Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal MissionFantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to 'civilize' the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing, and the consumption of material goods. After the mission closed in 1904, white observers saw the camp settlements that formed nearby as evidence of Aboriginal incapacity and immorality, rather than as symptoms of exclusion and poverty. Conceptions of transformation as acculturation survived in assimilation policies that envisioned Aboriginal people becoming the same as whites through living in European housing. These ideas persist in archaeological analysis that insists on Aboriginality as otherness and difference, and equates objects with identity. However Wergaia tradition was place-based, and, often invisibly, Indigenous people maintained traditional relationships to kin and country, resisting white authority through strategies of evasion and mobility. This study examines the complex role of material culture and spatial politics in shaping colonial identities and offers a critique of essentialism in archaeological interpretation. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Ch02 ORIENTING THE WERGAIA | 39 |
Ch03 EBENEZER FOR EXAMPLE | 79 |
Ch04 SPACE POWER AND THE MISSIONHOUSE | 103 |
MATERIAL CULTURE AND DOMESTICITY | 125 |
ANTWERP 19041930 | 175 |
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Common terms and phrases
538 Department Aboriginal Affairs Victoria Aboriginal community Aboriginal Housing Aboriginal Studies Press Antwerp archaeological investigation argued assimilation Australia Australian Aborigines Board British Cambridge University Press camp Canberra century Christian Church civilization Colonial Comaroff Coranderrk Crown Lands Davey Department of Crown Dimboola Banner domestic Ebenezer Mission Station environment European evangelical evidence example exchange explore Figure first Gender Goolum Hagenauer half—castes Heritage Historical Archaeology Howitt Indigenous influence Item 12 Jane Lydon Jensz John John Comaroff Lake Boga Lake Hindmarsh Lake Tyers Lands and Survey landscape live London Mallee Marks material culture Mathews Melbourne University Press mission—house missionaries Moravian Mission Nancy Harrison native title nineteenth noted ofthe Oxford PROV reflect reserves Robinson Rodney Harrison Ron Southern settlement settlers slum social Society South Wales spatial Spieseke Sydney tion traditional transformation Trobe Victorian Aboriginal VPRS Wergaia Western Wimmera River Wotjobaluk Wybalenna