An artefact of nation: historical archaeology, heritage and nationalism in Australia

An A r t e f a c t o f Na t i on

Historical Archaeology, Heritage and Nationalism in Australia

Tracy Ireland

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sydney

2001

Synopsis

This thesis argues that heritage and historical archaeology in Australia should be

understood as practices and discourses profoundly intertwined with nationalism.

Nationalism is often defined as a political doctrine or ideology, but here a broader

approach is advocated to enable a better understanding of the role of nation-centred

thought and practice in the Australian cultural context. Nationalism is an identity

project – one which is given great power and significance through its alignment

with the nation state and its economies, social structures and institutions.

Nationalism is also a discursive formation which is mutually constituted through

other modernist forms of specialist knowledge such as history and archaeology.

Nationalism in Australia is complex and fragmented, constituted simultaneously

through colonial and anti-imperial, radical and conservative, local and global

discourses. However, like most nationalisms around the world, it depends heavily

upon shared understandings of the nation’s past, which not only explain the basis

for national identity but also, significantly, provides benchmarks for the nation’s

future. Contests over the nature and moral implications of the past have been a

feature of much political and scholarly discourse in Australia over the last decade.

Looking at historical archaeology’s entanglement with nationalism in Australia

provides a window of understanding into some of the ways the category of the

national is negotiated, contested, reproduced and imagined anew.

It is generally accepted that all forms of knowledge are constituted through the

environment and cultural preconceptions within which they are formulated.

Archaeologists have tended to understand this situation through the identification

of political influences upon their research, rather than as a more complex

involvement of archaeological discourse and practice within in a web of broader

cultural discourses, practices, social structures and institutions. Conceptualising

archaeology as an “evolving”, independent “discipline” serves to further mask its

nature as a culturally embedded practice.

i

Synopsis

ii

This thesis provides a detailed reading of Australian historical archaeology in its

cultural context, exploring histories of practice, genealogies of theory,

interpretations and foundational concepts. I argue that nationalism provided a

crucial framework for the ascription of value to the material relics of settler

history, a value which has been primarily expressed through the discourse of

heritage since the 1960s. Discourses articulating a relationship between identity

and landscape have been particularly distinctive in the Australian context. Heritage

and historical archaeological research have been constituted through these

landscape and identity discourses, seeking to explain them and in some ways

therefore giving a reality to these historical mythologies.

Through case studies of historical archaeology’s involvement in some of

Australia’s key heritage initiatives, such as the conservation of Port Arthur in

Tasmania, the National Estate Grants Program, the conservation of the site of first

Government House in Sydney and the Australian National Maritime Museum's

search for Cook's ship Endeavour, I explore the way historical archaeologists have

participated in issues of national identity, history and heritage. These studies reveal

a history of idealistic practitioners who believed historical archaeology could

contribute valuable perspectives on Australian history and identity through their

stewardship of the nation’s material relics. Stewardship of fabric and relics

however, has tended to confine historical archaeologists’ role in public discourses

about nation and identity to one of authentication, rather than interpretation.

Entrenched institutional procedures perpetuate this situation within the heritage

management framework. Understanding the culture of nationalism, and how

archaeology participates in it, is crucial as Australian communities debate the

nature of the past more intensely than ever before.

Preface

This thesis is primarily the product of library and archival research conducted by

the author. Extensive use of secondary sources was made in order to review and

critique relevant approaches in the fields of archaeology, heritage, cultural studies

and social theory. Original case studies and historical reviews are the product of

archival and library research, concerning government and non-government records,

newspaper and magazine articles, legislation and policy, as well as a broad range

of published and unpublished reports. Many historic sites and museum exhibitions

were visited, and informal interviews undertaken, in the course of this research as

the basis for discussion and critique salient to the case studies.

An original contribution of this thesis is the presentation of new research

undertaken for the case studies and used to support the investigation of the

relationship between archaeology, heritage and nationalism in Australia. An aim of

this thesis is also to develop an original approach to the social and cultural analysis

of Australian archaeology. Therefore it is submitted that the original contribution

of this thesis lies not only in the presentation of new research, but also in the

application of innovative approaches to the socio-cultural analysis of archaeology,

within a well-founded theoretical framework.

iii

Acknowledgements

It is my pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of the following people and

institutions to this thesis:

For supervision, my primary debt is to Sarah Colley who worked so hard to instill

rigour and structure into my work, and bring me back to earth when required. I

thank Sarah for her generosity and persistence. Roland Fletcher and Judy

Birmingham also took on supervisorial roles, Roland taking over after Judy’s

retirement. Thank you to Roland for his recent help and I acknowledge the support

of Judy Birmingham over a period of many years before this thesis.

For funding, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Carlyle Greenwell

Bequest, which supported travel and research costs. A University of Sydney

Completion Scholarship supported the final 6 months of my candidature.

Many people working in, and associated with, the School of Archaeology at the

University of Sydney helped in many ways: Pim Allison took on the difficult

reading of an early draft, Aedeen Cremin, Peter White, Andrew Wilson, Jo

Thompson and Dan Potts all offered help in different ways.

For interviews, discussion and other generous assistance with research I thank

Mary Casey, Richard Morrison, Kate Holmes, Helen Temple, Judith Ion, Ian

Stephenson of the NSW National Trust, Peter Romey, Susan Hood and Greg

Jackman of the Port Arthur Historic Site, Leah McKenzie of Heritage Victoria,

Keiran Hosty of the Australian National Maritime Museum, Val Attenbrow and

Leanne Brass of the Australian Museum, Sydney and Chris Wells of Australian

Heritage Projects, Environment Australia, Canberra.

Thank you to the friends and colleagues who provided a mixture of professional

and social support: Wayne Johnson, Jane Lydon, Cath Snelgrove, Mary Casey,

iv

Acknowledgements

v

Matthew Kelly, Huw Barton, Matt Campbell, Iain Stuart, Robin Torrence and The

Sydney Reading Group.

Many individuals responded to requests for expert advice and discussed issues with

me, thank you to Bain Attwood, Richard White, Denis Byrne, Linda Young,

Eleanor Casella, Jane Lydon, Tim Murray, Grace Karskens, Mark Staniforth and

Susan Lawrence.

For his unreserved support and enthusiasm for my project, especially when mine

was flagging, I thank Nels Urwin. Connor and India Urwin deserve awards for

patience, while Neil and Janet Ireland have helped and encouraged me in endless

ways.

Table of Contents

Synopsis i

Preface iii

Acknowledgements iv

List of figures viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Nationalism and the Past 15

Modernity and Nationalism 16

Ethnicity and Nationalism 20

Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretations 25

Globalisation 30

The Culture of Nationalism 33

Nationalism and National Identity in Australia 36

Conclusions: Nationalism and the Past 57

Chapter 2 Relationships within Culture: Archaeology, Nationalism and Identity

63

Archaeology and the State: British Archaeology after World War Two.

65

The Social Context of Archaeological Knowledge: The World Archaeological Congress

69

Trigger’s Alternative Archaeologies and the Issue of Disciplinarity

74

Political Consciousness in Historical Archaeology: Capitalism and Inclusiveness

81

Constructing the Past in the Present 87

Conclusions: Relationships within Culture 95

Chapter 3 Giving Value to the Australian Historic Past 98

Valuing Things 104

An Archaeology of Value 115

Conclusions: Structures of Value 122

vi

Table of Contents vii

Chapter 4 Practice makes Perfect? Doing Historical Archaeology in Australia.

128

Legislation, Policies and Procedures 131

The National Estate Grant Program 1973 - 1998 145

The Port Arthur Conservation Project 1979 –1986 162

Conclusions: Practising the Nation 172

Chapter 5 Intimate Histories and National Narratives. 190

A Genealogy of Historical Archaeological Thought in Australia

192

Interpretive Themes 212

Conclusions: A suitable past? 224

Chapter 6 Materiality and National Origin Myths. 231

Relics of Cook: the Quest for the Endeavour 242

First Government House Site and the Museum of Sydney

251

Remnants of the Macquaries: Even Drains will Do 257

Conclusions: Archaeology, Materiality, Mythology 265

Conclusions Archéologues sans Frontières: Thinking Outside the Nation.

273

Appendix 283

Bibliography 309

List of Figures

Chapter 1 Nationalism and the Past

Figure 1.1 “Identity Crisis” Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend 25/3/1995

60

Figure 1.2 Statue of John McDowell Stuart, Department of Lands building, Sydney Source: The author.

61

Figure 1.3 “Down on his Luck”, Frederick McCubbin, 1899. Source: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

62

Figure 1.4 “The Selector’s Hut: Whelan on the Log”, Arthur Streeton, 1890. Source: national Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

62

Chapter 3 Giving Value to the Australian Historic Past

Figure 3.1 The Industrial Archaeology Committee of the National Trust of Australia (NSW) Source: National Trust Bulletin, Newsletter of the National Trust of Australia (NSW) No. 70 December 1975, page 1.

127

Chapter 4 Practice makes Perfect? Doing Historical Archaeology in Australia.

Figure 4.1 Legislation Affecting Historical Archaeological Sites and Relics in Australia

177

Figure 4.2 Funding of Historical Archaeology in the NEGP 1974 – 1991

178

Figure 4.3 Proponents of Historical Archaeology Projects – NEGP 1974 – 1998

179

Figure 4.4 Types of Historical Archaeology Sites in NEGP Projects 1974 – 1998

180

Figure 4.5 Definitions of Site Type Terms In text

Figure 4.6 Trends in NEGP Funding for Selected Site Types 1974 – 1998

183

Figure 4.7 Types of Historical Archaeology Projects in NEGP 1974 – 1998

185

Figure 4.8 Definitions of the Project Type Terms In text

Figure 4.9 Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania. Source: The author.

188

Figure 4.10 Restored Cottage, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania. Source: The author.

188

viii

List of Figures ix

Figure 4.11 Volunteers at Port Arthur in 1982. Source: Port Arthur Historic Site Archive No. 36 2(15).

189

Figure 4.12 Excavation at Port Arthur. Source: Port Arthur Historic Site Archive No. 69 5 (16).

189

Chapter 5 Intimate Histories and National Narratives.

Figure 5.1 Citations of Theory in AHA Articles 1983 - 1999 227

Figure 5.2 Citations of Case Studies in AHA Articles 1983 - 1999

227

Figure 5.3 Classification of Citations in All Articles in AHA 1983 - 1999

228

Figure 5.4 Citations in Articles on Industrial Themes in AHA 1983 - 1999

228

Figure 5.5 Citations in Articles on Urban and Ethnicity/Gender/Class in AHA 1983 – 1999.

229

Figure 5.6 Citations in Articles on Critique/History of Archaeology Themes in AHA 1983 – 1999.

229

Figure 5.7 Themes of Articles in AHA 1983 - 1999 230

Chapter 6 Materiality and National Origin Myths.

Figure 6.1 Endeavour Canon. Source: Australian National Maritime Museum.

268

Figure 6.2 Timber Samples from shipwreck in Newport, Rhode Island. Source: Australian National Maritime Museum.

268

Figure 6.3 Excavation at first Government House site. Source: Historic Houses Trust of NSW.

269

Figure 6.4 The Friends of First Government House Site Rally, 1983. Source: Historic Houses Trust of NSW.

269

Figure 6.5 Protestors in 1995. Source: The author. 270

Figure 6.6 MoS. Source: The author. 270

Figure 6.7 “The edge of the trees” Source: The author. 271

Figure 6.8 “Convict descendent and proud of it”. Source: The author.

271

Figure 6.9 The Conservatorium of Music, Sydney. Source: The author.

272

Figure 6.10 The “Macquarie” drain. Source: The author. 272

List of Figures x

Appendices A-1 Funding of Historical Archaeology (HA) Projects in the NEGP compared to the total NEGP Funds for each State, 1974-1991

284

A-2 Funding of Historical Archaeology Projects - NEGP 1974-1998

285

A-3 Analysis of Funding of Historical Archaeology Projects in the NEGP 1974-1998

286

A-4 Type of Site in Historical Archaeological Projects - NEGP 1974-1998

287

A-5 Trends in NEGP Funding for all site types, 1974-1998

288

A-6 Victoria: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

292

A-7 Tasmania: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

295

A-8 South Australia: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

297

A-9 Queensland: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

299

A-10 Northern Territory: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

301

A-11 New South Wales: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

303

A-12 Australian Capital Territory: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

305

A-13 Western Australia: NEGP Projects in Historical Archaeology

306

Introduction

“While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable,

many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins… But ruins are

never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic

fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time

in the records of destruction”(Healy 1997: 1).

“Such abandoned sites are Australia’s romantic ruins, the equivalent of Britain’s

Tintern Abbey or Stonehenge. The presence of old sites has a powerful effect. It

legitimises a society’s occupation of the land and it gives it historical depth.

Surely a people must have a valid claim to ownership of a land punctuated with

sites marking their conquest?” (Bickford 1991b : 77).

How have the ruins of colonialism become the artefacts of nation in Australia?

What are the processes a nation has used to turn new territory, terra nullius, into a

landscape which chronicles the culture, the values and the history of a settler

community? Some time before its 70th birthday, the Australian nation became a

worthy subject for the archaeologist, a profession previously associated by most

Australians with the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and perhaps also

with Aboriginal prehistory. The material remains of Australia’s colonial past, a

period of just over 200 years, were transformed from abandoned sites and buried

relics into “an archaeological record” in a process which began in the 1960s. Why

is it that this practice emerged at this time? Was it simply imported from Britain

and America, or did it emerge from local interests, and how has it been involved in

interpreting Australia’s colonial and national past?

Working in historical archaeology and heritage management in the late 1980s and

1990s led me to believe that, while innovative in some ways, these fields were

caught within a set of practices, institutions and philosophies that allowed little

room for reflexive readings of heritage, nation and culture. Entrenched practices

had led to a situation where heritage institutions not only represented Australia’s

colonial past, but also reproduced it, perpetuating the meaning and power of

1

Introduction 2

colonialist myths in contemporary society. It seemed to me at that time that the

intellectual inheritance of colonialism should be as significant an issue for

historical archaeology and heritage management as it was already perceived to be

for prehistory in Australia. However in the context of settler heritage conservation,

colonial thought and structures were embedded within the institutions of the nation

and the discourse of Australian cultural nationalism, perhaps most obviously

within the colourful rhetoric of national identity.

I first investigated these ideas in 1995 in a paper entitled “Excavating National

Identity”, which I prepared for a seminar marking the opening of the Museum of

Sydney on the site of First Government House (Ireland 1996). This site had been

excavated by historical archaeologists in the 1980s and the battle to preserve the

archaeological remains in situ was the first case of public activism for the

conservation of an historical archaeological site in Australia (Temple 1988 and see

Chapter 6). Inspired by recent readings in postcolonial studies, the work of literary

critic Kay Schaffer (1988) and historian Bain Attwood’s (1992) use of Foucault to

deconstruct colonial knowledge, I concentrated on the representations of identity

that had been reproduced and reinforced through heritage management and

historical archaeological research since the 1960s.

The 1990s saw a great deal of critical attention paid to the role of colonialism in

shaping the archaeology of Aboriginal prehistory in Australia. In the context of

local Aboriginal rights movements and international scholarship on the control of

the past by dominant groups, archaeologists in Australia addressed the

contemporary cultural and political implications of their work. The history and

intellectual genealogies of many aspects of archaeological practice were subjected

to scrutiny – from the level of institutions and professionalisation, to questioning

disciplinary boundaries, and re-assessing epistemologies of objectivity (Byrne

1996; Colley and Bickford 1996, Murray 1992; 1993b; 1996d).

The 1990s was such a vibrant period in Australian cultural and historical studies

that it was impossible not to continue to build ideas concerning nationalism,

Introduction 3

cultural practice and the perplexing context of the settler nation. Cultural and

political debates about the past escalated during this period. This was the initiation

of hostilities in Australia’s, still continuing, “history wars”, with the “black

armbands” against the “white blindfolds” in the forum of national parliament

(Birch 1997; Curthoys 1999a). These are debates between historians, politicians

and other cultural commentators, about the events of Australia’s colonial history

and about the moral responsibility of the present generation for violence and

racism in the past. During these years all that was solid about the good nature of

the Australian nation was challenged and defended, abandoned and reaffirmed.

And yet the nation remained at the centre of debates about a postcolonial future,

the celebratory version of the national past may have been discredited, but a

postcolonial nation remained the object of desire.

An Outline of Aim and Approach

The aim of this thesis is therefore to understand what the relationship between

Australian historical archaeology, heritage and nationalism has been. How is such

a relationship constituted and how has it been played out? My approach to this

investigation is derived from a broad range of techniques, methods and

perspectives developed in cultural studies, history, anthropology and the social

sciences. Central to these is the work of Foucault, his approach to the critique of

the relationship between knowledge and power, his histories of knowledge, and in

particular his scepticism about concepts of progress (Foucault 1970; 1972; 1991

and also see Dean 1994; Kendall and Wickham 1999). Getting this analysis

underway soon made it apparent that the problem of the nation as telos in historical

and cultural analysis is paralleled by the problem of the discipline as telos in

histories of archaeology and critiques of its epistemologies. Foucault’s histories

suggest ways around this problem. They are “problematised” by the present and

aim to undermine “objective”, foundational knowledges. In doing so, they disrupt

notions of progress by showing that these histories are specific and contingent.

These concepts gave me the basis for an approach to the relationship between

historical archaeology and nationalism that avoids a teleological denouement; that

Introduction 4

is a conclusion that resolves how this relationship has occurred and sets out how it

may be avoided or managed in the future. The aim here is to reveal the histories of

knowledge production and of practice, to use these histories to understand how

knowledge is produced and authorised in the present, and to assume that the

present is, and the future will be, an ongoing negotiation of contingent

circumstances, not an unfolding growth of knowledge - not a development in an

evolutionary sense, nor a resolution.

Combined with these Foucaultian perspectives I have followed other analysts of

archaeology, nationalism and colonialism in adopting various concepts from

Bourdieu’s influential sociology of culture (Bourdieu 1977; 1984; 1990 and see

Byrne 1993; 1996; Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996; Hamilakis 1999a). In particular,

Nicholas Thomas’ approach to colonialism, drawing on both Foucault and

Bourdieu, inspired my approach to nationalism as a project which is practised in

social and cultural contexts (Thomas 1994). It was with Thomas’ “ethnographic”

approach in mind, that I assembled detailed local case histories to explore issues of

meanings and values, practices and interpretations, and the negotiation and

deployment of these concepts in specific historical situations. My approach

therefore is centrally historical, but a history in the service of various tasks of

cultural and sociological analyses. It is also qualitative and although I introduce

various forms of empirical data, the aim is not to prove arguments on the basis of

numbers, but to employ this empirical information in broader discussions of

practice, discourse and institutional effects.

The deconstruction of foundational knowledge is primarily seen as a meaningful

political gesture which should be an end in itself, and antithetical to the creation of

alternative master narratives. Too often however, deconstruction leads to a

simplistic rejection of traditional subjects of study in preference for areas perceived

as neglected. It is my aim that this analysis supports an imaginative process that

goes beyond deconstruction: to assist archaeologists in thinking outside the

intellectual and geographical boundaries of the nation; and to assist in constructive

Introduction 5

new readings of existing research, within an enhanced understanding of their

cultural context.

The Contexts for Research

This study is situated within a number of broader debates about the social and

cultural context of archaeological knowledge production and also about

nationalism, identity, history and literature. In Chapters 1 and 2, I explore aspects

of these debates in detail and situate my approach. Many recent critiques of

identity discourse and archaeology treat nationalism as a political ideology and as

embodied primarily in the structures of the state (Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Kohl

1998; Atkinson et al. 1996; Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996). This leads to

descriptions of archaeology’s relationship to politics. It leads to the concept that

good archaeology can remain free of political bias through rigorous adherence to

codes of objectivity. Although the late 1990s saw the publication of several major

studies concerning archaeology and nationalism in different parts of the world

many of these focused on “abuses” of archaeology by fascist or oppressive regimes

(such as National Socialism in Germany, Salazar in Portugal and experiences in

parts of the USSR). These dramatic examples seemed to have little relevance to

Australia where 20th century nationalism has often been seen as quite

underdeveloped and as still possessing some radical potential to build a more

equitable social order (During 1990; McLachlan 1989; Turner 1994).

I will go on to propose in Chapter 1, not a definition of nationalism, but an

approach to the culture of nationalism. To understand the power and pervasiveness

of nationalism in the contemporary world it must be understood as an identity

project, a project which remains relevant and vital within the context of

globalisation. While this concept is critical to enabling my analysis, it is also

dangerously all encompassing, enticing me to see the nation as pervasive and

constitutive in all areas of culture and identity. In Australia, nationalism is a

fragmented, inconsistent discourse, and it is negotiated and contested in overt

political debates, such as Australia’s “history wars”. However such positions are

enabled through more subtle structures and discourses which are enacted daily,

Introduction 6

through forms of knowledge which appear to be objective and natural concepts. It

is this idea, of nation as a discourse which is constitutive of, and constituted

through cultural practice in ordinary and everyday contexts, which sits uneasily

with the term “nationalism” and its history of use to describe more narrow political

doctrines. This is the problem Bhabha refers to when he suggests that the history of

this term is a barrier to really understanding nationalism, which he describes as a

“ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture” (Bhabha 1990a: 291).

Another potential context for this study are analyses of colonial forms of science.

The development of “colonial sciences” has often been approached in terms of

their originality, or intellectual dependence on the metropolitan core (Robin 1997).

Murray has noted in relation to Australian prehistory how the development of

local, colonial “sciences” were involved in nationalist movements from the late

19th century (Murray 1992: 4). Indeed studies of Australian prehistory, and a few

concerning historical archaeology (Bairstow 1984a; 1991), have foregrounded

issues of local originality in the context of the metropolitan (Murray and White

1981; McBryde 1986). I have specifically avoided such issues in my analyses. This

is not because more detailed comparisons between Australian historical

archaeology and other archaeologies would not be worthwhile. On the contrary,

comparisons with American historical archaeology, or other British, European or

transnational archaeologies, or colonial or settler archaeologies for instance, would

be most interesting to pursue. I am assuming throughout my project that Australian

historical archaeological discourses are involved in broader, transnational

discourses. I am assuming that “Australian” discourses of identity, nation and

heritage for instance, are also constituted through both global and local cultural,

social and political discursive formations. My analysis does however foreground

the negotiation of meanings in local contexts. I am not concerned with whether or

not Australian historical archaeology is derivative but I am concerned with the

foundations of the knowledges which constitute historical archaeological practices

and interpretations. It is a limitation of my research project that I have not

investigated further issues of the global context of archaeological discourses, but I

Introduction 7

hope that future research on these issues will be facilitated through the analyses

presented here.

Historical Archaeology in Australia

Any discussion about “historical archaeology” is generally preceded by debates

about the definition of this term (see for instance Andren 1998; Funari et al 1999;

Orser and Fagan 1995). Since my aim is to analyse what sort of work and research

has been conceived of as “historical archaeology”, and to treat this as broadly as

possible, rather than to suggest what should be thought of historical archaeology, I

believe the issue of definition should be left somewhat open ended. However, in

using the term historical archaeology I mean to encompass archaeological research

in Australia focussing on the post-1788 or what is sometimes called the “post-

contact” period. I treat 1788 as more of a conceptual date than an actual one. The

remains of Macassan trepang processing sites or Dutch shipwrecks, which might

pre-date 1788, could just as well be covered by the term historical archaeology,

while at the same time, many areas of Australia remained untouched by white

settlement for long periods after 1788. Some Australian archaeologists have called

these early periods of pre-British-settlement contact between indigenous people

and “outsiders" a “protohistoric” period (Mulvaney 1969; Fredericksen 2000).

In Australia, the critical divide has been between “prehistoric”, precolonial

Aboriginal archaeology and more recent sites, for which written records of some

kind are relevant. Historical archaeology has therefore focused on the colonial

period and has occasionally been termed “colonial archaeology” (Jack 1980;

1985). While the term “colonial archaeology” has been associated with a

colonialist approach and has not been popular recently (Egloff 1994), it has

something to recommend it in the Australian context. To call a period historical,

and in opposition to “prehistory”, is to position it within the evolutionary,

conceptual framework of modern historicism: a product of the Enlightenment

belief in progress towards scientific rationalism from beginnings in myth and

superstition. Fredericksen has recently discussed the way in which terming colonial

Introduction 8

archaeology “historical” and precolonial archaeology “prehistoric” inserts an

ontological dilemma into the archaeology of Australia (Fredericksen 2000). He

concludes that drawing a line across time and calling one side historic does not

adequately deal with the issues that he, as an archaeologist, has to deal with. I

agree with Fredericksen as far as he goes, but he fails to get to the heart of the

problem because he does not separate the discourse of history from the phenomena

of writing and literacy. History is a way of understanding and ordering the past, it

is a discourse with a history of its own. The history/prehistory divide is not just

caused by the events of colonisation, it is an artefact of modernist, colonialist

discourse. The focus on literacy, which characterises many definitions of historical

archaeology, depoliticises and neutralises the context of colonialism and simply

has no interpretive validity in the context of a colonial past (see for instance Funari

et al 1999: 8). In these contexts the issue of literate modes of communication is far

less important than the constitution of the subject through nested historical

allegories and larger discursive formations such as colonialism or Orientalism

(Curthoys and Docker 1999; Lydon 1999).

Many American historical archaeologists have advocated Deetz’ definition of

historical archaeology as an archaeology centred around the events, processes and

cultures arising from European imperial expansion and contact with indigenous

people (Deetz 1977: 5). Others have centred on the context of capitalism as the

crucial issue for historical archaeology (Leone and Potter 1999; Johnson 1996). It

is not the place here to draw further conclusions about the problematic term

“historical archaeology”, but looking at historical archaeology’s broader

involvement in the cultures of colonialism and nationalism is pertinent to a better

understanding of how archaeology might deal with unequal experiences of

modernity within the context of colonialism.

Within the scope of this thesis, I confine my analysis, for the most part, to

terrestrial historical archaeology. Maritime, or underwater, archaeology in

Australia is now generally accepted as part of the broader practice of historical

archaeology (Hosty and Stuart 1994; Staniforth 1995). While I do include a case

Introduction 9

study on the excavations seeking Cook’s Endeavour in Chapter 6, the emergence,

institutional focus and legislative history of Australian maritime archaeology is

quite distinct from that of terrestrial archaeology, and because it is not tied to the

land and has international dimensions it appears also to have a different

relationship with nationalism than that of (land) historical archaeology (and see

comments in Bennett 1995: 149).

Historical archaeology in Australia possesses a small base in universities in

Australia, but one that has expanded numerically and geographically in the later

1990s, seeing aspects of historical archaeology taught in most States (Egloff 1994;

Mackay and Karskens 1999). It receives relatively little funding from sources

which traditionally fund research in Classical or Near Eastern archaeology or

prehistory (Connah 1998: 3; Colley 1996a). Alternatively, most historical

archaeological work is funded through private or government clients complying

with heritage management requirements embodied in legislation, which varies

from State to State. This commercial or “consulting” historical archaeological

work proceeds within a framework where research must be justified in terms of

heritage benefits. However, such is the nature of the system that such justification

is only rarely made explicit and therefore one of the aims of my project is to draw

out the “linking logic” between specific historical archaeological practices and the

way in which their role in the heritage framework is conceptualised.

The major funding source for university based archaeological research is through

the notoriously competitive Australian Research Council. This funding body has

become more significant for historical archaeological research only as the numbers

of university employed practitioners has expanded. Further, a review in 1994 of the

Australian Research Council’s system of classification and assessment, pointed out

that historical archaeology had previously been grouped disadvantageously, as

“Other Classical Studies and Archaeology”, which was at odds with both its

regional and historical context (National Board of Employment, Education and

Training 1994: 38).

Introduction 10

Having drawn a distinction between university based and commercial or consulting

historical archaeology that is indeed important for the context of research, I do not

want to overstate this division. Not only is academic research subject to the same

legislative framework as consulting historical archaeology, but many historical

archaeologists work in both spheres.

A Note on Key Terms and Concepts

Some of the terms and concepts which are relied upon in this thesis are ambiguous.

I have chosen to use each of the following terms or concepts in a particular way, so

it is important that I set out the choices I have made in this regard.

Aborigines

Throughout the text I use the term Aborigines to represent the indigenous peoples

of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. The terms “Aborigine” and “Aboriginal”

therefore represent a shorthand reference to a complex cultural reality covering an

array of people who may identify themselves in many different ways. These terms

have a history which is pertinent to the histories I am analysing in this thesis; the

history of archaeology and heritage in Australia; the history of nationalist discourse

in and about Australia (Attwood and Arnold 1992). My focus here is primarily on

discourses concerning settlers (see below), but the subjects “settlers” and

“Aborigines” have been formed in opposition to one another, and both are

implicated in constructions of the nation, its future and its past.

Colonialism

Following Thomas, I treat colonialism as a complex cultural formation rather than

primarily a form of social organisation resulting from the expansion of imperial

power (Thomas 1994: 2). This broad view of colonialism stresses that although

characterised by some large scale ideological formations and “world views”,

colonialism is a cultural project that was practised, negotiated, altered and

reconstructed in specific locations by individuals. While racism is a central aspect

of colonial perception, its expression can also vary greatly, from “a gentle

exoticism” to “racist settler violence” (Thomas 1994: 13). Also of central

Introduction 11

importance to the cultures of colonialism is Eurocentric progressive historicism.

Historicism can be seen as a cultural structure which promotes ideologies of

progress, development, civilising and improving which are central to the colonial

project (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). What is particularly relevant to my study is the

recognition that colonialism “instituted enduring hierarchies of subjects and

knowledges” (Prakash 1995: 3). Modern strategies of governance which enabled

colonialism as a social order also created institutional and disciplinary forms which

have been seen as separate from and not implicated in colonialism. I use the term

neo-colonial in this study to describe situations where such colonial forms are

promulgated and reinforced in contexts which are no longer seen as “colonial”.

Culture

While I have no intention of setting up a theory of culture here, I want to set out

some of the concepts about culture which have influenced my approach. Accepting

that archaeology is not an objective science that is separate from culture, I needed

ways of approaching archaeology as a part of culture. A Foucaultian perspective

uses the notion of culture as sets of practices and knowledges, stressing the use of

knowledge and institutions to shape the formation of individuals (Foucault 1972).

Foucault therefore saw power as the control and management of individuals by

their subjectification through expert knowledge, institutions and disciplinary

structures. Thus medical discourses produce the medically ill, and in the same way

archaeological discourses can be seen to produce the subject of archaeological

inquiry and the archaeological record.

Bourdieu’s focus on practice and concept of the habitus have also enabled an

approach to nationalism as more than an “ideology” which is imposed on

unknowing subjects. His concept of a dialectic between habitus and institutions, as

two modes of the objectification of history, that constantly create a history which

appears “like witticisms, as both original and inevitable”, is particularly useful in

understanding the culture of nationalism (Bourdieu 1990). This is not to suggest

that culture and nation are conterminous however, or that culture exists in any way

as a shared “substance”. Appadurai suggests that we think of culture simply as a

Introduction 12

“dimension of phenomena, a dimension which attends to situated and embodied

difference” (Appadurai 1996: 13). Therefore while I am interested in distinctive

shared narratives and practices which form material conditions for the formation of

identities, these should not be seen as existing in a sealed or fixed substance, but as

within a fluid and open cultural dimension.

Heritage

I use the term heritage here, not as a concept of a community’s shared inheritance

from the past, but as a discourse which sees the past as materially embodied in

places and things and which publicly demarcates and represents the past through

these things (Bennett 1995: 130). I am particularly concerned here with the forms

of practice, governance and expert knowledge that have been constituted through

this discourse.

Settler

Settler is a term that has gained currency through the field of colonial discourse

analysis or postcolonial theory (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995). It is used to

describe nations where colonisation was undertaken on such a scale that colonial

settlers eventually outnumbered and displaced the indigenous people, as in the

United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and of course Australia. The

term is used to distinguish the results of this colonial process from those where the

aim was to rule subject peoples and incorporate them within an empire for

economic and other reasons, as occurred in India and Indonesia. I use the term here

in preference to “European”, “invader” or “non-indigenous” as it offers an accurate

description of the cultural and historic context of the group with which my study is

largely concerned. It is important to note that in the context of postcolonial theory

the term “settler” does not imply peaceful or consenting settlement, but relates

more to the intent of the colonial practices involved.

Introduction 13

Structure of this Thesis

Chapter One explores ways of thinking about nationalism and how it relates to the

past. In particular I investigate concepts of nation and identity in Australia and the

lexicon of images which have operated within Australian culture to represent the

nation and its past. I set this exploration in the context of current issues in the

Australian community which problematise my research on archaeology, heritage

and nationalism.

Chapter 2 changes ground to examine archaeology, investigating ways that the

relationship between archaeology and nationalism has been explained and how

these explanations might relate to the Australian context.

Chapter 3 investigates the processes of giving value to the material remains of

Australia’s settler past. I consider how archaeological discourses were involved in

these processes of valuing and how concepts of historical archaeology were

defined through a linking of material remains with a continuous historical identity.

Chapter 4 focuses on historical archaeological practice. I consider the framework

of heritage legislation, policy and the procedures which formed a framework for

heritage management historical archaeology. At a national level, I look at historical

archaeological projects conducted through the National Estates Grant Program, an

important federal funding initiative introduced in 1972. I then look closely at the

influential conservation project at Port Arthur in Tasmania, where a distinctive

form of conservation historical archaeological practice was developed.

Chapter 5 is concerned with historical archaeological theory and interpretations.

Here I explore the foundations for the production of historical archaeological

knowledge and consider some interpretive themes which reveal important

relationships between nationalist narratives and archaeological interpretation.

Introduction 14

Chapter 6 pursues links between materiality and mythology which have

characterised archaeology’s involvement in nationalist projects across the globe. In

the Australian context I explore three case histories in which archaeology has been

directly involved with national origin mythologies and consider the role of

archaeology as an authenticating discourse.

Finally, in my concluding chapter I ask how we can rethink the relationship

between politics, historical consciousness and archaeology? I suggest that

transnational contexts are one way to deal with issues of globalisation, while

acknowledging the ongoing political importance of nationalism, yet simultaneously

disentangling its teleological effect from cultural and historical analyses.

Chapter 1

Nationalism and the Past

“The discourse of nationalism is not my main concern. In some ways it is the

historical certainty and settled nature of that term against which I am attempting

to write of the western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the

locality of culture” (Bhabha 1990a: 291).

Nationalism was perhaps one of the most debated fields within cultural and

political history, anthropology and sociology at the end of the 20th century. The

search for global definitions and classifications of this phenomenon has led to a

huge body of analytical literature, including a number of journals devoted solely to

this subject. In this chapter I will explore ways of thinking about nationalism and,

in particular, how it intersects with images and understandings of the past.

Combined with this exploration is a review of nationalism and national identity in

Australia. This is not a history of Australian nationalism, but a discussion about the

nationalist discourses, symbols and images which have been current, contested or

accepted in the period of my case study of archaeology and heritage from the late

1960s to the present.

This has been a period of change, debate and fragmentation of national imagery in

Australia, but a significant feature is, I will argue, the perpetuation of many of the

“traditional” images of national identity in new forms. Particularly prominent in

Australian nationalist imagery is the land: landscape, nature and the environment

are terms characteristically used in imprecise ways to embody the essence of

Australia and the “national identity”. Landscape discourse, as I go on to describe it,

is of central importance in configuring concepts of the past, of heritage and history,

and I will return to this theme in detail in subsequent chapters. This chapter

presents an account of the ongoing pervasiveness of this discourse and its

15

Nationalism and the Past 16

relationship to histories and popular narratives describing the past and the national

character.

The constructs of modernity and history tend to encourage a one-way

conceptualisation of cultural change. Ethnic and national fragmentation are

envisaged as being gradually overwhelmed by the ceaseless tide of globalisation:

the unstoppable expansion of global capital, the homogenisation of cultural

difference. However this kind of one-way development is a simplification of a

more complex reality. Nations and nationalism, rather than being simply the

product of modernity, may be a key way of understanding the co-constitutive

relationships which produce it (Arnason 1990: 218). Arguments regarding the

increasing importance of transnational cultural spheres as sources for identity and

the imagination of post-national political orders are compelling and need to be

acknowledged as crucial for contemporary cultural analysis (Appadurai 1996).

Alongside these arguments however, are those which show that modernity has

always been a hybridic, diasporic formation, within which narratives of bounded,

complete nations belie the processes which are most relevant to experiences of

modernity outside the Eurocentric context: imperialism, colonialism, the expansion

of capital, slavery and (forced) migration (Gilroy 1993; Lazarus 1999).

Modernity and Nationalism

Gellner and other theorists of nationalism and modernity have provided crucial

insights into the way nationalism works to reproduce itself politically and

culturally, highlighting the role of the intellectual and the consequences of

institutions which embody the intersection of a version of culture and the power

structures of the state. While these insights are important, and shall be pursued in

my study, they can also lead to an over-determined analysis that ignores the social

and cultural complexities of the modern world. The nation tends to “put itself

forward” as the obvious framework for cultural analysis, to embrace as

distinctively its own a society that is in fact constructing identity from a global


social reality and I will go on to argue that this has been a particularly significant

problem in the Australian context. Postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism also help

to highlight the teleology of nation-centred accounts of modernity.

Gellner has suggested that nationalism should be understood as a uniquely close

relationship between culture and power, a relationship created by the demands of

modern industrial society (Gellner 1983; Gellner 1997). He claims that nationalism

filled the gap left by the collapse of feudalism and absolutism and addressed the

disenchantment caused by the rationalisation of modern social life. The

organisational and technological characteristics of the modern, industrialised

economy, most importantly the need for an effective mobile labour market,

demanded new forms of social mobility and communication. This in turn required

a new form of cultural identity that aligned individuals with a larger, “higher” form

of culture: the nation. Gellner also stresses nationalism’s tendency to

institutionalise a normative version of “high” culture in the power structures of the

state. Nationalism is therefore cast by Gellner as the replacement of ethnicity and

kinship and as the dominant source of identity for individuals in the modern world,

an identity that is linked to powerful political structures in a new way.

Gellner sees nationalism as a cultural response determined by developments in the

economic and technological spheres. Arnason has suggested that Gellner’s theory,

while a “promising first step” in its location of nationalism in the field of relations

between culture and power, is overshadowed by “functionalist preconceptions”

about the nature of modernity (Arnason 1990: 216). Following Giddens, Arnason

attributes a constitutive role in the modernizing process to nationalism and the

nation-state (Giddens 1985). Rather than seeing ‘modernity’ as the determinant of

a new form of cultural identity (nationalism), resulting in a subsequent form of

political structure (the nation –state), Arnason argues that nationalism is a vehicle

through which culture and power might be “mutually determined and jointly

transformed” (Arnason 1990: 209).


Marxist theorists hold capitalist industrialisation as the fundamental process of

modernity but, although Marxism implies a critique of nationalism through its

promotion of international socialism, most theorists of nationalism have argued

that Marxist theory failed to explain the role and persistence of nationalism. Tom

Nairn claimed that “the theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical

failure”, while Benedict Anderson’s famous treatise Imagined Communities also

begins with the suggestion that, rather than a failure, nationalism remains an

unaccounted for anomaly in Marxist theory (Anderson 1983; Nairn 1977). Lazurus

however, has defended the ongoing utility of Marxism in theorising nationalism

and contemporary global reality. I will review his position below in the context of

globalisation (Lazarus 1999: 61). Giddens saw modernity as constituted through an

array of “institutional clusters”, including the organisational structures of both

capitalism and the nation state (Giddens 1990:174). He defined nationalism as

simply “the cultural sensibility of sovereignty, the con-commitant of the co-

ordination of administrative power within the nation state” (Giddens 1985:219).

Such distinct separation of the structures of the nation-state from nationalism

implies that the role of culture in institutional formation and on-going

administration can be minimised. I suggest Giddens’ separation of culture from

social structure is too succinct.

Liah Greenfield took a middle path between the relative importance of structures,

or Gidden’s institutions, and the social or cultural sphere, by focusing on human

agency and the primacy of nationalism as a “species of identity”, which necessarily

precedes and gives rise to the idea and the form of the nation (Greenfield 1992).

Greenfield argued strongly that the “idea of the nation… forms the constitutive

element of modernity” as it, most centrally, transformed the way individuals

understood their place in the world (Greenfield 1992: 18). In her focus on agency,

Greenfield considers in particular the influential role in Europe and the United

States of elite and middle class 18th and 19th century intellectuals who articulated

the character of national identities.


The relative importance of nationalism within the cultures of modernity is a

significant issue for my study, not so much in terms of the questions about

nationalism’s origins, but for theorising the relationships between aspects of

cultural practice. As Gellner suggests, the connection between culture and power

means that nationalism, as a form of identity, has more wide-ranging implications

than other forms of social and cultural identity. Nationalism may not necessarily be

the pre- eminent source of identity for individuals, but it can constrain the roles of

other forms of identity and discourse which configure many aspects of social

practice. The institutions of the State, as the political reality of the idea of the

nation, are of course a prime site of this power. As Giddens points out, institutions

retain normative referents and undoubtedly shape social practice in very significant

ways, and their administration tends to become “blackboxed”. This is the term

used by Latour to describe the way in which the rationale for proceeding in a

particular way is not analysed, but accepted as common sense, becoming integral

to what appears to be a coherent practice (Kendall and Wickham 1999:140). What

needs to be added to this understanding of the way in which institutions work, is an

account of the processes which enable change. An interest in individual agency is a

vital component of an approach to nationalism which is not overly deterministic. I

return to these issues below in the context of Thomas’ approach to colonialism

(Thomas 1994). As a species of identity relating to a sovereign, limited community, nationalism

tends to be subsuming, to suggest itself as the logical framework for analysis

(Anderson 1983: 6). For instance, in Australia the national boundary appears so

natural that the history of its construction is rarely acknowledged, and debates

about illegal immigrants have the effect of reinforcing the concept of the island

Australia as a bounded, even sealed geo-political body (see for instance

discussions in Byrne 1996; and White 1997). I will discuss these and other debates

later in this chapter. It is not so much that intellectuals have been blinded to

international contexts, but that the category of nation tends to attribute a coherence

to its subject that is more an artefact of the category than a reflection of actual

socio-cultural and geo-political complexity. Post-colonial critiques which question

the universality of Eurocentric explanations of modernity - which always place


Europe as its origin and apogee, also help to break down the perceived coherence

of the autonomous nation. Accounts of slavery, colonisation and diaspora have

cumulatively built up a picture of the experience of modernity from an alternative

point of view. Paul Gilroy claims that this reveals that the nation has never been an

adequate framework for the analysis of modernity, which has always, rather than

just recently, been a “transcultural, international, diasporic, hybridic formation”

(Gilroy 1993: 223). A mere glance towards the imperialism, colonialism, slavery,

and forced migration of the modern period, towards the histories of exploration,

travel, anthropology and natural science, and how they have shaped the Australian

experience, should confirm Gilroy’s arguments.

Ethnicity and Nationalism

Theorists discussed so far all agree on the distinctive modernity of nations. The

work of Anthony D. Smith however, has challenged this emphasis with the claim

that nations are based on ethnic traditions that form both pre-existing foundations,

as well as future limits, for the cultural expression of nationalism (Smith 1986).

Ethnicity is a term which has only been widely used in scholarship since the late

1960s, replacing the term “tribe” as it was used in anthropology before the Second

World War (Eriksen 1993: 8) and the construct of a “culture” (an association of

artefact types and styles thought to be the signature of a cultural group) in

archaeology (Jones 1997: 51).1 Eriksen discusses how nationalism and ethnicity

are kindred concepts. The difference between them lies, at the most fundamental

level, in the relationship between cultural identity and a political state that

represents that identity. This distinction is however, highly problematic (Eriksen

1993: 118). What is difficult about these terms is the cultural baggage they have

come to carry in contemporary Western parlance. Eriksen comments on their use in

the English speaking media where nation states are often linked with bureaucratic

principles of justice and democracy, while ethnic affiliations are associated with

traditional, pre-modern blood feuds and threats to the cohesion of a state. The


recent proliferation of the term “ethno-nationalism”, particularly in relation to

struggles in the former Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union, is also

generally associated in the Western media with racist and culturally chauvinistic

ideologies. I suggest that the recent history of these terms shows that they are used

in opposition to one another and that their definition is therefore circular. Ethnicity

is often conceived of as a form of primordial, group cultural identity, based on

kinship and myth-symbol complexes, which is pre-modern and which pre-existed

nationalism but, if given political expression, may become (ethno-) nationalism.

However, the problem with this political expression of ethnicity, in the perception

of the Western media, is that it lacks the modern, rationalist and progressive

inheritance of the Western Enlightenment which is exemplified by the core world

nation states: Britain, France, and the United States for instance.

Smith privileges the status of ethnic stories and symbols in modern nationalism

because, although he admits they might be chosen from a range of possibilities,

they must be “real”, authentic and of continuing meaning within culture to be

acceptable to the community. Smith notes in particular the role of archaeological

artefacts as symbols of the ethnic past (Smith 1986; Smith 1995). The materiality

of these objects seems to reassure Smith of their objective status as evidence of the

“social –magnetism and psychological charge” attached to “myth-symbol

complexes” (Smith 1986: 207). Smith builds up a detailed analogy of nationalists

as “archaeologists”, who are therefore bound to meet a range of criteria in their

exploration of the past: “their interpretations must be consonant with the scientific

evidence, popular resonance and the patterning of particular ethno-histories”

(Smith 1995: 13). He is arguing that modernists and postmodernists have tended to

deny the reality of ethnic traditions, and therefore their power and place in

nationalism, by treating the nationalist’s construction of traditions as, to continue

his analogy, a totally arbitrary “quarrying” of the “past” (see for instance

Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). One aim of Smith’s strategy is to diminish the

perceived power and influence of the intellectual’s creativity by claiming that they

may only draw out realities that already have an authentic form in the collective

1 Although Gordon Childe used the term ethnic in the 1930s to distinguish an archaeological


memory of the community. In this way Smith explains the operation of ethnic

traditions in nationalism as a constant rediscovery and regeneration of the

community’s knowledge of its self, as opposed to totally new, “invented” forms of

nation. His main point is that ethnicity is a pre-modern human trait that has

persisted and adapted in modern, industrial society as nationalism, and that

nationalism should therefore not be thought of as totally modern.

Miriam Dixson, in her recent book The Imaginary Australian, claims that ethnicity

inhabits a dimension “not entirely cultural and by no means necessarily embodied”

(Dixson 1999: 56). She seems to be imbuing ethnicity, or the “ethnie - the ethnic

group aware of itself as such”, with an embedded “race memory”, that stands apart

from culture. I will discuss Dixson’s thesis further below in relation to Australian

nationalism. What is relevant here is her work as an application of Smith’s general

theory. Dixson is attracted to the way in which ethnic history, as a definitional

limitation on the range of possible nations or nationalisms, democratises nation

building. Dixson claims that modernist and post-modernist positions on the nation,

the first termed the “elite plot” and the second condemned as the post-structuralist

orthodoxy of the “intellectual invention”, give too great a role in nation building to

intellectual elites and minimise the participation of ordinary people. She is

concerned to stress the positive aspects of national belonging and cannot accept the

indignity of seeing ordinary people as duped or deluded into an emotional

attachment to “primordial folk symbols”, which are in fact, as Gellner would

argue, part of an institutionalised high culture imposed upon the nation from its

centre of power.

Smith and Dixson seem to want to legitimate our current, nationality saturated

identities with some core of truth derived from an almost magical, psychological

holding of deep time tradition. I agree with Smith and Dixson that the organisation

and practice of social memory, of shared history, is a crucial aspect of the way in

which the nation form is produced and culturally reproduced. I also agree that

shared social memories and narratives can act as not only a psychological form of

cultural group from a racial one (Childe 1935).


understanding identity, but as a material condition which shapes social practices

and institutions. I also share Dixson’s interest in issues of agency and in the

manner in which individuals negotiate their ways through these webs of discourse

and practice in the context of local conditions and histories. However, what is

particularly problematic here is the notion that nations are simply taking ‘real’,

objective cultural roots and re-using them. This approach completely naturalises

the historic-narrative framework within which cultural genealogies are imagined. It

depoliticises the way in which discourses of identity, history, heritage and

archaeology construct knowledge about the past and disseminate it in the

community, shaping the way individuals and groups imagine their ethnic and

cultural backgrounds.

Archaeology is one of the ways many contemporary communities practice social

memory and it is a distinctive historical practice because of its material dimension.

As a result of their materiality, archaeological sites and remains are not only

amenable to the discourses of empirical science, in a way that history is not, but

they can also be experienced as things or places which appear to carry the past into

the present, in an apparently unmediated way (this issue is taken up in detail in

Chapter Six). Rowlands has suggested that “in escaping the deceit of historical

writing, the production of past material cultures has the spontaneity of a kind of

unconscious speech, a taken-for-granted, common-sense existence that simply

demonstrates that a people have always existed in that place” (Rowlands 1995:

136). Smith and Dixson’s uncritical adoption of ethnicity as a category which, to at

least some extent, exists outside discourse and culture, weakens their explanation

of nationalism.

What all theorists agree upon is nationalism’s obsession with history and historic

origins; its claim of a common historic legacy for its members; and its use of this

legacy as the basis of a collective project for the future (Jenkins 1995). History

provides the idealised, mythologised, and emotionally charged benchmarks around

which the political project for the future can be structured. Within culture then,

nationalism can be seen as a project to create and sustain a particular type of


collective identity, and this involves infinite political contests over the limits,

symbolic content and future implications of that identity (Stokes 1997: 10). This

inevitably attributes a crucial role to historians, archaeologists, and other

intellectuals who deal in representations of the national past. The critical issue here

is the concept that history and archaeology are natural and neutral methods which

are separate from nationalism. However as many historiographers and historians of

archaeology have revealed, historical and archaeological discourses are products of

the cultures of modernity. As I shall go on to discuss in Chapter Two, the rise of

modern or scientific archaeology is generally located within the emerging

European nations of the 19th century, and as a product of nationalist concepts of

continuous cultural identities. The notion that identities are continuous through

time is accepted by Smith as understood and unproblematic but Eriksen claims that

many anthropologists would be prepared to argue against this claim: “Perhaps they

(identities) only seem continuous and our analytical task consists in showing that

they are not, and that the very notion that people ought to be concerned with the

past is an ideological child of the age of nationalism” (Eriksen 1993: 96).

This discussion of ethnicity and nationalism led me to a consideration of the role of

archaeology and other historical discourses in the construction of the concepts of

cultural continuity upon which nationalism depends. I have highlighted the issue

that definitions of nationalism which claim that to be effective nationalisms must

incorporate some objective core culture, make this claim without explaining how

this core culture is to be known or distinguished from ideological constructions by

the community involved. This is not to discount the possibility that cultural

traditions have persisted in modernity, for it seems that discourses of modernity

have served to emphasise ruptures with tradition disproportionately. Nor is it to

suggest that all attempts to examine past identities, through archaeology or history,

should be abandoned as a false ideological consciousness. The material effects of

long established social relations, and the practices associated with these social

relations, may indeed be thought of cultural continuities. To imply however, that

identity is thus also continuous is, I argue, an effect of nationalism rather than an

explanation for it.


An understanding of nationalism as an identity project, and an understanding of the

practice of archaeology and the status of questions posed about the past, requires,

at the very least, critical, detailed scrutiny of the intellectual, historical and political

context of the “knowledges” which are compounded into ordinary, everyday

questions about how we know who we are. I will go on to outline below an

‘ethnographic’ approach towards a detailed, historicised analysis of historical

archaeology and nationalism in Australia as a means of accounting for the

relationship between these formations. But before moving on to this, I want to

consider postmodern and postcolonial interpretations of nation and nationalism

which stress the productive and creative cultural strategies of nationalism as the

key to understanding both its power and infinite adaptability.

Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretations

Benedict Anderson’s work has focused more on nationalism’s cultural strategies of

production and reproduction, than on its political power structures and sociological

forms (Anderson 1983). Anderson’s perspective on nationalism is largely

compatible with Gellner’s: “Both stress that nations are ideological constructions

seeking to forge a link between (self-defined) cultural group and state, and that

they create abstract communities of a different order from those dynastic states or

kinship-based communities which pre-dated them” (Eriksen 1993:100). Anderson

however, concentrates on “nation-ness”, as well as nationalism, as a “cultural

artefact”, rather than a political one, as Gellner tends to do (Anderson 1983:4). In

concentrating on cultural production, Anderson seeks to understand how

nationalist sentiment retains such commitment and persistence in the lives of

individuals that they are willing to die, and to sacrifice their children, for the sake

of an “imagined community”. Anderson’s study has therefore been more

influential in cultural studies, history and literary theory, than in cultural sociology

which retains a greater emphasis on the role of social structure as an autonomous

realm and normative constraint on cultural production and social action. Both


Anderson and Hobsbawm have been concerned with deconstructing nationalism,

focusing on the creation of narratives and “traditions” which become discourses of

national cohesion, central to personal and collective identity (Hobsbawm and

Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990).

This brings me to the question of exactly what are the mechanisms via which

nations might be regenerated and reproduce the idea of themselves? Anderson

focuses strongly on the role of print media as an enabling technology for

nationalism, related, as Gellner would agree, to the capitalist system of production,

and to linguistic commonalties and diversities. Novels, histories and romantic epics

exploring identity, national foundations, landscape and environment, form a

chronicle of the nation, and education systems have the effect of solidifying these

chronicles into a “canon” of national texts, which are widely understood

throughout a community. The role of the intellectual, who mediates the

relationship between “print capitalism” and national identity is obviously a crucial

one. In the Australian context Dixson (1999) and McLachlan (1989) make strong

arguments for the role of “ordinary people” in nation building and one of the much

discussed aspects of Australian national identity is its anti-intellectual character.

However, the role of the intellectual: the historian, writer, artist and film-maker for

instance, should not be underestimated, as they provide images around which

concepts of identity can be crystallized (White 1997; Curthoys 1997).

Anderson suggests that national communities are imagined through the

“homogenous time of realist narrative”(Anderson 1983). Bhabha follows Anderson

in arguing for the narrative as a significant form through which the nation is

articulated, pointing out that the rise of the realist narrative as the dominant literary

form is concurrent with the rise of post-Enlightenment nationalism (Bhabha 1990b:

2). Alexander and Smith have suggested that narrative should be analysed as a

deep “cultural structure” which underlies the formation of discourses, and as a

seemingly natural way people and nations have imagined their progress through

time (Alexander and Smith 1993: 156). The process of remembering and

forgetting, which Bruner describes as the process of “hermeneutic composability”,


implies more than just a selection of events, “the events need to be constituted in

the light of the overall narrative” (Bruner 1991: 8). The concept that narrative

structure is not simply a way of representing reality, but a means via which reality

is comprehended, is particularly important in the analysis of nationalism. As

Hadyn White puts it “narrative, far from being merely a form of discourse that can

be filled with different contents, real or imaginary as the case may be, already

possesses a content prior to any given actualisation of it in speech or writing”

(White 1987: xi). Archaeology, history and nationalism, as related, modern,

discursive formations, share the structural influence of the narrative form in the

way they constitute the past and the future (Attwood 1996a; Bhabha 1990b; Bruner

1991; Silberman 1995). Attwood has discussed the role of narrative structure, “the

content of form” (White 1987), in the composition of influential Australian

historical narratives (Attwood 1996b). Attwood stresses how the major

protagonists and events have been constituted within the context of the overall

narrative, its meanings and conclusions. A disruption of the meaning of one of

these components, as has occurred in the case of the “Aborigines”, disrupts the

meaning of the overall narrative and thus the meaning of “Australia” (Attwood

1996b:101). I will take up these issues again later in this chapter.

Anderson stresses the role of the print media in the development of nationalism, as

well as the shared, influential cultural structure of literary narrative. Film and

television (Turner 1986), commemorative ceremonies and community celebrations

(Spillman 1990), museums and the heritage industry (Bennett 1995; Byrne 1996;

1999; Handler 1988), are all important sites for the negotiation and legitimization

of national identities (Schudson 1994: Hutchinson 1994). The heritage industry

now forms an umbrella concept in Australia, and many other nations, covering a

wide range of forms of public consumption of the local or national past, as well as

being a vehicle for the consumption of the past of others through cultural tourism.

Byrne has shown how fetishisation of the national terrain, its very earth and soil, is

a process that is extended and emphasised in heritage, through discourses of place

and archaeology (Byrne 1996: 99). Hamilakis has investigated representations of

Greek antiquity on the World Wide Web in discourses constructing “Hellenic”


identities and Greek nationalism. Particularly interesting in this case is that the

transnational context of the Web is used in the construction of diasporic Hellenic

nationalism, challenging the effects of any supposed cultural globalisation and re-

creating the topos of the nation in cyberspace (Hamilakis 2000). In Chapter 3 I will

examine the way in which discourses of heritage value have been constructed for

the material remains of the Australian past, transforming all aspects of the

continent into a national inheritance.

Also important in national cultural integration is participation in the national

market economy (Schudson 1994:32). Some commentators see “National Culture”

as little more than the construct of a marketing exercise, a self-fulfilling advertising

prophecy describing who customers are, their needs and aspirations (Schudson

1994; Turner 1994). Advertising, through national broadcasting and print media,

has become a critical forum for the constant reinforcement and regeneration of

iconic national imagery. Nations are commonly characterised by the signature

array of consumer goods supported within the national market: food, clothes and

household accoutrements are ways in which national cultures are performed and

foreign or exotic cultures are consumed. Clothing and fashion are good case

studies for globalisation, as many local traditions where clothing defined ethnic,

class and status differences, appear to have been significantly eroded through

industrial mass production and distribution of standard western forms, blue jeans

perhaps being the most iconic. Despite “Cocacolonization”, food can still be a

significantly “nationalised” discourse, albeit one transformed through discourses of

multiculturalism. Multicultural influences in “national cuisine” often serve to

reinforce what is “new” and multicultural, and what is “authentic” and national

(James 1996). In Australia consumption of some fetishised products, such as

various brands of beer or Vegemite, is a nationalist practice, in that it is seen as

distinctively Australian. Consumption of such products becomes a performance,

and reaffirmation, of national identity. Graeme Turner has suggested that

Australia’s clearest lexicon of the “national character” has been found in the kind

of product advertising made since the 1980s (Turner 1994).


Postcolonial theorists see nationalism as a “Janus-faced” construct: a term coined

by Nairn but taken up by postcolonial theorists who are centrally concerned with

the ambivalence and “doubleness” of nationalism. While the nation has represented

freedom from colonial rule for some colonised countries, it is also defined by

colonial institutions, the doctrine of progress and the quest for modernity. It can

simply act “to transfer into native hands - those unfair advantages which are the

legacy of the colonial period” (Fanon quoted in Lazarus 1999: 78). Nationalism,

points out Bhabha, is also two faced in the way it purports to imagine a simple

unity, but one that is constructed in terms of “Others” (Bhabha 1990a). Thus to

define itself, the nation must define what it is not. It is this exclusionary aspect, and

the fact that it intersects with all facets of identity (gender, sexuality, race,

ethnicity, class) and politics (economics, democracy, imperialism, civil society)

that has lead to the enthusiastic launch of a “counter-totalizing” project, designed

specifically to reveal how nationalisms have stealthily constructed boundaries

(Bhabha 1990a; Hudson and Bolton 1997; Lerner and Ringrose 1993; Parker et al.

1992). Nationalism is also seen as two faced in the way that it both imagines the

nation surging forth into its ever more highly evolved future, while the other face,

like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”, is firmly fixed on the past (McClintock

1994).

Much current thinking sees nationalism originating in Europe (in England in the

1600s according to Greenfield), and then spreading and diversifying as a means of

linking a modern cultural collectivity to a political structure (Greenfield 1992).

Postcolonial critiques have pointed out how this philosophical framework

characterizes non-western nationalisms as unfinished projects, still striving towards

modernity (let alone the post-modernity of the West). The Eurocentric position,

epitomized by Hobsbawm, suggests that the importance of nationalism has been

surpassed in the late 20th century by globalisation and the (potential) creation of

supra-national entities like the European Union (Hobsbawm 1990). Leela Ghandi

claims that this European stance derives from an “historically deep seated

antipathy toward anti-colonial movements in the third world” (Ghandi 1998). This

suggests that the legacy of imperial history continues to construct the globe in


terms of metropolitan and other, Occident and Orient, civilised and civilising.

Hobsbawm’s position also requires that a logical developmental structure be used

to understand all world nationalisms as an essentially unitary phenomenon. Many

postcolonial scholars have reacted against the West’s demonisation of nationalism

as a form of collective identity which failed to transcend its “regressive”,

“atavistic” reliance on pre-modern forms of identity (Ghandi 1997: 107). I will

discuss in Chapter Two how underlying assumptions of nationalism as a

necessarily negative force has led to a concentration of studies in the

archaeological literature on the abuse of archaeological knowledge by nationalistic

regimes. The result of this situation is a proliferation of what is in fact a

sublimated, European-situated discourse of judgement upon the “level” of

modernity achieved in any particular location, with the secular, cosmopolitan, left

leaning European intellectual used as the measuring stick. This is not to deny that

nationalism has been responsible for bloodshed and violence. Nationhood

however, continues to be a crucial locus of identity for masses of the world’s

people and a central aspiration for communities oppressed by imperial nations and

their colonial regimes.

Globalisation

To this point I have treated nations as internally coherent political systems, even

though they emphasize the extent and effects of this boundedness. But it is the

conceit of nationalism itself which stresses the completeness of the nation, when it

in fact exists as a part of, and as a result of, a world of nations. Many theorists of

globalisation suggest that the world of nations is well on the way to be being

replaced by a global capitalist system entailing new forms of social organisation

and cultural consciousness (See for instance Albrow 1996; Appadurai 1996). The

consequences of this process, and the intellectual or conceptual framework within

which it is constituted and reflected, is the replacement of modernity with

“globality” (Dirlik 1994). This has prompted some critics to suggest that the nation

state is being rendered obsolete, both as a viable political formation and as an

appropriate unit for social and cultural analysis. Globalisation is also often linked


with the postmodern intellectual movement as the “twin bastions” of an apparently

radically altered world order and world view. If we think of post modernism in a

simple sense as an engagement with the intellectual inheritance of modernity, of

which nationalism is generally thought to form a crucial aspect, and of

globalisation as essentially an erosion of the relevance of nations in economic and

cultural terms, we can see that this has lead some theorists to proclaim an epochal

change in world history. While the expansion of capitalism is enabled in new ways

through recent technological developments in transport and information

technology, this appears to be more of a continuation of modern capitalism than a

radical break. While the national economy certainly seems less able to act

autonomously, and the amount of consumption of internationally created products,

from film, to clothes and electronic toys has undoubtedly intensified, just how

profound are the cultural implications of these processes? While it is clear that the

way the past is conceptualised and imagined has changed in the period 1960s to the

present should this be seen as a true epistemic shift (Appadurai 1996)?

Neil Lazarus’ recent review of positions in the globalisation debate concludes that

rather than a radical disjunction, recent events tend to suggest a consolidation of

the trends of modernity. Citing Habermas’ characterisation of the modern as a

sense of being cut off from the past and open to the future, Lazarus claims that the

present is “under constant pressure to (re-) imagine itself as a new beginning”

(Lazarus 1999: 18). “Strong” globalisation theory is disposed towards both

millenialism and technological determinism, claims Lazarus, and an assumption of

culture as subsumed by the capitalist economy (Lazurus 1999: 48). I am attracted

to Lazarus’ conclusions because they seem to most adequately theorise the

complex reality encountered in the Australian regional context. Globalisation,

particularly from a non-European perspective, has been as much a part of the

modern world as nationalism. Exploration, imperialism, colonisation and the

globalisation of capital, are processes that have been crucially interwoven with the

rise and spread of nationalism. The imperialistic aggression of European nation

states caused the proliferation of settler and anti-colonial nationalisms. The fact

that these revolutionary and anti-state nationalisms have been articulated through


the Western nationalist vocabulary has been a source of ongoing angst and

ambivalence amongst post-colonial thinkers (for instance Fanon 1968, Prakash

1990; Chatterjee 1993; Chakrabarty 2000). In Australia nationalism focused

primarily on the best interests of the settler population and, as I shall go on to

discuss, was essentially a continuation of colonialism. As concepts of personal and

collective identity have changed the concept of the nation has changed and

fragmented, but it has not been replaced as the central metaphor and political

reality for this continental community. Indeed, as has been argued for many

nations, globalisation appears to have resulted in a distinct intensification of the

level and importance of nationalistic imagery current in the community. As

Richard White has pointed out, accounts of the Australian nation have tended to

reproduce the innate coherence that is an effect of nationalism rather than a

description of the globally integrated history of this formation (White 1997). It has

also been suggested that the demise of the category of British Imperial and

Commonwealth history in the postwar period, ironically led to the loss of one of

the few comparative frameworks available for Australian history, and to the

effective isolation of Australian scholarship (Griffiths and Robin 1997: 5).

I conclude that much globalisation theory is misleading in suggesting that

modernity has been superseded by globality and that although nations were once

the prime site for cultural analysis this is no longer appropriate. Lazarus (1999) and

Gilroy (1993) convincingly argue that not only is the sociological evidence for this

change in world order lacking, but also that this misrepresents the nature of

modernity, which has always been an international and hybrid formation. The

impacts of technological change in communications and production, and of the

cultural changes caused by changing patterns of consumption and commodification

cannot be ignored (Appadurai 1996). However I remain convinced that the

“theoretical and political problems that shape our lives and thought today continue

to be those that have shaped them throughout modernity” (Lazarus 1999: 49).

While it has been simplistic to use the nation form as the main unit for cultural,

sociological and historical analysis, it is also simplistic to disregard its ongoing

importance as the site where cultural identity is wrought into objects of powers.


The culture of nationalism

Nations and nationalisms are not totalities with clearly defined boundaries,

predictable historical trajectories and “use by dates” declaring obsolescence. To

chronicle the history of a nation, or in my case the history of the archaeology of a

nation, is to simply reflect the nation’s strategy for self-definition. The Australian

nation today is not the same thing as the Australian nation in 1901, when it came

into being. But it is the same place, and the material remains of those earlier

nations make us imagine that the nation today is the only possible one, the

inevitable result of a process of evolution and maturation. The teleology of the

nation is a very powerful and insidious one. Richard White suggests that to really

understand the meaning and implications of the nation we should “write against the

notion of national history”, we should write it out of our analyses in order to reveal

its real role in the past and in contemporary life (White 1997). While

acknowledging White’s warning of the centrality of nation in Australian cultural

and historical analyses, I want to both unclothe naturalised concepts of the nation,

and also understand what I see as its ongoing importance for Australian

communities.

A problem in coming to come to grips with competing readings of nationalism are

the differences to be found (though not always explicitly stated) in understandings

of culture and the perceived relationships between culture, politics, economies,

states and other social structures. This is of course a significant issue for my study

which seeks to investigate links between different fields of cultural production and

what have traditionally been seen as separate areas of thought and practice, namely

archaeology and nationalism. It is therefore necessary to plot a careful path through

this minefield of statements about the way in which culture works and how

distinctive cultural structures are of particular importance in the modern world.


Clifford Geertz defines culture very broadly as the “webs of significance” which

humans spin and within which they are enmeshed. He therefore goes on to define

cultural analysis as “not an experimental science in search of law but an

interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973: 5). As I set out in the

Introduction I want to approach culture as a “ragbag” of practices and knowledges,

as a fluid and open dimension through which actions and events are constituted as

meaningful. While I am interested in meaning, especially in the way nationalist

discourses appear to be so deeply enmeshed in the web-like cultures of modernity,

I don’t want to approach my study without a sufficient emphasis on the role of

structures and institutions as well as an appreciation of issues of individual agency.

In this I have been inspired by Nicholas Thomas’ approach to the analysis of

colonialism. Drawing a range of concepts and methodologies, rather than entire

theoretical programs, from Foucault and Bourdieu, Thomas aims to “establish that

‘culture’ and ‘colonial dominance’ are deeply mutually implicated without

reducing one to the other” (Thomas 1994: 41). Developing the concept of

colonialism as a project, Thomas presents a range of detailed, local case studies

which analyse the “mediation, reformulation and contestation in practice” of

“regimes of truth”(Thomas 1994: 58). Thomas’ approach is therefore essentially an

“ethnography of colonial projects: that presupposes the effect of larger objective

ideologies, yet notes their adaptation in practice, their moments of effective

implementation and confidence as well as those of failure and wishful thinking”

(Thomas 1994:60). Thomas is driven not only by Bourdieu’s interest in practice to

illuminate agency in the colonial situation, to break down the notion of the passive,

repressed colonial subject, but also by Foucault’s conviction that treating the

effects of power in consistently negative terms of repression and exclusion, denies

the importance of what is actually produced through the effects of power. In this

vein Thomas suggests that Foucault’s focus on techniques of governmentality

which are at once “discursive, practical and local”, enables an emphasis on the

contingency of colonial encounters rather than reproducing the totalizing effect of

a monolithic colonial ideology.


Nationalism as an identity project has significantly different aims from the colonial

project, and yet Australian nationalism and colonialism are deeply intertwined. The

techniques Thomas borrows from Bourdieu and Foucault are not specifically

designed for colonial contexts or cross-cultural encounters. In fact their original

applications were more specifically concerned with national contexts, although this

was not the object of their analysis. What I want to draw from Thomas are

analytical strategies which reveal how nationalism and culture in Australia are

“deeply mutually implicated” but crucially, are not the same thing. My aim is to

break down the coherence of the national context especially in the way it has

“policed” representations of the past and practices relating to research and heritage.

Nation and national identity are dynamic images which contribute to individual

and community identity and which often lie unacknowledged, “always near the

surface of everyday life” (Billig 1995). Such images have the effect of

“structur(ing) what is thought”, which is to say they become a cognitive tool which

may be used to understand and evaluate social experiences (Bourdieu 1992). The

concept of habitus has aptly been applied to the daily enactment of national

identity: “The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature which

people must acquire and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the

whole past of which it is the product” (Bourdieu 1990: 56 and see Billig 1995: 42).

It is also useful to adopt the concept of discourse to describe groups of these

images or signs, which communicate related information to form a cultural code

(Foucault 1972). Discourses are sometimes described as operating in networks that

intersect to describe the possibilities for representation (Thomas 1994). Alexander

and Smith, in their model of cultural explanation, also stress the elasticity of these

codes or discourses, as they are applied by people in actual situations, which may

be experienced via an unlimited set of contingencies. In this way they attribute

agency to social actors, and the ability to disrupt discursive circularity. Culture’s

role in political and social life is mediated through institutional structures (such as

the bureaucratic and political institutions of the state) which develop their own

cultural logics and normative referents and which may therefore appear to act

autonomously (Alexander and Smith 1993: 159). It is both through their evaluative


application, as well as through their incorporation into institutional structures, that

discourses have practical effects on day to day life.

It is with these broad concepts in mind that I will approach my investigation of

historical archaeology, heritage and nationalism in Australia, considering aspects

of practice, the role of institutions and policy and the operation of discourses in

local, historicised ethnographies. In the following section I will first look more

closely at nationalism, national identity and representations of the past in Australia.

Nationalism and National Identity in Australia

“The settler makes history, his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute

beginning, ‘This land is created by us’ ” (Fanon 1968)

What are the facts about Australia’s past? Exactly how many Aborigines were

killed by settlers? How many indigenous children were taken from their families?

How many settlers were killed by Aborigines? Were all convicts hardened

criminals or victims of an oppressive system? Were all settlers brave pioneers or

were they destroyers of the environment? Can we be proud of our national history

or is it something to be ashamed of?

All of these questions have circulated in the Australian media over the past decade.

They have been debated in Federal Parliament, they have divided some

communities and brought others together. The past is always a national issue, but

in contemporary Australia, in this year of the centenary of Federation (1901 –

2001), there is no comfortable consensus about what happened in the past, nor

about what the past means for a national “identity” and a national future.

The past is contested everywhere. In Australia, the basis for the contested past is a

history of colonialism and the existence of a settler nation. To form a settler nation,

colonial control is transferred from the founding metropolitan country to the

colony itself, the settler group therefore becomes both coloniser and colonised. A


settler nation only exists through colonialism, involving, as it must, facts of

dispossession and discourses of racial superiority. However, the settler’s internal

“cultural geography” also insists that psychologically, they remain in a position of

inferiority and exile, somewhere “Down Under” or as past Prime Minister Paul

Keating (1991 – 1996) once put it, “at the arse end of the universe” (Rose 1996;

Gibson 1992).

Recent engagement with the historic facts of colonialism has undoubtedly eroded

the “moral authority” of the traditional narratives of colonial nationalism in

Australia (Rose 1996). However, I agree with Deborah Rose’s caution that it is

premature to apply the term “postcolonial” to present day Australian society:

“to contend that we are somehow postcolonial obscures that we live in a world

that is so effectively colonised that it is almost impossible to think beyond it. Here

the culture and practice of conquest … is so deeply embedded in our social

consciousness and so institutionalised in political and bureaucratic practices,

that it is almost unnoticed” (Bird Rose 1996: 209).

There are currently three prominent areas of public discourse in Australia which

contest the content and meaning of Australia’s past. These are debates about

whether Australia should become a republic, debates about reconciliation with

Aboriginal people, and debates about immigration. The question of the republic

hinges upon whether the colonial past and the continuing attachment to Britain,

with the Queen of England as the Head of State, should be “honoured”, celebrated

and continued, or whether Australia should break with tradition and acknowledge

the present as neo-colonial. Reconciliation is the term that has been given to a formal process designed to

address the implications of colonialism for Aboriginal people. One widespread

response throughout the community has been to ask the present Federal

Government to say “Sorry”, as a symbolic gesture that acknowledges wrongs done

in the past. The present Prime Minister has refused to accept that an apology is

appropriate, and has promoted instead what he calls “practical reconciliation”. This


addresses issues such as housing, education and medical care for indigenous

communities, which of course his critics claim should not be an element of

reconciliation, but a right of all citizens. The issue of reconciliation has also been

affected by debates over the truth about what happened to Aboriginal people in the

past, which I alluded to in the questions above. As Ann Curthoys has put it:

“Many (Australians) do not wish to be told that their whole society was built on a

process of invasion and child theft; they want, instead to reassert pride in their

history, institutions, and culture” (Curthoys 1999a: 2).

Debates about the need for reconciliation and the moral responsibility for past

events are joined with debates about immigration through the discourse of racism

(Curthoys 1999b). This has emerged in particular, in discussions surrounding the

rise to prominence of politician Pauline Hanson and her party “One Nation”.

Hanson was lauded as giving a voice to supposedly suppressed middle class

opinions, suggesting that Australian culture was being destroyed by Asian and

Arab immigration and that Aborigines were the undeserving and ungrateful

recipients of an unfair share of government welfare money. As Peter Gale

suggests, Hanson’s arguments depend upon a naturalised assumption of “ordinary

whiteness”; an assumption that the ordinary, hard working citizen is a white

Christian who loves and is proud of, not ashamed of, their country (Gale 2000:

266). Lydon has also pointed out how Hanson promoted a view of culture as a

unified national “essence” and of the past as shared and consensual (Lydon 2000:

96).

New understandings of the past (in this case the recognition of dispossession and

colonial violence) obviously challenge the self-perceptions of individuals who

locate their values and identity in that past. Despite decades of critical research,

revisionist history and alternative myth making, it appears that the traditional

national stereotypes continue to be enthusiastically regenerated (Figure 1.1). The

bushman for instance, which as I will go on to discuss was idealised by Henry

Lawson and the Bulletin writers of the 1890s. He was first described as a unique

Australian “character” in Russell Ward’s 1958 The Australian Legend, but this


character continues to be associated with not only modern day bushmen like

Crocodile Dundee (1986), but also, in the economics saturated 1980s, with the

larrikin corporate raider, Alan Bond (Turner 1994: 26). Libby Robin has also

convincingly argued that the wholesome dream of rural life created by the 1890s

Bulletin writers, has been regenerated in the guise of the spiritually restorative

“wilderness”, which all Australians need to connect with to really belong (Robin

1998).

The current Prime Minister John Howard’s 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture was

couched in terms fundamentally suspicious of the agenda of revisionist history:

“I have spoken tonight of the need to guard against the re-writing of Australian

political history... There is of course, a related and broader challenge involved.

And that is to ensure that our history as a nation is not written definitively by

those who take the view that Australians should apologise for most of it”

(Howard 1996: 13).

Attwood claims that the incorporation of Aboriginal history into the national

narrative fundamentally challenges its legitimacy, therefore challenging the

foundations of nationhood (Attwood 1996b: 116). The Keating administration

(1991 –1996) had attempted to deal with this issue in its cultural policy Creative

Nation, which celebrated aspects of the traditional national mythology, but it stated

that urban life (rather than the bush) and multiculturalism (rather than Anglophilia

or jingoism) were just as important to contemporary Australian society. It went on

to state that: “the culture and identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Australians has become an essential element of Australian identity, a vital

expression of who we all are” (Commonwealth of Australia 1994: 6). In contrast to

Keating, Howard disassociated himself from postmodern concepts of identity,

maintaining that:

“National identity develops in an organic way over time...social engineers should

not try to manipulate it or create a sense of crisis about identity.

It (Australian history) risks being further distorted if highly selective views of

Australian history are used as the basis for endless and agonised navel gazing


about who we are or, .... as part of a perpetual seminar for elite opinion about

our national identity” (Howard 1996: 13).

Here Howard calls upon the perceived anti-intellectual bias of Australian culture to

associate himself with ordinary people, “the battlers” and against what he calls the

“elite navel gazers”. Howard suggested that revisionist intellectuals had presented

Australian children with a depressing “story of imperialism, exploitation, racism,

sexism and other forms of discrimination” and in reply to this statement, leading

“revisionist” historian Henry Reynolds said:

“John Howard is looking back to his comfortable memories of the 1950s. He is

on record as saying that Australia does not have a racist, bigoted history. That

represents the greatest degree of historical revisionism possible” (Sydney

Morning Herald 20/11/96)

Where have these current debates I have just outlined come from? As Reynolds

alluded to in the quotation above, there has been a perceived fragmentation in the

meaning of nation in Australia since the 1950s. I will now go back in time to

outline what some of these changes have been and also look at the discourses

which have been fundamental to nationalist constructions of identity and the past. “The New Nationalism”

A revival in popular and scholarly interest in all aspects of Australian history and

culture in the 1960s and 70s saw the emergence of an array of contested discourses

concerning nation and identity. The reasons for this revival are complex, but events

such as the withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the collapse of the White Australia

Policy, and the 1973 Federal Commission to advise on Aboriginal land rights, all

signal challenges to colonial order and structure in Australia. In the late 1960s the

term “the new nationalism” came into use to describe this re-engagment with the

meaning of Australia, the desire to replace tired old symbols of the bush and

mateship with more urbane, intellectual and modern images. Donald Horne

suggested that the 1970s mining boom had a significant effect on the way in which

the world status of Australia was imagined, causing the irony of the title of his


1964 book, The Lucky Country, to be almost totally forgotten and the phrase

introduced into everyday speech as a truism (Horne 1981). Horne suggested that

the mining boom, in the context of post-war prosperity, seemed to represent a

move into a new industrialised era for Australia, when the notion of a nation

“riding on the sheep’s back” could finally be replaced with a more sophisticated

image. The election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972, with its reform

agenda, interest in Asia and focus on cultural development, saw many Australians

believing they were on the verge of a new era. As Alomes points out, Australian

society did not change overnight, but “the rhetoric of change” was certainly a

feature of political discourse at that time (Alomes 1988: 251).

This period of enthusiastic national identity renovation also saw the influence of

postmodernist deconstruction in scholarship. Intellectuals were interested in

breaking down the monolithic, colonial character of Australian national identity

and revealing the interests it had served over time (White 1981). Feminists sought

not only to challenge national identity constructions as masculinist, but also to

secure women a role in nation building and greater power in contemporary social

and political life (Dixson 1976; Summers 1975; Lake 1986; Lake 1992). In 1958

Russell Ward had distilled the accumulated myths about national identity into the

following description of the typical Australian:

“…he is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any

appearance of affectation in others. He is a great improviser, ever willing to have

a go at anything, but willing too to be content with a task done in a way that is

near enough. Though capable of great exertion in an emergency, he normally

feels no impulse to work hard without good cause. He is a hard case, skeptical

about the value of religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally. He

believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle,

probably a good deal better... He is a fiercely independent person who hates

officiousness and authority yet he is very hospitable and above all will stick to his

mates through thick and thin He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily

and often, and drinks deeply on occasion” (Ward 1958: 1-2).


Ward’s typical Australian was not only exclusively male, but also preferred

masculine company and the freedom of the bachelor life. Aboriginal women, as

casual sexual partners, had served, in Russell Ward’s view, to “keep the sodomy

out of mateship” and while black and white women were generally absent from

constructions of national identity, their historical characterisation had been

according to sexual stereotypes: Anne Summer’s “damned whores and God’s

police” (McGrath 1997: 40). Some feminists rejected the nation altogether as an

“imagined fraternity”, urging women’s voices into a counter-nationalist,

internationalist discourse (Reekie 1992).

Contrasting with the deconstructionists, more conservative intellectuals, politicians

and the media participated in the cultural revival in a different way: celebration. In

attacking White Australia’s greatest social malaise, “the cultural cringe”, a new

discourse of pride in Australian achievements was encouraged (Phillips 1950).

A.A. Phillips was one of a number of critics who revisited Australian literature

from the 1890s and promoted it as an authentically Australian tradition. Although

the “bush stereotypes” had lost some of their appeal in the new cultural

sophistication of the 1960s, pride in Australian acheivements was a central theme

in nationalist discourse (Horne 1981). This celebratory discourse could be found in

many arenas: advertising, political rhetoric, film and literature (Turner 1994). A

distinctive form developed in the heritage industry. After the flurry of legislation

creation and institutional development of the 1960s and 70s, the heritage industry

received a huge boost in terms of funds and personnel in the 1980s, leading up to

Bicentennial celebrations (Davison 1991a; Healy 1997: 2). In a similar way,

environmental conservation movements embarked upon celebrations of Australian

bio-diversity with nationalistic fervour (Morton and Smith 1999).


Colonialism and Race: Aborigines and the Nation

If a decolonising process can be seen to have begun in Australia in the 1960s and

1970s, then the perpetuation and regeneration of the images of colonial nationalism

gives some credence to Smith’s argument for nationalism’s tendency to re-invent,

rather than create anew (Smith 1986). However rather than the concept of ethnicity

upon which Smith focuses as the essential cultural basis for nationalism, the

Australian nation has been defined in terms of “race”, from which culture and

ethnicity were seen as essential derivatives. Despite Prime Minister John Howard’s

rejection of the opinion that we (Australians) have a “racist, bigoted past”, nothing

in fact could be clearer (Curthoys 1999a; Langton 1999). Colonial ideologies are

based upon concepts of racial superiority, this belief both enables the possession of

land occupied by so-called “primitives”, and also compels the progressive,

modernising mission of the colonialist (Attwood 1996b). The ebullient,

nationalistic rhetoric of the 1890s and the period of Federation (1901), clearly

established national unity on the basis of race, defined as essentially white and

British. For instance the slogan for the Bulletin Newspaper, “Australia for the

White Man”, clearly identified Aborigines and Asians as unAustralian. One of the

first acts of the newly federated nation in 1901 was to pass legislation that became

the basis for the White Australia Policy, which was designed to stop all non-

European immigration. This policy persisted until 1966 (Curthoys 1999b).

While nationalism in 19th and 20th century Australia may have at times been anti-

imperial, it has rarely been anti-colonial, and this is why the Mabo High Court

decision of 1992, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius which is discussed

a little further on, has been construed by a range of intellectuals as the most

significantly anti-colonial event in the history of the nation (Rowse 1993; Attwood

1996b). The greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the Australian nation came

from the actions and influences of the Aboriginal rights movements. As well as

overt political actions and protests, Aboriginal histories and pre-histories,

published from the late 1960s, had a cumulative impact on community attitudes


(see for instance Mulvaney 1969; Rowley 1970; this early literature is reviewed in

Broome 1996). While Aboriginal groups developed their own anti-colonial and

sometimes anti-state nationalisms, an appropriative discourse of indigenisation

emerged in main stream nationalist discourse. For example Lattas discusses a

“redemptionist discourse”, whereby the alienated settler is redeemed through a

spiritual connection with the land via Aboriginal culture (Lattas 1990). This is

most clearly seen as emerging in the cultural policy of the Keating government, in

particular Creative Nation, mentioned earlier, which set out a clear program for

reconciliation to proceed on the basis of the integration of Aboriginal identity into

national identity. Like all identity constructs this raised issues of essentialism, in

this case the concept of the timeless, unchanging character of Aboriginal culture,

profoundly linked with the land and particularly with remote, outback landscapes.

Multiculturalism

In the 19th century Australian settlers came predominately from Britain and

Ireland, over 160,000 arriving as convicts until this practice finally ceased in

1868. Free immigrants were also predominantly English, Scottish and Irish,

although some Europeans, especially Germans, thought to be culturally and

racially closest to the British, were encouraged. Chinese immigration, largely

associated with the gold rushes of the 1850s and 60s, caused immense social

debate in the late 19th century and was eventually restricted by the White

Australia Policy from 1901 (Curthoys 1999b). However, despite this

predominance of settlers of Anglo-Celtic heritage, the settler group should still

be considered as ethnically, religiously and politically diverse (Melleuish

1998:10). Miriam Dixson has construed the British “thread of kinship”, as an

expression of an “Anglo-Celtic ethnicity” which has formed the core of the

national community and its institutions. However the reality of a strongly

perceived, shared ethnicity amongst the white settler group as a whole seems

unlikely in view of the stronger divisions of class and religion.

Identification as British, and as a part of a great empire, was obviously a solid

basis upon which to define the identity of Australians at the time of Federation


and through the first part of the 20th century. If a concept of “ethnicity” cannot

be said to be shared, then the events of the First World War indicate that the

“imagined community” for white Australia was indeed the British Empire. The

Great War was followed by an upsurge of imperial feeling and allegiance to

Britain, which seems to have had the effect of blurring the memory of the ethnic

diversity of the 19th century population (Docker 1992).

Post war migration radically changed the ethnic composition of Australian

society. Since the late 1940s there has been a steady widening of the countries-

of-origin of immigrants, including large intakes from Asian countries such as

Vietnam and Hong Kong since the 1970s. In 1999 24% of the population had

been born overseas, while a further 27% had at least one parent born overseas

(ABS 1999).

This has engendered a diverse society which struggles in search of appropriate

expressions of cultural identity and national unity (Pettman 1992). Ghassan

Hage has argued that in contemporary multicultural discourse, ethnicity is

ascribed only to minorities, while the white, mainstream cultural identity is

completely nationalised (Hage 1998). Hage’s recent study of racism in

Australia, describes racism as a nationalist practice, enabled through deep

seated colonialist ideologies. Ann Curthoys has been quick to point out that

Australian multicultural discourse has also perpetuated these colonial

ideologies, and that all Australian immigrants are the “beneficiaries of a

colonial history” (Curthoys 1999b: 288). She points to the problems of a

dehistoricised multicultural discourse that casts indigenous claims for land as

just another problem of cultural diversity.

The perceived success of multiculturalism as a social policy, and the Mabo Land

Rights decision of 1992, led some to state that Australia was entering a post-

colonial, post-nationalist era. However the subsequent rise of Pauline Hanson’s

One Nation Party and John Howard’s criticism of “black armband history”, have

lead others to the conclusion that that particular celebration was premature (see


Castles, Kalantzis et al. 1988 and Gelder and Jacobs 1998, and contra see Curthoys

1999a; Curthoys 1999b, Hage 1998, Rose 1996).

In the absence of a common cultural legacy, the experience of place has been

described as central to identity constructions in settler societies (Ashcroft et al.

1995: 152). In Australia, the ideology of colonialism has constructed the land as

the prime object of desire, and it is the consequences of this desire that provides

the clearest basis for a community identity that is differentiated from that of the

Mother country (Schaffer 1988). In the final part of this chapter I will

concentrate on discourses which have configured understandings of landscape

and identity within the context of narratives and representations of Australia’s

past and Australian “culture”. These discourses have engendered a taken for

granted assumption that Australian identities are rooted in the landscape and

environment of the continent. This assumption, as I will go on to argue, is

integral to contemporary heritage discourse, and has been involved in

structuring narratives of the national past in distinctive ways.

Landscape and National Identity

As opposed to Dixson’s core ethnicity theory, Davison suggests that it is

ambivalence and confusion about a core culture which leads to Australian

nationalism being so focussed on the land, and to the expressions of national

“character” being seen as a product of the Australian environment (quoted in

Attwood 1996b and see Davison 1978). In her comparison of bicentennial

commemorations in Australia (1988) and the United States (1976), Lyn Spillman

has pointed out how central the landscape was to expressions of national identity in

the Australian celebrations. This contrasted markedly with the United States where

the land had formed only ‘a minor part of the symbolic repertoire’. She also noted

that the Australian land was more important in national iconography in 1988 than it

had been in the centennial celebrations of the previous century (Spillman 1997:

125).


Settling Australia was an imaginary as well as a physical process. The culture of

the settlers provided the forms and descriptions through which the landscape was

given a meaning and shape that was comprehensible to them. Representations of

landscape in the Australian imagination have constructed a powerful discourse

through which the landscape, and human behavior within it, has subsequently been

understood. This “landscape discourse” has, and continues to be, central in the

narrative construction of the Australian settler nation and its past. In particular, the

landscape is seen as a determinant of not only the course of colonial history, but

also of the distinctive characteristics of national identity. The construct of the

Australian environment as hostile, and as the opponent in the battle to establish the

nation, still persists as a fundamental tension in Australian society (Gibson 1993,

Griffiths and Robin 1997, Lattas 1990). This idea contributes structure and

rationale to the Australian mythologies of pioneers and explorers. In seeing the

settlers as alienated from the Australian environment, Lattas claims a prime

conceptual site for the construction of national identity is created (Lattas 1990).

Traditionally in the national canon, Aborigines have been seen as either irrelevant,

as in the genre of national history before the 1960s, or as part of the environment.

In more recent decades, Aboriginal spirituality and connection to the land has

served as a “model” for postcolonial forms of belonging. Although the last decades

of the twentieth century saw new imaginings of the nation and its postcolonial

future, the land remains absolutely central.

Landscape discourse has been an essential component of what has been termed an

“Australian cultural tradition” (Schaffer 1988:4). In this analysis I am less

concerned with critiquing the basis in reality of these ideas concerning landscape

and identity, than with understanding the way in which they have operated within

culture generally as discourses or self perpetuating codes of meaning (Foucault

1972; Schaffer 1988). It is important to point out that landscape discourse is not

only a set of ideas about the landscape but also about settler men and women, who

are constructed in various roles in opposition to it; about history, which is seen as a

result of it; and about Aborigines, who are viewed as part of it. In studies of

Australian cultural traditions the term “landscape” is used very broadly and may


cover a grab bag of concepts from the biophysical environment, to a natural

backdrop in films and literature, or the more specific genre of landscape painting

(see for instance Hodge and Mishra 1990, Gibson 1993 and Schaffer 1988).

Generally the term is used to describe representations of nature. Nature in this

context is the opposite to culture, and in the Australian settler context, the enemy

of culture and the opponent of civilization (Gibson 1993: 212). Griffiths suggests

that “the competing realities of geography and history, land and culture, have stood

for a fundamental, persistent tension between origins and environment in

Australian life.” (Griffiths and Robin 1997: 11). For the purposes of definition

however, it is important to note here that the archaeological understanding of

landscape, as both a cultural palimpsest and a culturally received perception of

place, cannot simply be overlaid upon concepts of “landscape” in Australian

culture generally. In Australian cultural and historical literature, the term

“landscape” is used interchangeably with “land”, “country”, “nature”,

“environment” and “place”.

A so-called Australian “cultural tradition” was first referred to as such by A. A

Phillips in his 1950s study of Australian literature (Phillips 1958). Phillip’s peers

were sceptical of both the worth and validity of this tradition, which he linked

solidly to the nationalistic texts of the 1890s. However, since the 1950s there has

been an expanding number of texts which have sought to define and explain a

tradition which in some way is seen to define national character. Graeme Turner’s

National Fictions (1986) took this examination in a new direction by positing that

the meanings produced by and through this cultural tradition actually create

imaginary relationships between Australian people and the situation in which we

now live. This is to say that we understand our environment, and our past, through

imagining it in terms of the symbolic vocabulary we inherit from our cultural

context, what Bourdieu has termed the habitus. As I discussed earlier, it is this idea

which is so useful in understanding how these received understandings are used to

evaluate and structure new experiences in day to day life, or to circumscribe the

possibilities for representations of the past. Both Turner and Schaffer point out that

the constant reconfirmation of nationalist concepts which are represented in myths


or narratives have the effect of actually creating “ a reality they appear to describe”

(Schaffer 1988: 171).

Terra Nullius:The Land as Empty

“It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her - the absence of

ghosts. Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that

much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place

where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the

presence of those who had been here before, leaving signs of their passing and

spaces still warm with breath - a threshold worn with the coming and going of

feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even

further; most of all, the names on the headstones, which were their names, under

which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath” (Malouf

1994: 110).

This passage from David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, is an eloquent

illustration of this process. Malouf describes how a settler from Scotland felt about

her surroundings on a remote Queensland farm in the late 19th century. He

catalogues what is absent from the place: the features of the European landscape

which represented her cultural identity and from which she could derive meaning.

Malouf’s settlers do see the land as empty and threatening, and this is based on the

European perception that property involves improvement and exploitation of

resources rather than simply living with the land as the Aborigines were seen to do

(Fletcher 1997). The novel in fact employs a conceit in which Aborigines were

literally invisible to the settlers, as invisible as the ecological balance of the land

which they struggled to make more like “home”. Malouf’s phrase “the absence of

ghosts” describes the cultural basis of the concept of terra nullius, a land belonging

to no-one, in the minds of some Australian settlers. Their culturally received

perception of the Australian landscape as hostile and without a human dimension,

results in a constant and unhappy emphasis on survival and on the hardships

associated with changing or battling the land to conform to their understanding of

civilization and progress. It also results in the formation of a group identity based

primarily upon fear of their opponents: nature or the environment, and Aborigines


as nature’s strange envoys in human form (Fletcher 1997: 176). Malouf reminds us

that although “imagined”, the results of this psychological battle are still real, and

that we live with its political and social consequences today: with the reality the

myth has created.

Terra nullius was the legal description of the concept that the continent of

Australia was vacant, unimproved territory, owned by no-one, before the

possession of the land by the British, a concept which was finally overthrown by

the High Court of Australia’s Mabo land rights decision in 1992 (Reynolds 1996).

The idea of terra nullius is crucial to the foundational histories and popular

understandings of Australia as a nation of settlers rather than conquerors. Although

no longer upheld by law, it remains deeply embedded within Australian culture,

from beliefs about pioneers and settler identity through to understandings of the

land, nature and so-called “wilderness” (Langton 1995). Recent studies have

attempted to assess the significance of terra nullius, and its subsequent overturning

in the Mabo decision, to Australian settler culture and national identity, through a

consideration of how it has operated within various fields of discourse such as

colonial history, science, politics, literature and the archaeology of Aboriginal

Australia (see for instance Attwood 1996; Hodge and Mishra 1990; Murray 1996d;

Griffiths and Robin 1997; Gelder and Jacobs 1998).

Attwood has shown how a philosophical rationale for the colonisation or invasion

of Australia in 1788, was in part provided by the Scottish Enlightenment

philosophers, such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, who expounded an

influential theory of the evolution of human society (Attwood 1996a). This four-

phase explanation saw hunter-gatherers as the first stage in a natural evolution that

concluded with commerce and empire. Hunter-gatherers, they proposed, had no

conception of property and so their lands were deemed desert or waste, that is terra

nullius. Interest in cultural evolution was one of the scientific rationales for the

journeys of exploration into the Pacific:


“The Moral Philosopher... who loves to trace the advances of his species... draws

from voyages ands travels the facts from which he is to deduce his conclusions

respecting the social, intellectual and moral progress of Man” (Jacques Julien de

Labillardiere 1800, quoted in Dixon 1986: 6).

These journeys were therefore conceived of as travel into the ancient past that

could be used to complete knowledge of “the history of man”. Within this

framework Aborigines were conceived of as living in a different time from the

Europeans: a time before History. Attwood has analysed the implications of the

epistemological framework of the European discourse of history for both the act of

colonisation and the subsequent construction of Australian colonial history

(Attwood 1996a). European historical discourse, following Enlightenment and

evolutionary thinking, aligns time with progress in an inevitable linear progression.

This discursive alignment formed part of the mental framework that enabled the

British to see the Australian landscape as wilderness and available for possession.

Attwood therefore claims that “History was not only the colonisers’ discourse; it

was also a colonising one” (Attwood 1996a: viii). Colonisation, and its attendants:

Christianity, civilization and progress, therefore enabled history to begin on a

continent where time, in European terms, had previously been meaningless.

In 1828 Sir Thomas Mitchell was appointed as Surveyor General of New South

Wales. A man of great energy, Mitchell saw his mission as translating these tracts

of wilderness into an intellectually defined object, through a process of survey and

naming. Benedict Anderson has pointed to the significance of mapping as a way in

which the colonial state “imagined its dominion” (Anderson 1983). The concept of

terra nullius is central to understanding this process of exploration and mapping in

Australia. The declaration of terra nullius constructs this task as “exploration” of

unknown, untouched land, rather than as “travel” through exotic cultures and

places. The task was therefore conceived of as purely geographical, not one that

involved mapping the boundaries or territories constructed by the indigenous

people. Mitchell undertook extensive journeys of exploration in Eastern Australia

in order to lay the framework for imperial possession. His exploration diaries detail

how each expedition was lead by Aboriginal guides who negotiated with the


various tribes encountered along the way. Although Mitchell records daily

encounters with different groups of Aboriginal people he was nevertheless able to

write that he saw “a country which is yet in the same state as it was when formed

by its maker… A land so inviting, and still without inhabitants” (Lines 1991: 71).

Mitchell named the lush valleys of Victoria ‘Australia Felix’ and wrote:

“Of this Eden I was the only Adam; and it was indeed a sort of paradise to me,

permitted thus to be the first to explore its mountains and streams – to behold its

scenery –to investigate its geological character – and finally, by my survey, to

develop those natural advantages, all still unknown to the civilised world…” (As

quoted in Bolton 1992: 1)

The Land as Hostile: Explorers and Pioneers

Mitchell and the early explorers wrote of Australia in rapturous terms, however as

settlement and exploration progressed, as explorers perished, and farmers

experienced drought, the land came to be seen as harsh and threatening. As early as

1849, when Charles Sturt published an account of his failed journey to locate an

inland sea in the center of the continent, visions of rapture are replaced with a

perception of the continent as inhospitable to civilization (Gibson 1996: 92). But

the dangerous and threatening character of the land was to become constructed as

the test of Empire and the test from which Australian manhood would emerge

ennobled:

“To successfully plant a young Colony…. Seems to require special qualities,

physical, moral and intellectual, which are possessed in their highest form by the

Anglo-Saxon people. It is a small matter to supplant the Aboriginal inhabitants of

a barbarous country and to secure possession of their land… It is battling with

Nature, conquering the soil, holding on against capricious seasons, fighting with

the elements and compelling the earth to yield…” (William Harcus’ 1876

emigration guide quoted in Schaffer 1988: 84).

Surveyors and explorers were popular figures in 19th century Australia, their

journeys often funded through public subscriptions (Hodge and Mishra 1990: 157)


(Figure 1.2). Explorers both acted for the imperial mission while also embodying

its notions of racially superior manhood (Schaffer 1988: 84). Their failure or death

became a metaphor for the “devastating human consequences of life in Australia”

(Hodge and Mishra 1990: 161).

Hancock’s 1938 history Australia is a crucial text in establishing, and giving

academic authority to, a nationalist history connecting the land with national

character. Hancock’s history is centrally concerned with land settlement and the

pastoral industry as the instrument of colonial possession. The battle for possession

is the battle to establish European agricultural systems in the Australian

environment. The enemy in this battle is therefore nature, not international trade,

economic depression or the inequities of the colonial administration (Schaffer

1988: 87). Failure on the land, through drought, bushfire and flood, came to be

seen as the mythical forge for national character. The settler’s failure in material

terms is compensated by the spiritual benefits of pioneering strength, stoicism, and

love of the land, love of the nation.

The bushman and the bush as the “essence” of Australia

The 1890s have been constructed through later history writing as the decade in

which a true national culture was crystallized. By this time seventy percent of the

settler population was Australian born and the six colonies were instigating the

process of federation which lead to the creation of the continent nation in

1901(Byrne 1996). Australian writers, artists, journalists and politicians began to

consciously articulate descriptions of a unique national character at this time, using

imagery which remains current and influential in the 1990s. The results of the

settler experience became essentialized in the myth of the “bushman”. His

character is the sum result of his relationship with the unique Australian landscape

(Figure 1.3,4).

Henry Lawson’s stories and poems are the best known of this genre. One form of

the bush hero beloved by Lawson is the swagman, an out-of-work man who


wandered the roads of rural Australia carrying nothing but his swag, or bed roll.

Lawson writes “The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land – of

the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat: the land of Self-

reliance and Never give in and Help your mate” (as quoted in Hodge and Mishra

1990: 153). This sentence is a distillation of Lawson’s ideology of the bush clearly

articulating how facets of the environment, distance, isolation and harsh climate,

shape a unique Australian character which is built on masculine, egalitarian

mateship.

The main aspect to note about the myth of the bushman is that its most famous

exponents were a group of urban writers and the magazine the Bulletin, which was

a mouthpiece for the urban liberal bourgeois against the interests of powerful rural

pastoralists. In contrast to the myths of settlement discussed above, which are more

centrally concerned with the process of imperial possession, the bush myths link

more strongly with these nationalist, democratic ideologies. At the time of the

creation of this representation, as is still the case now, the overwhelming majority

of the Australian population lived in a few cities on the eastern seaboard. The bush

or the land is used as an allegory for the masculine freedom that was the political

agenda of the writers. However this allegorical function of the bush within the

political context of the 1890s, is a largely forgotten aspect of this construction as it

has been reproduced throughout the 20th century as a key aspect of national

identity.

The bush myth has also been constituted through, and perpetuated by, landscape

art. In particular the images of the Heidelburg School of the 1880s and 1890s,

remain icons in Australian culture today (Figure 1.4). These landscape images,

often employing a heroic figure dwarfed by open surroundings, so dominated

Australian art that they lead prominent art historian Bernard Smith to state in 1976

that “This preoccupation with landscape has been largely responsible for the

creation and maintenance of a false consciousness of what it is to be Australian”

(Hodge & Mishra 1990: 143). The idea that national character is a result of our, or

our ancestor’s, experience of the bush and its hardships, still pervades Australian


culture today, exemplified in recent films such as Crocodile Dundee (1986), The

Man from Snowy River (1982), and even Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).

Libby Robin has recently pointed out how the meaning of the ‘bush’ in national

culture has changed since the 1970s. The value of a rural life on the frontier, as

conceived of by the Bulletin writers, has transmuted into the concept of the

spiritually restorative ‘wilderness’, required as an escape for suburban Australians

from ‘economy and history’ (Robin 1998: 123). Of particular interest in Robin’s

work in this context is her argument that current meanings of ‘bush’ and

‘wilderness’, associated with the environmental conservation movement, have

been developed through the power and meaning of the earlier bush myths,

revitalizing in some ways their ongoing centrality in national culture.

No place for a woman

“A country is a jealous mistress and patriotism is commonly an exclusive

passion: but it is not impossible for Australians, nourished by a glorious

literature and haunted by old memories, to be in love with two soils” (Hancock

1930: 51).

The texts and representations which created the bush myth, and which were so self

consciously designed to express the emergence of a new national culture, are also

pervaded by a description of gender relations which continued to resonate in

Australian culture in the 20th century (Rowley 1993: 186). If the bushman has

represented the nation, then the nation’s “Other” has been seen as the land or the

body of Australia itself. Analysts of nationalism have outlined how the nation

develops conceptions of itself in opposition to a perceived Other, an object which

may be simultaneously both desired and despised. In Australian nationalist

traditions the Other can take many forms, it may be Britain, it may be Aborigines

or Asians, but frequently the Other is the landscape itself. The linguistic

signification of Australia as mother, and the land as the body of a woman, was

studied in detail in a ground-breaking analysis published by Kay Schaffer in 1988.

In essence, it is the colonialist framework of desire, to possess, master and tame,

which casts the object of this desire, the land, in a feminine role. Historical rhetoric


of the 19th and early 20th centuries constantly eroticises the love/hate relationship

between the settlers and the land. The explorers “lift her veils of mystery” and

penetrate the vast recesses of the interior. In contrast to the benevolent European

construction of Mother Earth, Australia is often personified as a “witch mother”,

experimenting with her helpless victims.

The implication of this discourse, which casts the nation as masculine and its

“Other” as feminine, is that women as subjects are almost totally absent from

constructions of national identity. In the 1970s Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson

initiated an ongoing analysis into what they considered was an ethos of subtle

contempt for women which pervaded the Australian cultural tradition (Summers

1975; Dixson 1976). As I have suggested, the bushman is a loner, just a man and

the wide-open spaces. Freedom is paramount, as is loyalty to his mates, the ties of

the family can be construed as the antithesis to this freedom. Significantly, the

bush myth casts the battle with the land as establishing the territory of the nation.

This creates an inherent tension between the ties of wife and family and nation

building work. As Sue Rowley has pointed out, when women are present in bush

literature, their labour is not marked on the land, but on their own bodies, which

Henry Lawson habitually described as “gaunt” and “haggard”: “these women are

positioned not as the heroes of the battle, but as its casualties” (Rowley 1993: 188).

This construction has since been the subject of much historical explanation. It has

lead to an overwhelming focus on bush work, mineral prospecting, droving,

pastoralism and so on, as the work that made the nation. Revisionist historians

have successfully “discovered” women in the past and included them in popular

historical accounts, however the ongoing power of this discourse, which

establishes a relationship between men and the national territory based on

patriarchal gender relations, continues to resonate in Australian national life

(Reekie 1992: 17).


Conclusions: Nationalism and the Past.

It is into this fragmented field of debate about the nation, identity and Australia’s

past that this study of historical archaeology, heritage and nationalism, from the

1960s to the present, must venture. Nationalist discourse has changed and

fragmented in this period, and representations of the past have played a crucial

role. There have been competing versions of Australian nationalism, expressed by

conservatives, left wingers, feminists, Aborigines, multiculturalists, monarchists

and republicans, to name just the most obvious.

Richard White has claimed that for many Australian intellectuals, culture has been

explicable only in national terms: that in Australia, culture is synonymous with

national culture (White 1997:16). It is indeed difficult to think outside this elision

of nation, culture and history in Australia, partly because of the clarity and

“naturalness” of the national geographical boundaries. However, the political

history of that national boundary shows that it has been created, just as the highly

contested national boundaries of Europe and the Levant have (White 1998). White

claims that the tasks of writing the political history of the nation, the social history

of nationalism, and the history of idealised concepts about the nation, have often

been confused and have failed to tease out the meanings of the Australian nation

from more complex contexts of global cultural and economic interactions, local

conflicts and multiple identities. Revisionist Australian history has shown that

what the nation has imagined itself to be at various times, did not reflect the sum of

experiences, identities and histories of the people encompassed by the political

construct of the nation state (see for instance Dixson 1976, McQueen 1970;

Summers 1975, White 1981, Lake 1986; Lake 1992, Curthoys 1993; Curthoys

1997, Reynolds 1987). To write the fullest history of what has gone on in this

place, the geographical space called Australia, White suggests historians write

against the concept of national history which takes the nation not only as its

subject of analysis but also its teleological dynamic. This has been attempted by,

for instance, Paul Carter in The Road to Botany Bay and Ross Gibson in South of


the West (Carter 1987; Gibson 1992). Both texts attempt to destabilise the elision

of nation and continent by deconstructing the narratives of settlement and

discovery which have played such a central role in national history. While writing

the nation out of colonial history is an essential corrective in Australian

historiography, the period of my case study is one where it is appropriate to

interrogate more closely the intersection between nationalism and cultural practice,

in particular fields that generate representations of the past in the present, like

archaeology and heritage.

It is significant that current studies of “postcolonial belonging” in Australia,

perpetuate the concept of landscape as the location and inspiration for a cultural

understanding of identity (Read 2000). The land remains central to constructions of

the nation, masking conflicts which are really about community, identity and

power. The land is the central focus of Aboriginal rights movements, and this

threat to the legitimacy of settler possession, as Ann Curthoys has pointed out,

appears to be yet another battle for the battle weary settlers. The “average Aussie

battler” cannot see themselves as the beneficiaries of colonialism, because they see

themselves primarily as victims; of governments, larger nations, trade wars and of

a harsh, obdurate continent that gives up nothing without a fight. Curthoys argues

that this victim mentality continues to form a significant structuring device in the

historical narratives of Australians of British and Irish descent (Curthoys 1999a).

In an often quoted passage Benedict Anderson asked “But why do nations

celebrate their hoariness and not their astonishing youth?” (Anderson quoted in

Bhabha 1990a: 293). The traditional narratives of the Australian nation started time

in 1770 at the place of Botany Bay, with the “discovery” of a new continent by

Captain Cook. In the recent opening ceremony for the 2000 Olympic Games in

Sydney a new, but older and deeper narrative for the Australian nation was

performed that was acclaimed throughout the community. It began with a

“Dreaming”, attaching 50,000 years of Aboriginal culture onto the national

narrative. It stood as a timeless, mythical introduction to national history. The

national narrative seemed to easily unfold from a beginning in dreams, through a


colonial adventure and into a finale of colourful multiculturalism. Archaeology and

history have enabled the Australian nation to bury its roots more deeply on the

Australian continent. But as I shall argue this has not been any simple co-option of

research for political purposes. In fact it is a process which has not been national,

but has been involved in transnational discourses of preservation, heritage,

archaeology and identity. The nation is constructed, and deconstructed, within a

complex, hybridising, global social reality.

Chapter 2

Relationships within Culture: Archaeology, Nationalism and Identity

“... an ethnography of two discourses that feed off each other” (Handler 1988:9).

Recent debates in the Australian community draw upon different versions of the

past to support different visions for the future of the nation. This encourages

archaeologists to ask questions about the political implications of their research

and the way it participates in these issues of importance to the community. In this

chapter I will explore how similar kinds of questions have been approached by

archaeologists working in the recent Anglo-American tradition. How have they

characterised the relationship between archaeology and nationalism? What kinds

of problems have they identified; what strategies have they suggested for the future

of archaeological research; and what are the relevance or utility of these ideas in

the Australian context? The archaeological literature presents a wide range of

opinions on the depth to which cultural and historical contingencies permeate the

constitution of archaeological evidence and its interpretation, and on the real

significance of the social context of archaeological practice. However, there does

appear to be consensus amongst commentators that an important relationship does

in fact exist between nationalism and archaeology. The nature and implications of

this relationship have however, been explained in very different terms depending

upon the theoretical and philosophical orientation of the archaeologists involved.

In Chapter One I argued for the value of an approach to nationalism as a cultural

“artefact” constituted through discourse, governance strategies, and social

practices as deployed by competent social actors. I also suggested, following

Thomas’ concept of an ‘ethnography of colonialist projects’, that localised,

historicised analyses are necessary both to apprehend the productive complexity of

63

Relationships within Culture 64

culturally enmeshed nationalist projects, as well as to contextualise nationalism

within other global and local cultural discourses (Thomas 1994). It is possible to

focus on archaeology, as a disciplinary or knowledge project, in the same way

(Foucault 1972). Just as nationalism can be seen as a complex of cultural strategies

defining identity, so archaeological discourses, practices and institutions constitute

disciplinary identity(ies), objects of knowledge and power structures. This kind of

critique of archaeological practice is situated within the intellectual framework of

postmodernism, particularly the work of Foucault, which encourages a questioning

of foundational, “objective” categories of knowledge. I have already discussed

some of the ways in which nationalist and historical discourses are distinctive and

specific expressions of cultural modernity, and how nationalism and historical

consciousness are not separate areas of thought and practice, but mutually

entangled and mutually constitutive discursive formations. The implications of

such claims has lead some archaeologists, such as Bruce Trigger, to put special

emphasis on the role of the “archaeological record” as a material, objective

constraint upon archaeological interpretations, and also upon the ability of

archaeology, as a discipline, to progress as it accumulates more and more data

towards a fuller picture of the past. Yannis Hamilakis, on the other hand has

responded with suggestions for new research foci for archaeology: “I would argue

that the constructions and negotiations of national identity in everyday life and the

deployment of the material past in these processes should be one of our main

prorities for research” (Hamilakis 2000: 242). I agree with Hamilakis that the kinds

of insights provided by Foucault’s histories of ideas and critiques of knowledge

and power, do not imply a collapse of archaeology into paralysing relativism. On

the contrary these open up rich, new and philosophically demanding research areas

concerning identity, the past and material culture. Hamilakis’ approach is however

somewhat exceptional in the field of archaeology. This is because most critiques of

archaeology and nationalism continue to focus only on politics and the authority of

the state, implying that an objective archaeological practice is possible without

these influences (Hamilakis 2000: 242). They fail to adequately contextualise the

inter-relationships between these areas of thought and practice at the level at which


cultures constitute knowledge and the discourses and structures through which

reality is apprehended.

Archaeology and the State:

British Archaeology after World War II:

An interesting starting point for this investigation of archaeology and nationalism

is a comparison of the views of two archaeologists who are often credited with a

global influence on the conduct of archaeology since World War Two: Graham

Clark and V. Gordon Childe (See for instance Trigger 1989, Daniel 1981;

Ucko1995a:5). In the following discussion of their views I argue that, despite their

opposing visions for the future of archaeology, both conceptualised the

relationship between archaeology and nationalism as occurring in two main forms:

one was the “internal danger” posed by idealism and historicism, operating

through the theoretical positions adopted by archaeologists, to bias or skew

interpretations (Trigger 1996). The other form was the “external” direction of

archaeological research through alliances with the state, or with non-state bodies

which had nationalist, ethno-nationalist, or other political identity agendas. Recent

Anglo-American research continues to be centrally concerned with this essentially

dualistic concept of the relationship between archaeology and nationalism as a

“double edged sword” (Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996; Kohl and Fawcett 1995;

Anthony 1996).

At the Conference of the Future of Archaeology held in London in 1943, Grahame

Clark and Gordon Childe, with their British colleagues, debated what should be the

appropriate relationship between archaeology and the state (Evans 1995). In his

analysis of the historical significance of this conference Evans contends that the

events of World War Two had convinced Clark that state organised archaeology

was a recipe for the nationalistic distortion of archaeological interpretation. Clark

had admired the efficiency of German state archaeology before the war, but he

later saw it as a way in which German archaeology had been controlled by the


ideology of National Socialism. This post-war debate amongst British

archaeologists, argues Evans, was instrumental in giving form to the ideas

underlying Clark’s seminal work, World Prehistory, published in 1961. Clark felt

that the obvious influence of nationalism before and during the war had degraded

any sense of a common human experience. He also felt that education had a key

role to play in re-establishing a sense of the “solidarity of civilised men”. Clark

therefore argued that a prehistory concentrating on the “biological unity” of human

kind and on the universality of human experience, would avoid the nationalistic

bias and involvement in local politics, which he thought was inevitable in regional,

historicised archaeologies:

“Today men nurtured in their own parochial manners, beliefs, art conventions

and histories, and situated at the most diverse levels of economic and cultural

development find themselves caught up in a world that for a variety of reasons,

not least among them the possession of weapons of unparalleled power, cannot

long survive without a common sentiment and allegiance more positive than the

fear of mutual destruction. Modern science has created conditions under which

autonomous histories are not merely obsolete but even pernicious”(Clark1959:

12-13 quoted in Evans 1995:318).

Clark’s concept of a world prehistory reflected post-war idealism, supported by

economic prosperity, technological innovations such as radio carbon dating, and an

unassailed belief in objective, scientific truth. Clark saw objective science as the

essential counter to the nationally oriented prehistories which had characterised the

pre-war years (Evans 1995:320). He also sought to avoid the influences of

nationalism through situating his enquiry in the prehistoric past and concentrating

on movements of people around the globe, rather than on the depth of occupation

of present ethnic groups.

At the 1943 conference, Clark argued strongly against any state involvement at all

in directing archaeological research. This was in contrast to his colleagues

Jacquetta Hawkes and W.F. Grimes who claimed a need for both state regulation

of archaeological practice, of excavation in particular, and the creation of a


centralised funding source with the ability to promote large scale projects. Further

state roles were envisaged in the form of a “National Artefact Card Index” and the

concept of a “planned archaeology” administered through the public service, rather

than an uncoordinated practice conducted through universities and non-

government, amateur bodies (Evans 1995:315). Clark argued strongly against these

ideas:

“Many speakers have stressed the National interest, but I would stress rather

International interest. In efficiency of method, pre-war Germany was exceedingly

far advanced. I myself have admired it for years. Card indexing, record, and so

on are all magnificent. We are years behind, but where has it led Germany, and

where would it lead us?” (Clarke quoted in Evans 1995:315).

Gordon Childe’s concern with nationalistic abuses of archaeology has also been

comprehensively reviewed (Trigger 1994:11; Trigger 1996:275; Murray 1996b:67)

and although Childe advocated a very different theoretical program to that of

Clark, he too focused on a concrete, objective, scientific archaeology as the most

effective counter to spurious or contrived interpretations developed to support

particular regimes. However Childe remained pragmatic regarding the state’s role

in the funding and organisation of ‘archaeological exploration’ as he put it, and on

the seemingly unavoidable link between modern national boundaries and the

manner in which antiquities were investigated (Evans 1995:318). Childe’s interest

remained in European prehistory and in the archaeological antecedents of modern

populations, and therefore he obviously did not share the antihistoricism of Clark’s

approach. As Murray points out, Childe believed that to deny the importance of

ethnic heritages was “spiritual suicide”, and that understandings of ethnic heritages

could be positive forces through the application of rational scientific and historical

analysis (Murray 1996b: 67).

Clark’s future theoretical program resulted, Evans claims, at least partially from a

desire to withdraw archaeology from interaction with the state and to create a solid

platform for prehistory in education, as a means of fostering a universal sense of

humanity. (Clark therefore obviously saw university education as being


independent of the state). Childe, on the other hand, relied upon the hope that his

solid culture-historical methodologies would be broadly adopted to achieve an

internationally co-operative archaeology:

“…the elimination of metaphysical speculations that are liable to nationalistic or

other distortions, and the substitution of objective archaeology and legitimate

controllable deductions therefrom must depend upon international co-operative

effort”. (Childe quoted in Evans 1995:318)

These “metaphysical speculations” were the mechanism via which Childe believed

the works of the nationalistically driven German archaeologist Gustaf Kossina,

who published Die Herkunft der Germanen (The Origin of the Germans) in 1911,

were able to be tainted with racist and culturally chauvinistic views (Trigger

1989:170, Anthony 1996; Arnold and Hassmann 1996; Harke 1995; Wiwjorra

1996). Metaphysics is seen here, at least in part, as the influence of the German

Romantic movement, interest in which had been revived in the 20th century by the

philosopher Martin Heidigger, among others, who was also implicated in the

politics of National Socialism (Anthony 1996: 88 and see Thomas 1996). The

German Romantic movement contrasted the influence of Enlightenment traditions

of rationalist empiricism and scientific naturalism, with the insights achieved, in its

view, through a spiritual, humanist interpretation of the world (Anthony 1996: 88).

Nationalism was therefore seen as a potential problem for archaeology by these

post-War British archaeologists who focused on the issue of state interference in,

and misuse of, archaeological research. In this situation then nationalism is seen as

an external influence upon the discipline or individuals which, through the

mechanisms of state organisation and “planning”, might manipulate the content of

archaeological research and use it in support of evil political policies. However it

is evident that both Childe and Clark also saw a potential for nationalism to

infiltrate archaeological research from “within”, through the influence of Romantic

idealism and historicism on the theoretical standpoints adopted by archaeologists.

Childe concentrated on the potential for the metaphysical aspects of Romantic

idealism to interfere with the objective quality of scientific inference. Clark, on the


other hand, focused on historicism, believing that an historicised archaeology was

inevitably involved with national interests and could only serve to emphasize local

differences, rather than common human interests. Childe’s culture historical

methodologies became unfashionable in mainstream, Anglo-American archaeology

with the rise of de-historicised functionalism. While there is no doubt that Clark’s

“World Prehistory” and the functional and processual approaches it encouraged

have been very influential in Australia and other parts of the globe, as has been

broadly claimed, the extent to which such ideas replaced the foundational concepts

of culture history is questionable (Jones 1997: 137; Smith 2000: 111). Although I

will go on to argue in Chapter 5 that anti-historicism also had implications for

Australian historical archaeology, and for concepts of heritage, it was little more

than a surface posture for archaeology and not a thorough-going rethinking of

archaeological epistemologies. As Jones points out “expectations of boundedness,

homogeneity and continuity, which have been built into ideas concerning culture

since the nineteenth century, are related to nationalism and the emergence of the

nation-state” (Jones 1997: 136). These expectations remain fundamental to

archaeology and to the community’s understanding of identity, in particular the

notion of cultural heritage depends upon the reification and commodification of a

continuous identity and the material symbols of that identity.

The Social Context of Archaeological Knowledge:

The World Archaeological Congress.

In the 1970s and 80s, in the context of postmodern critiques of science and broader

social movements including indigenous rights, feminism and environmental

conservation, many archaeologists became more centrally concerned with the

implications of archaeology’s relationship with politics and society. This resulted

in an explosion of literature which problematised archaeological objectivity,

questioned the influence of ideology on interpretations of the past and the

involvement of archaeologically produced knowledge (and archaeologists) in

maintaining or subverting power in society (see for example Hodder 1986, Shanks


and Tilley 1987a; Shanks and Tilley 1987b, Leone 1973, Pinsky and Wylie 1989;

Trigger 1984, Conkey and Spector 1984). The debates leading up to and following

the First World Archaeological Congress in Great Britain in 1986, provided a

focus for some of these concerns (Ucko 1987). The Congress involved

archaeologists acting in an overtly political manner, in the banning of South

African academics from participation in the Congress as part of a world wide

protest movement against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. This challenged

traditional notions of the neutrality of science and academic pursuits and this

conflict was in fact explored in sessions designed to examine the cultural context

within which archaeological interpretations had been produced. As Peter Ucko, the

head of the Congress, put it:

“I wanted to show that a world archaeological approach to archaeology as a

discipline revealed how subjective archaeological interpretation had always

been. It would also demonstrate the importance that all ‘rulers’, ‘leaders’ and

politicians have placed on the legitimisation of their positions through the

‘evidence’ of the past.” (Ucko 1987: 31).

An understanding of the involvement of archaeological interpretations in wittingly

or unwittingly supporting political positions, and thus affecting human rights,

depends upon the perceived integrity of objectivity in archaeological interpretation

(Jones 1997:5). Ucko’s experience of working as an archaeologist in Australia

appears to have been influential to the development of his “world archaeological”

approach. During his leadership of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in

the 1970s he saw what he described as “an essentially British archaeological

discipline” as being transformed, in terms of research goals and practice, through

the involvement of Aboriginal people (Ucko 1983:11). Ucko saw these changes in

Australian prehistory as transforming “an aseptic (practice) of purely scientific

enquiry into a humane investigation of the past development of cultures whose

practitioners still live in the country of their origin” (Ucko 1983:22 my emphasis).

Ucko therefore draws out and links the pursuit of objective science with the moral

and political issues associated with practice. In his 1983 account of changes in

Australian prehistory through the 1970s Ucko focuses on the moral accountability


of archaeologists for their influence over broader public conceptions of

Aboriginality and for the respect of Aboriginal cultural sensitivities. Ucko saw the

single most important barrier to building a more “humane” archaeological practice

as the Western tradition of objective, positivist science and the status attached to

this knowledge at the expense of other forms of cultural knowledge. Ucko also

foreshadowed his interest in the implications for archaeology of culturally different

ways of constructing the past. In Australia he focused on concepts of time

(Western linear time vs Aboriginal non-linear and non-historical concepts of time)

and place (the archaeological construct of the site vs indigenous understandings of

landscapes or country). The political implications of culturally different ways of

constructing the past became a central focus of the World Archaeological

Congress, highlighted through the participation of representatives of indigenous

people, colonized people and Third World nations (Ucko 1987:2). Publications

resulting from the 1986 and subsequent World Archaeological Congresses today

form a significant core of the archaeological literature concerning nationalism,

ethnicity, identity and the past (see for example Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990;

Bond 1995; Layton 1989; Shennan 1989). In particular Ucko has intensified his

concentration on the role of archaeological theory as the critical component

shaping the way in which archaeology interacts with its political and cultural

context, finding situations where a positivist, objectivist version of culture

historical archaeology prevails as orthodoxy, as being the most “perilous” (Ucko

1995a: 11). He also finds little to recommend state management of archaeology:

“The evidence is that the vesting of archaeological enquiry in the 1990s within a

national state agency leads to two consequences: first, to a real fear for the

future of archaeology as public monies dry up and other priorities receive

greater support; second, to the fostering (whether it be in Germany, India,

Japan, the former Soviet Union, or the United Kingdom) of an approach to

archaeological fieldwork which assumes (in a good old Pitt-Rivers-type way, and

often using Pitt-Rivers methodology) that archaeological facts are out there to be

recorded objectively according to a series of always improving strategies and

technical skills” (Ucko 1995a:8).


As Ucko concedes, and as Moser has demonstrated in her study of Australian

prehistory, such generalizations tend to mask the complexity of the realities of

practice: which may include the influences of individuals, funding structures,

particular events and a host of other factors (Moser 1995; Ucko 1995a: 9).

However the “demonisation” of groups with a different theoretical orientation, and

the over simplification and patronisation of state – funded archaeology by elite,

metropolitan critics, remains a significant feature of the archaeology and

nationalism debate, as I will go onto discuss further below (Kohl and Fawcett

1995).

It is Evans’ contention that in some ways the World Archaeological Congress can

be seen as both a result of, and a reaction against, the global archaeological

perspective initiated by Clark’s “World Prehistory” (Evans 1995: 321). The advent

of absolute dating enabled Clark’s students, and others, to quickly take up his

“noble”, but imperialistic, vision of a world prehistory in areas, like Australia,

where little fieldwork had previously been done. This global perspective was

reflected in, for instance, the creation of the journal World Archaeology in 1969; in

the post-war focus of British (Cambridge) prehistory towards the ‘world’ rather

than the nation; and the great interest in “overseas” ethno-archaeological work in

the 1970s (Evans 1995:320). Evans also notes that this expansion of “world

prehistory” was through university appointments, not through the creation of state

departments of antiquities, as had been the case with British colonial archaeology

prior to World War Two (Evans 1995:321). However, in Australia, and other

colonised nations, the increasing power of indigenous movements from the 1960s

onwards, meant the rejection of universalising, scientific renderings of the

indigenous past. The 1980s thus witnessed a fragmentation within what had

previously been considered the theoretically cohesive Anglo-American core of the

discipline. Under the influence of broader paradigm changes in the social sciences,

the discipline became characterised by disputes over what Wylie terms “the

epistemic limits of enquiry: what can be understood of the human past and what

the status is of knowledge claims about the past” (Wylie 1989:108). These debates

heralded, it is claimed, the collapse of positivism revealing the historically


contingent nature of all archaeological interpretation (Murray 1993b:105). The

growing acceptance of varying degrees of relativism within the archaeological

community lead to a range of theoretical projects which aimed to enable

archaeology to continue to be done, in the face of postmodern uncertainty. In

Britain, the Cambridge based movement lead by Hodder, approached this problem

with a critique of processualism and formulated a range of “contextual”

archaeologies, sometimes combined with an idea of radical social action (see for

instance Hodder 1986; Hodder 1989, Shanks and Tilley 1987a; Shanks and Tilley

1987b, Bapty and Yates 1990, Wylie 1992). However, as Ucko has recently

demonstrated, the relevance of these metropolitan political and theoretical debates

upon the colonised “peripheries” of the world has varied enormously (Ucko

1995a). It has also been claimed that despite the democratic rhetoric of post-

processual theory, it in fact served to further isolate academic archaeology from

public archaeology and the political realities of heritage management (Smith

1994).

Throughout the 1970s and 80s many critics (see for instance Leone 1973; Shanks

and Tilley 1987b) refer to the involvement of archaeology in the creation of

national identities, however most did not pursue in detail the mechanisms via

which this involvement might occur, beyond a belief that: “Academic archaeology,

as often as not, operates as part of a wider cultural discourse serving to reproduce

the relationship between the dominated and the dominant” (Shanks and Tilley

1987b:189). Bruce Trigger however, took the relationship between nationalism and

archaeology as one of the central concerns of his wide ranging historical analysis

of the development of modern archaeology.


Trigger’s Alternative Archaeologies and the Issue of Disciplinarity

In his influential 1984 paper entitled “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist,

Colonialist, Imperialist”, Trigger broadly categorised regional archaeological

practices in terms of the cultural, political and economic systems under which they

occurred. In the light of the theoretical debates referred to above, Trigger’s paper

can be seen as a first attempt to understand in detail the variations in the “problems

that archaeologists think it worth investigating and in what they are predisposed to

regard as acceptable interpretations of evidence” (Trigger 1984:355). Trigger

believed that the relationship between archaeological interpretation, nationalism

and other political and economic contexts, could be understood in more

meaningful detail, and that particular systems resulted in an identifiable kind of

archaeology. His means of achieving these insights was to develop an historicised

account of the “development” of archaeological thought and the gradual

accumulation of archaeological knowledge (Trigger1989 :1).

Trigger outlined a set of characteristics for nationalist archaeology:

that it is most likely to occur in nations which feel politically threatened;

that it may be used to foster a sense of unity in nations suffering significant

social divisions;

that it is more likely to focus on the recent past, and be closely aligned with

national history; and

where ancient populations are considered, it is likely to stress the ‘primitive

vigour’ and creativeness of people assumed to be national ancestors (Trigger

1984:360).

Trigger’s analyses focus on prehistoric and ancient archaeology, but his

classificatory system clearly throws historical archaeology into the nationalist

camp. He further makes the point that different kinds of archaeology: “paleolithic,

prehistoric, ancient, medieval, industrial”, may have different social orientations

within the same country (Trigger 1984: 356). Within his 1984 schema Australian

prehistory would of course be classified as colonialist archaeology, while


Australian historical archaeology would, by implication, be nationalistic. However

he later made the important observation that during the 1970s Australian prehistory

became increasingly nationalistic, in that the uniqueness of Aboriginal culture, and

art in particular, had been stressed and claimed as an aspect of the national

heritage, a process Allen has called “grafting white culture directly onto an

Aboriginal root” (Allen 1988: 83; Trigger 1989: 144). Trigger noted how different

the situation of American prehistory has been in this regard. He suggests that the

historical orientation of Australia’s British trained prehistorians (of the 1970s)

provided the framework which enabled this kind of incorporation of prehistory into

national history, while the anthropological orientation of American prehistorians

had not facilitated a similar incorporation (Trigger 1989: 145).

“Alternative Archaeologies” was presented only as a collection of ideas in 1984,

but Trigger strengthened and clarified his original position in later publications

(Trigger 1989, Trigger 1996). In his 1989 History of Archaeological Thought, he

associated ‘nationalist archaeology’ most strongly with the culture-historical

approach, which in itself, he claimed, evolved through nationalist thought (Trigger

1989: 149; 1996: 269). He established an interrelated, developmental sequence

between the growth of nationalism and concepts of ethnic identity in the nineteenth

century, the collapse of cultural evolutionism, the rise of interest in diffusionism,

and eventually the crystallization of the culture historical approach by Kossina in

the first decade of the 20th century. The identification of geographically defined

archaeological “cultures” as the signatures of ethnic groups, according to Trigger,

appears to have occurred to a number of archaeologists simultaneously, but is an

important feature of late 19th and early 20th century work in Scandinavia and

Central Europe where it is particularly associated with the “invention” of national

traditions (Trigger 1989: 162 and see for instance Stig Sorenson 1996). However

Trigger does not argue that the culture historical approach must always be

nationalistic, nor that the nationalistic approach is always negative, stating that in

America and Europe it also caused archaeologists to trace spatial and geographic

variation in the archaeological record more “systematically” than had previously

been the case. He suggests that this lead to more sophisticated models of culture


change than could have been accommodated by evolutionary or colonial

archaeology (Trigger 1996: 270).

Anglo-American theoretical archaeological literature today remains deeply divided

by the meaning and implications of the “past as socially constituted” position for

archaeology. Trigger’s position might be described as a “common sense”

acceptance of the fact that in archaeology the construction of interpretations is both

defined and constrained by the material evidence and that the evidence is in fact

real. Trigger claims that Childe’s understanding of cultural systems offers a

“sophisticated and realistic” epistemological position from which to arbitrate

between matters of ideology and objective reality. Childe suggested that what

people believe could, in extreme circumstances, limit their responses to new

situations, which is to say that knowledge might be adaptively functional or

dysfunctional (Trigger 1996: 265). Trigger contends that: “Childe’s views apply

equally to particular nationalisms, to specific forms of archaeological

interpretation, and to cultural systems”(Trigger 1996: 265). He suggests that this

encapsulates a “Childean epistemology” which allows for a “productive dialogue”

between the cultural preconceptions of the archaeologist and the reality of the

archaeological record:

“Even though the preoccupations of archaeologists play a major role in

determining such basic matters as what they do or do not perceive as evidence

and the ways that they classify such evidence, the very fact that archaeologists

must take account of material that they did not create themselves imposes

significant limitations on their imaginations. It is absurd to maintain that there

are no empirical limits to the manner in which archaeologists can responsibly

interpret their data” (Trigger 1996: 265).

The key aspect of Trigger’s position on the social construction of archaeological

knowledge is his contention that misuses or misinterpretations of archaeological

data rely just as much upon an under documented and ill understood archaeological

database as they do on the socially determined beliefs of the archaeologist. He

suggests that tenuous origin myths such as the Mound Builders of North America


or the building of Zimbabwe by Semitic colonists, are gradually over turned by an

accumulated weight of evidence which eventually leads to the discredit of the

earlier theory. He stresses the ability of the archaeological database to provide

“resistance” to spurious or perhaps nationalistically biased interpretations, and also

the robustness of archaeology’s internally defined path towards gathering more

and more data. Trigger’s analysis is based upon his claim that the history of

archaeology reveals; “an irreversibly changing understanding of the past that has

been shaped by the constraining influence of the growing body of archaeological

data”(Trigger 1996: 276). He concedes however, that the “complex ways in which

internal patterns of research and external conditions intersect ensures that the

development of archaeology does not occur in a unilinear fashion and that the

paths it follows can never be predicted easily or with any assurance” (Trigger

1996: 266). This claim is, in effect, a justification for his historical project, but the

scope of his global analysis does not allow him to follow this notion through with

an appreciation of local details. Because Trigger concentrates so heavily on the

ability of the discipline to establish an overwhelming body of data with which to

overthrow wrong interpretations, I believe he downplays the significant roles

which local conditions may have on the conduct of local archaeologies. Such

conditions may include, as well as the political and economic differences referred

to by Trigger, a range of more idiosyncratic factors such as inertia to shifts from

the dominant paradigm, the long-term influences of institutional structures and of

particularistic funding, as well as the destruction of undervalued categories of data.

While Trigger accepts that the choice of sites for investigation is open to obvious

subjectivities, he places complete faith in archaeology’s ability to eventually

“discover” all aspects of a finite archaeological record. These issues are important

for my consideration of historical archaeology as the archaeology of the modern

world raises issues outside Trigger’s concept of “the archaeological record” (and

see Patrik 1985 and Thomas 1996 on this issue). Historical archaeological

evidence may be constituted from any modern material culture and is quite

transparently chosen because of its relevance to a research problem or because of

its cultural heritage value. Such material culture may still be in use (such as studies


of urban neighbourhoods or rural landscapes) and will certainly have a range of

cultural meanings and uses attached to it by contemporary communities.

Trigger does not pursue his analysis of archaeology and nationalism far enough to

take account of the changing, fluid and some times contradictory nature of

nationalism itself, responding in turn to cultural factors, which are in themselves

part of the milieu of archaeological research. This is because his analysis is framed

from within a naïve concept of disciplinarity which causes him to construe

divergent, culturally enmeshed practices into a history of archaeological progress.

Trigger’s analysis of local divergences in central disciplinary issues is both

illuminating and impressive in its scope, but he speaks as if situated at the

evolutionary zenith of a secure disciplinary entity. Uncritical acceptance of the

notion of the “discipline” as a neutral, inevitable entity, is a barrier to a more

sophisticated critique of archaeological knowledge. Even though recent studies

(Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Ucko 1995b) eloquently document fundamental

differences in what is meant by the practice of archaeology in the context of

specific regions, and to some extent account for these differences, the implications

of the construct of either an actual, or ideal, united disciplinary identity are rarely

made explicit (but see Hamilakis 1999; Hutson 1998; Ronayne 1998; Smith 1996;

Thomas 1995). The notion of the discipline, just like the idea of the nation, when

used as a subject of historical or social analysis, imposes an artificial coherence

and denies real understandings of disunity and diversity. To question the notion of

the discipline is not to question the reality of an international community of

practitioners who share a range of ideas, practices, a body of literature and

communications to greater and lesser extents. What it does question is: the political

neutrality of disciplinary structures and boundaries; the teleological effect that the

notion of an evolving, improving discipline has on accounts of archaeological

practices; and, as Hamilakis has pointed out, the understanding of the

archaeologist’s role in contemporary society (Hamilakis 1999). The concept of the

discipline exists primarily as a legitimizing power structure for the knowledge

produced by those authorized to do so, and this has been an empowering situation

which has enabled archaeology to develop in creative ways. Disciplinary


boundaries also serve to limit the range of social responsibilities which members

need to be aware of. In this vein Australian prehistorian John Mulvaney has been

termed a “public intellectual” because he has used his knowledge and status in the

service of many community causes which were considered beyond his

responsibilities to his discipline (Bonyhady and Griffiths 1996). Archaeologists’

responsibilities are often construed as being primarily to the discipline, to the past

or more specifically to the material remains of the past (Wylie 1996). Although

these concepts have been broadly critiqued through the latter part of the 20th

century, they remain foundational and influential within archaeological practice

and to broader understandings of archaeology within the community (Ronayne

1998). It is crucial to problematize the construct of the discipline in order to

investigate archaeology and nationalism because of the way disciplinarity appears

to separate disciplinary knowledge from culture. National histories and

disciplinary histories, such as Trigger’s, remain defined by the “high modernist”

project of progressive histories, underlain by the teleologies of reason and

universalism (Dean 1994: 3). Within this framework, relationships between

archaeology and nationalism are explicable through the internal/external model

discussed above, and remain focused on archaeology’s role in the sphere of state

politics (see for example Kohl 1998). Further, the currency of such explanations

act in the interests of continued Eurocentrism and its judgmental attribution of

levels of modernity. A focus on the relationships within culture of separate forms

of knowledge, and on the historicisation of the discourses which underlie cultural

practice, can effect a disruption of this pervasive, Eurocentric, progressive

historicism (Chakrabarty 2000:7).

Critiques of disciplinary regimes and expert knowledge derived from Foucault

have been broadly influential in the social sciences, but what I want to focus on, in

the context of my study, is the way in which they have been extended into analyses

of colonialism (see Stoler 1995 for a review of some of this literature). A persistent

theme of colonial studies has been the role of anthropological and historical

knowledge in enabling colonialism and in the constitution of its specific strategies

of authority (see for instance Attwood 1992 and Thomas 1996). This is one of the


most significant contributions from the field of postcolonial theory to my study: it

has highlighted the interrelationships between a whole range of texts and practices,

which were conventionally seen as specific to their own disciplinary spheres, and

subsequently implicated those texts and practices in the maintenance of colonial

domination (Barker et al 1994:2). I have already discussed the Australian settler

nation as a product of colonialism and how it remains subtly underpinned by

ideologies of colonialism, although many of these have been eroded to greater or

lesser extents in the second half of the 20th century. In Australia, critiques of

archaeological practices have focused far more on colonialism than nationalism as

such. Issues of colonialism in Aboriginal prehistory were put on the agenda by

McBryde and Mulvaney (see for instance McBryde 1986 and Mulvaney 1990), and

developed more recently into broad ranging critiques of essentialism and cultural

imperialism in archaeological interpretations and cultural heritage management

(see for instance Byrne 1993; Murray 1992, 1996d; Sullivan 1993; McNiven and

Russell 1997). In this vein, Laurajane Smith has examined the way prehistoric

archaeological knowledge in Australia has been “rendered as a technology of

government which governments and policy makers may utilise to understand and

govern a range of cultural and social groups” and, most importantly, may impact

upon the self perception of identity of these groups (Smith 1998; 1999: 109). In

other accounts, the ontological disjuncture between the practices and

interpretations of prehistory and historical archaeology has been interpreted as the

result of colonial regimes of knowledge and of the ongoing neocolonialism of

institutions and state structures (Colley and Bickford 1996; Byrne 1996; Murray

1996c; 1996d). The way in which Aboriginal prehistory has been co-opted into

nationalist discourses in Australia has also been considered (Head 1996, 1998;

Byrne 1996). The ancient indigenous past has been appropriated to provide deep

time roots for the nation, while Aboriginal spirituality has been seen as an antidote

to settler alienation as well as the source of a national uniqueness and exclusivity

(Lattas 1990). Australian prehistory has also been implicated in a most specific

kind of identity politics: the construction of Aboriginality. It could be argued that

some Aboriginal prehistory has taken on a nationalistic form of its own, counter to

colonialist nationalism, and involved in establishing the sovereignty of Aboriginal


people. Byrne has commented on how some Aboriginal people choose to see

archaeological sites as “title deeds” to their land (Byrne forthcoming) This

resistance to neocolonialism can be seen as an integral part of nationalist

discourses in Australia where there are conflicting imaginings of the national past

and future. However, the way in which the dominant nationalist and colonialist

narratives of the past have been supported by historical archaeology has received

little critical reflection to date (but see Byrne forthcoming; Ireland 1996;

Ireland forthcoming).

Political Consciousness in Historical Archaeology: Capitalism,

Inclusiveness and Identity

“ One of the key themes that does hold historical archaeology together is that we

walk in a uniquely dangerous space of the human past, a space between often

very powerful ‘master narratives’ of cultural and social identity and much

smaller, stranger, potentially subversive narratives of archaeological material.

Archaeology does not have a monopoly on the study of the voices of ordinary

people, but it does have the ability to render familiar things strange and reveal

timeless things as transient” (Johnson 1999: 34).

Historical archaeologists have often sought, and articulated, a political role for

their research. Here I want to focus on research which problematizes the

construction of the past in the present and proclaims a political, usually subversive,

role for archaeology in showing how dominant orders are historically constructed

and not natural. Most of the work referred to here is not centrally concerned with

the issue of nationalism or the nation in an explicit way, but as I shall go on to

explain, the role of nation, nationalism and national mythologies is implicitly

critiqued within this approach. The fact that the nation is rarely the subject of

direct critique is an interesting question to which I shall return. The vast majority

of this literature comes from the United States and is Marxist in its intellectual

affiliation. Mark Leone has published on this theme since the 1970s and is

consistently explicit about the archaeologist’s responsibility to challenge the way


capitalism uses “biology and history” to fix essential identities (Leone and Potter

1999: viii). Perhaps one of the broadest themes in historical archaeological

research has been its ability to provide a more inclusive past as a corrective to

history’s litany of great men and events of national significance. Since the 1960s

historical archaeology’s potential role as a “democratizing force”, in both giving a

past to “people without history”, and in revealing history’s systematic erasure or

distortion of events and causal relationships, has been broadly proclaimed. Glassie

articulated this as archaeology’s potential to act against the “superficial and elitist

tales of viciousness” which form “myths for the contemporary power structure”

(Glassie 1977). Jane Lydon linked broadly Marxist concerns with systemic

inequalities to historical archaeological research focusing on ethnicity (Lydon

1999: 16 and see for instance McGuire 1982) and Little demonstrated how concern

for the oppressed had been a central theme in American historical archaeology

concerning race, class, and gender (Little 1994:10). Studies of slavery and

colonialism have also aimed to “give back history” (for instance Orser 1990;

1996).

South African historical archaeologist Martin Hall has also used historical

archaeology in an actively political manner, deconstructing the myths underlying

inequitable social relations in his country (Hall 1992; Hall 1995). In the same vein,

in Australia there have been calls for the mobilisation of an historical archaeology

of indigenous people to assist in historicising recent Aboriginal experiences,

including them in the national narratives and making their past visible as a counter

to the dominant visibility of colonial heritage in the landscape (Byrne 1996;

forthcoming; Colley 1996a; Colley 1996b; Egloff 1994; Murray 1992). Lydon’s

investigation of cultural exchange between Chinese and white people in Sydney,

around the turn of the 19th century, actively sought to contribute to contemporary

race relations debates (Lydon 1999). Lydon questioned assumptions about how

cultural identity is constructed and suggested that disjunctures between the past

and the present are overstated in much Australian political debate.


All of the historical archaeological research referred to here conceives of the past

that is studied as directly constitutive of present social conditions. Whereas the

assumed message behind Marxist critique is the attainment of ideological

consciousness, analysis is firmly grounded in the American nation state and its

current and historical social issues. In the South African and Australian contexts

politically engaged archaeology is committed to the development of new political

discourses and institutions which right past wrongs, encompass multiple identities

and cultural diversity. While Marxist archaeologists in the United States appear to

find the nation state a reasonably benign formation, and of far less importance than

the formation of international capitalism, other historical archaeologists have

rarely explored the relationship between nation, identity and the context of

archaeological research. This is due, I suggest, to the naturalised national context

of their research. The nation is accepted as the context of and for research.

Although Little points out the importance of not accepting the development of

“modern American society and culture” as inevitable, she does not pursue a

critique of the national as a context for such notions of inevitability or the

teleological effect of nationalism (Little 1994:17). Other United States based

archaeologists have investigated archaeology and nationalism overseas, focusing

on the relationship between research and particular political regimes or the “state”,

the effects of neo-colonialism and of American and First World economic

imperialism (Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Kohl and Fawcett 1995). Trigger has

argued that the “New Archaeology” was involved in American political and

economic imperialism through its denial of the worth of national traditions and its

strong anti-historicism, and that a particular local result of this was an

anthropology of Native Americans which produced only generalised

interpretations of “human behaviour” (Trigger 1989: 315). Despite the fact that

much American historical archaeology deals reflexively with the histories and

myths of the nation the relationship between archaeology and nationalism has not

been extensively theorised as it has been in Europe. Interest in global capitalism

and the concept of American economic and cultural imperialism and world

dominance appear to be related and to have made the concept of the nation less

relevant to archaeological critiques in the United States.


In 1973 Leone declared one of archaeology’s major rationales to be the “empirical

substantiation of national mythology”, but he found that:

“archaeology in the service of national goals hardly merits condemnation; in

fact, it merits some celebration… Its role in national myth substantiation is, it

seems to me, quite inoffensive, but what is not inoffensive is the archaeologists’

unawareness of this function” (Leone 1973: 133).

The context within which Leone found this public role of archaeology to be

offensive, was in the naivete of archaeologists’ understanding of the operation of

ideology in their practice and, consequently, in its perpetuation of the dominant

ideologies which underpin social inequality. Leone identifies two legitimate

political roles for historical archaeology: first to demonstrate the operation of

ideology in the past and then to explain the roots of modern ideological

constructions; and second, to use knowledge about the operation of ideology in

society to enhance the quality of archaeological interpretations and produce

knowledge about the past which is “enlightened” and less contingent upon its

social context. In the 1980s Leone went on to expand the application of Marxism

to archaeology by investigating “critical theory” (Leone et al 1987). As Wylie

points out, his definition of critical theory was broad, encompassing “any research

program that adopts a critically self conscious attitude toward(s) its constituent

presuppositions: as they (Leone, Potter and Shackel) describe it ‘critical theory

asks of any set of conclusions from what point of view they are constructed’ ”

(Wylie 1987:297).

Leone sees capitalism as both the pre-eminent source of identity relevant in

historical archaeological research as well as to historical archaeologists as

individuals today (Leone and Potter Jr. 1999: 3). His schema therefore subsumes

nationalism as just one of the ideologies prominent in capitalist systems. While

capitalism is an “absorptive set of economic practices” it is seen as separate from

culture, although such is the duplicitous nature of capitalism that it may

masquerade as culture, through the commodification of cultural practice (Leone


and Potter Jr. 1999:14). Leone’s work has not pursued the relationship between

nationalism and archaeology specifically, although nationalist ideologies are

implicitly covered by the overarching concept of capitalism within which he

works.

The same could be said of the work of Thomas C. Patterson who has also written

about the development of American archaeology in its social and political context

(Patterson 1995; 1999). Patterson, for instance, stresses the link between the

development of archaeology and the rise of capitalism: the commodification of

antiquities and curios and the creation of antiquities markets gave rise to the need

for expert knowledge regarding the authenticity and value of antiquities. Value and

significance could in turn be increased by the proliferation of public interest and

fascination in the people or cultures who produced the objects and this could be

generated through archaeological research and “exploration” (Patterson 1999:

158). Accounts of the rise of nationalism and archaeology, such as those produced

by Diaz Andreu and Champion (1996), Kohl (1998) and Trigger (1989), tend not

to emphasize the relationship between archaeology and the expansion of

capitalism, perhaps ignoring this aspect too thoroughly in their rejection of, or lack

of interest in, Marxist approaches. Patterson provides a dry, functionalist account

of both archaeology and the changing social and cultural milieu of the United

States through his lack of interest in nationalism and generally reductive view of

culture. In particular his purist, Marxist concept of ideology insists that he sees all

power, all operations of the capitalist state, as negative and oppressive, denying

any creativity, or any sense of the ambiguous complexity experienced by the

people in his story, and surely by he himself as part of the academic and

educational system he is analysing. While I find Patterson’s account wholly

reductive, he does raise issues which have been insufficiently recognised by non-

Marxist approaches to archaeology and nationalism. The political and economic

implications of the role of archaeology as an authorised, expert knowledge for the

capitalist system are crucial issues for the analysis of archaeology’s

unacknowledged entanglement in nationalism, colonialism, capitalism and

globalisation. Of perhaps greatest relevance to my study is the context of the


expansion of archaeological heritage management, not just as an exercise in

nationalistic self-definition, but as the commodification of a product for local and

global markets of cultural tourism (Patterson 1999: 166).

Although an understanding of capitalism, critical theory, and the concept of

ideology, remain essential for approaching 19th and 20th century cultural history

and cultural analysis, they stop short of providing an adequate theoretical

framework for understanding the relationships between politics, culture and

knowledge. The problem with the Marxist concept of ideology, as identified by

many critics and philosophers, is that it denies agency to its ideologically

dominated subjects, and therefore does little to help us understand cultural life,

cultural difference and cultural processes in general (see for a summary Alexander

and Smith 1993: 158). My study focuses on nationalism because it highlights a

crucial regional context, but as I have been arguing, this should not be

foregrounded at the expense of other global and local contexts and their

implications in cultural and economic terms. Whereas Leone’s and Patterson’s

approach is to read this context primarily in terms of capitalist economic

relationships, I believe this leaves them with an unhelpfully reductive

understanding of cultural practice and production. The authorization of social

structures and cultural identities within the frameworks of colonialism and

nationalism are obviously interpenetrated by the global capitalist structures within

which they are formed. However Marxist concepts of ideology construe the

operation of power as always negative, restrictive and oppressive. Foucault on the

other hand, as I discussed in Chapter One, provides a theoretical means of looking

at the operation of power as also productive of culture and knowledge. In part my

critique here arises from matters of emphasis and interest. Patterson is more

interested, in his account of the rise of American archaeology, in its relationship

with the economic structures of capitalism. Leone’s interests seem broader,

encompassing historical archaeology’s ability to comment on capitalism, as both

its object of enquiry, as well as the dominant context for practice. I am more

interested in the problem of culture, and in the context, effect and meaning of

cultural practices. This leads to my interest in nationalism as an identity project


and to archaeology, not as a bounded discipline with external and internal

influences, but as a cultural practice that is characterised by confused motives in

determining its status.

Constructing the Past in the Present

In the 1990s, interest in the socio-political context of archaeological research has

expanded into broad ranging considerations of the history and regional conditions

of archaeological practice and theory (McGuire and Paynter 1991; Murray 1993b;

Ucko 1995b; Schmidt and Patterson 1995). One the most significant examples of

this kind of research has been feminist scholarship’s exposure of the way in which

androcentric bias had been perpetuated through archaeological interpretation (see

for instance Smith and du Cros 1993; Wylie 1992; Gero and Conkey 1991).

Particularly relevant here are three edited volumes considering archaeology and

nationalism specifically (Atkinson et al. 1996; Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996;

Kohl and Fawcett 1995). Other studies have looked at archaeology, identity and

politics in general (Bond and Gilliam 1995; Graves-Brown et al. 1996; Jones 1997;

Meskell 1999). As we have seen, in Australia critique has centred on the

relationship between colonialism, prehistoric archaeology and contemporary

Aboriginal identity politics, and also on the impact of Aboriginal concerns on

archaeological practice (Pardoe 1992; Colley forthcoming). Also relevant in this

context are changing world perspectives on the nature and meaning of “heritage”,

which has involved archaeology in many debates about the role of the past in

maintaining identities and about scholarly responsibilities towards the “accuracy”,

“authenticity” and ideological content of the pasts presented to communities

through the heritage industry (see for instance Bennett 1995; Gathercole and

Lowenthal 1990; Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1985).

A great deal of the literature produced under the heading of “archaeology and

nationalism” has taken the form of historically constructed case studies looking at

how particular political regimes, or other national or ethnic identity movements,


and archaeological practice have interrelated. These case studies provide a wealth

of details allowing us to appreciate the diversity of archaeological practices in the

context of local conditions (see for instance case studies in Atkinson et al. 1996;

Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Schmidt and Patterson

1995). They also demonstrate the way in which powerful metropolitan interests

representing the “discipline” of archaeology, have attempted to impose a core of

hegemonic principles which aim to shape local pasts according to their interests.

Much of this literature is characterised by an over reliance on the concept of

nationalism as a political doctrine, seeing it as a force contained within the realm

of politics, which then intersects with archaeological practice and knowledge

claims in a number of predictable locations (Hamilakis 1996). If nationalism is

seen as an identity project, enmeshed in culture, constructed through discourse and

practice, as I have suggested, then its relationship with archaeological

interpretation, not only through political policy but also through social action,

education, literature and popular culture, can be seen to be far more complex, and

far more responsive to local historical and social conditions.

Another issue from an Australian perspective, is the concentration in the literature

on case studies concerning the “abuse” of archaeology by nationalistic regimes

(Kohl and Fawcett 1995). This leads to cautionary tales about archaeologists

“selling out” to state sponsored archaeology, and colluding in the formation of

restricted and exclusive constructions of identity. This makes it seem possible to

withdraw archaeology from the culture in which it operates by avoiding the sphere

of politics, to achieve a new objectivity. Further, this literature is structured

through the Eurocentric perspective, discussed in Chapter 1, that nationalism is an

atavistic form of collective identity which has failed to transcend pre-modern

forms of identity based on blood and other dangerous concepts. This perspective

epiphenomenalises nationalism as a unitary, negative force and fails to appreciate

the distinctive fragmentation of nationalist discourses and practices in any location.

Although often, as is the case in Australia, nationalism is implicated in neo-

colonialism, many postcolonial scholars believe that due to the on-going

aspirations towards, and reality of national governments, to withdraw from an


active engagement with nationalism is to withdraw from effective political action

and to abandon a responsibility to contribute to an ethical vision of a community’s

future (During 1990). Further, that much theorising about postmodern,

cosmopolitan experience and identity simply elides issues concerned with real

political situations where such experience may be involuntary and the right to a

national identity, a passport, denied.

I want to consider two further issues covered by this literature:

1. The relationship between archaeological thought and modernist, nationalist

thought; and

2. The nature of archaeological theory and its potential complicity with particular

areas of ideological bias.

Modernity, nationalism and archaeological thought

Hides has convincingly argued that the way in which the past has been studied has

undergone fundamental conceptual changes since the Late Renaissance (Hides

1996). Foucault (1970) terms these changing conceptual frameworks “epistemes”

and has developed a mode of historical analysis based upon recognition of the

conditions within which knowledge has been constructed at different times in the

past. The emergence of modern, scientific archaeology, its adoption of rationalist

philosophy and systematic field practices, is generally located in the nineteenth

century, within the context of the development of nation states and new

understandings of the meaning of history (Hides 1996; Trigger 1989; Diaz-Andreu

and Champion 1996). Diaz Andreu and Champion (1996) and Trigger (1989)

therefore see the emergence of modern nationalism and the emergence of modern

archaeology as linked, primarily through the nation state’s need to legitimate the

historic origins of cultural and/or ethnic groups within the national territory. Hides

expands this understanding in a number of ways. He points out that 18th century

romanticism approached antiquities in terms of their ordering and classification,

like aspects of the natural world. Nineteenth century modern philosophy however

“defined the relationship between objects and identity historically”, through the


empirical study of “Man” and “origins” (Hides 1996:37). Hides characterises this

re-alignment of antiquarianism to archaeology not as an improvement in

archaeological techniques, but as the result of a radical change in the epistemic

context of the researchers. What is important to note here is that nationalism and

archaeology emerged out of modernist thought and its inherent historicity. This

means that their relationship cannot simply be explained in terms of the political

influence of nationalism on archaeological interpretation, or the subjective

influences of nationalistic archaeologists. The relationship is formed at a far more

fundamental level, and that is the “modern” way of understanding the world.

Critiques of modernity therefore begin to illuminate taken-for-granted structures of

thought which link what modernism has constituted as separate entities of thought

and practice, such as “archaeology” and “nationalism”. They also hint towards the

preconceptions involved in archaeological practice that will need to be confronted

in order to deal with post-modern issues of multiple identities, consumerism and

globalisation.

Rowlands expands upon another important consequence of modern thought for

understanding archaeology and nationalism (Rowlands 1995). Modernity, he

argues, situates us as already in the future and as having transcended traditional

lifeways. We therefore see the past not as a part of us and where we live, but as a

“foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985). Archaeology is therefore constituted as the

ideal method for uncovering this alien, and longed for past. Rowlands situates the

origins of naiveté in archaeological thought within the context of nineteenth

century nationalist modes of thought. He defines naiveté here as an “unreflexive

mode of practice that takes for granted the axioms on which established work

predetermines the value of future knowledge” (Rowlands 1995:129). Naiveté is

emphasised by positivist archaeology which sees material remains simply as the

direct evidence of what happened in the past. In addition, as I discussed in Chapter

1, nationalist discourse constructs the past as the key to identity, suggests that

identity is continuous through time and over generations, and makes identity

important as the imagined shared basis for the national community. Rowlands’

work also makes very clear that the ongoing basis of archaeology’s relationship to


nationalism is in the way it constructs, and reflects identities. This helps us draw

out, on a specific level, how it is misleading to separate internal and external

relationships between archaeology, nationalism and other aspects of cultural

identity, as is the case in the work of Trigger and other commentators discussed

earlier in this chapter.

Diaz-Andreu and Champion on the other hand, focus more on the historical

relationship between archaeology and nation states, arguing that “by the very fact

of being integrated into state and sub-state institutions and in general adapting its

findings to the frontiers of the present states, archaeology is nationalist” (Diaz-

Andreu and Champion 1996: 7). They also claim (contra Trigger who states that

nationalist archaeology is more likely in states under threat) that in secure nations

the role of archaeology appears to be “politically neutral” and “has become so

naturalised that we are hardly conscious of it”(Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996).

Diaz-Andreu and Champion therefore focus on relationships that have been created

through the structuring effects of state institutions, such as museums and

universities. Also interestingly, they see the growth of essentialist nationalism (or

ethno-nationalism) as a cause for the expansion of non-state archaeological

associations concerned with ethnic identities such as Catalan and Celtic. The

impression given here is of a discipline deeply structured by a long historical

relationship with a political ideology, the influence of which should, and could, be

avoided in the future through critical self reflection (Diaz-Andreu and Champion

1996: 21). This is the opposite of Rowlands’ conclusion:

“the expansion of archaeology’s relation to nationalism and ethnicity in the

construction of collective identity seems certain to continue. Partly the

materiality of the archaeological record will ensure this. Partly also the creation

of alternative pasts is increasingly being used to legitimate land claims, ethnic

territories and access to economic resources” (Rowlands 1995 :141).

Theory and Responsibility


A constant theme running through these recent discussions of archaeology and

nationalism is the ability of competing theory groups to provide archaeologists,

practicing in a range of political environments, with the means to produce

interpretations free of nationalistic bias, as well as the ability to understand the

hegemonic implications of their interpretations. Discussions centre on the

conventional three “groups” of archaeological theory: the so-called culture

historical, processual and postprocessual theoretical movements. Trigger presents

the most fully articulated thesis on the historical development of archaeological

theory and its context within broader philosophical, social and political

movements. I have already discussed some of his interpretations of culture

historical archaeology and its links with nationalistically driven research aims.

Jones has also pointed out how much culture historical archaeology appears to be

practiced in an “atheoretical” mode (Jones 1997: 24), that it is often seen as a suite

of methodologies to enable the “extraction, description, classification and

compilation of archaeological evidence relating to a particular period or amenable

to a particular kind of scientific analysis” (Thomas 1995: 349). As Ucko points

out, it is the socially embedded acceptance of culture history’s empirical methods

(i.e. gathering more and more evidence towards a fuller understanding of what

happened in the past) as pragmatic and natural ways of getting on and doing

archaeology, that serve to obscure its theoretical underpinnings (Ucko 1995a: 11).

These underpinnings include definitions of cultures as limited, homogenous

entities, that are naturally conservative and change resistant. Jones has shown how

the equation of archaeological cultures with modern concepts of ethnicity caused

an intellectual construction of prehistory as a mosaic map of cultures, which were

viewed as “distinct entities, despite the flow of ideas between them, and are reified

as actors on an historical stage” (Jones 1997: 25).

The critiques of culture history so far discussed have already implicated this type

of archaeology as being particularly “at risk” for co-option into nationalistic

agendas (Rowlands 1995; Trigger 1989; Jones 1997; Ucko 1995a). This risk can

be defined as the way in which positivist approaches to an objective, value free

archaeological record provide little scope for reflective practice, and naturalise


some ways of doing archaeology as “normal”. A second aspect to this definition of

risk is found in culture history’s materialist definition of “culture” and “culture

change” and the way in which culture history is in itself an extension of the

Eurocentric, progressive historicism which underlies much modernist, nationalist

discourse.

In contrast to culture history, I referred briefly above to Trigger’s claims that the

universalizing concerns of processualism and the New Archaeology trivialized the

importance of regional traditions and were an ideological reflection of the United

States’ economic and political interventionism during the Cold War period

(Trigger 1989: 315). This had major implications for the archaeology of Latin

America and Africa, and for the study of indigenous cultures within colonised

nations. The use of scientistic, “New Archaeology” theories and methodologies has

therefore played a major role in diverting attention from the significance of

archaeology’s social context, and contributing to the idea of a politically neutral

discipline of universal value. I will argue in Chapter 5 that “New Archaeology”

theory has played a significant role in both Australian historical archaeological

research and archaeological heritage management (and see Smith 2000). In

particular, the concept of an objective, scientific heritage significance remains

entrenched and unacknowledged within heritage management procedures, despite

the general abandonment of this notion by archaeologists. The broader cultural

perception of the objectivity of scientific evidence, and the attribution of this value

to the “archaeological record”, has major importance for my study, as it effectively

clouds the way in which such values are constituted by what Thomas terms

“specific interests and a project of dominance” (Thomas 1994: 4).

The third group of archaeological theories, “postprocessualism”, encompasses a

broad range of contextualised approaches to archaeological interpretation which

respond to the implications of postmodernism. Several writers have focused on

aspects of the post-processual position which they contend, open it to, or even

encourages, political abuse (see for instance Trigger 1996; Kohl 1993; Kohl and

Fawcett 1995; Anthony 1996; Yoffee and Sherrat 1993 ). These archaeologists


suggest that celebration of the political content of archaeological interpretation and

willing engagement in social issues, as advocated by Leone and Potter (1999),

Shanks and Tilley (1987a; 1987b) for instance, is ‘fraught with perils’ (Kohl and

Fawcett 1995: 6). They also find the degree of relativism inherent in the post-

processual position to be not only disabling, but dangerous. Trigger, Kohl and

Fawcett and Yoffee and Sherrat have all rejected a theoretical standpoint that

concedes alternative interpretations of the past. Trigger finds it supremely ironic

that post-processualism is, in his view, a descendent of the German Romantic

philosophical tradition. This tradition, as I discussed earlier, is implicated by many

in enabling the construction of the racially pure Aryan identity (Trigger 1996: 263

and see Anthony 1996: 88).

Sian Jones rejects that there is any evidence to implicate postprocessual

archaeology in immoral silences regarding spurious, deceitful or self-interested

interpretations of the past. In fact she contends that the opposite is the case, that it

has been scientistic, postivist archaeology that can more often be blamed for

supporting racist ideologies and encouraging political abuses (Jones 1997: 11).

Other commentators have argued that postprocessualism is only untenable to

archaeological "fascists" who rely on narrow and naive theorisations of relativism

and the way in which archaeology is related to forms of discourse such as

nationalism (Hamilakis 1996; Lampeter Archaeology Worksop 1997; Holtorf

1996; Ronayne 1998). Alison Wylie’s voice has occupied a middle ground

between the hyper-relativist and positivist positions by suggesting that

archaeological evidence can effectively constrain interpretation, and can also jolt

archaeologists from apathetic acceptance of dominant paradigms (Wylie 1992).

Wylie also uses feminist archaeology as an example of where strong political

commitments held by the archaeologist, outside the sphere of archaeology, can be

used positively and constructively to take research in new directions (Wylie 1992).

The concept of certain types of theory’s susceptibility to abuse has been dealt with

recently by Julian Thomas. Thomas was using theory derived from Martin

Heidigger, “a card carrying member of the Nazi Party”, to develop


phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches in archaeology (Thomas 1996). He

attempted to answer the question: is there anything inherent in this theory that

makes it likely to promote humanitarian abuses or fascism in general? Thomas

claims to separate out the aspects of Heidigger’s theoretical program which

became involved in the dangerous politics of Nazism and shows that he is using

other, more palatable ideas. Irrespective of the success of Thomas’ arguments for

this “test case”, he does demonstrate the need for a thorough understanding of the

history of theory and interpretations in general. This debate surrounding

postprocessual theory raises several issues critical to my study. First, that

demonstrating, in specific historic circumstances, how relativism (that is the depth

to which historical and socio-cultural contingencies have permeated archaeological

interpretation) can be seen to have operated in archaeology in the past, will

engender more meaningful understandings of archaeology’s broader involvement

in culture and society. Second, is an understanding that this study and

postprocessual theory both result from reactions to the basic questioning of

objectivity in science and from competing understandings of the way in which

cultures construct objects of knowledge. Deep contextualisation of both research

questions and the subject of research has been a response to this problematic and is

the aim of my project here. As in Thomas’ work (1996), a necessary response to

this problematic is for archaeologists to be informed of the “genealogy” of the

knowledge and assumptions which they bring to bear in interpretation. My study

considers how nationalism has been involved in structuring a particular genealogy

of knowledge, and I have discussed in Chapter 1 how this knowledge is

inseparable in the Australian context from colonialism, history and cultural

identity.

Conclusions:

Relationships within Culture

Many interpretations of the relationship between archaeology and nationalism have

been structured through teleologies of disciplinarity which describe an evolution


towards either an enlightened consciousness regarding social context, or a superior

level of objectivity. These explanations have conceived of archaeology’s

relationship with nationalism as either an “external” state control, or an “internal”

influence through certain theoretical precepts. These explanations repeat the

Eurocentric, modernist project of progressive historicism, in particular bolstering

the powerful position of those who appear to speak from the centre of the

“discipline”. In Chapter 1, I suggested an approach to this problem drawn broadly

from Foucault and from Thomas’ proposal for local, historical, ethnographies of

practice, focusing on genealogies of knowledge and their re-negotiation in specific

contexts. I will go on in the chapters which follow to present a range of case

histories and contextualised studies of Australian historical archaeology and

heritage management which consider many of the distinctive aspects of the

interaction between archaeology and nationalism that have been drawn out in this

chapter. The role of material culture, and of the material aspect of archaeological

evidence in general, has been raised in several contexts as the key to the distinctive

closeness between archaeology and nationalism (Diaz Andreu and Champion

1996; Trigger 1989; Hamilakis 1996; Rowlands 1995). In the following chapter I

explore the cultural process of giving value to the material remains of the

Australian historic past, a process within which discourses of archaeology and

nationalism combine to link identity with a material past. In Chapter 6 I go on to

look specifically at materiality and national origin mythology, to explore historical

archaeology’s role in authenticating nationalist narratives and expanding the realm

of the national sacred.

Another important theme discussed here has been debates over the role of theory in

structuring archaeology’s relationship with its social context. In Chapter 5 I

examine the antecedents and intellectual genealogies of theories and concepts in

Australian historical archaeology, revealing foundational discourses concerned

with nation and identity within what has often been considered an “atheoretical”

practice.


The inevitably political nature of historical archaeology’s dealings in the recent,

contested past has been broadly recognised but the implications for an archaeology

of the settler nation, its colonial past and neo-colonial present, have not been

widely analysed, particularly from a perspective that acknowledges the

entanglement of discourses about the past, identity, culture, nation and

colonialism. While acknowledging the concept of capitalism as a subject of, and

context for historical archaeological research has been crucial, this has tended to

mask the complexity of the cultures of modernity and in particular the absolute

centrality of the national context for the construction of local traditions of

historical archaeology. The role of historical archaeology in particularising details

of local identities and local histories is well acknowledged and this is generally

construed as a strength and source of meaning for this kind of work. It undoubtedly

has also involved historical archaeology in the spurious silences of colonial

narratives and the “unified” national heritage. While my study certainly aims to

suggest meaningful directions for future research, as well as enriched readings of

past research, it does not aim to set out a manifesto for a non-nationalistic practice.

Its aim is however a reflexive one, one of critique and engagement with cultural

and political contexts, one that assumes the present is at least as strange as the past.

Chapter 3

Giving Value to the Australian Historic Past

“A growing national maturity led to movements during the 1960s to preserve Australia’s heritage across a wide spectrum” (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999: 4).

Is it “maturity” that leads a nation to be concerned about the preservation of the

material remnants of its past? What indeed are the cultural processes that lead to

some aspects of the material environment being singled out as worthy of respect,

preservation and study, when this had not previously been the case? Historical

archaeology, as a practice which studies the physical remains of Australia’s past

since 1788, cannot be separated from the processes which resulted in the

attribution of value to the material remains of the colonial past. From the outset I

want to propose that the explanation for the emergence of historical archaeology,

and of heritage more generally, as the result of a “growing cultural awareness”

arising from national maturity, is an interpretation which is grounded in the

narrative mythologies of nationalism. The Australian historic, cultural and natural

environment was perceived as more valuable within the cultural milieu of a nation

engaging with its colonial history and re-acting against the psychological

inheritance of imperialism: the “cultural cringe”. However, the development of a

distinctive kind of heritage discourse in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s was

involved with many local and global discourses including environmentalism,

science, heritage conservation, professionalism, tourism, nationalism, anti-

imperialism, participatory democracy, and indigenous rights, to name some of the

most obvious (Bennett 1995; Byrne 1996; Davison 1991a; Griffiths 1996; Murray

1996a). On an even broader scale, these local and transnational discourses must be

seen within the context of globalisation, in its cultural, technological and economic

forms, and their implications for individual and group identities (Appadurai 1996).

In the context of my study, considering historical archaeology and nationalism in

Australia, I want to look at the way in which discourses of value were constructed

that attributed meaning and significance to the material remains of colonial history.

98

Giving Value 99

Although a new kind of archaeological practice for Australia emerged from this

process, the discourses of value used were not completely new but founded upon a

variety of ways of knowing the past. Recent research has shown that the heritage

movement of the 1960s and 70s was based upon traditions of environmental

concern, historic preservation, collecting, local history and national heritage which

stretched back into the latter 19th century (Bonyhady 1996; Griffiths 1996; Healy

1997). Bennett’s work however, has focussed on the nationalisation of the past in

Australia in the 1960s and 70s, seeing the period of the “new nationalism” as

creating a radical new set of “past-present alignments” in Australian cultural and

political discourse. He outlines very clearly that the significance of historic sites

and objects depends not upon their authenticity or accuracy in representing the past

as it really was, but upon:

“their position within and relations to the presently existing field of historical

discourses and their associated social and ideological affiliations – on what

Patrick Wright has called their past – present alignments” (Bennett 1995: 147

quoting Wright 1984:512).

In particular Bennett shows how the concept of the National Estate, the term

adopted by the Whitlam administration to describe Australia’s cultural and natural

heritage, serves to meld Australian cultural and natural history into a unity, a

uniquely national story which de-emphasises both internal complexities and

external entanglements, including that with Britain. The incorporation of cultural

artefacts from before 1901, when Australia became a nation, including the

evidence of Aboriginal prehistory and the geology, flora and fauna of the

continent, serves to “wrench those artefacts from the histories to which they were

earlier connected – those of Empire, for example – and thus to back project the

national past beyond the point of its effective continuity” (Bennett 1995: 148).

Bennett’s approach has been criticised for failing to adequately historicise the

heritage discourses which emerged in this period and contributed to the flurry of

(settler) heritage legislation and cultural policy created in the 1970s and 1980s

(Griffiths 1996: 195; Healy 1997: 93). He focuses on the implications of the nation

state’s construction of an autonomised past, which he suggests follows precisely

Giving Value 100

Benedict Anderson’s description of how nations take complex, globally

interwoven pasts and create a history of unfolding national unity: through the

historicisation of a territory, and the territorialisation of history (Anderson 1983:

19; Bennett 1995: 142). The more ethnographic historical work of Healy and

Griffiths does not refute Bennett’s critical role for nationalism in the 1960s and

70s, but rather it enriches our understanding of the diverse discourses and practices

this culture of nationalism was built upon. A focus on state cultural policy and the

large state cultural institutions such as museums may seem to overstate the “real

life” effects of the government’s heavy-handed nationalistic rhetoric. However as I

shall argue in the following chapters, the nation and its history is consistently,

almost unquestioningly, articulated through heritage discourses as the most

important source of community identity. By focusing on the attribution of value to

the material remnants of the national and colonial pasts, which are now constituted

as historical archaeological sites and objects, I want to explore the genealogies of

some of the concepts and knowledge that enabled this nationalisation of the past.

Several accounts of the emergence of historical archaeology, and of the character

of its practice, have been written and they form an important basis for my study

(see for instance Birmingham and Murray 1987; Jack 1985; 1996; Murray and

Allen 1987; Connah 1988; Temple 1988; Stuart 1992; Egloff 1994; Lydon 1995b;

Mulvaney 1996; Paterson and Wilson 2000). However I must make it clear that my

aim in the next four chapters is not to produce comprehensive histories or

generalised descriptions of historical archaeological practice in Australia. Rather I

will draw on a range of historical, ethnographic and empirical data to provide

“thick descriptions” of aspects of archaeological practice located in specific

cultural contexts. Within this framework I am particularly interested in drawing out

foundational discourses which have allowed the category of historical archaeology

to be articulated. The (on-going) re-imagination of the nation has been central to

the development of a rationale for, and the foundational structures of meaning

within, historical archaeology. This does not mean however that this process of

“building a discipline” was homogenous, simple or completely directional, in

terms of a linear concept of maturation. As I have outlined, my purpose in this

Giving Value 101

chapter is to explore discourses of value, but first I want to expand upon the

context and history of historical archaeology in Australia as a background to my

central discussion.

In 1974 the first university courses in historical archaeology were introduced at the

University of Sydney through the determination of an archaeologist, Judy

Birmingham and a historian, Ian Jack. The establishment of this course was not

universally supported; in fact Birmingham and Jack acted against the wishes of

their respective departmental heads. Helen Temple has investigated this history of

historical archaeology in NSW and claims that the lack of prestige accorded to

historical archaeological work by Australian archaeologists who worked overseas,

has had a prolonged effect on the practice and its practitioners (Temple 1988: 55).

The story of historical archaeology in Australia is often articulated as the quest for

academic and disciplinary recognition for a practice carried on mostly outside the

academy, in the context of heritage management. Similar concerns regarding the

prestige accorded to historical archaeology in the USA have been voiced, and

worldwide, “the archaeology of the recent” still appears to be an oxymoron to

many (Orser 1996: 2). But perhaps it is salient to point out in the Australian

context that although Near Eastern and Classical archaeology had been taught at

the University of Sydney since the 1940s (O’Hea 2000: 75), the first PhD in

history at an Australian university was granted in 1947 and the first chair in

Australian history was created in 1949 (Griffiths 1996: 213). John Mulvaney

taught the first course in the prehistory of the Australian region in 1957 (Mulvaney

1996: 3). This process of valuing, professionalising and institutionalising the

Australian past has been spectacularly condensed.

Also in 1974, the Hope Inquiry into the National Estate reported to the federal

government for the first time on the nature of Australia’s heritage. Historic sites

(including the concept of historical archaeological sites) were recognised in this

report and it recommended that the States introduce legislation to protect them

(Hope 1974: 176). So what had lead up to these two critical dates in the

formalisation and institutionalisation of historical archaeology? Mulvaney draws

Giving Value 102

attention to the expansion of Australian universities through the late 1950s and

1960s which drew numbers of overseas trained archaeologists to Australia and

expanded the teaching of archaeology in general (Mulvaney 1996: 3). An

expansion in the teaching of archaeology not only saw some archaeologists

become interested in the research questions raised by Australian historic sites (see

for instance Allen 1973; Birmingham 1971, 1976), but also a demand for student

training in the field (Jack 1985: 157). Further, as I have discussed to some extent in

Chapter One, Mulvaney and others acknowledge the context of emerging

Australian cultural issues, including heritage, history, environmental conservation

and urban amenity (Mulvaney 1996). The 1960s saw a range of activities that built

up a constituency for and awareness of historical archaeology. Mulvaney

encouraged Campbell Macknight and Jim Allen in their postgraduate research into

historic sites in Arnhem Land (Allen 1969; Macknight 1976). Judy Birmingham

and her colleagues at the University of Sydney involved students and volunteers in

excavations at Irrawang, north of Sydney, and Wybalenna, on Flinders Island off

Tasmania (Birmingham 1976, 1992). In Victoria, Bill Culican from the University

of Melbourne led volunteers from the Archaeological Society of Victoria in

excavating the Fossil Beach Cement Works on the Mornington Peninsula (Culican

and Taylor 1972). The Australian Society for Historical Archaeology was formed

in 1970 with an aim of encouraging public interest in the subject, and it remains a

non-professional society which is open to any devotee (Temple 1988: 60).

Following the Hope Inquiry into the National Estate, a Project Co-ordination

Committee on Historical Archaeology was established to advise on how to develop

a comprehensive list of historical archaeological sites in Australia (Allen 1978).

The thematic approach developed by this committee would be influential in

heritage management through the decades to come. Although the Commonwealth

established its Australian Heritage Commission in 1975, and initiated the Register

of the National Estate and the National Estate Grants Program, the “national

parliament (did) not have plenary powers to legislate in respect of all matters for

the whole of Australia” (Allen 1978: A7). This legislative issue, sometimes

referred to as “State’s rights”, is perhaps one of the defining characteristics for

Australian political history through the 20th century. It means that although

Giving Value 103

definitive statements about heritage were made by the Commonwealth through the

creation of the Australian Heritage Commission, its power over the States was very

limited and heritage conservation work therefore developed in highly regionalised

traditions. Tasmania for instance, formed an important focus for early heritage

conservation projects, particularly on convict sites such as Port Arthur which I will

discuss in Chapter 5. However heritage legislation to protect historic sites was not

passed in Tasmania until 1995 (Historic Cultural Heritage Act 1995). The

development of legislation by the States specifically designed to protect historical

archaeological relics occurred first in South Australia in 1965, in the Aboriginal

and Historic Relics and Preservation Act. Although in Victoria the Archaeological

and Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act 1972 was used to control activities on

historical archaeological sites, it was not initially intended for this purpose and its

use on historic sites was limited (Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 71; Stuart 1987: 11).

In NSW the Heritage Act 1977 resulted in a boom in urban historical archaeology

in particular, as compliance with, and tenacious administration of its

archaeological provisions was undertaken through the late 1970s and 1980s

(Temple 1988; Birmingham 1990; Lydon 1993; Johnson n.d.; NSW Department of

Planning 1989). However excavation only accounted for a small proportion of the

work done by historical archaeologists, most of whom, from the 1970s to the

present, have worked in government heritage agencies or as free-lance consultants,

with a small, but recently expanded, university base (Mackay and Karskens 1999:

110). Survey, historical and archival research, detailed structural recording and

building analysis concerning industrial sites and vernacular architecture, industrial

processes reconstruction, landscape and urban environment studies all constitute

important research methodologies in Australian historical archaeology. Amateur

and academic interest in industrial archaeology has been an important focus for

historical archaeology and below I will look at the activities of the NSW National

Trust’s Industrial Archaeology Committee formed in 1968 (and see Paterson and

Wilson 2000: 84). Overall subject trends in historical archaeology have recently

been analysed by Paterson and Wilson based on a review of published material and

theses (Paterson and Wilson 2000). I will look at research themes and theoretical

Giving Value 104

issues in detail in Chapter Five, in general terms however, the convict period, 19th

century urban sites, sites associated with the Chinese, pastoral, mining and other

industrial sites have been some of the major foci for historical archaeological

research. While sites of Aboriginal and settler contact were an early interest for

historical archaeology (see for instance Allen 1969 and Birmingham 1992 on the

Wybalenna project undertaken in the 1960s) this subject appeared to remain almost

dormant until a marked florescence in the later 1990s (Colley and Bickford 1996;

Murray 1996; and on new approaches to this subject see Harrison and Paterson

2000; Torrence and Clark 2000). The issues associated with this florescence will

be taken up specifically in Chapter 5.

Valuing Things

Griffiths and Davison have argued that what was new about the heritage movement

of the 1960s and 70s was not its nationalistic focus, as heritage and nationalism can

be seen as strongly linked in the 19th century, but the redefinition of heritage as a

material rather than a spiritual concept (Davison 1991b: 7; Griffiths 1996: 195). A

material heritage obviously requires collecting, curation, conservation and

empirical analyses in ways that are significantly different from spiritual, religious,

literary, linguistic and political heritages. Lowenthal succinctly defines the origins

of the desire to preserve material things:

“The urge to preserve derives from several interrelated presumptions: that the

past was unlike the present; that its relics are necessary to our identity and

desirable in themselves; and that tangible remains are a finite and dwindling

commodity” (Lowenthal 1985: 389).

Heritage conservation claims a crucial role for the material relics of the past as

vehicles for tradition in culture. It claims that without the presence of visible,

material reminders of the past, cultural continuity will be impaired, implying the

loss of distinctive, historically based identities. In many ways, heritage

conservation sees the material things themselves as the vessels of cultural

meanings that remain static over time. In a similar vein, archaeological

Giving Value 105

epistemologies see the materiality of the data as the physical embodiment of

research potential: a thing, as long as it exists, can be analysed in endless new

ways. As Lowenthal shows most preservationist discourses have a relationship to

experiences of accelerated social and environmental change. The impact of two

world wars, industrialisation, urban redevelopment and scientific progress in the

twentieth century have all contributed to the rise of preservationist discourses,

however as Lowenthal, and in the Australian context Griffiths, have pointed out,

earlier traditions of environmental concern and preservation movements are to be

found throughout the western world (Griffiths 1996; Lowenthal 1985, and also see

Schama 1996 and Grove 1995).

Historians of the museum agree that there were no major museum collections of

historic objects in Australia before the First World War, despite the fact that large

museums were established throughout Australia in the 19th century. This fact has

been interpreted in different ways: as an absence of interest in history, as a feeling

that the history of Australia was insubstantial and lacking in heroic content, or as a

focus on the youth of Australia, which meant that history was yet to happen (Healy

1997:87). Healy and Griffiths suggest however that there were some significant

historic practices in 19th century Australia, but that they are less recognised now as

they no longer conform to “the strange late-twentieth century habit of imagining

national histories as the primary historical category”(Healy 1997: 87). The fact that

there was only minor interest in Australian historical objects in museums in the

19th century, but that this interest grew steadily throughout the 20th century,

following the creation of the nation in 1901, suggests that nationhood and

nationalism created a new form of historical consciousness in Australia. While this

interpretation is undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, how was social memory

enacted in the absence of the national context? Which aspects of these earlier

traditions did the encompassing concept of national heritage absorb and recast as

national, which did it leave behind, and what might be considered as new?

The collection of documents concerning Australia’s history was a practice that was

enthusiastically pursued through the 19th century. Healy interprets this concern

Giving Value 106

with documentary evidence as a prevailing sense of modern historicism which

emphasised the role of history writing and documentary sources – in Europe, Healy

claims, objects were collected and valued as relics of pre-modern times, in the

spirit of 18th century antiquarianism (Healy 1997: 91). This was simply not

relevant to a nation born into science and modernity, except, perhaps, for the

curious relics of Australia’s prehistory. The urge to collect and categorise

indigenous cultural objects was a significant feature of 18th and 19th century

colonialism (Griffiths 1996; Thomas 1991; Thomas 1994; Neville 1997). It is

usually seen as connected to a heterogeneous range of colonial and scientific

collecting practices: “explorer’s curiosities, as a part of missionary work, settler

mementos, ethnological specimens, artefacts of technologies and scientific

evidence” (Healy 1997: 96 and see Thomas 1991). Colonial interest in Aborigines

was partly construed as an extension of interest in the natural environment, and

partly as a chance to observe a relict stone age, evolutionary “specimen”. Such

colonial practices encompassed a huge range of motivations, interests, human

relationships and negotiations (Griffiths 1996; Mulvaney 1989; Thomas 1994).

However in the Australian context it has generally been accepted that these

practices were in no way historical. The significant issue here, drawn from the

work of Healy and Griffiths, is that this collecting can be seen as historical in some

ways, not to do with Aboriginal history but more to do with a white “history and

geography of possession”, a collecting practice linked to white historical narratives

of progress, evolution, technology and settlement. This 19th and early 20th century

antiquarian collecting of Aboriginal material culture therefore bears no relationship

to the interest in the “Australian people” which was developing through the 19th

and 20th centuries (and from which Aborigines were obviously originally

excluded). Although interest in “Australian people and cultural identity” now

seems to be the main rationale of historical museum collecting, indigenous object

collecting can be seen as a practice which was performed in the settler community

as a material expression of local history, ownership and at times a deeply felt

passion and attachment towards their colonial territory. This aspect of this practice

is less obvious in the context of the great colonial museums where collections

might be displayed taxonomically alongside plants, animals and minerals. At a

Giving Value 107

local or individual level however, the objects’ context within these imperial

narratives is replaced with a local historical and environmental context. If we look

at the rage for collecting indigenous objects in this way, then it is perhaps this 19th

and early 20th century amateur collecting that is the colonial precursor to the new

forms of “Australiana” and local history collecting which grow enormously in

popularity in the second half of the 20th century.

Healy also considers the practice of collecting by local (settler) families and

communities, through the later 19th and 20th centuries, of items related to the

foundational histories of their districts. He argues that these collections were not

antiquarian in nature, nor tied to larger narratives of empire, state or nation, rather,

they acted as “mnemonic devices - collected so that intimate stories of beginnings,

of place and of family, could be told” (Healy 1997:104). As we have seen an

antiquarian interest in objects from the past requires a significant sense of rupture

between the present and the past, a sense of threat to the survival of its relics, and a

belief in a historically continuous identity. The 1975 Pigott Report into Museums

in Australia reports a proliferation of local museums in the 1960s and links this

with an intense interest in a “separate” Australian identity and with the “new

nationalism” (Report of the Committee etc 1975). What was new about this

nationalism, claims Griffiths, was this kind of local expression (Griffiths 1996:

220). Indigenous objects, such as stone tools and grind stones, often form the

“baseline” for local, pioneer museums – they document the march of progress, the

modernisation of the land and the absence of the people who produced them in

“prehistory” (see for instance the Gulgong Pioneer’s Museum collection illustrated

in Baglin and Wheelhouse 1981: 124 and see Mauldon and Witcomb 1996 on

Aboriginal material in local museums). As Aboriginal archaeology was

professionalised, collecting by amateurs made illegal, and Aboriginal groups began

to successfully assert their ownership of their cultural heritage, the settler’s

“antiquarian imagination” is increasingly captured by the material relics of colonial

history. However, according to the Pigott report at least, from the 1960s, these

local stories of origins were recast in terms of nationalist narratives, asserting not

just a local, but an “Australian” identity.

Giving Value 108

We can look at the preservationist’s concern for relics and historic objects in the

activities of the non-government organisation, the National Trust of Australia

(NSW) in the 1960s and 70s. Following the model of the English National Trust,

the NSW organisation was an amateur group. The NSW National Trust was

launched in Sydney in 1947, making it only the third of such organisations to be

created worldwide after England and Scotland (Anon. 1987: 9). While primarily

associated with the preservation of Australia’s famous examples of Georgian

architecture, the origins of the National Trust movement in NSW are to be found in

broad-based environmental concerns. The Trust’s founder Annie Wyatt had been

involved with The Tree Lover’s Civic League and the Forest Advisory Council

since the 1920s (Anon. 1987: 9). In 1943 Annie Wyatt wrote:

“I am convinced that had we had such an institution (as the National Trust) in

Australia the nation would already have been richer … It is only by cherishing

such treasures that we can hope to evolve a National Soul” (Anon 1987: 9).

The escalation of interest in these issues is reflected in the growth of membership

of the Trust: from 500 members in 1953 to 2000 in 1960, 10,000 in 1968 to 20,000

in 1973 (Anon. 1987: 10). The purview of the Trust was broad, covering

landscapes and natural areas, buildings, Aboriginal “relics” and other objects.

From the outset the Trust aimed at influencing governments especially in the

creation of conservation and planning legislation, and it chose influential barristers

and judges to lead the organisation (Anon. 1987: 9). The Trust was heavily

influenced by the scope and policies of the National Trust in England and it acted

as an important source of communication between Australia and the United

Kingdom on conservation issues. The Trust Bulletin of the 1960s frequently

mentions member’s visits to Europe and the U.K., as well as talks from visiting

British heritage experts. By the 1960s the Trust had a broad range of advisory

committees covering buildings and landscapes, but also relics, sites and objects,

covered by the Aboriginal Relics Advisory Panel, the Portable Antiquities

Advisory Panel, and the latest to be formed in 1968, the Industrial Archaeology

Committee. The roles of these panels and committees was to be fundamentally

Giving Value 109

disrupted over the following decades which saw the creation of heritage legislation

and government institutions concerning heritage. However in the 1960s they

reflected these older traditions of environmental concern, preservation interests and

colonial collecting with which we are here concerned. The re-structuring of the

national past interrupted the role of the Trust in NSW and it had to re-group in the

1980s to bring itself into line with new lines of policy and pressures for

professionalisation in heritage (Temple 1988: 43).

The National Trust’s role in lobbying for the protection of Aboriginal relics has not

been widely acknowledged in recent reviews of the creation of Aboriginal heritage

legislation (see for instance Byrne 1996 and Smith 2000). The National Trust,

following the English Trust, was broadly concerned with the quality of the

environment. Aboriginal sites and relics were seen as a unique and scientifically

significant aspect of the environment, and it was within this context that they came

within its area of concern. The chair of the Aboriginal Relics Panel was F.D.

McCarthy, the Curator of Anthropology of the Australian Museum, who had been

involved in lobbying governments for protection of Aboriginal relics since the

1930s (Smith 2000: 110; McCarthy 1962: 4). The National Trust had been

delegated some responsibilities for protecting Aboriginal relics in NSW through its

Act of Incorporation in 1960. The concept of Aboriginal relics as a component of

the national heritage is clearly articulated for the Trust’s membership in 1962 by

McCarthy:

“The need for the protection of aboriginal relics in situ is recognized by most

citizens, apart from the vandals. Engravings and paintings in particular, stone

arrangements and carved trees, illustrate the mythology and art of the now

extinct or civilized Aborigines. They are the work of the first people to occupy

Australia, and they fill an important niche in our national culture. But protection

of such relics is difficult in a young growing country in which the white man has

not lived long enough to establish a tradition or public conscious about national

relics, where the people as a whole are too busy working and enjoying themselves

to think seriously of relics, while the Aborigines themselves are still a social

problem” (McCarthy 1962: 4).

Giving Value 110

In this article McCarthy refers not only to vandals, but also to the increasing pace

of urban expansion and development as the major threat to the conservation of

relics. Whereas in archaeological and anthropological fora the threat from

untrained amateurs and treasure seekers is often stressed, it is interesting that in

this context McCarthy stresses the aesthetic and landscape significance of

Aboriginal relics. Byrne (1996) and Smith (2000) have recently questioned the

central importance accorded to archaeologists in achieving protective legislation

for Aboriginal sites, arguing that it was more the growth of heritage discourse that

changed community receptivity to the issues they were raising. What is of concern

here is that, as Bonyhady has clearly outlined, Aboriginal sites and relics had been

part of this discourse of environmental concern since the turn of the 20th century

(Bonyhady 1996: 158). It hardly needs restating here that, throughout that period,

Aboriginal antiquities were incorporated within a concept of a national inheritance,

the Aborigines themselves not being seen as taking an active role in the national

future. We see in the later Hope Inquiry (1974) a grouping of Aboriginal

archaeological sites and historic (archaeological) sites with other areas of special

scientific interest, such as caves and other geological formations, as a category of

the National Estate, perhaps influenced by the relatively early South Australian

legislation (1965) which covered both Aboriginal and historic relics (Hope 1974:

35). This legislation and the Hope Inquiry both reflect this tradition of seeing

archaeological sites as part of the natural environment and in the context of

science. The growing impact of Aboriginal rights movements and the re-claiming

by Aboriginal people of their cultural heritage is a process that was already

underway when the Hope report was prepared, a process with which its authors

appear to have had all sympathy. But the Hope Inquiry did see the past as radically

separated from the present, archaeological sites are clearly not aspects of

contemporary culture, but belong in the domain of the scientist for the benefit of

universal knowledge. This situation, which is certainly not specific to the Hope

Inquiry but is a feature of heritage discourses developed in Europe and the US in

the 1960s, has a critical impact on the practice of historical archaeology, which I

will explore further in Chapters 4 and 5. Indigenous involvement in heritage, and

the specialisation of prehistory and anthropology, has increased the separation of

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Aboriginal heritage management to within specialist agencies. As indigenous

involvement and control of heritage has increased so, necessarily, has its

incorporation within nationalist discourse to produce what Byrne has termed the

“deep nation” (Byrne 1996). As Smith points out, to allow otherwise would be to

allow a questioning of the unity and legitimacy of the nation (Smith 2000).

In 1969 McCarthy’s concerns were finally reflected in amendments to the NSW

National Parks and Wildlife Act and advisory activities changed focus to that

organisation. The incorporation of Aboriginal heritage within an organisation

chiefly concerned with environmental management and flora and fauna protection

reflects the tradition of seeing Aboriginal sites and relics as part of the

environment. In this decade then we see a fundamental change in traditions of

environmental concern and the new discourses of heritage. Aboriginal sites and

relics become a specialist area of heritage, an area professionalised by the

expanding discipline of Australian prehistory. Historical archaeological sites might

have been managed together with Aboriginal archaeological sites had the

categories of the 1974 Hope Inquiry been translated into legislation. That is, had

their archaeological character, or the use of archaeological methodologies, been

seen as a more important commonality than the cultural differences represented,

then perhaps we would have seen more heritage legislation such as the 1965 South

Australian Aboriginal and Historic Relics Act. However an overwhelming trend

towards separation has been the case. In Victoria for instance, the Victorian

Archaeological Survey (VAS) was involved with historical archaeology and

prehistory through the 1970s and 1980s, providing an unusual opportunity for

archaeologists, including maritime archaeologists, to work within a single heritage

management agency. However in the 1990s, changes to legislation saw the

termination of VAS and the creation of a new Heritage Act 1995, to deal with

historic cultural heritage, very similar to NSW’s Heritage Act 1977. Aboriginal

heritage issues were then managed from within Aboriginal Affairs Victoria. This is

one area then, where we can see the results of a transformation in the concept of

the national heritage and the resulting re-focusing of the National Trust away from

an interest in Aboriginal sites as part of the landscape, towards a more defined

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engagement with settler history. Just as Aboriginal sites were an aspect of a

treasured landscape so were historic buildings, however the need to manage, study

and protect this landscape through legislation required its dissection into specialist

categories.

I will now turn to another area of Trust activity in the 1960s where we can see the

operation of discourses of value closely linked to historical archaeology. I have

already mentioned briefly the rise in local history collecting in the 1960s and its

formation around popular national narratives of pioneering. Concurrent with local

history collecting was a growing professional interest in Australiana collecting. A

member of the National Trust’s Portable Antiquities Panel, the Old Government

House and Experiment Farm Cottage Committees, and the later Curatorial Panel,

was Kevin Fahy, who reminisces here about the rise of interest in Australiana:

“ ‘The whole business of collecting Australiana emanated from what the National

Trust was doing at Experiment Farm Cottage and then Old Government House in

the 1960s and early 1970s…When I was at university though (in the 1950s)

archaeologists were all interested in prehistory and classical archaeology.

Nobody had thought of exploring the Australian environment for evidence of what

had happened here…’ ” (Anon 1985: 8).

Fahy, a graduate in history and archaeology from the University of Sydney, used

his skills in material culture to pursue what he saw as the neglected subject of

Australian arts and crafts. The Committees of which he was a member oversaw the

sourcing and purchasing of items to furnish and decorate the two historic

properties mentioned above, owned by the National Trust and located in the west

of Sydney. In 1964 the National Trust launched a campaign called “Towards a

National Historical or Folk Museum” encouraging members to donate items of

Australiana (Anon. 1964: 6). The Trust’s policy in the 60s was to develop a series

of museums representing the major periods of Australia’s early colonial period.

The Georgian period was to be represented at Old Government House in

Parramatta, Regency at Elizabeth Bay House and Early Victorian at Lindesay (two

mansions close to the harbour in Sydney’s eastern suburbs). The Trust intended to

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house the “folk collection” in a country property (pers.com. Ian Stephenson). Its

aim was to show more about how “ordinary people” lived in contrast to the very

grand mansions the Trust owned in Sydney. The cause of the folk collection was

taken up by Mrs Jessie Scotford who had traveled to Scandinavia to look at their

folk museums. Mrs Scotford collected mostly textiles and costume (pers.com. Ian

Stephenson). The Trust’s grand museums vision did not come to fruition, although

it still owns and opens to the public a range of properties. This was partly due to

the growing professionalisation and compartmentalisation of heritage, including

museums, as legislation and state institutions controlling heritage were introduced.

Community based activities were directly impacted by the huge new commitments

made by the state in matters of cultural heritage. Sydney’s new Powerhouse

Museum (formerly the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) opened in 1988

after developing new “social history” collections and the Historic Houses Trust of

NSW was created in 1980 to take over the management of Elizabeth Bay House

(O’Brien 1998). The grand programs initiated by the Trust in the lead up to the

celebration of the Bicentenary in 1988, were perhaps more than the structure and

administration of this kind of community organisation, with large numbers of

consultative committees, could accommodate, and the NSW government appointed

an administrator to sort out an accumulation of debt (Davison 1991a: 27). However

in the 1960s the Trust was the focus for heritage conservation in NSW (Temple

1988: 43). It is also clear that rigid distinctions between heritage issues were not

made, it was a process of valuing the local, in ways that were inspired by all kinds

of heritage projects around the world, from Iron Bridge Gorge in Britain, to

Scandinavian folk museums. But the local was clearly seen as the national, and

represented by an entwinement of history, culture and environment.

An area of particular interest to Australiana expert Kevin Fahy was Australian

ceramics (Fahy 1967). Ceramics were also a specialist area of interest for Judy

Birmingham, mentioned earlier in her role as one of the initiators of historical

archaeology courses at the University of Sydney in 1974. Birmingham, a Lecturer

in Near Eastern Archaeology at Sydney University who had arrived in Sydney

from the UK in 1961, was also a founding member of the National Trust’s

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Industrial Archaeology Committee. In a 1985 Trust Magazine feature Fahy

recounted his nurturing interest in the new area of historical archaeology:

“Kevin was one of the pioneers of historical archaeology in this country. He

proved his point by locating traces of the old Irrawang Pottery… From those

beginnings he says, historical archaeology here has gone from strength to

strength. And at the same time Australian antiques have become more highly

valued for aesthetic as well as historical reasons” (Anon. 1985: 8).

The Irrawang site referred to here was excavated by Judy Birmingham and

students from the University of Sydney from 1967 and throughout the early 1970s

(Birmingham 1976). The site was of particular interest as it was an early (1840s),

entrepreneurial attempt at supplying cheap, domestic pottery to the New South

Wales market. Perhaps of greatest interest to Birmingham were the issues of

industrialisation and the process of adapting technologies to the colonial situation,

interests she was to pursue over the next two decades both academically and with

the Trust’s Industrial Archaeology Committee (see for instance Birmingham 1976;

Birmingham and Jeans 1983). In Birmingham and Fahy’s review of early

Australian pottery we can appreciate the great curiosity that developed as these

kinds of questions about Australian history and material culture were asked for the

first time (Birmingham and Fahy 1971). The Newsletter of the Australian Society

for Historical Archaeology, which started in 1971, shows that connections were

sought out with all manner of experts and members published brief snippets of

research as they went along. Such information sharing is no longer possible in the

professionalised and commercialised field of historical archaeology.

We can see in this local situation, some of the activities and relationships that were

beginning to combine to enable notions of value to be articulated for the material

relics of Australia’s history. It is evident that archaeological discourses were a part

of this valuing process, and I will turn to this aspect next. However it is important

to see that it was not archaeological discourses alone that were constitutive of

concepts of value around Australian historic sites and relics. Nor was the

relationship between archaeology and aspects of nationalism created through the

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controlling power of institutions or nationalistic individuals. In this case we see

material things and Australian identity becoming linked in new ways through a

range of discourses: the beginning of a process which will eventually link

Aboriginal cultural material to contemporary Aboriginal identity, and the

development of a belief that the objects created by settlers told a story about

learning to live in a new land and the sort of men and women this created.

An Archaeology of Value

Tim Murray wrote recently that we know that “Aboriginal sites and contexts were

protected before European ones (in legislation), but existing research has not

explained why this happened, nor what this might mean for the relative

significance of the two types of cultural heritage” (Murray 1996a: 729). The

answer to this lies in the linking of a material heritage to identity. Alain Schnapp

has argued that in contrast to most other parts of Europe, French archaeology

hardly developed in the 19th century and a law on antiquities was not passed until

1941 during the Vichy regime. He explains this time lag behind other parts of

Europe by the fact that antiquarian intellectual activity in France and about France

concentrated on history and culture, rather than on issues of race or ethnie, which

were the focus for archaeological and antiquarian studies in Germany and

Scandinavia for instance (Schnapp 1996: 49). This explanation for the taking up of

modern archaeological and preservationist practices has some interesting parallels

with the Australian context. Intellectual interest in the nature and definition of

“Australianess” has also been essentially the domain of the historian, political and

cultural commentator. Although the newly created nation of 1901 unambiguously

declared that it was founded on race, the definition of race was usefully

ambiguous: described as British or even more broadly as “the white race”.

Historical, literary and artistic projects of the late 19th and through the 20th

centuries, as we have seen, concentrated on how the combination of history and

environment forged a new kind of people from British stock: people who were

“racially” British but possessed of a unique, new Australian character. The

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intellectual interest here was in understanding the historical development of a

“character” and in its cultural expression. Issues of race and ethnicity have always

been central to the Australian nation, a nation of migrants, but these issues were

not linked to Australian soil, but to the historic territories of Asia and the Old

World. Of course with the Mabo High Court decision in 1992, issues of race and

land have become legally linked in the context of the national territory, making the

archaeological and anthropological authentication of the histories of traditional

owners more politically contentious than ever before. However what some have

described as the relative “lateness” of the passing of settler heritage laws in

Australia may relate to the fact that interest in the cultural patrimony in Australia,

as in France, centred on issues of settler cultural and historical identity within

which racial and ethnic difference was not incorporated. It was the rise of

preservationist concerns that encouraged the exploration of issues of

“Australianess” in a material and environmental context, and as we have seen in

this chapter so far, the material culture of settler Australia was a mystery to be

researched in the 1960s. However it has been comprehensively documented how

prehistoric archaeology was built upon amateur traditions of collecting and

antiquarianism, colonial science and anthropology in a way in which settler

heritage obviously was not. The lobbying of prehistorians and anthropologists such

as McCarthy, stressed the world class scientific importance of ancient sites, not

their importance to Aboriginal people as a cultural heritage. In fact, if the concept

that Aboriginal sites and relics might be related to contemporary Aboriginal

identity had been more developed in the 1960s, then perhaps governments would

have been far more conservative in passing legislation to protect indigenous sites,

and we might have seen settler heritage protected before indigenous heritage.

Historical archaeology may have formed around an archaeological epistemology

and methodology, but its evidence was created through the linking of identity,

environment and material remains as a cultural heritage. The idea of a material

heritage gave archaeological methodologies, such as survey, description and

classification, an obvious and useful role in the newly defined heritage movement.

Griffiths claims that an “archaeological sense of the past”, a belief that scientific

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methodologies may be used to recover material remnants and decode their

meaning, is integral to the nature of the modern preservation movement (Griffiths

1996: 196). Indeed the growth and popularisation of archaeology in the 1950s in

Britain and the USA for example, should not be seen simply as the result of a

growing interest in the past, but as a discourse which has shaped notions about how

the past could be known (see for instance Daniel 1981: 121). This linking of

materiality with heritage ensured that archaeology as a practice became more

deeply involved in the discourse of heritage, and of course in the doing of heritage

management work, than was the case with the related disciplines of history and

anthropology (Byrne 1996: 101).

While some of the earliest historical archaeological exercises were based on

excavation (see for instance Allen 1973; Birmingham 1976, 1992; Culican and

Taylor 1972), the 1970s saw a concentration on survey and inventory work, much

of it carried out with Commonwealth National Estate Grant Funding, a program

that will be considered in Chapter 4. This practice was based on the concept that

the database of historical archaeology was not only unknown, but also under threat

from development, modern progress , “cultural globalisation”, or perhaps more

specifically, Americanisation. Unlike its role with Aboriginal relics, the NSW

National Trust’s Industrial Archaeology Committee, formed in 1968, has remained

active to the present. After initial meetings in 1968, the Committee published a

“statement of purpose” in 1969. Surveying, recording, making recommendations

for preservation and raising public awareness about “the part played by certain

industries in the history of the State”, were the main aims of the group (Anon

1969: 3). As I outlined in Chapter One traditions of Australian historiography had

stressed the centrality of pastoralism and mining in not only successfully

establishing Australia as a nation, but also in forging a national character.

Contemporary (1960s) histories and historical geographies continued to focus on

industrialisation and economic structures as a framework for analysis of the

Australian historical landscape (see for instance Blainey 1963, 1966; Butlin 1964;

Jeans 1972; Perry 1963 and the later Linge 1979). Influenced by the British

practice of industrial archaeology and its methods (Anon 1989: 10), the Industrial

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Archaeology Committee was not dominated by archaeologists, although one or two

have always been members. Its membership has been diverse including academics,

engineers, architects, as well as non-professional amateurs with interests in

technologies and conservation. The archaeologist Judy Birmingham was a

founding member and chair of the panel between 1974 and 1984 (Anon 1984). The

committee initiated its aim of surveying and recording industrial sites and relict

technology by sending out a questionnaire to local historical societies all over

NSW, asking them for information about important industrial sites in their area.

The aim was then to classify the sites according to the Standard Industrial

Classification, a system devised for industry by the Central Statistical Office in the

UK (National Trust Annual Report 1969/70: 21). As well as surveying and

recording sites, the Committee from the outset became involved in the

conservation of individual sites under threat. The restoration of Segenhoe Mill at

Aberdeen, NSW, was a focus for the first few years of the Committee (Annual

Reports 1969/70 – 1972/73). With the support of staff later employed by the Trust,

the Committee’s work was eventually “pulled together” and published as the

Industrial Archaeological Sites List in 1980 and stage 2 in 1983, listing over 1400

sites which the Committee believed to be of significance.

Interests in industrial heritage represented in this committee were from a broad

range of perspectives, but a general or “umbrella” conviction, which we see

continually drawn out is the crucial importance of Australia’s industrial

development to its success as a modern, developed nation:

“The NSW Trust has been conscious for many years of the importance of

industrial development in our history. In less than 200 years Australia has

progressed from a convict colony to a nation of 14 million people with one of the

highest living standards in the world” (Anon. 1979: 3).

The link between these narratives of industrial progress and their formative effect

on Australian identity was accepted as a given:

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“These (industrial) sites illustrate first the convict beginnings of our colony, then

a range of 19th century rural industrial sites… the foremost activity in the

formation of the Australian character. Mining sites, settlements and landscapes…

comprise the second formative activity, especially for Australia’s economic and

social structure…” (Birmingham 1983: 141).

I will look at the implications for archaeological research of these discursive

relationships further in Chapter 5. Here I want to focus on the foundational

knowledge that underlies historical archaeology and its concepts of value. The

Industrial Archaeology Committee reflects the assumption that the key or the

essence of the Australian historic experience was reflected in men’s work in the

bush. A major activity for the group was weekend trips to survey sites found

abandoned or traditional technologies still in use. The Trust Bulletin and later

Magazine published regular articles on the activities of the panel often stressing

their swashbuckling adventures in the bush (Figure 3.1). This was also no doubt an

interesting juxtaposition with the Trust’s more genteel activities relating to their

Sydney mansion houses and the notoriously “establishment” Women’s Committee.

The Industrial Archaeology Committee’s Australia is the Australia of Ward’s

“legend” and knowing this past was a way of learning more about the Australian

character (Ward 1958). An archaeological methodology was a means of grappling

with this sort of empirical evidence- but an archaeological epistemology was not

needed to explicate the value of these places – as that was implicit in their

Australianess, their character and often in their setting and location in a landscape.

This fairly new concept of industrial archaeology, derived from Britain, saw

technology as the defining characteristic of Britain’s past in the context of the

industrial revolution. Such an emphasis on technology was a feature of much

archaeology at the time, not just that of the modern period. The classifications of

stone, copper, bronze and iron ages, in the context of cultural evolutionism, reflect

the long archaeological tradition of using technology as the most reliable, and

empirically interpretable, indicator of change and development through time

(Trigger 1989: 392).

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As I mentioned earlier, courses in historical archaeology were first introduced at

the University of Sydney in 1974. What was it that attracted students to this type of

archaeological study at this time? Kate Holmes recounts that she went to England

to get experience in archaeological field work in 1974 and 75 and found the later

medieval sites she worked on there far more interesting than earlier periods. She

thought that this was to do with the familiarity and interpretability of the structures

and objects encountered. This work inspired Kate to go back to Australia and start

a Masters degree in historical archaeology with Judy Birmingham, Ian Jack and

Dennis Jeans at the University of Sydney.

“I felt Australian history was badly taught at school and even at university, I

really wanted to learn about the lives of ordinary people in the past and historical

archaeology seemed to be the way to do this… Australian archaeology had far

more resonance for me personally than classical archaeology. I wasn’t

disillusioned (with the latter); it just meant more to me personally. Also the

general public were so interested and I felt that we could really explain things to

people” (pers.com. Kate Holmes).

Richard Morrison described the attraction of the new field of historical

archaeology in the mid 1970s;

“…there was nothing in the library! I was very keen on the practical skills, field

experience and on the multidisciplinary nature of historical archaeology. I

enjoyed photography and architectural recording and I could use these things to

interpret the environment around me. I rejected the fine arts, ‘booty and loot’

approach of classical archaeology. I was very interested in politics and

conservation, and liked what I saw as the more democratic nature of historical

archaeology” (pers.com. Richard Morrison).

An active engagement with one’s environment seems to emerge here as an

important part of the attraction to study historical archaeology. We could interpret

Kate Holmes’ identification with objects from the past as feeling a link between

them and her own experience of the world, which allowed her to “understand” the

past in a more coherent way. The emphasis on field work and practical skills also

attracted many students, recalled Richard Morrison, although he remembers other

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students explaining to him that Australian historic sites were a training ground for

“real” archaeological projects overseas (pers. com. Richard Morrison). Political

engagement is another theme that emerges here. Classical archaeology was seen as

totally removed from the real world and from the issues about environment,

identity and the political order which were rallying points for students in the 1960s

and 70s. Helen Temple recalls that, having just completed an Honours thesis on

gold funereal mouth bands of the Late Bronze Age, and about to enroll as a

postgraduate studying Pompeiian wall painting:

“ I woke up one morning and thought that this was not making a real

contribution… I wanted to contribute to the community - the Australian scene

was neglected and it seemed very important to me that this was an area where I

could make a real contribution” (pers.com. Helen Temple).

Helen Temple stressed the very strong feeling that the community was taking

action in a new way in the 1970s. Ideas about the value of cultural heritage had

been growing for some time but the sense of action and achievement was a heady

mixture that created enthusiasm amongst the first team at the NSW Heritage

Branch in 1977. Helen Temple, as a young graduate, was the first historical

archaeologist employed to advise the Heritage Council after the creation of the

Heritage Act in 1977. She recalls:

“we were all a bit bolshie! No one was afraid to be confrontational at that time,

and this included senior management and the Minister. In 1979 the Minister Paul

Landa stood in a muddy trench, in his Gucci shoes, in front of a bulldozer,

declaring the rights of archaeologists to investigate the site of Sydney’s first

gaol…We weren’t concerned about disciplinary boundaries, we all worked

together. Historical archaeology was perhaps viewed more broadly then and

generally cultural heritage was seen as a multidisciplinary issue. My experience

today is that the view of historical archaeology has really narrowed to issues of

excavation” (pers.com Helen Temple).

The breadth of issues encountered, and the multidisciplinarity of the approaches

developed to deal with them, emerges as another important theme in the attraction

to historical archaeology. In many ways we can interpret this as an experience of

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camaraderie between individuals, all working in the context of a dynamic heritage

movement. In other ways however, as Temple suggests, there are aspects of the

history of heritage management in Australia that suggest notions of historical

archaeological value, and the role of the historical archaeologist, have been

significantly curtailed as disciplinary boundaries have become more regulated,

refined and entrenched in heritage management. This is an issue I will take up in

the investigation of historical archaeological practice in Chapter 4.

Conclusions: Structures of Value

“Making and lauding difference is the very essence of heritage, an enterprise half

historical, half divine” (Lowenthal 1996: 181).

The rise and rise of the heritage movement in the late 20th century has established

powerful western discourses of value and authenticity in transnational, if not

global, networks. As several critics have suggested, this movement should not be

seen as a radical departure in terms of interest in the past, as it embodies the

historical consciousness(es) of modernity, but it can be seen as a new form of

practice, governance and a new site for the hegemonic deployment of forms of

expert knowledge (Smith 2000). I have argued that long traditions of

environmental concern included Aboriginal sites and relics as an aspect of a

treasured natural environment, and that the NSW National Trust’s role in the

conservation of indigenous sites reflected this tradition. However the 1960s and

70s in Australia saw the coalition of a number of discourses which linked cultural

identity to a material inheritance of things and places. One of these discourses was

archaeology. Historical archaeology derives its concepts of value and significance

from a process which historicised the settler nation, valued the material remnants

of the settler past and linked them to a historically continuous identity. This is not

to say that, as a practice, historical archaeology has not absorbed ways of

constructing meaning and attributing value from other fields of discourse; it is

obvious that it has. However the idea that the material remains of the recent past

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are worth studying and preserving at all, is one which has been established within

the community predominantly through the discourse of national heritage and

identity, rather than through discourses concerned with the universal value of

knowledge.

The environmental conservation movement which emerges in Australia in the

1960s has been described as a “a fusion of romanticism, nationalism and science,

but … also an attempt to reject colonialism” (Morton and Smith 1999: 172).

Davison plays down the central importance of nationalism as a cause for the

heritage movement stating that Australians were following wider trends, that the

National Estate might be just as well seen as a creation of UNESCO as a symptom

of nationalism (Davison 2000: 119). It is clear that Australia was involved in

wider, western, transnational preservation and environmental discourses but to

focus on the need to identify a single pre-eminent cause for Australia’s heritage

movement is to impose that linear, progressive framework which many scholars

today question as an appropriate framework for historical explanation. I am not

suggesting here that nationalism was a pre-eminent cause of the heritage

movement, a single cause is not realistic in what I have already described as a

discursively complex, fragmented cultural landscape. Today environmental

conservation and settler heritage movements have many diverging aims, however

the role of nationalism as a foundational basis for attributing value to history and to

the materials and landscapes which represent that history or prehistory in some

ways, appears to be of central importance, and of even more interest, locally

distinctive. The fact that the Australian landscape and settler identity are linked,

both in the past and in the present, has been accepted within environmental and

heritage conservation movements as a self evident, spiritual association, rather than

a historically constructed idea. Although significant attention has been paid in the

last decade to what has been termed “intangible heritage” and “social

significance”, heritage management retains a robustly fixed system whereby

heritage values are managed through land management and the conservation of

sites and objects. A distinct focus of many nationalist and culturalist movements

around the globe has been an interest in folklife and cultural traditions (Appadurai

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1996: 15; Handler 1988; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). However in Australia,

concepts of settler folklife, culture and tradition have not been developed in

tandem with the conservation of things. While there have been some folk life

movements in Australia these have focused on song and story telling and not

material culture and their overlap with main stream heritage movements has been

minimal (pers.com Linda Young). In 1986 the federal government announced a

Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia which found that:

“Community and government concern for heritage protection in Australia has so

focused on material heritage –‘the things you keep’ – that the essential intangible

elements of our heritage, our folklife in all its myriad forms, have been

neglected” (Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia 1987).

Concerns about the inclusiveness of heritage arose early in the history of the

movement, starting with Aboriginal rights to cultural heritage and moving into

concerns for the heritage of non-Anglo communities. It was recognised that

cultural difference needed to be understood to some extent to enable that

community’s heritage to be identified and managed. But why hadn’t this always

been an issue? Why was the white, Anglo-settler heritage so evident that its

cultural construction was not even questioned? The answer lies in the significance

of the category of national identity during this period of the development of

heritage management. The historical narratives which dominated popular

understandings of Australia’s 19th century colonial and early 20th century national

pasts were overwhelmingly the narratives of national development. The history and

identity of the white settlers was national identity and the history of the nation, the

equivalence was taken for granted. Within this context methodologies were not

required to understand the cultural construction of value, the value was historical

and national. This seems to be one of the reasons why concepts of folklife and

tradition were not developed alongside material heritage management, as they have

been to some extent in the United States (see for instance Glassie 1977; Hufford

1994). The other major thread in explaining the relative absence of folklife and

traditional culture in settler heritage discourse is the locating of national identity in

the Australian landscape, in places and things. Landscape and place are in fact

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constructed as the holders of tradition in Australian heritage discourse; the role of

tradition in community life has been under-conceptualised.

The role of nationalism as a foundational discourse for Australian heritage has

been underplayed because of a concentration on overtly nationalistic behaviour or

cultural expression, with associated negative connotations. However Ghassan

Hage’s study of multiculturalism in Australia shows how fundamental the national

context is to identity construction and cultural practice (Hage 1998). Hage also

finds that in Australia “ethnicity” and “culture” are ascribed only to minorities in

multicultural discourse while the white, mainstream cultural identity is completely

nationalised, masking any understanding of cultural difference within white,

Anglo-Australia. He develops terms such as practical nationalism and national

belonging to describe everyday modes of behaviour and cultural practice which are

not generally understood as overtly nationalist, but are subtly embedded in social

relations. In a similar vein I introduced the concept of the habitus in Chapter One,

Bourdieu’s term for an “embodied history”, as a useful one to describe the way

images of the nation operate within culture and in social relations in common and

everyday ways.

Donald Horne claimed that the period of the “new nationalism” was far more about

identity than about what people at the time would have articulated as nationalism

(Horne 1981). It was experienced as a “cultural awakening” which Horne thought

in many ways did not deserve the tainted term “nationalism” which then, as now,

was associated more with chauvinism, racism and warfare. Archer also suggests

that the debate about nationalism in Australia has floundered upon confusion

between nationalism and “Australianess” (Archer 1990: 90). Archer is using the

term “Australianess” here as a description of Australian cultural identity and

cultural practices, while he defines nationalism as a political doctrine. In both these

cases nationalism is read as a negative form of cultural chauvinism, and of course

this type of national expression is easy to find examples of. The activities I discuss

in this chapter show how a complex amalgam of beliefs and influences were

brought to bear in the articulation of a new form of value for the material relics of

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the Australian historic past. A crucial part of this process was their incorporation

within a concept of the nation, and valuing this concept as a source of history and

of identity.

Chapter 4

Practice makes Perfect? Doing Historical Archaeology in Australia The aim of this chapter is to investigate Australian historical archaeological

practice in the context of relevant policy, legislation and institutional frameworks,

and consider the role of nationalist discourses as constitutive of, or constituted

through this field of cultural production. In Chapter One I introduced the concept

that it is through their incorporation into institutional structures that discourses;

nationalist, colonialist and otherwise, have their most significant effects on day to

day life, as the basis for public policy. I also raised the issue that a feature of the

interaction between discourses and institutions is that institutional administration

tends to become “blackboxed” (Latour 1987 and see Kendall and Wickham1999:

140). This is Latour’s term for the way institutions tend not to analyse the rationale

for proceeding in a particular way, and the procedures become accepted as the

natural way of doing things, giving the appearance of a coherent practice (Latour

was concerned with the application of technology in society). These concepts will

also be investigated further in Chapter 5, where I move from issues of practice to

explore archaeological theory and interpretation, highlighting foundational

concepts which have formed a basis for historical archaeological knowledge

production.

In this analysis the role of government is crucial, but I don’t wont to focus on

government exclusively. This is because I am interested in demonstrating the

complex relationships between governments, institutions and policies, and other

fields of cultural production. I am therefore highlighting the context of practice

over the legal codification of heritage management. Rather than looking in detail at

the legislative protection for historical archaeological sites and the way in which

such provisions have been implemented, I have chosen two case studies of practice

128

Practice makes Perfect 129

which show the development of accepted modes of practice, procedural methods

and fields of interest. Legislation, policy and procedures therefore form a hierarchy

of formally codified institutionalised practices. Giddens has noted that it is often

the least formal “rules”, the rules which are subjected to the least scrutiny and

interpretation, which have the greatest structuring effect on practice (Giddens

1984).

This chapter concerning heritage and archaeological practice could also easily have

centred on the role of Australian party politics, and the contrasting nationalist

visions of the Labor and conservative sides, in shaping the history of heritage

management, and therefore aspects of archaeological practice in Australia. For

instance the history of heritage legislation affecting historical archaeological sites

and relics in Australia, as shown in Figure 4.1, is really only explicable in the

context of the different political histories of each State, the nature of the

parliamentary debates and the issues being confronted in them at the times the laws

were drafted and introduced (Yelland 1991: 45). While I will acknowledge and

analyse this political history to an extent, an aim of this thesis is to argue that most

analyses of the relationship between archaeology and politics fail to adequately

contextualise their accounts in understandings of the relationship between forms of

expert knowledge, foundational histories, nationalist discourses and the strategies

of governments and other areas of cultural practice. This is particularly important

in a consideration of Australia because of the way colonialism is embedded in

Australian nationalist discourse. The coherence of doctrines of progress and

development, of an unfolding national history, are underlain in Australia by

entrenched forms of colonial knowledge. While many aspects of nationalist

discourse in Australia are increasingly anti-colonial, this anti-colonial discourse is

often superimposed over undeconstructed colonial knowledge.

Another reason for not focusing this analysis on the role of government is to avoid

the inherent danger of overstating the authority of the state and its policy agenda.

The field of heritage is remarkable for its versatility and mutability. While tracing

the threads of political uses of the past in support of “dominant ideologies” is a


fairly straightforward matter, and is of course a necessary critique, a total focus on

this issue ignores the situational appropriation, reworking of and resistance to these

“ideologies” at local levels ( Bartu 1999: 92; Herzfeld 1991). The “blackbox”

concept is also crucial for a consideration of historical archaeological practice,

institutions and nationalist discourse because it flags the complex relationship

between intellectual critique, individual interests and institutional structures,

policies and procedures. Heritage is not just a discourse of value, but a complex

web of national and State bureaucracies. Bureaucracy is resistant to change on a

broad scale; it has a vested interest in structuring diverse issues to fit established

management structures. Bureaucrats, with a charter of ensuring legislative

compliance, create management systems based on an analysis of issues, but if

issues change, the system tends to obscure it by constraining and contriving input

to fit its structure. The relationship between intellectual critique, public policy and

its procedural implementation is therefore not straightforward and there is the

tendency for change to be shallow rather than systemic.

This chapter is made up of three components. First I review the framework of

institutionalised practice for historical archaeology in Australia and the legislation,

policy and procedures which archaeological discourse has been both constitutive

of, and constituted through, in complex local histories. As I have already outlined,

most historical archaeology in Australia is practiced outside the academic context,

and because I argue that historical archaeology developed as a result of the linking

of material relics with discourses of heritage and identity, my main interest here is

the heritage management context of historical archaeological practice. However it

should be noted that there is no clear distinction between “pure” and “applied”

research in Australian historical archaeology. The legislative and professional

framework applies equally to research archaeology carried out in an academic

context. In some States permits are required to excavate, consultation may need to

be undertaken, or various conservation objectives may need to be met by academic

research projects. Similarly archaeology undertaken as compliance with legislation

and in a commercial environment may fulfil research objectives. Colley has

recently noted how the term “public archaeology” seems to imply that academic


research is isolated and separate from its public context and that this is misleading

in the case of Australian archaeology (Colley forthcoming). The aim of this section

is therefore to introduce the major policy and procedural frameworks for historical

archaeology and this is relevant not only to the following discussion of practice,

but also for the investigation of theory and interpretation in Chapter 5.

The first detailed case study of practice concerns historical archaeological projects

funded under the National Estate Grants Program between 1974 and 1998. The

data presented here is a unique collation of historical archaeology projects on a

nation wide basis. This provides a rare opportunity to look at how practice

proceeded, at a comparative national level, in the context of the national policy

framework, and also in spite of this framework. The second case study considers

one of Australia’s largest conservation projects at one of its best known historic

sites: Port Arthur in Tasmania. Between 1979 and 1986 federal and State funding

was provided for the conservation, restoration and interpretation of this site which

contains some of the most spectacular remains from the convict system in

Australia. The project team developed distinctive practices based upon

archaeological and conservation philosophies, which I will argue, have been

influential in Australian historical archaeology. A particularly prominent theme in

this archaeological practice was the appeal to the materiality of archaeological

evidence as an “antidote” to the ideological manipulation of the heritage industry,

in particular the work of restoration architects.

Legislation, Policies and Procedures

I discussed in Chapter 3 that Aboriginal sites and relics were generally protected

by legislation earlier than the sites and relics of settler culture in Australia. This

related to the objectification of Aboriginal sites and relics as an important scientific

heritage and their association with the custodianship of archaeology. I argued that

the language of concern which developed around these sites in the early to mid 20th

century did not stress the relationship between indigenous sites and relics and

indigenous cultural identities, although these issues were certainly inserted into this


discourse in more and more emphatic ways from the 1960s. However, the

discourse of national heritage, particularly settler heritage, which also develops

from that time is centrally concerned with settler identity, with cultural

distinctiveness and its roots in a unique national history.

Yet even in its concern with the nationally distinctive, Australia’s heritage

movement was not nationally unique or entirely locally inspired, but closely

involved with broader transnational movements for cultural preservation and

environmental concern, as exemplified in the local influence of the activities of

UNESCO and preservation movements in Europe, Britain and the United States

(Davison 1991a: 5; 2000: 119). So while the spread of the western heritage

movement can be seen as an effect of globalisation, it is important to recognise the

significance of the concept of the nation in providing a framework for the local

expression of these broader, western concepts of valuing cultural and natural

inheritances. Bennett’s work in particular has shown how in the Australian context

the development of the public sphere of heritage emphasised Australia’s national

separateness, and de-emphasised its internationally involved history of colonialism

and migration (Bennett 1995: 141).

Several theorists have provided frameworks which are useful for analysing the role

and meaning of heritage policy and legislation in culture. Foucault’s work on

governmentality (1991) has informed Laurajane Smith’s analysis of the

development of Aboriginal heritage legislation in south-eastern Australia (2000).

Foucault distinguishes between “technologies of government” such as bodies of

expert knowledge, and “techniques of government” such as forms of surveillance

and methods for ordering activities and their locales (Dean 1994: 188). This is

useful for thinking about how heritage works in Australia. The knowledge created

and authorised through “fields of expertise” such as archaeology, anthropology,

history and also heritage, as a new field of expertise in itself, is deployed within

governmental techniques concerned with urban and social planning and land

management generally. Foucault’s framework establishes a basis, which I have

already drawn on extensively in this thesis, to investigate the relationship between


archaeology and politics and society, more profoundly his approach shows that

archaeology, as an authorised form of expert knowledge, is implicated in

power/knowledge alignments. As I discussed in Chapter 3, Byrne and Smith have

recently questioned the central role archaeologists have often claimed for

themselves in the development of heritage legislation to protect Aboriginal sites

and relics in Australia (Byrne 1996; Smith 2000). Both are concerned to show how

archaeology was not “innocent of power” in this process, as might be implied by

explanations of archaeologists acting simply as “custodians of the past”. Referring

to Foucault’s concept of the roles of expert knowledge in techniques of

governmentality, Byrne and Smith claim that in using the discourse of national

heritage to authorise archaeology as a profession, the discipline aligned itself with

the state, and facilitated the “modes of liberal governance” which have served to

de-politicise challenges to the legitimacy of the nation caused by growing

recognition of Aboriginal prior ownership of the national territory (Smith 2000:

116). This of course challenges the conventional accounts of archaeologists’

commitment to the conservation of the national heritage, the position epitomised

by the historical reviews of John Mulvaney (see for instance papers in Mulvaney

1991b). While I agree with many of the insights provided by Byrne and Smith they

fall short of Foucault’s aims in a number of ways. Their criticisms are constrained

by seeing the operation of power as exclusively negative: Byrne suggests

archaeology is “diminished” by its naive complicity with nationalist and colonialist

discourse, while Smith suggests archaeologists are culpable of self-interested

power-seeking in the arena of heritage management. Naive and self-interested

archaeologists may be, but this does not acknowledge the complexity of the social

and cultural context archaeological knowledge is involved in. Archaeological and

anthropological discourses have not simply been influenced and appropriated by

nationalism and colonialism, they also have provided seeds for their critique, as

Thomas (1994) and Appadurai (1996) have argued. Further, the authorisation of

archaeology must be seen to have been creative of knowledge which may have

both positive and negative effects in society in a way that is totally dependent on

the context of the consumption and deployment of this knowledge. This theoretical

perspective also needs to be applied to the field of heritage to recognise that it is a


discourse that it is deployed differently in different contexts, by different

individuals and groups in the community.

The following discussion outlines a range of ways to think about the relationship

between heritage legislation and policy and nationalism. Handler suggests that in

Quebec the patrimoine (a term he equates closely with cultural heritage) is

imagined as the property of the nation, and the nation is thus conceptualised as a

property-owning “collective individual”. He points to how this has required an

“objectifying logic”, allowing any aspect of culture to be imagined as bounded and

as the property of a similarly bounded group (Handler 1988: 141). While these

concepts are pertinent to an analysis of heritage legislation in Australia, here,

unlike Quebec, aspects of settler cultural practice, tradition and folklife, have

rarely been seen as encompassed within the definition of heritage, an issue I

referred to in Chapter 3. In Australia the discourse of heritage and the existing

heritage management framework, is firmly fixated on land and place, with a

secondary emphasis on things, or what is sometimes termed “portable” or

“movable cultural heritage” (in for instance the Commonwealth Protection of

Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986). Although some murmurs have been made at

the level of the Commonwealth government about a perceived need to link heritage

conservation as it is practiced to policy concerning Australian “cultural life”,

initiatives have not yet been forthcoming (Hill 1999: 10). While Handler’s concept

of the cultural objectification effected by heritage policy is relevant to

understanding its implications in Australia, this process appears less problematic

when applied to places and things, then when it is applied to the intangible

categories of cultural beliefs, practices and traditions. This is because places and

things are already established as commodities and their ownership, whether public

or private, is accepted as natural.

Bonyhady has outlined the tradition in Australia of understanding heritage as real

estate, as the term “National Estate” implies (Bonyhady 1996). He argues that of

all the terms used to describe public lands in the late 19th century, when there were

debates about the management and alienation of Crown lands, the term “National


Estate” was used to carry the strongest preservationist sentiment (Bonyhady 1996:

147). This reflects the power of the concept of the nation to imply a heightened

sense of community and joint responsibility, a sense that was not effected by the

terms public, crown or colonial lands. It must be remembered of course that this

usage predated the federation of Australia and the use of this term was therefore

particularly evocative of the sense of ownership, sovereignty and future destiny

which is inherent in the concept of the nation, but perhaps lacking in the concept of

a colonial dominion. Conservationist discourse engages with nationalist discourse

as a vehicle to achieve its objectives. The possessive pronouns of heritage

discourse (our cultural heritage, the places we want to keep) create the “imagined

community” of the nation. Conservation’s inherent sense of a responsibility to

future generations can be married with nationalist discourse’s focus on the future,

the notion of a national identity that is not only historically continuous but the

basis for ongoing cultural distinctiveness. It is of course misleading to speak of

conservation and nationalism as separate discourses in this way as they have

undoubtedly been mutually constitutive, but I do so in order to highlight how their

recent, overt marriage in the discourse of heritage in Australia has been particularly

distinctive.

Many commentators have pointed to the objectification and commodification of

culture enacted by the heritage industry, and the implications of this process in

terms of the ossification and reification of cultural practices as authentic, complete

and unchanging. The same process applies to the reification of the meaning of

places, and the concept that values are intrinsic to places and things, rather than in

the cultural practices that construct them as meaningful. Alternatively, the effect of

heritage legislation in Australia is also to interfere with the free market commodity

value of places and things by legally codifying their non-monetary cultural value.

Kopytoff has discussed how all societies have means of intervening in the

commoditisation of certain things, a process he terms “singularisation” (Kopytoff

1986: 73). He notes that singularisation by the state is a means by which the

“sacred power” of the state is expanded, while singularisation is also a process

groups within a community use in conflicts over class and identity. Heritage


obviously fits well within Kopytoff’s notion of singularisation. In liberal

democracies therefore heritage management and its codification in legislation is

seen as a formal means of conflict management between the singularisation

activities of different community groups. In the need to manage conflict it is

obviously in the state’s best interest to promote a broad vision of heritage and to

suggest that the nation encompasses the cultural values of all groups, while also

representing the overriding group, whose best interests must be safeguarded. In a

similar vein, Byrne (1999a) and Hamilakis and Yalouri (1996) have taken

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to analyse the deployment of antiquities and

heritage sites by groups involved in nationalist projects. Bourdieu’s analysis

focused on how taste, style and manners transform economic capital into a

symbolic or cultural capital used by individuals to improve their position in society

(Bourdieu 1977; 1984). In similar ways groups or individuals may use antiquities

to legitimise their authority by linking it, in a subtle way, to the values and

identities represented in contemporary culture by those historic objects or sites. Of

particular interest to Byrne and Hamilakis and Yalouri is the way symbolic,

cultural capital masks the ways in which power is actually maintained, for instance

the construct of an aristocratic genealogy may mask the fact that power is actually

maintained economically or through the control of land. Heritage discourse may

therefore be deployed as part of any these processes, possibly simultaneously: for

instance in Australia the concept of “wilderness”, and the need to conserve it, has

been used to singularise a certain type of land and construct it as part of the

nation’s sacred trust. The valuing of sites associated with convicts, on the other

hand, can be seen as involved in some Anglo-Celtic Australian communities’

accrual of cultural capital, raising their social status as early settlers with an

important role in establishing the nation. The overarching discourse, encompassing

all such situations, tends to enfold these class and community contests within a de-

politicised discourse of national heritage: a technique of government based upon

expert knowledge and practices which construct a unified, jointly owned, national

past.


The Hope Report

A key national policy statement about heritage was the 1974 Committee of Inquiry

into the National Estate, known as the Hope Report. As I outlined in Chapter 3 the

Hope Report identified historic sites, along with Aboriginal archaeological sites

and other sites of “scientific interest” as a distinct component of the National

Estate, distinguished through their scientific and archaeological research

significance. This Report defines historical archaeological sites primarily as the

evidence of industry, technology and agriculture. It also mentions tools and

equipment associated with traditional crafts as being “of great importance to the

documenting of Australian history” (Hope Report 1974: 176). Historical

archaeologists, through the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology founded

only a few years earlier in 1970, had effectively lobbied the Committee of Inquiry

regarding their interests, stressing in particular the need to develop a systematic

approach to the identification and conservation of sites (Hope Report 1974 and see

Mulvaney 1996). Also of interest is point 5.59 (Hope Report 1974: 176) which

suggests that greater co-ordination between the States was required to ensure a

consistent approach to management and that the roles and rights of various

organisations involved in this needed to be clarified.

These points reflect the desire to articulate boundaries for historical archaeology,

both in terms of a methodology perceived as scientific due to its consensual

consistency and also in terms of establishing links with, and power bases within,

appropriate institutional bureaucracies. While the strong influence of British

traditions of industrial archaeology and of contemporary American cultural

resource management literature is evident in these policy developments, shaping

the “database” of Australian historical archaeology, the process about which the

Hope Report was a crucial policy statement, was a process defined by the

colonialist narratives of national development. The definition of “historic sites”

was based on narratives concerning the opening up and industrialisation of the

Australian land. It focused strongly on the role of the ordinary man, the drovers,


miners and farmers who were attributed key roles in the national mythologies

which I discussed in more detail in Chapter 1 and will look at again in the context

of historical archaeology in Chapter 5. The Hope Report, as one of the key

examples of policy from the Whitlam era, represented a radical departure for

Australian governments in the field of cultural policy (Bennett 1995: 143). These

policy changes represent significant challenges to colonial structures in Australian

public life however the definition of settler heritage, particularly that which falls

into the domain of the historical archaeologists, strongly reinforced the colonial

construct of the development of the Australian nation.

The Hope Report’s singling out of the special component “scientific heritage”, as

distinct from natural and cultural (or built) heritage, is interesting. Whereas the

cultural values of the “built environment” are closely located within the

community, citing historical, architectural and social values, scientific values are

located in their own specialist province, presumably the province of scientific

researchers (Hope Report 1974: 35). However by virtue of their incorporation as an

aspect of the National Estate the ownership of scientific resources is not vested in

scientists, but in the nation. The scientific aspects of heritage are seen as an

important form of cultural capital for the nation. The highest form of scientific

significance is that which is seen as internationally significant. The oldest human

remains, the oldest rock art, like the rarest fossils or geological formations,

attribute special status to the nation which owns them. Therefore scientific

significance is conceptualised as more closely linked to abstract notions of the

nation as an entity in a world context and the universality of scientific knowledge,

than other forms of heritage significance which are more for and about the

“imagined community”. Due to its historical nature, historical archaeology would

never sit easily within definitions of science, and this is perhaps one of the reasons

it would remain nationally confined, as a heritage practice concerned with local

identity, rather than as an internationalising discourse which could promote the

nation and deliver cultural capital in the form of “world class” scientific

discoveries. Such issues however have centrally concerned Australian prehistory’s

focus on origins and antiquity, as Murray has pointed out (Murray 1992: 4).


Even though the concept of scientific significance remains integral to

archaeological significance in the heritage management framework a distinct

branch of “scientific heritage management” did not develop. This was in fact

already prefigured in the recommendations of the Hope Report. Indigenous cultural

heritage protection was seen in the Hope Report as requiring a higher level of

Commonwealth government involvement than settler heritage, and it produced a

strongly worded recommendation for uniform national legislative protection for

significant Aboriginal sites. Recommendations for settler heritage legislative

protection were directed towards State governments. The work of listing and

inventory, it proposed, should be supported by the Commonwealth and by the

continuing work of the community, particularly the National Trust. Therefore

while the Report conceptualised historic sites and Aboriginal archaeological sites

as scientific and archaeological, its recommendations immediately separated

historic sites from Aboriginal archaeological sites in terms of their future

management requirements.

Procedures and Legislation

Figure 4.1 outlines the introduction of “purpose built” settler heritage legislation in

Australia which have some provisions relevant to historical archaeological sites.

By the term “purpose built” I am suggesting that some of the earlier laws and

ordinances around Australia which may have been applied to historical

archaeological sites and relics were not developed with this purpose in mind.

Although this could be said of Victoria’s Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics

Preservation Act 1972, it was habitually used as a mechanism to authorise

historical archaeological activity and a High Court decision in 1982 confirmed that

this use was legal (Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 71). The Australian Heritage

Commisssion Act 1975 was created as a direct response to the Hope Report. Due to

the Federal Government’s limited powers to enforce federal legislation over the

States, this Act only regulated the activities of the Federal Government itself. In all

other matters it is an advisory and educational piece of legislation, that focuses on


the maintenance of the Register of the National Estate. This Register has been the

only nationwide heritage register which encompassed historic, natural and

indigenous heritage. Also of importance here is the fact that the Register of the

National Estate made no distinctions, as many other listing systems around

Australia have done, on the “level” of heritage significance, such as local, State or

national significance. However this is likely to change with a proposal currently

before government to introduce a new “National Heritage List” and a reformed

heritage management regime, which I will return to shortly (AHC 2000).

Figure 4.1 shows a cluster of early legislative activity in the south-eastern States

and at the level of the Federal Government, while throughout the 1980s

governments in Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia resisted pressures

from activists and the Federal Government to introduce settler heritage legislation.

Yelland notes that the similar legislation introduced by Labor Governments in

NSW and South Australia follows directly in the tradition of the Hope Report and

the Heritage Commission Act. Both the South Australian and NSW Acts were

designed to act in concert with planning legislation. Rather than this broad brush

development control approach, other Acts focused on the protection of “listed

places” (Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 38).

The most comprehensive recent analysis of heritage legislation in Australia is

Pearson and Sullivan (1995). They have analysed the complex array of federal and

state legislation into different types of legislative mechanisms (and see Parrott

1990). Following these studies, and my own reviews of legislation and procedures,

I suggest that the main legislative mechanisms used to the trigger historical

archaeological work can be summarised as follows;

1. “listing” or “registering” a heritage place, so that various regulations are

triggered for proposed activities which affect the place;

2. legislating to impose “environmental impact assessment” procedures, which

therefore trigger assessments of archaeological significance and perhaps also

some mitigative measures such as rescue excavation; and


3. requirements for the discovery of archaeological relics to be reported and acted

upon under the direction of the authority administering the Act. Responses here

might include a direction to stop work or the need to undertake rescue

excavation.

From this summary I can draw out 4 generic categories of historical archaeological

procedures which are enshrined in this legislative framework:

1) listing and inventory (identification of heritage);

2) significance assessment;

3) physical assessment (including strategic management plans based upon such

assessments); and

4) rescue excavation (and other forms of recording and interpretation of

archaeological data).

I do not propose that this summary covers all forms of historical archaeological

practice in the heritage management framework. It clearly does not. However it

does indicate the institutionalised framework for historical archaeological practice

and the range of procedures which are embedded in this framework. These

procedures are broadly analogous to archaeological heritage management

procedures around the world and there is a large international literature on their

description, definition and implementation (see for example Cooper et al 1995;

Cleere 1989; and in Australia Smith and Clarke 1996; Pearson and Sullivan 1995).

The case studies that follow concentrate on work that falls into categories 1. listing

and inventory, 3. physical assessment and 4. rescue excavation and recording. I

will discuss significance assessment in more detail in Chapter 5, however all

procedures and actions in historical archaeology involve some implicit decision

about significance. Looking at established practices and procedures will help to

bring out what some of the more implicit decisions about significance are in

historical archaeology. Central to these implicit concepts of significance and value

is the framework of the nation, as we shall go on to see.


The Burra Charter and Heritage Policy

The most influential policy in Australian heritage management since its

introduction in 1979, has been The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of

Cultural Significance, known as the Burra Charter, after the town in South

Australia where it was adopted. Australia ICOMOS is the local chapter of the

International Council on Monuments and Sites which is an affiliate of UNESCO.

The Burra Charter was updated in 1981, 1988 and most recently in 1999. It is

interesting to note that although archaeologists were heavily involved in the

drawing up of the original Charter, few were involved in the most recent process of

amendments (pers.com. David Young). One of the most influential aspects of the

Charter has been its definition of cultural significance. The charter introduced four

categories of “cultural significance”, a term used interchangeably around Australia

with heritage significance, although these terms do tend to separate around

concepts of heritage as only material things, while “cultural” maintains the broader

notion of material and non-material culture (see for instance Colley forthcoming;

Bonyhady 1996). The four categories of significance are historical, aesthetic,

scientific and social. Although federal and State legislation around Australia

include many variations upon these terms, most concepts fit within the umbrella

definition of the Burra Charter (Byrne et al 2001: 149).

Archaeological significance is noted as an aspect of scientific significance, which

in turn is defined as the research value of a place. The distinctive aspect of the

Burra Charter is that although its successive refinements have been devised to

temper its “fabric bias”, it retains its definition of significance as “embodied in

place”. This concept fits in well with materialist definitions of archaeological and

scientific significance, but it sits less well with current critiques of culturally

constructed meanings, value and knowledge (Tainter and Lucas 1983; Byrne et al

2001). These issues are taken further in Chapter 5, however it is important to note

here that materialist or “intrinsic” definitions of significance are part of the

rationale for most of the practices and procedures I will go on to discuss. I argue


here that the Burra Charter, in the context of other ICOMOS initiatives, such as its

Code of Ethics of Co-Existence in Conserving Significant Places (discussed further

below), shows that it attempts to deal with tensions between a modernist

commitment to universalism and a postmodernist commitment to pluralism. This

tension is a feature of heritage discourse generally. Can we align these modernist

discourses with nationalist discourses? I will go on to argue that to some extent this

is possible, however nationalist discourse is flexible and its constitution through

the field of heritage is a good example of this.

The Burra Charter was originally designed to articulate the standards for a

professional conservation practice in Australia. It was based on the 1964 ICOMOS

Venice Charter. Max Bourke points out that:

“Australia ICOMOS pioneered the important intellectual notion that the

conservation, identification and protection of cultural artefacts had a local

methodology and lexicon... Although intellectually an heir and successor to the

Venice Charter it was distinctly Australian” (Bourke 1992: 42).

Bourke’s view of cultural heritage was as a universal scientific value and that the

process to assess this value should likewise be scientific, rational and apolitical

(Bourke 1992). Many of these aspirations are dealt with in the Burra Charter. The

key aspects of the charter which will concern us here are; its identification of

processes which must be undertaken by professionals; its philosophy of

authenticity, which is expressed in procedures for minimal intervention in fabric;

its concept of archaeology as a recording mechanism for fabric; and its emphasis

on recording and archiving all changes to a heritage place.

The fabric bias of the Burra Charter was broadly critiqued and this led to its

comprehensive review of 1999. This review added the category of “spiritual” to the

four categories of significance, and added further provisions for involving the

community in the heritage process and for the definition of social value. These

issues reflect the major policy trends in heritage over the period of the case studies

I go on to present below. As I mentioned above, ICOMOS adopted its Code of


Ethics of Co-Existence in Conserving Significant Places in 1994. It aimed to

establish the principle that competing cultural values need not be resolved through

heritage management, but should be able to co-exist. This code of ethics relates to

both multicultural and indigenous cultural rights discourses as they were expressed

and developed through the 1980s in Australia. In the field of non-indigenous

heritage, these discourses resulted in designs for more inclusive practices for the

identification of heritage (Galla 1993), and a result of this was a growing interest in

the issue of social significance (Johnston 1992; Byrne et al 2001). More emphasis

on issues of social significance creates enormous tensions within the “scientific

identification” processes for heritage outlined above by Bourke, and I come back

to these issues in Chapters 5 and 6.

A further implication of concepts of social value and inclusiveness is that not only

are they inconsistent with materialist definitions of heritage, but they suggest that

the category of historical significance has also been defined by materialist,

nationalist discourse. I suggest in Chapter 5 that the distinction between historical

and social significance has been founded on the concept that historical represents

things which are important within a “nationalist high culture”, while social

accounts for things important within local and minority cultures.

A further trend in heritage management through the late 1990s, which can also be

seen as at odds with a more community centred, socially oriented heritage practice,

is the move towards the formation of a National Heritage List (Hill 1999). The

Federal Government has been pursuing reforms in the national heritage

management framework since 1996. At the time of writing a draft federal heritage

legislation was before the Parliament. The aim of these reforms is to simplify and

clarify the confusing and overlapping legislative system and to adopt a national

heritage policy. The desire for a National Heritage List has also been expressed as

a means of ensuring federal protection and resources for heritage places seen to be

of “national”, rather than state or local, importance (Commonwealth of Australia

1997). As I discussed above, this is a concept diametrically opposed to the basis of

the Register of the National Estate, which perhaps idealistically, aimed to include


places of significance to any community, not distinguishing between “levels” of

significance. The future of the National List is yet to be determined, but it is likely

that, if introduced, it will reify a particular lexicon of national identity in a new and

formal way:

“In Australia, there is an undoubted sense of national identity associated with

this country’s unique landscapes, flora and fauna: with the cultural heritage of

Indigenous Australia; with sporting heroes; with our pubs, our sporting ovals...”

(Commonwealth of Australia 1997: 2)

Historical archaeology in Australia is therefore practiced in a range of institutional

settings and under legislative and policy frameworks that vary from State to State.

I have outlined above however, a broad framework within which to approach

issues of archaeological practice in Australia. Practices and research concerns

appear to vary from State to State, but this issue is difficult to document because

so much of the mostly unpublished literature produced by these different aspects of

archaeological practice is dispersed in various State archives and in the offices of

the government departments and private clients who commission research. The

problem then was how to investigate the relationship between nationalist

discourses and the realities of historical archaeological practice at a national level?

The National Estate Grant Program 1974 – 1998

I first considered looking at the Commonwealth government’s National Estate

Grants Program (NEGP) as an opportunity to investigate the influence of the

national governments and policies over historical archaeology, in terms of the

projects it was prepared to fund. However it immediately became apparent that this

research aim was inappropriate and did not reflect the way the program had been

administered. Applications for the NEGP were essentially generated at the local

level and accepted from government organisations, research institutions and

community groups (but not from individuals). Priorities for funding specific

categories of projects were developed by the Australian Heritage Commission for


this program only from 1990/1, and State heritage agencies played a major role in

assessing the applications. The heritage significance of the place or project to be

funded may have been less critical in this review process than the ability of the

proponent to properly manage the project. Therefore the NEGP must be seen as

representing local initiatives which are filtered through several levels of State and

national bureaucracy. Because of this the NEGP does offer some opportunity to

investigate the issue of regional differences in practice between the States, within

the context of a national heritage policy framework. This sample of historical

archaeological projects does not therefore represent a “commonwealth/national

vision” of heritage management, but a unique assembly of historical archaeological

and heritage management projects, emanating from a local context, but accessible

at a national level. Nor would I suggest that the “snapshot” of historical

archaeological practice provided here should be extrapolated to make generalised

statements about historical archaeology in Australia. This is a specific case study

and its value is in documenting in detail the nature of historical archaeological

practice in these particular circumstances.

The NEGP was created in 1972 following an election promise by the Whitlam

government (1972 –75) to assist the States and the community in their

conservation efforts. The Australian Heritage Commission (AHC) was created in

1975 to advise the federal government on the Register of the National Estate, as

recommended in the 1974 Hope Inquiry. Following the 1975 dismissal of the

Whitlam government, the incoming Fraser administration (1975 – 1983) reviewed

the Australian Heritage Commission Act and removed the NEGP from the

Heritage Commission and placed it with the Minister for Environment, Housing

and Community Development, acting in conjunction with the States (Yelland

1991). This reflects the tradition of conservative governments in Australia to be

more likely to minimise the impact of Commonwealth legislation on the States

than their Labor counterparts. In 1989 the program was “returned” to the AHC and

that body then encompassed the program within its 5 yearly Research Strategies,

which established priority for certain types of projects (AHC 1989). In 1999 the

NEGP was subsumed by the Cultural Heritage Projects Program, administered by


the federal Department of the Environment and Heritage, and this essentially

marked the closure of this unique, long term funding initiative. Between 1974 and

1998 it provided more than $78 million Australia-wide to community, research and

government bodies to undertake a broad range of heritage activities concerning

natural, indigenous and historic heritage (AHC 1999: 76).

The NEGP has been a significant funding source for historical archaeology, both

inside and outside the academy, helping to support student field training, policy

and procedures development for historical archaeology, comparative research,

regional surveys and inventories, as well as a host of site specific research and

conservation projects. A review of this program will give a picture of historical

archaeological work practiced in university, government and community contexts,

on an Australia wide basis. Long term post-doctoral and collaborative academic

research, based primarily in universities, may be funded through the Australian

Research Council (see Introduction for further discussion), while NEGP projects,

which generally have smaller budgets and shorter terms, could be based in any

institution or not-for-profit community group, provided the project related to “ the

identification, conservation or presentation of an item of the National Estate”

(Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 50). The projects in the NEGP must therefore be

considered as heritage management archaeology. That is to say that the project

must generate some public benefit, such as the better management of a resource,

the protection, conservation or public interpretation of a heritage place, and it must

demonstrate its ability to produce these benefits in terms accepted by the

administering bureaucracies.

I assembled the historical archaeological project lists (Appendix Tables A.6-13)

directly from the funding allocation approval files, which are today housed in the

Heritage Assistance and Projects Section, Department of Environment and

Heritage, Canberra. Additional information has been sourced from the Australian

Heritage Commission Library and discussions with Heritage Commission and

Heritage Assistance and Projects staff. An NEGP bibliography in database form,

called Conserving the National Estate: a Bibliography of National Estate Studies,


has been prepared by the AHC however keyword searches were not considered to

be reliable enough to produce a comprehensive account of historical archaeological

projects. Therefore the paper files were reviewed to determine which projects

concerned historical archaeology. Even so, descriptions were often scanty or

ambiguous. I have focused on several broad levels of information: who was

carrying out the projects; what types of heritage places or heritage issues were

being addressed in the projects: and what sorts of projects, for instance

excavations, surveys, artefact analysis, conservation management plans etc, were

being funded. The NEGP was administered jointly with the States so the data can

be looked at on a State by State basis. This gives me the opportunity to compare

these categories across the States and also to look at trends in funding over time.

To look at historical archaeology in the NEGP the first issue to decide is what sort

of a project is an historical archaeological project? The administration of the

Program did not recognise disciplinary distinctions between the projects, many of

which were multidisciplinary, but rather followed the broad categories of the

National Estate: historic, natural and indigenous environments. I used the

following criteria to determine the list of historical archaeological projects:

Archaeological excavation, survey and assessment of historic sites.

Conservation and acquisition of historic sites, the value of which was partly or

wholly described as “archaeological”.

Studies, management plans and interpretation plans concerning historical

archaeological sites or artefacts.

Funding for archaeological seminars, publications, student training, and

procedural guidelines for historical archaeology.

Projects which were multidisciplinary but clearly included provision to employ

historical archaeologists.

The most difficult types of projects to assess as being “historical archaeological” or

other, were those concerning historic industrial sites or thematic studies of

industry. As I have discussed in Chapter 3 industrial archaeology formed a crucial

research focus for historical archaeology, however often such projects are lead by


architects, historians, engineers or other professions. I have included projects

where archaeologists have been employed, or archaeological methodologies and

research frameworks used, or where I believe they produced data likely to be used

by historical archaeologists. For instance while I would not include an Institute of

Engineer’s project to place plaques on sites of technological rarity, I would include

an Institute of Engineer’s survey of historic engineering sites in a region.

Historical archaeology in the NEGP (Figure 4.2)

There were a total of 257 historical archaeological projects in the NEGP, which

received a total of $5,740,550, between 1974 and 1998 (Appendix). With this

small number of projects, which averages out to just over 10 a year over this 24

year period, it is inappropriate to submit this data to a statistical analysis. This

figure is small enough so that my analysis of actual numbers can look at individual

projects in their historical and political context where this is indicated.

Figure 4.2 shows that historical archaeology projects have been a minor

component of the NEGP as a whole, which covered the gamut of conservation

projects concerning natural, indigenous and historic heritage. In NSW,

Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia,

historical archaeology projects account for around 5.0% of the total NEGP

between 1974 and 19911. This means that about 1.0% of the total NEG Program

funding went to historical archaeology projects in each of these States. The

variation between these States can be seen directly by referring to the actual

funding figures in Appendix Table 1, here it can be seen that the recipient of the

largest proportion if NEGP funds (apart from Tasmania) was Victoria, which

received $611,864.

The Tasmanian story is different because of the special allocation made from the

NEGP to the Port Arthur Conservation Project, which will be discussed in detail

below. While this project was certainly broader than just historical archaeology,


archaeology did play a strong role in it and several archaeologists were employed,

while hundreds of volunteers participated in Summer Archaeological Programs.

This project received $1,850,000 of NEGP funds between 1980 and 1986. It also

received other funding from State and Commonwealth sources. However it should

be noted that the total amount of NEGP funding directed towards Tasmania is not

significantly larger than other States, so proportionally historical archaeology

projects , at 5.6% of the total, play a much bigger role in the NEGP in Tasmania.

The ACT, as a small territory, received only a small proportion of National Estate

Grants and, as I discuss further below, many of these projects were initiated by

institutions in the ACT, but were for research in other parts of Australia.

Apart from Tasmania and the ACT, the consistency between the rest of the States

reflects the fact that congruous approaches to the allocation of funds towards

historical archaeology were applied. This in itself is notable and does reflect the

influence of the national policy framework. Throughout this period each State had

major differences in the nature of sites and relics to be dealt with, in the numbers

of historical archaeologists employed in local universities or heritage agencies, and

in the presence or absence of heritage legislation affecting historical archaeological

sites and relics (Figure 4.1). Despite these discrepancies, this Program shows only

a small amount of variation in projects between the states. These instances of

variance, which I will draw out below, are however significant and need to be seen

in the context of local histories.

The proponents of historical archaeology projects in the NEGP (Figure 4.3)

The projects were categorised according to three different types of proponents:

government bodies, community groups and universities (or related research

institutions). The vast majority of historical archaeology projects funded were

proposed by government agencies, which reflects their dominant role in the day to

day management of heritage and conservation in Australia since the 1970s. The

government category incorporates State Museums, which play roles in Queensland

1 NB the total amounts of funding for the years 1991 – 1998 were not available from the NEGP


(6 projects), Western Australia and NSW (3 projects each), and Tasmania (2

projects). State government departments receiving grants are generally those which

manage land and historic sites, like National Park services, or those involved in

administering planning systems and environmental protection. Local governments,

consisting of town or regional councils also figure prominently in the program.

As well as land management agencies, the government category also reflects the

administration of the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976. Most of the

NEGP studies of shipwrecks by government agencies were undertaken in Victoria

and Queensland (see Figure 4.4). Western Australia, which has the most famous

shipwreck sites and the longest history of maritime archaeology in Australia

(Hosty and Stuart 1994) accounts for only 0.4% of the total number of shipwreck

studies under this program. The pattern which we see emerging here is the use of

the NEGP, in some cases, to “fill in” areas where State or other monies may not

have been available.

The majority of grants going to community groups went to the National Trusts in

each State. The Western Australian National Trust was particularly active

accounting for 13 out of 16 community projects in that State, which is also the

highest number of community grants for any State or Territory. In Tasmania

however the National Trust held no NEGP grants for historical archaeology

projects. Many of the grants going to National Trusts around Australia relate to

their work in the field of industrial heritage, showing a strong amateur tradition in

this component.

The small number of grants going to universities reflects the few archaeologists

employed in Australian tertiary institutions with an interest in historical

archaeology over this 24 year period, however the way grants were distributed

bears little relationship to the appointment of historical archaeology lecturers, but

more to a complex amalgam of factors. These include an academic’s personal

interest in heritage management related research outside a purely academic

files so only figures to 1991 could be compared in this way.


context. It also includes the fact that many academic archaeologists in Australia

have had an intermittant involvement with historical archaeology, even though

their primary area of research is in prehistory, classical archaeology or otherwise.

Of the grants going to universities, the Australian National University, Canberra,

played a significant early role, receiving grants in the 1974/75 and 1975/76

programs for the Historical Archaeology Co-ordinating Committee reporting to the

Interim Committee on the National Estate (Allen 1978), and a third grant in

1978/79 for a project in Tasmania. No further grants went to the Australian

National University after 1979. This early flurry of activity in Canberra reflects the

setting up of the Australian Heritage Commission in 1975. Mulvaney has recorded

his facilitating role in this process, while his colleagues at the Australian National

University, archaeologists Isabel McBryde, Jim Allen and Rhys Jones also had

interests in historic sites (Allen 1978; Mulvaney 1991b: 249).

In NSW, the only university to participate in the NEGP was the University of

Sydney, which had the longest and most consistent association of any university in

Australia with the NEGP, receiving 7 grants between 1975 and 1995. The majority

of these grants went to Judy Birmingham, whose important role in historical

archaeological practice was discussed in Chapter 3. Universities in Victoria, South

Australia and Western Australia account for only one NEGP project each.

Queensland had the largest number of different universities to undertake NEGP

projects: the University of Queensland in Brisbane proposed local studies in

1980/81 and 1981/82, James Cook University in Townsville conducted projects in

1984/85, 1986/87and 1990/91 and Griffith University in Brisbane undertook a

project in 1991/92.

The types of historical archaeological sites covered by NEGP projects (Figure

4.4).

All projects were categorised in terms of the type of site or place they were based

on. The definitions of these site types are set out in Figure 4.5. In categorising the

site types I have consciously reflected some of the important or dominant themes


in Australian historical archaeology. The projects fell easily into these broad

categories with only 6 being relegated to the category “Other". Projects which did

not focus on a site or type of site, classified N/A, numbered only 8 out of a total of

257. In Figure 4.4 the array of site types covered in NEGP projects is set out

showing the percentage of all historical archaeology projects which focus on each

site type, expressed against the percentage of these projects which occurred in each

particular State. For instance, only 2.7% of all historical archaeology projects in

the NEGP took domestic sites as their subject, of this 2.7 %, 1.2 % occurred in

both NSW and Queensland, and the final 0.4 % in Tasmania (decimal places have

been rounded out and so are not exact but the actual numbers for each site type are

set out in the Appendix Table A.4).

Site Type Terms Definitions of Site Type Terms

Aboriginal Historic Places occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people during the post-contact or colonial period (post 1788).

Convict Places primarily associated with the penal system and/or the occupation of convicts.

Mining Places where extractive industry or mining was carried out, including the remains of mines and plant associated with extraction.

Other Industrial Places associated with land based industry other than mining, such as brickworks, lime kilns, canneries etc.

Shipwrecks Remains of wrecked ships in coastal or inland waters.

Maritime Industrial Industries associated with the sea, such as whaling, fishing, sealing, penguin oil.

Rural/Agricultural Places associated with farming, pastoralism and forestry.

Military Fortifications and other military sites.

N/A (Not Applicable) This classification is used for projects not concerned with sites or places, such as procedural guidelines or seminars.

Mixed Sites Studies concerned with a range of sites, usually in a regional or landscape context.

Domestic Houses or residences.

Settlement/Village Studies concerned with entire settlements or villages.

Other Six sites fell into this category. They were a “Chinese temple”, the “Police Paddock at Dandenong”, a Quarantine Station, a road and two cemeteries.

Figure 4.5 Definitions of the Site Type Terms used to classify historical archaeological

projects in the NEGP.

Studies of mining sites dominate at 22.4 % of all historical archaeology projects in

the NEGP, followed by Other Industrial sites at 17.3 %, and Mixed Sites at 12.5 %.


The Mixed Sites category concerns projects looking at the range of sites in a

landscape or regional context. If we refer to Figure 4.7, which shows that

“Survey/Inventory” type projects account for 46.2% of all projects, this indicates

that many of these survey and inventory projects focused on a particular type of

site, most often mining sites, rather than on all aspects of a landscape or region.

The unexpected result of this site type analysis is that the fourth largest category,

equal with Rural and Agricultural sites, is Aboriginal Historic Sites on 8.2 % of

total projects. As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 3 contact archaeology or

Aboriginal historical archaeology has been a subject of burgeoning interest

throughout the late 1990s in Australia. Colley and Bickford (1996) examined the

systemic reasons why contact archaeology had not flourished in Australia from the

1960s when initial interest and enthusiasm was shown for this subject. Murray

(1996a, 1996c) and Byrne (1996; forthcoming) have explored the cultural, political

and ontological issues associated with the concept of an archaeology of a “shared”

historical period. Contact archaeology opens questions which go to the heart of

archaeology’s materialist definitions of cultures and challenges archaeological

reasoning with a host of post-colonial questions about cultural identity. This

literature has shown that Aboriginal historic places are underrepresented on

heritage registers and tend to slip through the gaps in much heritage management

(Byrne et al 2001: forthcoming). These are issues I will explore further in Chapter

5, it is interesting to note here however, that historical archaeology projects within

the NEGP paid more attention to Aboriginal Historic Sites than shipwrecks,

convict sites, domestic and military sites, sites which have a broad popular appeal

in the context of the settler heritage industry. This reflects again, I would argue, the

use of the NEGP to fill gaps in funding for heritage management work available

from other sources. For instance, there has been a specialist program administered

through the Commonwealth government to fund underwater cultural heritage

management as well as various State funding allocations (the National Historic

Shipwrecks Program see Staniforth 2000). Sites associated with convictism have

often remained in public ownership and historical archaeology focusing on convict

sites is often funded through State governments as owners of these sites.


The State with the largest number of Aboriginal historic site projects is South

Australia, with 8 projects undertaken between 1981 and 1993, 4 by government

and 4 by community groups. There were more Aboriginal Historic site projects

than any other site type projects in South Australia. In Victoria, where there were 5

projects, the role of the Victoria Archaeological Service (VAS) is notable. VAS

was an unusual form of heritage management bureaucracy in Australia as it

included prehistorians, historical and maritime archaeologists in a single

archaeology-based agency. VAS only carried out 2 of the 5 Victorian projects, but

one, in 1988/89, was a major state-wide survey of Victoria’s Aboriginal historic

sites including missions, cemeteries and massacre sites. This project was in

association with the Melbourne Aboriginal Education Association, while a further

2 of these 5 projects were conducted by an Aboriginal community group, the

Corranderk Koori Co-operative. In Tasmania, where 5 projects on Aboriginal

historic sites were also recorded, 3 related to funds provided for the acquisition of

Wybalenna by the State government. Wybalenna is an important site on Flinders

Island in Bass Strait where Tasmanian Aborigines were interned in the 1830s

(Birmingham 1992; Mulvaney 1989: 56). The two remaining grants went to a

community group, The Tasmanian Environment Centre, to record Aboriginal

historic sites in the Furneaux Group of Islands, also in Bass Strait.

These Tasmanian Aboriginal Historic sites are perhaps the most contentious in

Australia because of historical claims that all Tasmanian Aboriginals had been

wiped out by 1876, the year when Truganini died. Truganini was believed by

colonial authorities to be the last full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal. Tasmania’s

Aboriginal Relics Act 1975 actually states that a relic must date to before 1876 to

be protected (Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 68). As in all colonial situations the

reality of Aboriginal people’s experiences was more complicated than the official

records allow (Ryan 1996). Documentation of Aboriginal historic sites in

Tasmania, especially those dating after 1876 as they do in the Furneaux Group of

Islands, was therefore an even more politically charged process than this type of

work in other parts of Australia. The strong community involvement in this site


type suggests the NEGP provided a source of funds which was at once open to

community participation and could add to the work that was being conducted by

the government agencies. It also reflects the growing participation in, and

management of, cultural heritage projects by Aboriginal communities.

Apart from projects identified as Aboriginal Historic, few other projects focused

on heritage places associated with an ethnicity, other than an assumed Anglo-

Australian one. Exceptions to this occurred in Queensland, with one historical

archaeology project on a “Chinese” temple, in Western Australia, with one project

looking at Macassan pottery and 6 projects in the Northern Territory identifying

Chinese and Macassan cultural remains. Macassans were fisherfolk from Indonesia

who harvested and processed trepang (sea slug or beche de mer) in Arnhem Land

and the Kimberly in northern Australia, and interacted with the people there in the

18th century (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999: 414). Therefore, although I have

shown above that one of the most important trends in heritage policy development

through this period was towards “inclusiveness”, including strategies for the

identification of “multicultural” heritage, this is not reflected in historical

archaeology projects in the NEGP. That is except in the area of Aboriginal historic

sites, where it is important to note that this work demonstrates a strong community,

rather than a government led, emphasis.

Trends in the funding of projects: site types (Figure 4.6)

Trends in the amount of funds allocated to each site type are set out in full in the

Appendix (Table A.5). Figure 4.6 shows funding commitments towards Convict

site projects, dominated by the major and unique commitment made to the Port

Arthur Conservation Project between 1980/81 and 1985/86. Other Convict sites

projects occupy a minor proportion of funds directed towards historical

archaeology projects, due I would suggest to the availability of other government

funding sources for this highly valued aspect of settler heritage. Although it should

be noted that, because of the large amounts of money going to Port Arthur, the


scale on this graph is very different to the other site types, No other site type

groups received over $130,000 in any year.

Mining sites represent the most consistent commitment in the NEGP both in terms

of numbers of projects and funding. While the dominant importance of this type of

heritage place, within the context of what was conceived of as “historical

archaeology”, has been drawn out in my discussions of industrial archaeology in

Chapter 3 and the earlier discussion of the Hope Report, this does not entirely

explain why it predominates here in the NEGP. For as we have seen, other

“popular” site types such as domestic sites, shipwrecks and convict sites, are much

less a feature of this program. As I have indicated, the factors which shape funding

through the NEGP include the existence of other State funding programs. The

consistency of funding of mining sites projects over the years suggests that these

sites may not have been well funded by the States. It also reflects the strong

community interest in this type of heritage. As we saw with Aboriginal historic

sites, community groups could access NEGP funds as well as professionals. The

area of mining and industrial heritage recording has a strong amateur tradition as

discussed in Chapter 3, regarding the NSW Industrial Archaeology Committee of

the National Trust. Identifying and recording industrial sites by amateurs is an

activity which is accepted in heritage management in Australia, while

archaeological excavation, development of management strategies and altering

historic buildings are activities which are authorised only for professionals.

Therefore, because of the NEGP’s aim of being open to the community, it must

also reflect the kind of work which the heritage management framework allowed

amateurs to undertake.

What is also of interest in the trends in funding for Mining sites is the direct

correlation which can be seen with the imposition of the Australian Heritage

Commission’s (AHC) Research Strategies, introduced when the Commission took

over management of the program in 1989 (AHC 1989). In the first five year

Strategy, mining sites were identified as a priority area for funding, particularly in

terms of studies which compared sites, developed site type profiles or thematic


studies of industry. This explains the steep rise in funding in the 1991/1992 and, to

a lesser extent, in the 1994 program. When this 5 year strategy was replaced in

1995 mining sites were no longer identified as a priority for funding and are totally

absent from the 1996 and 1997 programs (AHC 1995). The return of two large

projects in Western Australia and the Northern Territory in 1998 reflects the

ongoing importance of mining heritage in the States.

A further major influence from the AHC Research Strategy is shown in the funding

for Settlement/ Village sites in 1995/96. This was because Archaeological Zoning

Plans were identified as a priority in the 1995 strategy. Archaeological Zoning Plan

is the term given to a predictive management strategy for historical archaeological

sites, usually in an urban area, based upon historical research and physical

assessments of survival of remains (Ireland 1989; NSW Department of Planning

1993). All of the Archaeological Zoning Plan projects were conducted in NSW, in

Port Macquarie, Newcastle and Richmond. Each of these towns is built around an

early colonial or convict period settlement which was under threat due to

increasing development pressures in their regions. The 1995 Strategy also

identified “rural settlement and landuse” and “maritime industry” as priorities for

funding and this is also directly reflected in the 1995 and 1996 programs (see

Appendix Table A.5).

Mixed sites projects are those which looked at all, or a range of historical

archaeological sites in a region or a landscape, and at 12.5% of the program, this is

the third largest site type category in terms of numbers. This sort of project relates

more to “heritage studies” or studies designed to prepare inventories of heritage

sites for local councils or other management bodies. What is notable about this

category, is that it is so overshadowed, in terms of numbers and funds, by the

categories of Mining and Other Industrial, which so dominate this program. This is

no doubt partly due to the “thematic” approach to the study of heritage sites. I

discussed earlier how the task of creating inventories of historical archaeological

sites has usually been guided by the development of themes or thematic histories.

This has remained integral to the Australian Heritage Commission’s approach to its


task of “registering” the National Estate (AHC 2001). Studies of “site types” were

seen as useful ways of assessing their relative significance but it also became clear

that this “pigeon holing” of heritage places took them out of their regional context,

and in particular, took them outside their community or cultural context (Pearson

and Sullivan 1995: 311). While the Heritage Commission introduced projects of

regional assessments of all heritage values (Pearson and Sullivan 1995: 311), its

research strategies also continued to emphasise the site type approach by

identifying particular types of places, such as World War 2 fortifications or

maritime industries for instance, as high priorities for research. The dominance of

survey and inventory projects in the NEGP, which I will come to shortly, and the

dominance of specific site type projects shows the deep influence of the thematic

approach in historical archaeological heritage management projects.

The types of historical archaeological studies funded under the NEGP (Figure

4.7)

Figure 4.7 shows that Survey/Inventory projects dominate this program at 46.2%

of all projects. This is followed by Excavation/Survey/ Research at 20.6% and

Management/Research Plan at 19.1%. These terms are defined in Figure 4.8. These

three project types reflect the main procedural categories encouraged through the

legislative framework, as I outlined earlier in the chapter. Inventories and surveys

of the “historical archaeological record” were required to act as management tools

for site protection, but also as a means of defining what the historical

archaeological record in Australia was so that research issues could be formulated

(Temple 1979, Allen 1978: A22; Pearson 1984: 29). The

Excavation/Survey/Research category covers more detailed and site specific

projects, while Management/ Research Plans reflect procedures developed for the

strategic management of a place or a type of archaeological site.

NSW shows the greatest diversity of study types, with 7 different types of studies

represented, while (apart form the ACT) it shows the lowest percentage of

Survey/Inventory studies and the highest percentage of Management/Research

Plans. The diversity of projects in NSW is contributed to by the role of Sydney


University in undertaking student training, particularly at the site of Regentville,

near Penrith, NSW (Birmingham and Wilson 1994). Student training projects were

not undertaken in any other State in the NEGP. As well as student training, two

major Guidelines/Manuals projects were undertaken at the University of Sydney.

The small number of artefact studies conducted in the program obviously reflects

the place basis of the National Estate, but it is also reflective of broader trends in

historical archaeological research in Australia, as Lawrence has pointed out

(Lawrence 1998b).

Study Type Terms Definitions of Study Type Terms

Acquisition/ Conservation Works Project to fund the acquisition of, or works to conserve, a site associated with historical archaeological values.

Management/Research Plan A project to draw up a plan for future research or conservation work such as an archaeological management plan or a conservation plan.

Survey/Inventory A project which surveys an area, a group of sites, or sites of a particular type, for the purposes of listing or inventory.

Excavation /Survey/Research A project which undertakes detailed recording and/or analysis of a particular site involving excavation, above ground survey or other research methods.

Seminar/Conference Project to fund the holding of a seminar or conference for historical archaeologists.

Student Training Project aiming partly or wholly to train students in aspects of historical archaeological practice.

Guidelines/Manuals Project to prepare guidelines or manuals for aspects of historical archaeological practice.

Artefact Analysis A study analysing and/or interpreting archaeologically excavated artefacts.

Interpretation Project aimed at interpreting/presenting an historical archaeological site to the public.

Figure 4.8 Definitions of the Project Type Terms used to classify historical archaeological

projects in the NEGP.

Conclusions: Historical Archaeology in the NEGP

The National Estate Grants Program was introduced at a time when thoughts about

heritage value were exploding into action. In 1974 few States had settler heritage

legislation and historical archaeological projects had been undertaken by only a

handful of individuals. Historical archaeologists enthusiastically used the NEGP to

help define the practice of historical archaeology. This not only involved the mass

of survey and inventory style projects I have just discussed, but also included the

Project Co-ordination Committee where archaeologists got together and debated


what historical archaeology was (Allen 1978), the preparation of a manual for

historical archaeology in Australia (Birmingham and Murray 1987), the later

publication of guidelines for historical archaeology nationwide (NSW Department

of Planning, Heritage Council of NSW 1993), as well as projects such as

Regentville (Birmingham and Wilson 1994) and Port Arthur where generations of

historical archaeologists gained their first field experience.

The emphasis in this program lies squarely on the work of survey and inventory

which aimed to define the historical archaeological record in Australia. As the

analysis here has shown, this process of definition followed the established

narratives of national development, emphasising the industrialisation of Australia

and claiming this area as the province of historical archaeology. Although NEGP

projects were initiated at the local level, the nature of projects conducted by the

States was remarkably consistent. As State authorities were involved in the

administration of the program, this shows both the success of National Estate

related policy and its ability to be adapted to local conditions.

Historical archaeology in the NEGP also shows that once an array of types of

historical archaeology projects had been established, there was a resistance to, or at

least no reflection of, broader policy changes in heritage management. Here this

was evident in the fact that the push towards more regional assessments and more

multicultural heritage is not reflected in the historical archaeology projects. I

suggest that this was not because those involved were not aware or sympathetic

towards these issues, but that established forms of procedures, in this case the type

of project done by historical archaeologists, continued to be promulgated and

produce similar kinds of results. This is one example of “blackboxing”, where the

need to undertake inventories and compare and classify site types was not

deconstructed but accepted as the “sort of project historical archaeologists do”. I

will draw some further conclusions about these forms of practice at the end of this

chapter.


While there was a strong degree of consistency imposed in this program by the

national policy framework, Tasmania consistently emerges as showing different

characteristics of practice. The extent of involvement of the Commonwealth in the

funding of the Port Arthur project is unique in the NEGP, while the absence of any

projects carried out by the National Trust is similarly a contrast with other States.

Tasmania shows a greater emphasis on single site excavation and research than the

other States, reflecting the involvement of historical archaeologists in conservation

projects, often directed toward tourism, over the inventory and survey work which

tends to predominate, and involve the community, in the other States. This singling

out of Tasmania of course comes as no surprise to any one familiar with the

tempestuous relationship between the Commonwealth and Tasmania on issues of

heritage and the environment. These issues can now be explored further in the

context of the Port Arthur Conservation Project.

The Port Arthur Conservation and Development Project 1979-

1986

Port Arthur Historic Site, in southern Tasmania, has a dense and contested history

as a prison, as an early tourist attraction and pleasure garden, and as an historic site

embraced within the vocabulary of national heritage. In 1996 it was also the site of

a horrific massacre where 35 tourists and local people were murdered by a single

gunman. Remains of, and memorials to this most recent and terrible history have

become another aspect of the history and significance of this place, and of the

visitors’ experience of it. Although my case study will not be considering the more

recent history of Port Arthur Historic Site it should be acknowledged that its

profile as a site of national significance has become more confronting and poignant

because of these recent events, and consequently the challenge of managing this

place has become significantly more complex than in the period I am focusing on.

To choose this place as the subject of a case study focusing on archaeological

practice, is in some ways to limit a broader exploration of this complex,

confrontational history and the entanglement of this place in discourses of identity


and national heritage. However, in the context of my study, it provides an

important opportunity to investigate how some Australian historical archaeologists

negotiated their involvement in the fabric and meaning of this unique place during

the period 1979 – 1986. During these years The Port Arthur Conservation and

Development Project (PACP) was funded by a $9 million grant based on two parts

federal to one part State funding (Egloff 1986: 5). From the previous discussion on

the National Estate Grants Program, which provided some money towards the

project, the large scale of this conservation initiative in the Australian context can

be appreciated.

From 1833 to 1877 Port Arthur was Australia’s largest prison, at its peak holding

12,700 men which in fact made it the largest prison in the British Empire (Bickford

1991b: 86). Today’s Historic Site encompasses only the institutional hub of the

prison complex. During its period of operation the prison infrastructure, including

a range of industries run by convict labour, had extended throughout the entire

Tasman Peninsula, which is joined to the Tasmanian mainland at a narrow isthmus,

known as Eaglehawk Neck. When the prison was closed in 1877 the land was

subdivided and many of the institutional buildings became incorporated into a

village named Carnarvon. Fires which swept through the unused convict buildings

in the 1890s were reputedly aided by local people anxious to remove their

association with a convict past (Egloff 1986: 2). From the first decades of the 20th

century Port Arthur began to be appreciated for its striking landscape and scenic

qualities. The gothic, stone ruins, situated in a green, pastoral setting, against a

calm and picturesque harbour, belied their association with the notorious penal

establishment (Figures 4.9; 4.10). By 1916 the Tasmanian government’s Scenery

Preservation Board began to buy back the site and to manage it as a tourist park.

Local residents conducted tours for visitors around the landscaped site, while the

village continued to exist amongst some of the prison remains.

The 1970s saw the creation of the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service

which took over the role of the Scenery Preservation Board. From the 1960s

tourism became more and more central to the Tasmanian government’s plans for


the economic development of the state, and the development of heritage and

tourism is perhaps more closely linked in Tasmania than other parts of Australia

(Young 1996). Young notes that the Tasmanian National Trust formed in 1960 and

quickly became involved in the renovation of grand Georgian houses as tourist

attractions, however by 1971 none of the Trust’s properties were related to

convicts (Young 1996: 146). The ownership of convict places remained with

government rather than with local heritage enthusiasts. The 1970s and 80s saw the

bureacratisation of heritage all over Australia and the Tasmanian Government’s

heritage tourism development plans were assisted by the emphasis and resources

accorded to heritage conservation by the Whitlam government (1972-1975). The

Federal Government also established the Tasmanian Restoration Advisory

Committee, which included eminent archaeologists, historians, architects and

conservation specialists, to give expert advice on the work on Tasmania’s historic

sites.

It is necessary to comment briefly on Tasmanian attitudes towards the convict past.

Tasmania held the last vestiges of Britain’s transportation system. Tasmanians had

been central to anti-transportation agitation and lobbying of the Colonial Office

since the 1850s, and this movement has often been seen as the genesis of

“Australian national feeling” during the colonial period (Irving 1974: 133).

Tasmania was forced by the Colonial Office to continue to accept convicts long

after this time and as Dixson suggests, this resentment has been expressed as the

brutalisation of “Tasmania” by this brutal, colonial system (Dixson 1999: 113).

Tasmania’s racist history is also often linked to this aura of brutality. Richard

Flanagan for instance wrote:

“There has long been a useful symbol for all that Australians despise about

themselves. Australia’s convict past, its racism towards Aborigines..... All this

darkness can be made external and separate to Australians and given a name:

Tasmania” (quoted in Dixson 1999: 113).

Griffiths explains how 19th century concepts of “bad blood” and genetically

inherited traits, haunted Australians who were tainted by the “birth stain”, an


ancestor who had been transported. Thus, claims Griffiths, the moral concerns of

family history had a role in the formation of national histories of the late 19th and

early 20th centuries which tended to stress, rather than convicts and their

descendents, the roles of pioneers and explorers (Griffiths 1996: 117). Although

convict ancestors have generally been rehabilitated as “distinctively Australian”,

the images and ghosts of brutality and suffering continue to haunt not only

Tasmania’s tourist industry, but also the work of Tasmanian historians and writers

such as Richard Flanagan and Christopher Koch (Highways to a War, 1995, Out of

Ireland, 1999). Carmel Bird has also “obscurely linked” the 1996 gun massacre

with Port Arthur’s convict past through a “muted line of causation” (Dixson 1999:

115 discussing Bird 1996). It is important to understand that Port Arthur represents

all these cultural issues to Tasmanians, and to other Australians who know the

place and visit it in their thousands every year. To these “outsiders”, including the

archaeologists and heritage professionals I will go on to discuss, there are aspects

of Tasmania which are different to the rest of Australia. Either as an “isle of gothic

silence” or as a quaint colonial landscape, colonialism in Tasmania is not in the

past but an ongoing dynamic in its relationship with the rest of the nation.

The 1975 Draft Port Arthur Management Plan (National Parks and Wildlife

Service) stated that:

“the basic approach to the restoration and site design of Port Arthur will be to

give the site a mood of tranquility and quiet relaxation, matching the more

serious aspects of its historical background” (Tasmanian National Parks and

Wildlife Service 1975: 19.2).

During the 1970s, Mulvaney reports, architectural restoration projects were

becoming more and more popular in Australia, while some historical

archaeologists were becoming more and more concerned about the results of and

philosophy behind this practice (Mulvaney 1996: 6). A particular focus for these

concerns was planned restoration work on the ruined buildings of Port Arthur.

Arguments focused on the archaeologists’ claim that restoration decisions were

being based on judgements of taste, or aesthetics, rather than on historical


evidence, including the evidence of the buildings’ fabric and associated

archaeological deposits:

“As historical archaeologists working in this field we must take an active part in

interpretation and make sure the historical significance... is brought out to the

public to counteract this tendency simply to entertain and to sink into unhistorical

romanticism... we have a responsibility to our profession to examine the history

of the sites we are working and to influence the restorers and managers to reflect

this past as accurately as possible” (Bickford 1981: 4).

Mulvaney first felt the need to comment on the restoration proposals for Port

Arthur and for Norfolk Island (another early colonial penal establishment on an

island off the coast of NSW) at a 1975 meeting in Hobart, Tasmania, and then

throughout the later 1970s in his role as a Commisssioner for the Australian

Heritage Commisssion. He described his involvement in these issues as

“unexpected and traumatic” because of the confrontational nature of this debate

between archaeologists and architects (Mulvaney 1996: 6). Such debates led

however to the development of the Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter 1979, which

has been discussed above. This document was to be enormously significant for

archaeological practice at Port Arthur. In a 1978 paper the prolific Mulvaney set

out an envisaged role for historical archaeologists in conservation practice, citing

the example of Ivor Noel Hume’s work at Colonial Williamsburg (Mulvaney

1991a: 264 first published 1978).

Richard Morrison, an archaeologist later employed on the PACP, suggests that as

well as these concerns about conservation and authenticity, archaeologists Rhys

Jones and Jim Allen of the Australian National University, who were involved in

advising on archaeological work at Port Arthur in the late 1970s, were concerned

to demonstrate that archaeology could contribute to the interpretation of Port

Arthur and that archaeological research should have a role in any work on the

place (pers.com. Richard Morrison). Allen had been jointly supervising the

research of Sydney University PhD student, Maureen Byrne, who had excavated at

Port Arthur in 1976. Funds from a National Estate Grant to the Co-ordination


Committee on Historical Archaeology were made available for Byrne’s research to

demonstrate “the intrinsic and academic importance of excavation on historic

sites” (Allen 1978: 20). In 1977 Maureen Byrne suddenly died, leaving her

research unfinished. While some analysis of her excavations was later undertaken

at the Australian National University (Dane and Morrison 1979), with the creation

of the PACP her research was absorbed into that project, which moved into more

conservation oriented directions. It is interesting to speculate if archaeological

practice and interpretations at Port Arthur might have developed in different

directions had Maureen Byrne lived, completed her analysis and maintained some

research interest in the project.

The Project

In the wake of the creation and endorsement of the Burra Charter, it is clear that

defining professional methods for historical archaeologists within the scope of the

PACP was a primary concern. Project manager and archaeologist Brian Egloff

clearly saw the project, with its scale of funding and resources, as an opportunity

for archaeologists to “stake their claim” in conservation practices:

“As this country’s most ambitious heritage conservation project, it proved to be

an ideal testing ground for Australian historical archaeology... In Australia the

comprehensive management of historical resources had yet to develop and so no

local models were available ... . Similarly, heritage conservation in Tasmania

was not well developed at the time of the Project’s inception” (Egloff 1987: 1).

Of key importance to the definition of the archaeologists’ role at Port Arthur was

the decision that all fabric, from all periods of use of the site, was the responsibility

of the archaeologist. This meant that, following the tenets of the Burra Charter, the

archaeologists were responsible for recording and documenting in a formal way,

all changes made to the fabric of the place under the aegis of the conservation

project.

To assist in carrying out larger scale archaeological excavations, Summer

Archaeological Programs were developed to attract student volunteers (Figure


4.11, 4.12). These were very successful, attracting hundreds of students from all

over Australia (Egloff 1986: 12). A 1982 outline of objectives for the Summer

excavation programs shows that they were regarded as detailed investigations prior

to restoration, to fulfill Burra Charter Article 24, rather than pursuing any

particular research focus (PACP File TM2/66/263/(1)).

From my previous discussion it is clear that historical archaeologists had

developed a mistrust of conservation, or restoration architects, in the years leading

up to this project. Here, with the support of prominent archaeologists like John

Mulvaney and Jim Allen on the Commonwealth’s watchdog over this project, The

Tasmanian Restoration Advisory Committee, historical archaeologists exerted their

power over all works on the site. However it is clear that tension between the

archaeological approach to the fabric of Port Arthur’s buildings and the architects’

plans to restore them continued throughout the project. In a minute written by

project archaeologist Martin Davies in 1984 he detailed his opposition to many

details of the proposed restoration of the Commandant’s Residence (Davies 1984).

In this document Davies defined his archaeological approach to the fabric as

“rigorous”, based on a “multi-period approach”, “stressing great attention to

fabric” and specifically arguing against judgements based on “aesthetics” (Davies

1984).

An emphasis was placed on recording, and on the creation of an archive

documenting all conservation decisions as required by the Burra Charter (Articles

23 – 29). Historical archaeologists at Port Arthur set about creating the systems to

maintain both the desired level of control over conservation works on the site, as

well as systematising recording and management of the archive created. This

resulted in an Archaeological Procedures Manual published in 1987, the first

manual of its kind to be published for historical archaeology in Australia (Davies

and Buckly 1987). While archaeologist Martin Davies seems to have reveled in the

detail of building recording (Davies and Buckley 1987; Davies 1987), another staff

archaeologist, Richard Morrison, relayed some frustration at the fact that research

and interpretation were continually stifled by the stress of “keeping up” with day to


day project work (pers.com. Richard Morrison). Several research designs for

archaeological projects were developed over the years, however none of these

came to fruition as archaeologists were kept busy recording and documenting the

restoration work (PACP File NO. M2/66/277 (2) ).

Many stakeholders had to be kept happy with the progress of the project, including

both federal and State politicians. For instance, files show that questions were

regularly raised in the Tasmanian parliament about the nature and conduct of the

conservation project (PACP File No. A5/1/10). Frequent attention was given to the

fact that the small cottages on the site that had been restored were not open to the

public. All of the questions in parliament raise the issue of the amount of the

expenditure on conservation and archaeology and the “value for money” being

achieved for the public. In 1982 K.F. Lowrie, Leader for the Government in the

Senate, wrote to the Minister responsible for the project questioning the cost of the

restoration works on two small cottages and in particular the cost of the

archaeological works involved (PACP File No. A5/1/10). The Project Manager

Brian Egloff replied:

“The archaeological component of the works on the two small cottages was quite

minimal when compared to projects of this nature carried out in Canada or in the

United Kingdom. Archaeology as applied at Port Arthur refers not only to the

recovery of essential information which is required to direct the restoration

process but also to the recording of building elements which would be lost

through the process of restoration. As such it often adds those extra touches

which turn a rather common place restoration into a quality piece with a greatly

enhanced appeal. This enhancement is clearly apparent at the internationally

significant sites such as Williamsburg or Fortress Louisbourg in Canada” (Egloff

1982).

It is the “enhanced appeal” of authenticity which Egloff refers to here. Scientific

rigour at Port Arthur involved treating all fabric as valuable and, significantly, all

fabric as “archaeological”. The fact that this meant all fabric had to be treated

“equally” meant that the archaeologists could not focus on particular interpretative

tasks. The framework established by the Burra Charter, which included provisions


stating that conservation should not distort the “evidence of the fabric” (Article 3),

and that it should respect all periods of its use (Article 16), created a dilemma for

the ongoing interpretation and presentation of Port Arthur to the public.

The interpretation of Port Arthur, its presentation as a tourist venue, and site of

national heritage value, has been critiqued by many historians, archaeologists and

cultural commentators (see for instance Allen 1976; Bickford 1981; Daniels 1983;

Bennett 1995). Perhaps the most outspoken critic of the archaeology at Port Arthur

has been Tasmanian writer and historian, Richard Flanagan (1990; 1996). Flanagan

finds the results of the archaeological analysis of the Commandant’s cottage, as

they are presented to visitors, highly bizarre:

“ like a dead formaldehyde-stained rat whose flesh is peeled and held back by

surgical instruments to reveal its internal organs, the building has been clinically

and scientifically vivisected... There are no people here, certainly none of the

convicts who originally built the building then were set to work cleaning the

floors and carrying the firewood and cooking the food. They are exiled from their

past. In their place we have the archaeologists, the new high priests of the past,

for whom this building seems to have been reconstructed as a shrine. Pictures in

the displays in this building are not as you might expect of the commandants or

even of the convicts, but of specialist staff, particularly archaeologists”

(Flanagan 1996: 186).

The archaeologists at Port Arthur in fact achieved the aim looked forward to by

historical archaeologist Anne Bickford, who had been so outspoken about

whiggish, romantic conservation projects in the 1970s: “I know of no restoration

project in Australia where original parts of the structure have been left exposed, so

that one can see what the original paint colours, and structural details looked like”

(Bickford 1977 quoted in Mulvaney 1996: 6). The aim of these archaeological

practices involved concepts of the conservation of scientific evidence through the

recording of all impacts on fabric, ensuring authenticity in restoration and avoiding

the influence of ideological bias in restoration and interpretation through strict

adherence to the material evidence (see in particular here Bickford 1981). Such

practices also meant that interpretation of specific issues was avoided, and


archaeologists could not provide coherent stories about the place. Sydney museum

curator Peter Emmett was also influenced by the “fragmentary”, idiosyncratic

archaeological interpretation of Port Arthur when he later developed the Hyde Park

Barracks and Museum of Sydney where he was determined not to let archaeology

dominate the interpretation (discussed in Chapter 6 and see Emmett 1992). One of

the issues Flanagan and Emmett reacted so strongly against was the visibility of

archaeologists in the way these places were presented to the public. They saw this

as a heroizing and aggrandisement of the role of the archaeologists at the expense

of what everybody was really interested in; the past, or in the case of Port Arthur,

the convicts.

The PACP was terminated in 1986, not because the project was complete, but

because funding dried up, the federal Minister for the Arts, Heritage and

Environment, Barry Cohen, declaring that the site was a “bottomless pit” (Young

1996: 150). Egloff records that this left “ a backlog of unreported archaeological

work, mounds of uncatalogued artefacts” to be left on site as professional staff,

now unemployed, departed. The site was then transferred to the Port Arthur

Historic Site Management Authority which, for the first time, set up a toll booth at

the entrance and charged an entrance fee, much to the disgust of local Tasmanians

(Young 1996: 150). Archaeologists have continued to be employed on the site to

monitor conservation and maintenance works but funds for the analysis of Port

Arthur’s archaeological material have not been a management priority (pers. com.

Greg Jackman).

Conclusions: in a national context

The archaeological practices developed for the PACP had strong ideological

motivations, underlain by the concept that material, archaeological evidence, and

its proper documentation, was an objective constraint on bad restoration or

ideologically biased interpretation. Work focused on turning these ideas into a

coherent methodology of practice that was authorised through the Burra Charter,

which in turn was promoted by the Australian Heritage Commission. The

published manual of archaeological procedures was an influential document for


Australian consulting historical archaeologists, many of whom had “learnt the

ropes” as volunteers on the Summer Archaeological Programs. Martin Davies

published his approach to the archaeology of standing buildings in 1987 and

carried out analyses of many other buildings in Tasmania and NSW for clients

such as the NSW National Trust and the Historic Houses Trust. However the role

of historical archaeologists in conservation projects has tended to narrow since this

dominant role in the PACP (pers.com. Greg Jackman, and see comments by

Temple in Chapter 3). This may be the result of the development and promotion of

the “fabric technician” role as we have seen it at Port Arthur, with an

overwhelming focus on comprehensive recording and data management rather than

interpretation. This process has also been shaped by disciplinary jockeying

between archaeologists and architects. Others in the heritage conservation field

suggest that archaeologists have failed to produce the goods which were promised

by archaeological research (Connah 1983; Murray and Allen 1986; Birmingham

1990; Egloff 1994). Greg Jackman, the present archaeologist for the site, stated

that the methods developed by the PACP were still generally followed at Port

Arthur, and although he recognises that archaeology failed to provide any

interpretations of excavated data, he still admires the careful and insightful

approaches to building fabric that were developed by the PACP (pers.com. Greg

Jackman).

Conclusions: Practising the Nation

In this investigation of historical archaeological practice I have concentrated on

analysing the institutional framework for practice in terms of legislation, policy

and procedures, and then looked closely at two historical contexts of

archaeological heritage management practice. My aim has been to analyse the

relationship between policy, procedures and practice. I now want to tease out

further how nationalist discourses have been constitutive of various modes of

practice, and also constituted through practice. I outlined how at the time of the

Hope Report in 1974 historical archaeologists lobbied for the development of


systematic procedures for the identification and recording of historical

archaeological sites and relics. These aims remain a prominent feature of

archaeological heritage management today and remain at the heart of a heritage

management practice which is involved in “nationing” the material past.

While the role of inventories in reifying and commodifying aspects of culture has

been commented upon, perhaps more striking in the context of the Australian

settler past is the role of inventory as a technique of government which “practises”

the national past into existence. The inventory becomes a kind of cartography of

the past: mapping the contours of the nation’s historic landscape, taking the

unknown territory and rendering it known and knowable through location,

classification and comparison. From a Foucaultian perspective the heritage

inventory acts as a form of surveillance, monitoring the shape and form of this

publicly demarcated sphere of the past. While the term surveillance sounds sinister

it is of course a routine aspect of governance, however it denotes the fact that

theses inventories are not natural and self evident, but enabled and authorised

through a complex combination of practices and discourses, that construct concepts

of meaning and value. As a state aligned surveillance of the past the inventory is

clearly involved in singularising a range of places and things to extend the national

sacred (Kopytoff 1986). In this case sacredness emanates from the way these

places and things represent aspects of the past which are valued and seen as

integral to a shared historical identity.

This role of the inventory is particularly striking in relation to historical

archaeology because of the combination of this technique of governmentality with

scientific, empirical discourses that render the national past as exactly that: cut off

from the present, no longer a part of culture but part of a scientific universe with

geographical and temporal boundaries. This reinforces modernist discourses which

configure the present as cut off from the past, as having developed and progressed

beyond the simplicities of traditional lifeways. While most practicing

archaeologists have much more fluid understandings of heritage and archaeology

and their entwinement in culture, empirical methodologies aimed at


comprehensive, materialistic identification, radically separate things and places

from ongoing cultural processes.

Not only does the unambiguous empiricism of the inventory sever things and

places from their cultural context, they also cut off Australia’s past from the rest of

the world. As I have discussed previously, Bennett convincingly showed how

heritage discourses since the 1970s have constructed an autonomous past for the

Australian nation (Bennett 1995). While the nation back projects itself onto pre-

national pasts, it also tends to cut off Australia’s colonial and national pasts from

their world contexts. It is misleading to look at phenomena such as convictism and

the gold rushes as “Australian" events, these are transnational processes which are

significant in the context of globalisation. The narrowing of the representation of

these events has been an effect of heritage and nationalism. Earlier in the 20th

century it would have been more likely that convictism and the goldrushes were

thought of in the context of empire, and indeed this does persist as a research

context as I will discuss in Chapter 5, however the context of empire has most

certainly been “dummed down” in the discourse of national heritage.

The co-constitutive relationship between nation, heritage and archaeological

practice is expressed on two levels: in perhaps a more overt sense, heritage (as an

inheritance), or the past in general, can be defined by nationalist narratives,

characterised by their teleological renderings of development and progress. In a

less overt sense this relationship is seen in practices and procedures which are

entailed with nationalist thought. Inventory, intrinsic significance and recording,

all align modernist, universalist notions to construct a scientific, apolitical past

which is both unambiguous and naturally occurring.

The national past required the development of a distinctively Australian historical

archaeology and heritage management practice. I discussed in Chapter 1 how the

effect of the nation is to put itself forward as a coherent subject for historical and

cultural analysis and how this has tended to mask social and cultural involvement

on broader, transnational levels. Heritage management historical archaeology is


therefore defined by the nation not only through logistic and legislative reasons,

but through the overemphasized coherency of the nation as subject.

This is not to say that the concentration on the national context has totally stifled

creativity. The NEGP was created to aid in the identification and conservation of

the National Estate, and it enabled Aboriginal community groups and other

organisations to fund the neglected area of Aboriginal historic sites. Another

community to use the NEGP in creative ways was that of historical archaeologists

themselves; to finance the production of manuals, guidelines, and student training,

areas that were not being supported through other institutions like universities at

that time.

The Port Arthur case study highlights the deployment of archaeological discourses

to exert control over materiality and fabric in the heritage management context.

Historical archaeology was perceived as the “conscience of heritage management”

using its focus on material evidence, respect for authenticity and prudent scientific

reasoning as a corrective to less rigourous restoration. Also crucial at Port Arthur

was the role of recording. The importance of the creation of a record for future

generations, explaining why certain conservation decisions were taken and what

was destroyed in the process. These processes, enshrined in the Burra Charter,

while they appear reflexive and postmodern, were in fact based more on the

perception of the universal scientific value of archaeological data, a value which

could be unambiguously understood in the future.

Heritage policy, as I have outlined here, has consistently developed a more

inclusive vocabulary: greater recognition of indigenous people and their living

cultural traditions, concepts of multicultural and minority heritage in line with

similar discourses across public and academic fields. Does a growing rhetoric of

inclusiveness mean that heritage is becoming less nationally defined in terms of

concepts of a bounded, definable national identity and culture? In fact I argue that

this discourse of inclusiveness is constituted through nationalist discourse as a

means to reconcile the nation with its colonial past and to redress the


neocolonialism of earlier Australian nationalisms. These are questions I will go on

to explore in Chapter 5 where I consider historical archaeological interpretations of

the past.

Chapter 5

Intimate Histories and National Narratives What statements have historical archaeologists produced about the past in

Australia, and upon what foundations have these statements been constructed? In

this chapter I turn from what archaeologists have done, and how their practices

have been structured, to what archaeologists have said about the past. My aim here

is to investigate the discursive underpinnings of historical archaeological

knowledge and the role nationalist discourses have played in historical

archaeologist’s interpretations of Australia’s past.

In order to explore these questions I will treat historical archaeology, in this

instance, as a body of texts. While this can create an artificial division between

theory, interpretation, practice and social context, here this analysis stands in

contrast to the ethnographic and historical approaches of the previous two chapters.

This more textual and discursive analysis of archaeological interpretation is also

appropriate to the way in which a body of texts can represent a “discipline”. An

important component of the way modern disciplines are constituted is through a

body of literature that sets the parameters for research and the major fields of

interest (see for instance Connah 1998: 5). Scholars operate through this body of

texts in order to innovate, to consolidate disciplinary knowledge, to critique and to

historicise the discipline. Indigenous rights movements, the heritage industry,

feminism, postcolonialism and postmodernism have all served to erode traditional

notions of disciplinary barriers and the objectivity of disciplinary foundations. My

study emanates from this intellectual milieu as it involves looking at archaeology

and nationalism as discourses constitutive of, and constituted through, each other,

as well as other forms of cultural discourse.

‘Genealogy’ is the term given to a technique developed by Foucault to assist in his

critique of power and knowledge (see for instance Foucault 1980, 1984, 1988). The

190

Intimate Histories and National Narratives 191

aim of this technique is to chart the origins and functions of bodies of knowledge,

or discourses, and apply this to an analysis of their role in the present. What

attracts me to following Foucault’s technique in this instance is the need to avoid a

teleological account of the development of historical archaeology. That is to see

historical archaeology as maturing from a naïve, inexpert, unreflexive state, to its

present more enlightened and sophisticated one. I could say, for instance, that

historical archaeological practice and interpretations were uncritically constituted

through discourses of national identity in the 1970s and 1980s, but that through the

critical revision and debunking of colonialist national mythologies in the 1990s, it

now offers more complete and accurate interpretations of the past. While I, and

many others, may find historical archaeology’s current interests, in gender and

indigenous history for instance, a philosophical and political “step up”, I don’t

want to assume that this is the natural result of disciplinary maturation, but that all

practice is involved in complex cultural dynamics, as well as historical

relationships.

I argued in Chapter One that nation is a fragmented and disputed object in

Australia and perhaps it has always been so, however debate and contests over

these issues have been an increasing feature of public discourse since the mid

1990s. There have been significant ruptures in colonialist narratives and different

groups in society have different concepts about what the nation has been, is now

and should be in the future. These processes have given rise to my project of

considering the relationship between archaeology and nationalism, it is because

there have been shifts in discourses of the nation that it seems important to

understand how archaeology may have been shaped by images and concepts which

are no longer intellectually palatable, or have “disreputable origins” (Kendall and

Wickham 1999: 29). In understanding that my problem arises from this situation,

Foucault’s methodology offers a means to “use history to diagnose the present”

and to apply this critique of discursive relationships to the present and potentially

the future of Australian archaeology.


This chapter has two sections. First I want to disentangle the threads of theory,

theoretically based methodologies, and historical assumptions, both explicit and

naturalised, which are woven into the fabric of Australian historical archaeological

interpretations. Then I will go on to consider some of the implicit interpretative

themes that are embedded in historical archaeological discourse. The themes that I

have drawn out relate to the nation-centred constructions of the Australian settler

past that link landscape, identity and history, which I investigated in Chapter One.

I also discuss trends which appear less influenced by the national context than by

other forms of identity politics and consider the meaning of an “inclusive past” in

the context of Australian nationalist discourse.

A Genealogy of Historical Archaeological Thought

It has often been stated that early Australian historical archaeological research was

basically untheorised and that theoretical sophistication, once achieved, would

signify a level of disciplinary maturity (Birmingham and Jeans 1983; Bairstow

1984a: 32; Connah 1983). Theory building, theoretical frameworks and problem

oriented research have often been advocated for historical archaeology for a range

of reasons; including the creation of a disciplinary identity (Murray and Allen

1986: 90); the development of a nationally distinctive practice (Bairstow 1984);

and to enhance historical archaeology’s contribution to Australian society

(Megaw1984; Birmingham and Jeans 1983; Temple 1988: 2; Egloff 1994: 4).

However historical archaeological work was not “theory free”, but constructed

upon some common sense concepts:

that Australian history was important;

that material remains were a precious form of evidence that could expand

knowledge about history; and

that history was pertinent to contemporary identity.

In this context the location and description of archaeological material, placed

within an essentially historiographic, narrative, interpretive framework, was all that


was required to increase knowledge about the past. Historical archaeology does

however have a history, and obviously early historical archaeological work in

Australia was carried out with a sense of pioneering into a new area of

archaeological practice, dealing with material culture manufactured, distributed

and deposited in ways unfamiliar to the archaeologists trying their hand at its

analysis. Bodies of theory and data have since been created which have come to

form disciplinary benchmarks. However theories of disciplinary maturation, such

as that put forward by Trigger (1989) concentrating on the accumulation of more

and more data leading towards more accurate interpretations, obfuscate, and

minimise, changes which are culturally involved. This section considers four areas

or threads that are significant in historical archaeological thought in Australia.

While these threads may have been more or less visible in archaeological practice

and interpretation over the last thirty years, I will argue that all form significant

foundational concepts for archaeological practice. Some forms of practice may

however, be linked more closely to one of these paradigmatic areas than to the

others.

The Context of Heritage

Perhaps the most significant context for the formulation of theoretical approaches

in historical archaeology has been that of the heritage movement. The nature of

historical archaeology cannot be considered in isolation from the processes that

resulted in the ascription of value to the material remains of the national past, a

process I addressed in Chapter 3. As I discussed, an archaeological epistemology

was a central tenet of the modern preservation movement (Griffiths 1996: 196).

Archaeological discourse was not totally responsible for the notion of an historical

archaeological record in Australia however, this form of evidence was given value

and meaning through the linking of identity, environment and material remains as a

cultural heritage.

The implications of heritage for the theoretical development and institutional

support of historical archaeology were discussed by Murray and Allen in 1986.


They claimed that conservation philosophy not only formed the greater part of

historical archaeology’s theoretical foundations, but was also responsible for its

failure to develop an internally logical theoretical framework beyond the

requirements of a conservation ethic (Murray and Allen 1986: 86). They argued

that this was caused by four interrelated factors: first, such small numbers were

employed full time, especially as academics, in historical archaeology; second, that

there was an acceptance within the discipline that preservation was both the main

justification for, and activity of, the discipline; third, that the discipline had such a

short history that its identity was unformed; and fourth, that it was not supported

by any intellectual tradition such as antiquarianism, as was prehistory. I will look

at a number of these claims in more detail.

The conservation ethic

Murray and Allen argued that Australian prehistory had developed for several

decades in Australia before the expansion of public concern in the 1960s for the

preservation or conservation of material cultural remains, as well as inheriting

earlier traditions of antiquarianism (1986: 86). This had allowed prehistorians time

to provide “academic and intellectual justifications” for the importance and value

of their interpretations and of the archaeological record. Historical archaeology, on

the other hand had developed no similar justification, but was simply based on a

belief that historic material remains possessed archaeological research potential

and therefore should be conserved (Murray and Allen 1986: 86). This belief was

maintainable because, as they importantly drew out:

“...the value of archaeology as a discipline, and the value of the material remains

of past human action from the point of view of the cultural preservationist, have

been inextricably linked for over a century, not just the last twenty years in

Australia” (Murray and Allen 1986: 85-86).

The concept that archaeologists could produce history from material things was a

promise that was central to the values ascribed to material heritage. What

concerned Murray and Allen was that because the conservation ethic of the

heritage movement had become the central theoretical underpinning of historical


archaeology, this had lead to the development of methodologies designed to enable

preservation, but not to explain why it was necessary. The latter would be an

explicit statement of the research potential of historical archaeological evidence,

which of course should lead to the realisation of this potential in the form of new

knowledge.

Research potential was, and is, seen as the central defining characteristic of

archaeological heritage. But research potential must be theorised in some way in

order to be expressed more fully. Murray and Allen’s analysis drew out a crucial

problematic in historical archaeological thought and provided an insightful

characterisation of how the conservation ethic, as well as historic themes, which I

will go on to discuss, had shaped historical archaeological thinking and reasoning.

The conservation of scientifically significant fabric is based on the concept that it

is a moral responsibility not to foreclose on the possibilities for research in the

future. This concept is embodied in Article 4 of the ICOMOS Burra Charter,

which I introduced in Chapter 4:

“Study of a place by any intervention in the fabric or by archaeological

excavation should be undertaken where necessary to provide the data essential

for decisions on the conservation of the place and/or to secure evidence about to

be lost or made inaccessible through necessary conservation action. Investigation

of a place for any other reason which requires physical disturbance and which

adds substantially to a scientific body of knowledge may be permitted, provided

that it is consistent with the conservation policy for the place” (Burra

Charter1988).

At the Port Arthur Conservation Project, where the new Burra Charter was so

closely adhered to, this Article shaped the nature of their conservation

archaeological practices. The imperative was to record all fabric that was to be

altered or destroyed. The implication of the fabric based heritage management

approach is that it in fact tends to discourage the development of a research focus

because that is actually in conflict with the need to record fabric, the future

research potential of which should not be predetermined. I agree with Murray and

Allen that the “conserve first, think later” approach to archaeological heritage


management derives from this conservation ethic. The professionalisation of this

ethic in the widely endorsed Burra Charter, which remains the key set of

professional standards for heritage practice, has shaped a large part of heritage

management archaeology.

The conservation rationale is a good example of a procedure that has become

blackboxed in Australian archaeological heritage management. Its original

rationale has not been analysed, but simply incorporated within expanding

frameworks of practice. Murray and Allen correctly showed that the rationale for

preservation came largely from archaeological discourse, but in many ways a

blackbox has been placed around the concept of archaeological significance or

research potential. This is an effect of conceptualising scientific or archaeological

significance as an intrinsic, material quality. This reading is entrenched in the

heritage management framework, partly because of the legislation. In Australia,

heritage, often termed environmental heritage (as in the NSW Heritage Act 1977),

is legally characterised by its fabric and material qualities, and is constituted in

legislation as part of the environment. This implies that archaeological heritage,

like biodiversity, exists independent of human thought. Hence methodologies have

concentrated on discovering and classifying heritage rather than understanding its

cultural construction or the role it plays in cultural life.

Significance assessment

Whereas management of settler culture heritage was based upon a more or less

explicit, although not unproblematic, understanding of historical significance,

archaeological significance, as I have just discussed, remained a strangely

unexplored category. In the 1970s and 80s the view was expressed that not enough

was known about Australian historic sites to predetermine their research

significance and that because of this, inventory must be the main focus of research

(Allen 1978: A22; Temple 1979; Pearson 1984). This view underlines the notion of

a static archaeological record waiting to be discovered, which was so at odds with

the dynamic cultural environment which saw the rise of the heritage movement in

Australia. In a 1974 conference on historical archaeology Rhys Jones argued


against the over-concentration on inventory at the expense of developing ideas

about historical archaeological research potential, however he is recorded as a lone

voice (Jones quoted in Allen 1978: A22). Therefore, although the definition of

research potential which was broadly promoted in Australian heritage management

archaeology was “the ability to answer timely and specific research questions”

(Schiffer and Gummerman 1977 and see papers in Sullivan and Bowdler 1984),

this definition conflicts with perceptions of limited knowledge of the “data

universe” and of unknown future research potential.

The Hope Report’s categorisation of historical archaeological sites as of “scientific

interest” rather than of broader community value, contrasts markedly with John

Mulvaney’s writings about historic sites in the 1970s and later. In papers entitled

“Future Pleasure from the Past” (1978) and “The Heritage Value of Historical

Relics: A Plea for Romantic Intellectualism” (1979), both of which were delivered

in meetings aiming to develop policy and procedures for historical archaeological

sites and relics, he stresses the evocative character of historic sites, the sentiments

they evoke, their role of giving pleasure, evoking nostalgia for the past and their

relationship to cultural identity (Mulvaney 1991b). Mulvaney consistently argued

for heritage management techniques which appreciated these values of historic

sites, as well as their scientific significance. This reflects the tension, and apparent

paradox in Mulvaney’s work, identified by Lesly Head as contrastingly

postmodern in his recognition of complexity and multiple meanings, while

avowedly universalist and modernist in his concept of objective archaeological

knowledge (1998: 2). These are tensions which are not only embodied in

Mulvaney’s work, but in the discourse and practices of heritage generally.

Trigger’s analysis of archaeology and nationalism also stresses the dichotomy

between universalism and romanticism (Trigger 1996). He claims that both

nationalism and postmodernism grew out of romanticism and idealism, and their

coming together in the field of archaeology has produced an untenable relativism.

While the linking of nationalism and philosophies of romanticism may have some

validity in looking at the history of European archaeology, it does not explain the


role that materialism, positivism and universalism continue to play in neo-colonial

and national Australia.

While we can link Mulvaney’s plea “for romantic intellectualism” to a cultural

nationalist approach, it is also evident from the case studies presented in Chapter 4,

that the nationalist “surveillance” of the past utilised objectivist, scientific

discourses to separate places and things from their cultural context and render them

as representations of the past. The main point here is that the use of objectivist,

positivist, scientific discourses to characterise historical archaeological sites and

relics effectively masks the way their research potential was created through a

cultural process of valuing the historic past as pertinent to a continuous historical

identity. As I argued in Chapter 4, most archaeologists and heritage managers

would not dispute this assertion. This is the reason for the development of the

category of “social significance”, and the recognition that the broader cultural

values of archaeological sites not only acknowledges community interests, but also

contributes to a potentially expanded notion of research potential (Byrne et al

2001; Colley forthcoming). It is also the reason for the growth in community

archaeology projects, where research is either formulated with a community or

directly requested by it (Clarke 1995; Greer 1996; Smith et al 2000). This type of

research now co-exists with accepted methodologies for the development of

inventories and hierarchies of local, State and national significance. Both versions

of practice respond to issues of identity in the national context. State endorsed

methodologies have an interest in more solid and stable identities that can be

managed to minimise conflict. Communities, on the other hand, may react to a

range of specific agendas: local and global. As Abrams (1994) has pointed out, the

heritage process is usually understood as a means of holding on to the past; of

stable and unchanging cultural values. But communities deploy this process in

times of change and tension, it is not so much about holding on to the past as

choosing a direction for the future. The national context is a critical way identities

are imagined as proceeding into the future. The view of heritage as social action

shows that in a positive way these discourses may be deployed in community


building (Byrne et al 2001). In a negative way however, they may also serve as

“palliative care” for a ruptured colonial system, or bolster entrenched inequalities.

I mentioned in Chapter 4 that recent research on heritage significance in Australia

has highlighted the importance of “social significance” (Johnston 1992; Pearson

and Sullivan 1995: 153; Davison 2000: 129; Byrne et al 2001). The Burra Charter

defines social significance as “the qualities for which a place has become a focus

of spiritual, political, national or other cultural sentiment to a majority or minority

group” (Guidelines to the Burra Charter: Cultural Significance). This interest in

social significance follows trends towards greater community involvement in the

heritage process throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Byrne et al 2001: 112). There

are extensive implications for heritage processes generally with the greater

recognition of the concept that values are actually constituted within communities

rather than intrinsic to sites and relics themselves. I will discuss some implications

of conflict between archaeological and community values in the case studies in

Chapter 6. What is of particular relevance here, for the purposes of understanding

foundational concepts in historical archaeology, is the way this recent research

reveals that concepts of historical and social significance have actually been

defined in opposition to each other (Byrne et al 2001). I suggest that the distinction

between historical and social significance has been founded on the concept that

historical represents things which are important within a “national high culture”,

which is represented by “History”, while social accounts for things important

within local or minority cultures: “ while it is clear that contemporary social values

have historical dimensions, it appears that the heritage management framework

reserves the “historical” category, for the cultural mainstream” (Byrne et al 2001:

133). This emphasises the alignment of historical value with the nation and the

broad sweep of the national narratives of development. This recalls Gellner’s

theory, discussed in Chapter 1, suggesting that nations tend to institutionalise a

normative version of “high” culture through the state (Gellner 1983; 1997). The

distinction between historical and social reveals that, although the rhetoric of

heritage has been valuing the local, the “places in the heart” (AHC 1998), it has

implicitly assumed that heritage linked to the political and developmental history


of the nation as a whole should be valued above the local, because it is “historical”,

while the local has only “social” value. This tendency will be perpetuated with the

introduction of the proposed “National Heritage List” which was also discussed in

Chapter 4.

Themes of history/national narratives

Understanding the historic contexts within which to place the largely “unknown”

database of historical archaeology, was one of the main concerns of the Project Co-

ordination Committee on Historical Archaeology, convened in 1974 to advise the

Federal Government on issues surrounding the incorporation of historical

archaeology within the National Estate (Allen 1978). This Committee produced a

set of “themes and checklists” (Allen 1978: A34, A37) designed to aid in both the

identification of heritage items and the establishment of relative levels of heritage

significance. These themes included the following: The Conquest of Distance;

Coastal Penetration; Settlement and Adaptation; the Hostile Environment;

Economic and Industrial Development, (which was divided into ‘stocking the

land’, ‘technology in cultivation’, ‘motive poor’, ‘industrial pollution’, ‘material

self sufficiency’ and ‘economic depressions’) and Social Development

(‘imposition of law and order’, ‘Australians at war’, ‘ethnic minorities’) (Allen

1978: A34-36).

In 1986 Murray and Allen (the latter had been involved in the Committee) claimed

that these themes and checklists had been extensively relied upon by historical

archaeologists but had not been developed as a means through which to theorise

archaeological significance, as had originally been intended:

“The categories of Australian historical archaeology have remained essentially

inviolate – predefined, uninvestigated, and privileged sources of archaeological

interpretation” (Murray and Allen 1986: 87).

The themes and checklist approach remains broadly influential in Australian

heritage management. States have developed their own themes while the latest

national framework of themes was published in 2001 (AHC 2001). This approach


resulted in historical archaeological heritage being linked to oversimplified

historical frameworks which were overwhelmingly based on the narratives of

national development. It also appears that the dominance of historic thematic

frameworks, reflecting influential synthetic histories such as Hancock’s Australia

(1930), Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), and Blainey’s The Tyranny of

Distance (1966) and The Rush that Never Ended (1963), perpetuated the

prevalence of historiographic explanatory frameworks in historical archaeology. It

is clear from articles of critical review that some historical archaeologists were

interested in pursuing explanatory frameworks derived not from history, but from

anthropology, material culture studies and issues which were grouped under

Schiffer’s term of “behavioural archaeology” (Connah 1983; 1986; 1998;

Birmingham 1990a). Historical archaeology, as I will discuss below, is still

characterised by tensions between “historical” and “archaeological” questions

(Karskens 1996). These arguments obviously relate to broader archaeological

discussions (that is beyond Australian historical archaeology), but I suggest that in

Australian practice the heritage management framework has articulated the value

of historical archaeological sites and relics in terms of the historical themes they

may contribute to, thus making it easier to justify work which dovetails into

popular historical understandings.

The concept of themes as a management tool for the identification of heritage is

closely related to the practice of inventory: themes and inventory form a discourse

which produces the archaeological record. As Bickford pointed out in 1981

“checklists” accompanied these original themes and were designed to counter their

inherent “ideological bias" (Bickford 1981: 2). However of the 7 categories of site

types listed in the checklist, 5 were devoted to categorising different sorts of

industrial sites, reflecting the strong interest and expertise which had been

developed in that area (Allen 1978: A37-42).

As well as reinforcing the popular, colonialist narratives of national development,

these themes also assist in the production of popular historical understandings of

the “autonomous”, “free standing” national past (Bennett 1995). The latest national


thematic framework has only 9 very broad themes such as Governing, Educating,

Working and so on (AHC 2001: 9). These themes no longer reflect the colonialist

approach that was evident in the 1974 themes quoted above. However no theme

suggests Australia’s links with the rest of the world, formed through empire,

immigration, trade or other cultural attachments. Australia’s cultural and political

links with the United States for instance are rarely considered within the formal

framework of heritage. This is because the “Americanisation” of Australian

“culture” is considered by many Australians as cultural degradation (Curthoys

1997: 26), and heritage is all about protecting the distinctive, separate, Australian

past:

“We are the only nation to occupy a whole continent and the diversity of our

experience, of our landscapes can be linked through a thematic framework”

(AHC 2001: 2).

Themes are perhaps erroneously called historic when in fact they are instruments

of heritage; where heritage is a discourse which identifies the past as materially

embodied in places and things, and represents the past through those things in the

public sphere. The linking of historical archaeological practice with these devices

has had a distinctive effect in heritage management archaeology, where, as

Karskens has pointed out, history, as an interpretive discourse, was considered of

little relevance to heritage management archaeology throughout the 1980s

(Karskens 1996 and see Birmingham 1990a). This ambivalence to history has been

an important aspect of historical archaeological thought which I will develop

further below.

Although the heritage management framework supports the alignment of history

with national development within an autonomous national zone, historical

archaeologists have certainly sought broader contexts for their work, through

frameworks of “colonisation” and comparative colonialism (see papers in

Birmingham et al 1988; and see Allen 1973; Jack 1985;Birmingham 1990b) and

more recently Susan Lawrence has initiated work on the British Diaspora (1999).

In recent years the World Archaeological Congress has also been an important


vehicle in promoting global perspectives in historical archaeology (Torrence and

Clark 2000; Funari et al 1999). This research however, which is overwhelmingly

produced through Australian historical archaeology’s small academic sector, has

had little visible impact on the practice of heritage. The idea of a globally linked

past would, I suggest, alter broadly perceived beliefs about Australia’s Anglo-

Celtic history, dominated by “the tyranny of distance”. Highlighting Sydney’s past

as a cosmopolitan, colonial trading port was in fact one of the concerns of the

Museum of Sydney, on the site of first Government House, which I will discuss in

Chapter 6 (Gibson 1996).

Culture History

I discussed in Chapter One Eriksen’s comment that the notion that cultural identity

is continuous is anthropologically contentious, and in fact the concept might be

seen as “an ideological child of the age of nationalism” (Eriksen 1993: 96).

Heritage is based on a foundational belief that identity is historically “created” and

endowed, that individual identities are the sum of their historical parts. As I

discussed in relation to Port Arthur in Chapter 4, the question of the “convict

contribution” to Australian identity has fascinated many Australian writers from

Robert Hughes to Peter Carey, Christopher Koch, Miriam Dixson and many more

(Dixson 1999: 106). Crucial to the process of valuing Australia’s historical

archaeological heritage was the concept that historical archaeology would provide

better understandings of cultural identity (Bickford 1981; Birmingham and Jeans

1983; Birmingham 1983; Connah 1988; Temple 1988). Within this context the

relationship between historical archaeological material and questions about cultural

identity were not theorised, but seen as fundamental and implicit. In view of this,

what has seemed to some to be an inexpert and untheorised archaeological practice

could, in this light, and in view of its emergence within the context of heritage

discourse, also be seen as “culture historical” archaeology (see for instance Trigger

1989: 162).


As I discussed in Chapter 2, culture history is often thought of more as a

methodology than a theory (Jones 1997: 24), and has been considered by many

critics to be particularly “at risk” for subscription into nationalist agendas

(Rowlands 1995; Trigger 1989; Jones 1997; Ucko 1995a). Such risk has been

identified as culture history’s materialist definition of culture and culture change,

as well as its positivist approach to a value free “archaeological record”. Culture

historical archaeology also links artifacts to cultural identities in an

unproblematised way.

Heritage, especially in its state aligned forms, such as the National Estate, is based

upon exactly the same theories, which must be seen as a result of nationalist

discourses that propose a shared identity based on history. I suggest that historical

archaeology in Australia was founded, quite simply, on the premise that material

remains could reveal information about “Australian” culture and cultural change.

This was the basic premise of archaeology within the context of heritage.

Therefore the siting of remains within an historic or thematic framework, their

description and recording for the future, was a “natural” way of getting on and

doing archaeology (Ucko 1995a: 11). However, from the 1960s and 70s, overlaid

upon this fundamental tenet of culture history were the influential theories of

functionalism and the New Archaeology.

Functionalism and New Archaeology

Historical archaeology’s implicit theoretical foundations were characterised by its

context within heritage and the seemingly natural concepts and methods of culture

historical archaeology. However a functionalist view of society, centred on

technological change as an indicator of social change, was overlaid on these basic

premises to bring them within contemporary archaeological concepts of scientific

rigour (Lydon 1995b). These concepts were drawn from functionalism,

structuralism and the approaches of the New Archaeology, which were promoted

by Australian historical archaeologists in the 1980s to help re-dress what was then

perceived as historical archaeology’s failure to develop interpretive theories which


went beyond “historical supplementation” (Birmingham and Jeans 1983; Murray

1982; Murray and Allen 1986).

Trigger and Wylie have both discussed how the methods of the New Archaeology

aimed to establish serious, scientific credentials for archaeology within societies

that, since the Second World War, had come to value science as their most

important agent for progress and social improvement. Within this framework,

history became a soft option, an unprovable set of speculations. New Archaeology

therefore sought to distance archaeological practice from history and link with the

greater prestige and funding sources attributed to science (Trigger 1989; Wylie

1989). So the appeal to functionalist theory had a socio-cultural as well as a

scientific context. Australian historical archaeologists may have seen in this kind

of scientific theory the opportunity to establish a superior status for historical

archaeology as a discipline.

The use of the hypothetico-deductive method of confirmation for instance, was

used to impose a rigorous scientific reasoning process into historical

archaeological interpretation (Birmingham and Jeans 1983). However this also had

the effect of distancing historical archaeology from the more hermeneutic practices

of history and masking the complexity of the inferential links made between

observable and non-observable data (Wylie 1993; Murray 1985). The concepts of

the New Archaeology, which centre on the notion of value free data, have also had

a significant impact on the characterisation of archaeological evidence within the

Australian heritage management framework. In particular, as I have mentioned

above, positivist concepts of objective, archaeological data are implicit in heritage

management legislation and procedures (and see Smith 2000). Although

archaeological data is now generally understood by archaeologists to be “theory

laden”, or culturally constituted, this concept does not fit well into environmental

resources based legislation that relies upon empirical, bio-physical style

methodologies for management and conservation.


The much discussed theoretical model of 1980s historical archaeology, the “Swiss

Family Robinson”, was proposed by Birmingham and Jeans in 1983 (Birmingham

and Jeans 1983; and for comment see Bairstow 1984a; 1984b; Murray 1985;

Lydon 1995b). This model proposed to explain the process of colonisation through

phases of exploration, learning and development. It was based on environmental

perception theory which was then tied to a range of concepts concerned with

economic development. The Swiss Family Robinson model’s concentration on

technological innovation linked it strongly with Australian colonialist, nationalist

history writing focusing on the progressive “mastery of the land” – peopling it,

making it useful through industry and agriculture - the idea that land settlement and

pastoral expansion were the activities through which men made the nation (Lydon

1995b). Further, even though Birmingham and Jeans espoused the use of

established historical frameworks, primarily geographic/economic histories, as

well as World Systems Theory, the functionalist program, and the hypothetico-

deductive framework in particular, proved to be problematic when dealing with the

immense empirical complexity of the historic period. The hypothetico-deductive

approach could lead to the creation of hypotheses which oversimplified the historic

context of the sites investigated and limited the interpretation of archaeological

remains to mainly technological issues and taphonomic questions (see for instance

Connah 1986; 1994).

Damaris Bairstow argued that Australian historical archaeology must look to the

specifics of Australian history to develop a nationally distinctive practice, free

from the pervasive influence of American cultural imperialism in the form of

imported theoretical agendas (Bairstow 1984a). Bairstow argued for a program

based on inductive reasoning rather than what she calls the “American style”

hypothetico-deductive method. Bairstow’s idea that the H – D method was

imperialistically imposed upon the Australian context, by the dominance of

American archaeological/scientific discourse, was critiqued in detail by Murray

(1985). He recognised Bairstow’s argument as being based upon nationalistic

objectives rather than on a well considered review of the applicability of the H – D

model for historical archaeology. Bairstow appealed for the development of


nationally distinctive theory to enable issues of national significance to be dealt

with. In her discussion of potential “models” for colonisation her central concern is

with understanding the true nature and development of the “Australian Ethos” and

how this understanding might be used as an explanatory tool in Australian history.

In the term “Australian Ethos” Bairstow is following Ward (1958), and the radical

nationalist explanation for the development of the Australian character by working

men who developed the “skills” to cope with Australia’s bush. Bairstow also writes

of Australia and America as two clearly bounded, separate, historical and cultural

entities. However both the present and the histories of these two continents are far

more complex and intertwined than nationally defined histories of linear

development will allow (Murray 1985). It is interesting however, that while

Bairstow’s critique of the H – D model springs from an essentially nationalistic

perspective, which glosses over critical theoretical and historical contexts, it did

draw out what was to be a continuing conflict between historical archaeological

theory and its context within the heritage management framework, and more

generally, with perceptions of what the community wanted to know about its past.

As I discuss below, it was frustration with the dry, reductive accounts of

functionalism which encouraged historical archaeologists in the 1990s to

reconsider Australian historical archaeology’s relationship with history. The

prominence of articles reviewing the progress of historical archaeology and

bemoaning its lack of products which had some meaning to the broader

community, relate I suggest, to the tension created between functionalist theory’s

innate anti-historicism, and the theoretical basis for archaeology’s place within the

discourse of heritage (see for instance Megaw 1984, Murray and Allen 1986;

Temple 1988; Egloff 1994). As I have outlined, this basis was constructed through

the linking of a material heritage to a historically continuous identity. The

generalising aims of functionalist theory fitted within the framework of broad

brush economic and national narratives, but did not provide the intimate histories

of identity which had been a central motivation for the valuing of historical

archaeological sites and relics.


Archaeology and History: Postmodern Relationships

The difficult relationship between Australian historical archaeology and history

(see for instance S. Jack 1993; Jack 1993; Karskens and Thorpe 1992; Karskens

1996) is partly a result of this very influential grounding of historical

archaeological practice, and many of its current practitioners, in the essentially

antihistorical archaeological methodologies of functionalism. This has always been

strangely at odds with the requirements of the heritage management context, which

aims to link the past to the present. Ann Bickford for instance, welcomed the

participation of archaeology in the investigation of identity and Australianess,

attributing to historical archaeology a crucial role in determining authenticity

within heritage interpretation (1981). She also accorded historical archaeology a

special purpose in the investigation of class and gender issues because of its ability

to look at evidence beyond the written records produced by dominant social groups

(Bickford 1981; 1993). Frustration with the perceived lack of interest in

interpretive history in historical archaeology prompted Karskens and Thorp in

1992 to propose a new framework for urban archaeology in which history and

archaeology could be integrated into a seamless narrative (Karskens and Thorp

1992). Karskens has continued to follow this approach in her more recent historical

archaeological studies of Sydney’s Rocks district (Karskens 1997; Karskens 1999).

Her aims in integrating these two data sets were to allow archaeology to participate

in addressing questions of social historical importance and also to animate the

previously arid and unemotional accounts produced by historical archaeologists.

Karskens’ theoretical orientation towards Deetzian soft structuralism and feminist

narrative and story telling techniques also responded to identity issues in

Australian society. She used archaeological artefacts to illustrate stories about

individual, family and community identities in the past (Karskens 1997; 1999).

This is a compatible role for archaeology within the heritage framework.

In Lydon’s work on the Chinese in Sydney at the turn of the century she constructs

her study in part to address the historical context of one aspect of the race relations

debate in Australia, and in particular the present debate about revisionist or "black


armband" history which I discussed in Chapter 1 (Lydon 1999; 2000). As opposed

to Karsken’s integrationist approach to historical and archaeological data Lydon

chose techniques of juxtaposition and collage to draw out discontinuities and

conflicts between data and interpretations. Karskens and Lydon’s work are

examples of the theoretical re-orientation of historical archaeological work in the

1990s towards postprocessual theories which offer opportunities for a more

interpretive archaeology, one which will link current communities to the past and

respond to present issues in the community. Hodder has also linked the rise in

interpretive archaeologies to broader cultural interest in heritage and the

production of “heritage centres” which, unlike traditional museums, involve the

public in an experiential narrative representing the past. (Hodder 1992: 193) These

theoretical approaches have been adopted by Australian historical archaeologists

because they offered opportunities to address issues of concern and interest in

Australian society: multiculturalism, feminism, indigenous history and other forms

of identity politics.

The historical and experiential basis of national identity, as I have outlined, has

always been a central concern for historical archaeology, although dealt with in

more or less reflexive ways. Writing in the 1980s Anne Bickford and Damaris

Bairstow both clearly linked the practice of historical archaeology with

nationalistically oriented objectives: investigating identity and developing a

nationally distinctive practice.

It is clear that the recent directions in Australian historical archaeology that have

been outlined so far, such as interpretative, social archaeologies, community

archaeology and archaeologies of diaspora, combine aspects of postmodernism

with heritage and culture history, in the premise that the past is constitutive of

present identities.


Conclusions: Australian Historical Archaeology?

In Chapter 4 I suggested that nationalist discourse was obviously involved in

emphasizing the need for nationally distinctive ways of working and thinking. To

take this consideration of the genealogy of historical archaeological thought a little

further I have looked at the main journal for historical archaeology in Australia,

Australasian Historical Archaeology, between 1983 (when it was first published)

and 1999. This is not the only journal which publishes historical archaeological

research in Australia, but it is the only journal which specialises in this subject. I

looked at the journal in terms of the subject themes represented by the articles

(Figure 5.7), which I will discuss below, and also the patterns of citation. To do

this I classified all citations into the broad categories of theory, case studies and

contextual history, geography and so on. I omitted primary source documents from

the analysis. I then attributed a “nationality” to the citations, based on the main

known working location of the author. I realise such an attribution may often be

contentious, but my aim was simply to get a better picture of how articles in this

journal located their work in a broader context. In response to the thread in the

literature concerning the “American domination” of theory in Australian historical

archaeology, I identified “American”, “British” and “Australian” citations, and

grouped most others into regions, such as Asian and European. The category

“Other Settler” was used to characterise citations from settler nations like Canada

and New Zealand.

Figure 5.3 shows the break down of total citations. This showed that numbers of

citations of theory were, on the whole, low. Figure 5.1 gives a break down of this

category. Citations of “American “ theory indeed dominate at 47%, the next largest

category is “British” theory at 23%, then “Australian” theory at 21%. In contrast

however, American case studies, shown in Figure 5.2, made up only 11% of total

citations of case studies. Australian case study citations dominate at 53%, followed

by “Other Settler” case studies, mostly from New Zealand, at 17%, and British

case studies at 14%.


I also broke down the citations according to some of the subject themes

represented in the journal. As can be clearly seen, once again, in Figure 5.7,

Industrial themes dominate the journal overwhelmingly. This category showed a

similar reliance on theory derived from the United States, then Britain, followed by

Australia (Figure 5.4). Citations in Urban and Ethnicity/Class/Gender themes, what

we could call “social archaeology”, showed slightly higher numbers of theory

citations including European Theory, which was absent from Industrial themes

(Figure 5.5). This theme also included a high number of citations of British case

studies.

My aim in this analysis is not to reinforce these national categories, and certainly

not to advocate that Australians develop more “home grown” theory. I did want to

clarify how this group of historical archaeological researchers located their work.

This analysis shows that this research has been largely self-referencing in national

terms, through the citation of Australian case studies, while drawing heavily on

functionalist and structuralist theory developed in the United States. Citations in

Critique/History of Archaeology themes (Figure 5.6), show that Australian

historical archaeology (again denoted through the high number of case study

citations), has been historicised in the context of the region to some extent, through

the inclusion of New Zealand within the purview of the journal (denoted by the

high number of Other Settler Case Study citations). Comparison with Figure 5.2

however, shows that this tendency is specific to this theme only, and does not

apply to the more subject specific areas of research.

In this section I have worked through five areas of theory which can be unpacked

from Australian historical archaeological thought. Some of these areas have not

been understood as theory as such, such as culture historical methodologies,

heritage themes and significance assessment, but I argue that they have formed

foundational concepts for the production of historical archaeological knowledge,

especially for practice in the heritage management field. I have not argued that

nationalism or nationalist thought has a stranglehold on historical archaeological

interpretation, but that nation-centred thinking has been involved in the


constitution of concepts of historical importance, of cultural significance and in the

notion of historically continuous identities. More overt expressions of cultural

nationalism have been involved in the perceived need for nationally distinctive

theory and practice, in overstating the coherence and separateness of the national

subject and also in giving substance and historical form to the concept of national

identity. Finally, through the device of a self-referential practice, self consciously

referencing American “theory”, but not American research or case studies more

generally, the notion of a national discipline has been reinforced.

Interpretive Themes

A review of historical archaeological interpretations in Australia has led to the

identification of a number of thematic structures which resonate with nationalist

discourses and narratives about Australia’s past. What I go on to outline is not a

case of archaeological interpretation blindly following dominant nationalist

narratives, although there are examples of that, but more of subtle entwinements of

interpretation with naturalised, taken for granted structures within discourses about

history, identity and landscape. This is neither a comprehensive, nor objective

review of the literature, my aim has been to draw out structures of meaning which

are of interest to my exploration of archaeology and nationalism as entwined

discourses.

As I foreshadowed in Chapter 1, discourses that link the Australian landscape with

both the events of colonial history as well as with the development of national

identity, are particularly distinctive and prominent in the Australian cultural

tradition. Kay Schaffer, in her analysis of this landscape based cultural tradition,

showed how categories of identity are constituted through the embedding in

language and social practice of the symbolic codes which inscribe difference

(Schaffer 1988). Schaffer drew on Helene Cixous’ concepts of the masculine

economy of binary meaning structures: masculine/feminine, same/other,

nature/culture and so on (Cixous 1976), to investigate ways symbolic structures in

the nationalist code were transmitted and re-enacted through Australian culture.


Schaffer claimed that “patriarchal, imperial, colonial, bourgeois and national

ideologies intersect and support each other” in their construction of the land as the

feminine “other” in Australian historical and literary traditions (Schaffer 1988: 13).

Many critics have noted that nationality, like gender, is shaped by what it opposes,

relying on some concept of alterity for its definition (Parker et al 1992: 5). While

the nation is some times symbolically imagined as a woman, Britannia for

instance, nationality tends to be imagined as a “homosocial form of male bonding”

(Mosse 1985; Anderson 1983 and for Australia see for instance Lake 1992; Reekie

1992; Curthoys 1993a). As I argued in Chapter 1 the landscape itself is constructed

as the feminine other in the Australian nationalist tradition and this has had

significant implications for the woman as subject in historical and national

discourse.

Town and Country

Art and literature which valorised men’s lives in the bush in the 19th century, for

the purpose of allegory supporting a political standpoint, has been taken as

evidence of historical experience, as a reflection of reality rather than as a

construction for a political purpose. In addition to this, the colonialist history of the

“progressive mastery” of the land – peopling it, making it useful through industry

and agriculture, has dominated accounts of Australia’s national development. This

land - centred construction of the past can be shown to have operated through

historical archaeological interpretations in a number of ways, but also significantly,

there are indications that archaeologists have responded to issues arising from the

contexts of their research, both social and material, to highlight complexity and

ambiguity in the past.

Graham Connah’s book ‘Of the Hut I Builded’: The Archaeology of Australia’s

History (1988), is an example of how a variety of archaeological research and

interpretation may be structured within a framework which tacitly reproduces

colonialist and nationalist constructions of the past (Connah 1988). Connah’s book


occupies an important and central position to a consideration of Australian

historical archaeology, because it remains the only text which purports to give an

overview of historical archaeological research in Australia. As such it is prescribed

reading for undergraduates studying historical archaeology and has shaped

perceptions of what are legitimate areas of research to be pursued within the field.

The purpose of my discussion of this text is to analyze its discursive context, not to

criticize it for omissions identified with the hindsight of a decade of revisionist

history, and in the light of a significantly different intellectual climate.

This book was published with assistance from the Australian Bicentennial

Authority, a body that funded a host of history and heritage related projects to

mark 200 years of colonization in 1988, and in this light one of its aims is to

celebrate the material evidence of Australia’s recent past:

“Australia’s colonial achievement has not vanished without leaving traces, those

traces are all around us and it is the archaeologist’s task to recover from them an

understanding of past life...” (Connah 1988: 5).

The book instantly invokes the mythology of the bush by taking the Henry Lawson

poem, Reedy River, as its leitmotif. This poem recalls many of Lawson’s prominent

themes concerning man’s insignificance in the Australian landscape, its

intractability and dual status as desired object and hated foe. Three of the book’s 8

chapters are devoted to industry and rural production. Although whaling is

discussed briefly in one chapter, maritime industry and trade economies, which

account for critical, early transferals of capital into the colony, do not feature as a

theme of this land-centered narrative. Evidence from maritime archaeology,

dealing only with the wrecks of Dutch East Indiamen, is confined to a chapter

dealing with “pre-colonial contact” and is seen as an interesting introduction to the

real business of colonisation from 1788. The evidence of the Dutch East India

Company shipwrecks is termed “pre-colonial” by Connah because they predate the

settlement of Australia by the British. This highlights his understanding of

colonisation as settlement, rather than as a complex phenomenon including

cultural, trade and military activities. This is a clear example of the implications of


imposing the understanding of Australia as a potential nation, upon the complex

history of colonial activities in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The continent of

Australia was certainly implicated in European imperial politics from well before

this date.

This text places historical archaeological research within a framework based upon

the popularly understood themes of nationalist history: the centrality of rural

expansion in the process of founding the nation, the importance of industrialization

and the hostility of the environment to these processes. The rhetorical style of the

text reinforces this thematic structure: for instance, the settlement of Sydney is

where the “birth of a new nation can be observed from the archaeological

evidence”, while convicts are celebrated for their “vital role in the settlement of

this nation” (Connah 1988: 35, 62). The implication of considering the archaeology

of early Sydney as foundational to the nation, is clearly a case of back-projecting

the nation onto a complex colonial and imperial history. For instance, the first

annexation of Australia clung to the eastern coast, integrating Sydney in a colonial

adventure that in the minds of some, included the adjacent Pacific islands for as far

as Tahiti. (Crowley 1974: 48) The continent nation was not a foregone conclusion

in 1788. In Connah’s text the idea of colonialism is not problematised because the

term “colonisation” is used synonymously with settlement, and settlement in turn

is understood as the process of nation building.

Although research in urban archaeology (focusing on domestic sites) and in contact

archaeology (the archaeology of contact between settler and Indigenous people), is

referred to in the final chapter of the book, much of this research existed in

unpublished reports at the time of writing. The book also reflects a preference for

the analysis of structural and technological remains, rather than artefact or material

culture analysis. Specialist artefact studies in Australian historical archaeology, as

Lawrence has comprehensively documented, have only rarely been published

(Lawrence 1998b). The overall themes of Connah’s text, land settlement and

industry, are also incompatible with the social issues addressed by urban

archaeology and material culture studies, which may be why attempts were not


made to address what was then a burgeoning interest in the urban archaeology of

the 19th century (Lydon 1993).

Just how accurately does Connah’s emphasis on land settlement and rural and

industrial subjects reflect the practice of Australian historical archaeology? Figure

5.7 shows the thematic analysis of the contents of Australasian Historical

Archaeology, which I introduced earlier. This mirrors Connah’s book in that it is

overwhelmingly focused on industrial subjects, with far fewer examples of case

studies on urban or social themes. What is of real interest to me here is that

Connah’s book indeed reflects the thematic shape of this journal, but this is a

journal in which Connah has been heavily involved – acting as its editor for 50%

of the issues. I want to contrast this picture with a statement published by Ian Jack

in 1996 :

“But alongside these industrial sites, a wider diversity of habitation sites,

particularly in the major cities, have been investigated... The dominance of

urban over rural sites has come largely from another element in the historical

archaeology scene. Heritage issues have become much more widely respected in

Australia over the past twenty years” (Jack 1996: 24 my emphasis).

Jack is referring here to large numbers of historical archaeological excavations on

urban sites, mostly in Sydney. Very few of these excavations have been published

in Australasian Historical Archaeology, most in fact are documented in

unpublished reports. This confirms that Connah’s subject: The Archaeology of

Australia’s History, was constituted through both his interests as a scholar and the

aim of the book to celebrate both Australia’s Bicentennial and the discipline of

historical archaeology. The main journal of historical archaeology, as a body of

literature, also reflects a similar picture. Both Connah’s book and the journal

occupy central positions in disciplinary literature because they represent two of its

most readily available, published reference sources. In this case this has given a

higher profile to research structured through nationalist narratives, than to work

which foregrounds a wide range of other interpretive issues.


Success and Failure

Colonisation is underpinned by an understanding of settlement as transformative:

wasteland into productive land; nature into culture. As I discussed in Chapter One,

the construction of the Australian “landscape” as hostile has its roots in the

imagery of the late 19th century and was promulgated through popular historical

narratives and political discourse. This discourse emphasised the “battle” against

nature as the only battle involved in the process of building the settler nation.

Turner demonstrates that a common element to both literary and political traditions

in Australia is their identification with the “battler”, the construct of the

hardworking, ordinary Australian, battling the hostile environment or economic

forces outside their control. This is true of Australian political rhetoric today,

where both sides of politics claim to act for the “battler”. The conservatives

identifying with the rural tradition, and the Labor movement with the urban

working man. The currency in contemporary culture of the “battler” construction

re emphasises the idea of Australian nature as resistant to economic progress and

thus the advancement of the nation. Griffiths has shown how successive Australian

governments ignored advice on the nature of arid inland environments and

continued to promote the spread of settlement on the basis of “national and racial

anxiety” (Griffiths and Robin 1997: 11). Nationalistic rhetoric therefore construed

the Australian environment as hostile, rather than the policies of government as

wrong headed or as simply able to ignore human suffering in order to achieve

political ends. Ann Curthoys claims that attraction to failure and defeat is a crucial

aspect of Australian national identity, giving rise to powerful victimological

narratives which, like those of many other nations like Israel, Canada or the United

States, focus on the settler as victim, rather than beneficiary of colonisation

(Curthoys 1999a: 2).

Within historical archaeological interpretation, the idea of the “battle” to settle the

land and make it productive, has generated a marked tendency to consider sites and

landscapes in terms of success or failure in this “battle”. Studies carried out in the

1970s and 80s aimed to establish a field of interest for the emerging practice of


historical archaeology and, as I discussed in earlier chapters, their focus was

solidly on the abandoned relics of agricultural and industrial technology

(Birmingham et al. 1979; Birmingham et al. 1983). Abandoned rural and industrial

sites were also under threat from decay, expanding urban settlement and modern

industry, so the recording of such places was also seen as a conservation

imperative. Obviously research on sites still in operation is more problematic, and

although examples can be found, they are less dominant. Abandoned rural and

industrial sites now form an important research genre, or field of interest, in

Australian historical archaeology, as has been shown by the number of case studies

published in Australasian Historical Archaeology. Rural sites, removed from the

time pressures associated with the pace of urban redevelopment, also suit the

academic far better in terms of scheduling successive seasons of fieldwork

separated by periods of writing and analysis (see for instance Birmingham and

Wilson 1994; Connah 1978; 1994 1998a; Murray 1988, Lawrence 1998b; 2000;

Allison 1998).

Industrial sites have been interpreted within a predominantly economic framework,

such as the Swiss Family Robinson Model proposed by Birmingham and Jeans in

1983. This also predisposes interpretation towards the success/failure question

(Birmingham and Jeans 1983). In this area, archaeologists have effectively

established a circular and self-perpetuating relationship between the myth of the

hostile environment and the battle to establish the nation, and the research that

seeks to examine it. Abandoned and therefore notionally unsuccessful enterprises

are sought out in order to explain their failure. While individually these case

studies often provide insightful answers to this question, the fact that success/

failure becomes a self evident structuring device in interpretation, with the greater

weight of evidence falling on the side of failure, means that some archaeological

research has reproduced the idea that the environment in Australia is “hostile” and

the intent of colonisation benign.

The success/failure “model” has also been employed more broadly, to rural estates

as the material evidence of individual career aspirations for instance (see for


instance Connah 1998a; Wilson 1988) and to the study of abandoned settlements.

In “Of the Hut I Builded”, Connah devotes a chapter to the archaeology of failed

settlements, sites which have held obvious fascination for historical archaeologists,

not least as early remains undisturbed by later development. One of the examples

reviewed in this chapter is the military outpost of Victoria, Port Essington, in

Arnhem Land, northern Australia, which was the subject of a detailed study by Jim

Allen in the 1960s (Allen 1969). Allen’s interpretation of this site is as a

“successful strategic maneuver rather than a failed attempt at colonization”(Allen

1973: 44). While Connah refers to Allen’s interpretation, he further concludes that

“strategic and political considerations were not a sufficient basis on their own for

colonial success” (Connah 1988: 49). This suggests a moral difference between the

motives for establishing a settlement which are purely “strategic” and “political”

and motives which are described as a “genuine interest in colonisation”(Connah

1988: 49, my emphasis). As pointed out earlier, in this terminology colonisation is

synonymous with nation building, while strategic and political aims appear to be

associated more with protecting the selfish interests of remote imperial authorities.

Here the success/failure concept invokes not only the idea of battling the hostile

environment, but also the understanding of colonisation as progress towards an

outcome of meaning and value, in this case the birth of the nation. This equation is

founded in Enlightenment historical discourse and Judeo-Christian narrative

structures, through which colonisation imagines its successful transformation of

wilderness into useful, productive land (Rose 1999: 8).

I must conclude that the romance of the bush continues to seduce many of those

seeking the essential qualities of the Australian historical experience. Moser has

suggested that Australian prehistory sought its disciplinary identity through the

rigours of field work in the remote outback, archaeologists themselves re-living

Lawson’s promise of masculine fulfillment in the arms of the bush (Moser 1995).

Historical archaeologists, rather than re-living this tradition, have given much

attention to explaining it.


No place for a woman

Wylie has discussed how strong personal and political commitments to feminist

issues led American women archaeologists to address the implications of

androcentric theory, interpretations, practices and methodologies in their work as

archaeologists (Wylie 1992). In Australian historical archaeology there is evidence

that it was not only this external political commitment which lead to interest in

feminist theory, but also the material evidence of urban archaeology in particular,

with its focus on domestic spaces and artefacts, which drew archaeologists into

womens lives in the past and the construction of gender roles in the 19th century.

Historical archaeology’s concentration on rural work and industry continued to

tacitly reproduce the idea of Australia as “Manzone Country” (Summers 1975 and

see Lydon 1995b). Its focus on pioneer technology and the success or failure of

technological processes perpetuated an almost tacit understanding that this was the

work which made the nation, and it was man’s work. Rowley has demonstrated the

centrality of the idea that it was men’s work on the land, and their battle with the

hostile environment, that created the nation through the opening up of the land

(Rowley 1993: 187).

This alternative thread in historical archaeological research has come from within

the heritage management industry, rather than from the academy. The creation of

legislation protecting historical archaeological “relics”, particularly in NSW in

1977, saw a gradual growth in compliance which resulted in numerous, large scale

excavations of urban sites and neighborhoods (see for instance Lydon 1993; 2000;

Karskens 1997; 1999, and in Melbourne, Mayne and Lawrence 1998).

Archaeological work on urban sites could only occur within the heritage

management framework. For the obvious reason of the economic value of inner

city land, such sites are never likely to be available for planned, long term research

work carried on within the timetable of the university calendar. So although there

was an explosion in urban excavation done by consulting archaeologists in the

1980s and 1990s this was only rarely participated in by academic researchers. (but


see Birmingham 1990a). Because of the exigencies of the consulting

archaeological industry and the lack of full time researchers, material from urban

sites was very slow to be published and its usefulness and potential vigorously

debated (Egloff 1994: 4; Karskens and Thorp 1992; Mackay 1996). For instance,

the fact that these sites produced such huge numbers of artefacts, meant that

artefact analysis was an overwhelming and expensive proposition and it took some

years for a grounding in skills in analysis, and orientation in material culture

theory, to be established in the professional community (Birmingham 1990a;

Lawrence 1998b). Thus, real results from urban archaeology were slow to surface,

leaving the impression of the practice, gained through its published literature alone,

as overwhelmingly concerned with rural, industrial and technological subjects.

The material evidence of urban life did encourage archaeologists into partnerships

with social historians in order to interpret and interrogate the material culture (see

for instance Karskens and Thorp 1992; Karskens 1999; Mayne and Lawrence

1998). I suggested above that doing urban archaeology lead to a new focus on the

domestic sphere and a reconsideration of the roles of women as consumers,

mothers, homemakers, publicans, and boarding house keepers. It is also evident

that growing interest in feminist theory had a major impact in defining the key

fields of interest for urban archaeologists (Lydon 1995a; Karskens 1997). Lydon

has explained historical archaeology’s tardiness in adopting feminist themes in

terms of its dominant theoretical approaches, which favored economic and

technological explanatory frameworks (Lydon 1995b). The evidence I present here

suggests that nationalist discourse also shaped the practice, reflecting its particular

concerns with settling the land, the hostile environment, the bushman as hero, and

the absence of women as subjects within this discourse.

The way in which urban archaeology raised the issues of women’s lives, of

ethnicity and the relationship between identity and material culture, has now

provided evidence that shows the “flatness” of dominant nationalist discourses. By

“flatness” I mean the homogenising effect that narratives of unity and progress

have on the heterogeneity of lives and social relationships in the past (Lydon


1996). Susan Lawrence, on the other hand, has chosen to meet the nationalist myth

head on, and has used material culture to test the evidence concerning men’s lives

in the bush (Lawrence 1998a; 2000). Lawrence takes the construction of the lone

bushman, and rather than disproving its basis in reality, shows that reality was

likely to have been far more complicated. She sheds light on the social and sexual

tensions of 1890s society by demonstrating conflicting constructions of

masculinity apparent in the context of archaeological and historical evidence. A

further point of departure for Lawrence’s work on bush sites, is that she

approaches industry in its social context. In this way she addresses issues raised by

revisionist social and feminist historians, as well aspects of material culture theory,

revealing that; “Whalers, miners and pastoral workers were physically remote from the main

stream of society, but they were none the less integrated with it. A habitus that

incorporated domestic ideology, and domesticated masculine identity, informed

the lives of men, and sometimes women, in the bush”(Lawrence 1998: 5).

Confronting Colonialism

I briefly discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 that while historical archaeology rarely

considered issues of contact between indigenous people and settlers through the

1970s and 80s, this subject has boomed in popularity since the mid 1990s (see for

instance Harrison and Patterson 2000). In historical archaeology, understandings of

cultural landscapes have competed with the colonialist construction of the

expanding frontier, which is not simply geographical, but also a major ontological

disjunction between the beginning of history and the end of prehistory (Rose 1999:

9; Fredericksen 2000). In addition to this, the idea of “pristine wilderness” (that is

nature unaltered by humans), is so strong in Australian culture that conservationists

and land managers still struggle with the idea that most of the continent is a

cultural landscape, shaped by a long history of human occupation. Past approaches

to studying prehistoric sites and landscapes, and settler landscapes as evidence of

agricultural and technological processes, had not provided any framework within

which to approach what must, in many cases, have been shared Aboriginal and

European landscapes. In most contact studies, the point had been to assess the


impact of settler culture upon Aboriginal behavior and technology. In the narratives

of settler history, settlers are impacted upon by the environment, but rarely by

Aboriginal culture. The assumption was that colonial activities overwrite and

obliterate indigenous cultural landscapes, that the impact of colonialism was fatal

and total. More recent approaches however foreground knowledge sharing,

Aboriginal agency and creativity and cultural hybridisation.

The division in historical archaeology between black and white histories had been

reinforced by the fact, as pointed out by Colley and Bickford, that the two

“heritages” have often been protected under different legislation (1996). In

compliance archaeology therefore one set of consultants may have looked at

Aboriginal cultural heritage, while another group were employed to look at settler

heritage. Therefore, in day to day consulting work, there had been few arenas in

which the cultural landscape of colonialism, the historic period, could be studied in

a holistic way. These disciplinary and legislative boundaries have now been

recognised as colonial artefacts in themselves, a result of seeing Aborigines as a

part of the environment and as a people with no history.

Byrne and Egloff have discussed the potential power of contact or Aboriginal

historical archaeology in countering nationalist archaeology and acting for

reconciliation (Byrne 1996: 102; Egloff 1994). In 1994 Egloff claimed that the

Swiss Family Robinson Model, discussed earlier in this chapter, had been a ‘strait

jacket’ for Australian historical archaeology, which promoted the study of

colonisation at the expense of more relevant research areas. Egloff claimed that the

colonial model was only good for ‘coffee table reading’ and suggested that

environmental history and Aboriginal history should replace it as a focus for

historical archaeology (Egloff 1994). I suggest Egloff was reacting more to

historical archaeology’s conservative theorising of colonialism, rather than to the

appropriateness of colonialism as a research focus. The areas which he suggests as

more suitable research themes are obviously also underpinned by colonialism in

terms of their historical formation as subjects.


This is perhaps the clearest area where archaeological theory, as well as practice,

can be seen to have been transformed by current community concerns and identity

politics. The most significant changes in Australian archaeology generally have of

course occurred due to the deconstruction of colonial knowledge in the areas of

Aboriginal prehistory and the codification of ethical standards for archaeologists

working with Aboriginal communities. As part of international interest in the

implications of colonialism, there has been a spate of papers that are mini

manifestoes on how to decolonise Australian archaeology (Pardoe 1992; Head

1996; Colley and Bickford 1996; Head 1998; Byrne 1996). One of the most

prominent proponents of this genre has been Tim Murray (Murray 1992; 1993a;

1993b; 1996a; 1996c; 1996d). Murray’s central claim for the viability of a

postcolonial archaeology is that it would produce knowledge of value to all

Australians. Murray sees archaeology as a discourse which could illuminate a

“shared past”, speak for Australia’s national interests and work towards

reconciliation. He has been criticised by Gelder and Jacobs for aligning his

privileged western knowledge system, archaeology, with the national interest,

therefore casting Aboriginal people, who speak against this form of knowledge, or

deny its worth, as “unAustralian” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 88). In contrast to

Murray’s position Byrne has seen an Aboriginal historical archaeology as a means

to undermine “National” archaeology, aligning postcolonial with postnational

discourse in Australia (Byrne 1996). The position that colonial and nationalist

archaeology has most difficulty in reviewing, is that of the archaeologists’ role as

expert, with a right to speak for the past: “for this discipline then, ethics appear to

begin where the authority of science ends” (Ronayne 1998: 3).

Conclusions: a suitable past?

I concluded Chapter 4 with the question: does a growing rhetoric of inclusiveness

mean that heritage is becoming less nationally defined in terms of concepts of a

bounded, definable national identity and culture? Can we construe historical

archaeology’s current research focus on multiple and hybrid identities, on


Aboriginal history and women’s history for instance, as undermining the construct

of the nation? This diverse body of research has many motives, characterised by

the postmodern acceptance of “present interests” as a structure and rationale for

research.

To provide a shared history is to provide a suitable past for a reconciled,

postcolonial nation. While Murray speaks from the position of an intellectual

within a liberal democracy, committed to improving and continuing the viability of

the nation, Byrne seeks to undermine the coherence of the concept of the nation

and to fragment the construct of a necessary national unity. It is Murray’s position

which is echoed by leading Aboriginal historian Henry Reynolds, who promotes

the need for the single national story (Reynolds 2001). He has underlined this idea

recently by re-publishing his book, With the White People (1990) under the new

name, Black Pioneers (2000), in a desire to incorporate Aborigines as active,

contributing agents, within the mythology of nation building, to which pioneer

myths are central.

Because of this complexity of motives, beliefs and understandings of the nation

and its meaning, it is not possible to say that growing “inclusiveness” in historical

archaeology is leading towards postnational, global or postcolonial ends. In some

cases, as I have just outlined, discourses of shared history are certainly attempting

to redefine the meaning of the national in Australia, but they retain a deep

commitment to the national community. This tends to confirm Rowland’s claim

which I quoted in Chapter 2:

“the expansion of archaeology’s relation to nationalism and ethnicity in the

construction of collective identity seems certain to continue. Partly the

materiality of the archaeological record will ensure this. Partly also the creation

of alternative pasts is increasingly being used to legitimate land claims, ethnic

territories and access to economic resource (Rowlands 1995: 141).

Both nationalist and anti-nationalist approaches to the past in Australia have

created knowledge, perspectives, stories and places which have fluid, contested


and situational meanings - meanings which might be deployed to oppress or

emancipate. Aboriginal historical archaeology has created, and is creating, new

forms of knowledge about the past in Australia, knowledge that can be used in a

range of different ways. The potential for Aboriginal historical archaeology to act

as a new discourse for national unity, based on a “shared” past, is one that will

have to be negotiated by historical archaeologists in the context of the communities

within which they are working.

So what is the significance of the national context for the aspects of historical

archaeological practice discussed in this chapter? The issues outlined above

suggest that “national pride” has motivated some in quests for theoretical

innovation and for ways of escaping the intellectual dominance of the United

States. Heritage has tended to link archaeological interpretations to the themes of

national development, and to particular identity constructs that have some meaning

and resonance for the community today, but are an inaccurate filter to impose

retrospectively on the past. Historical archaeology has been deeply involved in the

gamut of identity politics, some of which relate specifically to the imagination of

the nation and the realisation of a distinctly Australian identity, while others relate

more to “so-called” minority identity politics; concerning women, homosexuals,

children and ethnic groups. These identities also intersect with national identity in

a number of very important ways, but they perhaps have more to do with “global”

(western) understandings of individuality and the link between personal identity

and personal freedom. These interests have motivated archaeologists to utilise

postprocessual theories which aimed to open archaeological interpretation to

concepts of multiple identities.

I have demonstrated the discursive relationship between representations of the land

and the environment in the Australian cultural tradition and the practice of

historical archaeology. The ideology of colonialism constructs the land as a place

of alienation and exile and also as the object of desire in Australia, in return

archaeological research has contributed to historicising and perpetuating this

colonial act of possession. The result of this conceptual circularity is that far from


revealing any disciplinary objectivity, discursive relationships between

archaeology, history and national identity, have in some cases contrived to “create

a reality that they appear to describe” (Schaffer 1988: 171). There is also evidence,

such as the case presented for urban archaeology, that individual practitioners can

break out of this conceptual circularity and that present interests, as well as

archaeological material, can provide an impetus to reconfigure research paradigms.

Chapter 6

Materiality and National Origin Myths

“We may be inclined to regard such (archaeological) traces as more stable, solid

and tangible than memory traces and also as relatively invulnerable to the

discursive play of written text and film. We may even be comforted by the thought

that these physical traces have a concrete existence independent of discourse -

independent of us - and we may imagine their mediated testimony putting solid

ground under us in an age where so little seems solid any more. Perhaps it is for

this reason that we have become so fervent and protective about heritage sites”

(Byrne 1997: 7).

Archaeology is generally understood as the study of material things: traces,

residues, ruins and objects. Materiality, as Byrne alludes to in the quotation above,

has always involved archaeology in the rhetoric of proof, the production of “hard

evidence”. It is this material dimension which means that archaeology, and its

products, participate in discourses about the past in a distinctive manner, in a

manner which is different from history and other non-material forms of social

memory. In this Chapter I will investigate some instances where archaeology has

clearly, and controversially, been involved in broader public discourses about the

nation, identity and the past. In particular, I will investigate how archaeologists

have gone about doing research into places and objects which derive a distinctive

kind of status from their relationship with origin myths or “foundational

moments”: the iconic or fetishised events of national history. What are the

implications of archaeological research into these mythologised subjects of

national history and identity; especially in the context of a settler nation and its

colonial history?

In 1973 Mark Leone declared that one of the main rationales for archaeology was

the “empirical substantiation of national mythology” (Leone 1973:129,133). In his

231

Materiality and National Origin Myths 232

use of the term empirical here, Leone implies that it is both the use of scientific,

empirical methods, as well as the production of tangible, material things, which

can be viewed and experienced by the public, that ensured archaeology occupied

this social role. The faith that the public puts in the authenticity of historic sites

reconstruction based upon archaeological research, and the lack of recognition of

the ideological content of these reconstructions, has been a frequent subject of

Leone’s critique since the 1970s (see for instance Leone 1981a; 1981b ). In their

historical review of nationalism and archaeology in Europe, Diaz-Andreu and

Champion found that the relationship between archaeology and nationalism was

perhaps most evident when archaeology was called upon to provide the

authentication of “national origin myths”. In the European context origin myths are

described as those stories of “ancestry, migration and liberation; of golden ages,

decline and rebirth” (Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996: 21). These European

myths are often found to concern issues of race and ethnicity, the origins of

“peoples” and their cultural symbols. Smith, a theorist of nationalism discussed in

Chapter 1, claims that archaeology has been perhaps “the most useful discipline” to

nationalists, commenting that although archaeology may “locate, classify and date”

artefacts “neutrally”, this neutrality breaks down in the selection of places for

research and in the act of interpretation (Smith 1986: 180). For a secular

intelligentsia, scientific, empirical archaeology was the perfect tool with which to

rehabilitate the power of ancient myths in the modern, rationalist times of the 19th

and 20th centuries (Smith 1986: 181).

Certain events, places or even objects, resonate with mythic themes, making them

“mythopoeic” subjects: the stuff which myths are made of. In Australia, settler

origin myths tend to centre on foundational events, like the “discovery” of the

continent by Cook, and on founding fathers, like Arthur Phillip and Lachlan

Macquarie, prominent colonial governors. Myths have also coalesced around the

development of a national character, linking particular character traits to

originative events, such as the “battler” and the spread of the pastoral industry

across the continent, or the “digger” and the Gallipoli campaign in World War

One. Naming these stories “myths” is not simply intended to question the truth of


their subjects, although aspects of them may be more closely rooted in reality than

others. The term myth is used here to denote the structuring of memories and

histories into narratives which follow mythic themes. The significance of narrative,

as not only structure but also as an interpretive device crucial to the way in which

progress through time has been imagined, was raised in relation to nationalism in

Chapter One. White stresses that narrative is the fabric of a “mythical view of

reality” (White 1987: ix). The term myth also denotes the role of these shared

stories about the past within a community: the myth works to explain why a

community is as it is, or how it was and once again should be (Smith 1986: 191).

In this last respect, the myth can be read as a mode of allegorical diagnosis for its

own time. Following Ann Curthoys, I would argue that the allegorical nature of

historical mythologies is of particular importance in the Australian context as a

settler nation. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, the process of colonial

settlement was rendered through allegorical association with well known European

myths and stories which not only provided a structure for the assembly of histories,

but also provided worthy outcomes: be they tragic failures or happy endings

(Curthoys 1999a: Curthoys 1999b). Curthoys has identified an array of

“victimological” narratives: convicts oppressed by a brutal system; pioneers

defeated by a hostile environment; the Australian digger’s fate as cannon fodder

for the British overlord. These she sees as drawing structure and meaning from the

biblical narrative of Exodus, and the significant outcome of this allegory is that the

settler, as victim, earns the right to the promised land (Curthoys 1999b: 18). Such

Australian narratives are certainly not exceptional, but can be identified in other

settler societies from New Zealand, the United States and Canada, to South Africa

and Israel. Davison has discussed the mythic theme of the “Great Journey” in

relation to America, Australia and New Zealand noting that its structure provides a

good pro-forma for a pluralist sense of nationhood, able to be extended to all those

who voyage to a new land. Foundation myths, on the other hand, also hold great

prominence in settler societies but are drawn from the patriarchal notions of

legitimacy and pedigree which figure so prominently in imperial ideology. Davison

suggests that foundation myths take the figure of the founding father, invest him

with “special visionary qualities and seminal virtues” and then transpose these


virtues onto the place he has founded (Davison 2000: 58). While the case histories

I will go on to discuss in this chapter centre on founding fathers: Cook, Phillip and

Macquarie, a variety of other mythic themes are invoked in the contests and

debates which arise over these things and places. This reinforces the understanding

that these mythic themes may function as allegories for the contests and

fragmentations of concepts of history and identity within a community. For

instance, Curthoys notes that the victim theme has featured in conservative,

feminist, and radical readings of Australian history at different times (Curthoys

1999b: 3). Here I want to focus on myths which relate to the nation and to

particular moments in its founding and maturation, but mythologies such as those I

have outlined may also have specifically local dimensions. Local founders and

pioneers are commemorated upon memorials across rural Australia, while other

fascinating types of Australian settler myths concern children lost in the bush

(Birch 1999:68), and white women held captive by Aborigines (Carr 2001;

Schaffer 1995). Archaeology has frequently been linked with foundation

mythologies at the sites of the earliest European settlement in different regions,

examples are Risdon Cove in Tasmania, Sullivans Bay and Corinella in Victoria,

and Fort Dundas in the Northern Territory, which are all discussed by Connah as

failed or abandoned settlements (Connah 1998:37). Earliest penal settlements, in

NSW in Newcastle and Port Macquarie, in Queensland at Morton Bay, and on

Norfolk Island, have also been archaeologically investigated in the context of

heritage management projects which have emphasized their foundational status for

the history of these regions. It is Sydney however, as the site of Cook’s first

landfall at Botany Bay and Phillip’s motley settlement in 1788, which claims for

itself the seminal role in the parturition of the nation. Mythological birthplaces

abound amongst Sydney’s streets and shores and it is here that my analysis is

primarily sited.

It has recently been suggested that “ …there are no ahistorical subjects in settler

societies, though we argue about the extent to which settlers fetishise particular

foundational moments.” (Neumann et al 1999: XVII). Perhaps the most public

locus for such “arguments” today is the heritage industry. Heritage has become a


means via which communities debate the relative importance of these myths and

legends which sustain a sense of historical, cultural identity. It is a discourse

through which the traditional myths of the powerful are upheld through the

conservation, and some might argue fetishisation, of the material expressions of

their power (Byrne forthcoming). But it is also a location for alternative myth

making, where powerful new myths about the underdogs of history have been

created: in Australia and all over the western world these have included women,

children, slaves, convicts, indigenous people and ethnic minorities.

In Chapter 3, I discussed how discourses of archaeological, heritage and other

cultural values have been constructed around places and objects related to the

historic, colonial and national pasts in Australia since the 1960s. I have argued that

establishing the concept of heritage as a material legacy, requiring expert

management, ensured that archaeology and archaeologists occupied a distinctive

niche in the heritage industry. Historical archaeologists actively sought a particular

role in heritage management as the “arbiters of authenticity”, as champions of a

democratic corrective to the elite aesthetics of the architects. As we saw at Port

Arthur, archaeologists were the stewards of original fabric, constantly challenging

the architects’ interest in reconstruction with the primacy of conserving and

recording surviving evidence. It is clear that, through the development of

increasingly sophisticated modes of scientific and material culture analysis, many

archaeologists saw it as their duty to challenge the myths of history, myths which

the heritage industry might otherwise uncritically perpetuate.

On the other hand, the materiality of relics is the key to the sensory, experiential

and evocative dimension of archaeology. The evocative character of objects from

the past, combined with the concept that an object cannot intentionally embody

bias, are ideas which have a tradition in western literature from at least the

Renaissance, and should be seen as foundational aspects of the modern practice of

archaeology (Andren 1998: 11; Lowenthal 1985: 244; Thomas 1991: 5).

Lowenthal has neatly summarised the hallmarks of “reliquary knowledge”

(Lowenthal 1985: 238- 259). The evocative appeal of historic relics seems to


derive from the fact that they bring the past into the present, suggesting that it has a

connection and a reality for the contemporary world. The perception of the relics’

relative lack of intentional bias obviously seems theoretically or philosophically

naïve, however the physicality of archaeological data remains for many scholars a

limitation upon theoretical relativism and the range of interpretations which might

be accepted by the scholarly community. The ordinary and everyday things from

the past have also been seen as the antidote to history’s focus on the grand and the

great. Small things speak to us of the day to day lives of ordinary people. This

factor has been an immensely important theme in historical archaeology in

Australia, the United States and elsewhere. The archaeological study of recent

periods, where the historic context is rich, is often justified on the grounds that

things can tell us about the people who have no history: slaves, Aborigines,

women, the illiterate and the poor. Also drawn out by Lowenthal is the notion of

the accessibility of the relic, a visit to a historic site or a museum provides an

immediate impression without the conscious effort of reading or study (Lowenthal

1985: 245). Finally, objects have the ability to become imbued with, and

representative of, whole suites of meanings and traditions. This is to say that

archaeological objects attract symbolic roles within culture which are based upon

shared understandings about the past. It has been for reasons relating to these

potential roles for archaeology and archaeological objects that many scholars have

found that the relationship between archaeology and nationalism has been both

profound and under acknowledged. An appreciation of the age, authenticity,

beauty, patina and so on, of an historic object, is often described as an experience

of an objective truth, as an unmediated experience of the past. The construction of

the message imparted by the artefact, and the historical dimensions of the process

which has imbued it with value and meaning, often go unrecognised or simply

undiscussed. Lowenthal defines how relics blur the boundaries between past and

present:

“things thus differ from thoughts and words in their temporal nature. Written

history demarcates the past from the present; verbal tense clearly distinguishes

now from then. But artifacts are simultaneously past and present; their historical


connotations coincide with their modern roles, commingling and sometimes

confusing them…” (Lowenthal 1985: 248).

Things therefore render the past more significant, more palpable, but crucially, not

better known. Each and every response to an object relies upon a memory, a

history and a narrative framework within which it can be sited.

Place and nation

Accepting the fundamental historicism of the nation, places where this history can

be felt or seen are crucial to maintaining a sense of nationhood. Indeed nationalism

is not simply a cultural artefact, but an entwinement of place and culture: what

Bhabha called “living the locality of culture” (Bhabha 1990a: 291). Deconstructing

the colonial imagining of Australian space, and understanding this as a

foundational, ongoing form of colonialism in contemporary culture is the project of

recent Australian spatial histories and cultural studies (see for example Carter

1987; Gibson 1992; Rose 1996; Barcan and Buchanan 1999).

The body of the nation, to which Rose has applied Bahktin’s concept of the

chronotope (“the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied”), is a

cultural coalition of time, space and the narratives which tie them together (Rose

1996: 194). Heritage places, I suggest, are specific, significant examples of “knots”

in the national narrative, places which allow the myths of the past to be read in the

geography of localities. There are several points I want to raise here in the context

of this discussion of archaeology, places and national origin myths. Reflecting

post-enlightenment historicism, mythological narratives of nation are constructed

in terms of a natural, linear development (Smith 1986: 179, 191). Communities and

states are imagined to develop “as if they were extensions of the natural world”;

that is they must be born, grow, mature, degenerate and then be born again (Smith

1986: 196). The other implication of the linear concept of modern time is that

natural development ensures that the past is left behind: the inevitable attachment

is with the future. Archaeology and heritage places therefore become inversions of

this natural order, similar to the way in which Foucault has called libraries and


museums heterotopias (Foucault 1986 and see Hamilakis 2000). As I discussed in

Chapter One however, the nation presents itself as a powerful interpretive device

for the experience of the time/space co-ordinates of the heritage place. Partly this

power derives from the narrative frameworks through which the nation is lived.

Objects and nation

While place is an inseperable aspect of the culture of nationalism, artefacts and

objects have more fluid and migratory relationships with culture and history.

Objects have not, in the past, had a central presence in the symbolic repertoire of

the Australian nation, although this may be changing. The focus in the 2000

Sydney Olympic Game’s opening and closing ceremonies on iconic objects of

suburban life, such as the Hill’s hoist clothes line and the Victa lawn mower,

shows the mythologising of these objects as iconic symbols of 1950s and 60s

suburban life as Australia’s “golden age”. Further, the opening of Australia’s

National Museum in Canberra in 2001, also reveals a story of nation told through

objects in a way which is likely to be influential in decades to come. However,

compared to the rich allegorical and nationalistic associations of the Danish lurs,

the archaeological treasures from the tombs at Vergina or the British crown and

sceptre, objects have not featured strongly in what Kopytoff called a “symbolic

inventory of a society” (Kopytoff 1986:73). The Eureka flag, Ned Kelly’s armour

and the statues of ANZACs found in most towns, are some of the objects that have

become symbols evoking mythopoeic subjects. Objects such as these become

compressed repositories for a range of national traditions that stress aspects of the

past which are important and good:

“In subtle ways they seem to hint that the past goes on. … What is created is a

mythical social prehistory, of which we are the inheritors… . The objects are

therefore used entirely to communicate a particular image of the past or of

desired social virtues, and it is through their abilities to represent the desired

image that they become and remain national symbols – part of the paraphernalia

of popular culture” (Stig Sorenson 1996: 38).


One could add to Stig Sorenson’s analysis the malleability of such symbols and

their ability to be reborn and re-invented by succeeding generations: processes

investigated by Healy (1997) in the case of Eureka, and by Inglis (1998) for the

ANZAC memorials. Smith has claimed that nationalism succeeds as a potent form

of social identity through the selection of symbols which link into traditions that

resonate historically with the community, and that these symbols are more likely to

be re-invented than created anew (Smith 1986: 201). As I discussed in Chapter 1, I

would not agree with Smith’s assessment of how and why such symbols are

important (i.e. deriving from an ethnic core culture), however the process of the

continual re-working of national symbols seems certainly to be the case in

Australia. The bushman, the ANZAC and the “battler” are personifications of

national character which have been re-invented and reborn many times in the art,

literature and journalism of the 20th century. Likewise the image of the convict has

been continually re- worked graduating from a hidden genealogical stain to a

hardworking layer of national foundations.

While the boomerang, shield and other forms of Aboriginal art and material culture

have provided motifs which enjoyed various phases of popularity in the arts and

crafts of settler Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, Aboriginal objects and

material culture have failed to attract broadly symbolic roles in national discourses

(Jones 1992). In the 1940s renowned artist Margaret Preston and anthropologist

Fred McCarthy both advocated the adoption of Aboriginal artistic forms as an

appropriate stylistic vocabulary for a nationally distinctive decorative arts and

architecture (Thomas 1999: 123). In more recent years of course Aboriginal art has

enjoyed a florescence which has been closely tied to nationalism and to other

global and local discourses (Lattas 1990; Thomas 1999). However Aboriginal

archaeological artefacts cannot really be said to have been appropriated into

nationalistic discourses in the way that Greek antiquities have become a source of

authority and superiority for Greek nationalism (Hamilakis 1996), or perhaps as a

more appropriate analogy, the nationalist “applications” of Moari art and artefacts

in New Zealand (Thomas 1999: 96). This is not to say that Aboriginal archaeology

has remained apart from nationalistic discourse in Australia. On the contrary, the


rise of Aboriginal studies and the valuing of the indigenous has been a process

closely intertwined with Australian nationalism. We have seen the stretching back

in time of C14 dates of Aboriginal sites and claims that Aborigines possess the

“oldest civilisation on earth” become a source of national pride (Commonwealth of

Australia 1994:6).

Looking at the sites and objects constructed through archaeological practice, as

well as through other cultural discourses, we can not only see historical

archaeologists engaging in an outward dialogue with the community, but also

observe the ongoing “life” of archaeological sites and artefacts which are

“released” into the public arena. The location for this dialogue and display is often

the museum, where archaeological material is exhibited, or the “historic site”,

designated through the processes of heritage planning and made accessible to the

public in a range of ways. Print and broadcast media are also important public

locales for discussion and debate about the meaning and importance of

archaeological artefacts and sites.

In each of the following case studies we can see archaeological practices

intersecting with national origin mythology in slightly different ways. The

mythological status of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour was well established in the

recent public imagination through the celebration of the bicentenary of Cook’s

landing in 1970. The most recent search for the “real” Endeavour shows

archaeology in its role as the scientifc arbiter of authenticity, the archaeologists

involved being pulled, somewhat unwillingly it seems, into debates about the

meaning of these relics for the nation and how it might best lay claim to their

ownership. In the case history of the first Government House site in Sydney,

archaeology is first witnessed as a public theatre of discovery. The exposure of

these tangible relics of 1788 evoked a unique response from diverse parts of the

community. Following the in situ preservation of the archaeological remains,

archaeology then became one of several competing modes of interpretation of the

place, its very materiality actually challenged in contests over its meaning. The

case of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music sees the remains of humble roads and


drains suddenly launched as symbols of national identity in a startling media

campaign. This case is of interest here because, as opposed to the Endeavour and

the first Government House, the mythic status of which were secure, this is an

example of more creative mythologising, and more spontaneous interpretations of

materiality.

Under the auspices of the contemporary heritage industry, archaeology has become

an authorised dealer in the national sacred. Heritage legislation, as I discussed in

Chapter 4, takes archaeological artefacts and sites out of circulation as

commodities and sacralises them as part of the ever expanding symbols of the

nation. When combined with the established myths of the national past,

archaeology has the effect of authenticating and consolidating the power and

meaning of these myths in the narrative construction of the nation. Archaeology

may also be a site of alternative myth production and a means of opening up the

past to ambiguities and contradictions. In both of these respects the context of

identity production is crucial.

But what does authentication really mean in this context? Greg Dening provides

some clues I believe in a discussion about the creation of historic replicas of two

ships: the Endeavour and the Hokule’a (Dening 1997). The danger of historic re-

enactments, he claims, “is that they tend to hallucinate us into seeing the past as us

in funny clothes” (Dening 1997:34). What is authenticated through the material

manifestation of myth is not so much a sense of authenticity about a particular

interpretation of the past (although I will not discount this effect as important), but

an authentication of our present sense of our selves. As Dening claims, history is

interpreted through modern concepts of individuality and personhood: the cramped

conditions in Cook’s cabin are interpreted through our embodied experience as a

timeless feeling of claustrophobia – one that surely must be natural and not a

construct. The experience with the historic object confirms a sense of progress and

development and a sense of a historically and culturally continuous identity (and

see Holtorf and Schadla-Hall 1999:243). Authenticity itself is an aesthetic carefully


constructed within the national context: history, science and myth combine to

produce that “shiver of contact” with parts of ourselves we long to know.

Relics of Cook: the Quest for the Endeavour

“A cloud of historical consciousness must affect our vision, attributing to

doubtful contours a permanent significance. A more sensuous trace of aircraft

and oil refineries stains the prospect but, with a selective eye, the outlines of what

Cook saw, the rim of the shore on which Bank’s natives remained absorbed in

their own preoccupations, these material facts remain discernable. Botany Bay: if

we believe the name, the place is still recognizable. Or is it?” (Carter 1987: xiii)

When Arthur Phillip arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 the name of James Cook was

already a legend. As Bernard Smith has pointed out, Cook possessed all that was

required to be the perfect Enlightenment hero: rising from humble origins, his

writings masterpieces of rational, empirical matter of factness, not an aristocrat

motivated by power and economic gains, but a man of science motivated by the

quest for knowledge (Smith 1992: 240). Cook’s writings became key texts in

enabling the European imagination to conceive of imperial conquests as

“humanitarian acts of civilisation” (Healy 1997:18). But as the conventional

historiography of the Australian nation would have it, 1788 saw the end of myth on

the Australian continent, and brought it into the secular and rational order of

modern imperial time. Educated men of the First Fleet brought Cook’s descriptions

of Botany Bay with them, but Watkin Tench for one soon found himself doubting

the veracity of Cook’s reports (Carter 1987: 36). No physical traces of Cook’s

passing were found by the First Fleeters, but eventually his legend recovered from

this early disfavour and invisibility, and it has been inscribed on the Australian

landscape, by patriots, by historians, by collectors, and more recently by

archaeologists.

There have been innumerable studies of Cook as both man and myth, and it is not

my aim to add to these here. My focus will be archaeological renderings of


material associated with Cook, and the way archaeology provides the aura of

authenticity for Cook relics which the public, no less than museum curators,

demands to be established. I am particularly inspired in approach by the work of

Chris Healy who has considered, amongst many other themes, the nationalising of

Cook, and the Cook myth not as a legend to be verified or refuted, but as a

“cultural artefact” to be understood in terms of the “forms, rules and desires of and

around social memory” (Healy 1997: 15). Although by no means absent from

histories and literature in the early and mid nineteenth century the Cook myth

experienced an upsurge in popularity in the historical imagination of colonial

patriots in the late 19th century. During this nation building period many historians,

writers and artists were concerned to express the uniqueness of the Australian

landscape and of the Australian character or identity. From the 1860s monuments

to Cook began to be erected, during the 1888 Centenary of the arrival of the First

Fleet, Cook was celebrated as often as its leader, Governor Arthur Philip. By 1899

Captain Cook’s Landing Site at Kurnell had been declared a public reserve (Healy

1997: 37). Around this time the Australian Museum and the Mitchell Library, both

located in Sydney, expanded their collections of Cook memento mori, which

included a lock of his hair encased in a tiny coffin, a spear said to contain a piece

of his leg bone, as well as more prosaic objects such as a waistcoat embroidered by

Mrs Cook (pers.com. Val Attenbrow; National Library of Australia 2001: 60).

Healy has argued that one of the reasons why Cook was promoted as a national

hero and founder was because, unlike Arthur Phillip, he was not only associated

with the colony of NSW, but through his place names, with the length of the east

coast, and was generally credited with the discovery of the entire continent. Nor

was Cook associated with the stain of convictism, but with the far nobler causes of

science and exploration (Healy 1997: 29). Cookomania perhaps reached its zenith

in 1933 when a Melbourne nationalist, Russell Grimwade, purchased a Yorkshire

cottage associated with Cook’s family and transported it for re-erection in Victoria

(Healy 1997: 30). Finally Australia possessed a material and palpable link with the

great man. By the time of the Bicentenary of Cooks landing in 1970 an important

cultural change had occurred in Australia resulting in the transformation of the


value attributed to the material remains of the colonial past. In 1970 American

marine scientists began diving on Endeavour Reef in Queensland, and through the

initial and subsequent projects not only the cannon, but also several tonnes of

kentiledge, stone ballast and other artefacts jettisoned from the Endeavour, were

conserved and eventually accessioned by the National Maritime Museum (pers.

com. Keiran Hosty). Every fragment of corrosion, every exotic stone was collected

and conserved, transformed from mementos and curiosities, which they might have

been earlier in the century, into “scientific evidence” (Figure 6.1). This collection

of artefacts associated with Cook and the Endeavour is constituted differently from

earlier Australian collecting related to Cook. The collection process was now seen

as the concern of the state and the concern of professionals, archaeologists,

scientists and conservators. Professional archaeologists in Australia had begun the

process of de-authorizing amateur artefact collecting by 1970. Shipwreck sites

demanded special scientific and technical skills, and were especially vulnerable to

disturbance through treasure hunting and other activities. The Commonwealth took

up the co-ordination of maritime archaeology with the creation of the Historic

Shipwrecks Act in 1976. However it was the discovery of the Dutch ships, such as

the Batavia and the Vergulde Draek, off the coast of Western Australia in the early

1960s which lead to the amendment of the West Australian Museums Act in 1964

to protect shipwrecks. This lead to the development of skills, personnel and

museums dedicated to this specialist area of archaeology. Bennett has argued that

the Commonwealth “annexation” of this pre-settlement maritime history, and its

amalgamation within the concept of the National Estate, is another form of deep

time anchoring of the national, territorial history (Bennett 1995: 149). It is curious

for instance that the pewter plate left by Dirk Hartog on the coast of (what is now)

Western Australia, and which has been in a museum in Europe for hundreds of

years, is a famous item because it predates British settlement. However, the

foundation plate left by Governor Phillip under the first Government House site in

1788, which was rediscovered in 1899 and lodged in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, is

a very little known object. Maritime archaeology has not been linked with the

myths of national origins and development in the same way as terrestrial

archaeology. Not only are international negotiations required regarding the


ownership of cultural material, an international sphere of archaeological

comparison is required to interpret the shipwrecks and their transnational contents.

Further, there have been several cases of maritime archaeologists travelling off

shore to explore aspects of Australia’s heritage. One case is of course the

Endeavour which I will go on to discuss, others include the investigations of

Australia’s World War One submarine the AE2, sunk off Gallipoli, and also the

search for William Dampier’s ship in the Azores (Smith 1999).

In terrestrial archaeology, evidence of Cook’s first contact with Aboriginal people

was sought by Vincent Megaw in his midden excavations at Cook’s Landing Place

Historic Site at Kurnell from 1967 - 1971 (Megaw 1968; 1969a; 1969b; 1972).

Megaw’s aim was to seek material evidence which could be compared to the

descriptions of Aboriginal life found in Cook’s account of their 1770 landfall,

rather than material evidence related to Cook himself. Nevertheless, in what

Megaw described as a well stratified context within a deep midden deposit, a

square shafted nail, a bone button and fragments of bottle glass were recovered.

Megaw cautiously suggested that there was every possibility that this material was

part of the gifts given by Cook to the Aborigines he encountered at this place.

Megaw took the European material to the UK to be examined by material culture

experts. The bone button was identified as part of a late 18th century covered

button, and its iconic status in the (anecdotal) history of Australian archaeology

gradually grew as it was referred to as “Cook’s fly button” - one of the momentous

first discoveries of Australian historical archaeology! (Jack 1985: 161; Mulvaney

1996:3).

Late in 1999 Mr Cameron Thompson, the Federal Member for Blair, put the

following motion to the Federal Parliament:

I move… that this House:

1) notes the reported discovery of Cook’s ship Endeavour off Newport, Rhode

Island;

2) acknowledges that if it is indeed the Endeavour, this wreck is the most important

single artefact in Australia’s history;


3) notes that the United States and British Governments are preparing for a legal

battle over rights to the wreck;

4) calls on the Government as a matter of urgency to immediately notify the world

community of the importance of the wreck to Australia and stake our claim to its

ownership by virtue of its significance to our nation;

5) calls on the Government to support a fundraising campaign to enable the

recovery and eventual return of the wreck to Botany Bay; and

6) ensures that plans for this important venture are in place and that the public

fundraising and community awareness campaign is made a centrepiece of

Australia’s Centenary of Federation celebrations in 2001.(Motion to the House of

Representatives put by Mr Cameron Thompson, Hansard 22/1/99)

It was this statement which made me immediately begin to follow and research this

project, despite the fact that I had already been made aware of it through friends

and colleagues in the archaeological community. What prompted this interest in

federal parliament was research into Cook’s ships by an American maritime

archaeologist Cathy Abbass (Abbass 1999). Her documentary research showed that

the Endeavour became the Lord Sandwich, which ended its days as a prison ship in

Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, and finally was one of 10 ships sunk during the

American Revolutionary War, as a defense for the harbour. In local legend, claims

Abbass, the Lord Sandwich became confused with another Cook ship the

Resolution, which also ended its days in Newport, called La Liberte (Abbass

1999). These findings immediately called into dispute all those hundreds of pieces

of the true Endeavour which are held in museums around the world, including the

sternpost fragment presented by Newport to Australia in 1988. Archaeologists

from the Australian National Maritime Museum were invited to participate in the

search for the wreck in Newport Harbour. This was not only agreed to by their

Minister, Senator Hill, but also met with a contribution of $25,000 from

consolidated revenue, as well as an agreement to meet the expenses of the team to

travel to the US. This raised the jealous ire of many other maritime archaeologists

around Australia, unable to fund research on wrecks in Australian waters. A debate

about the research potential and iconic status of the Endeavour wreck was argued

out on the maritime archaeology www discussion group “SUB-ARCH”. Funding

for shipwreck research had become tighter in recent years and opinions were


expressed suggesting that the Endeavour was not archaeologically significant, that

it had been substantially researched and massive amounts of documentary evidence

about all aspects of its construction and history had already been assembled. The

team from the National Maritime Museum felt however that the Endeavour was a

cultural icon in Australia, the replica of the ship remained very popular and it was

the Museum’s role to respond to such a culturally significant issue (pers.com.

Keiran Hosty).

One of the main issues of debate was which nation’s legal or cultural rights to the

relics should prevail. Abbass’ position on this was very clear:

“First of all, I have made it very clear in every interview that, despite the fact that

Endeavour is their cultural icon, the Australians have no legal claim to her. The

British may have residual rights to her, but the Rhode Island Historical

Preservation Committee has possession and custody; they are also moving to take

title” (Abbass 28/11/99 [email protected]).

.

Here Abbass is referring to the fact that the Rhode Island Committee went through

a procedure known as “arresting the wreck” under US Admiralty law, further the

Americans claimed that as the British had scuttled and abandoned the ship (during

the American Revolutionary War) these acts divested them of any rights of

ownership. Australia had no existing legal claim on the relics under maritime laws.

During the course of the debate it was pointed out that Endeavour figured

prominently in the colonial history of places like Vancouver, New Zealand and

several Pacific nations, not to mention its status as an icon of British imperial and

scientific history. In Australia the ownership of historic British shipwrecks has

been negotiated by the commonwealth government, through its Historic

Shipwrecks Act, 1976. The aim has been to establish a Memorandum of

Understanding between governments, similar to the agreement made between the

Dutch and Australian governments following the discovery of the Dutch wrecks.

The Rhode Island Maritime Archaeological Project, led by Dr. Abbass, has

continued to insist that any relics of the Endeavour discovered belong, and will

remain, in Rhode Island.

mailto:[email protected]


One of the most striking aspects of the archaeological project were the numerous

offers received of considerable “support in kind” from a range of scientific

laboratories. Australian Water Technologies offered to analyse silts collected from

the site using the lead 2(10) dating process. Stone and coal were analysed at

Newcastle University. The Police Forensic labs in Canberra contributed expertise

in the analysis of organic materials. Individual scientists from a number of

Australian universities offered a range of other analytical services. It was only with

the assistance of this kind of “forensic” analysis that a reliable identification of the

remains could be achieved. A great deal is known about the construction of the

Endeavour so types of timber and other products used in construction can be tested

for their composition and origin (Figure 6.2).

The project attracted intense media attention, from Australia, the US and the UK,

while the first season of excavation in 1999 was underway. A live dive web site

was created which received 5,500 hits per day and daily interviews on Sydney

radio followed the progress of the search (pers.com Keiran Hosty). Media interest

in the Endeavour project waned considerably when it eventually announced that,

on the basis of structural form and timber samples collected, the ship investigated

in 1999 could not be the Endeavour (pers.com. Keiran Hosty). A second season of

excavation on another wreck site in Newport was mounted in July and August

2000. Results from this season were much more favourable, but an announcement

has not yet been made regarding the conclusions of the investigation, and the team

wish to avoid media speculation. If an identification is confirmed, it is expected

that sale of exclusive film rights for the project by the Rhode Island Maritime

Archaeological Project will help raise funds for future research in Newport. A

number of film and television companies have also already approached the

National Maritime Museum seeking exclusive access (pers.com. Keiran Hosty).

However excavation of the Endeavour wreck is not a foregone conclusion, stresses

project archaeologist Keiran Hosty; the first concern would be for the protection

and management of the site. Samples collected from the second wreck site are

tantalising in their results: petrographic analysis of coal identified it as English, and


probably from Whitby, while sediments analysed using the lead 2 (10) process have

dated to the 1770s. If the analysis of timber samples is also favourable then further

investigations will be planned pending the necessary funding support.

Before I read the report in Hansard which I quoted above, I was somewhat

convinced, along with Stephen Muecke, that “Captain Cook” style histories of

exploration and discovery had been displaced “by a new version of national origin

mythology which sought deeper historical roots for the nation in the profound

antiquity of Aboriginal culture” (Muecke 1999). It was the Member for Blair’s

reference to Botany Bay which really fascinated me. In calling for the eventual

“return of the wreck of the Endeavour to Botany Bay” I imagined a massive Mary

Rose like operation to perhaps airlift the remains of a rotting hulk and deposit it

amongst the sandhills and oil refineries of present day Kurnell. Why was the

reference made to Botany Bay and not to “Australia” or the “nation”? The use of

the term was poetic, in the sense that it ritualistically recalls the myths, stories and

songs that carry its meanings in the popular imagination. What could disjointed

fragments of ship’s timbers, brought back to Australia at enormous expense, really

mean to the people who would view them? The project makes more sense if

meaning is sought not in the objects, nor the processes of authentication

themselves, but in looking at the whole as a ritualistic performance of the national

sacred. Rituals are not understood, but performed: it is the performance of

archaeology, science, display and visitation which, in the context of myth and

memory, should be seen as practices which constitute the realm of the “sacred” in

the nation (Muecke 1999; Taussig 1996, Kapferer 1988).

Many of the Australian media reports about this archaeological project refer to the

Endeavour as the “holy grail” for maritime archaeologists: the term evokes not

only a noble quest, but also the sacred quality of the relics. The context of the

heritage industry and cultural tourism has become central to the extension of the

national sacred. The practice of visiting museums, archaeological sites, historic

districts of cities “materially instantiates the retrospective prophecies of the various

sciences of history and prehistory” which are implicated in the modernist narrative


of the nation (Bennett 1995: 179). Archaeology may take on this ritualistic role in

the context of mythologies of birth, origins and matyrdoms. The context of ritual is

transformative: it attributes powerful new meanings to objects or practices which

might mean something quite different in another context (Muecke 1999:34). The

question here is how can the archaeologists involved in the project respond to the

richly symbolic nature of their quest?

The Australian and American archaeologists involved in this project have a range

of research questions which they wish to pursue, beyond the simple authentication

of the remains as Endeavour. The Australian team wishes to investigate the repairs

made to the ship in Australia and Jakarta, while the American team are interested

in its later life as a prison ship. Perhaps one of the most important issues

researchers can try to deal with reflexively in their analyses and interpretations is

how the Endeavour is symbolic of not only colonial origins in Australia but also of

an intertwined global history. Endeavour is not historically related to the

Australian nation in a profound way, it is a relic of an imperial vision and

Enlightenment science, of the colonial history of the Pacific and the Americas, of

fatal colonial clashes and dispossession. The physical remains of this ship will be

intensely vulnerable to use in a national narrative that interprets Australia’s

colonial history as the founding of a nation, a simplistic and even erroneous

interpretation. As we have seen, materiality is not an antidote to mythology – the

relics of the Endeavour will recall the Cook myth that has been established in the

Australian community. While the archaeologist, as an intellectual, may intervene in

this ritualistic incantation of neo-colonialism, it is also likely that their

interpretations will have little bearing on the use of these items in public discourses

in the media. One of the issues drawn out strongly in these case studies is that

archaeologists have had very little power to intervene in broader public discourses

about the meanings of places and things once they become involved in the media

or political debate. One reason may be the identification by the public of

archaeologists primarily as field technicians (pers.com. Cath Snelgrove), with a

limited, if any, role to play in the ongoing interpretation of these kinds of high

profile sites and objects. Maritime archaeologists in Australia however have much


closer professional relationships with museums than is the case for terrestrial

historical archaeologists, with three of the Australian archaeologists involved in the

search for the Endeavour being employed by the National Maritime Museum. If

historical archaeologists are to play a greater role in interpreting the material relics

of national history, and participating in public debates, the museum offers an

important field for authorising their increased participation. However, as the story

of first Government House site and the Museum of Sydney shows, such a

symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship is not always naturally occurring.

The First Government House Site and the Museum of Sydney.

In 1846 the leaky, dilapadated house that the first nine colonial governors of NSW

had put up with, was finally demolished. It had been in bad repair for some time,

and in any case had been built haphazardly using the materials available during the

precarious early days of settlement at Sydney. The site was put to several uses over

the ensuing century, but in the 1980s it was once again vacant and being used as a

car park. When, in around 1980, development was proposed for this prominent,

state owned site in the heart of Sydney’s “big end of town”, the proposal attracted

a broad range of public comments - all of which were bound up in notions of

heritage, environment, national identity and the economic and cultural

development of the nation. In 1980 the “1788-1820 Association” campaigned for

the building of a replica of Governor Phillip's house on the site, while in 1981 the

National Trust (in something of a faux pas) suggested it as a better location for the

Inter-Continental Hotel, which was planned for the site of the “old Treasury”

across the road (Anon 1981: 3). The lease for the vacant site had been sold to a

Hong Kong based firm and the fact that foreign interests were about to exploit this

historic sector of Sydney no doubt galvanized opposition to any proposals. Anne

Bickford, who would become the excavation director for the site, recalled that

slogans such “Aussie history not Hong Kong $” were prominent in later protests

against development (Bickford 1996: 70).


Archaeological investigations were commissioned by the NSW Department of

Environment and Planning to determine the existence and extent of remains of the

“first house” and to gauge what impact proposed developments would have on

them. The location of trenches on the site were therefore not determined by any

archaeological or historical research questions, but by the areas expected to be

impacted upon by construction (Temple 1988:83). The techniques of excavation

were also influenced by conservation issues, causing contexts and features to be

conserved where possible rather than excavated and destroyed. The site,

unexpectedly, produced surviving remains of Australia’s earliest British

colonisation - the footings and artefacts immediately connected some Australians

to the mythology of "1788 and all that".

In November 1983 the Australian Archaeological Association produced a

statement of significance for the site (Bickford et al 1983). The statement focused

on the social, historic and scientific significance of the place, describing it as a

cultural landmark, a focus of sentiment, a symbol of European settlement, and, to

Aboriginal people, a symbol of invasion. The site was described as unique because

it possessed the only known remains dating to 1788. The archaeological research

potential of the site was discussed in fairly vague terms but its scientific

significance was emphasised for future research. In 1984 a seminar was held by the

NSW Department of Environment and Planning to discuss, among other things,

future research questions for the site (Temple and Sullivan 1985). However as the

issue of conservation of the remains became pre-eminent, research areas were not

developed. This has had long lasting implications for the interpretation of the site.

Media and public interest in the excavation was strong - no doubt tantalised by the

fact that the digging team operated behind a high hoarding in some secrecy

(Temple 1988: 86) (Figure 6.3). A citizen action group was formed in June 1983

called the Friends of First Government House Site. They organised a successful

public rally in August 1983 to protest any proposals to destroy the remains of the

house (Friends of First Government House Site 1993) (Figure 6.4). In the same


year the developers were released from their contract and in 1985 the State

government announced its intention to preserve the remains in perpetuity.

It was not until 1987 that post-excavation analysis of the archaeological work,

begun in 1983, started. As part of this project the NSW Department of Planning

commissioned a popular book to explain the history and archaeology of the site

(Proudfoot et al 1991). With huge quantities of artefacts to be dealt with, from

excavations that were designed to reveal the architectural remains rather than

investigate entire archaeological contexts, limited results were initially obtainable

from the archaeological material. In September 1988 the Historic Houses Trust of

New South Wales was appointed as manager of First Government House Site

Museum. Although the Trust had been acquainted with archaeological

investigations associated with the other houses it owned, the presentation of a place

revealed only through archaeological excavation was a new challenge (The Sydney

Review 1994). The fact that the archaeological remains of the house had been

sealed under a paved plaza for conservation and design reasons, appears to have

had considerable impact on the path the Trust took to interpret the site (Figure 6.6).

The path was to be a controversial one. In 1992 the Historic Houses Trust launched

their policy statement for a Museum dedicated to the site. The significance of the

site was summarised as follows:

"The most potent and provocative significance of First Government House Site is

as a symbol of British colonisation of Australia in 1788 and its subsequent role as

the seat of British authority in the colony. To Australians in the 1990s this

symbolism will mean different things to different people. Hence First

Government House site becomes a symbol of different perspectives on how we see

ourselves as Australians today” (Historic Houses Trust 1992: 5).

The Trust established in this document that the museum would be about the issues

arising from the symbolism of the place. This immediately alienated the Friends of

First Government House who prepared the following statement of significance in

response to the Trust's:


"The foundations of Government House were laid in the same year as the

foundation of the nation now known as the Commonwealth of Australia. They are

the only known remains from 1788. The life of this building and its additions thus

co-exists with the Convict Era of Australian history. As such it represents a

tangible record of continuous occupation and development not only of the

formation years of Australia but also of the broader concerns of colonialism and

imperialism in the nineteenth century. These tangible links, the very foundation of

a nation are unique" (Friends of the First Government House Site 1994).

As the Friends continued to focus on the celebration of the founding of a nation,

the Trust moved further away from this position. In 1993 the name of the museum

was changed to the Museum of Sydney on the site of first Government House

(Sydney Morning Herald 20/11/93). This enraged the Friends who saw this

departure as "fraudulent" and "deceitful" (Friends of the First Government House

Site 1994) (Figure 6.5). To the further dismay of the Friends, the Trust also

abandoned a proposed monumental statue of Governor Phillip, and in its place

commissioned a sculptural installation designed and executed by two women

artists, Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley (Figure 6.7). This sculpture, reputedly the

first public artwork in Sydney created collaboratively between an indigenous and a

non-indigenous artist, was called The Edge of the Trees after a passage written by

prehistorian Rhys Jones describing the emotions at first contact (The Sydney

Review, 12/1994; MacDonald 1999).

Later statements by the Trust show that its focus on the issues of first contact

between indigenous people and Europeans was strengthening. At a 1994 seminar

the Museum's Curator of Indigenous Australian Studies, David Prosser, stated that

for many people the Museum of Sydney would be an introduction to the cultural

values of Aboriginal people - values that had never been seen as of equal worth to

those of other communities in Australia (Assessing Social Values Seminar, Sydney,

Australia ICOMOS 10/12/94). The Museum of Sydney (MoS) was not only

criticised by the Friends; among the community of heritage professionals, some

with a long involvement in the conservation of this site, there was much bitterness

about the way the Trust made decisions about the interpretation of this site

(Meredith Walker speaking at the Assessing Social Values Seminar, Sydney,


Australia ICOMOS 10/12/94). The conservation of the site was seen as a unique

community based initiative and it was felt that the Trust was not interested in

acknowledging this part of its history. Within the archaeological community

feelings about this site also ran high. A large proportion of the resources available

to public archaeology in NSW, particularly in terms of people and the

archaeologists employed by the state, had been fed into the excavation and

conservation of this site. The original excavation team was not commissioned to

produce a final report on the excavations in the traditional manner and although

innovative research on the archaeological data was undertaken for the Museum,

this has still not been published in its otherwise wide ranging publication program

(but see Lydon 1996). For many archaeologists first Government House was a

critical turning point for public archaeology in Australia. The creation of a museum

based upon an archaeological site seemed to present a long worked for opportunity

to introduce the public to historical archaeology and to promote research (see for

instance Temple 1985: 21).

On January 26 (Australia’s National Day) 1995, First Government House Place,

the plaza covering the archaeological remains, and the sculpture The Edge of the

Trees was launched. There were many Aboriginal people at the ceremony and

children gave a performance based on Aboriginal dance. At the same time the

Friends of First Government House Site protested rather quietly. As the Premier of

NSW spoke, a male voice called out "What about the convicts?" ( Figure 6.8). This

group obviously saw the tenor of the interpretation of the site pursued by MoS as

an affront to their traditional values and a nod in the direction of political

correctness. In fact they saw it as an attack on their identities as Australians, and on

the good name of the Australian nation.

MoS, and its curator Peter Emmett, as we have seen, planned to take on nationalist

mythology at full tilt:

“Surely we’re tired of national myths and stereotypes; history is so much

stranger than fiction; those imperial narratives of self-fulfilling intentions, as if

history is a stage with a play waiting to be performed… this museum is not a


staged diorama of history… It’s not the birthplace of a nation… I went through

all that with the Bicentenary and we’re not into all that stuff” (Emmett 1996:

111).

Emmett assembled an avant garde array of advisers for the Museum including the

noted spatial historian, Paul Carter and cultural critic, Ross Gibson. Emmett

himself was not enthusiastic about archaeology, if his previous comments on the

subject are any indication. Following his experiences in developing the Hyde Park

Barracks Museum in Sydney he termed archaeology “Epicurean Empiricism: warts

and all fragmentation; so preoccupied with lifeless survivals that it only documents

their survival, not their human use” (Emmett 1992: 28). Accusing archaeology

dominated conservation projects, such as Port Arthur discussed in Chapter 4, as

producing meaningless, fragmentary interpretations for the public, Emmett and his

team embarked on an imaginative and challenging route for the museum.

“What is this place?... It’s not an archaeology site; the conservation action was

to preserve the site under concrete. It’s not a house museum; the house doesn’t

exist. It’s not a museum of collections; we have a collection of archaeological

artefacts that will be stored in the study centre but can never be the basis for

complete interpretation of the place” (The Sydney Review 12/1994).

Emmett did not want to avoid mythologies, but to create a new kind. Within the

museum archaeological artefacts were arrayed in beautiful collections emphasising

their physical shape and textural qualities. One display was a reference to 18th and

19th century collectors chests, but recreated in a sleek, stainless steel form. Each

drawer contained a mythopoeic collation, stripping the artefacts of their “modern”,

“scientific”, archaeological context, and recreating them as antiquarian collectibles.

The desire appeared to be to unmask archaeology as a modern, scientific discourse

and reveal it as a continuation of the 19th century, colonial obsession with

collecting, taxonomies and a fetishistic attachment to objects. MoS generally works

to break down the distinction of archaeologically excavated material as scientific

evidence. The use of the word “archaeology”, rather than “archaeological

artefacts” or “trench excavated by archaeologists”, in some of the museum labels is

a deliberate double entendre, either in terms of Donato’s ‘archaeological


epistemology’, and perhaps also in a Foucauldian sense. Bennett defines Donato’s

archaeological epistemology as where:

“each archaeological artifact has to be an original artifact, and these original

artifacts must in turn explain the meaning of a subsequent larger history. For this

to be possible, it is necessary that origins be cast in the mould of the larger

history they are the called upon to explain” (Bennett 1993: 227).

Rather than using archaeological artefacts according to this doctrine, the

interpretation of MoS implied that it was in the nature of archaeology as a practice

to produce what it needs to fulfil the myth of significance. Archaeology is treated

with great suspicion in MoS, as the “materialiser” of the myth of the “birthplace of

the nation”. The materiality of the actual building foundations recovered through

archaeology seemed too solid and stable a metaphor to resist their interpretation as

“national foundations”, and so they were replaced with what Carter termed a vera

narratio of the site – “a history that took full account of the mythic footings of

foundational narratives” (Carter 1999: 63). The result however proved

incomprehensible for most visitors, and this produced some quite hostile reactions

from those who held expectations of it (see for instance Young 1995; MacDonald

1995; O’Brien 1998). In this case the public seemed to demand that the stones be

made to speak, and this was just as much the promise of archaeology, as the

expectation of myth.

Relics of Macquarie: Even Drains will Do1.

Throughout the 20th century Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music occupied a

building designed by the famous convict architect Francis Greenway, as the stables

for Government House (Figure 6.9). Construction began on the stables in 1817, at

1 Between February and May 1998 I was contracted by the NSW Department of Public Works and Services to provide them with advice on the archaeological resources of the Conservatorium site. My role during that time included applying for the excavtion permit for the site and assessing tenders for the archaeological excavation. The events I discuss here occurred after the completion of my contract, and I have researched them through sources available in the public domain, as well interviews with archaeologist Mary Casey.


which time the colonial governor, Macquarie, still resided in the first Government

House, the site of which has just been discussed. The much grander new

government house envisioned by Macquarie was not completed until 1845. The

stables complex not only housed horses, grooms and carriages, but offices for a

range of other public servants (Heritage Group State Projects 1997).

A public debate developed around this landmark building in June 1998 when the

Government Architect’s proposal for a large scale expansion of the

Conservatorium’s facilities was beginning to get underway. The position of

“Government Architect” is itself an interesting relic of NSW’s colonial past. It is

one which derives considerable status and power from its historical genealogy,

which links the present incumbent directly back to the first Colonial Architect,

Francis Greenway, through an unbroken masculine descent line. The Government

Architect’s grand plan was to retain the historic building, but to create new

facilities around it by sinking them below ground level. This entailed large

amounts of excavation within and surrounding the stables building. The stables

were sited within what was at the time of their construction, the Governor’s

Domain. The Domain remains as open space in Sydney today, although its original

extent has been heavily encroached upon. The parts of the Domain surrounding the

Conservatorium today are the grounds of Government House and the Royal

Botanic Gardens. This is the hub of colonial Sydney and was the hub of colonial

authority in NSW. The stables building was a romantic, castellated folly, designed

to be first encountered visually by an approach to Sydney by ship, heading for its

berth in Circular Quay, which the stables and the two Government Houses, at

different times, looked down upon. Governor and Mrs Macquarie and Francis

Greenway are credited with the development of an elaborate landscape plan for the

Domain, including castellated forts and pavilions, perhaps imitating the romantic

settings of Stirling or Edinburgh Castles in Scotland (Heritage Group State Projects

1997: 149). Macquarie’s grand vision for the small colony, a vision not shared by

many of his contemporary colonial administrators, is a quality which attributes

special significance to him in the retrospective gaze of national history.


When all the necessary approvals had been issued for the Conservatorium

redevelopment and works began, archaeological evidence of early 19th century

roads, drains and other landscape features were revealed on the site. The road

remains were discovered in May 1998, by consulting archaeologists Casey &

Lowe Associates. Casey & Lowe were working under an archaeological

excavation permit (S140 Permit) issued by the Heritage Council of NSW,

following its, and the City of Sydney Council’s, Development Application

approval for the scheme (Ireland 1998a: 3). An Archaeological Zoning Plan

prepared for the site in 1997 assessed some areas as likely to contain

archaeological evidence of past landscaping features (Annable 1997). Test

excavations carried out in February and March 1998 confirmed the existence of

features such as drains and a rock cut cistern, the construction details of which

dated them to the pre 1820 period (Ireland 1998b: 5). However large areas of the

site had been disturbed by later works that had destroyed archaeological evidence

of the early 19th century (ERM Mitchell McCotter 1998; Ireland 1998b). When

more road and drain remains were confirmed during the planned archaeological

excavation, further Heritage Council approvals were required, under the terms of

the excavation permit, to totally remove the remains and allow the development to

proceed (NSW Heritage Office S140 Application No. B583500). At this point the

National Trust of Australia (NSW) launched a campaign for the retention of these

archaeological remains (Figure 6.10). A series of articles in the Sydney Morning

Herald and other Sydney newspapers covered the debate between the NSW

Heritage Council, the Department of Public Works (the developer), the

Conservatorium of Music (the client for the development), the National Trust and

other heritage activists. The National Trust held a public rally near the site to

protest against the redevelopment of the Conservatorium and the removal of the

archaeological remains of the roads and drains. Students of the Conservatorium

assembled at the rally to protest against this threat to the improvements to their

school. They gathered with with their instruments and attempted to drown out the

speakers (The Sydney Morning Herald 3/7/98a). Many issues were raised in this

debate apart from the significance of the archaeological remains. Perhaps the

overriding concerns centred on the scale of the redevelopment of this significant


early building and its impact on the landscape of the surrounding Botanic Gardens.

There is no doubt that the archaeological remains were eagerly seized upon by the

National Trust as further ammunition in their broader conservation issues for the

site. Nevertheless, newspaper articles reflect particular interest in the remains

themselves (see for instance The Sydney Morning Herald 27/6/98; 30/6/98; 1/7/98;

3/7/98a; 3/7/98b). Geraldine O’Brien, a heritage issues journalist, summarises what

these archaeological remains mean to her:

“ But old drains, like old mansions, have stories to tell and this one is our old

drain, a part of our story as the first European settlers on the fringe of this

continent. And it is vivid evidence of the valiant efforts of Governor Macquarie

and his lady to impose order on the alien shore, a romantic vision of landscape

on the scrabbly Australian bush” (O’Brien 1998).

Here O’Brien is consciously and enthusiastically linking these archaeological

remains to a foundational history which in particular heroises Governor Lachlan

Macquarie’s role in the development of Sydney. In this paragraph O’Brien urges

her readers to see the remains of these roads and drains as symbols of not only the

founding father and hero Macquarie, but also as emblems of the European struggle

against the Australian environment. She re-inforces the colonialist narratives

concerned with the civilising transformation of settlement by valorising the

European vision of landscape over the indigenous bush. Her words are so high

flown that they seem to be partly tongue-in-cheek. However, her article is clearly a

plea for the retention of the remains on the basis of their relationship to such

stories.

At the Heritage Council’s request, the site archaeologist Mary Casey was asked to

assess the heritage significance of these archaeological remains. She mounted an

argument that as part of Macquarie’s deliberate picturesque landscaping of the

domain, these remains were part of an archaeological landscape of high research

potential (Casey 1998a). In relation to the social significance of the remains, Casey

noted that the debate showed that some parts of the community valued this place as

the Conservatorium of Music, while other parts obviously focused more on the


association with Macquarie, with whom they linked the archaeological remains.

(The term “social significance” is used in Australian heritage management

generally to cover contemporary communities’ attachment to places, see for

instance Johnston 1992; Byrne et al 2001). She also claimed that the issues raised

in the community campaign related primarily to the scale of the development that

was proposed, rather than to the archaeological items as such. Further, she

suggested that many claims made in the media about the rarity and date of the

remains were somewhat ill informed.

The Heritage Council was not satisfied with Casey’s assessment of the social

significance of the archaeological remains and subsequently suggested an

alternative (Heritage Council of NSW 1998). This stated that although not the

subject of “explicit study” the remains were socially significant due to a number of

factors:

• “Because the archaeological remains relate to the Macquarie family and first Government

House they are symbolic of the colonization of this country by the British and as such they

evoke powerful emotions in sectors of the non-indigenous community relating to the

establishment of order and authority in the new settlement”.

• “The existence of broad arrow or ‘convict’ bricks evokes images of hardship and suffering

throwing into relief the maturation and success of present day Australia”;

• “these remains might evoke a similar but opposite emotion in the indigenous community

centred on the complete modification and domination of the Sydney Landscape (sic) by the

invaders”;

In addition to the above points the Council stressed the association with the

architect Francis Greenway and the prominent location of the archaeological

remains within the Domain, which was perceived by the community as an “old and

hitherto protected precinct” (Heritage Council of NSW August 1998). The

Heritage Council of NSW therefore claimed very specifically that these

archaeological remains physically expressed historical understandings of identity

linked to several major mythic themes: the suffering of the convicts, the hostile

Australian environment, the colonial imposition of order and civilisation, and


Macquarie as hero. The text also links these mythic themes explicitly to the

perception of a mature, successful, modern nation.

In Casey and Lowe’s second draft of their Archaeological Conservation

Management Plan (1998b) they attempted to address the Heritage Council’s

concerns for the social significance of these items through a review, at the Heritage

Council’s request, of media reports discussing the issue. Media reports were

suggested in this case as evidence of community feeling in the absence of any

other form of consultative research (pers.com. Mary Casey 2000). Mary Casey

raised several issues in this discussion:

• The short time available for a genuine attachment to be formed with the road

and drain remains led her to suggest that the attachment was an extension of

existing community esteem for the Macquaries;

• The fact that the Heritage Council had suggested that even attachments based

on “illogical or irrelevant” evidence need to be accepted. This was disputed by

Casey who quoted both the NSW Heritage Manual and Pearson and Sullivan’s

work as requiring professionals to accurately research places and correct

erroneous perceptions where they existed (NSW Heritage Office 1996; Pearson

and Sullivan 1995).

• Casey also claimed that the concerns held about the site, such as those

expressed in letters to newspapers, were generally about the scale and nature of

changes to the Greenway building and its landscape rather than the

archaeological elements discovered (Casey 1998b).

The Heritage Council eventually required the retention of some archaeological

elements in-situ, necessitating some amendments to the design but certainly not

avoiding the impacts of scale the National Trust and other activists feared

(Heritage Council of NSW 1998). This entailed the removal of sections of a

rockcut cistern and several lengths of drains, so that they could be reinstated in the

underground areas of the new building, in approximately their original location,

which in some cases will mean their suspension from the ceiling. It will also


involve other displays and interpretations of archaeological information (pers.com.

Mary Casey).

Irrespective of the success of the resulting interpretation of archaeological remains

within this development, the reasons for their retention in-situ have been confusing

and disputed. The Heritage Council’s media release of 8 August 1998 focussed on

“the obvious public attachment to the site, both for its association with the

beginnings of European settlement in Australia and the Conservatorium of Music”.

The archaeologist involved here focussed on the research potential of these items,

but had difficulty in taking seriously a profound community attachment formed

within a few days of exposing something of a sort which she, literally, “digs up all

the time” (The Sydney Morning Herald 3/7/98). The success, or partial success, of

the campaign to save “Macquarie’s drain” is one which, in contrast to the previous

two case studies, relied very little upon archaeological processes of authentication.

And yet the materiality of these remains, and their exposure through archaeological

research, allowed heritage legislation to be invoked, and a decision to be made by

the state that they were worthy of protection to benefit some parts of the

community, while inconveniencing others, in this case, another arm of

government.

I want to draw several conclusions from this case study but to do so it is first

necessary to step back and take a wider view of heritage and social issues in

Australia. Several cultural commentators in Australia have recently commented

upon the perception that Aboriginal claims for sacred sites are proliferating, linked

to ever more tenuous claims for their importance. Saving such tenuous sites at the

expense of industry and development is seen as an illegitimate and unsupportable

demand on the nation (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 125). On the other hand, others

have demonstrated how Native Title legislation demands that Aboriginal people be

able to develop and to demonstrate a local history to support their claims to land.

Denis Byrne comments:

“ it is interesting to observe the way that the process of identity building on the

part of one community is often derided or criticised by representatives of another


community who appear to be blind to the identity building process they

themselves are engaged in” (Byrne et al 2001: 68).

In the white Australian community heritage is not generally conceived of as

“community building”, except in so far as activism may draw people together, or

successful heritage protection may raise a community’s “self esteem”. Issues of

community attachment or social significance have received much attention in

Australian heritage management during the late 1990s (Byrne et al 2001: 110).

This has been seen as a corrective to a heritage system focussed on materiality

rather than culture, a factor which had major implications for the management of

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. The arguments which “saved”

Governor Macquarie’s drain depended primarily on the community’s attachment to

them as symbols of identity, a form of heritage discourse that relates strongly to

concepts developed to explain Aboriginal attachment to places and, in fact, to

archaeological sites which have been crucial, material “pegs” upon which notions

of Aboriginal heritage have been hung. What is interesting about this case study is

that we see methodologies which were developed specifically to benefit

disenfranchised groups (groups which have little stake in the colonialist myths of

nation) to have their sacred or special places recognised by the state, being utilised

in order to extend the scope of the established national sacred. Archaeology

managed to prove the sacredness of the Conservatorium site in a way that

anthropologists have failed to do in cases such as the Hindmarsh Island Bridge (a

notorious Australian legal case where claims of an Aboriginal womens’ sacred site

were not proven to the satisfaction of the court, see Gelder and Jacobs 1999). The

fear reflected in this case was that individuals or groups could use this notion of

intangible heritage values, or sacredness, for their own benefit and against the

public good. The issue raised at the Conservatorium is where is the line between

social identity building and vested interests? Who is the arbiter between real

attachment, invention, and dishonesty. While the rhetoric of postmodern

archaeologists has been to allow multiple interpretations of places and things to co-

exist (see for instance Hodder at Catalhoyuk, Hodder 1998), this is rarely possible

within the day to day realities of heritage management in towns and cities.


Conclusions: Archaeology, Materiality and Mythology.

In these archaeological projects associated with national origin mythologies we can

see a pattern of process. First is the choice or requirement to conduct

archaeological research related to a mythopoeic place or subject. Second, an

authentication process is played out before the public gaze, in some cases this is

the theatre of archaeological discovery, as at first Government House and the

Conservatorium of Music, while in the Endeavour case, the authority of scientific

testing also contributed to public confidence in the authenticity of the discovery.

The third part of the process is the sacralisation (the making sacred through the

aura of authenticity) of the places and objects through museum accession,

conservation, insurance, public display and presentation.

It is as yet unknown whether relics of the Endeavour will be discovered and find

their way back to Australia. If they do, their preciousness and fragility will

emphasise their sacred qualities. Such relics as these, shapeless lumps of wood,

rely on the faith of the beholder, like pieces of the true cross they have no power

for those who do not hold the stories in their heart. The relics of Macquarie which

may be retained within the enlarged Conservatorium have a less secure hold on

their sacred status. Outside the museum context and surrounded by the hubbub of

everyday life they may loose the ritualistic context necessary to keep their status as

icons secure. This process has been actively denied in the Museum of Sydney

leaving many members of the public in a somewhat dazed and confused state.

However this Museum has not shirked an involvement with myth, it has

experimented with a new kind of colonial poetics; focusing on the moments when

the march of imperial time towards Australia’s nationhood was subverted, or

forgotten. To do this the archaeological artefacts produced through excavation

were consciously removed from their context as evidence, in terms of their display

to the public. They were treated as an antiquarian collection of curiosities to avoid

making them seem sacred and fixed, and risking their permanent attachment to a

nationalist myth that is a source of conflict in Australian society. Is this the only

route to take for archaeological sites or objects that are highly mythologised, but


because of this cultural richness, of continuing fascination for historians and

archaeologists?

These case studies have shown that the participation by archaeologists in the

interpretation in these places and things has been significantly curtailed due to their

perceived role as “technical authenticators”. In all of these cases, and many others

discussed in this thesis, archaeologists have been keenly aware of the multiple and

contested meanings inherent in Australian historic places, and to issues of

nationalism, colonialism and racism. Throughout this thesis I have treated

nationalism as an identity project which can be both positive and negative, creative

and constraining, neo-colonial and post-colonial. Most importantly it is a context to

be dealt with by the Australian community: not simply accepted or rejected, it is a

site for the creation of identity which needs to be acknowledged and responded to.

One of the issues that arises from this investigation of historical archaeology and

nationalism in Australia is the lack of fit between the notion of archaeology as a

cultural practice, the importance of representations of the past in identity

formations and social relationships, and the entrenched position of archaeologists

in the Australian heritage management framework as curators of the material and

empirical: the “inventorisers” of culture. I suggested in Chapter 4 that the

institutionalisation of “blackboxed” practices and procedures creates a disjuncture

between the direction of intellectual critique and its reflection in public policy;

what Byrne has recently called the “ship of practice sailing so far from the ship of

knowledge” that they are out of range of communication (Byrne et al 2001: 46).

These case studies all show that the established modes of practice for historical

archaeologists in heritage management limit their participation in the

interpretations of material culture, places and landscapes which are crucial

locations for contested mythologies of identity and nation.

The established myths of the nation in Australia remain largely the triumphant

myths of colonialism; which enable the powerful to populate the heritage

landscape with the ruins of empire. To intervene in this historical archaeologists


must seek to broaden concepts of practice and seek opportunities to work through

museums, the media and heritage to explore materiality, myth and meanings.

Conclusions

Archéologues sans frontières: Thinking outside the nation.

“National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing which will

give us an international dimension” (Fanon 1968: 199)

“The decision as to how local or global a historical narrative or piece of social

scientific research need be cannot be determined by epistemological arguments

extraneous to the task at hand. It is the empirical researcher who should answer

this question; the philosopher has no business legislating the scope of research to

the empirical scientist…

The more difficult question …appears to me to be different: even while we

dispense with grand narratives, how can we rethink the relationship between

politics, historiography and historical memory?” (Benhabib 1999: 358, first

published in 1991)

Nationalism has been seen by most western archaeologists as the province of the

naive, the militaristic, the racist - as an atavistic regression from the realities of

globalisation and a sophisticated, (post) modern world view. Because of this

perception, the relationship between archaeology and nationalism has been

subjected to only a surface deconstruction and the mutual constitution of these

discourses within culture only partially understood.

With the collapse of meta-narratives there is a tendency to install an indistinct

theory of globalisation as the new “meta-meta-narrative”. Millenial dreams of

globalisation, as a world force which replaces nationalism with an identity that is

newer than modern, seem to be more a seduction by multinational capitalism than

a critique of it (Lazarus 1999: 47). The nation is a form of governance which

remains deeply embedded in the present world order. The meanings of nation, as

273

Archéologues sans frontières 274

they are constituted through discourse and cultural practice, are however,

situational, not absolute, not fixed, not even reliably consistent. While it has been

possible to identify areas of nationalist, modernist thought that are characteristic in

terms of their progressive historicism, their materialism, their emphasis on stable

identities and certain shared narratives of development, there are also forms of

postmodernist, nationalist imagining. I see no reason to think of these concepts as

“postnational”, simply because they are not linked to any proposed forms of

postnational governance, but retain a commitment to the nation as a symbol of

transcended colonialism. This is not to say of course that culture, history and the

“mobilisation of identities” should be primarily analysed within a national

framework (Appadurai 1996). Rather, I argue for the recognition of the nation as a

location for meaningful political action and thus as a formation which has had, and

will continue to have, cultural implications. I suggest that western attitudes to

decolonising or postcolonial nationalisms, as still striving towards modernity, are

based on judgemental, Eurocentric discourses which continue to embody the

legacies of imperialism, colonialism and Orientalism. Such discourses fail to

acknowledge the involvement of the non-west in the construction of modernity, as

active participants, not merely victims, in histories of imperialism and its

aftermath. Australian history epitomises these unequal experiences of modernity

and the inability of Eurocentric progressive historicism to account for the complex,

intertwined histories of decolonising nations.

The aim of this thesis has not been to present a manifesto for a non-nationalistic

practice of archaeology and heritage, but rather to develop a critique towards a

nationally aware practice. An historical archaeology of modernity, of globalisation

and locality, of colonialism, nation and diaspora, needs to think outside the

boundaries which disciplinarity and nationalism tend to impose. The discourse of

heritage can be deployed by groups as an act of community building. A heritage

discourse which is less nationally defined and confined, could be a means via

which the entangled cultural practices and histories of modernity are reconciled

with attachments to localities.


One of the central theses in Lowenthal’s influential book, The Past is a Foreign

Country (1985), was his argument that western society was developing an

increasing sense of dislocation from the past. The cultures of modernity seemed to

have produced an increasingly radical sense of rupture between understandings of

lives as enmeshed in tradition and the past, and a sense of an inevitable hurtling

into the future. Perhaps the most poignant example of the effect of such a form of

modern consciousness is the way some elements of settler society in Australia,

elements still wedded to the colonialist definition of progress and development,

claim that the community today has no responsibility for the events of the past, that

our responsibilities are only towards the future. I discussed in Chapter 1 debates

about Australia’s past, debates about the “true facts” of colonial dispossession and

violence. These debates have turned on the issue of the responsibility for the

dispossession of Aboriginal people and contested beliefs over how the past is

manifested in present social relations between black and white in Australia. I came

across this letter to the editor when I was preparing the case study on the search for

the Endeavour:

“I take it we’ll soon be hearing Pauline Hanson and One Nation complaining

about the Government spending $52,000 to find the wreck of the Endeavour. After

all, we’re being asked to pay for something that happened over 200 years ago”

(The Australian 13/8/99).

This letter refers to the conservative political leaders in Australia who claim that

the present generation is not responsible for and should not have to “pay” for

things which happened in the past. It highlights the irony that the same

conservative leaders are prepared to pay for some things from the past but not for

others. Such critiques of the heritage programs of governments and institutions,

which reveal the political and ideological roles they serve, are a familiar practice.

Paradoxically, the heritage movement is often conceptualised as a holding on to the

past, but it is actually a practice which makes choices about the future. Through its

self-conscious representation of the past in the present, heritage discourse tends to

make the present seem the inevitable result of the past and this seeming

inevitability, effectively deflects responsibility for past events or their


consequences. This sense has been achieved, at least in part, through the co-

constitutive relationship between progressive historicism and nationalist

discourses. This relies on a sense that the past is separate from the now - that

history is read in a book, not experienced through the form and conduct of social

relationships.

I have argued here for an approach to nationalism as a cultural artefact, constituted

through discourse and practice - negotiated and contested in complex, specific

locations. Following Thomas’ ethnographic approach, I assembled detailed local

case studies to highlight how archaeological practice, heritage management and

nationalist discourses have interacted in Australia since the 1960s (Thomas 1994).

This ethnographic approach aimed to disrupt disciplinary teleology where

archaeology is imagined as developing fuller and more accurate accounts of the

past, as opposed to providing accounts which satisfy changing cultural and

political interests.

In Chapter 3 I discussed the processes which constituted heritage value for

historical archaeological remains, articulating the authentic Australian experience

through material sites and relics, especially those relating to the industrialisation

and development of the land. The focus on the material and on the land has meant

that notions of settler traditions or cultural practices have not been incorporated

within the heritage management framework in Australia. Heritage discourses in

Australia reified the concept that identity and place were linked through a

historical and spiritual connection. Landscape and place are therefore constructed

through Australian heritage discourse as the holders of tradition and identity in

Australian settler society. This concept encourages a view of culture and cultural

identity as an essence that is absorbed from the environment, rather than learned

through culture and community. This form of heritage discourse also reinforces an

alignment of culture, land and nation.

Growing interest in Aboriginal historical archaeology has been a response, by

settler Australians, to issues of decolonisation. This has challenged disciplinary


boundaries in archaeology and has been responded to in terms of inclusion of this

past “omission” of historical archaeological research. The desire to enfold

Aborigines and settlers within shared narratives of the past must also be seen as at

least partly constituted through the nationalist desire for the single story. This aim

has been expressed clearly by leading Aboriginal historian Henry Reynolds

(Reynolds 2001). There will be inherent tensions in Aboriginal historical

archaeology which are caused by the national context, where discourses of

inclusiveness may not totally disrupt notions of who is at the centre and doing the

“including”.

Despite its historical grounding in industrial archaeology and research focusing on

technology this did not describe an inevitable trajectory for the development of an

historical archaeological “discipline”. Heritage legislation and other broader

interests in heritage and history promoted research in diverse locations and this

encouraged historical archaeologists to deal with many aspects of social life in the

past. Historical archaeology, by its very nature, is a boundary crossing practice,

and with “modernity” as its subject, it is a practice which has become more popular

– seen as more relevant- in the context of postmodern intellectual influences. I

suggest that its recent expansion in the university sector in Australia relates more

to the acceptance of postmodern research objectives and issues of heritage within

archaeological circles, than to any consolidation of “disciplinary” achievements to

date.

However, as I have outlined in my case studies the entrenched position of

historical archaeologists in the Australian heritage management framework is as

“technicians”: as the “curators” and “recorders” of the material and empirical.

These authorised modes of practice have limited historical archaeologists’

participation in interpretations of material culture, places and landscapes which are

crucial sites for the competing mythologies of identity and nation. In particular it

has involved archaeology in the expansion of the national sacred, through the

singularisation of sites and relics which represent origins of both identity and

nation. In this context archaeology can become part of a ritualistic process of


authentication. Such authentications relate not to the past, but confirm narratives of

progress and development, while maintaining the construct of a historically

continuous identity. I have argued that heritage can act as a form of surveillance of

the national past for powerful or State aligned interests. On the other hand the

discourse may also be deployed as resistance to these interests. But as I argued in

Chapter 6, authenticity itself is an aesthetic carefully constructed within the

national context.

Heritage management frameworks have tended to over-emphasise a bounded

national past and de-emphasise its involvement in broader spheres. Even the

context of empire has been downplayed in the “historic themes” of heritage.

Despite this limitation on heritage management archaeology, some research has

always sought a global context. This has been a familiar pattern throughout my

research: bureaucratised procedures tend to entrench limited, nationalist modes of

practice within the heritage management framework. And yet such research has

provided the seeds of its own critique. The problem however is the implementation

of change in the heritage bureaucracy. Critiques tend to be slowly absorbed by

bureaucracy, and then dealt with by adding another layer of requirements, rather

than through the overhaul of the systems which are based on empirical, scientific,

resource management methodologies.

This has implications for future historical archaeology in the context of heritage

management. My research clearly shows how procedures, policies and even basic

theoretical concepts become blackboxed within the context of heritage

management structures. This factor could be taken into account to some extent by

historical archaeologists involved in strategic planning. I have shown how the

relationship between heritage, nationalism and historical archaeology can be

constituted on two levels: the definition of heritage, as an inheritance, may be

constituted through nationalist narratives and origin mythologies; and on a second,

less overt level, practice, procedures, concepts of value and significance may be

mutually constituted through modernist, nationalist discourse.


The far greater challenge that arises from my research is the possibility of a

heritage discourse that could encompass local, national and transnational contexts

for cultural practice relating to place and tradition. Currently the concept of

heritage is overwhelmingly confined to the national, but could communities benefit

from a concept of heritage that has more fluid borders? What would non-national

heritage be? UNESCO’s concepts of “World heritage” do not currently fulfill this

need. World heritage is a world of nations showcasing their unique treasures which

possess, not a national it is claimed, but a universal value (see for instance www.

unesco.org/whc and also comments in Bourke 1992). As Hamilakis (2000) and

Appadurai (1996) have shown, global communication networks are not a simple

antidote to narrow nationalisms, but can add to their recreation. Currently heritage

discourse in Australia contributes to several potential dislocations in the cultural

lives of communities: it locates identity in place and landscape, and not in cultural

practice; it locates the past in historic sites and not as embodied in practices and

traditions, and it dislocates cultural life from its histories beyond the national

territory. More fluid discourses of heritage and the past could assist in the

constitution of concepts that cultural identities are practised within communities,

made distinctive through personal and collective historical memories, and

constructed from a global cultural landscape.

There are interesting tensions in the practice of historical archaeology currently.

Practices in Australia, U.S.A., South Africa, Canada and New Zealand for

instance, have traditionally been very nationally defined (and confined), closely

linked to local heritage management structures, and often to particular community

concerns. With nationalism considered to be an essentially modern phenomenon, it

is hardly surprising that the archaeology of modernity is so defined by this

pervasive expression of cultural identity. However the tension to which I refer

arises from the desire, on the one hand, to contextualise historical archaeology

within the complex global networks of the colonial, modern period, while on the

other hand, make the most of the particularising concerns of the nationally

distinctive practice. In Australia this has led to a practice which is grappling

meaningfully with the issues of local communities, methodologies for community


participation, and the realities of cultural difference. From the Australian

perspective calls for a world or global historical archaeology sound suspiciously

like another form of archaeological neo-imperialism, which belittles the

proliferation of locally defined archaeologies, and privileges, yet again, the

superior metropolitan discourse emerging from the Anglo-American core of the

“discipline” (Funari et al 1999).

How can we acknowledge the ongoing importance of nationalism, while

simultaneously disentangling its teleological effect from cultural and historical

analyses? Locally meaningful practices must also deal with the meaning of

“locality” in the contemporary global context. Though the local past may be the

object of interest, it seems unlikely that we can also say that such interests are also

purely local. This is to suggest that despite research aims towards deeply

contextualised local studies, an aspect of a reflexive practice is also the issue of

question formulation in the present, and in this case, issues of global cultural

contexts must be dealt with. One of the key questions, I suggest, that arises from

my study is how can we contextualise our current questions about the past within a

framework which does not dismiss the importance of the nation, but also deals

with broader, perhaps “global” cultural contexts for these questions?

One framework recently discussed by Stephen Muecke is that of “transnational

cultural studies” following the exemplar of Gilroy’s approach to “black modernity”

that was discussed in Chapter 1 (Muecke 1999a; Gilroy 1993). What would a

transnational historical archaeology look like? As my research progressed it

became clear that while the context for questions about the past should rightly deal

with frameworks of empire, frameworks of trading links and patterns of

immigration as current research is doing, these contexts were not necessarily the

ones within which to “problematise” in a Foucaultian sense, these histories. One of

the central “problematisations” in histories of Australia is decolonisation: the

perceived need to deal with colonial history and better understand neocolonialism.

These are the issues which drive the debates about Australia’s past which argue

about history, but which are really about future directions for the nation. In this


way they involve perceptions of personal and national identity and contests over

the authorisation of possible identities. To contextualise such problems the

framework of the nation must be considered, but regional networks of decolonising

nations could supply a context to highlight different responses to decolonisation.

Muecke is focusing on the Indian Ocean “as a metaphor for international cultural

relations, and showing different responses to decolonisation” (Muecke 1999a:

188). A transnational historical archaeology could of course focus on other

decolonising settler societies, but it could also look at Australia in its Asian Pacific

region. The latter would be more challenging, but potentially more rewarding. In

its region, particularly from the point of view of Indonesia and Malaysia, Australia

has been termed the “last country to be decolonised, the place where the story

didn’t end happily, where the colonisers didn’t go home” (Millard quoted in

Curthoys 1999c: 32). How and why do issues about the past differ and are there

any shared concerns in this culturally diverse decolonising region, which is closely

linked in political and geographical terms? Identifying such networks for

discussion would help to subvert the old imperial networks and provide a critique

of experiences of modernity, the interpretation of which has been so dominated by

Eurocentrism.

At the beginning of this section I quoted Seyla Benhabib asking; “how can we

rethink the relationship between politics, historiography and historical memory?”

This seemed to summarise the broader issue I have been dealing with in this thesis.

While I have been exploring the relationships between nationalism, historical

archaeology and heritage, the outcome has been to think about ways for

archaeologists to question what it is we want to know about the past (historical

memory), how we think we can know it (practice or historiography) and what are

the broader implications of this research (politics). The nation has been at the heart

of many of the questions about the past that archaeologists and historians have

been interested in; nationalist thought has been constitutive of many aspects of

practice. Finding a national future through decolonisation or through

neocolonialism is also at the heart of current debates in the Australian community.


How then to frame future archaeological research in the face of such complex

entanglements; and in the context of the collapse of the grand narratives of

progress and objectivity? I have just suggested that transnational frameworks may

provide an interesting context within which to develop creative, non-Eurocentric

responses to these problems, while the aim of this research has been to show, and

to provide some understanding of, how relationships between seemingly separate

areas of thought and practice are constructed within culture. Decolonisation or

neocolonialism in turn provide the imperatives to continue to interrogate the past in

Australia. In the end I agree with Benhabib, its not up to philosophers to legislate

the scope or locale of research, problems will continue to arise from interests,

individuals, communities and environments. My contribution has been to address

ways of thinking about their national context.

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