Some things do change:

indigenous rights, geographers and geography in Australia

Richard Howitt and Sue Jackson (School of Earth Sciences, Macquarie University~Sydney)

(accepted for publication in Australian Geographer, July1998)

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ABSTRACT:

KEYWORDS:

indigenous rights, geographers, colonialism, native title, decolonisation, geographical societies

Some things do not change: Australia still has an Aboriginal 'problem'; the world is still concerned about its food supply; and the present Editor is writing this on a day with 'extraordinary muggy conditions at Sydney' and summer thunderstorms with hail forecast for later this evening (Biddle and Aplin 1996: 7).

In a recent review of the achievements of the Australian Geographer, Biddle and Aplin (1996) emphasised continuities which should not pass without comment. In this paper, we want to critically reflect on some aspects of this brief editorial comment in order to advocate a concerted effort to decolonise geography in Australia. We aim to add to the currently modest foundations for more detailed critical work on the intellectual heritage of geography in Australia, its legacies and its implications for our contemporary responsibilities (eg Powell 1986, 1994; Adams 1986; Peake-Jones 1980-81, 1985; Jacobs 1996).

Our argument, contrary to Biddle and Aplin's assertion that 'some things do not change', is that there has been substantial change in the relationship between geography in Australia and indigenous people. Further, we suggest that the relationship is of great value to the discipline and the nation as we move towards more equitable and sustainable futures.

Under the polarising pressure of the populist, anti-intellectual, 'back-to-the-future' myopia currently affecting public life and politics in Australia, indigenous rights, social justice and inter-cultural tolerance are all under attack. In this context, we feel it is imperative for geographers to avoid naive, cliched or romanticised celebrations of darker aspects of our intellectual heritage. We feel strongly that there is a need to better understand the particularities of 'geographyís "colonial encounter"' (Smith and Godlewska 1994a: 4) in Australia in order to transcend them. There have been some recent efforts towards similar ends in European geography, notably in the work of Hudson (1977), Driver (1992) and the collections edited by Smith and Godlewska (1994b) and Hooson (1994). To a large extent, however, discussion has been focused on Europe's imperial relations with Africa, and left the Australian experience unexplored. In particular, the implications, both historic and contemporary, for indigenous Australians of the intrusion of 'geography militant' (Conrad 1955: 6) into this continent remains largely unexamined. It is, therefore, not our intention to criticise the recent editorial per se, but to use it as an impetus for a much wider discussion. We aim to be constructive and to open debate rather than draw on some implied political correctness as a basis for closure.

Locating geography's Aboriginal "problem"

The recent editorial refers to the 'long, proud history and tradition' of the Geographical Society of NSW, providing a 'short introduction to the Society and its journal' (Biddle and Aplin 1996: 5). Drawing on the title of a paper in the first issue of the journal, in which two anthropologists and a missionary discussed ëaspects of the Aboriginal problem in Australia' (Warner et al 1928), Biddle and Aplin suggest that 'Australia still has an Aboriginal "problem"' (1996: 7).

These six unfortunate words warrant more careful consideration than they receive in the editorial. As written, they raise many more questions than they answer. The use of quotation marks seems to suggest some awkwardness in adopting the terminology of the 1928 paper in an era when such labels are widely acknowledged to be offensive and unreasonable.

One might dismiss these six words as a 'slip-of-the-word processor'. For us, however, they triggered concerns about geography's largely unexamined imperialist, paternalistic and compromised intellectual and political genealogy in Australia. The more we thought and talked about the unfortunate choice of words, the more we found ourselves discussing the ways in which Aboriginal people have so often been rendered invisible and/or irrelevant in Australian landscapes and geographers' representations of them. In many ways, we found ourselves questioning the nature of the 'problem' to which Biddle and Aplin might be referring. In airing our concerns in this paper, our intent, although critical, is to consider just how geography's relationships with indigenous Australians and indigenous rights involve issues of significance to the discipline, and its future in Australian intellectual life. We seek to take some preliminary steps towards a wider acknowledgment and transcendence of the disciplineís compromised intellectual genealogy in Australia.1

Geography and exploration

We take as the starting point for our discussion Biddle and Aplin's consideration of the NSW Geographical Society's 1940s bookplate (1996: 8), where the link between geography and colonial 'voyages of discovery into unknown realms' is left unchallenged, as it was in Biddle's original paper for the 1988 special issue of Australian Geographer. That earlier paper explained that, in the bookplate:

... the globe symbolised the wide field of geographical studies; in the ship Endeavour, the vessel used by Captain James Cook when he explored the east coast of Australia in 1770, was symbolised the spirit of adventure sailing through the dark seas of the unknown-to-Europeans towards a dawn of discovery ... (Biddle 1988: 5).

The link between these adventurous explorations and the impacts of colonial occupation on indigenous peoples and environments is raised in neither paper. Instead, there is an implicit suggestion that geographical knowledge was the exclusive province of imperial interests sailing 'towards a dawn of discovery'. In such representations, whether from the colonial or the contemporary period, indigenous peoples are effectively rendered invisible and indigenous environments targeted for settlement are subsequently dehumanised and exoticised. Indeed, in contrast to evidence about the extent to which the landscape into which European exploration intruded was already a cultural landscape, Powell,for example, suggested that:

Geographical thought in Australia has been built on the various forms of practical landscape authorship contributed by pioneer settlers, key bureaucrats and leading government agencies (1994: 259).

Such representations suggest that geographers may need to acknowledge that indigenous people might have a problem with geography's colonialist foundations and our failure to decolonise our views. Europeans celebrated the "discovery" of "new worlds", but they also set in train changes that included the beginning of geographical endeavours directly implicated in the expanding frontier of dispossession, racism and the worst excesses of social Darwinism, environmental determinism and patronising welfarism. Critical review of the discipline's roots in these matters in Australia is long overdue, as is consideration of their contemporary implications for the discipline and the nation. Conrad's journey into European imperialism's 'heart of darkness'(Conrad 1980) drew heavily on imaginative geographies to unsettle representations of "natives" which had 'hitherto been offered as disinterested "descriptions" of the Other' (Fothergill 1992: 50). Conrad's 'erasure of precise location and of historical and ethnic specificity [in order to give] the native peoples he represents the appearance of the near mythic' (Fothergill 1992: 51), has not prevented assumptions that it was a disembodied Africa that is represented in Heart of Darkness. In his own discussion of geography, however, Conrad also reflects on imperial and personal experience in Australasia (1955: 6-10, 18-21). Given the extent to which geographical thought, colonial history and colonial enterprise have been interwoven in Australia2, the need to review the connections, the representations of peoples and landscapes, and the concrete social, cultural and environmental legacies built on Australian geographical knowledge is urgent.

Current relations between geographers and indigenous people in Australia provide a useful vantage point from which to consider the demanding intellectual, social and political processes of reconciliation between Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders and other Australians. The reconciliation agenda is currently under siege from anti-intellectual, racist and self-interested critics of native title, the High Court Wik decision, and the shift back towards paternalism and assimilation as the basis for state and national policies in indigenous affairs. We believe the thoughtful and constructive contributions of geographers are able to transcend the discipline's colonial legacies and assist in reconciliation on the ground in diverse communities around Australia.

Geography's colonial baggage

The 1928 paper about 'Australia's Aboriginal problem' to which the Australian Geographer editorial refers, reports on addresses to the NSW Geographical Society by two anthropologists (Warner and Radcliffe Brown) and a missionary (Burton). Warner is quoted as suggesting Australian Aborigines had no hope of surviving, 'but some effort must be made to make their passing easy' (The Australian Geographer 1928a: 67). Warner argued for 'reservation of an area solely for blacks, say in eastern Arnhem Land, a soft, marshy area where there are no minerals and not much grazing' (ibid.). Burton acknowledged that 'missionaries are charged with depopulating certain areas' (p 68). Radcliffe Brown reflected on the relationship between Aboriginal people and anthropologists and acknowledged that

not 150 years ago, he (sic) owned and occupied this land. His primitive type of culture was in accordance with scattered population and nomadic habits. There were property rights'(The Australian Geographer 1928a: 68.).

Radcliffe Brown also argued that anthropology should be carried out as an objective science. The anthropologist, he said, 'treats the human native as the chemist does his substance ... If he admits human sympathies and interests, he impairs the validity of his work' (ibid.). The conclusions Radcliffe Brown drew in his address to the Society, in the year of the Coniston Massacre3, were pessimistic.'The aboriginal (sic)'

is not inferior racially to many of our own people. Fifty percent are under-nourished. Their future is to have a little of aboriginal stock absorbed into whites of a little higher class (The Australian Geographer 1928a: 69).

The nature of race relations on the colonial frontier was glossed in such presentations. There was no sense of ambiguity, uncertainty or debate in this representation. Nor is there mention of the extent of Aboriginal resistance to the oppressive practices of the settlers. The importance of indigenous people and their knowledge of Australiaís cultural landscapes in shaping colonial geographies through the assistance they provided to European explorers, for example, was often ignored in reviews of the frontier. Yet it is not difficult to find references in the diaries and records of exploration to settlers and administrators who faced moral turmoil over the state of frontier relations4, and references to Aboriginal people's intimate knowledge of their country as crucial in sustaining explorers:

It appeared that this old gentleman knew the country, and some watering places in it ... and on making a kind of map on the sand he put down several places which he called by the following names, viz. - Chimpering, Mowling, Pylebung, Whitegin, and Wynbring (Giles 1875 [1979] in Davis and Kirke 1991: 78).

European appropriation of such places as the frontier of settlement extended across the continent rapidly escalated the foundations of conflict on the frontier (see for example, Reynolds 1982; 1987a and 1987b).

In the work of Griffith Taylor, one of geography's founding fathers in Australia, we find a similar ambiguity at work. On the one hand, Taylor represents Australian landscapes as hostile to white settlement; and on the other, the Aboriginal presence is often simply invisible. In reviewing Taylor's work and its implications for an understanding of the cultural and physical dimensions of Aboriginal landscapes, Head suggests he thought that the demise of the Aboriginal population was not a result of the colonial engagement but an inevitable outcome of evolution 'towards a higher type of civilisation' (paraphrased from Head in press).

It might be argued that the invisibility of Aboriginal people in Australian geographers' representation of Australia landscapes reflects an absence of "evidence", but Clark's painstaking and detailed reconstruction of boundaries, territories and language in western and Central Victoria (Clark 1990), reveals the extraordinary amount of information that was recorded about Aboriginal people on the frontiers.

In addition to its consideration of 'some aspects of the Aboriginal problem', the first issue of The Australian Geographer also provides a brief account of the 'scope of geographical research' as understood by the Royal Geographical Society (NSW Branch) in 1888 (The Australian Geographer 1928b: 83). Geography, we are told, encompasses:

... the collection and publication of the records of the work and lives of the explorers, pioneers and others identified with the discovery, formation or progress of Australia ... together with the collection and preservation of ethnological and historical records of colonial interest, and, not least, of the manners and customs of those interesting savage races which so mysteriously vanish at the approach of civilisation and sometimes scarcely leave a trace behind (The Australian Geographer 1928b: 88).

The 'savage races' were of 'passing interest' to the colonial Geographical Societies, who, like most new settlers, saw the decimation of indigenous cultures as an inevitable result of progress, evolution and the 'approach of civilisation'. The work of these colonial Geographical Societies laid the foundations for both the academic discipline in Australia, and a geographical enterprise harnessed to the needs of the expanding colonial frontier:

The work of the geographer goes hand in hand with that of the pioneer...No work can be productive at home of more practical good than one which has for its object the perfection of the knowledge we already possess of 'our great land'; the existence and the distribution of its natural resources; the natural advantages offered to the settlement on Australian shores of numbers of the white race, and the preservation and civilisation of the various indigenous races.... The first care of a young nation must likewise be to obtain a thorough knowledge of its new home, the land it has peacefully conquered, and which is destined to become the home of countless generations of descendants (Marin la Meslee 1885: ix) (see also Hudson 1977, passim).

Geographical research was instrumental in constructing profoundly influential visions of the environment as empty, unknown, and waiting for (white) settlement (see for instance Holmes 1935, 1936; Lowndes 1941; Price 1939; Taylor 1947; White 1907). A network of societies in southern-eastern Australia colonies was established in the 1880s (Sydney and Melbourne in 1883; Queensland in 1884; South Australia in 1885) (see eg Powell 1986: 10 and Peake-Jones 1981: 86). At the meetings to establish these societies, many speeches recounting recent contributions of explorers to geographical knowledge were made, generally to male audiences comprised of judges, parliamentarians, surveyors, members of the military, church and local dignitaries.

Collecting, analysing and making geographical knowledge accessible was crucial to the task of attracting interest in the colonies at the centre of empire (cf Jacobs 1996). The geography of the colonial geographical societies aimed to facilitate the settlement and development of an empty country and furthering the interests of empire. Such work would also give the colonial societies' endeavours a scientific imprimatur:

If the Society does no more that methodise and make accessible the large stores of information that are distributed in the various Surveyor-Generals' offices in the different colonies, and in the hands of persons who have taken part in exploring expeditions, a very large step will be made towards the advancement of geographical science. A very large part of the map of Australia is blank (Magery and Jones 1886: 9).

There was no doubt about the link between geographical knowledge and imperial expansion. As Powell puts it, there was a:

definite association of science with the commercial, humanitarian, and ideological motivations for empire (Powell 1986: 5).

Although Australia remained a blank to the civilised world, imperial interests faced threats from a 'near neighbourhood of eager, ambitious, and daring competitive nations' (Davenport 1886:41).5 In protecting imperial interests, geographical knowledge, or at least the colonial geographical societies, were central:

And thus, on the 26th of January, 1788 was first sown on Australian soil the seed of British settlement, which, in the 98 years since elapsed, has spread its branches as we see it this day ... On that memorable day when Governor Phillip landed and founded Sydney, the germ of Australian geography proper began its life (Davenport 1886: 49).

... we have seen ... how, in a few years, a continent has been first trodden. Then how, when once started, the energies of the bold and brave of our race have threaded, like a network, their paths of investigation into its nature and thus have paved the way to great settlements of population, production and trade, by which we and the world are benefited. And, as we see the amount of area of Australia thus unveiled to us, we also see blank spaces of varied magnitude waiting discovery. Hence, to construct a repository to save from oblivion, and store for public service, the acquisitions of the past, and to influence for good all movements promotive of geographical knowledge in the future - these are the grounds we trust you will approve as commanding your warm support of the institution we at this hour commend for your adoption (Davenport 1886: 99).

In South Australia the task was seen as monumental, yet rewarding, according to Sir Samuel Davenport, spokesman in the Legislative Council for the pastoral interest:

With the exception of Western Australia, no colony had so large a territory of her own to explore as South Australia, and therefore we should promote the establishment of a Society of this kind. It was a Society whose work would be of an elevating character. It would have a beneficial effect upon the community, and it would advance the material interests of the colony (Applause) (Davenport 1886: 13).

In Queensland, Governor Bowen believed the views of the Royal Geographical Society might influence decisions about Queensland's expanding frontier. He wrote to the Duke of Newcastle in England, suggesting:

exploration....of the Gulf of Carpentaria and in the neighbouring interior of Australia cannot fail to be regarded with much interest by men of science in England, I venture to suggest that it would be well that a copy of the first eight paragraphs of this dispatch. and of the enclosure should be transmitted to the Royal Geographical Society. (Correspondence from Governor Bowen to the Duke of Newcastle, 5 September 1861, in (Heatley and Nicholson, 1989, p.94).

Further he called on the observations of President of the Royal Geographical Society, who in the annual address of 1862, said:

There can be no doubt that the colonists of Queensland will soon extend their pastures to the Gulf of Carpentaria; and that the northernmost settlers of South Australia, following up the track of Stuart, will ere long found establishments in the bosom of the noble recesses of Cambridge Gulf and the Northern Victoria River, where fleets can anchor securely, and where the vegetation is luxuriant (Heatley and Nicholson 1989: 142).

The colonial geographical societies saw their links to both science and commerce as serving the interests of Europeans in general, and the European raceís manifest destiny. In the mid 1880s, there were patriotic calls for cooperation between the fledgling geographical societies in the Australian colonies:

There is one respect in which we will shall all recognise the advantages of a Society of this kind. It will bring us into immediate communication with the Geographical Societies all over the world. There are some sixty Geographical Societies in Europe.... even the slow-growing Portuguese colonies on the coast of Africa have established a Society.... We do not want a small struggling Society in each colonial capital. This is especially a work in which we require federation, and in which we can happily combine to accomplish a great object (Magery and Jones 1886: 10).

The geographical knowledge to be applied in subjugating and controlling environments and resources was neither haphazardly nor unconsciously gathered. Knowledge was to be obtained from the 'work and lives of the explorers, pioneers, and others identified with the discovery, formation or progress of Australia' (Magery and Jones 1886: 10). For the geographical societies, Australian geographical knowledge came from either explorers, who by definition knew little or nothing about the country until they returned from their expeditions through uninvestigated landscapes ('unknown-to-European'), or from surveyors, whose task involved inspecting the country and rationally allocating it to settlers or speculators.6 Thus it was not until the feet of "white men" traversed a country, that it could be "known". The notion that European explorers and surveyors were the first to traverse the unknown regions reinforced the assumed absence of indigenous societies and their geographical knowledge base from their country, as Ernest Giles' commentary of his efforts in Central Australia illustrates:

For several years previous to my taking the field, I had desired to be the first to penetrate into this unknown region, where for a thousand miles in a straight line, no white man's foot had ever wandered, or, if it had, its owner had never brought it back, nor told the tale....(Cited in Donovan, 1982: 37).

The geographical knowledge of explorers and their maps of new territory were often called on to facilitate and justify colonial expansion into the remote regions of the country. Maps produced by explorers, surveyors and geographers were both the crucial symbolic tool by which the empire took possession, and the practical means of dispossessing indigenous peoples (Huggins, Huggins and Jacobs, 1995: 171).

Bolstered by maps which inscribed a landscape empty of precolonial sovereignties (Carter 1987; Ryan 1996), settlers and colonial governments appealed to the arguments of the 'men of science'- the geographers - who were the colonists' most vocal advocates. For example, in the constitutional history of the Northern Territory numerous documents refer to the role of the Royal Geographical Society. According to Coltheart:

The (Geographical) Society argued that such a line of exploration through Stokes' "green and glistening valleys" would open up country between the settled districts of Australia and the ports of India, and make accessible new fields for British enterprise and British labour" (Coltheart, 1982: 55).

Geography's troubled present

In current debates about racism, multiculturalism, indigenous rights and Australian identity, many people with vested interests in the structures of racism and inequality derived from the colonial frontier (see eg Howitt 1991) seek to re-establish a misleading vision of equality by re-inscribing Australian landscapes as terra nullius. On the one hand, the National Farmersí Federation and the Queensland National Party seek to extinguish native title which the High Court has ruled coexists with leasehold titles on some pastoral leases, while on the other, many naïve environmental groups advocate the exclusion of indigenous peoples from their traditional lands because they perceive them as pristine wilderness and not as the product of long indigenous stewardship. For both, despite the clear persistence of native titles derived from systems of law and property which predate colonial claims of sovreignty, the land is, or should be, empty (see eg Rose 1996; Langton 1995).

In coming to terms with geography's troubled genealogy in Australia, it is important to dispel the idea that terra nullius was unchallenged, and unequivocally held to be 'right', prior to the Hight Court's 1992 decision in Mabo. Nineteenth century international legal opinion, and even the opinion of settlers on the ground, was deeply divided on the validity of the European nations'claim to the New World drew on the principle of discovery as a basis of sovereignty (eg Reynolds 1996). It seems that the nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial geographical societies were not so divided. The Royal Geographical Society's Queensland Branch hosted a lecture titled 'Geographical Discovery as a Basis of Territorial Right' in 1908-09. In this instance, the speaker, Cumbrae-Stewart, described the influence of the British fear of Dutch discovery of north Australia as the motivation for British settlement, and urged the Geographical Society to be prepared to dutifully assist in legal cases where they may be called upon to 'substantiate our claim to the territory which we occupy or any part thereof'(Cumbrae-Stewart 1908-09: 62). As already discussed, discovery and utilisation of land was the raison díetre of the colonial geographical institutions. Implicit in the emphasis on discovery was, of course, the notion that the land and sea was unknown to science, and hence, civilisation. Moreover, it assumed that the occupants were not in possession of the land. Quoting early Roman legal theorists, Cumbrae-Stewart exposes this imperial way of thinking to the Queensland Geographical Society

'Discovery'says Heineccius.... is a kind of occupatio. Occupatio is the taking of something which belongs to no one, so there can be no such discovery of things lost by others so as to give us right to them. Discovery is the taking of something which belongs to no one (Cumbrae-Stewart 1908-09: 66).

Unsurprisingly, a few years later in the work of the celebrated founders of academic geography in Australia, we find echoes of this troubling legacy. Figures such as Griffith Taylor and Grenfell Price, for example, contributed vigorously to key debates about White Australia, the carrying capacity of Australian environments and how to respond to the perceived threats to Australiaís claims to sovereignty in vast areas of north Australia in the absence of occupation. Indeed, geographers wound together aspects of race, environmental determinism and the white Australia policy to advocate policies on importation of Asian labour to allow occupation of the land without jeopardising exploitation of the geographical knowledge produced by exploration of those areas. Arguably one of the most influential geographers at this time was Grenfell Price who described the Australian tropics as places where:

... the colored peoples, with their lower standards of living and culture, are absorbing the whites. Hence, it is vital to ascertain whether these biological changes are advantageous to humanity and whether the white people should continue to send colonists to tropical regions in which absorption is almost certain to take place (Price 1939: 178).

In another of the discipline's academic founders, Oskar Spate, we find a more critical engagement with questions of race and racism, building on experience in Asia and Africa (eg Spate 1965). In a paper originally delivered in 1956 at the Muslim University in Aligarh, India, Spate discusses the problematic nature of racial categories, and the difficulties involved in using them in geographical analysis (1965: 131-134). Unlike other geographers, Spate addressed the relationship between racism and the geographical expansion of empire:

Apart from anti-Semitism, which grew up within the European society and has far more complex origins, Racism is associated with the intrusion of a technologically advanced society into the area of less advanced societies with different cultures and racial origins (1965: 137).

Spate points to the relevance of such issues to geography using the examples of apartheid in South Africa and the policies of 'white Australia' (1965: 138-146). Despite recognising the importance of the issue of racism, and the injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal Australians (eg pp 141-142), Spate's paper ultimately mounts a spirited defence of Australiaís restrictive 1950s and 1960s immigration policies:

Australia in effect has no fundamental race problem: seeing the misery which race problems cause, would we really risk another South Africa? At the same time, those of us in Australia who think thus have strongly opposed the opening of New Guinea to large-scale white immigration to produce 'a second Kenya' (1965: 145).7

Decolonising Geography in Australia

Until recently, most of us might have said these matters were hardly relevant to the work of contemporary geographers. We might have said that things had changed. The work of many geographers on matters that contribute to the protection, enhancement and recognition of indigenous rights in Australia, through teaching, research and public commentary, might superficially suggest that few legacies of this colonial past remained influential in the discipline. The absence of a critical literature on the history of geographical knowledge in Australia, and our response to the six troubling words in the Australian Geographer editorial, however, suggests to us that the discipline remains hobbled to and troubled by antecedent colonial ideologies.

It is worth considering how the discipline has changed, and how it might change further in the future; how geographers contribute to a different view of things in which the idea of 'an Aboriginal "problem"' is itself rendered problematic. The problem with Biddle and Aplin's wording is that it risks implying that what is interesting are the continuities, not the dissonances with the past. Implicit in this is an unquestioned sense of 'progress' in the discipline and its social roles. There is no sense here of deconstructing the imperial roots of colonial geographical societies committed to documenting records 'of colonial interest'. Nor is there a sense of any need to consider the genealogy8 of the discipline and the colonial geographical societies, nor the contemporary relevance of research ethics - despite the inclusion of a piece on research ethics in the same issue of the journal (Winchester 1996). Similarly absent is the possibility that the discipline's history contains contested themes or approaches of the sort alluded to by Smith and Godlewska (1994: 3).

So, let us reverse the questions. In 1928, did Aboriginal Australians have a problem with a discipline that was pessimistic about their future, committed to documenting ethnological material of colonial interest, and recording those few traces they left as they mysteriously vanished at the approach of civilisation? Do they still have a problem with a discipline whose senior figures can carelessly suggest nothing has changed since 1928? Despite the careless expression of Biddle and Aplin, the discipline and its relationship with Aboriginal Australians has changed very substantially since 1928.

In fact, Australian geographers have contributed significantly to understanding of the complex and dynamic links between Australian landscapes and Australian identities in ways that have demonstrably contributed to indigenous Australians' opportunities to exercise their rights, and contrary to Powell's pessimism (1994: 274) have laid foundations for all Australians to develop a better literacy in Australiaís complex cultural landscapes. In diverse fields several generations of geographers have been making contributions of intellectual, practical and political significance. For example:9

Important theoretical and methodological contributions, each with wider implications for the discipline, can be identified in this field. For example:

In current policy debates, there are several key issues in which geography and geographers are centrally implicated. For example:

It is notable that the 1997 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers not only passed a motion celebrating the place of native title in Australiaís cultural landscape and committing the Institute to supporting indigenous peoples' efforts to secure recognition of and respect for their rights, but also endorsed establishment of a special interest group within the Institute to foster development of scholarship in this area.

Amongst indigenous Australians' representative organisations, there is increasing recognition of the valuable contributions that geographers can make to their work. In many employment advertisements in areas of regional coordination, land-use planning, land management, cultural activities, community support and so on, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations are including a background in geography as an appropriate qualification. Similarly in those industries which must learn to deal equitably with indigenous interests such as the mining and tourism industries, geography is increasingly specified as a desirable part of a candidateís professional toolkit (Howitt 1997c). In government, too, geography graduates are being employed in areas of indigenous service delivery, planning and policy because of their disciplinary background. Clearly, many indigenous people do not have a problem with at least some parts of the discipline.

But, this is by no means a blanket endorsement of all work that is produced by geographers. For example, Davis and Prescottís 1992 book Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries, has been roundly condemned as poorly researched, poorly conceptualised, ethically compromised and inaccurate by anthropologists and geographers alike (eg Sutton 1995). Davis' approach to his role as "Group Geographer" for Western Mining Corp. Ltd, with an office motto of orbis terras compendiosa descripto10, suggests that the imperial legacy remains influential in some quarters. Likewise, the continued dedication of some parts of the discipline (and its journals) to "national planning" - a practice which has long provided a euphemism for planning for those (non-indigenous people, the "mainstream" of Australian society) who are deemed to constitute the 'national interest' (Howitt 1991; Tatz 1982) - suggests that however anti-colonial some geographers' work might be, the discipline itself is yet to be effectively decolonised.

Our goal in this paper is to advocate neither a radical transformation of the discipline, nor imposition of 'political correctness' on all geographers. On the contrary, geographers working with indigenous peoples in Australia encompass an exceptional diversity of theoretical, methodological and political approaches, and such diversity is to be valued very highly. Nor should this be read as advocacy of postmodern rejection of the past. Again on the contrary, we are advocating an increased awareness and ownership of the past (both in terms of our discipline and the nation) as a necessary means for understanding and transcending the yoke and limitations of its colonial trappings. The NSW Geographical Society's nostalgic appropriation of "heritage" facsimiles (including the continued use of the Endeavour bookplate) as something quaint, unproblematic and outside both the blood-and-fire-history of exploration, colonisation, dispossession and the displacement of indigenous Australians from their own cultural geographies11 and current debates within and beyond geography, about representation, meaning, power and ethics, exemplifies for us precisely the issues that troubled us most about Biddle and Aplinís turn of phrase. Indeed, the notion that such issues remain unproblematic reinforces our perception of the need to set to work on decolonising the discipline.

That the knowledge constructed by geographyís colonial advocates was then considered to be of universal value is unsurprising when one considers how the role of the 'civilised' societies of the Empire was perceived at the time. That geography's universal appeal and shared historical origins were still being promoted one hundred years later in a Presidential address to the Institute of Australian Geographers - an address which calls for a discovery of our cultural identity and yet is silent on the impact of Australian exploration, settlement and attitudes to environments, or geosophy, on Australia's indigenous peoples - illustrates the lengths Australian geography still has to go in achieving genuine decolonisation:

Popular interest in the advance of science undoubtedly increased during the 1880s, but geographyís attractive universality captured the ambience of the times more than most - blending the old and new, amateur and professional....

We are reminded of the tyrannies of context which form our worlds of teaching and research; there are salutary tales of dependency, but a new bond may be formed, and perhaps a degree of emancipation, as we reach out and discover our common roots...Australian geographer, know thyself (Powell 1986: 10, 24)

We look forward to a vigorous response to our criticism of Australian geography's continuities with its problematic colonial identity. Our critique, triggered by six words in the Australian Geographer editorial, is not intended to be either personal or censorious. Rather, our assertion is that an unwillingness to recognise, own and transcend the consequences of geography's intimate links with blood and fire history of Australia's colonial past makes it harder for nation as a whole to come to terms with and transcend the myopia reflected in continuing debates about Australian identities.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank a large number of colleagues who have provided helpful comment on earlier drafts of this paper. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the thoughtful and challenging contributions of Jocelyn Davies, Richard Baker, Robyn Dowling, Bob Fagan, Leslie Head, Bill Jonas, Roy Jones, David Mercer, Sandra Suchet, and Elspeth Young, and Australian Geographer's anonymous referees. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of Graeme Aplin in appreciating the value of debate on this important issue in this journal.

Notes

  1. It would be equally possible to consider the genealogy of (and changes in) the discipline's contributions to Australians' understanding of environmental crises, but that is not our focus here. To some extent, this is the task taken up recently by Powell (1994), and we note that his paper does not address indigenous peoples'experience at all. Similarly, Spateís paper in the same volume refers to (and even reinforces) Hope's poetic representation of Australia as "the last of lands, the emptiestí (1994: 277), as if the notion of terra nullius had never been contested. For example the 'extraordinary mugginess' of Sydney's weather referred to by Biddle and Aplin, may not be the same in 1996 as it was in 1928, if one considers the question of environmental and climate change. Our intention here is explicitly to address the question of geography and indigenous issues. In focusing our initial concerns on a few poorly chosen words in the Biddle and Aplin paper, we wish to acknowledge that the editorial may have been trying to raise the editors' own concerns that, even after seventy years, there is still no reconciliation between indigenous and settler Australians, that racist ideas like those underpinning the 1928 paper referred to, retain wide currency; that the world's food situation is probably more critical now than in 1928, and that some people remain convinced that their own era's climate is "extraordinary", rather than linked to systemic processes of change. The focus of our concern, of course, is in the substance of the issues rather than their particular expression by any particular authors. [return to text]

  2. See Powell (1994: 263) and his quotation of John Forrest's 1888 presidential address to the geographical section of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science for the original source of the words paraphrased here. [return to text]

  3. The Coniston Massacre in the Northern Territory was Australiaís last officially acknowledged massacre of indigenous people. In 1928-29, following the murder of a European prospector and station hand, a large number of Aboriginal people were murdered by police. The police were exonerated by an official inquiry which concluded tht the deaths of at least 31 Warlpiri people had occurred 'while the blacks were resisting justifiable arrest' (Cribben 1984: 156; see also Horton, 1994: 218). [return to text]

  4. The recent documentary series Frontier broadcast on ABCTV in Australia (Belsham 1996) refers to many such documents (see also Reynolds 1982, 1987b). [return to text]

  5. See also Morgan for a brief history of geography's interest in the European discovery of Australia (1891-92). [return to text]

  6. There are, of course, many examples of imagined geographies, those representations of unknown places that Conrad (1955: 3) referred to as geography in 'its fabulous phase'- a phase of 'circumstantially extravagant speculation which had nothing to do with the pursuit of truth' (Conrad 1955: 2) – which created expectations of all sorts of in explorers and settlers as they set out towards new frontiers. Similarly, explorersí reports were widely circulated, laying foundations for perceptions of frontiers visited by few, but well-understood by many. [return to text]

  7. Spate's brief 1994 reflection on what 'Australian geographers and geography contributed to the national sense' (1994: 279) acknowledges that ëby a tragic irony, the people who fit lest easily into a national identity are the original Australians, who were too much at home in the land they loved so deeply to cope readily with the vastly different Australia that whites have madeí (p280), with little critical engagement with the 'vast geographical consequences' of the dismissal of the doctrine of terra nullius (p281). [return to text]

  8. On the use of the conept of genealogy of such terms see, eg, Fraser and Gordon 1994. [return to text]

  9. This list and the one which follows are indicative rather than exhaustive. We apologise to anybody whose work is not referred to here, but our intention is to indicate to those unfamiliar with this part of geography in Australia that this is an active and productive field of scholarship and action. [return to text]

  10. Translated as 'comprehensive description of the whole world' by WMC (pers comm 16.12.96). [return to text]

  11. See for example Stokes (1987) and the work in New Zealand geography of figures such as Stokes, Tutua-Nathan, Cant and others (see eg contributions in Cant et al1993) In Canadian geography eg Osborne (1996). [return to text]

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