Research findings.
Below is the full-text of Steve Skitmore's 2016 dissertation on Red Hill Camp.
A full PDF including images and appendices is available at the ACT Heritage Library, or please email [email protected]. |
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RED HILL CAMP
Prioritising Indigenous Communities in Inner City Community Archaeology
Steve Skitmore, Master of Archaeological Science (Advanced) The Australian National University, October 2016
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Archaeological Science (Advanced) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences
Images in this thesis are used courtesy of Canberra’s RAO groups.
Intellectual property of recorded oral histories rests with those telling the stories.
ANU Human Ethics Protocol 2016/086 relates to this research. A copy of this approval is available in Appendix A.
Contact details for further information: Steve Skitmore [email protected] 0401766903
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge that wherever I stand in Australia, I am on stolen land. I have deep gratitude towards all of Canberra’s Aboriginal groups for allowing me to live and work here, and for taking the time to collaborate on this Project. Matilda House, Wally Bell, Arnold Williams, Carl Brown and James Mundy, I hope that this project will be a useful contribution to your continuing fight for recognition and respect.
As a first generation migrant to this country, the history of bloody oppression and dispossession carried out by those who came before me has been slowly unveiled by numerous educators and activists. I am deeply indebted to all of these, especially to those who have channeled my flailing desire ‘to help’ into something more constructive. Thanks particularly to Darren Bloomfield, Isabel Coe, Roxley Foley, Jenny Munro, Marianne Mackay, Mark McMurtie, Mitch, Winiata Puru, Jude Saldanha and Sam Watson.
Dave Johnston deserves a special mention. As my community supervisor, Dave has done a serious amount of legwork for this project, and this research would have not been possible without him. Thanks also to Duncan Wright, my academic supervisor, for introducing me to Dave and Matilda, and for giving me opportunities to cut my archaeological teeth. Cheers to ANU’s Dave McGregor and Rachel Wood and ACT Heritage’s Euroka Gilbert and Megan Russell for your support too.
Many other people contributed at every step of the way. Thanks go to Andrew Ball, Aleese Barron, Amy Beugelsdyk, Wayne Brennan, Loki Campbell Type, Catherine Claessens, Rebecca Dixon, Unaiki Esther, André Fleury, Louise Glasson, Catriona Graham, Anna Himmelrich, Jaqui Hockey, Tanya Johnston, Ack Mercer, Emily Miller, Liam Norris, Ang O’Niel, Lauren Prosser, Karl Van Rjisbergen, Bridget San Miguel, Simon Tener, Glenn Van Der Kolk, Rob Williams, Simon Williams, Amber Wood-Bailey, Io Wu Won and to all the crew at the Canberra Student Housing Co-operative.
I am also thankful for the information, support and advice offered by others I reached out to about how to understand the processes and interactions that occurred during the Project. Thanks especially to Denis Byrne, Ann Gugler, Peter Kabaila, Barbara Little, Paul Shackel and Marilyn Truscott. Your thoughts have helped shape this story.
Abstract
This dissertation reports on a community archaeology project run in Canberra, Australia in 2015-16. The overarching aim was to address the limited number of community archaeology projects conducted with Indigenous groups in the urban environment, by showing that this research is both feasible and beneficial. It focused on the ‘Red Hill Camp’, an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite in the suburb of Griffith.
The Project’s focus, aims and methods were developed in collaboration with members of Canberra’s Representative Aboriginal Organisations (RAOs). The site’s history was investigated through oral history, archival material and archaeological excavations. The results from these distinct disciplinary approaches were sometimes complementary, yet often ran parallel to each other and at times were in direct conflict. Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of conversations was utilised to navigate these divergences and to develop a co-authored history of the site.
The Project’s outcomes display the value of undertaking community archaeology projects focusing on Indigenous heritage in the inner city. The process acted as a catalyst for broader community dialogue around how the recent history of the Canberra suburb of Griffith is currently interpreted in a way that marginalises Indigenous people. The Project showed that by prioritising Indigenous voices in this research, community archaeology can play an important role in supporting struggles for increased recognition and control over cultural heritage in the urban environment.
Foreword
This Project has critiqued the extent to which practitioners of community archaeology are objective in their research. With this in mind, I feel it is important to autoethnographically present myself to the reader at the start of this dissertation (following D. Boyd 2008).
I am a 29-year-old first-generation Anglo-Celtic Australian who has been involved in environmental, social justice and Indigenous rights groups for the past decade. I have a background in community development practice and popular education facilitation. My engagement in archaeological practice comes from an interest in whether there is a role for my own culture in decolonisation in Australia. More specifically, I am interested in whether archaeology can be used as a tool through which to deconstruct colonial narratives that have whitewashed Australia’s recent past. I am also interested in whether there is a role for non- Indigenous archaeologists to engage with Indigenous communities to interpret their heritage, and if so, how researchers make the decision of how, where and when to collaborate.
1.0 Introduction
This dissertation reports on a community archaeology project run in Canberra, Australia, in 2015-16. The Project was a joint undertaking between the author, a student researcher at The Australian National University (ANU), and senior members of Canberra’s Representative Aboriginal Organisations (RAOs1). It is part of the broader Local Significance: Indigenous Archaeology in and around Canberra collaboration supervised by Dr Duncan Wright (ANU) and Dave Johnston (Aboriginal Archaeologists Australia) that aims to promote understanding of Indigenous heritage in Canberra and its environs. This Project used a community archaeology methodology to investigate and promote an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite called ‘Red Hill Camp’, located in the inner-south suburb of Griffith2 (Figure 1).
Impetus for this research has come from recognition that while community archaeology has had positive impacts for Indigenous3 communities globally, there are to date very few projects in inner city Australia which have prioritised the voice of Indigenous people. Community archaeology is a term used to describe a group of archaeological practices that share analytical and interpretive power between researchers and communities who have an attachment to that history (Atalay 2006; Truscott 2004; Tully 2007). In Australia, these approaches have been strongly underpinned by the demands of Indigenous movements and postcolonial theory, which have critiqued traditional archaeological approaches for marginalising non-Western understandings of history (Brady and Kearney 2016; Greer 2010). Attempting to deal with these critiques has resulted in community archaeology developing as a more inclusive methodological approach to investigating Indigenous histories. This in turn has led to an increased focus on research questions that are of relevance to Indigenous communities, with most projects emphasising the recent, remembered past (D. Byrne 2003b; Mitchell et al. 2013). Despite these benefits however, the vast majority of community archaeology projects in Australia that have worked with Indigenous communities have taken place in the remote north of the country (for instance, Clarke 2002; David et al. 2004; Greer 2014; D. Wright 2015). Simultaneously, community archaeology in urban environments has generally prioritised working with non-Indigenous communities (D. Byrne 2003b). This dichotomy has large implications for recent historical narratives of urban space, positing Indigenous history as either in the deep past, or in remote areas where non-Indigenous people rarely go (D. Byrne 2003a). This situation is explored in detail in the Literature Review, Section 2.0.
This Project aims to bridge the gap by conducting a community archaeology project in inner city Canberra that prioritises the voices of Canberra’s Indigenous groups. To do this, the ‘Red Hill Camp’ location was identified in collaboration with RAO representatives as a case study to investigate and promote. As an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite, ‘Red Hill Camp’ is a site of particular importance to senior Ngunnawal/Ngambri Elder Matilda House, who camped at this location in the 1940s with her grandparents. Despite this significance, the current historical narrative of the area emphasises how in the 1920s town planners transformed what was then a pastoral landscape into a rare example of Garden City planning (National Trust of Australia (ACT) 2009). The site-specific research aim was therefore to investigate and develop a more nuanced history which included stories of Indigenous use of the area. This was summed up by the (only partially) tongue-in-cheek comment by Matilda House that she wanted the project to, “put an Aboriginal campsite smack bang in the fanciest part of town!”. These aims are presented in Section 1.1.
To investigate ‘Red Hill Camp’, a three-pronged methodology was chosen in collaboration with the RAOs where: oral histories relating to the site were recorded; archival research was undertaken to understand changing use of the site over time, and; the site was excavated to assess the subsurface archaeology. Project methodology and methods are detailed in Section 3.0, with the Results reporting on the oral history (Section 4.2), archival research (Section 4.3) and archaeological investigations (Section 4.4). Section 5.1 offers a jointly developed interpretation of these results, utilising the conceptual framework of interdisciplinary conversations, as described by Wendy Beck and Margaret Somerville (2005). Finally, this dissertation concludes by offering some reflections (Section 5.2) on the Project’s processes and outcomes, and assesses the benefits and challenges of such collaborations in the urban environment.
1.1 Research Aims
The overarching aims of the Project were to:
Secondary aims developed in collaboration with the RAO groups relate specifically to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ investigation:
2.0 Literature Review
Community archaeology is a term used to describe a range of archaeological practices which aim to share power between researchers and communities (Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Marshall 2002). Emerging largely as a response to demands for increased control of cultural heritage by Indigenous people in Australia, community archaeology aims to make archaeological research more relevant to local communities (Atalay 2006; Clarke 2002; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; Silliman and Ferguson 2010; Truscott 2011). This literature review initially provides an overview of what is encapsulated by the term ‘community archaeology’ and the benefits of the approach. Secondly, it traces the development of the field with particular reference to Indigenous involvement in archaeological research in Australia. Finally, it presents an overview of archaeological research undertaken in Canberra to date.
2.1 Defining Community Archaeology
While ‘community archaeology’ has sometimes been used erroneously to describe any project that entails community involvement, at its core it is an approach that requires power sharing between researchers and community during all stages of the research; from conception to dissemination (Atalay 2006; S. Byrne 2012; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; Greer 2014; Moser et al. 2002; Silliman and Ferguson 2010; Truscott 2004). The result of such power sharing is that community archaeology often works across disciplines, linking archaeological approaches to explaining the past (excavations, surveys, laboratory analysis, etc.) with other methods such as oral history. The approach has often been used by Western academics who have either sought to, or responded to demands to, work with knowledge systems that are very different to their own (Greer 2014). Therefore, a particular formulation is often seen in the literature, whereby research is initiated as a collaboration between community groups and academic researchers, includes medium-length community- based visits, and most often presents oral histories combined with archaeological investigations (for instance, Atalay 2010; Brady et al. 2003; David et al. 2004; D. Wright 2015).
There is no prescribed set of practices that defines community archaeology however, and the literature exhibits a great range of collaboration approaches. Power sharing can range from projects based within external academic institutions which merely “involve the local community in the investigation and interpretation of the past” (Truscott 2004, 30), to others where researchers are embedded in community power relations and actively relinquish any demands for archaeological outcomes (Brady and Kearney 2016). The latter projects have often led to quite sophisticated methodological understandings that draw on critiques of social power in the construction of history (Brady and Kearney 2016; De Leiuen and Arthure 2016; Tur, Blanch, and Wilson 2010).
The community archaeology literature also exhibits a wide range of perspectives on who constitutes ‘the community’ of community archaeology. The majority of projects to not delve into detail about this, often presenting the community as an idealised, bounded and essentialist entity which can be ‘engaged with’ (Silliman and Ferguson 2010; C. Smith and Jackson 2006). However, this assumption is increasingly challenged by authors who suggest that communities are fluid entities of constant formation, and that the choice over which people in ‘the community’ researchers share power with has significant impacts on the nature of the collaboration (Agbe-Davies 2010; Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Little and Shackel 2014; Silliman 2010; L. Smith 2012; L. Smith and Waterton 2009).
2.2 Benefits of Community Archaeology
The community archaeology literature suggests that the approach has many potential benefits, both to the field of archaeology and to local communities. Firstly, there are claims that community archaeology is a form of decolonising practice, which destabilises dominant Western forms of knowledge and creates a more democratic form of research (Atalay 2006; C. Smith and Jackson 2006; L. T. Smith 2012). There has been recognition that the dominance of certain demographics in archaeological and historical research has perpetuated narratives that have excluded certain groups, such as women, Indigenous people and the working class (Hayden 1994; Shackel 2011). The inclusion of such groups can allow researchers to devolve power in a way that creates “fuller histories viewed through multiple lenses”, strengthening interpretation and conclusions (Franklin 1997, 46; also Brady et al. 2003; J. Field et al. 2000; Jones and Russell 2012; Rose and Lewis 1992; Schmidt and Patterson 1995). This often quoted benefit is sometimes critiqued by Indigenous scholars as a co-option of Indigenous (and other minority) voices to support the continued dominance of the archaeological epistemology. They suggest that decolonisation of research will only truly come about through challenging the social inequality that results in such collaboration being needed in the first place (Grande 2004; Yellowhorn 2002).
Secondly, in sharing power over research aims, community archaeology can allow archaeological practice to become more relevant to contemporary community priorities. This means that archaeology as a research tool can move beyond its traditional realm of abstract knowledge creation about the past into tangible social outcomes (Little 2009). Archaeology has been used for decades to inform government policy (for instance Rathje 1996), however, in the past 20 years there has been an explosion in community based archaeological projects with express social and environmental justice outcomes (Little 2009). These have ranged from supporting Indigenous land rights in Latin America (Jofré 2014), developing inclusive homelessness policy and addressing race relations in the United States of America and South Africa (Little and Shackel 2014; Rassool 2007; Shackel 2011; Zimmerman, Singleton, and Welch 2010), to peacebuilding in the Middle East (Keinan- Schoonbart, Sayej, and Solsona 2014) and development of more inclusive histories worldwide (Miller and Henderson 2010). Some authors have described this targeted social engagement as an ‘activist archaeology’, and haved called on archaeologists to “engage in ‘politics’ and translate their findings into information useful for developing social policy” (Zimmerman, Singleton, and Welch 2010, 443; also Jofré 2014; Stottman 2011).
2.3 Community Archaeology in Australia
Community archaeology in Australia, and indeed globally, began with growing demands from Australian Indigenous groups from the 1970s for greater control over their heritage (Truscott 2004). Until 1967, no legislation protected Indigenous archaeological sites, and researchers were under very little social or legislative pressure to seek out or engage with Indigenous communities (McBryde 1985). At the same time, Australian archaeology was in its infancy, and focused primarily on developing regional sequences and determining dates for the earliest inhabitation of the continent. This was a history which many researchers saw as the nation’s heritage, rather than the specific heritage of contemporary Indigenous communities (Wilfred Shawcross in Kabaila 2011, 58). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s however, Indigenous activist groups increasingly pushed for equal rights and greater say, including over what they saw as their cultural heritage (Dodson 1997; Land 2015). While legislative protection of archaeological sites was introduced from the late 1960s, control of conservation remained in the hands of majority non-Indigenous committees and government departments (Moser et al. 2002; Truscott 2004). Frustration with this continuing lack of control coalesced in Ros Langford’s intervention (on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community) at 1982 Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) Conference in Hobart (Langford 1983) which explicitly laid out the difference between archaeological and Indigenous stakes in cultural heritage (Bowdler and The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre 2012). Partially in response to this push, the Australian Heritage Commission in 1985 introduced consultation around the listing of Indigenous heritage places into the Register of the National Estate (Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002). In the same year, archaeologist Isabel McBryde published a snapshot of the growing recognition that Indigenous people were the owners of Australia’s pre-invasion past (McBryde 1985). Requirement for consultation was formalised in the AAA’s Code of Ethics in 1991 that required archaeologists to “obtain informed consent of representatives authorised by the indigenous people whose cultural heritage is the subject of investigation” (Davidson, Lovell- Jones, and Bancroft 1995: 83). As a result of these developments, consultation and engagement with Indigenous groups has become a mainstay in Australian archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management (CHM).
The concurrent rise of postprocessual archaeology and postcolonial theory during the 1970s also had major influences on archaeological practice in Australia. It questioned whether archaeological research could ever reach objective conclusions and demanded that academics look self-reflexively at how they engaged in research (Atalay 2006; Hodder 1995; Lydon and Rizvi 2010). The merging of these challenges into a ‘postcolonial archaeology’ has been a powerful lens in showing how representations of history created by non-inclusive approaches to archaeology have been used to support colonial narratives of the nation’s past (D. Byrne 1996; Ferris, Harrison, and Beaudoin 2014; Ireland 2012; Moore-Gilbert 2007). In particular, it has shown how exclusion of Indigenous voices from research in Australia has perpetuated artificial binaries such as the divide between ‘Aboriginal/ Indigenous’ and ‘Historical’ periods of Australian history (Gandhi 2006; Hinckson and Smith 2005; Karskens and Mackay 1999; Lightfoot 1995; Lydon and Rizvi 2010; McNiven and Russell 2005).
As a response to the these demands, more collaborative research practices developed from the mid-1980s, with Australian researchers Shelley Greer (1989; 2014), Anne Clarke (1995; 2002) and Colin Pardoe (1990) amongst the first in the world to develop new forms of ‘community-based archaeology’. These collaborations initially emerged as in-the-field transformations in personal practice, driven by recognition that the communities on whose land research was being conducted were conceptualising project outcomes in a very different way (Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002). Over the past 30 years, these models have coalesced into a group of methodological approaches with a core commitment to shared power (Brady and Kearney 2016; D. Byrne 2008; Clarke 2002; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; C. Smith and Jackson 2006).
As a result of developing as a way to navigate epistemological differences, the majority of community archaeology collaborations have been undertaken with Indigenous communities in rural and remote areas, where these differences are most explicit. This has included work in the Torres Strait (Brady et al. 2003; David et al. 2004; D. Wright 2015), in Cape York (Greer 2014), on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Clarke 2002), and on Flinders Island, Tasmania (Birmingham 1992). Other projects have been undertaken in south-eastern Australia, with counter-mapping exercises of pastoral and coastal landscapes aiming to build more inclusive, shared historical narratives of landscapes (D. Byrne and Nugent 2004; Harrison 2002, 2014; T. Murray 2011; Thomas and Ross 2013). These projects have largely worked with oral history and have therefore focused on the post-invasion period (D. Byrne 2013).
In contrast, fewer community archaeology projects have been undertaken in the inner urban environment. Those that have have generally taken the form of the ‘big dig’, which draw on the ‘public archaeology’ tradition whereby interested members of the local area are encouraged to help in excavation and interpretation of finds. Examples of such projects include the Sydney Rocks Big Dig (Karskens 1999), Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations in Melbourne (Mackay et al. 2006), and more recently, ANU led projects at Springbank Island in Canberra (Ricardi et al. 2016) and the Triabunna Barracks in Tasmania (Jenkins 2016). The vast majority of these projects have been focused on working with non- Indigenous local and descendant communities. Meanwhile, examples of research projects that have collaborated with Indigenous communities in the urban environment have mostly focused on peri-urban segregated spaces which have featured large in Indigenous memory; fringe camps (Beck and Somerville 2005), reserves and missions (Kabaila 1999; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Morrison, McNaughton, and Keating 2015), or ‘native institutions’ (Lydon 2005). Numerous recent projects from within the CHM and Natural Resource Management (NRM) fields have also focused on collaborative recording and promotion of peri-urban sites for their intangible heritage (for instance, Guilfoyle et al. 2011; Johnston and Cooke 2008a; Mitchell et al. 2013). These have largely been undertaken prior to greenfield development, on rural properties, or in within nature reserves and national parks.
Several community archaeology researchers have argued that this situation maintains a neo- colonial status quo which, by positing Indigenous history as either in the pre-invasion era or in remote or peri-urban areas, causes Indigenous peoples “to disappear from past colonial spaces that they otherwise occupied” (Silliman and Ferguson 2010, 33; also Griffiths 1996; Hayden 1994; Moreton-Robinson 2006). Denis Byrne suggested more than a decade ago that this lack of focus on the shared, recent history of the inner city was having profoundly negative results for the telling of the Australian national narrative, and subsequently for contemporary Indigenous lives (D. Byrne 1996; 2003a). It does not appear that the situation has changed since.
2.3.1 Community Archaeology in Canberra
Archaeological work in Canberra has followed a similar trajectory, with increasing Indigenous involvement in CHM work, but very few community archaeology projects that share control with the local community. Prior to the 1980s, little archaeological work was done in the ACT, with the small amount that was being conducted focusing on traces of the deep past with little involvement of Indigenous communities (D. Bell 1975; English 1985; Flood 1973; Tugby and Tugby 1964). Since the mid-1980s, archaeological assessment has been mandated for all new developments, resulting in more recent subdivisions in the north and the west of the city being subject to numerous archaeological investigations (for instance, ANUtech 1984; Access Archaeology 1991, 1992; Barber 2000; Bulbeck and Boot 1990; Canberra Archaeological Society 1984; Klaver 1997; Kuskie and Boot 1992; Navin Officer Heritage Consultants 2001; Officer 1995).
Despite this, consultation with Indigenous people was not required until a decade later, resulting with the majority of assessments only referencing Indigenous peoples’ presence in the area by stone artefacts and ochre quarrying, assuming all other cultural material was of ‘European’ origin (ACT Heritage Council 2015, Matilda House and Wally Bell, personal communication). Indeed, of the approximately 3500 Indigenous heritage places recorded in the ACT, the vast majority relate to the pre-invasion period (ACT Government 2010). Furthermore, recently protected heritage places in urban areas have been able to achieve conservation status due to the presence of pre-invasion artefactual evidence (ACT Heritage Council 2011; Johnston and Cooke 2008a).
Despite increasingly consultative CHM practice, there have been no examples of community archaeology research projects that have collaborated primarily with the RAO groups. One example of the ‘big dig’ form of community archaeology, the Springbank Island Project (2015) (Ricardi et al. 2016), has been undertaken in Canberra to date. While this project invited RAO groups to participate, its research aims were determined before involvement, and it focused primarily on investigation of early European heritage in Canberra. Some oral history recordings and material culture recording have also been carried out in Stirling Park by amateur historian Ann Gugler (1999; 2001) with the Bell family; however, these have not followed an archaeological approach.
2.4 Summary
The above review shows that archaeological research can contribute to positive social outcomes when it shares power with local communities. However, while there has been an increasing presence of Indigenous voices in archaeological research and CHM in Australia, community archaeology with these communities is still a rarity. It has mostly been undertaken in remote, rural and peri-urban areas, with large-scale public archaeology projects focusing on European heritage dominating community archaeology in the inner city.
3.0 Methodology and Methods
3.1 Methodology
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ Project used a community archaeology methodology, with both the choice of site and specific methods developed in discussion with RAO groups. This section outlines the Project’s collaboration framework and investigative approach.
Discussions between the author and RAO groups were facilitated by Dr Duncan Wright (ANU) and Dave Johnston (Aboriginal Archaeologists Australia), both of who have worked closely with the RAO groups in the past. This initial engagement process followed the requirements of the ACT Heritage Act 2004, as well as guidelines produced by the Canberra Archaeology Society (Johnston and Cooke 2008b) and the Australian Heritage Commission (Australian Heritage Commission 2002). Discussions commenced in September 2015, with a site and methods decided upon by the end of the year. Methods included recording oral histories with RAOs, collating archival material relevant to the site, and undertaking a sub-surface archaeological investigation.
Throughout the Project, despite community archaeology’s ideal of full shared control between the researcher and constituent community, it was essential for the degree of shared decision making to be flexible so as not to overburden the RAO representatives involved. The extent of required collaboration for each project stage was thus discussed and a three step ladder of engagement developed. This framework drew on the civic engagement work of Sherry Arnstein (1969) and the IAP2 model utilised by Cherie De Leiuen and Susan Arthure (2016) and is detailed in Appendix B. Signed statements were given by Matilda House (Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council) and Wally Bell (Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation) stating their approval of the Project’s approach (Appendix C, following viewing of the Information Sheet Appendix D), and oral support was given by Carl Brown (King Brown Tribal Group) and James Mundy (Ngarigu Kurrawong Clan).
3.2 Methods
3.2.1 Oral History
The Project’s first stage involved visiting the chosen site with interested RAOs to record oral histories related to the vicinity. While it was anticipated that the non-Indigenous community would also have memories relating to the site, the Project’s aim was to prioritise Indigenous voices and therefore only aimed to record oral histories with RAO groups. A Human Ethics approval was acquired from the ANU Ethics Committee to undertake this research stage, and is included in Appendix A.
On 1st March, 2016, Steve Skitmore, Dave Johnston and ANU student researcher Bridget San Miguel4 visited ‘Red Hill Camp’ with Matilda House. The oral history recording method followed a form of ‘story trekking’ (following Green, Green, and Neves 2003, 378), where various locations of significance to Matilda House were visited throughout the course of the day and discussed informally. ‘Red Hill Camp’ was one of these locations. The discussion was facilitated by Dave Johnston, and while at the site, he asked Matilda questions about:
This discussion was recorded on an iPhone 6 and transcribed by Steve Skitmore and Bridget San Miguel in March 2016, and is available in full in Appendix E. The original recording was stored on a secure server and will be deposited with ACT Heritage. Matilda has requested for it to be open access.
Despite not being officially recorded as part of the Project, both Wally Bell and Matilda House’s brother Arnold Williams also visited the site and shared some of their thoughts about the location and surrounding area. Summaries of these stories have been included in the oral history results. Wally’s comments were recorded by 666 ABC Canberra’s Alex Sloan on 16th May 2016 and are available online (666 ABC Canberra 2016). A transcript of these comments is also included in Appendix F. Arnold Williams shared his story of the site on 18th May 2016 with a tour group from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Notes of this informal presentation were recorded in Steve Skitmore’s field notebook.
3.2.2 Archival Research
Desktop research was undertaken between March and May 2016 to review all direct and indirect references made to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ and Indigenous use of the surrounding area. Particular attention was paid to the 1820-1930s era which lay beyond the range of the oral history. Research was undertaken at the National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, ACT Heritage Library and the Canberra and District Historical Society. Material accessed included:
Fieldwork involved a comprehensive surface survey and excavation of three 1 x 1m squares at the site between 12th May and 20th May 2016 inclusive. The location of the squares was influenced by Matilda House, who indicated that the campsite was associated with a dacite outcrop at the southern end of the park (see Section 4.1). Permits for the work were gained from the ACT Heritage Council, ACT Public Use, ACT Treescapes and Territory and Municipal Services. Excavation was conducted manually in 5cm Excavation Units [XU] by a team of ANU students, supervised by the author. All deposit was weighed and sieved through a 3mm wire mesh onto tarpaulins associated with each square. Where possible, the three dimensional location of all in situ cultural material and charcoal fragments was recorded. All other cultural material recovered from the sieving station was bagged by XU according to material category. Total deposit weight and depth measurements were recorded at the corners and centre of the square at the base of each XU, using a Leica automatic level calibrated daily to a fixed datum point. Sediment samples were retained from each XU, with Munsell colours recorded and soil pH assessed using an InoculoTM kit. Where there was an obvious sediment change within the XU, a sample was taken for each Stratigraphic Unit (SU). Squares were closed when several layers indicative of an environment of low archaeological potential had been recorded. After recording the sections, squares were then backfilled with their associated sieved spoil. With the permission of RAO groups, finds were then taken to the ANU’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology for cleaning and analysis. All cultural material will be repatriated to the site in November 2016 and reburied in Square 1 at approximately 20cm depth.
During the archaeology stage, local residents were informed about the Project and were invited to visit the excavations. This included:
4.0 Results
4.1 Site Overview
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ site is an elongated traffic island/ small park located at the intersection of Flinders Way, Durville Crescent and Hayes Crescent, Griffith, ACT (Figure 2). It is part of the Blandfordia 5 Heritage Precinct, designated for its Garden City associated planning values (ACT Heritage Council 2004a). Its orientation is northwest by southeast, and it is approximately 65m long and 20-30m wide. The park is flat, with a covering of mown exotic grasses in the northern half. The southern portion contains a large outcrop of dacitic ignimbrite (welded tuff) of the Mount Painter volcanic formation (Finlayson 2008). This runs diagonally north-south across the park, and is as high as one metre in places. These boulders are surrounded by bark chippings and plantings of exotic street trees Crataegus laevigata (hawthorn) and Prunus cerasifera 'Nigra' (black cherry plum). These were planted in the 1940s and are part of the area’s registered treescape (Taylor and Boden 1994). The park itself is around 100m north of a perennial watercourse that runs through parkland south of Flinders Way. It is on low lying ground, approximately 200m east of the lower slopes of Red Hill, 1.1 kilometres east of the top of the Red Hill ridgeline, and 2.3 kilometres southwest of Lake Burley Griffin.
4.2 Oral History
The first stage of the Project recorded oral histories with RAO group representatives. Given her personal connection to the site, Matilda House was the only RAO who took part in the official recording in March 2016 (Figure 3), and therefore this results section primarily reports on her stories (in bold italic). In order to present a 60-minute informal conversation with Matilda in manageable form, sections not relevant to ‘Red Hill Camp’ have been removed, and stories re-ordered into a thematic flow. While the words themselves remain Matilda’s, it must therefore be noted that this oral history is essentially a collaborative exercise between Matilda and the author. The written result was approved by Matilda House in September 2016. Arnold Williams (Matilda’s brother) and Wally Bell (of the Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation) also visited the site during the excavation stage (Figure 4) and shared some of their stories relating to the area. Where relevant to ‘Red Hill Camp’, these are included below.
Some pre-existing oral history recordings, mostly with Matilda House, include reference to ‘Red Hill Camp’ (House et al. 2015; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014; Read 1984; Wesson and Australian Alps Liaison Committee 1994). These have been assessed in the course of research, and where they provide additional context for the site have been included below. Unfortunately, access was not able to be gained to Ann Jackson-Nakano’s original recordings for The Kamberri (Jackson-Nakano 2001) due to National Library of Australia restrictions and Jackson-Nakano’s poor health. Other oral histories of recent Indigenous connections to Canberra have been recorded by Peter Read (1984, 121–23), Ann Gugler (1999) and Peter Kabaila (1999; 2011). These were accessed, but given that they do not mention camping in Canberra, have not been included. There are also many oral histories relating to the area that have been published by non-Indigenous locals. Where published, and relevant to the Indigenous story of ‘Red Hill Camp’, these have been included in the Archival Research Section 4.3. However, during the excavation stage of the Project, several local residents also volunteered stories about the site, and summaries of these are included below.
Matilda first discussed her early life growing up in Cowra and Yass. She mentioned talking to her mother about camping at ‘Red Hill Camp’:
What a beautiful spot [‘Red Hill Camp’] must have been. How I remember is because I used to talk to my mother you know, I would be talking to my mother about camping and she’d then say to me later, “you would’ve been only about two or three then Matilda”. You know because I lived on two Aboriginal missions. One was in Cowra, the other one was at Yass, on Hollywood. And I mostly stayed at Yass for the majority of my life growing up because my grandparents were there. When I was about eleven though, or twelve, I went back to Cowra.
Matilda discusses her childhood in Cowra and Yass in more depth in Aboriginal Heritage Stories: Queanbeyan and Surrounds (Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014).
4.2.1.2 Family Memories of Camping in Canberra
My grandfather [‘Lightning’ Williams] was a great stockman, and his father was Black Harry. My grandfather and his brother, who was known as Roddy, and that's another story, he camped up at Campbell, up behind Russell. That was his camping ground.
Roddy [Roderick] Williams lived in Canberra all his life. According to relative Betty Homer, he worked on the construction of the provisional Parliament House in 1920s and on the conversion of the Yarralumla Homestead into Government House (Jackson-Nakano 2001). Betty also said that she frequently visited him at his camp at Red Hill when she was a child, and that he also had a room at the local working men’s hostel (Jackson-Nakano 2001). Arnold Williams also remembered the Roddy-Red Hill connection, “Grandfather Lightning always told us we were from here (ACT-Queanbeyan). He told us about the Red Hill camp and our Uncle Roddy. Aunty Tiny [Rosemary Connors, nee Williams] used to visit Uncle Roddy out at Red Hill and so did Dad” (Arnold Williams in Jackson-Nakano 2001, 187). Matilda continues:
But camping here, on this side, was close to what my grandfather had work for the people who owned the cattle that's not far from here, it was called Russell Hill5. Russell Hill is just up there behind Red Hill. And that's why we always called this the Red Hill side. My grandfather would have been working with people like the Russells, but he would also work next to my grandmother. She would be doing domestic duties and he'd be out chopping wood or cleaning the yard or doing all the things that black people did in them days.
This place here it must’ve been some wonderful place for my grandparents to come. My grandfather died in 1959. But he had a great legacy behind him from this place with his brother and his father and his grandfather. So you know it should be noted of the wonderful things that he knew coming from the Murrumbidgee River and Uriarra. But I can see why this place would be a site of significance especially for camping. You know, just for camping.
4.2.1.3 Memories of ‘Red Hill Camp’
Matilda then spoke about the specific types of activities that occurred at ‘Red Hill Camp’, and her memories of what it looked like when she visited:
In my time, as a little girl, I came here with my grandparents who was doing domestic work for people around here for the elite. And we'd come with the horse and cart, horse and sulky. The horse and sulky was something we travelled around in them days, coming from Yass. And it was a time when us all we ever did was go around in was horse and sulky.
Never knew it as Flinders, or Manuka or anything, that was just the Red Hill Camp. It didn’t have a language name. And it wasn't anything of significance, just a place where we could water the horses, 'cause there's a creek running down there, from Boys' Grammar. And I don't know if it was Boys' Grammar in them days, but in the end of the day there was a creek and that's where as a little girl we would take the horse, it was only one horse, her name was Poppy. And we'd take her down there and she would have a drink and wander around and stuff like that. It was shady.
And I don't think the road was that exciting about being tarred and all this and that but it might have been a ruddy old dusty road, who knows. We're talking about myself being at the age of about two or three [approximately 1947-48].
Yeah, so that's what I can remember. Don't ask me what happened yesterday, 'cause I don't know!
4.2.1.4 Reasons for Choice of Campsite
In response to questions about whether Matilda thought this area might have been a campground prior to the 1940s, she suggested that this was likely to be the case:
[The ‘Red Hill Camp’] would have been [a campground before the 1940s], if my grandparents, especially my grandfather [camped here]. This was the country of his father and his brother and his grandfather, Onyong. They went through all the time, as people of Country here.
So if we camped here, it was for a reason, 'cause it was close to water, regardless of whether we had a horse or not. At the end of the day it was close to water, and that's what people wanted in them days, somewhere where you can always have a drink of water. And of course the Molonglo River, it wasn't far from here, which is now under Lake Burley Griffin, but it was part of the substance for people, for Aboriginal people to live on as well. 'Cause in them days, the abundance of food that was on the Molonglo River was a good source of everything. Not only had shellfish, it had lots of fish in it, you know, it had cod in it and crabs and you know, all sorts of stuff. And of course, ducks and stuff like that.
4.2.1.5 Travelling and Camping Elsewhere
Camping and travelling were recurring themes in Matilda’s stories, and she offered some vivid insights into everyday life on the road:
We were always fond of the horse and sulky. And that took us everywhere. We never had cars. But to come over here with it, I remember being bundled off in the sulky you know, and we’d camp on the outskirts, and then we’d drive in the next day for them to do their work, and then we’d probably camp.
The poor old horse named Poppy, she would just keep going. She took us all the way out to Uriarra as well, when I was very young. Of course they stopped when they used to round up all the mad cattle that was out there. I was never allowed to go outside of the old shed that we lived in because the cattle were mad, they would chase you! [laughs] Yes so a lot of history.
As a little girl, my grandmother made sure she looked after me, as a child. I think she had brought Arnold [Matilda’s brother] here as well. But not so much my other brother, my eldest brother, Crow, because he was never well enough, to do travel and that.
Matilda also discussed travelling and camping to the north of Yass in Aboriginal Heritage Stories: Queanbeyan and Surrounds (Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014), reiterating the children’s active role in looking after the horses and camp:
Travelling back and forward between Yass and Cowra with Nanny Cissy and Grandfather Lightning we always had a camp stop at the Borowa Road. Grandfather Lightning was a police tracker based at Wee Jasper, that’s where he met grandmother Cissy. Nan and me would make up a feed while Grampy and my younger brother Arnold would care for the horses and fix anything wrong with the sulky.
Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council (2014, 25)
4.2.1.6 Memories of Previous Signage
Matilda remembered there being a small plaque in the park at some stage in the 1960s or 1970s, referencing a camp in the area. Whilst at the site we scouted for the sign, however, there was no indication of it ever having been there. Matilda offered thoughts on why this might have been the case:
In them days, before it was self-government, years before, when I was a little girl, somehow or other they put a sign up and they called it the 'Ngunnawal [or Ngunawal] Campsite'.
'Cause when they built these places around here later on, they would have made sure this would be part and parcel, otherwise they would have knocked it all down. So why would they have kept a little space like this? Why would they keep this spot? And in a place what is now what we blacks would call a ‘posh place’.
In them days, Red Hill and all that would have just been another part of what Canberra was being built on. But now it's all finished, you know, and it's turned into what not far up the road is all the embassies, you know, stuff like that, so it certainly didn't want to be known as a camping ground for blacks. So that's why the sign went.
4.2.1.7 Thoughts on Current Vegetation and Landscaping
During the visit, Matilda walked around the park and gave some thoughts on the landscaping of the site. During this time, she also indicated where she thought would be the best location to place the excavations:
They piled it up, you can tell, look at it. They weren't brought here [points at boulders]. You don’t have big boulders and that around just to look at you know, there must’ve been something there for shade and maybe you’ll find something down there when you’re digging, where they cut the tree off or whatever. We don’t know.
I think we should just keep looking at other things and the vegetation. 'Cause the vegetation is going to tell us exactly, you know, what was around here. Because to make it look real deadly or whatever in them days, they would have tossed out all the good vegetation. It’s just, I’d like to see all the native trees that’ve been around here. Because you can see that they’ve been cut down, destroyed, to make a very English place to live.
And when they built Hindmarsh Drive all these sort of boulders are exactly like the ones that they pulled out of the ground there. But I find it fascinating that that rock [one of the boulders in the park] split, you know. It wasn’t deliberate, it was done by lightning or whatever. And just to know that these things happened around country and that, or on country.
4.2.2 Arnold Williams’ Oral History
Arnold Williams spoke briefly to ANU Media and an AIATSIS tour group in May about his memories of the site. He spoke about how he had visited the site on and off since the early 1990s with Matilda, and that he had heard additional information about the park being an Ngunnawal/ Ngunawal campsite from an elderly local resident. Arnold spoke mostly of his memories of life ‘on the Mission’ at Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve in Yass.
4.2.3 Wally Bell’s Oral History
Wally Bell spoke to 666 ABC Canberra about the broader cultural landscape within which ‘Red Hill Camp’ sat. He emphasised that there was a need to put ‘Red Hill Camp’ in its wider context, and discussed evidence of pre-invasion Indigenous use of the area, including that creeklines were often used as pathways by Indigenous groups:
This would have been a good spot for a campsite. What I’ve found doing cultural heritage work for 30 years is that not many people talk about cultural landscapes. Everyone talks about ‘sites’. What I’d like to see is all those different areas, all those sites around the place, are actually put into proper context and we can actually talk about the whole cultural landscape, take a big picture view and tell the true story about our occupation of this area. There’s so many areas around this little area for instance, we’ve got Red Hill where there are numerous scar trees up there and a really nice women’s business site up there too.
The landscape itself, you’ve got all these large features such as Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie and Mount Majura. But these mountains also tie into the fact that the Molonglo River was one of our pathways. Because to travel through the landscape, we used waterways as our pathways. The smaller rivers like the Molonglo would lead to the larger rivers such as the Murrumbidgee. And we’re finding that most of our artefact sites are along those waterways. All these features are really prominent along every waterway you walk along. You’re bound to find some evidence of our occupation.
Wally Bell, recorded by Alex Sloan, 16th May 2016 (666 ABC Canberra 2016)
4.2.4 Other Local Oral Histories
During the excavation stage of the Project, all houses in a two street radius of the park were letterboxed with information about the Project. Some residents visited and shared their memories of the area.
Helen Hamilton of 3 Hayes Crescent has lived in the area since 1969 and remembered that boys from the Canberra Grammar School used to congregate in the park to smoke throughout the 1970s. She also noted that it has always been a play area for the local neighbourhood’s children, and that they often dig holes and bury toys in the park near the boulders.
Bronwyn Rose of 6 Hayes Cresent has lived in the area since 1973 and also remembers Canberra Grammar School boys using the park, up until the early 2000s. She mentioned that one of the older residents of the area had told her the story of an Indigenous campsite in the park was ‘made up’ by residents in the 1930s, who used the story to make sure the park was protected from development.
Brendan Price has lived in the vicinity since the early 1990s. He said that he has talked to older locals who recall there being about five creeklines in the area. He also mentioned that an old neighbour, Mr Hall, who lived on Durville Crescent, remembered there being a ‘shepherd’s hut’ in the Bass Gardens park in the 1930s. Mr Hall used to regularly walk in Bass Gardens and found a few pieces of blue and white willow patterened plate, and what he believed to be an old hearth stone from the aforementioned hut.
4.3 Archival Research
The second part of this results section examines the archival record. It primarily assesses written material relating to the present ‘Red Hill Camp’ location prior to the era covered by oral history, in order to tie the oral history into the longer term history for the site. In particular, it aims to provide detail about Indigenous movement and camping in the Canberra region, and why a campsite might have been established in this park in particular. It will also run parallel to Matilda House’s oral history (Section 4.2.1) by presenting the archival references to her grandparents and Roddy [Roderick] Williams in the 1940s.
Archival material is only available subsequent to European invasion of the Molonglo valley in 1820, and will therefore focus on transformation of and control over the landscape in the 130-year period between the 1820s and the 1950s. There are four identifiable phases relating to the Indigenous history of Canberra that emerge from these documents, and the results are thus categorised according to the following periods:
4.3.1 Invasion and Early Relations (1820s-1860s)
The first written records that relate to the area that is now Canberra are from the 1820 summer scouting parties of the British colonial presence in southeastern Australia. These early documents are field notes and journals which note the lay of the country and include some references to traditional land management techniques such as burning (Harvard 1956, 16–17; Lea-Scarlett 1968, 7–10). By 1824, the first squatters arrived in the region with cattle and occupied the central Molonglo River valley, outside the official ‘Limits of Location’ of the New South Wales Colony (Harvard 1956). The first of these occupations to receive formal approval from the British system was Duntroon in 1825, a compensation grant of 4000 acres at the base of what is now Mount Ainslie. By 1832, this grant had increased by a further 2060 acres with land in the north portion of the now Majura valley and across the Molonglo in what is now Kingston, Barton and Griffith (Robinson 1927, 68). Narrabundah is the first recorded name for the area south of the river, with the Red Hill ridge being referred to as the Narrabundah Range until the early 1900s (The Evening News 1909). The earliest references to Indigenous groups in the region either note gatherings from afar, or retribution parties against European transgressions of Indigenous law (Sevacks in Avery 1994; Bluett 1954; Gillespie 1991; Mackaness 1941).
European invasion intensified and, by the mid-1830s, much of the land beside the Molonglo had been occupied by some of the wealthiest landowners of the new colony (White and New South Wales. Surveyor-General 1953). In the years between 1828 and 1838, the number of Europeans living along the Molonglo exploded from 94 to 1728 (Lea-Scarlett 1968, 16). By 1838, the town of Queanbeyan had been established, and around the same year a claim was made that a third of all the colony’s sheep were grazed in the locale (Schumack 1967, 21).
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, diaries and memoirs suggest that there was a slow shift into a shared economy in the region, with both Indigenous and European groups becoming increasingly reliant upon the other (Harvard 1956; Mackaness 1941; Mowle 1899). Most references to relations at this time discuss positive relationships between the groups (Robinson 1927; W. D. Wright 1923). Local leaders such as Onyong/Allianoyonyiga appeared to form close personal relationships with certain friendly squatters and often set up camp close to their homesteads in order to reap the material benefits of engagement with the newcomers (Mackaness 1941). Other trades also appear to have occurred, with Onyong’s grandson inheriting the name Henry Williams6 from a Coopers and Co. worker (Jackson- Nakano 2001). Local W. D. Wright (1923, 27) states that during this time, Indigenous people were in “no way seen as a menace” to the squatters, unlike the bushrangers that occasionally visited the area.
It appears that Indigenous groups, while incorporating the new stations into their economies, also maintained traditional law and control (Australasian Chronicle 1842). Until the 1860s, properties remained on the open grassy plains alongside the river valleys and were largely unfenced, meaning that food access and movement were largely unimpeded (D. Bell 1975; Flood 2010). Despite efforts of squatters to attract permanent camps near their homesteads to provide a steady supply of labour, Indigenous groups mostly remained seasonal, continuing to move between traditional camping grounds and only engaging with the occupiers on their own terms (Bingham 1841; New South Wales. Legislative Council 1842). Bogong moth hunts continued into at least the 1850s and there are references to numerous corrobborees at campsites near what is now Black Mountain Peninsula, Pialligo and Queanbeyan (Queanbeyan Age and Queanbeyan Observer 1919; W. D. Wright 1923; 1927). W.D. Wright (1923, 27) notes that there was a camp at ‘Majura’ at this time, however, whether this refers to the Griffith area or to the Majura valley north of the Molonglo is not clear.
It appears that maintenance of traditional practices became increasingly difficult as European occupation intensified throughout the 1840s and 1850s (D. Bell 1975, 51; Bennett 1834, 241; Bluett 1954, 8–9; Schumack 1967, 151; Williams 2007). Stories arose at this time of increased conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, largely focusing on different approaches to cattle as a food resource (M. Brennan 1907; The Sunday Mail 1927; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1839). There also appears to have been increased tensions at this time within the Indigenous community over different ways of engaging with the continued occupation (W. D. Wright 1927, 109). Stewart Mowle, manager of the Yarralumla property in the 1830s, noted different approaches between the various Indigenous groups, some of whom worked on the station and helped liaise with and at times disperse what they themselves referred to as “the wild blacks” (Mowle 1899, 8). In the same way, squatters who were not open to understanding and adapting to Indigenous resource use were to a certain degree in conflict with those who were closer to local groups. For instance, most squatter memoirs speak very poorly of Henry Hall of Charnwood for shooting Onyong in the leg after he speared one of Hall’s cattle (Bluett 1954; Schumack 1967; W. D. Wright 1927).
4.3.2 Intensified Occupation (1860s-1890s)
The Roberston Land Acts of 1861 saw large changes to land use in the Molonglo valley. Prior to this time, large patches of crown land remained between stations and were essentially neutral, common ground, where Indigenous groups could maintain traditional practices without much hindrance (Figure 5). In 1861, however, these areas of crown land were opened for settlement. Regulations required the ‘improvement’ of this land, including clearing and fencing, transforming the region between the 1860s-1880s into a more densely grazed and settled pastoral landscape (F. Brennan 1971). Concurrent with the loss of crown land, a formal European cadastre of gazetted roads, fences and boundaries was increasingly imposed (Lea-Scarlett 1968). Prior to the 1860s, informal rights of way had been prevalent across the landscape (De Salis 1882; The Queanbeyan Age 1882). The 1861 Acts however required the consolidation and formalisation of fenced road corridors to alleviate increasing conflicts between older landholders and the new ‘Selectors’ (Goulburn Herald 1881).
This enclosure of a previously relatively open landscape, and the simultaneous decrease in local flora and fauna, would have impacted significantly on the ability of Indigenous groups to remain disengaged from the colonial occupation (D. Bell 1975; Watson 1927). Other major events occurred around this time that would have impacted on this, including a series of deaths in the older generation that had personal experience of a time before the region was occupied by Europeans (Jackson-Nakano 2001). However, despite these push factors to integrate further with the pastoral economy, the influx of new European immigrants meant that the older homesteads suddenly had less reliance on local Indigenous labour. As such, records suggest that Indigenous family groups were increasingly under pressure in this period, moving from station to station for work, and camping on the outskirts of Yass and Queanbeyan to gain access to the town economies (Avery 1994; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Percival 1927; Schumack 1967).
However, there remained areas across the Molonglo valley which would likely have provided cadastral ‘gaps’ where Indigenous families could have continued to camp. Regulations in the 1860s around cattle droving along roadways meant that Travelling Stock and Camping Reserves (TS&CRs) of up to ten acres were established every ten miles along the newly gazetted roads (McKnight 1977). Due to the fact that these were always located close to perennial water sources, it is likely that they were near places where Indigenous groups would have traditionally camped, and they may have continued to be used in this way (McKnight 1977, 42).
Records from this time that relate to the part of historic Narrabundah which now is home to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ show that it is a microcosm of these broader landscape changes. Crown land until 1861, early surveys show that the aggressive expansionist George Campbell of the Duntoon estate secured seven out of eight new Selections on the newly opened land between Duntroon’s southern boundary and Mount Mugga Mugga (New South Wales. Department of Lands and Baylis 1940) (Figure 6). This monopoly essentially meant that the area where ‘Red Hill Camp’ is now located would not have been as intensely occupied as other Selection plots (Gillespie 1991; Lang 1862; The Golden Age 1863; Watson 1927). At the same time, one of only two TS&CRs in the Molonglo valley was gazetted along the creekline which runs just below what is now Flinders Way (New South Wales. Department of Lands and Wood 1940). The Reserve was designated to serve the newly gazetted Narrabundah Lane/ Mugga Lane, which ran south from Yass towards Tuggeranong and the Cooma Road to towns on the Monaro Plains.
While there is no archival material relating to Indigenous use of the vicinity between the 1860s and 1900, this use is strongly suggested by early references to the creekline as ‘Black Creek’ and ‘Black Springs’. Other such names in the region have historically been associated with Indigenous use, including the historically-named Black (or Blacks’) Creeks, near both HMAS Harman and Ginninderra (J. Murray 1981; Schumack 1967, 28; The Canberra Times 1928b). There are also other potential records of Indigenous use of the area around this time. Ample material relates to use of the TS&CR from the late 1880s by stock workers (for instance, The Sydney Morning Herald 1890a; The Sydney Morning Herald 1890b). Given the diminished, but continuing, Indigenous presence on local stations, often working directly with stock, it is likely that such workers would have been involved in watering stock here at some stage (Percival 1927). There are also records of other itinerant workers camping in the area in the 1890s, particularly by rabbiters who were often given permission to cross boundary fences to deal with the then plague proportions of rodents that had infested the district (Schumack 1967, 298). Arthur Sheedy (b.1885) of the Narrabundah homestead (now in Endeavour Street, Narrabundah) remembers walking down Narrabundah Lane to school and rabbiters camping in the ruins of a stone cottage on the top of the hill just above the current ‘Red Hill Camp’ location (Arthur Sheedy in E. Boyd 1972) (Figure 7, also see Figure 8):
There was only an old hut on the side of the hill as we walked down, on the left hand side, and it was supposed to be haunted, and as children we were always afraid of the place. The only people I ever knew who lived there was rabbiters, they would come stay there a few weeks or a few months, that was it.
(Arthur Sheedy in E. Boyd 1972)
While Sheedy does not mention anything more about these rabbiters, other oral histories refer to Indigenous men being involved in the rabbiting industry in the 1930-40s (Agnes Shea quoted in Kabaila 1995, 52), and it may well have been work taken up by Indigenous people prior to this time.
4.3.3 Dispossession and ‘Mission’ Life (1890s-1940s)
In the late 1890s, much of the archival material relates to stories of the Indigenous groups of Canberra ‘dying out’, often referring to the death of Nellie Hamilton in Queanbeyan in 1897 as evidence of the “extinction of a people” (Lea-Scarlett 1968, 22; also Gillespie 1991; Watson 1927). While emphatically not the reality, by turn of the century, Indigenous groups in the Canberra region were increasingly moved out of sight of local towns and properties by government policies which sought to deal with the continuing impact of invasion and dispossession on the local population. In the 1880s, the NSW Aborigines Protection Board (the Board) had been formed and began establishing reserves which were promoted as places where Indigenous people could live without hindrance, with support for self-sufficient farming (Jackson-Nakano 2001). The last large meetings of Indigenous groups near towns are recorded at Tharwa and Queanbeyan in 1889 (Avery 1994; Lea-Scarlett 1968). After this time, it appears that while there were still a few Indigenous people continuing to live in Queanbeyan and surrounding pastoral stations, the majority of families by 1900 had moved to reserves established near Yass (Jackson-Nakano 2001). However, the Board maintained control of these areas, and often revoked grants under pressure of non-Indigenous locals (Jackson-Nakano 2001; Kabaila and Truscott 2012). This meant that officially designated reserves and unofficial fringe camps near towns such as Yass were continually formed and re-formed between the 1890s and 1920s, often violently (Anon. 1910; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Kevin 2013).
Indigenous groups maintained some agency in these decisions, sometimes voting with their feet and walking off certain poorly-managed reserves back to town camps or to better managed (or unmanaged) reserves (Read 1982, 15; Read 1988). In the 1930s, the Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve was opened on the outskirts of Yass, and, despite lack of amenities and being located on an exposed hilltop, was generally seen as positive move by local Indigenous people as it was self-managed (E. Bell 2011; Brown 2007). Interestingly, through the depression years of the 1930s, some of the areas recalled as ‘Aboriginal camps’ (such as the ‘Bag Camp’ in Cowra) had also become areas where unemployed non-Indigenous people camped while looking for work (Kabaila 1999).
Movement for family and work are constant themes in the archival material from the 1900s to the 1940s, and there are numerous oral histories which have been recorded referring to this era of ‘mission life’ (for instance, E. Bell 2011; Kabaila 1995, 2011, 2012; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014; Read 1984). Movement between Yass (Hollywood), Cowra (Erambie Aboriginal Reserve) and Brungle (Brungle Aboriginal Station) took place regularly, often to visit family members and to gain work (Bluett 1954; Browne 1939; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Kevin 2013; Yass Courier 1927):
Some families were local and stayed in the area [Yass] all their lives. Others were 'comers and goers' as we called them, and they moved between places like Brungle, Wallaga Lake and Cowra ... Men from Brungle rode to Kylie's run7 to work there as stockmen. Women walked ... It's so unique, because they paid them equal wages.
As kids we all had chores to do and we looked after the horses and sulkies. We fed and watered the horses ... Hollywood was better than Brungle [Brungle Aboriginal Station near Tumut], because there was no manager, and when people got better known in the town they got work. Around the stations at Yass the Aborigines used to do a lot of rabbiting and shearing, burr-cutting [clearing of weeds such as thistles] and ringbarking. In the town there was gardening and housework for the women, washing and ironing.
(Agnes Shea quoted in Kabaila 1995, 52;80;82)
Despite these records from Indigenous people themselves showing their presence working on pastoral stations and in town, there is almost a complete absence of reference to this from the non-Indigenous record at the time (for some examples, see Kevin 2013).
4.3.4 Coming of the Capital (1920s-1950s)
These stories of movement for work and family are echoed by Matilda House’s oral history of her grandfather working as a stockman for Charlie Russell and her grandmother as a domestic worker for local residents in Griffith. What is distinctly different about Canberra of the 1940s compared to other towns in the region is that it had only very recently changed from a pastoral backwater into the nation’s Capital. This situation casts a very particular light on Indigenous work in the vicinity, as it also must be read against a broader, highly transient non-Indigenous population, all engaged in the construction of developments across the Molonglo valley.
Canberra was chosen as the new Australian capital in 1908, and a 1910 panorama photograph taken during early surveys shows that the area which is now Griffith was then a deforested pastoral plain, with an open Eucalypt forest covering the lower slopes of Red Hill (Figure 8). Despite construction of key infrastructure commencing in 1913, it was only in 1925 that construction reached the area where the ‘Red Hill Camp’ is located. Until this time, the area remained in use for grazing, the Travelling Stock and Camping Reserve was still actively used, and the creekline was still mapped as ‘Black Creek’ (Australia. Commonwealth Surveyor General 1920; Great Britain. War Office. General Staff. Commonwealth Section 1913; ‘J.E.R. Campbell Duntroon Estate’ 1925; ‘Timber - Narrabundah Paddock’ 1917).
Given that several oral histories recorded in Section 4.2 questioned why the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park was left undeveloped, archival material was assessed to offer a view on why this might have been the case. It appears that while the general layout of Canberra was designed by the Burley-Griffins in 1911, the specific layout of Griffith is an artefact of the tension between this plan and the authorities in charge of its implementation. In the Burley-Griffin plan (Figure 9a), this area is in the extreme south and, unlike the plan’s detailed central parts, shows only an outline of major roads. The November 1925 gazetted plan for Canberra (Commonwealth of Australia 1925) developed under the Federal Capital Advisory Committee (FCAC) (Figure 9b) differs from this alignment slightly, although it still does not reflect the contemporary street layout. This was only achieved in early 1926 with an early variation by the newly established Federal Capital Commission (FCC) to the gazetted plan (Federal Capital Commission 1926a) (Figure 9c). While there is no documentation which states explicitly why this change was made, it appears to have occurred for at least two key reasons. Firstly, the Burley-Griffins’ plan was criticised for being too rectilinear, and for prioritising the motor car above the pedestrian (Wigmore 1963, 201; also Australian Institute of Planning 1955; Odgers 2012; Select Committee 1955; Watson 1927).
Underpinning this was FCAC Chairman John Sulman’s association with the Garden City movement (Freestone 1989; Taylor and Boden 1994; Ward 2000), in which parks and roads were to be laid following the contours of the land, in order to provide visual relief and open up vistas (Australian Construction Services 1990; Department of the Interior 1931; Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Select Committee 1955). The second reason is likely to have been a major flood in May 1925 that would have indicated the folly of laying roadways directly across the Black Creek waterway (Gibbney 1988; Rolland 1988; Select Committee 1955, para. 235). Despite the digging of a stormwater ditch at the base of Red Hill in 1924, the flooding of the creek still resulted in widespread inundation and at least one death (Daley 1994, 78; Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Harry Trevillian cited in Emerton 1996, 24). According to the archival material, it therefore appears that planning ideologies and practical flood management were deciding factors in the overall road and park layout of Griffith. While there are no documents that suggest why the layout avoided the particular spot where the park now is, given topographic concerns outlined above, it is most likely to have been in order to avoid the large dacite outcrop now visible in the park (see Section 4.1).
Residential development of the area began in 1926 with release of the Blandfordia 5 subdivision (Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Federal Capital Commission 1926b). The Monolyte Construction Company won the tender to build 25 concrete cottages using largely unskilled labourers, and the development was complete in late 1927 (The Canberra Times 1926; The Canberra Times 1927a; The Mercury 1927; The Register 1926; The Sydney Morning Herald 1926) (Figure 10).
While there are no specific references to Indigenous camps in Canberra at this time, there are many references to the temporary camps that sprung up to house workers on such construction projects. This is relevant because one of these, (situated in what is now Latrobe Park, Forrest, and housing workers from various locations including the Monolyte project), was often referred to as ‘the Red Hill Camp’ at the time (Federal Capital Commission 1927a; Gugler 2014; The Sydney Morning Herald 1927). It is also here that the signature of one of the Monolyte workers, “R. Williams”, is recorded in April 1926 on a petition calling for increased provisions and cleanliness in the camp (‘Camps - Monolyte Labourers’ Camp’ 1927). This is suggestive of the Latrobe Park camp being the original ‘Red Hill Camp’ of Roderick Williams, and that he was engaged on the building of the housing development that now surrounds the current ‘Red Hill Camp’ location. This interpretation is supported by the fact that when the Latrobe Park camp was dismantled in 1927, many of the workers moved to the Russell Hill Settlement in Campbell (The Canberra Times 1927b), and Roderick Williams is recorded on the Commonwealth electoral rolls and by several other sources as residing at this settlement from the mid-1930s until his death in 19518 (ArchivesACT 2016; Australian Electoral Commission 2016; Gugler 2016c; The Canberra Times 1951a, 1951b).
Alongside these formal camps, numerous small, informal camps also appeared during the Depression years of the 1930s and early 1940s (Charles and Elizabeth Chandler in Emerton 1996, 90; Selwyn Wark cited in Gugler 2000). A shepherd’s camp was recorded behind Mugga Way on the slopes of Red Hill at this time (Calthorpe 2002), and there are reports of the authorities fining unauthorised campers (for instance, The Canberra Times 1928a, 1932). No material relates to the backgrounds of these campers, although oral history recorded by Ann Gugler (2001) suggests that inhabitants of the camps were largely overlooked and even actively avoided by local residents and the media of the time. However, Charles Croft Russell, who Matilda House references her grandfather working for, reports that during the 1940s, he set aside land on Red Hill for the Yugoslav, Latvian and English families who worked for him, even purchasing camp cubicles for them to live in (Russell 1995). Where exactly this was is not recorded, and these cubicles burnt down in a bushfire in 1952 (Hewitt 1988). Whether or not Indigenous families who worked for Russell in the 1940s ever also camped on this land is also left unsaid. Russell passed away in 1998, and few of his personal records are publically available.
By the late 1940s, the era to which the oral history relates, Griffith was a fully developed suburb, with street tree plantings and the Canberra Grammar School established along a still unsealed Flinders Way (Figure 11). Despite pumping works established by the School to manage flooding (personal communication, Mike Illiff, Property Manager, Canberra Grammar School), the creek was still a perennial source of water and a flood hazard, even during the drought years of the 1940s (Coral Charlton in Emerton 1996, 12; McTainsh et al. 2011). Flinders Way was to remain the southern extremity of Canberra for another decade, with a horse agistment paddock directly opposite the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park (Department of the Interior 1955). This agistment area had a “wealth of grass” and was opened in the mid 1930s for use by the local community to depasture stock (The Canberra Times 1942a).
Despite an attempt by the Minister of the Interior to close the paddock in 1942, it appears to have remained open and in use until at least 1955 (The Canberra Times 1942b). Given ongoing debates about the lack of agistment areas in the ACT (The Canberra Times 1943), this location would have been an ideal place to water horses on a brief visit to Griffith in the 1940s and early 1950s.
4.4 Archaeological Investigations
The final part of the results section reports on the May 2016 archaeological investigation of ‘Red Hill Camp’. This included a comprehensive surface survey of the park and creekline running through Griffith Park to the south of Flinders Way, and excavation of three 1x1 m squares. This section first provides an overview of archaeological work undertaken in the vicinity of the site, and then provides an overview of the archaeological results.
4.4.1 Archaeological Background
No previous archaeological work has been conducted in the park or surrounding residential area, other than above ground assessments preceding heritage registration of the Blandfordia 5 Garden City Heritage Precinct (ACT Heritage Council 2004a; Australian Construction Services 1990). These documents state that the park is an “additional value” to the heritage precinct, and “includes one of the most recently used traditional Ngun(n)awal camping grounds” (ACT Heritage Council 2004a, 5). Previous archaeological investigations in the Canberra region have pointed to such an area, near a perennial creekline and previously located in an ecotone at the base of a hillslope, as has having high potential for pre-invasion archaeological material (Anderson 1984; ANUtech 1984; Navin and Officer 1991; Navin Officer Heritage Consultants 2005; Saunders 1995).
Various artefacts and places of Indigenous significance have been unofficially recorded along the Red Hill ridgeline, with the Bell family noting several scar trees and a ‘women’s site’ on the ridge above ‘Red Hill Camp’ (Wally Bell, personal communication). A ground edged basalt artefact (confirmed by archaeologist John Mulvaney) was found to the immediate east of Flanagan Street, Garran (Michael Mulvaney, personal communication). A surface survey along a pipeline corridor between Fyshwick and Phillip showed a concentration of stone artefacts in the saddle between Mount Davidson and Mount Mugga Mugga, on the southern part of the ridge (Dearling 1997).
In relation to other campsites from the 1940s in the area, amateur Canberra historian Ann Gugler has undertaken extensive surface surveys of the Westlake Settlement (now Stirling Park, Yarralumla). These reports show the extent of material culture present at the site of these camps, even after subsequent landscaping (Gugler 1999, 2016b, 2016c) (see Appendix G).
4.4.2 Survey Results
4.4.2.1 ‘Red Hill Camp’ Park
A comprehensive surface survey was conducted at the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park in May 2016, with all visible material culture recorded. Zero percent ground surface visibility in the northwest end of the park meant that no material was recorded in the grassed area. The area of woodchips surrounding the dacite outcrop had around 50% ground visibility, and material culture was present in this location. A baseline offset survey was therefore undertaken in this area of the park to map this spread of material (Figure 12).
The survey recorded 17 isolated items or grouped artefactual scatters (Figure 13). These included cigarette butts, broken ceramic, fragmented bottle glass, lumps of concrete and brick, a metal pipe, green waste and a partially buried geocache9. The geocache (appropriately called Memories) was installed in January 2015 by a local who had been raised in the area and played in the park as a child (Groundspeak Inc. 2016). Since 2015, over 50 names have been recorded on the geocache log of people from all over the world who have visited the park to partake in the game (Figure 14).
One piece of glass (location e) (Figure 15b) was identified as a fragment from a 1960s pyroceramic labelled Gest soft drink bottle, a brand only sold in Western Australia at the time (‘Vintage Old Glass Soft Drink Bottle Gest Perth WA’ 2016). Apart from the recent Coopers and Tooheys beer bottles, no other glass fragments had identifiable marks. The concrete block (location q) was a piece from a roadside stop valve, and appeared to have been recently moved to the site as it was located above leaf litter. The metal pipe initially appeared to be part of a standing tap, however it does not seem to have ever been connected to a water main.
In summary, the surface survey suggests that the park has been moderately landscaped and used often in recent years. While the accuracy of the material distribution is limited by ground visibility, it appears that this use has generally centred on the dacite outcrop. Material culture present points to use of the site for recreation and dumping of household and construction waste, as early as the 1960s. The Gest soft drink bottle and geocache also indicate use by interstate and international visitors over this period.
4.4.2.2 Griffith Park Creekline
A two-metre-wide transect was also walked along each side of the creekline in Griffith Park, where Matilda House referred to watering the horses in the late 1940s (Figure 16). Since the 1960s, the creek has been largely culverted under the Canberra Grammar School’s playing fields (Mike Illiff, Property Manager, Canberra Grammar School, personal communication). However, for around 100m between the culvert outflow to the La Perouse Street bridge, the creek is relatively naturally contoured. The transects identified 14 material culture items, including plastic bags, fence posts and a metal shopping trolley (Figure 17). No material was identifiably older than a few years, and most of objects were located in the watercourse itself, hence it was decided not to attempt a comprehensive mapping exercise of these finds.
4.4.3 Excavation Results
Three 1x1 m squares were excavated near the dacite outcrop in the park in May 2016 (Figure 18). Overall, the excavation suggests that the site’s stratigraphy has been moderately disturbed, particularly towards its northern end in T3 (see Table 1 for Stratigraphic Unit [SU] descriptions and Figure 19 for section drawings). In squares T1 and T2, the stratigraphy showed an A Horizon of topsoil and loose gravels (SU1-2), under which was a brown silt with a lens of flattened, rolled pebbles at its base, at around 25cm depth (SU3). Under this pebble lens was a compacted (SU4-5) to concreted (SU6) yellowy-red clay layer which continued to the base of the excavations (SU6). The stratigraphy of square T3 was more complex, with SU3 sitting above two distinct layers, the compact clay of SU4 in the northwest and a crumbly loam with roots throughout in the southeast of the square (SU5).
The excavation recovered 324 artefacts. Glass was the most prevalent material (n=215), followed by plastic (n=39), metal (n=17), concrete (n=16) and brick (n=15) (Table 2). The material largely fell into two categories: construction/demolition related material and household/recreational items. In order to determine the date range of each SU assemblage, the manufacturing ranges of conclusively dateable objects were collated to determine the layer’s terminus post quem and terminus ante quem dates (Table 1). This analysis suggests that the majority of material present at the site relates to the 1940s or later. Overall artefact distributions (Figure 20) show that the bulk are located in SU1-3, above the pebble lens.
Square T1 showed the least evidence of stratigraphic disturbance, with all layers having distinct interfaces and following the same orientation. All material culture from this square was recovered from S1-3 (XU1-4), above the pebble lens, with the majority of material appearing in the A Horizon. The fewest number of artefacts (n=57) were recovered from this square, with 84% (n=48) comprising glass fragments (Table 2). All identifiable glass came from clear (52%), brown (38%) and green (10%) glass bottles, however it was not possible to determine a manufacturing date for any of these fragments. Some pieces of building related material were also present, with brick fragments, a lump of mortar and several conjoining sherds of very thick teal porcelain recorded in SU2 and SU3 (Figure 21).
T1 distribution analysis (Figure 20) shows a distinction between recreation related material (bottle glass) in SU1 and building related material (mortar, ceramic) in SU2-3, suggestive of an overall change in use at the site. While none of the material culture could be accurately dated, the presence of building material suggests that SU3 dates to the 1920s or later, when the suburb was being built (Australian Construction Services 1990). That there are Crataegus laevigata and Prunus cerasifera 'Nigra' seeds in this layer supports a date range of 1940s and later, when street trees were planted at the site (Identic 2016; Taylor and Boden 1994). A dramatic decrease in seeds in SU1-2 could suggest that the stratigraphy is disturbed. However, this decrease appears to have been a result of changing sieve-station collection strategies (at XU3 in squares T1-2 and XU2 in T3) relating specifically to seeds, rather than an accurate representation of seed distribution in the square. However, all seeds present in SU3-6 were recovered, and their absence below the pebble lens is therefore certain. This suggests that layers below the pebble lens predate the 1940s, and that building material just above the lens relates to early construction in the vicinity. An increase in charcoal in SU3 may also be indicative of this, either showing an increase in burning associated with these early developments, or else a palimpsest of burning events on an older land surface.
The stratigraphy of T2 also appears largely undisturbed, however, the pebble lens at the interface of SU3 and SU4 is less distinct in this square and there is some evidence of bioturbation from root action at this level. The most glass was recorded from this square (n=126, 205.7g), with the mean mass and colour type percentages suggesting that this assemblage closely resembled that in T1 (see Table 3). Very little construction/demolition material was present in T2, with material culture largely comprised of household and recreational material; chocolate wrappers, a wine bottle lid, and beer and spirit bottle sherds. The earliest dateable find was a fragment of brown glass from SU3, with an AGM makers’ mark (Figure 22). Variants of this mark were used by Australian Glass Manufacturers between 1934-1968 (Bolton 2005; Burke and Smith 2004, 370), with the sherd’s serial number, ‘IS 1...’, in use on New South Wales Bottle Company bottles between 1941-1968 (Gugler 2016a). The conjoining fragment of this serial number was not present in the assemblage and therefore the bottle can only be dated to this range. The pre-1968 date for the layer is consistent with the interpretation of building material present in the same layer in T1. The interpretation above that the pebble lens is the pre-1940s land surface is also supported by the lack of seeds recovered from below SU3 in T2.
The pebble lens was more fragmented in this square and two small (<0.2g) pieces of glass and brick are present in SU5 below the lens. Given their size and that SU4 comprises of a loamy sediment with root inclusions, it is likely that these fragments have been translocated down the section due to treadage or bioturbation, rather than having been deposited prior to the pebble lens. Three angular chert pieces (mean mass of 17.6g) were also recovered from SU5 (Figure 23). These were situated in close proximity to each other and within an area which had the greatest density of charcoal at the site. While these have no diagnostic features which suggest being worked, given a lack of other chert pieces in the assemblage (apart from one in T3, in the same stratigraphic layer) or in the samples of natural residue, these have likely been brought to the site and have been categorised as lithic manuports. The pieces were recovered from below the glass and brick fragments, and given their
size and proximity to each other, are highly unlikely to have been deposited in this location via bioturbation.
An AMS radiocarbon date with an ABA pretreatment [SANU50125] on a 5mm piece of charcoal within 10cm of the chert pieces gave an age estimate of 276calBP-151calBP (1640-1799calCE) (95.4% probability, median of 1668calCE) (see Appendix I for full details). Given the small size of the pieces of charcoal, it may be that these have also been subject to post-depositional bioturbation. However, the compact sediment and lack of roots in SU5 suggests that it is unlikely that they would have moved from below, and if translocated from above this still provides a terminus ante quem for the layer. It is therefore likely that this age estimate does accurately relate to SU5. If it does, then this is supportive of the interpretation that layers below the pebble lens are older than the 1940s, and that the manuports were present at the site prior to this period.
Square T3 showed the greatest amount of stratigraphic disturbance. The topsoil was thick compared to the other squares, and the loose gravel layer SU2 was indistinct or even non-existent in places. The pebble lens at the base of SU3 was intact in the northwest corner, under which the compact clay of SU4 was present. However, towards the southeast, this was non-existent, and SU4 was cut by a loamy layer with many roots, SU5 (Figure 19).
Combined with material culture distribution analysis (Figure 20), this suggests that there are two distinct depositional episodes apparent in this square. Firstly, SU1-2 contains much evidence of recreational use of the site since the late 1960s, including recent cigarette filters and bottle glass fragments. Pieces of plastic clothes line and clothes pegs in the topsoil are suggestive of local residents using the site during this period. The glass pieces include conjoining fragments of a Sharpe Brothers pyro-ceramic labelled soft drink bottle that was manufactured between 1965-1972 (Sharpe Brothers 1972) (Figure 24). The glass fragments in this square had a greater mean mass than the other squares (4.8g as compared to 1.4g in T1 and 1.6g in T2). While this could be the result of greater trampling towards the bottom of the slope, the thick topsoil and the depth of material with little date differentiation is more likely suggestive of an increased rate of sediment deposition in this square, which would have protected these pieces from breakage.
The second depositional episode in Square T3 is associated with SU5, which likely represents the fill of a shallow pit that has been dug into SU4. In contrast to SU1-2, this layer mostly contains building related material; including bricks, mortar, plaster and ceramics (Figure 25). Many large brick fragments were recovered from SU5, including two with frogs indicative of ‘Canberra Red’ bricks, which were manufactured at the Yarralumla Brickworks between 1913 and the early 1970s (Figure 26) (ACT Heritage Council 2004b; Gugler 2016b). It is inconclusive whether this deposit relates to building or demolition material, though the fragmented nature of the bricks and the presence of mortar on some of them is perhaps indicative of the latter. It is interesting that there is no concrete present in the layer, suggesting that the deposit is not associated with the concrete Monolyte development in the immediate vicinity. However, from the 1930s, houses utilising Canberra Red bricks were built in the local area, and therefore it appears that the deposit relates to during or after this time (Australian Construction Services 1990). The presence of street tree seeds in this level suggests that the material was deposited in the 1940s or later. However, given that SU4 does not overlay SU5, the deposit does not appear to have been manually capped by sediment, and the seeds may therefore have collected in the feature at a later date.
In summary, where the stratigraphy of the site is not disturbed, a lens of smooth, flat pebbles appears to show the land surface at the time of surrounding residential development. Four possible chert manuports are present below this layer, and their deposition likely dates to before the 1940s, and most likely prior to the original 1920s development. Material culture distributions suggest that the park was used as early as the 1930s as a site to dump small amounts of construction and demolition related material, particularly toward its northern end near square T3. Over the last 50 years, sediment has accumulated rapidly around the dacite outcrop, and there is much evidence of recreational use, including by local residents. The excavations do not show a material culture assemblage consistent with the formalised campsites in Canberra in the 1940s, or any specifically related camping paraphernalia.
5.0 Interpretation and Reflections
5.1 Interpretation of Results
Sitting in the shade of the trees at ‘Red Hill Camp’, we chatted with Matilda House about what we wanted the archaeology to archive. Initially, I suggested that the archaeology might provide objects and things to support Matilda’s stories. Her response (expected perhaps!) was, “well, you don’t need to find anything to prove what I’m saying!” Steve Skitmore (field notes – Red Hill Camp Project 2016)
The Project’s results are on the surface largely contradictory; while there is a vivid oral history for the site, no archival or archaeological evidence suggests the presence of Indigenous camps in the park. The complexity of interpreting these results within a community archaeology frame is highlighted by the quote from Matilda House above, which hints at intractable epistemological problems in this divergence. However, it is important to sit with and work through this complexity if community archaeology is to offer an insight into the past that does not merely prioritise one view of history over another. This section first addresses interpretive frameworks which can assist with navigating this space. Secondly, it presents a co-authored history of ‘Red Hill Camp’. It then offers some reflections on the benefits and challenges of this Project.
5.1.1 Interpretive Frameworks
David et al. (2004, 159) suggest that community archaeology interpretations drawing on academic and Indigenous understandings of the past should aim to “complement both methods of historicising”. Indeed, despite the overarching conflict above, some of the Project’s results do complement each other. The archival material has, for instance, allowed for the oral history to be contextualised in relation to other camps around Canberra. In particular, it has provided more detail around the likely presence of Matilda House’s uncle Roderick Williams in the Monolyte construction, and therefore shows a family connection to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ location from at least as early as the 1920s. It also suggests that the area was a likely place for people to camp prior to development of Canberra, and that it would have been a good place to water horses until 1955. The archival material and oral histories have also provided invaluable detail that has allowed for the interpretation of the archaeological record; for instance, showing that exotic seeds should only be in the record from the 1940s onwards.
However, for the most part, these results sit in conflict. While the oral history tells of a shady site, archival material shows that there were very few trees in the vicinity at the time. The oral history speaks of camping with horses, however, the archaeology shows no sign of a campsite, fireplace nor horse related material, nor of any conclusive ‘Indigenous’ material culture (this is critiqued below). Other local oral histories even directly contradict the main narrative, suggesting that the idea of Indigenous campsites in the area was ‘made up’. The question then arises; how can the results of these different lines of evidence be woven into a narrative that does not marginalise Indigenous oral histories, nor completely dismiss the archival and archaeological results?
This question can initially be answered by assessing the limitations of each approach. Firstly, with regard to the written record, Byrne and Nugent (2004) state that there are large gaps in which marginalised groups are almost absent, and that in Australia, this is particularly the case with Indigenous people in the early and mid-20th century. This absence from the record does not mean that Indigenous people were absent from the landscape at the time, however. Secondly, mainstream ‘culture history’ approaches to archaeology are limited in their ability to make clear statements about cultural distinctions when dealing with shared material culture (Shackel 2011). Therefore, using the archaeology of ‘Red Hill Camp’ to suggest that there was no Indigenous presence at the site is fraught, when there is evidence of use of the park in the 1940s and the oral history suggests a sharing of ‘European’ material culture. Furthermore, given that the ‘campsite’ refers to perhaps just a single night of camping 75 years ago, such an event is potentially very difficult to observe in the archaeological record. Finally, while oral histories can be taken as the fact of an individual’s experience, this way of historicising can also include and inform other community memories through their telling (Jones and Russell 2012). Indeed, this might well be the case here, with Matilda mentioning that while she remembered certain things about the area, she was very young and the story had been largely recounted to her by her mother. Furthermore, Arnold Williams stated that he had been given additional information about the park by an elderly local in the 1990s, suggesting that memories about the site have been both informed and re- enforced by broader community oral histories.
A second way to approach this apparent conflict is by drawing on Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of interdisciplinary conversations, developed as part of a community archaeology project in Corindi Beach, NSW. These conversations are essentially the ways in which different lines of evidence come together. The authors suggest that for most projects working with oral history, archival material and archaeology, the latter two approaches are seen as more valid than the former, entering into a co-opting conversation which sees oral history as something to either to confirm or deny. However, other forms of conversations exist. Most relevant to this Project is the parallel conversation, where “the archaeology and the oral history data remain separate, but enrich each other, with parallel stories that neither confirm nor support each other” (Beck and Somerville 2005, 476). At ‘Red Hill Camp’, the archaeology most likely shows use of the site in the 1940s, a time when Matilda recounts that she visited with her family. However, it is unlikely that there would be much archaeological material directly related to the vivid recollections of camping and travel. As such, the lines of evidence sit in parallel. This understanding was neatly summed up by Matilda at the beginning of the project when she was asked what artefects she envisioned the excavations might find. “Probably just a pile of horse crap!” was her en point answer.
Also relevant is the concept of conflicting conversations, where two disciplinary knowledges contradict each other. At ‘Red Hill Camp’, however, this was most vividly seen within one discipline. Two contradicting oral histories were recorded, one (Matilda’s) locating the campsite squarely amongst the dacite outcrop, and a second (a local who had lived in the area since the 1970s) suggesting that there had never been any Indigenous camps in the park. On one hand, this contradiction could be dismissed as quite simple; the camp could have been set up for a short while, with Matilda’s family only being recognised as one of the many itinerant families camping around Canberra at the time. It could also be argued that a second-hand oral history from a resident who had only arrived in the area three decades after Matilda’s memories is not as robust as one that talks of personal experience. However, this kind of inter-community disagreement raises a pertinent point that is likely to be a hallmark in community archaeology projects focusing on Indigenous history in the inner city. When Indigenous and non-Indigenous oral histories relating to the history of one location come into conflict, where should a researcher situate themselves in relation to this tension?
Unfortunately, Beck and Somerville (2005) do not discuss such contradictions within a discipline. However, working on marginalised African-American heritage places in the USA, Dolores Hayden suggests that it is not a researcher’s role to try and determine which history represents ‘the truth’, but rather to make equal the visibility of all histories (Hayden 1994). This relates to the broader aim of community archaeology with Indigenous groups in Australia, which goes beyond the narrating of history and into engaging in socially beneficial action through heritage. In Australia, where mainstream historical narratives of the post- invasion era generally sideline Indigenous voices, there is an imperative as researchers with a commitment to decolonising practice to prioritise these voices. This should not mean that researchers actively exclude all conflicting non-Indigenous voices. Rather, it suggests that a conceptual understanding should be developed of how to act when these conflicts do occur, in a way that is consistent with the postcolonial underpinnings of community archaeology practice. Therefore, this interpretation chooses to prioritise Matilda’s oral history above the contradicting voice of the local resident, in order to ensure that the Indigenous story of the site is made visible.
5.1.2 A Co-authored Interpretation of ‘Red Hill Camp’
With the above limitations and concepts in mind, an interpretation of ‘Red Hill Camp’ was written and was given approval by Matilda House in October 2016. The aim was to produce a co-authored version of the site’s history and for this story to be promoted to the wider community through interpretive resources and signage.
An Interpretation of Red Hill Camp
By Steve Skitmore, with alterations and approval from Matilda House
Red Hill Camp is a place of special significance to the House-Williams family, a Ngunnawal/Ngambri Aboriginal family of the Canberra region. It is one of the 1940s campsites of Matilda House and her grandparents, Harold ‘Lightning’ Williams and Cissy Freeman, and is where they stayed when working with Charlie Russell and other local residents of south Canberra. Given that it was a campsite then; it is likely that there would have been a family campsite in the area a long way back.
Archival material shows that after European invasion in 1820, the area around ‘Red Hill Camp’ remained crown land until the 1860s. This meant that the creekline was a ‘neutral zone’ where Aboriginal families would have likely camped. This use is potentially captured in the early name for this watercourse: Black Creek. In 1880, a Travelling Stock and Camping Reserve on the creek gave an official camping space in the area. Around this time, non- Aboriginal workers were likely camping in the vicinity, with stockmen using the Reserve and rabbiters camping in the stone cottage above the site.
Archaeological deposits at Red Hill Camp show that some chert pieces were brought to the site prior to the 1920s, and these are likely to suggest Aboriginal use of the area. The rest of the material relates to development of the Blandfordia 5 residential area from the 1920s onwards, when the older open landscape of pastoralism gave way to a residential zone on the edge of a small greenfield development. Until the 1950s, this area was the extreme outer edge of Canberra, opposite a community agistment paddock through which Black Creek continued to flow. Material culture diversifies from the 1960s to include artefacts related to the use of the park as a recreational area. This use continues until today.
Oral histories about Red Hill Camp strongly foreground labour practices and movement, focusing on Aboriginal families travelling into Canberra to undertake work for the European occupants of Griffith and Narrabundah. This story tells mainly of gendered work, with men working as stockmen and labourers on pastoral properties and construction sites, and women working in domestic duties. Despite these visceral oral histories, there is very little archival material that relates to Aboriginal labour or seasonal movement in the region. News stories and official documentation appear to have largely ignored Aboriginal people at the time, despite the crucial role these groups played in the development of Australia (Reynolds 1990).
However, ample archival material relates to the impact of the Depression years of the 1930s and War years of the 1940s on the wider Australian workforce movement, and the Aboriginal story of Canberra is bound up in this. Many families and workers were on the move at this time, attempting to find employment wherever they could. There are records of both formalised and itinerant workers’ camps being set up in parks and vacant land across Canberra during this period, and of Government response to the latter through fines, camp closures, and the requirement from 1928 that all workers to be registered to vote in the ACT. Archival evidence shows that some Aboriginal labourers, including Lightning and Roddy Williams, enrolled to vote around this time and Roddy lived in these formal workers’ camps. Given the exclusionist policies of the era, it is perhaps surprising that Aboriginal men would have been enrolled to vote. However, some electoral officers allowed Aboriginal people to enrol if they were seen to be living and working in a similar way to non-Aboriginal people (Australian Electoral Commission 2006, 5; Dodson 1997).
This engagement in the shared practices and material culture of working class life suggests that identification of a distinctly Aboriginal presence in these camps would be incredibly difficult to determine archaeologically. Indeed, this appears to be the case at ‘Red Hill Camp’. While artefacts from the 1940s and 1950s were recovered from the excavation, there is no material culture that conclusively suggests an Aboriginal presence at the site. However, to conclude that this means no Aboriginal people were there would be a mistake. Instead of focusing on their cultural origin, it is important to emphasise how these objects were brought into and used within other cultural spaces. In the case of ‘Red Hill Camp’, the oral history clearly describes such use by Aboriginal families at the site.
The lack of archival material relating to Aboriginal family camps in Canberra is replicated in a lack of material that relates to Canberra’s early construction camps. That these places have been widely erased from the narrative of Canberra’s history is perhaps unsurprising. They were generally seen as fleeting eyesores that interrupted the symmetry and striving class aspirations of the newly inaugurated Capital, to be moved out of sight as soon as their necessary functions had ceased. This geo-spatial marginalisation in the past has flowed into their marginalisation from the historical narrative today, and relies on archaeology and oral history to place it back on the map.
5.2 Reflections on the Community Archaeology Process
The second set of Project aims relates to the use of the community archaeology methodology, and this section therefore offers some reflections on the benefits and limitations of the approach with Indigenous communities in the inner city. These reflections include: the role that site-based excavations can play as a vehicle for social change; which parts of ‘the community’ have been and should be collaborated with, and; challenges experienced around the core community archaeology aim of sharing control.
5.2.1 Physical Spaces for Co-Creative Dialogue
By focusing research at one specific site, the Project was able to create a physical space where broader dialogues about Canberra’s history could occur. While ‘sites’ are the primary management unit of both CHM and archaeology, this focus has been critiqued for overlooking the fact they are merely points along pathways in broader landscapes of significance (Wally Bell in 666 ABC Canberra 2016; D. Byrne 2008). What this Project showed however, was that the site-based approach can contribute towards the broader, social implications of community archaeology. For two weeks, while the park was physically taken over by a local Indigenous history project, it provided a tangible location to which local residents, passers-by and the media could visit, share stories and hear alternative versions of local history. This included young families who were particularly keen to help out with the excavation, and the decision was made to allow them to help dig and sieve under supervision (Figure 27). Media interest in the Project was also most intense during the excavation stage, with the possibility of artefactual material drawing 666 ABC Canberra, SBS Living Black and ANU Media to visit the site and report on the excavations and oral history (Figure 28) (Appendix J). Local community groups also visited the site during the excavations, including groups from ASHA and AIATSIS, and individuals from local history associations (Figure 29). During these visits, conversations were had about the oral histories relating to the site, and broader Indigenous use of Canberra in the last century. What this showed was that there was something particularly useful in creating the immediately visible, promotable image (following Levi Strauss 2009) of a small public park bounded with orange fencing.
Whilst not an original Project aim, this use of promotional tools traditionally associated with the “big dig” form of community archaeology provided the space for the non-Indigenous local community to be part of the re-creation of the narrative of place. An example of this was in the months following the excavation, local children who used the park constructed a play-related ‘fireplace’ and ground red rocks onto the dacite boulders (Figure 30). This form of play had not been apparent in the months leading up to the excavations, and it therefore appears that involving local children in the excavation meant that the stories of Indigenous use became part of their narrative of place. In addition, by communicating the results of the Project to the ACT Heritage Unit, representatives of the Unit proved very interested in supporting a grant application to install interpretive signage in the park to tell the Indigenous story of the site (Figure 31) (Appendix K). What both of these outcomes attest to is that the inclusion of non-Indigenous community members in the Project has resulted in a co-created, shared local history, over which members of the wider community also feel ownership.
This form of dialogue, which sees local residential areas as places of shared history, may also have wider social implications for current power dynamics which exclude Indigenous voices (Little and Shackel 2014; Westoby and Dowling 2013). To re-appropriate a piece of community space as a site for commemoration of a marginalised history is a political act; one that allows for the reclamation of actual ground that is essential in the struggle for recognition and power in narrating the past (Grande 2004, 278–81; Hayden 1994; Winichakul 1994). This is particularly so in the case of ‘Red Hill Camp’, where signage in a place heritage listed primarily for its European values can serve to subvert dominant narratives which exclude the recent Indigenous presence in Canberra’s history.
5.2.2 Who is ‘the Community’ in Community Archaeology?
What the above shows is that some of this Project’s main benefits have come from the engagement between communities which have stories about and connections to the same location. Given the multitude of communities that inhabit the urban environment, the city can be of particular transformative power in this instance. However, what emerged from the research process was the complexity of understanding the different communities that had an investment in the outcomes, how each of these communities was constituted and how each should be involved in the Project. Questions that arose included; who is ‘the community’ with which to share power? Is this community flexible and does it constitute one voice or many? Should ‘the community’ of local residents and the historical society be engaged with, and in what way, and who should be approached? Given the research is based on a site of significance to the House/Williams family, should all RAO groups be collaborated with? And what if there is disagreement in this process?
These questions have implications for how community archaeology researchers conceptualise ‘the community’ they share power with (L. Smith and Waterton 2009). The majority of community archaeology projects working with Indigenous communities in Australia constitute a particular interest group, often represented by a local Land Council, as ‘the community’ (for instance, Brady et al. 2003; A. Smith and Beck 2003). Likewise, this Project initially conceputalised ‘the community’ as all RAO groups who are officially recognised as the Traditional Custodians of Canberra by the ACT Government.
Throughout the Project it has become apparent that making this decision at the commencement of the research process has meant that certain voices have held much greater sway than others. For instance, the decision to work closely with Matilda House was made because of her pre-existing relationship with Dr Duncan Wright, and that has meant that her input has held the greatest sway in the ‘community’. In addition, all four RAO representatives who engaged with the Project were adept at navigating archaeological and heritage discourses and projects given their previous work in the field. It would therefore be interesting to see whether the Project’s aims and outcomes would have been significantly different if other, less prominent, members of ‘the community’ had been engaged.
Given that the community archaeology methodology relies upon the development of personal relationships, it is likely that these imbalances would be the case in work with any location. However, this reflection shows that while community archaeology claims to provide benefits when sharing power with ‘Indigenous communities’, the nature of ‘community’ is in part formulated by the action of engagement by researcher and therefore requires careful consideration. This may be particularly so in the inner city, where the Indigenous ‘communities’ that are easily engaged with are sometimes (like the case of Canberra ‘RAO groups’) constituted by the requirements of official governmental structures. It is therefore important for researchers to be conscious not only of the structure of power sharing in community archaeology, but also, when these initial conversations do occur, which voices might not be present.
5.2.3 Sharing Control – Complete or Targeted?
Despite the express aim of community archaeology to share power, this was less than ideal throughout the Project’s life. Key deadlines were largely dictated by the requirements of the ANU’s sub-thesis program, meaning that for much of the collaboration process, RAO groups were pushed to engage within boundaries mandated by a Western institution. During several project stages, it would likely have been better to wait several more months to ensure adequate engagement time, however, because of the above, windows of opportunity to jointly develop ideas were often severely curtailed. In addition, the ability to provide tangible resources throughout the Project, for instance, to pay for transport or the time of the RAOs involved, was almost non-existent. While these challenges relate in particular to student research, it is telling that they also have broader echoes in the heritage field. For instance, when applying for the grant for signage in the park, ACT Heritage communicated that specific financial resources were not usually provided to pay for RAO consultation time.
However, with this said, it is important to consider what ‘ideal’ engagement in a community archaeology project looks like, and indeed, who should decide this. If the ideal is for members of the constituent community to participate in every step of the project regardless of their interest, time or ability, then community archaeology must be wary of wielding the requirement to participate as a “new tyranny” (following Cooke and Kothari 2001; also La Salle 2010). In reality, there was a need to balance the desire and importance of community involvement, with the practical reality that some stages were more important to the RAOs than others. This was reflected in the evolving engagement structure, and by the fact that in response to certain stages like the archaeological results, there was less interest by the RAOs than in stages like oral history and media promotions. This choice not to engage in some Project stages despite agreed upon schedules appears to reflect RAO agency within the collaboration, rather than an inherent failure of the Project. Sarah Byrne (2012) also came across a similar challenge during a community archaeology Project on Uneapa Island, Papua New Guinea, and she suggests that the community’s choice not to engage was an enabling one in terms of their decision to prioritise how they wanted to bring the archaeological results into their narrating of local history.
Therefore, it became clear that instead of ‘ideal’ engagement being full community involvement and shared power for each stage, it was essential rather to initiate conversations about which stages were important for a particular RAO, and ensure that everything was done to make that stage as accessible as possible to them. Given the lack of financial resources, this involved harnessing other tangible benefits, such as using university vehicles and equipment, paying for lunch and coffee, and offering to put in time organising grant applications and media liaising. It is important also to note that some of the RAOs saw involvement as being larger than the Project’s outcomes, with Matilda House saying at one stage how she hoped that her “investment in a new generation of Australian archaeologists” would lead to archaeologists who would commit to working alongside Indigenous communities. Perhaps then, the Project was to be a test of the process of commitment and cultural learning above all else.
6.0 Conclusion
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ Project is one of the few Australian examples of community archaeology focused on Indigenous heritage that has been undertaken in the inner city. Examples from the literature have shown that community archaeology in collaboration with historically marginalised groups can bring about positive social outcomes. This Project contributes to these conclusions, with results suggesting that shared control of research with Indigenous communities in urban contexts can lead to a focus on recent Indigenous histories which have often been ignored. This is a particularly powerful tool when utilised in areas which are primarily known for their European heritage. By doing so, the approach can offer a contribution to decolonising the production of history in Australia, through incorporating Indigenous epistemologies in research and promoting more inclusive narratives of history.
Specific results of the Project show strong connection to the site through oral history, yet little archival or archaeological material suggestive of Indigenous use. This apparent contraction has clearly shown the interpretive complexity of working across and balancing different epistemologies. The interpretation has used Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of conversations to navigate a way through these methodological intricacies, and a co- authored narrative of the site has been produced which will be used for future promotion activities. In this way, the Project has been successful in Matilda’s original hope of “putting an Aboriginal camp smack bang in the fanciest part of town!”.
Reflections on the Project’s outcomes suggest that as well as being a tool through which to create knowledge of the past, site-based excavations can provide a transitory space and image which can act as a vehicle for co-creative dialogue around the shared history of urban space. They also suggest that researchers undertaking community archaeology in the urban environment should be particularly aware of the often contested nature of communities, and the degrees to which complete shared control is actually viable or desirable.
Finally, the initial, personal impetus for this research was to see if the Western, empirical tool of archaeology could be of assistance in deconstructing colonial narratives in Australia. From the above, it appears to be the case, and that the urban environment holds a particularly transformative place for this work.
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Prioritising Indigenous Communities in Inner City Community Archaeology
Steve Skitmore, Master of Archaeological Science (Advanced) The Australian National University, October 2016
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Archaeological Science (Advanced) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences
Images in this thesis are used courtesy of Canberra’s RAO groups.
Intellectual property of recorded oral histories rests with those telling the stories.
ANU Human Ethics Protocol 2016/086 relates to this research. A copy of this approval is available in Appendix A.
Contact details for further information: Steve Skitmore [email protected] 0401766903
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge that wherever I stand in Australia, I am on stolen land. I have deep gratitude towards all of Canberra’s Aboriginal groups for allowing me to live and work here, and for taking the time to collaborate on this Project. Matilda House, Wally Bell, Arnold Williams, Carl Brown and James Mundy, I hope that this project will be a useful contribution to your continuing fight for recognition and respect.
As a first generation migrant to this country, the history of bloody oppression and dispossession carried out by those who came before me has been slowly unveiled by numerous educators and activists. I am deeply indebted to all of these, especially to those who have channeled my flailing desire ‘to help’ into something more constructive. Thanks particularly to Darren Bloomfield, Isabel Coe, Roxley Foley, Jenny Munro, Marianne Mackay, Mark McMurtie, Mitch, Winiata Puru, Jude Saldanha and Sam Watson.
Dave Johnston deserves a special mention. As my community supervisor, Dave has done a serious amount of legwork for this project, and this research would have not been possible without him. Thanks also to Duncan Wright, my academic supervisor, for introducing me to Dave and Matilda, and for giving me opportunities to cut my archaeological teeth. Cheers to ANU’s Dave McGregor and Rachel Wood and ACT Heritage’s Euroka Gilbert and Megan Russell for your support too.
Many other people contributed at every step of the way. Thanks go to Andrew Ball, Aleese Barron, Amy Beugelsdyk, Wayne Brennan, Loki Campbell Type, Catherine Claessens, Rebecca Dixon, Unaiki Esther, André Fleury, Louise Glasson, Catriona Graham, Anna Himmelrich, Jaqui Hockey, Tanya Johnston, Ack Mercer, Emily Miller, Liam Norris, Ang O’Niel, Lauren Prosser, Karl Van Rjisbergen, Bridget San Miguel, Simon Tener, Glenn Van Der Kolk, Rob Williams, Simon Williams, Amber Wood-Bailey, Io Wu Won and to all the crew at the Canberra Student Housing Co-operative.
I am also thankful for the information, support and advice offered by others I reached out to about how to understand the processes and interactions that occurred during the Project. Thanks especially to Denis Byrne, Ann Gugler, Peter Kabaila, Barbara Little, Paul Shackel and Marilyn Truscott. Your thoughts have helped shape this story.
Abstract
This dissertation reports on a community archaeology project run in Canberra, Australia in 2015-16. The overarching aim was to address the limited number of community archaeology projects conducted with Indigenous groups in the urban environment, by showing that this research is both feasible and beneficial. It focused on the ‘Red Hill Camp’, an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite in the suburb of Griffith.
The Project’s focus, aims and methods were developed in collaboration with members of Canberra’s Representative Aboriginal Organisations (RAOs). The site’s history was investigated through oral history, archival material and archaeological excavations. The results from these distinct disciplinary approaches were sometimes complementary, yet often ran parallel to each other and at times were in direct conflict. Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of conversations was utilised to navigate these divergences and to develop a co-authored history of the site.
The Project’s outcomes display the value of undertaking community archaeology projects focusing on Indigenous heritage in the inner city. The process acted as a catalyst for broader community dialogue around how the recent history of the Canberra suburb of Griffith is currently interpreted in a way that marginalises Indigenous people. The Project showed that by prioritising Indigenous voices in this research, community archaeology can play an important role in supporting struggles for increased recognition and control over cultural heritage in the urban environment.
Foreword
This Project has critiqued the extent to which practitioners of community archaeology are objective in their research. With this in mind, I feel it is important to autoethnographically present myself to the reader at the start of this dissertation (following D. Boyd 2008).
I am a 29-year-old first-generation Anglo-Celtic Australian who has been involved in environmental, social justice and Indigenous rights groups for the past decade. I have a background in community development practice and popular education facilitation. My engagement in archaeological practice comes from an interest in whether there is a role for my own culture in decolonisation in Australia. More specifically, I am interested in whether archaeology can be used as a tool through which to deconstruct colonial narratives that have whitewashed Australia’s recent past. I am also interested in whether there is a role for non- Indigenous archaeologists to engage with Indigenous communities to interpret their heritage, and if so, how researchers make the decision of how, where and when to collaborate.
1.0 Introduction
This dissertation reports on a community archaeology project run in Canberra, Australia, in 2015-16. The Project was a joint undertaking between the author, a student researcher at The Australian National University (ANU), and senior members of Canberra’s Representative Aboriginal Organisations (RAOs1). It is part of the broader Local Significance: Indigenous Archaeology in and around Canberra collaboration supervised by Dr Duncan Wright (ANU) and Dave Johnston (Aboriginal Archaeologists Australia) that aims to promote understanding of Indigenous heritage in Canberra and its environs. This Project used a community archaeology methodology to investigate and promote an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite called ‘Red Hill Camp’, located in the inner-south suburb of Griffith2 (Figure 1).
Impetus for this research has come from recognition that while community archaeology has had positive impacts for Indigenous3 communities globally, there are to date very few projects in inner city Australia which have prioritised the voice of Indigenous people. Community archaeology is a term used to describe a group of archaeological practices that share analytical and interpretive power between researchers and communities who have an attachment to that history (Atalay 2006; Truscott 2004; Tully 2007). In Australia, these approaches have been strongly underpinned by the demands of Indigenous movements and postcolonial theory, which have critiqued traditional archaeological approaches for marginalising non-Western understandings of history (Brady and Kearney 2016; Greer 2010). Attempting to deal with these critiques has resulted in community archaeology developing as a more inclusive methodological approach to investigating Indigenous histories. This in turn has led to an increased focus on research questions that are of relevance to Indigenous communities, with most projects emphasising the recent, remembered past (D. Byrne 2003b; Mitchell et al. 2013). Despite these benefits however, the vast majority of community archaeology projects in Australia that have worked with Indigenous communities have taken place in the remote north of the country (for instance, Clarke 2002; David et al. 2004; Greer 2014; D. Wright 2015). Simultaneously, community archaeology in urban environments has generally prioritised working with non-Indigenous communities (D. Byrne 2003b). This dichotomy has large implications for recent historical narratives of urban space, positing Indigenous history as either in the deep past, or in remote areas where non-Indigenous people rarely go (D. Byrne 2003a). This situation is explored in detail in the Literature Review, Section 2.0.
This Project aims to bridge the gap by conducting a community archaeology project in inner city Canberra that prioritises the voices of Canberra’s Indigenous groups. To do this, the ‘Red Hill Camp’ location was identified in collaboration with RAO representatives as a case study to investigate and promote. As an ethnographically known Indigenous campsite, ‘Red Hill Camp’ is a site of particular importance to senior Ngunnawal/Ngambri Elder Matilda House, who camped at this location in the 1940s with her grandparents. Despite this significance, the current historical narrative of the area emphasises how in the 1920s town planners transformed what was then a pastoral landscape into a rare example of Garden City planning (National Trust of Australia (ACT) 2009). The site-specific research aim was therefore to investigate and develop a more nuanced history which included stories of Indigenous use of the area. This was summed up by the (only partially) tongue-in-cheek comment by Matilda House that she wanted the project to, “put an Aboriginal campsite smack bang in the fanciest part of town!”. These aims are presented in Section 1.1.
To investigate ‘Red Hill Camp’, a three-pronged methodology was chosen in collaboration with the RAOs where: oral histories relating to the site were recorded; archival research was undertaken to understand changing use of the site over time, and; the site was excavated to assess the subsurface archaeology. Project methodology and methods are detailed in Section 3.0, with the Results reporting on the oral history (Section 4.2), archival research (Section 4.3) and archaeological investigations (Section 4.4). Section 5.1 offers a jointly developed interpretation of these results, utilising the conceptual framework of interdisciplinary conversations, as described by Wendy Beck and Margaret Somerville (2005). Finally, this dissertation concludes by offering some reflections (Section 5.2) on the Project’s processes and outcomes, and assesses the benefits and challenges of such collaborations in the urban environment.
1.1 Research Aims
The overarching aims of the Project were to:
- Undertake a community archaeology project in an inner city location that prioritises
collaboration with the local Indigenous community; - Reflect on the benefits and limitations of utilising the community archaeology
methodology in the urban environment through this case study.
Secondary aims developed in collaboration with the RAO groups relate specifically to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ investigation:
- To explore the extent of Indigenous use of this location and immediate vicinity over time;
- To develop and widely promote a historical narrative for the vicinity which is more inclusive of Indigenous use.
2.0 Literature Review
Community archaeology is a term used to describe a range of archaeological practices which aim to share power between researchers and communities (Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Marshall 2002). Emerging largely as a response to demands for increased control of cultural heritage by Indigenous people in Australia, community archaeology aims to make archaeological research more relevant to local communities (Atalay 2006; Clarke 2002; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; Silliman and Ferguson 2010; Truscott 2011). This literature review initially provides an overview of what is encapsulated by the term ‘community archaeology’ and the benefits of the approach. Secondly, it traces the development of the field with particular reference to Indigenous involvement in archaeological research in Australia. Finally, it presents an overview of archaeological research undertaken in Canberra to date.
2.1 Defining Community Archaeology
While ‘community archaeology’ has sometimes been used erroneously to describe any project that entails community involvement, at its core it is an approach that requires power sharing between researchers and community during all stages of the research; from conception to dissemination (Atalay 2006; S. Byrne 2012; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; Greer 2014; Moser et al. 2002; Silliman and Ferguson 2010; Truscott 2004). The result of such power sharing is that community archaeology often works across disciplines, linking archaeological approaches to explaining the past (excavations, surveys, laboratory analysis, etc.) with other methods such as oral history. The approach has often been used by Western academics who have either sought to, or responded to demands to, work with knowledge systems that are very different to their own (Greer 2014). Therefore, a particular formulation is often seen in the literature, whereby research is initiated as a collaboration between community groups and academic researchers, includes medium-length community- based visits, and most often presents oral histories combined with archaeological investigations (for instance, Atalay 2010; Brady et al. 2003; David et al. 2004; D. Wright 2015).
There is no prescribed set of practices that defines community archaeology however, and the literature exhibits a great range of collaboration approaches. Power sharing can range from projects based within external academic institutions which merely “involve the local community in the investigation and interpretation of the past” (Truscott 2004, 30), to others where researchers are embedded in community power relations and actively relinquish any demands for archaeological outcomes (Brady and Kearney 2016). The latter projects have often led to quite sophisticated methodological understandings that draw on critiques of social power in the construction of history (Brady and Kearney 2016; De Leiuen and Arthure 2016; Tur, Blanch, and Wilson 2010).
The community archaeology literature also exhibits a wide range of perspectives on who constitutes ‘the community’ of community archaeology. The majority of projects to not delve into detail about this, often presenting the community as an idealised, bounded and essentialist entity which can be ‘engaged with’ (Silliman and Ferguson 2010; C. Smith and Jackson 2006). However, this assumption is increasingly challenged by authors who suggest that communities are fluid entities of constant formation, and that the choice over which people in ‘the community’ researchers share power with has significant impacts on the nature of the collaboration (Agbe-Davies 2010; Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Little and Shackel 2014; Silliman 2010; L. Smith 2012; L. Smith and Waterton 2009).
2.2 Benefits of Community Archaeology
The community archaeology literature suggests that the approach has many potential benefits, both to the field of archaeology and to local communities. Firstly, there are claims that community archaeology is a form of decolonising practice, which destabilises dominant Western forms of knowledge and creates a more democratic form of research (Atalay 2006; C. Smith and Jackson 2006; L. T. Smith 2012). There has been recognition that the dominance of certain demographics in archaeological and historical research has perpetuated narratives that have excluded certain groups, such as women, Indigenous people and the working class (Hayden 1994; Shackel 2011). The inclusion of such groups can allow researchers to devolve power in a way that creates “fuller histories viewed through multiple lenses”, strengthening interpretation and conclusions (Franklin 1997, 46; also Brady et al. 2003; J. Field et al. 2000; Jones and Russell 2012; Rose and Lewis 1992; Schmidt and Patterson 1995). This often quoted benefit is sometimes critiqued by Indigenous scholars as a co-option of Indigenous (and other minority) voices to support the continued dominance of the archaeological epistemology. They suggest that decolonisation of research will only truly come about through challenging the social inequality that results in such collaboration being needed in the first place (Grande 2004; Yellowhorn 2002).
Secondly, in sharing power over research aims, community archaeology can allow archaeological practice to become more relevant to contemporary community priorities. This means that archaeology as a research tool can move beyond its traditional realm of abstract knowledge creation about the past into tangible social outcomes (Little 2009). Archaeology has been used for decades to inform government policy (for instance Rathje 1996), however, in the past 20 years there has been an explosion in community based archaeological projects with express social and environmental justice outcomes (Little 2009). These have ranged from supporting Indigenous land rights in Latin America (Jofré 2014), developing inclusive homelessness policy and addressing race relations in the United States of America and South Africa (Little and Shackel 2014; Rassool 2007; Shackel 2011; Zimmerman, Singleton, and Welch 2010), to peacebuilding in the Middle East (Keinan- Schoonbart, Sayej, and Solsona 2014) and development of more inclusive histories worldwide (Miller and Henderson 2010). Some authors have described this targeted social engagement as an ‘activist archaeology’, and haved called on archaeologists to “engage in ‘politics’ and translate their findings into information useful for developing social policy” (Zimmerman, Singleton, and Welch 2010, 443; also Jofré 2014; Stottman 2011).
2.3 Community Archaeology in Australia
Community archaeology in Australia, and indeed globally, began with growing demands from Australian Indigenous groups from the 1970s for greater control over their heritage (Truscott 2004). Until 1967, no legislation protected Indigenous archaeological sites, and researchers were under very little social or legislative pressure to seek out or engage with Indigenous communities (McBryde 1985). At the same time, Australian archaeology was in its infancy, and focused primarily on developing regional sequences and determining dates for the earliest inhabitation of the continent. This was a history which many researchers saw as the nation’s heritage, rather than the specific heritage of contemporary Indigenous communities (Wilfred Shawcross in Kabaila 2011, 58). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s however, Indigenous activist groups increasingly pushed for equal rights and greater say, including over what they saw as their cultural heritage (Dodson 1997; Land 2015). While legislative protection of archaeological sites was introduced from the late 1960s, control of conservation remained in the hands of majority non-Indigenous committees and government departments (Moser et al. 2002; Truscott 2004). Frustration with this continuing lack of control coalesced in Ros Langford’s intervention (on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community) at 1982 Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) Conference in Hobart (Langford 1983) which explicitly laid out the difference between archaeological and Indigenous stakes in cultural heritage (Bowdler and The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre 2012). Partially in response to this push, the Australian Heritage Commission in 1985 introduced consultation around the listing of Indigenous heritage places into the Register of the National Estate (Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002). In the same year, archaeologist Isabel McBryde published a snapshot of the growing recognition that Indigenous people were the owners of Australia’s pre-invasion past (McBryde 1985). Requirement for consultation was formalised in the AAA’s Code of Ethics in 1991 that required archaeologists to “obtain informed consent of representatives authorised by the indigenous people whose cultural heritage is the subject of investigation” (Davidson, Lovell- Jones, and Bancroft 1995: 83). As a result of these developments, consultation and engagement with Indigenous groups has become a mainstay in Australian archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management (CHM).
The concurrent rise of postprocessual archaeology and postcolonial theory during the 1970s also had major influences on archaeological practice in Australia. It questioned whether archaeological research could ever reach objective conclusions and demanded that academics look self-reflexively at how they engaged in research (Atalay 2006; Hodder 1995; Lydon and Rizvi 2010). The merging of these challenges into a ‘postcolonial archaeology’ has been a powerful lens in showing how representations of history created by non-inclusive approaches to archaeology have been used to support colonial narratives of the nation’s past (D. Byrne 1996; Ferris, Harrison, and Beaudoin 2014; Ireland 2012; Moore-Gilbert 2007). In particular, it has shown how exclusion of Indigenous voices from research in Australia has perpetuated artificial binaries such as the divide between ‘Aboriginal/ Indigenous’ and ‘Historical’ periods of Australian history (Gandhi 2006; Hinckson and Smith 2005; Karskens and Mackay 1999; Lightfoot 1995; Lydon and Rizvi 2010; McNiven and Russell 2005).
As a response to the these demands, more collaborative research practices developed from the mid-1980s, with Australian researchers Shelley Greer (1989; 2014), Anne Clarke (1995; 2002) and Colin Pardoe (1990) amongst the first in the world to develop new forms of ‘community-based archaeology’. These collaborations initially emerged as in-the-field transformations in personal practice, driven by recognition that the communities on whose land research was being conducted were conceptualising project outcomes in a very different way (Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002). Over the past 30 years, these models have coalesced into a group of methodological approaches with a core commitment to shared power (Brady and Kearney 2016; D. Byrne 2008; Clarke 2002; Greer, Harrison, and McIntyre-Tamwoy 2002; C. Smith and Jackson 2006).
As a result of developing as a way to navigate epistemological differences, the majority of community archaeology collaborations have been undertaken with Indigenous communities in rural and remote areas, where these differences are most explicit. This has included work in the Torres Strait (Brady et al. 2003; David et al. 2004; D. Wright 2015), in Cape York (Greer 2014), on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Clarke 2002), and on Flinders Island, Tasmania (Birmingham 1992). Other projects have been undertaken in south-eastern Australia, with counter-mapping exercises of pastoral and coastal landscapes aiming to build more inclusive, shared historical narratives of landscapes (D. Byrne and Nugent 2004; Harrison 2002, 2014; T. Murray 2011; Thomas and Ross 2013). These projects have largely worked with oral history and have therefore focused on the post-invasion period (D. Byrne 2013).
In contrast, fewer community archaeology projects have been undertaken in the inner urban environment. Those that have have generally taken the form of the ‘big dig’, which draw on the ‘public archaeology’ tradition whereby interested members of the local area are encouraged to help in excavation and interpretation of finds. Examples of such projects include the Sydney Rocks Big Dig (Karskens 1999), Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations in Melbourne (Mackay et al. 2006), and more recently, ANU led projects at Springbank Island in Canberra (Ricardi et al. 2016) and the Triabunna Barracks in Tasmania (Jenkins 2016). The vast majority of these projects have been focused on working with non- Indigenous local and descendant communities. Meanwhile, examples of research projects that have collaborated with Indigenous communities in the urban environment have mostly focused on peri-urban segregated spaces which have featured large in Indigenous memory; fringe camps (Beck and Somerville 2005), reserves and missions (Kabaila 1999; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Morrison, McNaughton, and Keating 2015), or ‘native institutions’ (Lydon 2005). Numerous recent projects from within the CHM and Natural Resource Management (NRM) fields have also focused on collaborative recording and promotion of peri-urban sites for their intangible heritage (for instance, Guilfoyle et al. 2011; Johnston and Cooke 2008a; Mitchell et al. 2013). These have largely been undertaken prior to greenfield development, on rural properties, or in within nature reserves and national parks.
Several community archaeology researchers have argued that this situation maintains a neo- colonial status quo which, by positing Indigenous history as either in the pre-invasion era or in remote or peri-urban areas, causes Indigenous peoples “to disappear from past colonial spaces that they otherwise occupied” (Silliman and Ferguson 2010, 33; also Griffiths 1996; Hayden 1994; Moreton-Robinson 2006). Denis Byrne suggested more than a decade ago that this lack of focus on the shared, recent history of the inner city was having profoundly negative results for the telling of the Australian national narrative, and subsequently for contemporary Indigenous lives (D. Byrne 1996; 2003a). It does not appear that the situation has changed since.
2.3.1 Community Archaeology in Canberra
Archaeological work in Canberra has followed a similar trajectory, with increasing Indigenous involvement in CHM work, but very few community archaeology projects that share control with the local community. Prior to the 1980s, little archaeological work was done in the ACT, with the small amount that was being conducted focusing on traces of the deep past with little involvement of Indigenous communities (D. Bell 1975; English 1985; Flood 1973; Tugby and Tugby 1964). Since the mid-1980s, archaeological assessment has been mandated for all new developments, resulting in more recent subdivisions in the north and the west of the city being subject to numerous archaeological investigations (for instance, ANUtech 1984; Access Archaeology 1991, 1992; Barber 2000; Bulbeck and Boot 1990; Canberra Archaeological Society 1984; Klaver 1997; Kuskie and Boot 1992; Navin Officer Heritage Consultants 2001; Officer 1995).
Despite this, consultation with Indigenous people was not required until a decade later, resulting with the majority of assessments only referencing Indigenous peoples’ presence in the area by stone artefacts and ochre quarrying, assuming all other cultural material was of ‘European’ origin (ACT Heritage Council 2015, Matilda House and Wally Bell, personal communication). Indeed, of the approximately 3500 Indigenous heritage places recorded in the ACT, the vast majority relate to the pre-invasion period (ACT Government 2010). Furthermore, recently protected heritage places in urban areas have been able to achieve conservation status due to the presence of pre-invasion artefactual evidence (ACT Heritage Council 2011; Johnston and Cooke 2008a).
Despite increasingly consultative CHM practice, there have been no examples of community archaeology research projects that have collaborated primarily with the RAO groups. One example of the ‘big dig’ form of community archaeology, the Springbank Island Project (2015) (Ricardi et al. 2016), has been undertaken in Canberra to date. While this project invited RAO groups to participate, its research aims were determined before involvement, and it focused primarily on investigation of early European heritage in Canberra. Some oral history recordings and material culture recording have also been carried out in Stirling Park by amateur historian Ann Gugler (1999; 2001) with the Bell family; however, these have not followed an archaeological approach.
2.4 Summary
The above review shows that archaeological research can contribute to positive social outcomes when it shares power with local communities. However, while there has been an increasing presence of Indigenous voices in archaeological research and CHM in Australia, community archaeology with these communities is still a rarity. It has mostly been undertaken in remote, rural and peri-urban areas, with large-scale public archaeology projects focusing on European heritage dominating community archaeology in the inner city.
3.0 Methodology and Methods
3.1 Methodology
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ Project used a community archaeology methodology, with both the choice of site and specific methods developed in discussion with RAO groups. This section outlines the Project’s collaboration framework and investigative approach.
Discussions between the author and RAO groups were facilitated by Dr Duncan Wright (ANU) and Dave Johnston (Aboriginal Archaeologists Australia), both of who have worked closely with the RAO groups in the past. This initial engagement process followed the requirements of the ACT Heritage Act 2004, as well as guidelines produced by the Canberra Archaeology Society (Johnston and Cooke 2008b) and the Australian Heritage Commission (Australian Heritage Commission 2002). Discussions commenced in September 2015, with a site and methods decided upon by the end of the year. Methods included recording oral histories with RAOs, collating archival material relevant to the site, and undertaking a sub-surface archaeological investigation.
Throughout the Project, despite community archaeology’s ideal of full shared control between the researcher and constituent community, it was essential for the degree of shared decision making to be flexible so as not to overburden the RAO representatives involved. The extent of required collaboration for each project stage was thus discussed and a three step ladder of engagement developed. This framework drew on the civic engagement work of Sherry Arnstein (1969) and the IAP2 model utilised by Cherie De Leiuen and Susan Arthure (2016) and is detailed in Appendix B. Signed statements were given by Matilda House (Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council) and Wally Bell (Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation) stating their approval of the Project’s approach (Appendix C, following viewing of the Information Sheet Appendix D), and oral support was given by Carl Brown (King Brown Tribal Group) and James Mundy (Ngarigu Kurrawong Clan).
3.2 Methods
3.2.1 Oral History
The Project’s first stage involved visiting the chosen site with interested RAOs to record oral histories related to the vicinity. While it was anticipated that the non-Indigenous community would also have memories relating to the site, the Project’s aim was to prioritise Indigenous voices and therefore only aimed to record oral histories with RAO groups. A Human Ethics approval was acquired from the ANU Ethics Committee to undertake this research stage, and is included in Appendix A.
On 1st March, 2016, Steve Skitmore, Dave Johnston and ANU student researcher Bridget San Miguel4 visited ‘Red Hill Camp’ with Matilda House. The oral history recording method followed a form of ‘story trekking’ (following Green, Green, and Neves 2003, 378), where various locations of significance to Matilda House were visited throughout the course of the day and discussed informally. ‘Red Hill Camp’ was one of these locations. The discussion was facilitated by Dave Johnston, and while at the site, he asked Matilda questions about:
- Memories of experiences there;
- What significance the site held for her today;
- How the site fitted into the broader cultural landscape;
- Desires for site promotion and management;
- Hopes for what the Project might achieve.
This discussion was recorded on an iPhone 6 and transcribed by Steve Skitmore and Bridget San Miguel in March 2016, and is available in full in Appendix E. The original recording was stored on a secure server and will be deposited with ACT Heritage. Matilda has requested for it to be open access.
Despite not being officially recorded as part of the Project, both Wally Bell and Matilda House’s brother Arnold Williams also visited the site and shared some of their thoughts about the location and surrounding area. Summaries of these stories have been included in the oral history results. Wally’s comments were recorded by 666 ABC Canberra’s Alex Sloan on 16th May 2016 and are available online (666 ABC Canberra 2016). A transcript of these comments is also included in Appendix F. Arnold Williams shared his story of the site on 18th May 2016 with a tour group from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Notes of this informal presentation were recorded in Steve Skitmore’s field notebook.
3.2.2 Archival Research
Desktop research was undertaken between March and May 2016 to review all direct and indirect references made to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ and Indigenous use of the surrounding area. Particular attention was paid to the 1820-1930s era which lay beyond the range of the oral history. Research was undertaken at the National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, ACT Heritage Library and the Canberra and District Historical Society. Material accessed included:
- Early maps showing homesteads, land boundaries and road locations in the vicinity;
- Government gazettes showing evolution of road plans and camping areas;
- Photographs, including large scale aerial photography, which showed the changing
nature of the site; - Newspaper articles (both via Trove and in microfilm) relating to early occupation of
the region and the building of Canberra, with a particular focus on Indigenous
movement; - Diaries and memoirs from Europeans living in the Canberra region;
- Unpublished oral histories recorded with early residents of Griffith, and;
- Minutes and reports of the various Committees and Commissions charged with
development of Canberra, with a focus on the suburb of Griffith.
Fieldwork involved a comprehensive surface survey and excavation of three 1 x 1m squares at the site between 12th May and 20th May 2016 inclusive. The location of the squares was influenced by Matilda House, who indicated that the campsite was associated with a dacite outcrop at the southern end of the park (see Section 4.1). Permits for the work were gained from the ACT Heritage Council, ACT Public Use, ACT Treescapes and Territory and Municipal Services. Excavation was conducted manually in 5cm Excavation Units [XU] by a team of ANU students, supervised by the author. All deposit was weighed and sieved through a 3mm wire mesh onto tarpaulins associated with each square. Where possible, the three dimensional location of all in situ cultural material and charcoal fragments was recorded. All other cultural material recovered from the sieving station was bagged by XU according to material category. Total deposit weight and depth measurements were recorded at the corners and centre of the square at the base of each XU, using a Leica automatic level calibrated daily to a fixed datum point. Sediment samples were retained from each XU, with Munsell colours recorded and soil pH assessed using an InoculoTM kit. Where there was an obvious sediment change within the XU, a sample was taken for each Stratigraphic Unit (SU). Squares were closed when several layers indicative of an environment of low archaeological potential had been recorded. After recording the sections, squares were then backfilled with their associated sieved spoil. With the permission of RAO groups, finds were then taken to the ANU’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology for cleaning and analysis. All cultural material will be repatriated to the site in November 2016 and reburied in Square 1 at approximately 20cm depth.
During the archaeology stage, local residents were informed about the Project and were invited to visit the excavations. This included:
- Letterboxing local residences with Project details;
- Installing temporary signage to inform passers-by of Project aims;
- Emailing local groups, including Canberra Grammar School, Red Hill Regenerators
and the Griffith Narrabundah Community Association to invite them to visit the
excavations, and; - A media release and news follow-up with RAO representatives.
Many local residents and several community groups visited the site during this stage, with numerous passers-by stopping and engaging in conversations about the Project. A group of local children were closely supervised to help excavate part of one of the squares. Groups visited from AIATSIS, the Griffith Narrabundah Community Association, the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology (ASHA), as well as local media. Some local residents also shared their stories about the location where relevant to inform the archaeological results, summaries have been included in the Oral History Section 4.2.4.
4.0 Results
4.1 Site Overview
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ site is an elongated traffic island/ small park located at the intersection of Flinders Way, Durville Crescent and Hayes Crescent, Griffith, ACT (Figure 2). It is part of the Blandfordia 5 Heritage Precinct, designated for its Garden City associated planning values (ACT Heritage Council 2004a). Its orientation is northwest by southeast, and it is approximately 65m long and 20-30m wide. The park is flat, with a covering of mown exotic grasses in the northern half. The southern portion contains a large outcrop of dacitic ignimbrite (welded tuff) of the Mount Painter volcanic formation (Finlayson 2008). This runs diagonally north-south across the park, and is as high as one metre in places. These boulders are surrounded by bark chippings and plantings of exotic street trees Crataegus laevigata (hawthorn) and Prunus cerasifera 'Nigra' (black cherry plum). These were planted in the 1940s and are part of the area’s registered treescape (Taylor and Boden 1994). The park itself is around 100m north of a perennial watercourse that runs through parkland south of Flinders Way. It is on low lying ground, approximately 200m east of the lower slopes of Red Hill, 1.1 kilometres east of the top of the Red Hill ridgeline, and 2.3 kilometres southwest of Lake Burley Griffin.
4.2 Oral History
The first stage of the Project recorded oral histories with RAO group representatives. Given her personal connection to the site, Matilda House was the only RAO who took part in the official recording in March 2016 (Figure 3), and therefore this results section primarily reports on her stories (in bold italic). In order to present a 60-minute informal conversation with Matilda in manageable form, sections not relevant to ‘Red Hill Camp’ have been removed, and stories re-ordered into a thematic flow. While the words themselves remain Matilda’s, it must therefore be noted that this oral history is essentially a collaborative exercise between Matilda and the author. The written result was approved by Matilda House in September 2016. Arnold Williams (Matilda’s brother) and Wally Bell (of the Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation) also visited the site during the excavation stage (Figure 4) and shared some of their stories relating to the area. Where relevant to ‘Red Hill Camp’, these are included below.
Some pre-existing oral history recordings, mostly with Matilda House, include reference to ‘Red Hill Camp’ (House et al. 2015; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014; Read 1984; Wesson and Australian Alps Liaison Committee 1994). These have been assessed in the course of research, and where they provide additional context for the site have been included below. Unfortunately, access was not able to be gained to Ann Jackson-Nakano’s original recordings for The Kamberri (Jackson-Nakano 2001) due to National Library of Australia restrictions and Jackson-Nakano’s poor health. Other oral histories of recent Indigenous connections to Canberra have been recorded by Peter Read (1984, 121–23), Ann Gugler (1999) and Peter Kabaila (1999; 2011). These were accessed, but given that they do not mention camping in Canberra, have not been included. There are also many oral histories relating to the area that have been published by non-Indigenous locals. Where published, and relevant to the Indigenous story of ‘Red Hill Camp’, these have been included in the Archival Research Section 4.3. However, during the excavation stage of the Project, several local residents also volunteered stories about the site, and summaries of these are included below.
Matilda first discussed her early life growing up in Cowra and Yass. She mentioned talking to her mother about camping at ‘Red Hill Camp’:
What a beautiful spot [‘Red Hill Camp’] must have been. How I remember is because I used to talk to my mother you know, I would be talking to my mother about camping and she’d then say to me later, “you would’ve been only about two or three then Matilda”. You know because I lived on two Aboriginal missions. One was in Cowra, the other one was at Yass, on Hollywood. And I mostly stayed at Yass for the majority of my life growing up because my grandparents were there. When I was about eleven though, or twelve, I went back to Cowra.
Matilda discusses her childhood in Cowra and Yass in more depth in Aboriginal Heritage Stories: Queanbeyan and Surrounds (Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014).
4.2.1.2 Family Memories of Camping in Canberra
My grandfather [‘Lightning’ Williams] was a great stockman, and his father was Black Harry. My grandfather and his brother, who was known as Roddy, and that's another story, he camped up at Campbell, up behind Russell. That was his camping ground.
Roddy [Roderick] Williams lived in Canberra all his life. According to relative Betty Homer, he worked on the construction of the provisional Parliament House in 1920s and on the conversion of the Yarralumla Homestead into Government House (Jackson-Nakano 2001). Betty also said that she frequently visited him at his camp at Red Hill when she was a child, and that he also had a room at the local working men’s hostel (Jackson-Nakano 2001). Arnold Williams also remembered the Roddy-Red Hill connection, “Grandfather Lightning always told us we were from here (ACT-Queanbeyan). He told us about the Red Hill camp and our Uncle Roddy. Aunty Tiny [Rosemary Connors, nee Williams] used to visit Uncle Roddy out at Red Hill and so did Dad” (Arnold Williams in Jackson-Nakano 2001, 187). Matilda continues:
But camping here, on this side, was close to what my grandfather had work for the people who owned the cattle that's not far from here, it was called Russell Hill5. Russell Hill is just up there behind Red Hill. And that's why we always called this the Red Hill side. My grandfather would have been working with people like the Russells, but he would also work next to my grandmother. She would be doing domestic duties and he'd be out chopping wood or cleaning the yard or doing all the things that black people did in them days.
This place here it must’ve been some wonderful place for my grandparents to come. My grandfather died in 1959. But he had a great legacy behind him from this place with his brother and his father and his grandfather. So you know it should be noted of the wonderful things that he knew coming from the Murrumbidgee River and Uriarra. But I can see why this place would be a site of significance especially for camping. You know, just for camping.
4.2.1.3 Memories of ‘Red Hill Camp’
Matilda then spoke about the specific types of activities that occurred at ‘Red Hill Camp’, and her memories of what it looked like when she visited:
In my time, as a little girl, I came here with my grandparents who was doing domestic work for people around here for the elite. And we'd come with the horse and cart, horse and sulky. The horse and sulky was something we travelled around in them days, coming from Yass. And it was a time when us all we ever did was go around in was horse and sulky.
Never knew it as Flinders, or Manuka or anything, that was just the Red Hill Camp. It didn’t have a language name. And it wasn't anything of significance, just a place where we could water the horses, 'cause there's a creek running down there, from Boys' Grammar. And I don't know if it was Boys' Grammar in them days, but in the end of the day there was a creek and that's where as a little girl we would take the horse, it was only one horse, her name was Poppy. And we'd take her down there and she would have a drink and wander around and stuff like that. It was shady.
And I don't think the road was that exciting about being tarred and all this and that but it might have been a ruddy old dusty road, who knows. We're talking about myself being at the age of about two or three [approximately 1947-48].
Yeah, so that's what I can remember. Don't ask me what happened yesterday, 'cause I don't know!
4.2.1.4 Reasons for Choice of Campsite
In response to questions about whether Matilda thought this area might have been a campground prior to the 1940s, she suggested that this was likely to be the case:
[The ‘Red Hill Camp’] would have been [a campground before the 1940s], if my grandparents, especially my grandfather [camped here]. This was the country of his father and his brother and his grandfather, Onyong. They went through all the time, as people of Country here.
So if we camped here, it was for a reason, 'cause it was close to water, regardless of whether we had a horse or not. At the end of the day it was close to water, and that's what people wanted in them days, somewhere where you can always have a drink of water. And of course the Molonglo River, it wasn't far from here, which is now under Lake Burley Griffin, but it was part of the substance for people, for Aboriginal people to live on as well. 'Cause in them days, the abundance of food that was on the Molonglo River was a good source of everything. Not only had shellfish, it had lots of fish in it, you know, it had cod in it and crabs and you know, all sorts of stuff. And of course, ducks and stuff like that.
4.2.1.5 Travelling and Camping Elsewhere
Camping and travelling were recurring themes in Matilda’s stories, and she offered some vivid insights into everyday life on the road:
We were always fond of the horse and sulky. And that took us everywhere. We never had cars. But to come over here with it, I remember being bundled off in the sulky you know, and we’d camp on the outskirts, and then we’d drive in the next day for them to do their work, and then we’d probably camp.
The poor old horse named Poppy, she would just keep going. She took us all the way out to Uriarra as well, when I was very young. Of course they stopped when they used to round up all the mad cattle that was out there. I was never allowed to go outside of the old shed that we lived in because the cattle were mad, they would chase you! [laughs] Yes so a lot of history.
As a little girl, my grandmother made sure she looked after me, as a child. I think she had brought Arnold [Matilda’s brother] here as well. But not so much my other brother, my eldest brother, Crow, because he was never well enough, to do travel and that.
Matilda also discussed travelling and camping to the north of Yass in Aboriginal Heritage Stories: Queanbeyan and Surrounds (Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014), reiterating the children’s active role in looking after the horses and camp:
Travelling back and forward between Yass and Cowra with Nanny Cissy and Grandfather Lightning we always had a camp stop at the Borowa Road. Grandfather Lightning was a police tracker based at Wee Jasper, that’s where he met grandmother Cissy. Nan and me would make up a feed while Grampy and my younger brother Arnold would care for the horses and fix anything wrong with the sulky.
Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council (2014, 25)
4.2.1.6 Memories of Previous Signage
Matilda remembered there being a small plaque in the park at some stage in the 1960s or 1970s, referencing a camp in the area. Whilst at the site we scouted for the sign, however, there was no indication of it ever having been there. Matilda offered thoughts on why this might have been the case:
In them days, before it was self-government, years before, when I was a little girl, somehow or other they put a sign up and they called it the 'Ngunnawal [or Ngunawal] Campsite'.
'Cause when they built these places around here later on, they would have made sure this would be part and parcel, otherwise they would have knocked it all down. So why would they have kept a little space like this? Why would they keep this spot? And in a place what is now what we blacks would call a ‘posh place’.
In them days, Red Hill and all that would have just been another part of what Canberra was being built on. But now it's all finished, you know, and it's turned into what not far up the road is all the embassies, you know, stuff like that, so it certainly didn't want to be known as a camping ground for blacks. So that's why the sign went.
4.2.1.7 Thoughts on Current Vegetation and Landscaping
During the visit, Matilda walked around the park and gave some thoughts on the landscaping of the site. During this time, she also indicated where she thought would be the best location to place the excavations:
They piled it up, you can tell, look at it. They weren't brought here [points at boulders]. You don’t have big boulders and that around just to look at you know, there must’ve been something there for shade and maybe you’ll find something down there when you’re digging, where they cut the tree off or whatever. We don’t know.
I think we should just keep looking at other things and the vegetation. 'Cause the vegetation is going to tell us exactly, you know, what was around here. Because to make it look real deadly or whatever in them days, they would have tossed out all the good vegetation. It’s just, I’d like to see all the native trees that’ve been around here. Because you can see that they’ve been cut down, destroyed, to make a very English place to live.
And when they built Hindmarsh Drive all these sort of boulders are exactly like the ones that they pulled out of the ground there. But I find it fascinating that that rock [one of the boulders in the park] split, you know. It wasn’t deliberate, it was done by lightning or whatever. And just to know that these things happened around country and that, or on country.
4.2.2 Arnold Williams’ Oral History
Arnold Williams spoke briefly to ANU Media and an AIATSIS tour group in May about his memories of the site. He spoke about how he had visited the site on and off since the early 1990s with Matilda, and that he had heard additional information about the park being an Ngunnawal/ Ngunawal campsite from an elderly local resident. Arnold spoke mostly of his memories of life ‘on the Mission’ at Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve in Yass.
4.2.3 Wally Bell’s Oral History
Wally Bell spoke to 666 ABC Canberra about the broader cultural landscape within which ‘Red Hill Camp’ sat. He emphasised that there was a need to put ‘Red Hill Camp’ in its wider context, and discussed evidence of pre-invasion Indigenous use of the area, including that creeklines were often used as pathways by Indigenous groups:
This would have been a good spot for a campsite. What I’ve found doing cultural heritage work for 30 years is that not many people talk about cultural landscapes. Everyone talks about ‘sites’. What I’d like to see is all those different areas, all those sites around the place, are actually put into proper context and we can actually talk about the whole cultural landscape, take a big picture view and tell the true story about our occupation of this area. There’s so many areas around this little area for instance, we’ve got Red Hill where there are numerous scar trees up there and a really nice women’s business site up there too.
The landscape itself, you’ve got all these large features such as Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie and Mount Majura. But these mountains also tie into the fact that the Molonglo River was one of our pathways. Because to travel through the landscape, we used waterways as our pathways. The smaller rivers like the Molonglo would lead to the larger rivers such as the Murrumbidgee. And we’re finding that most of our artefact sites are along those waterways. All these features are really prominent along every waterway you walk along. You’re bound to find some evidence of our occupation.
Wally Bell, recorded by Alex Sloan, 16th May 2016 (666 ABC Canberra 2016)
4.2.4 Other Local Oral Histories
During the excavation stage of the Project, all houses in a two street radius of the park were letterboxed with information about the Project. Some residents visited and shared their memories of the area.
Helen Hamilton of 3 Hayes Crescent has lived in the area since 1969 and remembered that boys from the Canberra Grammar School used to congregate in the park to smoke throughout the 1970s. She also noted that it has always been a play area for the local neighbourhood’s children, and that they often dig holes and bury toys in the park near the boulders.
Bronwyn Rose of 6 Hayes Cresent has lived in the area since 1973 and also remembers Canberra Grammar School boys using the park, up until the early 2000s. She mentioned that one of the older residents of the area had told her the story of an Indigenous campsite in the park was ‘made up’ by residents in the 1930s, who used the story to make sure the park was protected from development.
Brendan Price has lived in the vicinity since the early 1990s. He said that he has talked to older locals who recall there being about five creeklines in the area. He also mentioned that an old neighbour, Mr Hall, who lived on Durville Crescent, remembered there being a ‘shepherd’s hut’ in the Bass Gardens park in the 1930s. Mr Hall used to regularly walk in Bass Gardens and found a few pieces of blue and white willow patterened plate, and what he believed to be an old hearth stone from the aforementioned hut.
4.3 Archival Research
The second part of this results section examines the archival record. It primarily assesses written material relating to the present ‘Red Hill Camp’ location prior to the era covered by oral history, in order to tie the oral history into the longer term history for the site. In particular, it aims to provide detail about Indigenous movement and camping in the Canberra region, and why a campsite might have been established in this park in particular. It will also run parallel to Matilda House’s oral history (Section 4.2.1) by presenting the archival references to her grandparents and Roddy [Roderick] Williams in the 1940s.
Archival material is only available subsequent to European invasion of the Molonglo valley in 1820, and will therefore focus on transformation of and control over the landscape in the 130-year period between the 1820s and the 1950s. There are four identifiable phases relating to the Indigenous history of Canberra that emerge from these documents, and the results are thus categorised according to the following periods:
- Invasion and Early Relations (1820s-1850s)
- Intensified Occupation (1860s-1890s)
- Dispossession and ‘Mission Life’ (1880s-1940s)
- Coming of the Capital (1900s-1950s)
4.3.1 Invasion and Early Relations (1820s-1860s)
The first written records that relate to the area that is now Canberra are from the 1820 summer scouting parties of the British colonial presence in southeastern Australia. These early documents are field notes and journals which note the lay of the country and include some references to traditional land management techniques such as burning (Harvard 1956, 16–17; Lea-Scarlett 1968, 7–10). By 1824, the first squatters arrived in the region with cattle and occupied the central Molonglo River valley, outside the official ‘Limits of Location’ of the New South Wales Colony (Harvard 1956). The first of these occupations to receive formal approval from the British system was Duntroon in 1825, a compensation grant of 4000 acres at the base of what is now Mount Ainslie. By 1832, this grant had increased by a further 2060 acres with land in the north portion of the now Majura valley and across the Molonglo in what is now Kingston, Barton and Griffith (Robinson 1927, 68). Narrabundah is the first recorded name for the area south of the river, with the Red Hill ridge being referred to as the Narrabundah Range until the early 1900s (The Evening News 1909). The earliest references to Indigenous groups in the region either note gatherings from afar, or retribution parties against European transgressions of Indigenous law (Sevacks in Avery 1994; Bluett 1954; Gillespie 1991; Mackaness 1941).
European invasion intensified and, by the mid-1830s, much of the land beside the Molonglo had been occupied by some of the wealthiest landowners of the new colony (White and New South Wales. Surveyor-General 1953). In the years between 1828 and 1838, the number of Europeans living along the Molonglo exploded from 94 to 1728 (Lea-Scarlett 1968, 16). By 1838, the town of Queanbeyan had been established, and around the same year a claim was made that a third of all the colony’s sheep were grazed in the locale (Schumack 1967, 21).
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, diaries and memoirs suggest that there was a slow shift into a shared economy in the region, with both Indigenous and European groups becoming increasingly reliant upon the other (Harvard 1956; Mackaness 1941; Mowle 1899). Most references to relations at this time discuss positive relationships between the groups (Robinson 1927; W. D. Wright 1923). Local leaders such as Onyong/Allianoyonyiga appeared to form close personal relationships with certain friendly squatters and often set up camp close to their homesteads in order to reap the material benefits of engagement with the newcomers (Mackaness 1941). Other trades also appear to have occurred, with Onyong’s grandson inheriting the name Henry Williams6 from a Coopers and Co. worker (Jackson- Nakano 2001). Local W. D. Wright (1923, 27) states that during this time, Indigenous people were in “no way seen as a menace” to the squatters, unlike the bushrangers that occasionally visited the area.
It appears that Indigenous groups, while incorporating the new stations into their economies, also maintained traditional law and control (Australasian Chronicle 1842). Until the 1860s, properties remained on the open grassy plains alongside the river valleys and were largely unfenced, meaning that food access and movement were largely unimpeded (D. Bell 1975; Flood 2010). Despite efforts of squatters to attract permanent camps near their homesteads to provide a steady supply of labour, Indigenous groups mostly remained seasonal, continuing to move between traditional camping grounds and only engaging with the occupiers on their own terms (Bingham 1841; New South Wales. Legislative Council 1842). Bogong moth hunts continued into at least the 1850s and there are references to numerous corrobborees at campsites near what is now Black Mountain Peninsula, Pialligo and Queanbeyan (Queanbeyan Age and Queanbeyan Observer 1919; W. D. Wright 1923; 1927). W.D. Wright (1923, 27) notes that there was a camp at ‘Majura’ at this time, however, whether this refers to the Griffith area or to the Majura valley north of the Molonglo is not clear.
It appears that maintenance of traditional practices became increasingly difficult as European occupation intensified throughout the 1840s and 1850s (D. Bell 1975, 51; Bennett 1834, 241; Bluett 1954, 8–9; Schumack 1967, 151; Williams 2007). Stories arose at this time of increased conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, largely focusing on different approaches to cattle as a food resource (M. Brennan 1907; The Sunday Mail 1927; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1839). There also appears to have been increased tensions at this time within the Indigenous community over different ways of engaging with the continued occupation (W. D. Wright 1927, 109). Stewart Mowle, manager of the Yarralumla property in the 1830s, noted different approaches between the various Indigenous groups, some of whom worked on the station and helped liaise with and at times disperse what they themselves referred to as “the wild blacks” (Mowle 1899, 8). In the same way, squatters who were not open to understanding and adapting to Indigenous resource use were to a certain degree in conflict with those who were closer to local groups. For instance, most squatter memoirs speak very poorly of Henry Hall of Charnwood for shooting Onyong in the leg after he speared one of Hall’s cattle (Bluett 1954; Schumack 1967; W. D. Wright 1927).
4.3.2 Intensified Occupation (1860s-1890s)
The Roberston Land Acts of 1861 saw large changes to land use in the Molonglo valley. Prior to this time, large patches of crown land remained between stations and were essentially neutral, common ground, where Indigenous groups could maintain traditional practices without much hindrance (Figure 5). In 1861, however, these areas of crown land were opened for settlement. Regulations required the ‘improvement’ of this land, including clearing and fencing, transforming the region between the 1860s-1880s into a more densely grazed and settled pastoral landscape (F. Brennan 1971). Concurrent with the loss of crown land, a formal European cadastre of gazetted roads, fences and boundaries was increasingly imposed (Lea-Scarlett 1968). Prior to the 1860s, informal rights of way had been prevalent across the landscape (De Salis 1882; The Queanbeyan Age 1882). The 1861 Acts however required the consolidation and formalisation of fenced road corridors to alleviate increasing conflicts between older landholders and the new ‘Selectors’ (Goulburn Herald 1881).
This enclosure of a previously relatively open landscape, and the simultaneous decrease in local flora and fauna, would have impacted significantly on the ability of Indigenous groups to remain disengaged from the colonial occupation (D. Bell 1975; Watson 1927). Other major events occurred around this time that would have impacted on this, including a series of deaths in the older generation that had personal experience of a time before the region was occupied by Europeans (Jackson-Nakano 2001). However, despite these push factors to integrate further with the pastoral economy, the influx of new European immigrants meant that the older homesteads suddenly had less reliance on local Indigenous labour. As such, records suggest that Indigenous family groups were increasingly under pressure in this period, moving from station to station for work, and camping on the outskirts of Yass and Queanbeyan to gain access to the town economies (Avery 1994; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Percival 1927; Schumack 1967).
However, there remained areas across the Molonglo valley which would likely have provided cadastral ‘gaps’ where Indigenous families could have continued to camp. Regulations in the 1860s around cattle droving along roadways meant that Travelling Stock and Camping Reserves (TS&CRs) of up to ten acres were established every ten miles along the newly gazetted roads (McKnight 1977). Due to the fact that these were always located close to perennial water sources, it is likely that they were near places where Indigenous groups would have traditionally camped, and they may have continued to be used in this way (McKnight 1977, 42).
Records from this time that relate to the part of historic Narrabundah which now is home to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ show that it is a microcosm of these broader landscape changes. Crown land until 1861, early surveys show that the aggressive expansionist George Campbell of the Duntoon estate secured seven out of eight new Selections on the newly opened land between Duntroon’s southern boundary and Mount Mugga Mugga (New South Wales. Department of Lands and Baylis 1940) (Figure 6). This monopoly essentially meant that the area where ‘Red Hill Camp’ is now located would not have been as intensely occupied as other Selection plots (Gillespie 1991; Lang 1862; The Golden Age 1863; Watson 1927). At the same time, one of only two TS&CRs in the Molonglo valley was gazetted along the creekline which runs just below what is now Flinders Way (New South Wales. Department of Lands and Wood 1940). The Reserve was designated to serve the newly gazetted Narrabundah Lane/ Mugga Lane, which ran south from Yass towards Tuggeranong and the Cooma Road to towns on the Monaro Plains.
While there is no archival material relating to Indigenous use of the vicinity between the 1860s and 1900, this use is strongly suggested by early references to the creekline as ‘Black Creek’ and ‘Black Springs’. Other such names in the region have historically been associated with Indigenous use, including the historically-named Black (or Blacks’) Creeks, near both HMAS Harman and Ginninderra (J. Murray 1981; Schumack 1967, 28; The Canberra Times 1928b). There are also other potential records of Indigenous use of the area around this time. Ample material relates to use of the TS&CR from the late 1880s by stock workers (for instance, The Sydney Morning Herald 1890a; The Sydney Morning Herald 1890b). Given the diminished, but continuing, Indigenous presence on local stations, often working directly with stock, it is likely that such workers would have been involved in watering stock here at some stage (Percival 1927). There are also records of other itinerant workers camping in the area in the 1890s, particularly by rabbiters who were often given permission to cross boundary fences to deal with the then plague proportions of rodents that had infested the district (Schumack 1967, 298). Arthur Sheedy (b.1885) of the Narrabundah homestead (now in Endeavour Street, Narrabundah) remembers walking down Narrabundah Lane to school and rabbiters camping in the ruins of a stone cottage on the top of the hill just above the current ‘Red Hill Camp’ location (Arthur Sheedy in E. Boyd 1972) (Figure 7, also see Figure 8):
There was only an old hut on the side of the hill as we walked down, on the left hand side, and it was supposed to be haunted, and as children we were always afraid of the place. The only people I ever knew who lived there was rabbiters, they would come stay there a few weeks or a few months, that was it.
(Arthur Sheedy in E. Boyd 1972)
While Sheedy does not mention anything more about these rabbiters, other oral histories refer to Indigenous men being involved in the rabbiting industry in the 1930-40s (Agnes Shea quoted in Kabaila 1995, 52), and it may well have been work taken up by Indigenous people prior to this time.
4.3.3 Dispossession and ‘Mission’ Life (1890s-1940s)
In the late 1890s, much of the archival material relates to stories of the Indigenous groups of Canberra ‘dying out’, often referring to the death of Nellie Hamilton in Queanbeyan in 1897 as evidence of the “extinction of a people” (Lea-Scarlett 1968, 22; also Gillespie 1991; Watson 1927). While emphatically not the reality, by turn of the century, Indigenous groups in the Canberra region were increasingly moved out of sight of local towns and properties by government policies which sought to deal with the continuing impact of invasion and dispossession on the local population. In the 1880s, the NSW Aborigines Protection Board (the Board) had been formed and began establishing reserves which were promoted as places where Indigenous people could live without hindrance, with support for self-sufficient farming (Jackson-Nakano 2001). The last large meetings of Indigenous groups near towns are recorded at Tharwa and Queanbeyan in 1889 (Avery 1994; Lea-Scarlett 1968). After this time, it appears that while there were still a few Indigenous people continuing to live in Queanbeyan and surrounding pastoral stations, the majority of families by 1900 had moved to reserves established near Yass (Jackson-Nakano 2001). However, the Board maintained control of these areas, and often revoked grants under pressure of non-Indigenous locals (Jackson-Nakano 2001; Kabaila and Truscott 2012). This meant that officially designated reserves and unofficial fringe camps near towns such as Yass were continually formed and re-formed between the 1890s and 1920s, often violently (Anon. 1910; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Kevin 2013).
Indigenous groups maintained some agency in these decisions, sometimes voting with their feet and walking off certain poorly-managed reserves back to town camps or to better managed (or unmanaged) reserves (Read 1982, 15; Read 1988). In the 1930s, the Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve was opened on the outskirts of Yass, and, despite lack of amenities and being located on an exposed hilltop, was generally seen as positive move by local Indigenous people as it was self-managed (E. Bell 2011; Brown 2007). Interestingly, through the depression years of the 1930s, some of the areas recalled as ‘Aboriginal camps’ (such as the ‘Bag Camp’ in Cowra) had also become areas where unemployed non-Indigenous people camped while looking for work (Kabaila 1999).
Movement for family and work are constant themes in the archival material from the 1900s to the 1940s, and there are numerous oral histories which have been recorded referring to this era of ‘mission life’ (for instance, E. Bell 2011; Kabaila 1995, 2011, 2012; Kabaila and Truscott 2012; Ngambri Local Aboriginal Land Council 2014; Read 1984). Movement between Yass (Hollywood), Cowra (Erambie Aboriginal Reserve) and Brungle (Brungle Aboriginal Station) took place regularly, often to visit family members and to gain work (Bluett 1954; Browne 1939; Jackson-Nakano 2001; Kevin 2013; Yass Courier 1927):
Some families were local and stayed in the area [Yass] all their lives. Others were 'comers and goers' as we called them, and they moved between places like Brungle, Wallaga Lake and Cowra ... Men from Brungle rode to Kylie's run7 to work there as stockmen. Women walked ... It's so unique, because they paid them equal wages.
As kids we all had chores to do and we looked after the horses and sulkies. We fed and watered the horses ... Hollywood was better than Brungle [Brungle Aboriginal Station near Tumut], because there was no manager, and when people got better known in the town they got work. Around the stations at Yass the Aborigines used to do a lot of rabbiting and shearing, burr-cutting [clearing of weeds such as thistles] and ringbarking. In the town there was gardening and housework for the women, washing and ironing.
(Agnes Shea quoted in Kabaila 1995, 52;80;82)
Despite these records from Indigenous people themselves showing their presence working on pastoral stations and in town, there is almost a complete absence of reference to this from the non-Indigenous record at the time (for some examples, see Kevin 2013).
4.3.4 Coming of the Capital (1920s-1950s)
These stories of movement for work and family are echoed by Matilda House’s oral history of her grandfather working as a stockman for Charlie Russell and her grandmother as a domestic worker for local residents in Griffith. What is distinctly different about Canberra of the 1940s compared to other towns in the region is that it had only very recently changed from a pastoral backwater into the nation’s Capital. This situation casts a very particular light on Indigenous work in the vicinity, as it also must be read against a broader, highly transient non-Indigenous population, all engaged in the construction of developments across the Molonglo valley.
Canberra was chosen as the new Australian capital in 1908, and a 1910 panorama photograph taken during early surveys shows that the area which is now Griffith was then a deforested pastoral plain, with an open Eucalypt forest covering the lower slopes of Red Hill (Figure 8). Despite construction of key infrastructure commencing in 1913, it was only in 1925 that construction reached the area where the ‘Red Hill Camp’ is located. Until this time, the area remained in use for grazing, the Travelling Stock and Camping Reserve was still actively used, and the creekline was still mapped as ‘Black Creek’ (Australia. Commonwealth Surveyor General 1920; Great Britain. War Office. General Staff. Commonwealth Section 1913; ‘J.E.R. Campbell Duntroon Estate’ 1925; ‘Timber - Narrabundah Paddock’ 1917).
Given that several oral histories recorded in Section 4.2 questioned why the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park was left undeveloped, archival material was assessed to offer a view on why this might have been the case. It appears that while the general layout of Canberra was designed by the Burley-Griffins in 1911, the specific layout of Griffith is an artefact of the tension between this plan and the authorities in charge of its implementation. In the Burley-Griffin plan (Figure 9a), this area is in the extreme south and, unlike the plan’s detailed central parts, shows only an outline of major roads. The November 1925 gazetted plan for Canberra (Commonwealth of Australia 1925) developed under the Federal Capital Advisory Committee (FCAC) (Figure 9b) differs from this alignment slightly, although it still does not reflect the contemporary street layout. This was only achieved in early 1926 with an early variation by the newly established Federal Capital Commission (FCC) to the gazetted plan (Federal Capital Commission 1926a) (Figure 9c). While there is no documentation which states explicitly why this change was made, it appears to have occurred for at least two key reasons. Firstly, the Burley-Griffins’ plan was criticised for being too rectilinear, and for prioritising the motor car above the pedestrian (Wigmore 1963, 201; also Australian Institute of Planning 1955; Odgers 2012; Select Committee 1955; Watson 1927).
Underpinning this was FCAC Chairman John Sulman’s association with the Garden City movement (Freestone 1989; Taylor and Boden 1994; Ward 2000), in which parks and roads were to be laid following the contours of the land, in order to provide visual relief and open up vistas (Australian Construction Services 1990; Department of the Interior 1931; Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Select Committee 1955). The second reason is likely to have been a major flood in May 1925 that would have indicated the folly of laying roadways directly across the Black Creek waterway (Gibbney 1988; Rolland 1988; Select Committee 1955, para. 235). Despite the digging of a stormwater ditch at the base of Red Hill in 1924, the flooding of the creek still resulted in widespread inundation and at least one death (Daley 1994, 78; Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Harry Trevillian cited in Emerton 1996, 24). According to the archival material, it therefore appears that planning ideologies and practical flood management were deciding factors in the overall road and park layout of Griffith. While there are no documents that suggest why the layout avoided the particular spot where the park now is, given topographic concerns outlined above, it is most likely to have been in order to avoid the large dacite outcrop now visible in the park (see Section 4.1).
Residential development of the area began in 1926 with release of the Blandfordia 5 subdivision (Federal Capital Advisory Committee 1926; Federal Capital Commission 1926b). The Monolyte Construction Company won the tender to build 25 concrete cottages using largely unskilled labourers, and the development was complete in late 1927 (The Canberra Times 1926; The Canberra Times 1927a; The Mercury 1927; The Register 1926; The Sydney Morning Herald 1926) (Figure 10).
While there are no specific references to Indigenous camps in Canberra at this time, there are many references to the temporary camps that sprung up to house workers on such construction projects. This is relevant because one of these, (situated in what is now Latrobe Park, Forrest, and housing workers from various locations including the Monolyte project), was often referred to as ‘the Red Hill Camp’ at the time (Federal Capital Commission 1927a; Gugler 2014; The Sydney Morning Herald 1927). It is also here that the signature of one of the Monolyte workers, “R. Williams”, is recorded in April 1926 on a petition calling for increased provisions and cleanliness in the camp (‘Camps - Monolyte Labourers’ Camp’ 1927). This is suggestive of the Latrobe Park camp being the original ‘Red Hill Camp’ of Roderick Williams, and that he was engaged on the building of the housing development that now surrounds the current ‘Red Hill Camp’ location. This interpretation is supported by the fact that when the Latrobe Park camp was dismantled in 1927, many of the workers moved to the Russell Hill Settlement in Campbell (The Canberra Times 1927b), and Roderick Williams is recorded on the Commonwealth electoral rolls and by several other sources as residing at this settlement from the mid-1930s until his death in 19518 (ArchivesACT 2016; Australian Electoral Commission 2016; Gugler 2016c; The Canberra Times 1951a, 1951b).
Alongside these formal camps, numerous small, informal camps also appeared during the Depression years of the 1930s and early 1940s (Charles and Elizabeth Chandler in Emerton 1996, 90; Selwyn Wark cited in Gugler 2000). A shepherd’s camp was recorded behind Mugga Way on the slopes of Red Hill at this time (Calthorpe 2002), and there are reports of the authorities fining unauthorised campers (for instance, The Canberra Times 1928a, 1932). No material relates to the backgrounds of these campers, although oral history recorded by Ann Gugler (2001) suggests that inhabitants of the camps were largely overlooked and even actively avoided by local residents and the media of the time. However, Charles Croft Russell, who Matilda House references her grandfather working for, reports that during the 1940s, he set aside land on Red Hill for the Yugoslav, Latvian and English families who worked for him, even purchasing camp cubicles for them to live in (Russell 1995). Where exactly this was is not recorded, and these cubicles burnt down in a bushfire in 1952 (Hewitt 1988). Whether or not Indigenous families who worked for Russell in the 1940s ever also camped on this land is also left unsaid. Russell passed away in 1998, and few of his personal records are publically available.
By the late 1940s, the era to which the oral history relates, Griffith was a fully developed suburb, with street tree plantings and the Canberra Grammar School established along a still unsealed Flinders Way (Figure 11). Despite pumping works established by the School to manage flooding (personal communication, Mike Illiff, Property Manager, Canberra Grammar School), the creek was still a perennial source of water and a flood hazard, even during the drought years of the 1940s (Coral Charlton in Emerton 1996, 12; McTainsh et al. 2011). Flinders Way was to remain the southern extremity of Canberra for another decade, with a horse agistment paddock directly opposite the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park (Department of the Interior 1955). This agistment area had a “wealth of grass” and was opened in the mid 1930s for use by the local community to depasture stock (The Canberra Times 1942a).
Despite an attempt by the Minister of the Interior to close the paddock in 1942, it appears to have remained open and in use until at least 1955 (The Canberra Times 1942b). Given ongoing debates about the lack of agistment areas in the ACT (The Canberra Times 1943), this location would have been an ideal place to water horses on a brief visit to Griffith in the 1940s and early 1950s.
4.4 Archaeological Investigations
The final part of the results section reports on the May 2016 archaeological investigation of ‘Red Hill Camp’. This included a comprehensive surface survey of the park and creekline running through Griffith Park to the south of Flinders Way, and excavation of three 1x1 m squares. This section first provides an overview of archaeological work undertaken in the vicinity of the site, and then provides an overview of the archaeological results.
4.4.1 Archaeological Background
No previous archaeological work has been conducted in the park or surrounding residential area, other than above ground assessments preceding heritage registration of the Blandfordia 5 Garden City Heritage Precinct (ACT Heritage Council 2004a; Australian Construction Services 1990). These documents state that the park is an “additional value” to the heritage precinct, and “includes one of the most recently used traditional Ngun(n)awal camping grounds” (ACT Heritage Council 2004a, 5). Previous archaeological investigations in the Canberra region have pointed to such an area, near a perennial creekline and previously located in an ecotone at the base of a hillslope, as has having high potential for pre-invasion archaeological material (Anderson 1984; ANUtech 1984; Navin and Officer 1991; Navin Officer Heritage Consultants 2005; Saunders 1995).
Various artefacts and places of Indigenous significance have been unofficially recorded along the Red Hill ridgeline, with the Bell family noting several scar trees and a ‘women’s site’ on the ridge above ‘Red Hill Camp’ (Wally Bell, personal communication). A ground edged basalt artefact (confirmed by archaeologist John Mulvaney) was found to the immediate east of Flanagan Street, Garran (Michael Mulvaney, personal communication). A surface survey along a pipeline corridor between Fyshwick and Phillip showed a concentration of stone artefacts in the saddle between Mount Davidson and Mount Mugga Mugga, on the southern part of the ridge (Dearling 1997).
In relation to other campsites from the 1940s in the area, amateur Canberra historian Ann Gugler has undertaken extensive surface surveys of the Westlake Settlement (now Stirling Park, Yarralumla). These reports show the extent of material culture present at the site of these camps, even after subsequent landscaping (Gugler 1999, 2016b, 2016c) (see Appendix G).
4.4.2 Survey Results
4.4.2.1 ‘Red Hill Camp’ Park
A comprehensive surface survey was conducted at the ‘Red Hill Camp’ park in May 2016, with all visible material culture recorded. Zero percent ground surface visibility in the northwest end of the park meant that no material was recorded in the grassed area. The area of woodchips surrounding the dacite outcrop had around 50% ground visibility, and material culture was present in this location. A baseline offset survey was therefore undertaken in this area of the park to map this spread of material (Figure 12).
The survey recorded 17 isolated items or grouped artefactual scatters (Figure 13). These included cigarette butts, broken ceramic, fragmented bottle glass, lumps of concrete and brick, a metal pipe, green waste and a partially buried geocache9. The geocache (appropriately called Memories) was installed in January 2015 by a local who had been raised in the area and played in the park as a child (Groundspeak Inc. 2016). Since 2015, over 50 names have been recorded on the geocache log of people from all over the world who have visited the park to partake in the game (Figure 14).
One piece of glass (location e) (Figure 15b) was identified as a fragment from a 1960s pyroceramic labelled Gest soft drink bottle, a brand only sold in Western Australia at the time (‘Vintage Old Glass Soft Drink Bottle Gest Perth WA’ 2016). Apart from the recent Coopers and Tooheys beer bottles, no other glass fragments had identifiable marks. The concrete block (location q) was a piece from a roadside stop valve, and appeared to have been recently moved to the site as it was located above leaf litter. The metal pipe initially appeared to be part of a standing tap, however it does not seem to have ever been connected to a water main.
In summary, the surface survey suggests that the park has been moderately landscaped and used often in recent years. While the accuracy of the material distribution is limited by ground visibility, it appears that this use has generally centred on the dacite outcrop. Material culture present points to use of the site for recreation and dumping of household and construction waste, as early as the 1960s. The Gest soft drink bottle and geocache also indicate use by interstate and international visitors over this period.
4.4.2.2 Griffith Park Creekline
A two-metre-wide transect was also walked along each side of the creekline in Griffith Park, where Matilda House referred to watering the horses in the late 1940s (Figure 16). Since the 1960s, the creek has been largely culverted under the Canberra Grammar School’s playing fields (Mike Illiff, Property Manager, Canberra Grammar School, personal communication). However, for around 100m between the culvert outflow to the La Perouse Street bridge, the creek is relatively naturally contoured. The transects identified 14 material culture items, including plastic bags, fence posts and a metal shopping trolley (Figure 17). No material was identifiably older than a few years, and most of objects were located in the watercourse itself, hence it was decided not to attempt a comprehensive mapping exercise of these finds.
4.4.3 Excavation Results
Three 1x1 m squares were excavated near the dacite outcrop in the park in May 2016 (Figure 18). Overall, the excavation suggests that the site’s stratigraphy has been moderately disturbed, particularly towards its northern end in T3 (see Table 1 for Stratigraphic Unit [SU] descriptions and Figure 19 for section drawings). In squares T1 and T2, the stratigraphy showed an A Horizon of topsoil and loose gravels (SU1-2), under which was a brown silt with a lens of flattened, rolled pebbles at its base, at around 25cm depth (SU3). Under this pebble lens was a compacted (SU4-5) to concreted (SU6) yellowy-red clay layer which continued to the base of the excavations (SU6). The stratigraphy of square T3 was more complex, with SU3 sitting above two distinct layers, the compact clay of SU4 in the northwest and a crumbly loam with roots throughout in the southeast of the square (SU5).
The excavation recovered 324 artefacts. Glass was the most prevalent material (n=215), followed by plastic (n=39), metal (n=17), concrete (n=16) and brick (n=15) (Table 2). The material largely fell into two categories: construction/demolition related material and household/recreational items. In order to determine the date range of each SU assemblage, the manufacturing ranges of conclusively dateable objects were collated to determine the layer’s terminus post quem and terminus ante quem dates (Table 1). This analysis suggests that the majority of material present at the site relates to the 1940s or later. Overall artefact distributions (Figure 20) show that the bulk are located in SU1-3, above the pebble lens.
Square T1 showed the least evidence of stratigraphic disturbance, with all layers having distinct interfaces and following the same orientation. All material culture from this square was recovered from S1-3 (XU1-4), above the pebble lens, with the majority of material appearing in the A Horizon. The fewest number of artefacts (n=57) were recovered from this square, with 84% (n=48) comprising glass fragments (Table 2). All identifiable glass came from clear (52%), brown (38%) and green (10%) glass bottles, however it was not possible to determine a manufacturing date for any of these fragments. Some pieces of building related material were also present, with brick fragments, a lump of mortar and several conjoining sherds of very thick teal porcelain recorded in SU2 and SU3 (Figure 21).
T1 distribution analysis (Figure 20) shows a distinction between recreation related material (bottle glass) in SU1 and building related material (mortar, ceramic) in SU2-3, suggestive of an overall change in use at the site. While none of the material culture could be accurately dated, the presence of building material suggests that SU3 dates to the 1920s or later, when the suburb was being built (Australian Construction Services 1990). That there are Crataegus laevigata and Prunus cerasifera 'Nigra' seeds in this layer supports a date range of 1940s and later, when street trees were planted at the site (Identic 2016; Taylor and Boden 1994). A dramatic decrease in seeds in SU1-2 could suggest that the stratigraphy is disturbed. However, this decrease appears to have been a result of changing sieve-station collection strategies (at XU3 in squares T1-2 and XU2 in T3) relating specifically to seeds, rather than an accurate representation of seed distribution in the square. However, all seeds present in SU3-6 were recovered, and their absence below the pebble lens is therefore certain. This suggests that layers below the pebble lens predate the 1940s, and that building material just above the lens relates to early construction in the vicinity. An increase in charcoal in SU3 may also be indicative of this, either showing an increase in burning associated with these early developments, or else a palimpsest of burning events on an older land surface.
The stratigraphy of T2 also appears largely undisturbed, however, the pebble lens at the interface of SU3 and SU4 is less distinct in this square and there is some evidence of bioturbation from root action at this level. The most glass was recorded from this square (n=126, 205.7g), with the mean mass and colour type percentages suggesting that this assemblage closely resembled that in T1 (see Table 3). Very little construction/demolition material was present in T2, with material culture largely comprised of household and recreational material; chocolate wrappers, a wine bottle lid, and beer and spirit bottle sherds. The earliest dateable find was a fragment of brown glass from SU3, with an AGM makers’ mark (Figure 22). Variants of this mark were used by Australian Glass Manufacturers between 1934-1968 (Bolton 2005; Burke and Smith 2004, 370), with the sherd’s serial number, ‘IS 1...’, in use on New South Wales Bottle Company bottles between 1941-1968 (Gugler 2016a). The conjoining fragment of this serial number was not present in the assemblage and therefore the bottle can only be dated to this range. The pre-1968 date for the layer is consistent with the interpretation of building material present in the same layer in T1. The interpretation above that the pebble lens is the pre-1940s land surface is also supported by the lack of seeds recovered from below SU3 in T2.
The pebble lens was more fragmented in this square and two small (<0.2g) pieces of glass and brick are present in SU5 below the lens. Given their size and that SU4 comprises of a loamy sediment with root inclusions, it is likely that these fragments have been translocated down the section due to treadage or bioturbation, rather than having been deposited prior to the pebble lens. Three angular chert pieces (mean mass of 17.6g) were also recovered from SU5 (Figure 23). These were situated in close proximity to each other and within an area which had the greatest density of charcoal at the site. While these have no diagnostic features which suggest being worked, given a lack of other chert pieces in the assemblage (apart from one in T3, in the same stratigraphic layer) or in the samples of natural residue, these have likely been brought to the site and have been categorised as lithic manuports. The pieces were recovered from below the glass and brick fragments, and given their
size and proximity to each other, are highly unlikely to have been deposited in this location via bioturbation.
An AMS radiocarbon date with an ABA pretreatment [SANU50125] on a 5mm piece of charcoal within 10cm of the chert pieces gave an age estimate of 276calBP-151calBP (1640-1799calCE) (95.4% probability, median of 1668calCE) (see Appendix I for full details). Given the small size of the pieces of charcoal, it may be that these have also been subject to post-depositional bioturbation. However, the compact sediment and lack of roots in SU5 suggests that it is unlikely that they would have moved from below, and if translocated from above this still provides a terminus ante quem for the layer. It is therefore likely that this age estimate does accurately relate to SU5. If it does, then this is supportive of the interpretation that layers below the pebble lens are older than the 1940s, and that the manuports were present at the site prior to this period.
Square T3 showed the greatest amount of stratigraphic disturbance. The topsoil was thick compared to the other squares, and the loose gravel layer SU2 was indistinct or even non-existent in places. The pebble lens at the base of SU3 was intact in the northwest corner, under which the compact clay of SU4 was present. However, towards the southeast, this was non-existent, and SU4 was cut by a loamy layer with many roots, SU5 (Figure 19).
Combined with material culture distribution analysis (Figure 20), this suggests that there are two distinct depositional episodes apparent in this square. Firstly, SU1-2 contains much evidence of recreational use of the site since the late 1960s, including recent cigarette filters and bottle glass fragments. Pieces of plastic clothes line and clothes pegs in the topsoil are suggestive of local residents using the site during this period. The glass pieces include conjoining fragments of a Sharpe Brothers pyro-ceramic labelled soft drink bottle that was manufactured between 1965-1972 (Sharpe Brothers 1972) (Figure 24). The glass fragments in this square had a greater mean mass than the other squares (4.8g as compared to 1.4g in T1 and 1.6g in T2). While this could be the result of greater trampling towards the bottom of the slope, the thick topsoil and the depth of material with little date differentiation is more likely suggestive of an increased rate of sediment deposition in this square, which would have protected these pieces from breakage.
The second depositional episode in Square T3 is associated with SU5, which likely represents the fill of a shallow pit that has been dug into SU4. In contrast to SU1-2, this layer mostly contains building related material; including bricks, mortar, plaster and ceramics (Figure 25). Many large brick fragments were recovered from SU5, including two with frogs indicative of ‘Canberra Red’ bricks, which were manufactured at the Yarralumla Brickworks between 1913 and the early 1970s (Figure 26) (ACT Heritage Council 2004b; Gugler 2016b). It is inconclusive whether this deposit relates to building or demolition material, though the fragmented nature of the bricks and the presence of mortar on some of them is perhaps indicative of the latter. It is interesting that there is no concrete present in the layer, suggesting that the deposit is not associated with the concrete Monolyte development in the immediate vicinity. However, from the 1930s, houses utilising Canberra Red bricks were built in the local area, and therefore it appears that the deposit relates to during or after this time (Australian Construction Services 1990). The presence of street tree seeds in this level suggests that the material was deposited in the 1940s or later. However, given that SU4 does not overlay SU5, the deposit does not appear to have been manually capped by sediment, and the seeds may therefore have collected in the feature at a later date.
In summary, where the stratigraphy of the site is not disturbed, a lens of smooth, flat pebbles appears to show the land surface at the time of surrounding residential development. Four possible chert manuports are present below this layer, and their deposition likely dates to before the 1940s, and most likely prior to the original 1920s development. Material culture distributions suggest that the park was used as early as the 1930s as a site to dump small amounts of construction and demolition related material, particularly toward its northern end near square T3. Over the last 50 years, sediment has accumulated rapidly around the dacite outcrop, and there is much evidence of recreational use, including by local residents. The excavations do not show a material culture assemblage consistent with the formalised campsites in Canberra in the 1940s, or any specifically related camping paraphernalia.
5.0 Interpretation and Reflections
5.1 Interpretation of Results
Sitting in the shade of the trees at ‘Red Hill Camp’, we chatted with Matilda House about what we wanted the archaeology to archive. Initially, I suggested that the archaeology might provide objects and things to support Matilda’s stories. Her response (expected perhaps!) was, “well, you don’t need to find anything to prove what I’m saying!” Steve Skitmore (field notes – Red Hill Camp Project 2016)
The Project’s results are on the surface largely contradictory; while there is a vivid oral history for the site, no archival or archaeological evidence suggests the presence of Indigenous camps in the park. The complexity of interpreting these results within a community archaeology frame is highlighted by the quote from Matilda House above, which hints at intractable epistemological problems in this divergence. However, it is important to sit with and work through this complexity if community archaeology is to offer an insight into the past that does not merely prioritise one view of history over another. This section first addresses interpretive frameworks which can assist with navigating this space. Secondly, it presents a co-authored history of ‘Red Hill Camp’. It then offers some reflections on the benefits and challenges of this Project.
5.1.1 Interpretive Frameworks
David et al. (2004, 159) suggest that community archaeology interpretations drawing on academic and Indigenous understandings of the past should aim to “complement both methods of historicising”. Indeed, despite the overarching conflict above, some of the Project’s results do complement each other. The archival material has, for instance, allowed for the oral history to be contextualised in relation to other camps around Canberra. In particular, it has provided more detail around the likely presence of Matilda House’s uncle Roderick Williams in the Monolyte construction, and therefore shows a family connection to the ‘Red Hill Camp’ location from at least as early as the 1920s. It also suggests that the area was a likely place for people to camp prior to development of Canberra, and that it would have been a good place to water horses until 1955. The archival material and oral histories have also provided invaluable detail that has allowed for the interpretation of the archaeological record; for instance, showing that exotic seeds should only be in the record from the 1940s onwards.
However, for the most part, these results sit in conflict. While the oral history tells of a shady site, archival material shows that there were very few trees in the vicinity at the time. The oral history speaks of camping with horses, however, the archaeology shows no sign of a campsite, fireplace nor horse related material, nor of any conclusive ‘Indigenous’ material culture (this is critiqued below). Other local oral histories even directly contradict the main narrative, suggesting that the idea of Indigenous campsites in the area was ‘made up’. The question then arises; how can the results of these different lines of evidence be woven into a narrative that does not marginalise Indigenous oral histories, nor completely dismiss the archival and archaeological results?
This question can initially be answered by assessing the limitations of each approach. Firstly, with regard to the written record, Byrne and Nugent (2004) state that there are large gaps in which marginalised groups are almost absent, and that in Australia, this is particularly the case with Indigenous people in the early and mid-20th century. This absence from the record does not mean that Indigenous people were absent from the landscape at the time, however. Secondly, mainstream ‘culture history’ approaches to archaeology are limited in their ability to make clear statements about cultural distinctions when dealing with shared material culture (Shackel 2011). Therefore, using the archaeology of ‘Red Hill Camp’ to suggest that there was no Indigenous presence at the site is fraught, when there is evidence of use of the park in the 1940s and the oral history suggests a sharing of ‘European’ material culture. Furthermore, given that the ‘campsite’ refers to perhaps just a single night of camping 75 years ago, such an event is potentially very difficult to observe in the archaeological record. Finally, while oral histories can be taken as the fact of an individual’s experience, this way of historicising can also include and inform other community memories through their telling (Jones and Russell 2012). Indeed, this might well be the case here, with Matilda mentioning that while she remembered certain things about the area, she was very young and the story had been largely recounted to her by her mother. Furthermore, Arnold Williams stated that he had been given additional information about the park by an elderly local in the 1990s, suggesting that memories about the site have been both informed and re- enforced by broader community oral histories.
A second way to approach this apparent conflict is by drawing on Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of interdisciplinary conversations, developed as part of a community archaeology project in Corindi Beach, NSW. These conversations are essentially the ways in which different lines of evidence come together. The authors suggest that for most projects working with oral history, archival material and archaeology, the latter two approaches are seen as more valid than the former, entering into a co-opting conversation which sees oral history as something to either to confirm or deny. However, other forms of conversations exist. Most relevant to this Project is the parallel conversation, where “the archaeology and the oral history data remain separate, but enrich each other, with parallel stories that neither confirm nor support each other” (Beck and Somerville 2005, 476). At ‘Red Hill Camp’, the archaeology most likely shows use of the site in the 1940s, a time when Matilda recounts that she visited with her family. However, it is unlikely that there would be much archaeological material directly related to the vivid recollections of camping and travel. As such, the lines of evidence sit in parallel. This understanding was neatly summed up by Matilda at the beginning of the project when she was asked what artefects she envisioned the excavations might find. “Probably just a pile of horse crap!” was her en point answer.
Also relevant is the concept of conflicting conversations, where two disciplinary knowledges contradict each other. At ‘Red Hill Camp’, however, this was most vividly seen within one discipline. Two contradicting oral histories were recorded, one (Matilda’s) locating the campsite squarely amongst the dacite outcrop, and a second (a local who had lived in the area since the 1970s) suggesting that there had never been any Indigenous camps in the park. On one hand, this contradiction could be dismissed as quite simple; the camp could have been set up for a short while, with Matilda’s family only being recognised as one of the many itinerant families camping around Canberra at the time. It could also be argued that a second-hand oral history from a resident who had only arrived in the area three decades after Matilda’s memories is not as robust as one that talks of personal experience. However, this kind of inter-community disagreement raises a pertinent point that is likely to be a hallmark in community archaeology projects focusing on Indigenous history in the inner city. When Indigenous and non-Indigenous oral histories relating to the history of one location come into conflict, where should a researcher situate themselves in relation to this tension?
Unfortunately, Beck and Somerville (2005) do not discuss such contradictions within a discipline. However, working on marginalised African-American heritage places in the USA, Dolores Hayden suggests that it is not a researcher’s role to try and determine which history represents ‘the truth’, but rather to make equal the visibility of all histories (Hayden 1994). This relates to the broader aim of community archaeology with Indigenous groups in Australia, which goes beyond the narrating of history and into engaging in socially beneficial action through heritage. In Australia, where mainstream historical narratives of the post- invasion era generally sideline Indigenous voices, there is an imperative as researchers with a commitment to decolonising practice to prioritise these voices. This should not mean that researchers actively exclude all conflicting non-Indigenous voices. Rather, it suggests that a conceptual understanding should be developed of how to act when these conflicts do occur, in a way that is consistent with the postcolonial underpinnings of community archaeology practice. Therefore, this interpretation chooses to prioritise Matilda’s oral history above the contradicting voice of the local resident, in order to ensure that the Indigenous story of the site is made visible.
5.1.2 A Co-authored Interpretation of ‘Red Hill Camp’
With the above limitations and concepts in mind, an interpretation of ‘Red Hill Camp’ was written and was given approval by Matilda House in October 2016. The aim was to produce a co-authored version of the site’s history and for this story to be promoted to the wider community through interpretive resources and signage.
An Interpretation of Red Hill Camp
By Steve Skitmore, with alterations and approval from Matilda House
Red Hill Camp is a place of special significance to the House-Williams family, a Ngunnawal/Ngambri Aboriginal family of the Canberra region. It is one of the 1940s campsites of Matilda House and her grandparents, Harold ‘Lightning’ Williams and Cissy Freeman, and is where they stayed when working with Charlie Russell and other local residents of south Canberra. Given that it was a campsite then; it is likely that there would have been a family campsite in the area a long way back.
Archival material shows that after European invasion in 1820, the area around ‘Red Hill Camp’ remained crown land until the 1860s. This meant that the creekline was a ‘neutral zone’ where Aboriginal families would have likely camped. This use is potentially captured in the early name for this watercourse: Black Creek. In 1880, a Travelling Stock and Camping Reserve on the creek gave an official camping space in the area. Around this time, non- Aboriginal workers were likely camping in the vicinity, with stockmen using the Reserve and rabbiters camping in the stone cottage above the site.
Archaeological deposits at Red Hill Camp show that some chert pieces were brought to the site prior to the 1920s, and these are likely to suggest Aboriginal use of the area. The rest of the material relates to development of the Blandfordia 5 residential area from the 1920s onwards, when the older open landscape of pastoralism gave way to a residential zone on the edge of a small greenfield development. Until the 1950s, this area was the extreme outer edge of Canberra, opposite a community agistment paddock through which Black Creek continued to flow. Material culture diversifies from the 1960s to include artefacts related to the use of the park as a recreational area. This use continues until today.
Oral histories about Red Hill Camp strongly foreground labour practices and movement, focusing on Aboriginal families travelling into Canberra to undertake work for the European occupants of Griffith and Narrabundah. This story tells mainly of gendered work, with men working as stockmen and labourers on pastoral properties and construction sites, and women working in domestic duties. Despite these visceral oral histories, there is very little archival material that relates to Aboriginal labour or seasonal movement in the region. News stories and official documentation appear to have largely ignored Aboriginal people at the time, despite the crucial role these groups played in the development of Australia (Reynolds 1990).
However, ample archival material relates to the impact of the Depression years of the 1930s and War years of the 1940s on the wider Australian workforce movement, and the Aboriginal story of Canberra is bound up in this. Many families and workers were on the move at this time, attempting to find employment wherever they could. There are records of both formalised and itinerant workers’ camps being set up in parks and vacant land across Canberra during this period, and of Government response to the latter through fines, camp closures, and the requirement from 1928 that all workers to be registered to vote in the ACT. Archival evidence shows that some Aboriginal labourers, including Lightning and Roddy Williams, enrolled to vote around this time and Roddy lived in these formal workers’ camps. Given the exclusionist policies of the era, it is perhaps surprising that Aboriginal men would have been enrolled to vote. However, some electoral officers allowed Aboriginal people to enrol if they were seen to be living and working in a similar way to non-Aboriginal people (Australian Electoral Commission 2006, 5; Dodson 1997).
This engagement in the shared practices and material culture of working class life suggests that identification of a distinctly Aboriginal presence in these camps would be incredibly difficult to determine archaeologically. Indeed, this appears to be the case at ‘Red Hill Camp’. While artefacts from the 1940s and 1950s were recovered from the excavation, there is no material culture that conclusively suggests an Aboriginal presence at the site. However, to conclude that this means no Aboriginal people were there would be a mistake. Instead of focusing on their cultural origin, it is important to emphasise how these objects were brought into and used within other cultural spaces. In the case of ‘Red Hill Camp’, the oral history clearly describes such use by Aboriginal families at the site.
The lack of archival material relating to Aboriginal family camps in Canberra is replicated in a lack of material that relates to Canberra’s early construction camps. That these places have been widely erased from the narrative of Canberra’s history is perhaps unsurprising. They were generally seen as fleeting eyesores that interrupted the symmetry and striving class aspirations of the newly inaugurated Capital, to be moved out of sight as soon as their necessary functions had ceased. This geo-spatial marginalisation in the past has flowed into their marginalisation from the historical narrative today, and relies on archaeology and oral history to place it back on the map.
5.2 Reflections on the Community Archaeology Process
The second set of Project aims relates to the use of the community archaeology methodology, and this section therefore offers some reflections on the benefits and limitations of the approach with Indigenous communities in the inner city. These reflections include: the role that site-based excavations can play as a vehicle for social change; which parts of ‘the community’ have been and should be collaborated with, and; challenges experienced around the core community archaeology aim of sharing control.
5.2.1 Physical Spaces for Co-Creative Dialogue
By focusing research at one specific site, the Project was able to create a physical space where broader dialogues about Canberra’s history could occur. While ‘sites’ are the primary management unit of both CHM and archaeology, this focus has been critiqued for overlooking the fact they are merely points along pathways in broader landscapes of significance (Wally Bell in 666 ABC Canberra 2016; D. Byrne 2008). What this Project showed however, was that the site-based approach can contribute towards the broader, social implications of community archaeology. For two weeks, while the park was physically taken over by a local Indigenous history project, it provided a tangible location to which local residents, passers-by and the media could visit, share stories and hear alternative versions of local history. This included young families who were particularly keen to help out with the excavation, and the decision was made to allow them to help dig and sieve under supervision (Figure 27). Media interest in the Project was also most intense during the excavation stage, with the possibility of artefactual material drawing 666 ABC Canberra, SBS Living Black and ANU Media to visit the site and report on the excavations and oral history (Figure 28) (Appendix J). Local community groups also visited the site during the excavations, including groups from ASHA and AIATSIS, and individuals from local history associations (Figure 29). During these visits, conversations were had about the oral histories relating to the site, and broader Indigenous use of Canberra in the last century. What this showed was that there was something particularly useful in creating the immediately visible, promotable image (following Levi Strauss 2009) of a small public park bounded with orange fencing.
Whilst not an original Project aim, this use of promotional tools traditionally associated with the “big dig” form of community archaeology provided the space for the non-Indigenous local community to be part of the re-creation of the narrative of place. An example of this was in the months following the excavation, local children who used the park constructed a play-related ‘fireplace’ and ground red rocks onto the dacite boulders (Figure 30). This form of play had not been apparent in the months leading up to the excavations, and it therefore appears that involving local children in the excavation meant that the stories of Indigenous use became part of their narrative of place. In addition, by communicating the results of the Project to the ACT Heritage Unit, representatives of the Unit proved very interested in supporting a grant application to install interpretive signage in the park to tell the Indigenous story of the site (Figure 31) (Appendix K). What both of these outcomes attest to is that the inclusion of non-Indigenous community members in the Project has resulted in a co-created, shared local history, over which members of the wider community also feel ownership.
This form of dialogue, which sees local residential areas as places of shared history, may also have wider social implications for current power dynamics which exclude Indigenous voices (Little and Shackel 2014; Westoby and Dowling 2013). To re-appropriate a piece of community space as a site for commemoration of a marginalised history is a political act; one that allows for the reclamation of actual ground that is essential in the struggle for recognition and power in narrating the past (Grande 2004, 278–81; Hayden 1994; Winichakul 1994). This is particularly so in the case of ‘Red Hill Camp’, where signage in a place heritage listed primarily for its European values can serve to subvert dominant narratives which exclude the recent Indigenous presence in Canberra’s history.
5.2.2 Who is ‘the Community’ in Community Archaeology?
What the above shows is that some of this Project’s main benefits have come from the engagement between communities which have stories about and connections to the same location. Given the multitude of communities that inhabit the urban environment, the city can be of particular transformative power in this instance. However, what emerged from the research process was the complexity of understanding the different communities that had an investment in the outcomes, how each of these communities was constituted and how each should be involved in the Project. Questions that arose included; who is ‘the community’ with which to share power? Is this community flexible and does it constitute one voice or many? Should ‘the community’ of local residents and the historical society be engaged with, and in what way, and who should be approached? Given the research is based on a site of significance to the House/Williams family, should all RAO groups be collaborated with? And what if there is disagreement in this process?
These questions have implications for how community archaeology researchers conceptualise ‘the community’ they share power with (L. Smith and Waterton 2009). The majority of community archaeology projects working with Indigenous communities in Australia constitute a particular interest group, often represented by a local Land Council, as ‘the community’ (for instance, Brady et al. 2003; A. Smith and Beck 2003). Likewise, this Project initially conceputalised ‘the community’ as all RAO groups who are officially recognised as the Traditional Custodians of Canberra by the ACT Government.
Throughout the Project it has become apparent that making this decision at the commencement of the research process has meant that certain voices have held much greater sway than others. For instance, the decision to work closely with Matilda House was made because of her pre-existing relationship with Dr Duncan Wright, and that has meant that her input has held the greatest sway in the ‘community’. In addition, all four RAO representatives who engaged with the Project were adept at navigating archaeological and heritage discourses and projects given their previous work in the field. It would therefore be interesting to see whether the Project’s aims and outcomes would have been significantly different if other, less prominent, members of ‘the community’ had been engaged.
Given that the community archaeology methodology relies upon the development of personal relationships, it is likely that these imbalances would be the case in work with any location. However, this reflection shows that while community archaeology claims to provide benefits when sharing power with ‘Indigenous communities’, the nature of ‘community’ is in part formulated by the action of engagement by researcher and therefore requires careful consideration. This may be particularly so in the inner city, where the Indigenous ‘communities’ that are easily engaged with are sometimes (like the case of Canberra ‘RAO groups’) constituted by the requirements of official governmental structures. It is therefore important for researchers to be conscious not only of the structure of power sharing in community archaeology, but also, when these initial conversations do occur, which voices might not be present.
5.2.3 Sharing Control – Complete or Targeted?
Despite the express aim of community archaeology to share power, this was less than ideal throughout the Project’s life. Key deadlines were largely dictated by the requirements of the ANU’s sub-thesis program, meaning that for much of the collaboration process, RAO groups were pushed to engage within boundaries mandated by a Western institution. During several project stages, it would likely have been better to wait several more months to ensure adequate engagement time, however, because of the above, windows of opportunity to jointly develop ideas were often severely curtailed. In addition, the ability to provide tangible resources throughout the Project, for instance, to pay for transport or the time of the RAOs involved, was almost non-existent. While these challenges relate in particular to student research, it is telling that they also have broader echoes in the heritage field. For instance, when applying for the grant for signage in the park, ACT Heritage communicated that specific financial resources were not usually provided to pay for RAO consultation time.
However, with this said, it is important to consider what ‘ideal’ engagement in a community archaeology project looks like, and indeed, who should decide this. If the ideal is for members of the constituent community to participate in every step of the project regardless of their interest, time or ability, then community archaeology must be wary of wielding the requirement to participate as a “new tyranny” (following Cooke and Kothari 2001; also La Salle 2010). In reality, there was a need to balance the desire and importance of community involvement, with the practical reality that some stages were more important to the RAOs than others. This was reflected in the evolving engagement structure, and by the fact that in response to certain stages like the archaeological results, there was less interest by the RAOs than in stages like oral history and media promotions. This choice not to engage in some Project stages despite agreed upon schedules appears to reflect RAO agency within the collaboration, rather than an inherent failure of the Project. Sarah Byrne (2012) also came across a similar challenge during a community archaeology Project on Uneapa Island, Papua New Guinea, and she suggests that the community’s choice not to engage was an enabling one in terms of their decision to prioritise how they wanted to bring the archaeological results into their narrating of local history.
Therefore, it became clear that instead of ‘ideal’ engagement being full community involvement and shared power for each stage, it was essential rather to initiate conversations about which stages were important for a particular RAO, and ensure that everything was done to make that stage as accessible as possible to them. Given the lack of financial resources, this involved harnessing other tangible benefits, such as using university vehicles and equipment, paying for lunch and coffee, and offering to put in time organising grant applications and media liaising. It is important also to note that some of the RAOs saw involvement as being larger than the Project’s outcomes, with Matilda House saying at one stage how she hoped that her “investment in a new generation of Australian archaeologists” would lead to archaeologists who would commit to working alongside Indigenous communities. Perhaps then, the Project was to be a test of the process of commitment and cultural learning above all else.
6.0 Conclusion
The ‘Red Hill Camp’ Project is one of the few Australian examples of community archaeology focused on Indigenous heritage that has been undertaken in the inner city. Examples from the literature have shown that community archaeology in collaboration with historically marginalised groups can bring about positive social outcomes. This Project contributes to these conclusions, with results suggesting that shared control of research with Indigenous communities in urban contexts can lead to a focus on recent Indigenous histories which have often been ignored. This is a particularly powerful tool when utilised in areas which are primarily known for their European heritage. By doing so, the approach can offer a contribution to decolonising the production of history in Australia, through incorporating Indigenous epistemologies in research and promoting more inclusive narratives of history.
Specific results of the Project show strong connection to the site through oral history, yet little archival or archaeological material suggestive of Indigenous use. This apparent contraction has clearly shown the interpretive complexity of working across and balancing different epistemologies. The interpretation has used Beck and Somerville’s (2005) concept of conversations to navigate a way through these methodological intricacies, and a co- authored narrative of the site has been produced which will be used for future promotion activities. In this way, the Project has been successful in Matilda’s original hope of “putting an Aboriginal camp smack bang in the fanciest part of town!”.
Reflections on the Project’s outcomes suggest that as well as being a tool through which to create knowledge of the past, site-based excavations can provide a transitory space and image which can act as a vehicle for co-creative dialogue around the shared history of urban space. They also suggest that researchers undertaking community archaeology in the urban environment should be particularly aware of the often contested nature of communities, and the degrees to which complete shared control is actually viable or desirable.
Finally, the initial, personal impetus for this research was to see if the Western, empirical tool of archaeology could be of assistance in deconstructing colonial narratives in Australia. From the above, it appears to be the case, and that the urban environment holds a particularly transformative place for this work.
Footnotes
- The official names of Canberra’s RAOs are, in alphabetical order; Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation, King Brown Tribal Group, Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council and Ngarigu Currawong Clan. The term ‘RAO groups’ or ‘Aboriginal groups’ will be used to refer to these groups collectively, rather than individual group names. However, where a specific RAO or individual is referred to, their group name will be used.
- This is a working name, and therefore will be referred to in quotation. When used, ‘Red Hill Camp’ refers to the park in Griffith under investigation.
- The term ‘Indigenous’ is used when referring to Aboriginal peoples more broadly, either within Australia or globally. The term is critiqued within postcolonial literature as positing an essentialised distinction between ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’. However, this dissertation attempts to show how this distinction is often used in heritage discourse, and will therefore use the term to describe the role played by groups in this process.
- San Miguel’s 2016 Bachelor of Archaeological Science (Hons) thesis focused on women’s perspectives in determining significance of heritage sites in the Canberra region.
- This ‘Russell Hill’ refers to the lease held by Charles Russell between 1938-1992 (“Narrabundah”) who grazed cattle on Red Hill and Mt Davidson from 1930 until the 1990s. This property was previously owned by Charles’ brother Dick (from 1920 as a soldier settlement block) and before that by Patrick Sheedy as part of the Duntroon Estate (G. Field 1989; Russell 1995).
- This is ‘Black Harry’, Matilda House’s Great-Great-Grandfather.
- This is the ‘Red Hill Station’ near Tumut (Stephenson 2014).
- Harold (Lightning) Williams also enrolled to vote in the early 1930s (Australian Electoral Commission 2016).
- A hidden ‘cache’ or small box that is part of a global network of millions of such boxes. People partaking in the game find the box with a GPS, log their visit and exchange small objects. For more information, visit www.geocaching.com.
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