Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape

296 Pages·2004·1.49 MB·English

by  Philip Clarke

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Where the Ancestors Walked
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Dr Philip Clarke started at the South Australian Museum in 1982,after
finishing a Science degree majoring in biology at the University of
Adelaide. Based in the ethnographic collections, his early work was on
Aboriginal use of plants. This eventually broadened out to Indigenous
perception and use of the land, leading to a PhD on the Aboriginal
cultural geography of the Lower Murray in South Australia. Since this
time, Dr Clarke has worked mainly in Central and Northern Australia,
investigating Aboriginal links to land.During 1998–2000 he curated the
Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery Project. Dr Clarke is presently
theHead of Anthropology and Manager of Sciences at the Museum.
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Where the Ancestors Walked
Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape
Philip Clarke
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First published in 2003
Copyright © Philip Clarke 2003
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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Clarke, Philip A.
Where the ancestors walked:Australia as an
Aboriginal landscape.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 74114 070 6.
1. Aborigines, Australian. 2. Aborigines, Australian –
Religion. 3. Aborigines, Australian – Antiquities.
I. Title.
306.0899915
Set in 11/14 pt Caslon Regular by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria
Printed by South Wind Productions, Singapore
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To Kyle and Cameron
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Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I Origins of Aboriginal Australia 1
1 First Human Colonisation 3
2 Religious Landscapes 15
3 Social Life 30
Part II Materials of Culture 51
4 Hunting and Gathering 53
5 Aboriginal Artefacts 68
6 Art of the Dreaming 89
Part III Regional Differences 105
7 Living in a Varied Land 107
8 The South 117
9 The Central Deserts 136
10 Beyond Capricorn 157
Part IV Cultural Change 175
11 Northern Contacts 177
12 Arrival of Europeans 187
13 Aboriginal Australia Transformed 197
14 Changing Cultural Landscapes 208
Notes 227
References 245
Index 272
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Preface
The ancestors of modern Aboriginal people arrived in Australia about
50,000 years ago. Aboriginal people have not remained unchanged since
initial human settlement on the continent,but have successfully adapted to
a changing Australian environment.More recently they have had to cope
with the impact of European colonisation.Many Aboriginal people did not
survive this and many of those that did suffered from alienation from their
land and the loss of cultural traditions. Europeans in the past harshly
judged Aboriginal cultures as ‘primitive’, primarily on the basis of the
apparent simplicity of their hunting and gathering tools. Yet Aboriginal
people had—and continue to have—unique ways of life and possess deep
spiritual attachments to their country,strong senses of community,and an
ability to draw upon their traditions and respond to new situations in
creative and innovative ways.This is evident to many people today who
interact with Aboriginal people in a multitude of ways. It is also evident
through the study of Aboriginal societies and their heritage.
Museums are responsible for the preservation of objects that relate to
cultural and natural heritage.They achieve this by researching,publishing
and displaying culturally and scientifically based themes or stories through
the media of graphics and artefacts. The focus on cultural and natural
heritage by museums has made them attractive places to work for people
with broad scientific and cultural interests.I arrived at the South Australian
Museum in 1982,with a basic degree in the biological sciences.My first
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PREFACE ix
task was to help organise the Aboriginal collections, which had been
neglected over the previous two decades.Curating the artefact collection
gave me an appreciation of Indigenous relationships with the environment
and exposed me to the diversity of Aboriginal artefact styles across
Australia.The development of my own research interests coincided with a
blossoming of awareness in both Australians and international visitors of
Australian Indigenous cultures.By the early 1980s,Aboriginal studies as a
subject was becoming more common in schools and universities.Australian
Indigenous people were also beginning to study their own cultures through
schools,universities and museums.There was a critical need for museums
to develop new exhibitions to satisfy the demand for knowledge by the
public.
My initial research at the South Australian Museum focused on the
plants and animals that Aboriginal people used as food,medicines and for
making artefacts.This grew into an interest in the wider set of Aboriginal
relationships with the land,as reflected in language and mythology,which
helped as background information in the recording and interpreting of
biological data that I was then collecting across southern and Central
Australia.It was this broadening of focus that led me to return to univer-
sity during the mid-1980s for further study in social anthropology and
human geography. I became interested in using cultural geography to
explain the relationship that Aboriginal people had with their land and
environment.
Cultural geographers have provided a useful way of looking at relation-
ships between people and their surrounding landscapes.They explain the
cultural landscape as the product of a culture modifying the land it
occupies.The cultural landscape is also an expression of how people engage
with their world,how they create explanations for and experiences of their
surroundings.Cultural landscapes are not only the outcome of economic
activity,material culture and settlement patterns,but of the attitudes and
perceptions about that landscape of those living in it.1 The land and the
people who live upon it are deeply entwined,so much so that it would be
wrong to simply treat the environment as a stage upon which people live.
Rather,those same environments are very much part of the cultural act,for
cultures are expressions of how people engage with their worlds.
Every culture has a unique relationship with the land. It is a funda-
mental assumption by cultural geographers that later waves of colonisers do
not encounter lands that were previously occupied as blank canvases.Yet
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x WHERETHEANCESTORSWALKED
new arrivals nevertheless tend to take it upon themselves to connect with
the features of the land according to their own traditions,to give the land
their own meanings,and in the process to begin the creation of new cultural
landscapes.The anthropologist Veronica Strang has called this tendency
for different cultural groups to give different meanings to the same places
‘uncommon ground’.2
Since the original act of human colonisation in Australia,the continent
has undergone massive changes in the physical environment due to global
climatic change and as the result of Aboriginal hunting and gathering
practices. This book considers the cultural landscapes that Aboriginal
people have occupied, developed and responded to during their long
history in Australia.It uses the land and material possessions as a doorway
through which Aboriginal people and culture can be investigated.Of key
interest are the dimensions of the meaningful world that Aboriginal people
have created for themselves.
From the beginning of British settlement, the newcomers have
exploited Australia’s natural resources and wherever possible transformed
the land into new cultural landscapes, based largely upon Western
European models.Although modern Australians recognise the impact of
British settlement on the physical environment,through practices such as
vegetation clearing, the introduction of foreign plants and animals, and
through the establishment of irrigation schemes,there is little awareness of
how pre-existing Aboriginal landscapes have shaped Australian history
and culture. All Australians, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, are
part of the story of the human engagement—the human occupation and
transformation—of this continent.
In 1998 I became Principal Curator for the development of the Australian
Aboriginal Cultures Gallery,launched at the South Australian Museum,
Adelaide in March 2000.3 This book develops the main themes of this
permanent national exhibition.The Museum’s involvement in Australian
and Pacific Indigenous cultural displays for over a hundred years reflects
the institution’s longstanding academic interest in anthropology and the
environment.The material presented here draws upon the extensive collec-
tions at the Museum, the published literature, and from my personal
research and fieldwork,which now stretch back twenty years.
The scope of Aboriginal cultures is vast, far too large for adequate
treatment of all cultural groups in a single volume.In this book,therefore,