Ways of Belonging: Reconciliation and Adelaide's Public Space Indigenous Cultural Markers

Abstract

As an arguably ‘post colonial’ society, Australia is evolving its particular identity and sense of self, but reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples remains a significant political and cultural issue. Social inclusion or marginalisation is reflected in the construct of the civic landscape and this paper traces and contextualises public space Indigenous representation or ‘cultural markers’, since the 1960s in Adelaide, South Australia, the Kaurna people's land. This paper identifies social phases and time periods in the evolution of the ways in which Indigenous people and their culture have been included in the city's public space. Inclusion of Indigenous peoples in civic landscapes contributes not only to their spiritual and cultural renewal and contemporary identity, but also to the whole community's sense of self and to the process of reconciliation. This has the potential to provide a gateway to a different way of understanding place which includes an Indigenous perspective and could, symbolically, contribute to the decolonisation of Indigenous people. An inter‐related issue for the colonising culture is reconciliation with the Indigenous nature of the land, in the sense of an intimate sense of belonging and connectedness of spirit through an understanding of Indigenous cultural landscapes, an issue which this paper explores. The paper also sets out suggestions for the facilitation of further Indigenous inclusion and of re‐imagining ways of representation.

Searching for Belonging – An Analytical Framework

“…According to Trudeau (2006, 423), belonging is inherently spatial, and therefore who belongs and who does not is written in the landscape. As a visual means of communication, landscape indeed conveys meanings of inclusion/exclusion, by (re)producing a certain order of things and an idea of cultural unity and wholeness (Trudeau 2006, 437–438– see also Fenster 2004; Price 2004; Malone 2007; Schein 2009). Thus, following the psychological inquiry of Dixon and Durrheim (2004, 459), one should also reflect on the extent to which our personal, intimate feeling ‘at home’ in a place may derive from ‘the comforting realization of others’ absence’.…”

“…As a rapid review of the usage of the term in social sciences reveals, belonging is at times treated as a self‐explanatory term and, therefore, left undefined by various scholars, being them geographers (Malone 2007; Nagel and Staeheli 2005; Schueth and O’Loughlin 2008; Winders 2007), cultural theorists (Bromley 2000; Duruz 2002), or sociologists (Marshall and Foster 2002). More often, though, belonging is used, more or less consciously, as a synonym of identity, and in particular national or ethnic identity.…”

Geographies of Belonging

“…All the papers from that special issue address belonging as a central issue [see particularly Dunn (2008), and also Clark (2008), Dunn and Ip (2008), Friesen (2008), McAuliffe (2008), Zevallos (2008)]. A number of other papers that were initially presented at the IGU and subsequently appeared as published papers address issues of belonging (Fenster and Vizel, 2007;Malone, 2007;Power, 2007;Trigger et al, 2008). The mobilisation of ideas of belonging at the IGU conference signifies a growing interest in belonging in geography generally and perhaps particularly, as Schein (2009) of contemporary national governments.…”

Segregation and protectionism: Institutionalised views of Aboriginal rurality

“…An Aboriginal presence in Australian urban and rural places is often ignored or denied on the basis of an imagined inauthenticity (but see Malone, 2007). This erasure of an Aboriginal presence is linked to a refusal to recognise that cultural interpenetration and hybridity characterises many Indigenous lives, regardless of how they may choose to represent their identities socially and politically (Dodson, 1994;Anderson, 1997).…”