(un)making Angas Downs: a spatial history of a Central Australian pastoral station 1930 - 1980
Creators: name: Palmer, Shannyn
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2016
Subjects: place and space
Aboriginal history
oral history
cross-cultural history
place-making
spatial history
mobility
pastoralism
Central Australia

description: Angas Downs is a pastoral station situated in the arid Central Australian rangelands, 300 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs. Yet, as pastoral station, it does not articulate easily with the established historiography of Aboriginal people’s participation in the northern pastoral industry. Nor does it conform to the image of the outback cattle station popularised in myths of pioneers and pastoralists which dominate Central Australian history. Located in the marginal lands of the desert interior, Angas Downs was a largely defective capitalist enterprise, and one which actually ‘employed’ very few Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, significant numbers of Anangu lived on Angas Downs, or used it as a base between 1930 and 1980. By approaching the station as moments in time and space, this thesis examines the ways in which this desert pastoral station was made – and unmade – by Anangu and others in their encounters with each other over fifty years across the middle of the twentieth century. It asks: What kind of place was Angas Downs? And how should we see it and understand it as place? It shows that pastoralism is but a fraction of the story. Taking a spatial approach to history and memory, and drawing insights from anthropology, ethnography and cultural geography, the thesis traces the ways in which Anangu drew upon existing social practices to make sense of the new places that emerged when whitefellas came to the desert. The thesis traces travels, itineraries, and networks of movement. In doing so, it grapples with the question of how people, dislocated by historical and spatial shifts, made a place for themselves. Oral histories are a key resource. More than recollections of the past, Anangu historical remembrance is conceptualised in this thesis as an ‘inscriptive practice’ that brings places into being, and endows them with meaning that is both learned, shared and sustained through particular narrative modes and techniques. Focusing upon extended oral histories of lives that spanned five decades of change, the thesis presents a detailed analysis of the complex and creative social processes involved in place-making at Angas Downs. Rather than a single site produced through colonial structures, relations and processes, Angas Downs emerges in this study as a deeply complex place of dynamic interaction and social life. The spatial approach and analysis draws out the multiple and layered meanings of Angas Downs, which were created in and through intersecting travels, encounters and exchanges. The thesis explores themes of Anangu knowledge and historical change; the production of locality and place-making as social practice; mobility as productive of social relations and of place; and the interplay between environmental and social ecologies and the ways in which this shaped the making and unmaking of Angas Downs. At a time when the politics of place continues to be keenly felt in Australia, this thesis contributes to understandings of practices of place-making that reflect the complex legacies of colonialism, while holding out Angas Downs as a symbol of hope for more responsive and creative formulations of relationships to place.