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Re-Reading the Landscape: Place and Identity in NE Australia During the Late Holocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2009

Bruno David  and
Meredith Wilson
Bruno David
Affiliation:
Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia
Meredith Wilson
Affiliation:
Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
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Abstract

Through an examination of land use during the late Holocene, this article explores the changing nature of place and identity in what is today Djungan country (NE Australia). We begin with the notion that use of place is mediated by historically positioned systems of meaning. We further contend that through praxis (as social practice), experience of place participates in the structuring and construction of identity. By examining changes in the way a distinctive mountain — Ngarrabullgan (Mt Midligan) — has been incorporated within the broader socio-cultural landscape through time, we conclude that major alterations took place in peoples’ relations to their surroundings, and by implication in the construction of landscapes, life experiences and identity, around the fourteenth century AD. This has implications for the way we project ethnographic details, attuned to Dreaming-based ontological views of the world, into the more distant past.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , October 1999 , pp. 163 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 1999

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