Grace Karskens
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Carson Fellow 2012
I write Australian colonial, cross-cultural and environmental history
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Books by Grace Karskens
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
Papers by Grace Karskens
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, it nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people of the river had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years, a people whose history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from their river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury–Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
The early paintings, journals and letters seem naïve and straightforward, untrammeled evidence of building progress as it happened. Appearances are deceiving, however. Jostling in the backgrounds on both sides of Sydney Cove in those early pictures were the buildings which made up the largest, unofficial and essential part of the town: the modest, vernacular houses of convicts and ex-convicts. In the later more sophisticated paintings of stately homes and genteel landscapes, the occupation and dispossession of Aboriginal people has been erased, or is shown as inevitable.
Permanent buildings were also fundamental to justifying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Those of elegance and fashion in particular were hard evidence of the colonists’ right to occupy this country, because they brought taste and civilisation to ‘savage’ shores. They are thus deeply implicated in what is, after all, the oldest fiction about land in European Australia: the idea that the way people used land, the kind of labour they invested in it, underpins claims to rightful possession and who really ‘belongs’. The concomitant fiction, which still has popular currency today, is that Aboriginal people did not build structures, that they had no permanent place of living, and that they did not use or ‘improve’ the land.
Ironically, Lockean ideas about land rights were also ably used by the convicts sent to New South Wales, something never intended in the original scheme for the colony, and which in the end utterly subverted it. In the towns, land was nominally controlled by the Crown in the person of the governor. But convicts simply appropriated and built on allotments, and held them by ‘naked possession’, as the legal term went. Their houses and yards were thus the stuff of urban expansion, but, as private spaces out of official view and control, they also nurtured the subversion of order. For the first forty years, a vast proportion of the early towns were occupied by naked possession– by convicts and ex-convicts with no more legal right to the land (in British terms) than the original, naked Aboriginal possessors, but with those vital additions: buildings and structures, proof of labour, mixed with the earth. In the end their occupation was ratified through freehold titles. Yet rising paranoia about ‘the convict stain’ meant these structures were later regarded with contempt and horror. Historians have dismissed them as mere ephemera, or as evil slums - they were certainly not the stuff of nation-building. Meanwhile the still humbler shacks and shelters of Aboriginal people forced to retreat to the fringes were always promptly destroyed whenever the relentless new suburbs reached them. This process continued right up to the 1950s.
Drawing on archaeological evidence, artefacts, paintings, and documentary research, this paper explores the many ways of building in early Sydney, and argues that read together they reveal the realpolitik of struggle over land and urban space, as well as the underlying convictions about land, rank, race and empire which drowned out the ‘whispering in our hearts’ over Aboriginal dispossession.
This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?
Last year, 2013, saw the bicentenary of the famous ‘first’ crossing of the Blue Mountains and 2014 marks 200 years since the construction of Cox’s Road, the fabled ‘first’ road over the Blue Mountains. But 2013 also marks fifty years since geographer Tom Perry pointed out that the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 was not driven by the search for new land at all, but by a need for more grass for cattle and sheep. Since then many other key strands of the ‘first crossing’ legends have also been challenged or dismantled. This is why bicentenary event organisers have been careful to add the qualifiers ‘first official/ reported/ recognised crossing of the Blue Mountains by white men’.
But can we move beyond simply adding qualifiers to the old story? What new insights have the historical, geographical and archaeological research of the last half century revealed about the crossings? Where do the legends lead us now? In this paper I want to return to the environments, animals and people of the mountains, river, ford and floodplain. What did the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and the construction of Cox’s Road mean to convicts, emancipists, settlers and Aboriginal people in their own time and place? What new light does this throw on the dynamics, culture and compass of colonial life in the 1810s and 1820s?
Yet in the later nineteenth century, the colonies were also profoundly shaped by discontinuities in memory, place and experience, as wave upon wave of new arrivals started new lives literally unaware of what had happened earlier, or how these places had come to be. The success of later settlers was built upon those earlier foundations, and yet false assumptions about ‘gaol colonies’ and ‘savages’, twinned with assertions of legitimate occupancy and entitlement, easily captured the narrative as well as the literal ground, and are still widespread in Australian historiography, popular history and heritage today.