"Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas"
and Reflections Along the Angus.

The Macclesfield History Group are custodians of the book “Reflections Along the Angus” (1980, ed. J. Faull).  For some time, we have been concerned about the lack of any reference to the local Aboriginal inhabitants in this book. This is a big deal and deserves some reflecting upon in its own right.

How are we to think about this book now? We still value it as a local recorded history of European settlement, for its information and its sentimental value for people whose families are a part of the stories. Yet how are we to deal with this absence of reference to Aboriginal Traditional owners and their descendants, who today refer to themselves as the Peramangk. There is very little surviving historical information available about the Peramangk.  Their identity has been erased from the landscape.

“John Bull, in his ‘Reminiscences’ in 1884 stated that the Aborigines of the Mount Barker district (of which Macclesfield is a part) were extinct.  Elderly residents of Mount Barker relating stories that their parents and grandparents told them, were able to describe things which happened in the district well over 100 years ago, could only say "They died out very early", or, "I never heard much about them." (John Wathall Bull, ‘Early Experiences of Life in South Australia. Quoted in Mount Barker, Mountain upon the Plain, p72,1983 Bob Schmit).

That was the status quo for Adelaide Hills Peramangk (and the nearby Kaurna) until sometime in the 1970’s when descendants of Aboriginal survivors began privately and publicly re-identifying and reconnecting with the country of their ancestors. They were not extinct, but history and society, through a process of social amnesia effectively ignored this until these more recent times.

What happened to those original populations includes decimation of the population through imported diseases and economic degradation with a corresponding reduced cultural resilience, relocation to lone isolated camps or to distant ‘Aboriginal Missions’ and forced child adoption out of their own community. All this was enabled by community attitudes, ignorance and Government Policies.

This is the so-called gap in the history of the original inhabitants. It became a history gap when it was papered over with stories of valiant (which they truly were) early European settlers. Our book, “Reflections Along the Angus”, unwittingly records the means by which this happened and is in itself an example of the erasure process in action.

We have not come across a better summary of this process that our book represents, than the one quote below from Gillian Cowlishaw, at the time a research scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney. We think that, upon reflection, our book is far more provocative and valuable than it is in its original simplistic understanding. There is now much more to reflect upon here.

“The country was marked out in squares on a map ready for leasing (Bauer 1964) ….  Marking boundaries with straight lines was a major technology of invasion. Naming spaces is a way of claiming them (Carter1987:327ff). Exploring, surveying, drawing maps, marking their scale and contours, establishing borders, measuring distances, forming roads, constructing fences, naming places: all these activities undertaken by state officials impressed a certain set of intentions on the country.  Land was parcelled out to private owners; town sites were marked and areas for natives and areas prohibited to them were specified.

This enabled the policing of space and more insidiously came to mark the contours of a social reality which was antithetical to that already in the country. The indigenous meanings of country remained on only for the Aboriginal people. Few if any white people seem to have noticed, let alone understood, the particular and local meanings for Aboriginals and no anthropologists then explored the significance of Aboriginal identifications with, and attachment to, specific country, or the mutual responsibilities in the interaction between the country and its clans-people.

While Aboriginals were seen as belonging in the outback, an organic part of the land, their manner of being was rendered illegitimate by the new markings on the earth’s surface. The struggle to make the land produce in a new economy was paralleled by the need to make its inhabitants cooperate in this productive process which resulted in denying their separate social reality”.

Cowlishaw, G. 1999, p 59. ‘Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas. A study of racial power and intimacy in Australia’: University of Michigan Press.

References cited by Cowlishaw above: -
Bauer, F.H. 1964. Historical Geographic Survey of Part of Northern Australia. CSIRO.
Carter, P. 1987 The Road to Botany Bay. London: Faber & Faber.

What we can do now is embrace Peramangk stories of past and present into our history collection when we get the opportunity. Bridging the History. QED!