‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

Schomburgk’s Chook: the entangled South Australian collections of a German naturalist

Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.     

Truth-Telling in the Wake of European Contact: Historical Investigation of Aboriginal Skeletal Remains from Normanton

This study heeds the call for a ‘truth-telling’ of injustices carried out on Aboriginal communities during the colonial acquisition of Australia as stated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart 2017. Here, we discuss the lives of eight Indigenous people buried in Normanton in north-west Queensland (QLD) who died and had their remains collected in the late 1890s as scientific specimens. The remains were later repatriated to the community before being further exposed by erosion in 2015. With the consent and participation of local traditional owners—the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people—this assessment utilised bioarchaeological, historical and anthropological methodologies to gain a better understanding of Indigenous life and health on the Australian colonial frontier. Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people were engaged throughout the investigation, and statements throughout this piece made by them illustrate how bioarchaeology can inform on past injustices in Australia’s history, bringing them into the public consciousness and aiding the transition to reconciliation through ‘truth-telling’.     

Indigenous biocultural rights and the Blue Mountains: Local and international policy challenges

Indigenous knowledges play a critical role in addressing the environmental crisis, and the United Nations system has adopted a suite of international treaties to protect and strengthen Indigenous peoples’ rights, which are often described as biocultural rights. Because World Heritage Areas are nominated and monitored by UNESCO, an initial hypothesis in this study was that such areas would be subject to higher than normal standards in regard to Indigenous people’s biocultural rights. By reference to the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia, this research examined how the international legislative framework influences conservation practices. We held semi-structured interviews with conservation and Indigenous local experts and compared park management practices in the Area against those used in an Indigenous Protected Area. Findings align with the literature and suggest that Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems can generate new insights for the Area and other sites. Yet, Indigenous knowledges are only marginally applied in practice. Some barriers to full participation of Indigenous people are specific to the colonial history of the area. Yet, findings point to a lack of action by Australian governments and UNESCO, and that needs to be redressed. The study calls attention to the need to support and resource Indigenous people to enable collaborative partnerships to yield significant benefits for biodiversity and protection of Country.     

Teaching Indigenous geography in a neo-colonial world

Australian universities are increasingly embedding Indigenous content and perspectives within curriculum to promote Indigenous cultural competency. We present teaching challenges in an Indigenous geography course designed to present an engaged, intercultural learning experience. We critically reflect on student evaluations, informal discussions and observations to complement scholarly debates. Course design and delivery was seen as stimulating and illuminating in terms of course content. While diversity of student cohorts, backgrounds and learning styles remain challenging, the romanticism of some students can override critical engagement with the geographical context of the course material and their positionality. There remains a tendency in both student constructions and the geographical literature to create an Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary that not only essentializes both, but can be culturally unsafe for Indigenous students. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students may share a sense of pessimism in confronting apparently unstoppable development and environmental destruction. We argue for scholarship around the fundamentally intercultural nature of coexistence to contextualize the spatial diversity of Indigenous lives in landscapes, currently obscured by dominant constructions of Indigeneity. Critical reflection on settler educators’ and learners’ positionalities with respect to neocolonial structures will help to transcend both essentialism and pessimism.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.     

Identifying Domination and Resistance Through the Spatial Organization of Poonindie Mission,South Australia

One of the spaces where the interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups during the period of contact and cross-cultural interaction took place around the world, was at missions. In Australia, missions were founded, rearranged and closed down over a period of time in which the attitudes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and official Government policy towards contact relationships were continually changing. By analyzing the use of these contested spaces at Australian Missions by both groups, archaeologists can begin to understand how the new relationships between these groups were negotiated, contested and played out over time. This paper analyses the use of space, using the theoretical frameworks of the archaeologies of capitalism, at Poonindie Mission in South Australia, which was established by the Anglican Church with support from the colonial government and operated between 1850 and 1896.     

Enshrined in Law: Legislative Justifications for the Removal of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children in Colonial and Post-Colonial Australia

While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the article identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation.     

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

ABSTRACT

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.     

Control of Indigenous Archaeological Heritage in Ontario,Canada

Few Indigenous peoples have control over their heritage, despite international recognition of this right in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007. In Ontario, Canada, the Ontario Heritage Act, R.S.O. 1990 regulates archaeology and grants licences to archaeologists to investigate archaeological heritage. Indigenous people want more control of their archaeological heritage in Ontario. To uphold Indigenous rights to archaeological heritage in Ontario, heritage legislation and policy needs to be revised and site protection increased. This paper recommends that Indigenous archaeological heritage in Ontario would be best protected by strengthening Ontario government land development policy and legislation to require the free, prior, and informed consent from affected Indigenous communities before removal of significant archaeological sites and remains from their ancestral territories.     

Recognise what? The limitations of settler colonial constitutional reform

In settler colonial societies such as Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have turned to constitutional reform as a means of addressing historical exclusions and colonial injustice. In practice, however, the promise of constitutionalism has revealed clear limits. This article explores these limits in the context of the current Australian campaign for the constitutional ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where the loudest dissenting voices have come from Indigenous people themselves. In light of this, this article proposes a more agonistic engagement of diverse and dissenting opinions, with a view to opening up a more radical, decolonising space for constitutional politics.     

From Fighting Underpopulation to Curbing Population Growth: Tracing Colonial Power in German Development Interventions in Tanzania

This paper investigates how colonial power is rearticulated in policy and practice of German development cooperation in Tanzania. Drawing on archives and interviews, it analyses the emergence of interventions with regard to population control and reproductive health during Germany's colonisation of ‘German East Africa’ and compares these interventions to present-day German development assistance in Tanzania. While German policies during colonial rule addressed ‘underpopulation’ and contemporary German development aid stresses population growth to be the problem, this paper finds that racialised, gendered discourses are interconnected with the political economy of population control in both periods. It highlights that colonial power in development cooperation can only be fully comprehended by tracing the continuity of colonial discourses to material practices as well as economic interests of the Global North, and argues that critique of population politics should address population control in general – whether anti- or pro-natalist – as imbued with racism and serving the interests of capital. Such a perspective might allow us to be sensitive to possible future developments in population and reproductive health policy towards the Global South, in which antinatalist (regarding marginalised people) and pronatalist (regarding privileged people) policies run concurrently, as is the case in countries of the Global North today.     

Vacuums and Veils: Engaging with Statistically ‘Invisible’ Indigenous Population Dynamics in Yamatji Country,Western Australia

Although much is known about broad trends in Australian Indigenous geographies, particular aspects of Indigenous spatiality continue to be rendered invisible by standard statistical measures. The national census, for example, only registers moves at one and five year intervals. Any mobilities enacted within these timeframes are not measured. Yet these statistically ‘un‐captured’ mobility processes are often integral to Indigenous lived experiences and have a significant dialectical relationship to government service delivery processes. Understanding these population dynamics is therefore a critical, though underdeveloped, consideration within geographic enquiry and contemporary debates about State and Federal Indigenous policy directions and initiatives. This paper presents qualitative research findings regarding local experiences and perceptions of Indigenous spatiality in Yamatji country, Western Australia. Within this grounded framework, the paper builds on existing literature by drawing out some of the common spatial, temporal and demographic characteristics, or dimensions, of statistically un‐captured Indigenous mobility processes. With this discursive, albeit generalised and malleable, typology established, the analysis turns to a reflection on some of the methodological and conceptual complexities of measurement, interpretation, and translation of these mobility processes across the policy‐research nexus.     

This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?”

‘Indigenous’ is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indigenous’ have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean ‘to be Indigenous’ are explored.     

Whistling the Death March? Listening in to the Acoustics of Ludwig Leichhardt's Australian Exploration

Scholars considering the acoustics of exploration have focused on how explorers heard Australian space in terms of silence, to argue this silenced Indigenous presence, or that stillness, was incongruous with how a place to be colonised should sound. I focus on the acoustically attuned Ludwig Leichhardt, a science-poet indebted to the Enlightenment, but also engaged with the German Romantic legacy. The manifold acoustic dimensions of expeditioning – including music – were important to him in different ways. The acoustic world could be assayed and harnessed in ways that were often consistent with colonialism. But there was also something fugitive about acoustics. They could mark a site for emotional engagement with place, and sometimes embryonic cross-cultural dialogue. Yet the possibilities were not always heard and, in line with Romanticism, the acoustic could drag down expeditioners’ spirits just as it could buoy them up. It could baffle or be a site for Indigenous resistance.     

Abject life and disaster: Opportunity and invasive species governance following the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires

The 2019–2020 Australian bushfire disaster witnessed extraordinary wildlife death. A key component of the response was killing invasive life that might opportunistically colonise freshly burnt landscapes or prey on what survived. This paper considers the notion of disaster as opportunity in order to examine the ontological politics of governing invasive life. Our focus is twofold: the re-articulation of power over invasive life during disaster reproducing its abjection, and the colonial context in which invasive species management and disaster responses occur. We first consider how invasive life is rendered abject in governance through the application of the ‘invasion curve’ which preconditions opposition to invasive life, and through a moral politics of neglect, maintains it as unworthy of care. Presenting new empirical analysis of media discourse and responses to invasive life during and after the Australian 2019-2020 bushfires, we then consider the moral geographies of opportunity, including the moral status of different species, and Indigenous responses to the disaster. Responses to invasive species during the fires tended to reproduce existing approaches but responses from Indigenous people suggest that the opportunity of this disaster might be otherwise imagined. In this case, questioning the terms of engagement with invasive life provides possibilities for decolonising invasive species governance, ushering in new obligations and responsibilities.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.