concentrated (Figure 21.2). I had a vision of a whole alternative traic moving on a web of routes criss-crossing the state of New South Wales and beyond; an alternative road map invisible to people like myself but common knowledge to my Aboriginal fellow citizens. he momentary window onto this traic closed and did not open again until, much later, I was working on a heritage study of historic-period Aboriginal cemeteries. It was then that I read of the dispersal of Aboriginal population that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century when many people moved from the old, oten remote, settlements to larger towns and cities. he same roads that took people away were then used to bring them back to visit those who had stayed behind. he road network became instrumental in maintaining contact between the dispersed kin groups. Jeremy Beckett (1988: 119) used the term ‘beats’ to describe these networks of movement (and see Birdsall 1988 for a comparable situation in south-western Western Australia). My own particular interest was in the way this road network brought relatives and friends back to attend funerals at the old Figure 21.2 Wallaga Lake Aboriginal settlement, 1977 (reproduced with permission from National Archives of Australia) 296 Denis Byrne settlements and sometimes also to return the bodies of those who had died in towns and cities back to be buried with their relatives in their own Country (Byrne 2004). he ‘white road’ had morphed into an Aboriginal ‘kinship object’ (Ahmed 2010: 248), as had cars, despite their origin in settler transportation history. I turn now to consider the situation of contemporary Aboriginal culture in Sydney. In doing so I am mindful of Stephen Silliman’s argument, mentioned earlier, that an archaeological focus on the cultural origin of objects can lead ‘Indigenous people to disappear from past colonial spaces that they otherwise occupied . . . ’ (Silliman 2010: 33). He urges us to remember that material culture and space in the colonial setting has an ambiguous status—we must look to the dimension of use rather than origin. We should look to Indigenous labour relations, for instance, if we hope to reinstate the colonized in colonial space (Silliman 2010; see also Harrison 2002a, 2004). If this is true of colonial times, how much more so is it of the contemporary past? Aboriginal people living in contemporary Sydney are entangled via their labour relations, their welfare dependency, their sporting pursuits, and so many other spheres of life, not only with the cultural world of white Australians but with those of the members of a myriad of other cultures who, particularly since the 1950s, have made the city their home. he western and south-western suburbs of Sydney in 2006 were home to 28,065 Aboriginal people though this represented only 1.5 per cent of the area’s total population (Department of Aboriginal Afairs 2011). hese people mostly live in the same housing (much of it public housing) as non-Indigenous people and they wear much the same clothes and eat much the same food as their Anglo-Australian neighbours. he anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw (2009), who in the 1990s carried out ethnographic ieldwork among Aboriginal residents of one of these suburbs, Mount Druitt, found that by outward appearances there was less obvious distinction between Aboriginal people and their non-Indigenous fellow-residents of this suburb than between both these groups and someone like herself who came from the wealthier inner-city parts of Sydney. She describes how Aboriginal cultural diference is masked by supericial similarity: In Mt Druitt, cultural diference is masked by supericial similarity. here is no other language, public ceremonial life, or radically diferent epistemology among the Aboriginal population. Cultural speciicity is more elusive, a matter of subtle attributes and orientations. (Cowlishaw 2009: 63) On the track of these elusive ‘diferent diferences’ Cowlishaw (2009: 64) documents culturally distinct ‘manners’ and speech habits of the Aboriginal people she spends time with in Mt Druitt. hough the language is English, she inds that ‘local rhythms and expressions lay traps for . . . [her own] usual speech habits’ (2009: 155). For much of the twentieth century, up until the 1970s, the ‘assimilation’ of Aboriginal people into white society was oicial government policy in Australia, only abandoned when cultural diversity came to be valued. Cowlishaw notes that assimilation is now equated with ‘reprehensible social destructiveness’ (2009: 158) and yet she inds that in Mt Druitt ‘an assimilative process is ubiquitous, inevitable and to some extent necessary if a colonised minority people is to survive with some sense of its (diferent) self ’ (2009: 158–9). Cowlishaw helps us see assimilation as a creative as well as destructive process. Arguably in response to state multiculturalism’s call upon Indigenous subjects ‘to perform an authentic diference in exchange for the good feeling of the nation’ (Povinelli 2007: 6), some Aboriginal Difference 297 people in Mt Druitt produce carved ‘traditional’ artefacts, paintings featuring distinctively Aboriginal motifs, and take part in modern renditions of ‘traditional’ dances. Cowlishaw acknowledges the validity of this performative aspect of contemporary Aboriginality but she juxtaposes the self-conscious performance of diference against what could almost be seen as a striving for sameness evident in much of Aboriginal history since 1788. his is not to be seen as an Aboriginal aspiration to whiteness but rather an aspiration for ‘the good life’ under colonial conditions. Heather Goodall (1990, 1996) documents the eagerness of many Aboriginal people in New South Wales in the early and mid-nineteenth century to adopt elements of the white settler farming economy, an eagerness that saw them seeking to reacquire portions of land (their former country) and clear it for agriculture. In a counter-narrative which sits uncomfortably with the accepted vision of fringe camp lethargy and degeneracy she writes of Aboriginal people building houses, planting gardens, and spending farm proits on curtains, pianos, and most particularly on horses. We have to remember that by this time colonialism had almost completely redeined the possibilities of Aboriginal life in most of the area of New South Wales. Aboriginal people were powerless to prevent the colonial remaking of the environment that rendered hunting and gathering virtually impossible and the continuance of customary ritual practices impracticable. By the mid-nineteenth century many formerly secluded ritual sites were exposed in open paddocks grazed by cattle and sheep, with fences blocking access to sacred sites that had formerly anchored the traditional belief system. But we should not take this occlusion to mean Aboriginal people were blind to the attractions of farms and horses or that they did not see their culture as capable of ‘forging ahead’ (Silliman 2005: 66) under radically new conditions. One of the tragedies of Australian history is that white society and the colonial state did so much to stile this creativity, this reaching for the new. Stepping forward in time to the mid-twentieth century, a distinctive Aboriginal rural lifestyle comes into view. Most of the land Aboriginal people farmed had by now been taken of them (Goodall 1996). People are living in huts on government reserves or in fringe camps around country towns. In reminiscing about these days, contemporary Aboriginal people remember going hungry to bed, playing with home-made toys and wearing second-hand clothes.3 It is a lifestyle which resonates with that which many white Australians were reduced to living in the Great Depression (1929 till the late 1940s), which was particularly severe in Australia (unemployment peaked at 30 per cent in 1932, a rate exceeded in the industrial world of the time only by Germany). During the Depression, thousands of urban white Australians, having defaulted on their mortgages or being unable to pay rent, set up squatter camps on the edges of cities. Some of these were in close proximity to Aboriginal reserve settlements, as was the case with the Happy Valley camp at La Perouse, Sydney, where Aboriginal and poor white people who had previously had no contact across the racial boundary found themselves mixing socially (Kensy 2008). Lydon (2009: 198) mentions a similar situation in north-western Victoria. here were also instances of poor white people living in sandstone rock shelters in the ocean clifs on the southern side of Sydney, the kind of rock shelters that frequently contain archaeological evidence of Aboriginal occupation in precolonial times (see Figures 21.3 and 21.4). 3 Autobiographies by, and biographies of New South Wales Aboriginal people which reference the mid-twentieth century include Langford (1988), Crawford (1993), Beckett (2000), Meehan (2000), and Flick and Goodall (2004) 298 Denis Byrne Figure 21.3 Non-Indigenous residents in their rock shelter home at Kurnell, Sydney, during the 1930s Depression (reproduced with permission from National Library of Australia) Figure 21.4 Non-Indigenous residents outside their clif-top rock shelter home at Kurnell, Sydney, during the 1930s Depression (reproduced with permission from National Library of Australia) Difference 299 In New South Wales the 1930s were perhaps the low-point of Aboriginal impoverishment in the post-invasion, post-frontier era. Aboriginal people sufered from loss of employment, as did whites, but most were ineligible for the dole. he origins of Aboriginal poverty, however, were grounded in colonial dispossession, racism, and government policies far more than they were in the 1929 Wall Street crash, and while white society returned to aluence in the 1950s Aboriginal impoverishment, especially in rural areas, continued. When ‘observing’ Depression-era white poverty in Australia via photographs and historical accounts one is drawn to question whether the materiality of Aboriginal culture in the recent past might not simply be the materiality of poverty. Certainly the use of cast-of artefacts and materials—the use of lattened-out kerosene tins for cladding and rooing huts, for instance, and the lining of interior walls with newspaper—were common to both Aboriginal camps and white Depression camps. But poverty is a reality that can be lived in many diferent ways. Many older Aboriginal women whose reminiscences of the mid-twentieth century were recorded for a project on Aboriginal women’s heritage in New South Wales recall living as children in dirt-loored huts on Aboriginal reserves and in fringe camps.4 hey oten make particular note of how their mothers went to great eforts to keep these loors clean. Many also reminisce nostalgically about time spent with their mothers on the edges of creeks and rivers while the laundry was done. Clothes and bed linen were washed in buckets of river water or boiled in ‘coppers’ over open ires and bleached with Reckitt’s Blue whitener. White women also, of course, made comparable eforts to keep clothes clean and keep the whites white but Aboriginal women were doing this, I suggest, in a context of exposure to a critical white gaze in which their pride in cleanliness seems partly a refutation of racist stereotyping. his goes back to Cowlishaw’s point about the inevitability of a certain assimilative efort by contemporary Aboriginal people. In a situation where the only way they could get respect from whites was by being as like them as possible (e.g. laundering their clothes white) it would be understandable if many Aboriginal people made eforts in that direction. his may have been especially so if their identity as Aboriginal was grounded more in a distinctive sociality, including a distinctive array of ‘manners’ (Cowlishaw 2009: 155–9), than in a distinctive materiality. In such circumstances, strategically emulating—might one say ‘counterfeiting’?—white culture may not have cost them greatly. Can strategic sameness then be considered a matter of cultural distinction? 21.5 The South Coast Whistle and the Archaeology of Entanglement One aternoon in the early 1980s I was in George Street in the Sydney Central Business District when I ran into Uncle Ted waiting to cross at an intersection. I think we were both disoriented for a moment, accustomed as we were to seeing each other only on the south coast. We walked up the street exchanging news and at a certain point I noticed he was looking past me, across the lanes of traic to the opposite pavement. 4 A series of illustrated booklets present the results of this project. See <http://www.environment. nsw.gov.au/nswcultureheritage/AboriginalWomensHeritage.htm>. 300 Denis Byrne ‘hat looks like a Koori over there’, he said. Following his gaze I saw what could have been an Aboriginal man of about 30 over on the other side of the busy street, heading in the same direction and a little ahead of us. his part of George Street, going north to the Town Hall, is quite steep and with Uncle Ted at my side it was a bit like walking up one of those ridgelines in the south coast forests, looking for stone artefacts among the fallen leaves and bark. It was just as if he had paused to point out some feature of interest through the trees, over on an adjacent ridge. ‘Do you know about the south coast whistle?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got a special whistle so we can get each other’s attention.’ So saying, he put his ingers to his lips and whistled loudly and quite melodiously. hough I can’t recall now quite what it sounded like, it worked, however. Everyone else of the other side of the street kept walking but that particular man paused and turned around. ‘You see, you see!’ Uncle Ted said, laughing in that delighted-by-the-world way of his. We watched while for a couple of moments the man over there scanned the street, and then he saw Uncle Ted and raised his arm and waved. Uncle Ted waved back and the man continued on his way up the street. ‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘No idea’, said Uncle Ted absently, as if he’d already forgotten the incident. Whoever he was, the south coast whistle had stopped him in his tracks. Moments later the low of life on the street closed back over this rupture which had, anyway, only existed in the consciousness of three people. In retrospect, this incident seems a metaphor for the invisibility of contemporary Aboriginal culture in mainstream Australian society. From about the mid-nineteenth century in Australia, Aboriginal people were widely held to be biologically diferent to Europeans and to be innately deicient racially and culturally in their capacity to compete with or survive alongside Europeans—they were considered to be a dying race (McGregor 1997; Anderson 2007: 145). Eventual extinction of the ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal ‘race’ was anticipated and it was expected that those of ‘mixed-blood’ would, through continued interbreeding, be biologically assimilated into white Australia. he passing of traditional Aboriginal artefacts into European hands (e.g. into museum collections) seemed to consolidate white identity-in-superiority. he corresponding low of European products into Aboriginal hands was, by contrast, seen by whites as indexing Aboriginal cultural impoverishment (Byrne 1996). Rodney Harrison (2002b: 368) points to the way ‘blood’ and artefacts were commensurate in settler thought: the movement of European objects into Aboriginal society meant Aboriginal technologies were being ‘bred out’. ‘he process of incorporation of settler material culture into indigenous technologies was considered to mirror the biological processes that were occurring within the bodies of Aboriginal people themselves’ (Harrison 2002b: 368). I suggest that this way of thinking, or a version of it, is still current in Australia: a lack of obvious distinctiveness, especially at the level of materiality and except in ‘performative’ registers such as crat, art, dance, and eco-tourism, conirms for mainstream Australian that ‘authentic’ culture in Aboriginal New South Wales has been ‘bred out’. To what extent might an archaeology of the Aboriginal contemporary past ofer potential to counter this perception? Heidi Norman (2006, 2009) has shown how something as seemingly emblematic of white Australia as Rugby League has taken on distinctive characteristics in New South Wales Aboriginal society, one manifestation of which is the annual ‘knockout’ competition which she likens to a corroboree (a term used to describe Aboriginal ceremonial gatherings oten featuring song and dance performances). It is reasonable to think the Difference 301 Aboriginal culture of football also has a distinctive materiality, one that surely would extend into Mt Druitt Aboriginal households. Nor need we think that a microscopic archaeological vision is required for such distinction to come into view. It can, ater all, be argued that in some ways Aboriginal culture is more distinctive in New South Wales today than it was in the nineteenth century. Ben Highmore (2011) has recently drawn attention to Gregory Bateson’s 1930s writings on ‘schismogenesis’, a term Bateson developed to denote the way cultural distinction was oten intensiied as a result of culture contact. Bateson agued that this applied not just to cultures but also to gender and class—class diferentiation may, for instance, ‘intensify at moments of close proximity’ (Highmore 2011: 127). Cowlishaw (2009) points to the distinctiveness of Aboriginality in Mt Druitt as stemming partly from the weight of a certain history of engagement with white culture. he Aboriginal experience of the Protection system5 (c.1883–1940) was layered onto the prior frontier experience of dispossession and the experience of Assimilation and the Stolen Generations6 (c.1909–69) was layered over that, and this is to mention only a few of the accumulated traumas and grievances that have resulted in what today might be described as the standof between Aboriginal and white society. Cowlishaw comments on the hope of many presumably well-meaning Australians that this history can be reversed: ‘We aspire to be post-colonial, hoping to reverse or neutralize colonialism’s consequences, yet we are those consequences’ (2009: 188). For Aboriginal people the sedimentation of this shared history forms part of their distinctive identity. he task for an archaeology of the contemporary past is not to excavate that history but to excavate its present. 21.6 Conclusions It may be that non-Indigenous Australians with an interest in the archaeology of the Aboriginal contemporary past should concentrate on what we know best—ourselves. I mean by this that we might focus on our side of the ‘contact’ situation, bearing in mind, though, that the historical ‘entanglement’ (homas 1991) of the Aboriginal and non-Indigenous cultures means the archaeology and heritage of a place like Australia is always a ‘shared’ one (Harrison 2004). Some years ater the incident on the Princes Highway, mentioned earlier, in which my eyes were opened to the existence of a whole web of ‘Aboriginal roads’ stretching across the state, I became interested in the cadastre (the division of the landscape into surveyed allotments) as an instrument of colonialism in New South Wales but also as a white artefact implicated in the ‘nervous landscape’ of racial segregation (Byrne 2003b). he cadastral grid had numerous implications for Aboriginal movement through the colonized landscape and it provoked a ‘tactical’ (De Certeau 1984) culture of subversion. he cadastral grid was a ‘hybrid’ artefact and the millions of kilometres of wire fences that sprang up along the lines of that grid ended up entangling Aboriginal and white people 5 During this period a large proportion of the Aboriginal population of New South Wales lived on reserves under the control and surveillance of the Aborigines Protection Board. 6 he ‘Stolen Generations’ refers to the phenomenon of the government-sponsored removal of children from Aboriginal families. he children were institutionalized, fostered by, or adopted by white people. See the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997). 302 Denis Byrne alike. he fences provoked an Aboriginal fence-jumping culture as people endeavoured to move cross-country and as Aboriginal kids took the risk of taking a summertime dip in a farmer’s dam or raiding his orchard (Byrne 2003b; Byrne and Nugent 2004). he fences oten kept Aborigines out of white properties and they thus helped construct those peculiarly monocultural rural landscapes in which Aboriginal people were rendered almost invisible. Or, as was sometimes the case, the fences failed to keep Aborigines out and then they became a focus of white anxiety. Either way, the fences and the cadastral grid came to be elements in a hybrid heritage and we cannot now understand white cadastral history without also seeking to understand its Aboriginal implications. heoretically, the fences helped keep Aboriginal and white people spatially separate and they were thus entailed in the project of segregation. Racial segregation always strove to create two hyper-distinct life worlds but, as Ann Stoler (2002) shows, in many ways it just heightened and complicated their mutual entanglement. hat entanglement was and is highly spatialized and materialized and would seem to be an eminent subject for archaeological unravelling. I ofer the cadastral grid as an example of a materiality that exists in shared Aboriginal– white space and would seem to invite investigation by either side. Colonialism’s legacy of cross-cultural tension may, however, mean that there are spaces where white archaeologists are unlikely to be welcome. During the bad old days of the Protection era, government oicers regularly ‘inspected’ Aboriginal households. he intrusiveness of these inspections, deeply resented by Aboriginal householders, extended to the oicers peering into the cupboards in people’s kitchens (Byrne 2003b: 176–7). Archaeology, for its part, is a notoriously nosey profession—who else except the police goes poking around in people’s garbage?—but given the history of the Aboriginal recent past, I suspect that few contemporary Aboriginal people would tolerate white archaeologists entering even abandoned Aboriginal houses to enact an archaeology of the contemporary past. Such investigations might seem like some kind of re-enactment of Protection era prying and surveillance. Notwithstanding such obvious limitations, I suggest that, regardless of who it is undertaken by, the importance of an archaeology of the recent and contemporary Indigenous past in settler colonies such as Australia, the United States, or New Zealand, will always lie in what it might ofer in the way of cross-cultural understanding leading in however small a way to alternative futures. he obsessive focus on Indigenous diference and the fetishization of diference in the archaeology of colonial others has always been to do with a denial of ‘coevalness’ (Fabian1983). In positioning the colonized other in another time—past time—it withholds recognition of them as people who can ‘invent local futures’ (Cliford 1988: 284). It is that kind of future-making that Uncle Ted seemed to have been engaged in when we walked the south coast ridgelines in the early 1960s and I regret the lost opportunity to have been part of that. 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