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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Historical Inheritance: Tracing the Past
- 2 Dwelling in Place: Absorbing the Past
- 3 The Social Community: Networks of Memory and Attachment to Place
- 4 The Cultural Circuit: Making Sense of Lived History
- 5 ‘Memory’ to ‘History’: From Verbal Transmission to Text
- 6 Settler Belonging, Victimhood and Trauma
- 7 Unsettling the Disconnect
- Appendix 1 Interviewees
- Appendix 2 Towns/ Settlements Whose Public Spaces Were Surveyed
- Appendix 3 List of Mid-Northern Written Histories Surveyed
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Dwelling in Place: Absorbing the Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Historical Inheritance: Tracing the Past
- 2 Dwelling in Place: Absorbing the Past
- 3 The Social Community: Networks of Memory and Attachment to Place
- 4 The Cultural Circuit: Making Sense of Lived History
- 5 ‘Memory’ to ‘History’: From Verbal Transmission to Text
- 6 Settler Belonging, Victimhood and Trauma
- 7 Unsettling the Disconnect
- Appendix 1 Interviewees
- Appendix 2 Towns/ Settlements Whose Public Spaces Were Surveyed
- Appendix 3 List of Mid-Northern Written Histories Surveyed
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I think the biggest sense is the generational thing. Just being in a – you know I could go around and say ‘oh my great- grandfather did that, my grandfather did that, my father did that and I did that’. You know, you can see, I knew exactly who had done what – planting something or fixing something or, you know, why did he build the house here? I can see he built it here because of this that or the other. You know the things he [my great- grandfather] did were probably the biggest things but yet they are less obvious to see because they are so big, you think, well, he had nothing to do with it. But my grandfather's time, I can see where they trained the horses and where – you know it's all changed now – but all the history is there in my mind.
Andrew Gebhardt is describing his awareness of his family's connection with Mackerode, the land his great- grandfather Gustav Gebhardt purchased from the South Australian colonial government in the late 1860s. Mackerode is a sheep and crop property situated in the mid- north between Burra and Mt Bryan in the North- Eastern Highland district, 170 kilometres north of Adelaide. During my conversation with Andrew, he explained that as he went about his everyday life, as he lived his life at Mackerode, which was both his home and workplace, the physical legacies of earlier generations – their imprints in and on the country – provided constant and enduring reminders of earlier times.
Places in which rural settler descendants live are deeply culturalised landscapes; they are physical spaces invested with cultural meanings, sites of ‘intense cultural activity and imagination – of memory, of affectivity, of work, of sociality, of identity’. For South Australian settler descendants such as Andrew who have grown up on land occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century, tangible reminders of the past – the homesteads in which they grow up, farm buildings such as implement sheds and woolsheds, living and nonliving markers in the landscape such as trees, ruins and fence posts and objects such as furniture and photos – are an integral part of everyday life. However, there is a need to take into account the cultural frame through which these physical reminders of historical connections to place are interpreted.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler HistoryUnderstanding Australians’ Consciousness of the Colonial Past, pp. 61 - 92Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017