Search

In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest.

The criminalisation of Aboriginal people when asserting their sovereign right to place continues to operate in settler-states such as Australia. This chapter responds to Jacoby’s call for a closer engagement with scholarly work on settler colonialism in the context of moral ecology. Through an analysis of a protracted dispute over the redevelopment of a Brewery building in Perth, Western Australia this chapter explores the occupation of the site by Nyoongar Aboriginal activists seeking to protect their sacred site. Long after the occupation has been removed and the redevelopment completed a settler colonial critique of events reveals how inversions come to dominate public discourse where the state becomes the hosts while original inhabitants who have survived, managed and cared for the land are excluded. The chapter concludes with the possibility of reimagining contested claims to place in the city.

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open u...

This paper contributes to the literature on the stigmatization of Australian public housing tenants and to the literature on Australian housing metaphors, explaining the usage of “the Bronx” as a means of stigmatizing country town and suburban localities dominated by public housing. It compares four Australian situations where the marginalization of the poor is expressed through the typification of the area in which they live as “the Bronx” by local usage, the media or both, comparing these with a fifth situation that matched the signal characteristics of this typification but escaped being so labeled. An examination of the Bronx’s (New York City) history shows the development of its reputation as a metaphor for the urban ghetto. The results of qualitative fieldwork undertaken in the Western Australian towns of Kalgoorlie, Carnarvon, and Broome are compared with media representations of analogous stigmatizations in New South Wales.

In this paper we consider the sociospatial problem of crowding in Indigenous Australia. Quantitative data are regularly collected in Census and other social surveys by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to create quantitative indices of the extent of household utilisation and then ‘overcrowding’ in Australian society in general, and amongst the Australian Indigenous population in particular. However, in our view, the identification of states of Indigenous crowding requires an understanding of distinct cultural constructs to achieve greater validity of measurement. Our analysis also refers to the interconnected nature of Indigenous crowding and homelessness, a relatedness that has been seldom addressed in the literature,1 despite its importance to policy development in the Indigenous sector including effects on housing, family violence, education and health.