Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements by Lars Eckstein Andrew Wright Hurley

Author:Lars Eckstein, Andrew Wright Hurley [Lars Eckstein, Andrew Wright Hurley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032084145
Google: 6DJmzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-06-30T05:13:32+00:00

He goes on to argue, citing Duff, that this forgetfulness increased after 1927, prior to which most local residents would have had a clear idea of, for example, the location of the burial spot of Bennelong on James Squire’s Farm in Putney, and he attributes the reasons for such forgetfulness to traumatic societal events such as ‘the disruption of [Aboriginal] families by Protection and Welfare Boards, town camp destruction and child removals, the denial and obscuring of Aboriginal descent within families, and the determined destruction of sites by shire or parish councils’, all of which, he argues, ‘have consigned very much place-specific information to oblivion’.36

In terms of a critical heritage approach, I would argue that this forgetfulness and carelessness is, as Read suggests, a deliberate (repressive) performance of refusing to look at the uncomfortable reality of historical violence and the dispossession of Indigenous land. This ‘knowing and not knowing’ at the same time is elaborated in both Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of colonial aphasia37 and in Michael Taussig’s concept of a ‘public secret (that which is known but cannot be spoken)’.38 Nonetheless, Read’s research with Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and scholars goes a long way to addressing this absence and affirms that an ‘enormous amount of information remains to be rediscovered in parish maps, Aboriginal oral histories, family photographs, local historical societies, private letters and reminiscences of older residents’ to further uncover this historical erasure.39

In fact, it was a reference in Read’s history of Aboriginal Sydney that first informed me of a historically recorded Indigenous presence in the Wahroonga area – in the next-door suburb of Turramurra. A comment by a certain J.G. Edwards, in the Evening News of July 1921, noted how members of a Koori clan travelling from Lane Cove to Cowan had always stopped to ‘break the “journey” and camp on Wright’s Hill, near the present reservoir at Pymble’. He added that ‘the hill beyond the present situation was called by those campers “Turramurra” or “Turraburra”’, the word meaning ‘big hill’.40 Turramurra is indeed located on a steep hill and is now traversed by the Conemarra Parkway, a road I walked on and later drove along many times while growing up.

Back in Germany, I was mulling over all this, and thinking about the effort and commitment of community members and scholars going into making Indigenous history present and available, when I received an unexpected SMS from my cousin Rowena containing the following image:

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