This article focuses on urban space and heritage. Our aim is to understand how ordinary streets in Perth respond to urban change and how much these urban streets represent Western Australia’s heritage. The intention is to eschew the dominant branding of WA as Australia’s mining state and shift the spotlight so that in addition to the economic and material, light is also shed on the socio-cultural in the everyday and the vernacular. This project uses Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach to explore a contrapuntal reading of heritage that disrupts the deserving, dominant and fixed histories of High Road in Willetton and High Street in Fremantle. Amid the tides of migration, commerce, and cultures, heritage facades on High Street Fremantle appear singular and fixed, whereas multiple cultures have been extracted for sale on High Road. Superficially High Road seems diverse, but the overarching impulse across both sites is commerce – ‘Business as usual’ reigns.
This paper addresses the prevalence of state violence directed at Aboriginal people. It examines how violence has been reproduced in recent years in the space of Western Australia through mutually-reinforcing relations of financial interest, and how the function of private capital accumulationin state violence against sovereign Aboriginal peoplehas remained hidden in white sight. This paper argues that state violence is legitimized through a discourse of Aboriginal protection. After outlining how this discourse and violence have operated in Western Australia, the paper provides a substantive narrative challenging the routine reproduction of state violence against Aboriginal bodies through a close reading of public and media texts. These texts relate to state violence against a blockade preventing land-clearing machines from entering Aboriginal country in mid 2011; state violence against the Nyoongar Tent Embassy in early 2012; and, the government's announcement in May 2011 that it would amend the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Through this analysis, lines are drawn between media, machines and might for the purpose of enabling white sight to see private capital accumulation functioning within the reproduction of state violence against Aboriginal people.
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