Places of Reconciliation: Commemorating Indigenous History in the Heart of Melbourne

By Sarah W Pinto

Central Melbourne is filled with markers of the city’s pasts. At its heart are the stories of exploration and settlement, of the so-called first to arrive, and of the building of a colony and nation. But when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the centre of Melbourne has long been a place of silence.

Over the last two decades, Indigenous histories and peoples have been brought into central Melbourne’s commemorative landscapes. Memorials, commemorative markers, namings and public artworks have all been used to remember the city’s Indigenous pasts. Places of Reconciliation shows how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasures of its Indigenous histories. Sarah Pinto considers the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and concludes that the twenty-first century settler city does not give up its commemorative landscapes easily.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780522872347

Book preview

Places of Reconciliation

Commemorating Indigenous history in the heart of Melbourne

Places of Reconciliation

Commemorating Indigenous history in the heart of Melbourne

Sarah W Pinto

Melbourne University Press

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2021

Text © Sarah W Pinto, 2021

Images © individual contributors, various dates

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2021

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by J & M Typesetting

Cover design by Phil Campbell

Cover photography courtesy Natasha Saltmarsh

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522872323 (paperback)

9780522872347 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

1     Unsettling the settler city

2     Indigenous storytelling in the city

3     Naming and language

4     Places of practice

5     At the margins

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time coming, and I have a huge number of people to thank as a consequence. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Cultural Consultations team at the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, and especially Elders Aunty Gail Smith and Aunty Julieanne Axford, who took the time to speak with me about this research over a number of years. I am especially grateful to Aunty Gail for her knowledge, expertise and patience with someone who had—and continues to have—a lot to learn. I hope we can continue our conversations as I keep working towards research and teaching practices that amplify Indigenous voices.

I am also enormously grateful to the Indigenous people who were able to find the time to speak with me about the places of commemoration examined in this book, or who were willing to help me with my research, particularly Vicki Couzens, Lee Darroch, Rob Hyatt and Mandy Nicholson. And thank you to everyone who responded to my cold out-of-the-blue requests about mostly long-ago projects.

A long list of people helped me with the archival and documentary research for this project, over many years. Catherin Bull generously shared records of her work on the New Riverside Park at the very beginning of the project, without which I would not have known where to start. Mary Tomsic and Meighen Katz gave me invaluable advice about accessing the City of Melbourne’s records. And a range of people at the City of Melbourne were generous with their time and expertise in responding to my queries, including Rob Adams, Maree Norman, Debbie Tate, Samantha Oliver, Sophie Turnbull, Jeanette Vaha’akolo, Rob Ellis, Erica Read and Rita Henshall. I would like to particularly thank the staff in the Public Art team who gave me access to the City of Melbourne’s artwork files: Eddie Butler-Bowden, Cressida Goddard, Robyn Simpson, and Jo Mair. I would also like to particularly thank Chelvi Arunagiri in the Governance and Legal team, who worked so hard on a number of Freedom of Information requests, especially in relation to naming in Docklands.

Rafe Benli at Geographic Names Victoria always took the time to respond to my naming records queries with care, and gave me important insight into the work that is taking place on Indigenous naming around the world. Matthew Thompson (Department of Premier and Cabinet), Juliet Kim and Lina Georgiou (Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions), and Dany Holl (Development Victoria) processed a range of State Government of Victoria Freedom of Information requests for me, for which I am grateful. Adrian Beresford-Wylie and Ed Wensing answered my queries about the Australian Local Government Association’s Local Councils Remember program. And of course this project would not have been possible without the work of archivists and librarians at the Public Record Office Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, and the Deakin University Library.

An equally long list of people also helped me to find a way to turn all this research into an actual project, and then turn that project into a book manuscript—once again, over many years. The advice of the late Tracey Banivanua Mar to always look for the political has been at the forefront of my thinking throughout this project, as I hope it will always be. Conversations with Matthew Klugman about intersectional research and Luke Isaacs about treaty and government funding were also vital to my thinking. And the Decolonizing Solidarity Deakin University Reading Group helped me to grapple with what it might mean to undertake this research from a non-Indigenous perspective, and I would like to thank Michiko Weinmann for her work in organising this group in 2018.

Aspects of this project were presented at a number of seminars and conferences, including: the Histories on Wednesday Seminar Series at Macquarie University in 2010; the History Seminar Series at the University of Queensland in 2011; the Australian Historical Association Annual Conference in 2011; the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series at the Australian National University in 2013; the Perspectives on Progress Conference at the University of Queensland in 2013; The Warrnambool Collective at Deakin University in 2016; the Urban Belonging Conference at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London in 2017; and the Contemporary Histories Research Group Seminar Series at Deakin University in 2018. I thank the organisers, fellow presenters and audience members for their interest and engagement. Some of the research and writing for this book was carried out while I was a Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in 2013, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney in 2017. I thank both Centres for invaluable time and space for research, and especially Anna Clark for her work in organising my visit to UTS.

A wide range of kind and generous scholars have read and commented on drafts and earlier versions of the chapters in this book, including Joy Damousi, Alex Dellios, James Findlay, Joe Latham and Yorick Smaal—thank you. Thanks also to members of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences Writing Group at Deakin University for their thoughtful comments on several chapters and earlier versions of this work, not to mention their ongoing writing encouragements over the last four years: Laura Bedford, Danielle Chubb, David Hundt, Amy Nethery, Maree Pardy, Maria Rae, Emma Russell, Andrew Singleton, Kim Toffoletti and Andrew Vandenburg. And special thanks to some of my wonderful fellow historians at Deakin, who also read chapter drafts with care and kindness, and who have been nothing but supportive: Clare Corbould, Joanna Cruickshank, Tiffany Shellam and Bart Ziino.

Jordy Silverstein read the entire manuscript, and asked the kind of questions that only someone with her skill, knowledge and brilliance is able to ask, and this is a much better book for it. The incomparable Peter Spearritt has been involved in this project from almost the beginning, and I am so very fortunate to have had his advice, guidance and exceptionally good humour throughout that time. I would like to particularly thank Peter for showing me how to think about a project as a book, and for reading and commenting on innumerable drafts. A range of other colleagues and friends have also offered advice and support while I have been working on this book, especially at La Trobe University, the University of Queensland, and Deakin University. I would particularly like to thank Steven Angelides, Melissa Bellanta, Andrew Bonnell, Leigh Boucher, Greg Burgess, Kirstie Close, Marion Diamond, Chris Dixon, Susan Foley, Helen Gardner, Geoff Ginn, Katie Holmes, Tony Joel, David Lowe, Kate Fullagar, Patrick Jory, Dolly MacKinnon, Elspeth Martini, Nick Melchior, Clive Moore, Siobhan O’Dwyer, Kriston Rennie, Chips Sowerwine, Paul Turnbull, and Chris Waters. They have all made this a better book, though all errors and inaccuracies are of course my own.

Matthew Clarke appointed me into a continuing position at Deakin after seven long years of contract and casual work following the completion of my PhD, and I will always be grateful to him for giving me the privileges that an ongoing job provides. One of those many privileges has been Matthew’s support and encouragement of me as a teaching and research academic, and I thank him in particular for helping me to see that more clearly. My job at Deakin was initially at the university’s Warrnambool campus, about 250 kilometres southwest of Melbourne. I could not have asked for a better place to land after so many years of insecure work, and I thank my Warrnambool colleagues and friends for helping me to recover, particularly Emma Charlton, Kristy Hess, Julianne Lynch, Terri Redpath, Roxanne Thomson and Bernadette Walker-Gibbs. I would especially like to thank Julie Rowlands for her friendship and care in the southwest, and for her thoughtful and longstanding guidance on how to actually write a book—I simply could not have done it without her.

2020 was not an ideal time to be attempting to finish a book manuscript. The pandemic also made life in Australia’s universities even more difficult than usual. Barbara Fraser helped me to find a way through the mess, for which I will always be thankful. Yorick Smaal always knew what to say to get me back on track. Liz Day, Julie Rowlands, Natasha Saltmarsh and Jenny Zahara were the best lockdown correspondents anyone could ask for. And I would also like to thank my Deakin colleagues Petra Brown, Alyson Miller and Chad Whelan for allowing me to get some time back by taking an extended period of leave for my administrative day job to finish this manuscript. I am strongly opposed to using leave in this way, but being able to do so was also a privilege my untenured colleagues do not have, and now more than ever it is vital that we make that privilege visible.

I am enormously grateful to Joy Damousi for her guidance and work on this book, along with Catherine McInnis, Louise Stirling and everyone in the wider MUP team, and especially for their patience with the time it has taken me to complete this manuscript. Thanks also to Guy Holt for creating the map, Jon Jermey for his work on the index, and Lisa Jones and the SMARTdocs team for their work on interview transcripts. Natasha Saltmarsh took the beautiful cover photograph, along with most of the images inside this book. I thank her for her skills, her recon, and for her love of a project.

And finally, I want to thank my friends and family for their love, support and encouragement while I have been working on this book, especially Leigh Boucher, Len Boucher, Liz Day, Jordana Dymond, Jess Freame, Molly Freame, Tom Freame, Virginia Grant, Jane Hansen, Audrey Isaacs, Henry Isaacs, Ben Kaczynski, Clara Kaczynski, Carol Knott, Emil Leonardia, Esther Leonardia, Gemma Leonardia, Vincent Leonardia, James Little, Paul Little, Elspeth Martini, Elizabeth McCartney, Natasha Saltmarsh, Mary Tomsic, Sarah Vincenzini, Harriet Zahara and Jenny Zahara. I am so lucky to have you all in my life. Most of all, I want to thank my Mum, Angela Woodruff, for giving me a curiosity about the world, and a love of learning—and much else besides.

Parts of this book are adapted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer, ‘Unsettling the Settler City’, by Sarah Pinto, in Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space: Conversations, Investigations and Research, edited by Sarah Pinto, Shelley Hannigan, Emma Charlton and Bernadette Walker-Gibbs, 2019, pp. 197–213.

Introduction

On a hot and humid morning on 26 January 2018, a large crowd assembled at the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House in central Melbourne. Officially, 26 January is known as ‘Australia Day’, a national day of celebration that marks the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney Cove in 1788. It is a day of nation-making: of flag raisings, parades, citizenship ceremonies, community barbecues, sporting events, fireworks and the announcement of national honours. For Indigenous people, however, 26 January has long been a time of activism and protest. Sometimes renamed a Day of Mourning, Invasion Day or Survival Day, 26 January is also a day that marks the impact and legacies of British colonialism on Aboriginal peoples in the place now known as Australia.¹

Those gathered at Parliament House in Melbourne on that day in 2018 were there to protest. As many as 60 000 people marched from Parliament House through Melbourne’s central business district (CBD) to Flinders Street Station, occupying the city’s streets for several hours.² They were led by local Indigenous activists from the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR).³ The city’s official Australia Day events were held a few blocks away, outside Melbourne’s Town Hall, where the flag-raising ceremony and parade that followed were a celebration of Melbourne’s multiculturalism. Many in that crowd carried the native plants that new citizens often receive when they take the pledge at a citizenship ceremony. Among the much larger crowd of protestors, however, there was a very different atmosphere, alternating between sadness, mourning, anger and defiance.⁴ Like similar events held around the country each year, Melbourne’s protest was part of a growing campaign against 26 January as Australia’s day of national celebration—or the very idea of a national day of celebration at all—in recognition of its impact on Indigenous peoples.

The protest began at one of the city’s key sites of colonial power: Parliament House. Parliament House was constructed in stages from 1856 for Victoria’s legislature following the colony’s separation from New South Wales in 1851. As the Indigenous activist, historian and writer Tony Birch reminded the crowd, Victoria’s government was established ‘as a colonial government of the empire’, whose founding members ‘in this House’ would not have ‘expected that the [local] Wurundjeri people would be here today’.⁵ Perhaps unbeknown to most protestors, however, the protest also began at the site of a counter-memorial to the city’s colonisation. Built into the pavement at the bottom of the steps of Parliament House is a small public artwork made of granite, brass and bluestone (see figure 1). Its design features an interpretation of paintings by the nineteenth-century Wurundjeri leader, activist and artist William Barak (c. 1824-1903).⁶ Barak’s art often depicted Wurundjeri ceremonies, and the figures in this artwork are also a reference to the site as a meeting-place of the five Language Groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation, whose land reaches across much of present-day central Victoria.⁷ The artwork was also intended to mark the site as a place of Wurundjeri performance in the early years of Melbourne’s colonisation, when it was a forest of gum and wattle trees at the top of a hill.⁸

Figure 1. Ray Thomas (Gunnai) and Megan Evans, Another View Walking Trail (Site 1: Parliament House), 1994. Invasion Day Protest, Melbourne, 26 January 2018. Photo by the author.

The artwork is part of a counter-memorial project created in and around central Melbourne in 1995 known as Another View Walking Trail: Pathway of the Rainbow Serpent. Another View was commissioned by the City of Melbourne—central Melbourne’s local government—and developed collaboratively by the Gunnai artist Ray Thomas, the non-Indigenous artist Megan Evans, and Woorabinda and Berigaba writer and researcher Robert Mate Mate. It offered ‘another view’ of the city’s past, centred on contact and conflict between local Indigenous peoples and British colonisers. The walking trail created what the collaborators called ‘counterpoints’ to the city’s historical markers at seventeen sites, using artworks, installations, plaques and stories.⁹ Another View was decommissioned in the early 2000s, and most of the artworks have been removed: the Parliament House artwork is one of only three remaining sites along the Trail.¹⁰

Figure 2. Travelling towards Wurundjeri Way from the Charles Grimes Bridge, with the high-rise towers of the Batman’s Hill precinct of Docklands in the background, Melbourne. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

Since the early 2000s, however, a range of official commemorative markers of Indigenous peoples and histories have been placed into central Melbourne’s commemorative landscapes. In June 2000 the Victorian state government announced that a major new road along the edge of the CBD would be called Wurundjeri Way (see figure 2). Contemporary Melbourne is built on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples, and the naming of Wurundjeri Way was intended to be an act of recognition of the Wurundjeri.

In 2001 the artwork Scar—A Stolen Vision (see figure 3) was installed first in the City Square at the corner of Swanston and Collins streets and then in Enterprize Park on the northern banks of the city’s Yarra River. Scar was commissioned by the City of Melbourne to mark the centenary of Australia’s Federation in 2001. The installation is a collaborative work led by Wiradjuri artist and filmmaker Kimba Thompson, who worked with seven other Indigenous artists to represent the scars of Indigenous peoples.¹¹

In 2001 the state government also announced that a new park on the northern banks of the Yarra River would be named Birrarung Marr (see figure 4), said to mean riverside in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people. Birrarung Marr was the first significant park created in Melbourne in more than a century, and it added almost 8 hectares of land along the Yarra to public parkland.

Figure 3. Kimba Thompson (Wiradjuri), Ray Thomas (Gunnai), Glenn Romanis, Treahna Hamm (Yorta Yorta), Ricardo Idagi (Meriam Mir), Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Yorta Yorta and Boon Wurrung/Wemba Wemba), Karen Casey, Craig Charles (Yorta Yorta and Mhutti Mhutti), and Lou Bennett (Yorta Yorta/Dja Dja Wurrung), Scar—A Stolen Vision, 2001. Enterprize Park, Melbourne. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

Figure 4. The entrance to Birrarung Marr at Princes Walk, Melbourne. Photo by the author.

Figure 5. Fiona Clarke (Kirrae Whurrong) and Ken McKean, Eel Trap, 2003, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne. The Tanderrum Bridge can be seen in the background. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

In 2003 the first of several markers of Indigenous peoples and histories was introduced into the Birrarung Marr parklands: Kirrae Whurrong artist Fiona Clarke and non-Indigenous artist Ken McKean’s Eel Trap (see figure 5).¹² This sculpture represents the nearby river and the design of an Indigenous eel trap, referencing the importance of eels as a rich and plentiful food-source in the area.

In 2005 a new pedestrian bridge linking the Birrarung Marr parklands to the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) became the William Barak Bridge (see figure 6), to honour the nineteenth-century Wurundjeri leader. The bridge was created for the city’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2006, and includes a sound installation called Proximities. Proximities turns a section of the bridge into what the designers called a ‘corridor of human voices’, which includes recordings of Wurundjeri songs, as well as those of other nations of the Commonwealth.¹³

In 2006 the artwork Birrarung Wilam (see figure 7) was installed in the Birrarung Marr parklands. Birrarung Wilam was created by the Keerray Wooroong and Gunditjmara artist Vicki Couzens, the Yorta Yorta, Mutti Mutti and Boon Wurrung artist Lee Darroch, and the Yorta Yorta artist Treahna Hamm. The artwork evokes an Indigenous campsite, and uses a range of installations to depict Aboriginal place, life and culture, with a particular focus on the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples, as well as those of the Eastern Kulin Nations.¹⁴

Figure 6. Walking towards Birrarung Marr from the top of the William Barak Bridge, with the high-rise towers of Melbourne’s CBD in the background, Melbourne. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

Figure 7. Vicki Couzens (Keerray Wooroong/Gunditjmara), Lee Darroch (Yorta Yorta, Mutti Mutti and Boon Wurrung), and Treahna Hamm (Yorta Yorta), Birrarung Wilam (Common Ground), 2006, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne. This image shows sections of the installation along Birrarung Marr’s main pedestrian pathway, including some of the eel pathway (foreground), and the shields and spears that represent the five Language Groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation. The Birrarung (Yarra River) is in the background. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

In 2007 the Pastor Sir Douglas and Lady Gladys Nicholls Memorial by the non-Indigenous sculptor Louis Laumen (see figure 8) was dedicated in the Parliament Gardens. The Nicholls Memorial was the first statue of twentieth-century Indigenous leaders to be made in Australia, and it marks the importance of Sir Douglas (1906–1988) and Lady Gladys (1906–1981) Nicholls as Indigenous leaders and community workers in twentieth-century Melbourne.¹⁵ It is accompanied by Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta, Dhudhuroa and Dja Dja Wurrung artist Ngarra Murray’s Dungula Wamayirr (River People), which depicts Murray’s great-grandparents’ connection to Country.¹⁶

The name of a second pedestrian bridge which would link the Birrarung Marr parklands to Melbourne’s sporting and event precinct was announced by the state government as Tanderrum Bridge (see Figure 9) in 2016. Tanderrum Bridge is named after a ceremony that brings together the five Language Groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation and has returned to Melbourne in recent years to open the Melbourne Festival, the city’s annual international arts festival.

Figure 8. Louis Laumen, Pastor Sir Douglas and Lady Gladys Nicholls Memorial, 2007; Ngarra Murray, Dungula Wamayirr (River People), 2007, Parliament Gardens, Melbourne. Photo by Natasha Saltmarsh.

Later that same year the commemorative marker Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner (see figure 10), by the Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew and the non-Indigenous artist Trent Walter, was installed near the corner of Franklin and Victoria streets at the northern edge of the city. Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were Palawa men