Race Relations
Unit 1: Cultural Maps & Colonisation
Cultural Aspects Historical Issues Race Relations Contemporary Issues
Unit 1: Cultural Mapping Unit 2: Racisim Unit 3: Power Unit 4: Reconciliation
Race Relations
Unit 01: Cultural maps and colonisation
1.01
Tuesday December 19 2006, London
Mapping Our Country
Australian remains were widely procured during the colonial era for scientific research conducted within the race paradigm. The history of the collecting and interpreting of those remains was embedded within, and contributed to, power relations between the West and Australia's indigenes. The study of Aboriginal remains reified pre-existing concepts of racial hierarchy by constructing the Aboriginal body as inferior to that of the European and, in doing so, contributed to what has been termed 'Aboriginalism', a mode of discourse which constructs, guides and constrains European knowledge about 'Aborigines'.
Fforde, C., 1997
I am writing from the Social Sciences Reading Room in the British Library in Bloomsbury, London, where I have found an abstract for an academic thesis produced through the University of Southampton in 1997. The section quoted above demonstrates how much things have changed since the days of British Imperialism when the official line of thinking promoted the intrinsic superiority of 'Western' man.
However, as the catalogue for a major exhibition, 'Voyages of Discovery' staged in London in 1999-2000 reveals, colonial attitudes persist.
In Victoria, Australia, there is a mural painted on the outside wall of a local supermarket in the main street of Camperdown. Celebrating the history of the local area, it takes the form of a pictorial time-line. Only a tiny section at its beginning start depicts Aboriginal people. The rest charts the civilizing of the Australian landscape through farming productivity and the genteel European living. The country known by the Aboriginal people is rendered invisible.
Our maps influence the way we think, feel and act - the way we see the world. Why do we choose particular maps over other to guide us on our journeys? The early Western map-makers, or cartographers, used their imagination when it came to filling in the blanks for 'Terra Incognita Australis', or the Great South Land...
...What do these early European imaginings about 'Terra Incognita Australis' tell us? What do they reveal? How accurate were they? Did their imagined destinies for European civilization 'edit out' other ways of looking at the world? What were the likely consequences for future relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Australia?
Hutchinson, F., 2003, Unit 1, p. 8
The Imperialists of Europe mapped the world with themselves as its centre. Every other place was north, south, east or west of it. Greenwich Mean Time defined time itself with Greenwich, England, as the reference point. The Europeans judged their own cultures superior to others furthest removed from themselves, with each defining their flavour of culture own as defining 'civilization' itself.
The European mind also imagined the existence of a vast southern continent that would physically balance what they knew of the northern continents, and assumed it was their god-given duty to 'civilize' it.
American president Bush talks about drawing up a 'road map' for liberating Iraq. In this case, this is simply a euphemism for his plan to overtake it for America's economic advantage. Words acquire new meanings, historically re-defined by those in power to suit their own purpose. Here, this new meaning of mapping reflects the new style of Imperialist expansionism practiced by America, which is clothed in paternalism reminiscent of the way Aboriginal culture was overtaken 'for their own good' (liberation from barbarian ways).
Mapping our Country
The exhibition 'Mapping our Country', staged at djamu Gallery, Australian Museum, Sydney in 1999, was reviewed on ABC Radio's 'Awaye' programme in September of that year. Judy Watson, one of he three curators said:
Every culture on earth has a way of mapping their country, to express a relationship to the land, sea and sky. Maps are also tools of colonisation, a way of marking territory won or lost...
This exhibition told us about different ways we map our countries. For example, looking at an Aboriginal dot painting of country next to a geological map drawn up for use by a mining company reveals huge gaps in understanding about the value of the land. Each culture and each individual maps their worlds according to our understandings, beliefs, our hopes and our dreams. Watson discussed the concept of 'unknown maps' , of 'those things that might be on the edge of our existence...memory maps...mapping dreams...'
The fact that three curators were involved in staging the exhibition, and selected maps that had meaning for them as individuals rather than as a group, reinforced our appreciation of the subjective nature of mapping. Three different perspectives are revealed through their choice of maps. Judy Watson selected according to aesthetic appeal, John Kirkman wanted to make a point about the tentative nature of white Australia's imposition on the land, and Paul Tason selected geological maps to contrast against traditional Aboriginal maps of country. There was no overall connecting theme, no one point of view. The audience was invited to make their own interpretations.
1.02
European conceptions of Australia
The European imagination furnished their maps of the southern hemisphere with mermaids, monsters and sailing ships. These reflected their belief in a 'paradise lost' - an Eden that has escaped the destruction of Noah's flood and lay in waiting for rediscovery. The poet Dante (1265-1321) raised the possibility that...
Eden had escaped destruction by being located on top of a mountain soaring above the ocean on the island of Purgatory. In Date's account, Purgatory was vaguely sited in the 'Southern Hemisphere of Oceans.'
Hutchinson, F., 2003; Unit 1, p. 9
Through their poetry, pictures and maps, the lands of the southern hemisphere were being earmarked for the Europeans to redeem.
1.03
Colonial blindness to the Aboriginal relationships with the land
Ways that Aboriginal people traditionally map the country reflect a holistic culture in which there is no division between the spiritual and secular planes of existence. Rituals of art making that include dance, painting, music, song and story, work together to map connections between people, the Ancient Ones, and the land. Social, spiritual and environmental matters are communicated through the arts of ritual in strong relationship with each other. Where food supplies can be found, and how to care for and ensure their continuity, is very much related to how people behave with respect to the Ancient Ones (spirit), the land (environment) and between each other (social).
An example of how Aboriginal people have mapped their country is the Souh Australian Yuendumu School Doors project of 1983. Aboriginal artists Paddy (Cookie) Japaljarri Stewart, Paddy Japalijarri Simms, Kumunjaya Jupurrula and Jungarrayi painted stories on 30 doors. I saw these in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 1995, where each was hung from a free-standing architrave. Together, they drew me in to different worlds, in which knowledge of the land known only by its traditional owners, might be revealed. This knowledge is different from the traditionally segregated knowledge of European thought which is variously categorised as intellectual, academic, scientific, anthropological, or aesthetic, for example. Here, the whole being is involved in the knowing, through all the senses:
The meanings, understandings and feelings depicted in these 'doors of perception' contain intimate knowledge of the land.
Hutchinson, F., 2003; Unit 1, p. 12
1.04
Different ways of seeing
Writer Jonathan Swift and artist Gordon Bennett each take critical looks at the Western mapping of voyages of 'discovery.' Swift's imaginary country of Lilliput was located in southern Australia, and he forecast how colonisation would proceed, going on shore to
rob and plunder...they see an harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they gie the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king, they set up a rotten plank or stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, they bring a couple mmore by force for example, return home,and get their pardon. Hence commences a new dominion with a title by divine right...
Gordon Bennett's painting, 'As Far as the Eye can See', Acrylic on canvas, 1993, shows a white Australian in early colonial garb, standing amongst trees stumps left from logging. He looks into another plane of reality consisting of black ground made up of human (Aboriginal) hands. Inscribed in white over the top of this land are European 'lines of sight' including CVP (central vanishing point) on a horizon, and mirrors set at angles. These lines are strewn with the bodies of Aboriginal people, as the European and Aboriginal 'realities' collide. They do not exist on the same plane of reality: Aboriginal connection with land is physical (hands composing the ground), whereas the Europeans measure, divide, compartmentalize, with their lines and captions.
1.05
Surveying
A tragic lack of cross-cultural awareness on the part of the colonisers blinded them to the fact that their gridlines and other imposed categories were transgressing Dreaming tracks...European ways of seeing and valuing the land were given a privileged, dominant status. These ways took for granted Western economic ideas, notions of progress and legal values concerning private property.
Hutchinson, F., 2003; Unit 1, p. 19
The grave of the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, rests in an overgrown old cemetery near where I live in Newtown, Sydney. He mapped the lands of Aboriginal people according to his own 1826 'System of Surveying for Geographical and Military Purposes:'
...he led four expeditions of exploration into the interior...[H]is maps [of the interior] opened the land to invasion...and transformed [what was to the colonisers] the amorphous face of Australia into an imperial possession... (Lines, W., 1991, pp 50-53)
A 1794 map of the first farms on the Hawkesbury River and the first geographical map of Australia drawn up by Beete Juke in 1850, share the grid as their distinguishing feature, with numerals and European place names. There is no reference to Aboriginal place names, for example the Dharug Country on the Hawkesbury River. Aboriginal custodianship has been edited out of the picture.
1.06
Assumptions underlying colonisation
The Human Genome Diversity Project (HUGO) is the largest and best-known attempt to map the genetic diversity of isolated and threatened Aboriginal communities. (Tuhiwai Smith, L., 1999; 100)
The spiritual beliefs as well as privacy of the communities from which such genetic samples are taken for research would need to be respected.
1.07
Pacific Crossing 1768-1771
This extract recounting the explorations of Captain James Cook around Australia was written in 1999, from the triumphant perspective of the colonising nation - Britain, and assumes its readers share their values. No mention is made of Aboriginal people inhabiting Australia, nor is there mention of other peoples, for example the Dutch, who had explored these waters.
1.08
Understanding our shared history
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Hutchinson, F., 2003, Race Relations A Learner's Guide., Aboriginal Programs Unit, NSW DET, TAFE NSW, Open Training and Education Network (OTEN).
Fforde, C., 1997, Controlling the Dead: an analysis of the collecting and repatriation of Aboriginal human remains.
Watson, J., 1999, 'Away', ABC Radio National, September 10
Lines, W., 1991, pp 50-53 Taming the Great South Land, Allen & Unwin: North Sydney.
Tuhiwai Smith, L., 1999, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Aboriginal Peoples, Zed Books, London.
Sheridan, J. & Tranter, J. 2000, Aspects of Cultural Studies A Learner's Guide, Open Training and Education Network, Sydney.
Isaacs, J. 1987 Australian Dreaming, 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, Lansdowne Press, Sydney.
Benterrak, Mueke, Roe 1984 Reading the Country, Freemantle Arts Centre Press
Ngankat-kalo: Aboriginal Education , http://www.vaeai.org.au/timeline/1901.html [Online accessed 21 August 2006]
