ingereth macfarlane
I
am a postgraduate student in the Australian Center for Indigenous
History, The Australian National University, completing research for a
PhD on the long term interactive history in the area that is now known
as the western Simpson desert, northern South Australia.
I have been having a good look around this country, being taught its places and people and the stories connected to them by several members of the Irrwanyere Aboriginal Corporation. This is an association of people descended from Lower Southern Arrernte, Wankanguru, Luritja and Arabunna language groups who now speak for this country. They have a joint management agreement with the state government to run Witjera National Park.
It is big country, silica country, where stony desert meets the red sand of the 300km wide dune field. The Finke River, when it flows, runs into the sand here, describes a right-angle and disappears. Australia’s largest artesian mound springs, now called Dalhousie Springs, pump old water onto the surface where it provides for birds, dingoes, people, and after 1872, cattle. It is Perentie country, Two Snakes, and Kingfisher Dreaming country. It is pastoral country, a national park, a tourist stop-over.
In my research, I am tracking two-way interactions between people, with each other and with the material world, in particular locales through time. From these interactions, places as humanly recognised and distinguished locales, emerge. My background in archaeology has informed my spatial and materially-based approaches to following the histories in place that have given rise to the forms the places have now. My approach juxtaposes textual, pictorial, oral, and archaeological material evidences. While there may be overlaps between the different evidences, they often tell different stories, differently inflected, in which people, objects and locales show up in different configurations and connections. The histories that emerge take in pre-colonial stories of human life and ancestral beings, colonial stories of the construction and impact of the Overland Telegraph Line, pastoral stories and living biographical stories.
I focus on cultural continuities and transformations as an important aspect of place-making, especially in the context of the major intervention in the social and physical landscape that was the Overland Telegraph Line and all that followed from its construction.
I also develop a water history for places in the region. Rather than a de-contextualised notion of a ‘water source’ as a neutral resource point in the landscape, I demonstrate that people’s relationship to any given water place is historical and meaningful. We already know that water is a crucial focus for peoples’ actions, especially in a desert. We can turn the question around – knowing that water will be such a focus, what happens at a particular water place, at the small, lived scale. This is particularly revealing in the context of colonial changes to land use and the insertion of wells and bores (see ‘A water history of the western Simpson Desert, South Australia’, 2005, 23 Degrees South: Archaeology and Environmental History of Southern Deserts, M.A. Smith and P. Hesse (eds), National Museum of Australia).
I look at connections between places - forms of movement, travel and mobility - and how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s various spatial practices operate in this landscape and with these major historical changes in it.
An underlying question that I am attending to asks how, and to what extent, do the existing circumstances and conditions of a place affect what happens there next – a question about modes and possibilities of reproduction of the available interactions in that place.
Parallel to my research work, since 2001 I have been the Managing Editor of Aboriginal History journal. Aboriginal History has been a pioneering publisher of interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander's interactions with non-Indigenous peoples since 1977 (see our website www.aboriginalhistory.org). I have edited a monograph celebrating the work of Prof. Isabel McBryde, Many exchanges: archaeology, history, community and the work of Isabel McBryde, Aboriginal History Monograph 11, 2005, and a collection of innovative studies of Indigenous history, Transgressions: critical Australian Indigenous histories, Aboriginal History Monograph 16, 2007.
I have an MA in archaeological theory from the University of Southampton, UK, and have worked as a consultant public archaeologist, as a consultant editor and as a tutor. I am a Friend of the Western Buddhist Order, I row in a women’s eight, and maintain lively connections with a constellation of companion animals, plants, people, colours, rocks, cultural productions.
I have been having a good look around this country, being taught its places and people and the stories connected to them by several members of the Irrwanyere Aboriginal Corporation. This is an association of people descended from Lower Southern Arrernte, Wankanguru, Luritja and Arabunna language groups who now speak for this country. They have a joint management agreement with the state government to run Witjera National Park.
It is big country, silica country, where stony desert meets the red sand of the 300km wide dune field. The Finke River, when it flows, runs into the sand here, describes a right-angle and disappears. Australia’s largest artesian mound springs, now called Dalhousie Springs, pump old water onto the surface where it provides for birds, dingoes, people, and after 1872, cattle. It is Perentie country, Two Snakes, and Kingfisher Dreaming country. It is pastoral country, a national park, a tourist stop-over.
In my research, I am tracking two-way interactions between people, with each other and with the material world, in particular locales through time. From these interactions, places as humanly recognised and distinguished locales, emerge. My background in archaeology has informed my spatial and materially-based approaches to following the histories in place that have given rise to the forms the places have now. My approach juxtaposes textual, pictorial, oral, and archaeological material evidences. While there may be overlaps between the different evidences, they often tell different stories, differently inflected, in which people, objects and locales show up in different configurations and connections. The histories that emerge take in pre-colonial stories of human life and ancestral beings, colonial stories of the construction and impact of the Overland Telegraph Line, pastoral stories and living biographical stories.
I focus on cultural continuities and transformations as an important aspect of place-making, especially in the context of the major intervention in the social and physical landscape that was the Overland Telegraph Line and all that followed from its construction.
I also develop a water history for places in the region. Rather than a de-contextualised notion of a ‘water source’ as a neutral resource point in the landscape, I demonstrate that people’s relationship to any given water place is historical and meaningful. We already know that water is a crucial focus for peoples’ actions, especially in a desert. We can turn the question around – knowing that water will be such a focus, what happens at a particular water place, at the small, lived scale. This is particularly revealing in the context of colonial changes to land use and the insertion of wells and bores (see ‘A water history of the western Simpson Desert, South Australia’, 2005, 23 Degrees South: Archaeology and Environmental History of Southern Deserts, M.A. Smith and P. Hesse (eds), National Museum of Australia).
I look at connections between places - forms of movement, travel and mobility - and how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s various spatial practices operate in this landscape and with these major historical changes in it.
An underlying question that I am attending to asks how, and to what extent, do the existing circumstances and conditions of a place affect what happens there next – a question about modes and possibilities of reproduction of the available interactions in that place.
Parallel to my research work, since 2001 I have been the Managing Editor of Aboriginal History journal. Aboriginal History has been a pioneering publisher of interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander's interactions with non-Indigenous peoples since 1977 (see our website www.aboriginalhistory.org). I have edited a monograph celebrating the work of Prof. Isabel McBryde, Many exchanges: archaeology, history, community and the work of Isabel McBryde, Aboriginal History Monograph 11, 2005, and a collection of innovative studies of Indigenous history, Transgressions: critical Australian Indigenous histories, Aboriginal History Monograph 16, 2007.
I have an MA in archaeological theory from the University of Southampton, UK, and have worked as a consultant public archaeologist, as a consultant editor and as a tutor. I am a Friend of the Western Buddhist Order, I row in a women’s eight, and maintain lively connections with a constellation of companion animals, plants, people, colours, rocks, cultural productions.
