Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission

Jane Lydon

doi:10.5771/9780759118041

Summary

Fantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to 'civilize' the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing, and the consumption of material goods. After the mission closed in 1904, white observers saw the camp settlements that formed nearby as evidence of Aboriginal incapacity and immorality, rather than as symptoms of exclusion and poverty. Conceptions of transformation as acculturation survived in assimilation policies that envisioned Aboriginal people becoming the same as whites through living in European housing. These ideas persist in archaeological analysis that insists on Aboriginality as otherness and difference, and equates objects with identity. However Wergaia tradition was place-based, and, often invisibly, Indigenous people maintained traditional relationships to kin and country, resisting white authority through strategies of evasion and mobility. This study examines the complex role of material culture and spatial politics in shaping colonial identities and offers a critique of essentialism in archaeological interpretation.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2009
Copyright Year: 2009
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7591-1104-2
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7591-1804-1
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 322
Product Type: Monograph

1. CONTENTS No access
2. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No access
3. ILLUSTRATIONS No access
Ch01. “THEY COVET NOT MAGNIFICENTHOUSES, HOUSHOLD-STUFF” No access Pages 1 - 38
Ch02. ORIENTING THE WERGAIA No access Pages 39 - 78
Ch03. EBENEZER, FOR EXAMPLE No access Pages 79 - 102
Ch04. SPACE, POWER, AND THE MISSION-HOUSE No access Pages 103 - 124
Ch05. “ALL THESE LITTLE THINGS”:MATERIAL CULTURE AND DOMESTICITY No access Pages 125 - 174
Ch06. AFTER THE MISSION CLOSED:ANTWERP 1904–1930 No access Pages 175 - 195
Ch07. THE OUTSKIRTS OF CIVILIZATION No access Pages 196 - 246
Ch08. “A HANDLE OF A CUP”:CHANGING VIEWS OF THE MISSIONS No access Pages 247 - 276
REFERENCES No access Pages 277 - 310
INDEX No access Pages 311 - 320
ABOUT THE AUTHOR No access Pages 321 - 322