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Journal of Intercultural Studies

ISSN: 0725-6868 (Print) 1469-9540 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjis20

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a decolonising migrant historiography

Joseph Pugliese

To cite this article: Joseph Pugliese (2002) Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a decolonising migrant historiography, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 23:1, 5-18, DOI: 10.1080/07256860220122368

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860220122368

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Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 23, No.1, 2002

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: for a decolonising migrant historiography JOSEPH PUGLIESE Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the ways in which migrant heritage projects risk reproducing colonial formations unless they adopt decolonising strategies. I illustrate this through my critique of the Migrant Heritage in Australia kit. I then discuss the manner in which migrant communities reproduce colonial relations of power in the context of their everyday practices when they fail to consult with local Aboriginal communities over the cultural signi� cance of sites used by migrants for investment, recreation and so on. I conclude by calling for the development of a protocol that will instantiate a decolonising migrant historiography.

Introduction

The closing decade of the twentieth century saw the publication, by the Australian Heritage Commission, of the Migrant Heritage in Australia kit, a kit designed to help migrants begin to identify places that they deemed worthy of preservation for the future and that they could consequently nominate for heritage status. After decades of neglect, during which the concept of migrant heritage was largely absent from the concerns of the Anglocentric heritage and conservation bodies in this country, the value of migrant heritage was � nally acknowledged as constitutive of the cultural history of Australia. My concern, in this paper, is to contextualise the burgeoning movement to identify and preserve migrant heritage places in the context of the ongoing colonial relations that still dominate and shape Australian culture. In particular, I want to draw attention to the failure in the Migrant Heritage kit to register the issue of Indigenous history and heritage as something prior to both Anglo and migrant heritage concerns. In order not to reproduce the very colonial system of relations which have for so long dominated the political and cultural fabric of this nation, I argue in my conclusion that any policy documents articulating the pro- cesses whereby heritage places and precincts are identi� ed and nominated must

ISSN0725-6868print/ISSN1469-9540online/02/010005-14 Ó 2002Centre for Migrant and Intercultural Studies DOI: 10.1080/07256860220122368

6 Joseph Pugliese

include the directive that migrant communities do their homework—in other words, migrants must, in the � rst instance, consult with the local Indigenous community in order to acknowledge the fact that what potentially will be identi� ed as a place of migrant heritage already possesses an Indigenous history and, indeed, might already be inscribed with prior Indigenous heritage value. In arguing for the establishment of a series of fundamental protocols that articulate a historiographical procedure that refuses to reproduce colonial relations, I call for a decolonising migrant historiogra- phy.

Bonegilla: migrant heritage and contemporary colonialism

As someone who grew up as a migrant in the assimilationist days of pre-multicul- tural Australia, I don’t underestimate the struggle that migrant communities have had to face in order to receive of� cial recognition of places that have particular value for them in terms of both their past and future. Heritage is a concept that carries the prestige of naming a place as worthy of preservation because it is critical to the history and future of a people; as such, heritage is about visibility. By visibility, I mean that the act of designating a site as possessing heritage status assigns to that site a new degree of prominence; this prominence resonates on a number of levels: at the level of the community, the district or region and, potentially, at the level of the nation. Heritage is also about making identity visible. Heritage visibly and materially marks and delineates the contours of a subject’s identity—again, at both the local and/or national level. As such, the concept of heritage mobilises texts, artefacts, sites and spaces into narratives that attempt to make intelligible a people’s sense of belonging in relation to aspects of their past. Heritage is not, however, simply about the past. Encoded within the category of heritage is also a sense of futurity: heritage sites ground themselves in the past but, to a degree, their very heritage status suggests that they will continue to project outwards into the future. As master signi� ers in the narratives of a community and/or nation, heritage sites are charged with a privileged signifying status that suggests that they will inform and structure the shape of things to come.

Precisely because heritage sites, in order to qualify for heritage status, must undergo a process of assessment, de� nition, selection, nomination and, � nally, assignation, they must be seen as underpinned by relations of power and knowledge. As I will illustrate below, in the context of the example of the Australian Hall, a community or group cannot automatically designate a site as possessing heritage status. Regardless of the heritage importance of the site to a particular community, unless the site is assigned a Permanent Conservation Order and/or is listed on the Register of the National Estate, the site will remain at risk and its heritage signi� cance to a particular community will count for naught in the face of possible demolition or redevelopment. Heritage, then, must be seen as a category constituted by relations of power underscored by political and regulative bodies of governance. Even though the heritage status of a site might be claimed by a particular group, its heritage status can only of� cially come into being once it is conferred by a recognised State or Commonwealth heritage agency (for example, the NSW Heri-

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 7

tage Of� ce or the Australian Heritage Commission). The act of conferring and of� cially acknowledging the heritage signi� cance of a site critically determines what sites will be preserved and how they will be positioned in the narratives of the nation. Again, my discussion of the Australian Hall below will bring into focus the relations of power that inscribe questions of heritage.

In order to illustrate what’s at stake in the identi� cation of migrant heritage and its relation to Indigenous history and contemporary colonialism, I want to turn my attention to a speci� c migrant heritage site. Bonegilla Migrant Centre, Darebin, Victoria, is one migrant site that has been placed on the Commonwealth’s Register of the National Estate. It has been identi� ed as

nationally signi� cant as the � rst of former army camps to open as a migrant reception and training centre after the Second World War. It is intimately associated with the massive post-war immigration program that fundamen- tally changed the formerly British composition of the Australian popu- lation. (Australian Heritage Commission [AHC]: a guide, 2000, p. 36)

Simultaneously, Bonegilla Migrant Centre has played and continues to play a role of critical importance to the local community, as indicated by the publication of the book, Taking a Punt: � rst stop Bonegilla, by the City of Darebin and its residents; this book is devoted to recording the migration history of Bonegilla. Bonegilla, then, because of its elevation to a signi� cant heritage site, can be seen to be situated in a system of relations that functions to constitute it in terms of a multifaceted visibility. This multifaceted visibility is produced by the labour of cultural production at both the national and local level. As a heritage site, it becomes a point of reference in the historical and cultural narratives of the nation, for example, in narratives concerned with the post-war formation of nation, with immigration issues, ethnic identity and so on.

This multifaceted visibility, however, is marked by a blind spot, more precisely, a colonial blind spot. In the Australian Heritage Commission’s Migrant Heritage in Australia kit, Australia’s Indigenous peoples are mentioned twice, and only in passing. In the � rst instance, they are mentioned in the answer to the question ‘What are heritage places?’ ‘They can be places of traditional signi� cance to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, natural places or places which tell the history of settlement over the last 200 years’ (AHC: A Guide, 2000, p. 7. My emphasis. I have italicised the term ‘traditional’ as I want to discuss in some detail in the latter part of this paper the political effects of this word as a quali� er to ‘Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people’). The second instance in which Australia’s Indigenous people are named is in answer to the question ‘What are heritage registers?’: ‘The Register of the National Estate contains places from the natural, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and historic environment’ (AHC: A Guide, 2000, p. 8). Aside from these two mentions, Australia’s Indigenous people fail to � gure at all in any of the documents that constitute the kit.

Similarly, in the text produced by the local community of Darebin, Australia’s Indigenous people only � gure in the Editorial of Taking a Punt as a mere anecdotal mention: “‘Bonegilla” is a beautiful Aboriginal word which means place of the

8 Joseph Pugliese

meeting waters. The word rolls off the tongue, conjuring images of wide blue skies expanding over the drifting brown rivers’ (Moss, 1997, p. 6). In this narrative, the Aboriginal people of the district are only invoked in order to supply a semantic gloss to this now famous place-name. After this mention, they are dispatched to a symbolic terra nullius. Aside from their brief lexical contribution to the history of Bonegilla they are erased from the narrative. The act of ‘conjuring’ generates this double movement. In the very act of invoking the prior Aboriginal history of the place, they are conjured away, brought into visibility only to be dispatched into an unspeakable pre-history which merely lodges at the incidental level of toponomy. Their passing mention, however, disturbs the bucolic tranquility that the Aboriginal word is said to conjure. The pastoral image of wide blue skies and drifting brown rivers must be seen as already caught in a system of historicidal violence: on one level, in the physical violence that forced Aboriginal people from their country, and on another level, in the symbolic violence that ensures their effacement from the cultural history of Bonegilla as heritage site.

The invocation of the Aboriginal place-name raises a series of critical questions that fail to be articulated in either the AHC Guide or in Taking a Punt, but that demand to be asked: Which Aboriginal people named this place? What was the cultural signi� cance of Bonegilla to the original inhabitants of this land? Were the Aboriginal inhabitants of Darebin consulted during the process which saw the placement of Bonegilla on the Register of the National Estate? Does Bonegilla, as a place of the meeting of waters, possess heritage signi� cance for the Aboriginal people of the area?

The decision handed down by the High Court on the 3 June 1992 in the Mabo and others v State of Queensland saw the of� cial rejection of the concept of terra nullius. Terra nullius, contrary to the common-sense understanding of the term, does not mean that Australia was viewed by the colonial invaders as an uninhabited or empty land ripe for colonial settlement. Rather, terra nullius understood in its legal sense signi� es something rather more complex: ‘Territory inhabited by a people who did not have a recognised social or political organisation was considered terra nullius in international law’ (Bartlett, 1993, p. ix). I invoke the term terra nullius, as understood in its rigorous legal sense, precisely because it clari� es the ongoing colonial relations that continue to script and in� ect Australian cultural practices at virtually every level. The manner in which the two migrant heritage texts I have discussed fail to mark and acknowledge the Aboriginal history of Bonegilla in any but an incidental way functions to reproduce and sustain the concept of terra nullius. The prior social, cultural, economic and political Aboriginal organisation and history of Bonegilla is reduced to a level of invisibility. The Aboriginal history of Bonegilla only signi� es in the tokenistic terms of a toponomic artefact.

Bonegilla as a migrant heritage site of national signi� cance must be seen as founded on acts of physical and symbolic violence. The Aboriginal history of the area has been buried and overlaid by at least two historical folds: military and post-war migrant history. In their failure to acknowledge the Aboriginal history of Bonegilla, the migrants who tell their painful and anguished histories of dislocation, loss and racism must be seen as complicit agents in the reproduction of contempor-

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 9

ary colonialism. This might seem like a harsh judgement to pass but I would argue that there can be no ‘innocence’ about the violent colonial history of this country.

There can be no ‘innocence’ but there certainly can be ignorance of this violent colonial history. And it would be opportune to quote here one of the cornerstones of the rule of law in Australia: ‘Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.’ Which is to say, again, there is available no complacent refuge from which to shirk, as migrants, our ethical responsibility to the Indigenous peoples of this country in work committed, for example, to issues of heritage. As Suvendrini Perera and I have argued elsewhere:

The possibility of the NESB immigrant in the Australian context is already predicated on a colonial violence that has established the effective— governmental, legislative and judicial—disenfranchisement of Aboriginal peoples in the process of constructing the Australian nation. Migrant labor worked and continues to work on ground appropriated through the viol- ence of the colonial process. (1998, p. 5)

I draw upon these issues of ignorance of colonial history and ethical responsibility to Indigenous peoples and their history not as some detached and superior observer, but rather as a migrant fully implicated in the mesh of colonial relations which continue to shape the practices of everyday life in the various locations that I inhabit. Framed within this context, I want to articulate two personal stories that illustrate these issues and concerns. And I re� exively discuss these issues in the context of the ‘personal story’ in order to revalorise what is usually represented as a lower order, transient and incidental genre in the hierarchies of genres which structure a culture’s communication practices. In the face of dominant historical narratives and represen- tations, the genre of the personal story, as a genre grounded and validated by the complex and contradictory experiences of everyday lived history, can often be charged with a contestatory potential. I view personal stories and anecdotes as potentially dissident sources of Australian history, and ‘personal’ here signi� es not in an individualistic sense, but in a discursive sense which embraces the lived histories of subjects within local and communal contexts. (Let me underscore here my use of the quali� er ‘potentially dissident’, as not all personal stories are inherently transgressive or contestatory. Indeed, as I illustrate below, too often one’s life stories complacently reproduce the master narratives of the dominant order.) In the face of the master narratives of the nation and their gallery of Anglocentric heroes, the systematic failure by both Indigenous and migrant subjects to recognise themselves in such narratives has been generated by the very disjunction between their lived experiences and the dominant representations of the nation.

The Australian Hall: migrant investments and the struggle to preserve Aboriginal civil rights heritage

During the period of my adolescence I used to frequent what was then known as the Mandolin Cinema, situated at the southern end of Sydney’s CBD. It was at the Mandolin Cinema that I received my education in art-house cinema, watching the

10 Joseph Pugliese

� lms of Eisenstein, Bunuel, Goddard, Kurosawa, Antonioni, and so on. Many years later, in my � rst full-time position as lecturer at the University of Wollongong, I taught units on colonialism and postcolonialism. One of the texts I taught was William Ferguson’s and John Patten’s landmark manifesto ‘Cries from the Heart: Aborigines claim citizen rights!’ Set against the Sesqui-Centenary celebrations of the 1788 colonial invasion, this moving and passionate text calls for a ‘Day of Mourning and Protest’ as it proceeds to articulate a shocking catalogue of institutionalised and legislated abuses of human rights that the Indigenous peoples of Australia were forced to endure under the colonial regime of the Aboriginal Protection Acts. The manifesto ends by calling for equal rights for all Indigenous peoples in this country. The copy of the text that I used in my tutorials had a reproduction of the original poster, giving such details as the date and place for the organised protest: ‘The Australian Hall, Sydney (No. 148 Elizabeth Street) on Wednesday, 26th January, 1938 (Australia Day)’ (Moores, 1995, p. 61). Regardless of the many years during which I continued to use this document in my teaching, I still failed to join the dots, so to speak, in order to make visible what colonial history had erased.

It was not until I became aware of the protest marches and rallies organised in 1995–1996, and which continued for a number of years, that I became aware of the signi� cance of the site. After it closed as an art-house cinema, the Australian Hall became the Cyprus-Hellene Club. In 1995, the migrant owners of the Cyprus-Hel- lene Club agreed to sell the building to developers who wanted to demolish the Hall in order to construct a 25-storey redevelopment. An Aboriginal Committee was immediately constituted and it proceeded to organise protests, rallies and petitions in order to prevent demolition of the Hall. The Aboriginal Committee consequently lodged a demand for a Permanent Conservation Order (PCO) on the historic Hall. The PCO was rejected by the NSW Minister for Planning, Craig Knowles. In one of the many � yers issued to advertise the protests, marches and petitions, SOS: save our site, the question is raised ‘Why is the rejection of a PCO an act of discrimi- nation?’ The answer: ‘This is the � rst legitimate bid for a PCO under the NSW Heritage Act for a site of Aboriginal signi� cance. In contrast, the NSW Heritage Council has 629 PCOs protecting sites of white heritage.’ The rejection of a PCO on the Australian Hall graphically illustrates how questions of heritage are inscribed with relations of power. Heritage is not some self-evident category automatically bestowed on sites of local and/or national signi� cance. Rather, it is a political and thus contested category; its political and contestatory status accrues from its power as a master signi� er that, as I mentioned above, privileges a particular version of the past whilst simultaneously projecting and shaping a vision of the future. The decision that determines whether or not a site is bestowed heritage status is political precisely because it determines whether it will be emplotted within or deleted from the narratives of nation.

In order to begin to make sense as to why the writer of this � yer calls the rejection of the PCO an act of ‘discrimination’, I want to return to the use of the term ‘traditional’ as a critical quali� er in the Australian Heritage Commission’s Migrant Heritage: A Guide: ‘What are heritage places?’: ‘They can be places of traditional signi� cance to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, natural places or places

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 11

which tell the history of settlement over the last 200 years’ (p. 7. My emphasis). I would argue that the quali� er ‘traditional’ here serves to reproduce an implicitly narrow and colonial understanding of Indigenous culture. In particular, it privileges sites and practices that invariably fall outside metropolitan centres like Sydney, where the full brunt of the colonial invasion ensured the irreversible destruction of traditional practices and the related connection to land and sites. The term ‘tra- ditional’ also reproduces a colonial notion of Indigenous culture as exclusively located or � xed in the past. ‘Traditional’, by de� nition, excludes such quali� ers as contemporary, modern or urban. It functions, in other words, to perpetuate the notion of Indigenous culture as somehow static (as opposed to the dynamic, modern and transforming white culture), ‘tribal’ and invariably and schematically connected to ‘outback land’ claims and practices. Jenny Munro, chair of the Metropolitan Aboriginal Land Council and one of the key activists who organised and struggled to save the Australian Hall, clearly articulates the discriminatory, and thus racist, assumptions that underpin such quali� ers as ‘traditional’: ‘It’s a struggle’, says Jenny Munro, ‘to get recognition that Aboriginal people could have an interest in a building. As far as most people are concerned, our only sacred sites are out in the middle of the bush’ (quoted in O’Brien, 2000, p. 12).

After 5 years of struggle, a PCO was � nally placed on the Australian Hall and the building was purchased by the Metropolitan Aboriginal Land Council and the Indigenous Land Corporation for $4.25 million. The Hall will house a museum of Aboriginal heroes, as well as an Aboriginal archive. An application for funding assistance from the NSW State Government was rejected. More signi� cantly, an application for funding assistance from the much-vaunted Federal Government’s Centenary of Federation Fund was also refused. In the context of a 1 billion-dollar fund that saw the funding of everything from the colonial jamboree held in London to the restoration of colonial pubs in country towns, money was withheld from one of the most important historic sites in the nation.

The Australian Hall has been nominated as one of the most important urban sites in the nation because it is seen as one of the key sites from which the Aboriginal civil rights movement was of� cially launched. Boori Pryor sets the context for the importance of what happened in 1938 at the Australian Hall:

Then a group of Aboriginal people were rounded up from the missions, trucked down to Sydney, and forced to take part in the re-enactment of the landing of the First Fleet from England. At the time, there were protests from a lot of Aboriginal people, but the re-enactment went ahead with a group of red-coated, white soldiers with � xed bayonets coming ashore and dispersing the unfriendly ‘natives’. (1998, p. 67)

The Aboriginal people who were forced to take part in the re-enactment were, signi� cantly, billeted in Redfern police barracks and they were prohibited under ‘strict instructions from the Protection Board … to see anybody’ (Horner, 1994, p. 61). In keeping with the conditions of slave labour under which so many Aboriginal people worked at the time, this group of Aboriginal workers, from

12 Joseph Pugliese

Menindee, were ‘con� ned in temporary huts, police dogs roamed around and there were blankets and palliasses only. Their acting was unpaid’ (Horner, 1994, p. 62).

It was in opposition to this celebration of colonial history that the Day of Mourning was declared by the Aboriginal activists who delivered their manifesto calling for equality and basic human rights for Aboriginal people at the Australian Hall. It would be hard to imagine a similar site in the USA, identi� ed as one of the key sites from which was launched the African-American civil rights movement, not qualifying, in the � rst instance, for a PCO and government funding for its preser- vation. The Aboriginal writer, Wayne King, has drawn attention to the double standards that have scripted white Australia’s relation to Aboriginal demands for civil rights and the African-American movement:

About the same time as I started my job, the American civil rights movement was hitting the headlines. White Australians were horri� ed at the way America treated its blacks, and said so. They said such discrimi- nation could never happen in Australia. They appeased their consciences with phrases like ‘a fair go for all’ and ‘all Australians.’ Nobody in the Aboriginal community said anything, but we knew better. No matter how covert the racism was, Aborigines had suffered it for generations. We knew that the situation in Australia, pared down to its basic essentials, was no different from that in America or South Africa. (1996, p. 45)

In a characteristic move, colonialism for white Australia is seen as something external to the nation: it is what happens elsewhere in the world, in South Africa or the USA, but not in one’s own backyard. Of� cially to recognise and fund, at a government level, the historic importance of the Australian Hall would compel the Australian nation to acknowledge its own history of racism and apartheid and the struggle for civil and human rights by its Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Jenny Munro, in discussing the use of the Australian Hall by the Aboriginal activists of 1938 describes a scene usually associated with South Africa or the American South: when the Aboriginal activists marched to the Australian Hall in order to launch their demands for civil rights, ‘they weren’t allowed in by the front door—they had to come in through the back’ (quoted in O’Brien, 2000, p. 12). Munro is drawing attention here to the pre-1967 apartheid practices of racial segregation. These apartheid practices took many forms, including: the segregation of Aboriginal people into separate hospital wards; the exclusion of Aboriginal children from public schools; the demand that Aboriginal people sit only at the front of the cinema and drink on the pavement outside of pubs and so on (see Horner, 1994, pp. 27 and 45; Huggins & Huggins, 1994, pp. 25, 39, 63, 85; King, 1996, pp. 24, 39, 209).

In my years of going to the cinema, and receiving my art-house education, there was not one reminder of the momentous signi� cance of the site to Aboriginal and Australian history, no plaque, no sign, nothing. I was privileged to enjoy the cinematic fruits of world culture whilst sitting in a theatre where less than 40 years ago a dispossessed people, coming in through the back door, were demanding basic civil rights. In the words of Patten and Ferguson, what was articulated in that very theatre was a demand for social justice: ‘We ask for equal education, equal oppor-

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 13

tunity, equal wages, equal rights to possess property, to be our own masters—in two words, equal citizenship’ (Moores, 1995, p. 58). In my ignorance of the importance of the site, I was unwittingly complicit in the erasures of an ongoing colonialism. Similarly, in the failure of the Cyprus-Hellene Club to negotiate with the Aboriginal community over the future of the Australian Hall, there was reproduced a migrant complicity with the colonial forces that still dominate the Australian landscape.

‘Welcome to the Lucky Country’: migrants and historicidal sites

In the context of the dominant colonial histories which still shape the manner in which Australians understand and relate to questions of heritage and history, I want to articulate one more personal story. During the years that I taught at the University of Wollongong, I lived in a town, Thirroul, on the south coast of NSW, which nestled beneath a magni� cent escarpment. Directly above the township of Thirroul was a famous tourist site: Sublime Point, which offered spectacular views up and down the coast. Soon after my arrival, I began to research the local history of the area as I became involved with the local Aboriginal community in the production of a documentary video titled Contemporary Colonialism and the Struggle for Aboriginal Self-determination. In my research I focused, in particular, on the colonial history of Sublime Point (see Pugliese, 1999). In all the local histories that I read, Aboriginal people failed to � gure in any account of Sublime Point. In the course of the production of the video, however, Aboriginal friends began to speak of places up in the escarpment where they refuse to go as they have been marked traditionally as sites of massacres. Tess McLennan, New South Wales Indigenous Cultural Of� cer, New South Wales Community Arts Association, retells stories of Sublime Point as a site of violent colonial con� ict and massacre of Aboriginal people. Tess McLennan has described Sublime Point as a place where the colonists corralled the local Aboriginal people and then drove them off the high cliffs. The so-called O’Brien and Weston case (October 1818) records, in the form of testi- monies given in court, one of the massacres perpetrated on the south coast:

Joseph Wild, District Constable at Illawarra, sworn saith on the 26th of Setpr. William Richards alias Charcoal Will came to my Hut and asked me to lend my two muskets. He said Mr O’Brien had sent him, for that the Natives were ‘very savage.’ He said that nobody had seen them (only their smokes). I said as they had done no Damage I would neither go myself nor lend my Muskets.

The next day Bundle a Native came and told my Natives (Men and Women) at the river were all killed, he said a Black Woman had told him so. … McAlese said he had shot one who howled like a Native Dog, and that he would shoot all before him even if the Governor stood by, if they ship’d a spear at him.… The Black Women said that one little Boy was shot in the forehead with a slug. (quoted in Organ, 1990, p. 102)

These colonial wars remain unspeakable in the colonial histories of the region; they are what Marnie Kennedy calls the ‘silent war[s]’ (1985, p. 30). The Aboriginal

14 Joseph Pugliese

histories of the Illawarra region, which tell of colonial massacres and dispossession, are, to a large degree, articulated orally. As practices that continue to transmit and disseminate counter-histories, they establish points of instability which function to fracture the magisterial narratives of (neo)colonial histories. The ongoing pro- duction of these colonial histories, at local levels, draws attention to what can only be termed � elds of force that ensure the reproduction of dominant modes of cogni- tion; these dominant modes of cognition function to make sense of the local in the context of the larger national narratives.

Soon after I completed my research on the colonial history of Sublime Point, I delivered a version of my paper at an academic symposium at the University of NSW. After I had delivered my paper, two different speakers made a revealing observation. As post-war migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds who had arrived in Australia in the 1950s, they both spoke of the manner in which, soon after their arrival, they were taken to Sublime Point by their friends. They spoke of this trip as constituting a type of foundational experience: immediately they arrived at Sublime Point, they were ushered from their cars and taken to the edge of the high cliffs, where they were made to admire the spectacular views of the escarpment, the coast, its cities and townships and the wide expanse of the Paci� c Ocean before them. Both speakers remarked how their hosts framed this experience in a particular way. Situated before this sublime view, their hosts pointed out to their newly arrived guests that this symbolised Australia: freedom, vast expanses and sublime natural beauty; they were indeed lucky, as migrants, to have arrived in the lucky country. Both NESB speakers expressed shock at not knowing the buried history of colonial violence that inscribed this famous tourist site.

I mention this other personal story as it also encapsulates the manner in which migrants become enmeshed within the colonial histories and cultural practices that continue to script and make intelligible both natural and cultural heritage sites. In the very framing of Sublime Point as a type of quintessence of Australianness, its prior Aboriginal history must be erased and the genocidal violence that was perpe- trated there becomes literally unspeakable and unrepresentable outside the oral histories of the Aboriginal communities of the area. There are no plaques or monuments marking the Aboriginal history of Sublime Point. The migrants’ experi- ence of Sublime Point, as a type of de� ning moment in their assumption of Australian identity and culture, is predicated on their becoming unwittingly com- plicit in the reproduction of another form of symbolic colonialism.

Terra Nullius in an Everyday Context

What I am arguing here is that terra nullius is not some grand and remote legal term. On the contrary, terra nullius is something that � lters down into the practices of everyday life. Terra nullius functions to render Indigenous heritage and history invisible at the level of heterogeneous practices and sites. It is not purely a term that can be reduced to having a white, Anglo and monocultural history. Rather, it must be seen as multiculturally in� ected and ethnically reproduced—at the seemingly banal or inconsequential levels of everyday life, for example, simply going to the

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 15

cinema or visiting a tourist site. Precisely because the effect of terra nullius is to negate and erase prior Aboriginal history and heritage concerns, it works to position its subjects as active participants in the practices and process of colonialism.

In a profound meditation on how things in this country can � nally be turned around in order to produce social justice for Aboriginal people, Boori Pryor makes this observation: ‘Start with the basics. Look at the Aboriginal history from your own area and then you can go on and � ow out into the bigger picture, which is the rest of Australia’ (1998, p. 5). Pryor’s vision for social change starts with a critical focus on the importance of the local as the building block for larger national change which will � nally acknowledge the Indigenous history of Australia. And this vision for change hinges precisely on the basic labour of learning and formally acknowledging the Aboriginal history of one’s local area and then building on that local knowledge. As there is no area of land on the Australian continent that falls outside the domain of the original Indigenous ‘nations’, at the most basic level, migrants should acknowledge the Indigenous owners of the land that is now occupied by, for example, a migrant heritage site.

In the context of what is now a national process of identifying, documenting and preserving migrant heritage sites, there isn’t a better time to begin to make a powerful symbolic intervention in the production of cultural history in this country. To a large degree, we are surrounded in this country by the results of what I can only term a massi� ed colonial history which has so effectively dominated and shaped issues of historical and cultural representation. Both Indigenous and migrant histor- ies still largely occupy marginal spaces in the dominant colonial narratives of nation, despite the counter-histories published by Indigenous and migrant writers. In fact, the last few years have seen a concerted effort, at the levels of the media and the Federal government, to discredit and dismiss these counter-histories concerned with articulating such things as the Stolen Generations and massacres of Indigenous people as recorded in oral histories (see, for example, Devine, 2001, p. 10). Precisely because the task of identifying and preserving migrant heritage sites is now in process, migrants have the opportunity literally to reject the reproduction of colonial history by marking in their own histories the very Indigenous histories that have so effectively been erased from both the local and national histories of Australia. It is the very processual status of the project of articulating and recording migrant histories that generates an opening of possibility to reject dominant colonial histori- ographical methods and to instantiate critical decolonising practices.

Viewed in the context of the complex racialising economies that constitute the lived histories of minority peoples (both Indigenous and migrant) in Australia, these economies of othering might best be described as fundamentally inscribed by the logic of the ‘other and the other’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 77). This logic establishes hierarchies of division through which the dominant Anglo culture maintains its position of privilege not only by othering its minorities but, critically, by having its minorities reproduce their own internal systems of othering: Anglo as other to migrant as other to Indigenous.

To identify and commemorate the Indigenous history of a migrant heritage site would enable the effective disruption of this chain of colonial signi� cation. The

16 Joseph Pugliese

Aboriginal, in this context, is not some remote and abstract or romantic signi� er (as, for example, expressed in the eulogy on the Aboriginal name ‘Bonegilla’ as discussed above); rather, the Aboriginal is the a priori being of the place which simultaneously orients the past, the present and the future. Understood in the context of this ontological and temporal dynamic, Aboriginality does not signify some token ac- knowledgement, some toponomic shard of history ossi� ed in a wall plaque; rather, it assumes the ontological dimensions of a lived exteriority and materiality of place: Aboriginal people lived out their lives here and, in many instances, despite displace- ment, they still do: ‘For further information on the Aboriginal history of this area,’ for example, ‘contact the local Indigenous Land Council.’ In underscoring the importance of marking the a priori Indigenous being of the place as a way of overturning the racism of colonial history, I am thinking along the lines of what Wayne King says when he discusses the annihilating effects of racism: ‘Racism’, he writes, is ‘a negation of being’ (1996, p. 58). I interpret ‘being’ in this context as signifying the gamut of the existential spectrum that enables a subject to be a self-determining agent: cultural, political, economic and so on.

The acknowledgement of the Indigenous cultural history of the place must not be seen as reproducing some harmonious, pluralist vision which magically transcends the originary and ongoing colonial violence that mark so many sites in this country (for example, Sublime Point). On the contrary, what must also be articulated are the painful striations that mark the contemporary landscape and that silently bear witness to the colonial history of violent dispossession and expropriation. These are wounds that � ssure colonial narratives of synthetic and harmonious unity. Their marking will disrupt the divisive circuit of the other and the other and transform it, in Levinasian terms, into the allegiance of one for another (1991, p. 913). Boori Pryor draws attention to power and pain that inscribes these issues of naming and acknowledging the violence of colonial history as he outlines the manner in which they establish connections between the violence of the past and its contemporary reproduction and symbolic legitimation:

I � nd it hard to drive around and see all the whiteman’s names for places over our signi� cant sites. And I mean white because they’re almost always the names of white men. It’s even more painful to see derogatory names like Black Gin Creek and so on. This is like calling a creek ‘White Slut Creek.’ Imagine naming streets in a Jewish area ‘Hitler Drive’ or ‘Goebbels Court.’ This is what it is like to live where placenames have been changed to be called after white people who have done the most appalling things to black people. (1998, p. 81)

Cleonie Quayle, Wirringa Baiya Aboriginal Women’s Legal Service, has spoken of the violent history inscribed at a site just outside Narrabri. The cliff, named by whites as ‘Gin’s Gap’, marks the site where an Aboriginal mother and child plunged to their death. Quayle retells how the mother, holding the child, was surrounded by a group of white men threatening to rape her. In an attempt to escape the violence, she jumped off the cliff with her baby. The violent history of the site is, according

Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context 17

to Quayle, compounded by the refusal by whites to re-name the site and establish a memorial to the Aboriginal woman and child (Quayle, 2001, n.p.).

In the context of colonial history, toponomy functions as the sign of the victor in which the residual violence of the past extends its reach into the present. And this residual violence need not be brutally literal, as in the above examples that Pryor and Quayle mention; it can in fact assume a symbolic dimension whenever a heritage site fails to mark its prior Indigenous history. Bonegilla graphically illustrates this. Even its multi-accented and ethnicised articulation, in the oral and written histories of the migrants that passed through the camp, will not ensure that it transcend colonialism as an ongoing practice. Colonialism will continue to function recursively in a migrant context until that act of dialogue with Indigenous peoples instantiates a process of formal reckoning and acknowledgement.

Conclusion: for a decolonising migrant historiography

Once migrant heritage sites have been identi� ed, the next step is to begin an archaeology of the occluded and the invisible, precisely by asking the question concerning the Indigenous history of the site and the area and, consequently, approaching the local Indigenous community. The history of colonialism, particu- larly in urban Australian sites, can be likened to a palimpsest inscribed with the strati� cation of prior Aboriginal histories. In the context of migrant heritage, I will conclude by arguing that the recently published Migrant Heritage in Australia kit be rewritten in order to include a directive asking migrants, in the process of identifying and naming migrant heritage sites, to � rst consult with local Aboriginal communities so as to mark any prior claim on the site of Aboriginal history or heritage. In this manner, migrants will not reproduce the colonial relations that have for so long structured questions of history and heritage in this country.

I envisage a decolonising migrant historiography as shaped by a series of basic methodological procedures and protocols:

1. Once a migrant heritage site has been identi� ed by a NESB community, the issue of prior and contemporary Indigenous history as it relates to that site needs to be addressed.

2. To achieve this end, consultation with the Indigenous community of the area must be sought and relevant oral and written Indigenous histories must be researched.

3. On the advice of the Indigenous community, the Indigenous history of the site will be acknowledged in both the textual and architectural fabric of the migrant heritage site.

4. That information on the relevant Indigenous organisations of the area be made available in the migrant history texts in order to underscore the ongoing connec- tion between the land and contemporary Indigenous peoples and to facilitate lines of communication between migrant and Indigenous communities.

The issue of ongoing colonialism in Australian cultural practices resonates, of course, well beyond the con� nes of migrant heritage sites and migrant histories. It

18 Joseph Pugliese

demands the instantiation of decolonising protocols across the broad spectrum of Australian sociocultural practices.

References

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Education Unit and the University of Wollongong). PERERA, S. & PUGLIESE, J. (1998) Detoxifying Australia? Migration Action, XX(2), pp. 4–18. PRYOR, B.M. (1998) Maybe Tomorrow (Ringwood, Vic., Penguin). PUGLIESE, J. (1999) Indigeneity and the racial topography of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, in:

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QUAYLE, C. (2001) Untitled paper delivered at: ‘Women Reporting Violence in a Time of War: a forum on racial and sexual violence: silenced voices of the “race” election’, University of Technology, Sydney, 8 November. Cited with permission from the author.