Spirit of place: The critical case for site visits in the construction of Indigenous Australian histories

Abstract

They come out to the community in a big four-wheel drive -towin' flash campin' gear -looked like they'd be stayin' awhile -set up camp. The historians -they said they were -come out to help us tell our story. (Leane, 2017) The photographs in this essay depict work done during a research project that examines the education scheme facilitated by Friedrich Wilhelm (FW) Albrecht, the superintendent at Ntaria (Hermannsburg Mission) in the Northern Territory in the 1950s and 1960s. Albrecht created a program in which young girls were taken with permission from their families, fostered and educated, but were allowed to return to family and community for holidays. Never before studied, the history of this scheme promises to provide us with a deeper understanding of the varied ways in which postwar 'assimilation' was imagined and enacted by both officials and Aboriginal people. But this project is not just about uncovering the past. It is also about finding new ways of writing history that move beyond the problems created when a discipline that is overwhelmingly staffed by non-Indigenous people disseminates knowledge about communities, individuals and places that they are not connected to, and have never visited, spoken to or stepped foot upon.