Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  The history encapsulated by these pioneer memorials at Port Lincoln has moved in and out of focus over the decades, as the physical memorials themselves have deteriorated or become invisible to public view. But although their restoration might have been more motivated by a wish to remember early pioneers rather than to reflect on Aboriginal dispossession, this second effect has in fact become a consequence of the first. These projects have brought together two kinds of remembrance to resonate in public consciousness: one of pioneer origins and the other, necessarily entailed in this, the more discomforting realities of Aboriginal dispossession.

  The frontier in the contemporary museum

  If the realities of the frontier have been revived as a by-product of pioneer restoration projects at Port Lincoln, they are more deliberately foregrounded elsewhere in some regional museums where the first frontiers of settlement were most contested. In the south east, the Lady Nelson Discovery Centre, established in 1996, is a local museum that devotes a permanent exhibition to representing Aboriginal-settler relations on the frontier. The days of early settlement are revitalised into living history through the figure of Christina Smith: the first white woman in the district, lay missionary, and author of The Booandik Tribe of Aborigines. In the Discovery Centre’s ‘living’ exhibition, an auditorium is fronted by a theatre set modelled as a settler’s hut, and features a framed photograph of Christina Smith with several of her Aboriginal ‘converts’. The idea of ‘lived history’ is imparted through the ghostly figure of Christina Smith herself, who is made oddly material when, at a trigger, she steps forth from the photograph as a glowing hologram and moves around the auditorium, telling the audience in her own ‘voice’ about her experiences and impressions of those past times. Her account includes the devastating effects of European occupation on the local Buandig people, her views on their pre-contact cultural life, and her own efforts to convert them to Christianity.

  Around this installation are written panels conjoining Aboriginal pre-history and European history in a timeline of the region’s past. Sociologist Jane Haggis has analysed the Centre’s spatial organisation in terms of its conscious effort to depict Aboriginal and European civilisations and their technologies in terms of equivalence.28 A panel of text entitled ‘Aboriginal People Survive’ emphasises the continuity of Aboriginal cultural life within and alongside the evolution of the region’s post-settlement identity. The concept of overlapping cultures is also emphasised through use of Christina Smith herself, as an historical figure who demonstrates that on the colonial frontier, Aboriginal-settler relations were not entirely defined in terms of antagonism but allowed for other forms of negotiated relationships.

  But how much does the museum achieve its aim to view ‘two sides’ of the story, as one of written panels puts it? In many ways, Christina Smith comes to ‘stand in’ for Aboriginal people’s points of view: it is through her recollections that the colonial frontier is revived, and it is her late colonial work of missionary ethnography that is called upon to describe Aboriginal culture. As Haggis puts it, it is more Christina Smith than the Buandig people she ‘speaks for’ who has locally enduring visibility, and her authority as historical eyewitness is cemented by her perceived role as the exemplary benevolent civiliser.29 The Discovery Centre does remember the violence of the frontier, but primarily to the degree to which it was defined by ‘roughnecks’ rather than being something more systematic. Undoubtedly ‘roughnecks’ committed various violent deeds on the south-eastern frontier, but what of reputable settlers, like James Brown, whose names survive as part of the making of South Australian prosperity? Although the Christina Smith installation brings into view the region’s history of Aboriginal dispossession, it does so through a conventional filter of the ‘good’ pioneer, whose nostalgic regret for the ‘dying race’ forms an integral part of her benign intentions.

  Just as the colony’s early pastoral frontiers were settling down in the south east and across the gulf on the west coast, they were only just opening up further north, in the southern Flinders Ranges. How is the social memory of cultural contact and conflict visible in the local museums of that region? Port Augusta was established in 1854 as a harbour settlement that provided a departure point for pastoral expansion both to the western Eyre Peninsula and to the northern Flinders Ranges. As a natural crossroads, it was also a culturally significant trading point for various Aboriginal groups from the broader region, including the Nukunu people around the gulf, the ‘Parnkhalla’ (Banggarla) people to the west, and the Adnyamathanha and Ngadjuri peoples to the north and north-east. As we know, European occupation did not go uncontested by these Aboriginal groups, and within a few years, conflict between Aboriginal people and settlers in the north was exacerbated by the great drought of the 1860s. From as early as the 1850s Mounted Police were stationed at Port Augusta and nearby at Melrose in the southern Flinders Ranges. When the paramilitary Native Police corps was established under Mounted Constable Willshire in 1884 to subjugate Aboriginal attacks on pastoral properties in the Centre, Port Augusta was the divisional headquarters.

  In all these respects, Port Augusta has a significant place in the history of colonial contact and frontier policing. Today, the Wadlata Outback Centre is one of the state’s most visited attractions: it averages 100,000 visitors a year and is a four-times Regional Attraction winner. It was first opened in the Bicentennial year of 1988, funded in part by sponsorship by the Australian Bi-Centennial Authority. Its Establishment Committee at that time included representation from the Bi-Centennial Authority, the Department of Tourism and the History Trust of South Australia, as well as from the local Aboriginal and business communities. It was recently closed for a one million dollar upgrade, and re-opened in mid-2008. It is, by its own measure, a key entry point to the history of the wider ‘outback’ for visitors: the sign at its front door invites visitors to come in and ‘Get the Whole Story’ and it is named after the Banggarla word ‘to teach’ or ‘to communicate’.

  In its intention to tell ‘the whole story’, the Centre is clearly structured around highlighting both an Aboriginal and a European history of the broader region. Organised as a ‘tunnel through time’, the visitor sets off on a journey to be experienced through Aboriginal and European eyes – or ‘two views’, as one of the text panels puts it. Yet in its organisation, this journey does not dwell on colonial contact; it is rather a walking tour of ‘progress’ through time. Aboriginal history and Aboriginal perspectives are associated with the ‘ancient time’ of an ‘ancient land’. Adnyamathanha dreaming stories are available to be read as an alternative to a scientific narrative of the land’s geological formation from millions of years past, but the Centre’s attention to Aboriginal history ends at this point: thereafter, the visitor moves through various rooms that illustrate the evolution of European settlement in chronological order, from the trials of early European explorers, to the hardships of early pastoral settlers, to the coming of civilisation and prosperity with the railway, the overland telegraph, and the mining industry.

  The concept of contact between Aboriginal people and European settlement is almost entirely absent in the Centre’s organisation of regional history, except in one illustrated text panel, ‘And Then Came the Europeans’, which marks the visitor’s departure from rooms about Aboriginal Dreaming to rooms about European settlement. In this illustration, traditional Aboriginal figures and European pioneers are imagined as co-existing, for a brief moment, in the same time and space. With one group occupying the left of the frame while the other approaches from the right, they appear together yet remain separate. Their configuration side by side suggests either a peaceful relationship, or no relationship at all. This illustration is the only instance within the museum where Aboriginal and European groups appear side by side, and it is emblematic of the way that the museum as a whole offers these ‘two views’ of the land’s history without depicting that there was any relationship between them.

  To a large extent, th
e Wadlata Outback Centre represents a model of historical consciousness that Tony Bennett regarded as characteristic of Australia’s museum sector twenty years ago. Writing in 1988, the year of Australia’s Bicentenary, he argued that the Australian public historical sphere was expanding dramatically to become more regionally localised in its focus, and also more inclusive, especially in acknowledging Aboriginal history. But, he argued, this re-imagining of the national past to include Aboriginal history was limited by the degree to which heritage policy was becoming ‘centrally linked to the promotion of tourism’.30 With the modern museum’s eye to the touristic gaze, he argued then, Aboriginal history might be becoming more visible in museums, but was becoming visible in a way that did not challenge an orthodox national story of settlement. Rather, the trend was to absorb Aboriginal history into the national story, giving it the role of the ancient tradition that lends the country a longer and richer history than European settlement alone allows.31

  In fact, the Wadlata Outback Centre was first opened in the bicentennial year when Bennett made this observation. But given its status as a primary point of access to the region’s history, its recent overhaul and re-opening might have suggested an opportunity to revise an orthodox presentation of history. Instead it presents an example of the way that the stories around Aboriginal and European history in Australia still remain locked into two, apparently unconnected roles: the one bound to ancient time, the other bound to the pioneer legend.

  A more deliberate effort to directly engage the history of early contact between Europeans and Aboriginal people is evident at the Melrose Police Station Museum, a National Trust site in the southern reaches of the Flinders Ranges. Until 1856, Melrose was the most northerly post in South Australia for the mounted troopers who patrolled the frontier and protected settlers’ stock and properties, and it later became the headquarters of the far-northern police division. Established in 1848 and rebuilt in 1862, the Melrose police building is the oldest historic site representing colonial settlement in the northern region, and in terms of the state-sanctioned subjugation of Aboriginal people, it is the most significant.

  Fully restored and opened in 1998, the Melrose Police Station Museum is structured around an aim to portray a glimpse into the different nineteenth century communities that occupied the region in uneasy proximity. One aspect of this, of course, is the institutional history of the Mounted Police force. Some of the museum’s exhibits point to the daily routines of police station life, while others, such as an exhibit of leg irons and a photograph of chained Aboriginal prisoners, imply the nature of the troopers’ real business on the pastoral frontier. One panel shows a studio photograph of Mounted Constable William Willshire and his Native Police Constables, although the accompanying text does not suggest anything of the historical notoriety they earned for their violence in subduing Aboriginal ‘cattle killers’ in central Australia. A second section of the museum represents the life of early pioneers through displays that depict settlers’ daily lives. A third section is dedicated to Aboriginal ‘stories of heritage and identity’, which traces the social and ceremonial significance of the land around what is now Melrose and Mount Remarkable, and describes the ‘profound disruption’ to the cultural life of the local Nukunu people that followed in the wake of European settlement. Through the exhibit, visitors are invited to bear witness ‘to the survival and evolution of Nukunu people and their culture and … their continuing connection to the Mount Remarkable area’. Each of these perspectives on this pastoral frontier – that of the pioneers, of the Nukunu, and of the Mounted Police who secured contested lands for pastoral occupation – are recognised in plaques mounted on the front face of the main police station building. One is a National Trust plaque identifying the building as the 1862 police headquarters; one is a Centenary of Federation plaque, ‘dedicated to the memory of the pioneers of this district’; and one is a plaque in the form of the indigenous flag, acknowledging ‘the traditional custodians of this land’. These three plaques frame the museum’s entrance, and are echoed by three flags – the British flag, the Australian flag and the Aboriginal flag – which fly side by side inside the front gate.

  The Melrose Police Station Museum’s explicit engagement of these different historical perspectives is a sign of how contemporary museum culture is changing in acknowledging the displacement and survival of Aboriginal culture alongside the story of European settlement. At the same time, a structural separation remains in the museum’s representation of these perspectives: the policing, pioneer and Nukunu ‘stories’ are each contained in their own section; and although the role of the police in facilitating ‘punishment’ of Aboriginal resistance to European occupation is in some ways implicit, this location itself as a key regional site from the 1850s through to the 1880s of a concerted colonial project to dismantle Aboriginal sovereignty in order to secure colonial settlement is nowhere specifically addressed.

  Jane Lydon has recently argued that historic sites structured to acknowledge the Aboriginal experience demonstrate a ‘shift from settler assertions of the possession of landscape and history’ and open ‘new spaces for reconciliation’.32 In their own ways, each of these regional museums and memorial projects offer examples of how historical memory within settler-descended communities has attempted to acknowledge Aboriginal experience within the settler story. But although it is increasingly common in museum practice to represent both pioneer and Aboriginal perspectives in order to throw different lights on the broader historical story of the colonial past, it is not common to emphasise the discomforting ways in which these histories are essentially linked: that is, that settlers, police and colonial governments actively dispossessed Aboriginal peoples of their lands, and did so through a practiced culture of surveillance, intimidation and often violence. This is an aspect of Australia’s history that has always been subject to a partial knowledge and a partial forgetting – a pattern of conceiving of the past in the half-light of the ‘twilight of knowing and not knowing’.33

  Conclusion

  Reconciling history and memory

  Despite the fact that South Australia was founded with an explicit principle to protect Aboriginal peoples as British subjects in line with Colonial Office concerns in the 1830s, their actual treatment under the law proved to be little different to that which prevailed in Australia’s earlier settled colonies.1 The realities of the ever-expanding settler frontier simply did not match the legal code which was intended to apply to it. Over the decades of evolving British settlement this truth was cyclically demonstrated, not only through settler behaviour that was elusive to the eyes of the authorities, but also through the actions of the state itself in not protecting but rather punishing Aboriginal peoples ‘with exemplary severity’. That it was able to do so was a symptom, somewhat perversely, of the putative status of Aboriginal people as British subjects, for their actions against settlers could be treated as criminality to be policed, rather than understood as the resistance of sovereign peoples to occupation of their lands. Ultimately, as David Neal puts it, ‘the rule of law proved an effective instrument for groups and individuals within white society, [but] for the Aborigines the protections it promised came to little’.2

  For almost two centuries, the violence of Aboriginal dispossession has shifted in and out of visibility, depending on the forums in which the colony’s foundation has been commemorated as well as on changing political needs. The foundational principle that South Australia protected Aboriginal peoples as British subjects has conventionally been enlisted as demonstrating the state’s humanitarian ‘difference’ at the level of state commemorations like Proclamation Day, though perhaps there appeared to be less need to assert this perceived ‘difference’ at times when the history of contact with Aboriginal people – or indeed the concept that they would play any role in the future Australia – had little national purchase. On the whole, until very recently, South Australia’s official commemorations of foundational moments have largely served to tel
l a story that closely accords with the national tradition of a ‘great Australian silence’ on frontier violence, one of British settlement that was benign and progressive, and in which the history of the former colony was conceived as feeding seamlessly into the future of the Australian nation. Yet if state-sanctioned commemorations of foundation have largely channelled a story of origins that gave little voice to the history of Aboriginal subjugation and dispossession, at a more localised level this pattern of silence has never held in the same way. Just as Aboriginal people themselves have long engaged in the production of a counter-history to Australia’s orthodox narrative of settlement, stories of foundation generated by settler-descended communities – from first-generation pioneering reminiscences in the late nineteenth century to local commemorative histories in the late twentieth century – have remembered and retold the often violent history of European settlement and Aboriginal dispossession in the process of chronicling a land hard won. Sometimes this history has inspired expressions of regret and at other times served to justify the colonial endeavour, but even in the heyday of the ‘great Australian silence’, stories of the contested frontier have remained persistently present.