Place and Environment
How do communities make place out of space? How do societies form their identifications, and in what kind of relation to their environment? Trans/forming Cultures' research moves through heritage studies to a consideration of national borders, from conceptions of local communities to those of the natural environment, interrogating issues such as belonging, home and homelessness, for a deeper understanding of how these identifications are made.
Integral to ideas of place are social and cultural constructions of nature, conceptions of ecological crisis and concomitant notions of environmental justice. TfC research considers the eco-social dimensions of place and environment, and investigates different cultures’ interrelations between the natural and social world. Indigenous notions of place are of special interest, as are indigenous constructions of ecology and the natural environment.
TfC is strongly committed to cross-boundary, interdisciplinary work, and most of our research projects relate to other program areas, and to TfC Events.
Current TfC projects in this area include:
Black Soil Country: journeys on a floodplain in crisis
Echoes from the Poisoned Well: global memories of environmental injustice
How People Swim: water and trans/formation in the new oceans
Homebush Bay: place, society and politics in a city's history
Land of the Black Stump: a history of Australia's Inland Corridor, 1815-2005
RePlacing China - a research network on the imaginative geographies of cultural transformation
Selected completed TfC projects in this area include:
The Collarenebri Aboriginal Cemetery Documentation Project
Evans Head Bandjalang Native Title Claim
Pat Cameron at Boggai Bend, North Bourke, 1997
Photo: Fairfaxphotos
Black Soil Country: journeys on a floodplain in crisis
Researcher: Heather Goodall
This project will contribute to a sustainable future in rural NSW by investigating the way rural communities remember their relationship with the land and the rivers and how they evaluate environmental changes. The floodplains of north west New South Wales and south west Queensland have faced rapid changes since the 1950s with new crops, new methods of farming, pressures from overseas and internal economic conditions and a continuing loss of services. Floods and most recently severe drought have intensified the difficulties of living sustainably in this marginal country.
Graziers, town residents, Aboriginal people, dryland wheat farmers and irrigated cotton farmers all have different interests and different perspectives on how change has occurred, what the costs have been and what the benefits are. This project is documenting how these different sections of the diverse floodplain community have seen and coped with rapid change under great pressure. In this way the project will reveal the broader processes in which our complex society negotiates its relationships with the fragile environment in which we live.
Echoes from the Poisoned Well: global memories of environmental injustice
Researcher: /researchers/StaffDetails.cfm?StaffId=969&NumRecords=1">Heather Goodall, Sylvia Hood-Washington, Paul Rosier
This project is investigating the concept and practice of environmental justice as it is experienced around the globe. The environmental justice movement is best known in the US where it has developed in specific historical circumstances. It has been a response to industrial modernity, which has resulted in waste and dangerous byproducts being distributed so that they most severely affect the least powerful sectors of society. The environmental justice movement has arisen in many ways directly from the civil rights campaigns of minority groups, who have recognised their health and quality of life suffers as a result of discriminatory environmental damage. However these local struggles can be seen as only one manifestation of the wider issue of spatial power, which has been exercised in the pursuit of colonisation and other conquests over the last four centuries. So environmental injustice can be identified in issues as diverse as industrial pollution and apartheid, nuclear contamination and colonial dispossession. This project is investigating the issues of environmental justice in this wider sense of the exercise of spatial power. The researchers are tracing the way environmental injustices and the conflicts which arise from them can be understood, compared and learnt from, across quite different situations of colonialism and modernity. Indigenous people have in many ways led the attempts to work out radical alternatives to the corporate and military nationalism and more recently globalised assault on environmental justice. With little investment in the nation state, indigenous people are offering transnational and globalised models for networking, activism and identity which may allow new patterns of effective mobilisation for groups seeking environmental justice.
Georges River National Park
The Georges River project: strategic research for building social, cultural and environmental capital in urban parklands
Researcher: Heather Goodall, Stephen Wearing, Denis Byrne, Jo Kijas
Partner: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Department of Environment and Conservation; The Sydney Urban Parks Education and Research Group
The Georges River Project is an innovative collaboration between park managers and academic researchers. It will result in deeper knowledge about how cultural and ethnic diversity affects the way communities use urban parks and how they interact with each other in those parks. The project focuses initially on four groups on the Georges River in suburban Sydney: the Indigenous, Anglo, Vietnamese and Arabic-speaking communities. It draws on oral history and interviewing methodologies as well as innovative mapping of the actual movements of people and communities through the landscape of the parklands, to make visible the differences and similarities between ethnic groups in their use of parks and their construction of nature. A study of their use of parklands will then be the basis for developing best-practice research, planning and interpretation resources to assist park managers in other locations to collaborate more effectively with their changing local users, thus enhancing positive cross-cultural relations in urban parks
Photo: Johanna Kijas
How People Swim: water and trans/formation in the new oceans
Researcher: Heather Goodall, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
This project is in development as part of TfC's interest in the cultures and narratives of water and water use in the rapidly changing worlds of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The work looks at the way in which people move through water, and how water moves through the imagination of the societies of the Rim/s. Our areas of focus include gendered swimming, and the performances of swimming; trans-cultural swimming - where our focus includes uses of water, the notion of dangerous waters as a metaphor for racial tension and swimming as a form of touristic capital, and swimming under duress where we investigate the use of waters as a barrier to migration and change.
Homebush Bay: place, society and politics in a city's history
Researcher: Heather Goodall, Allison Cadzow
Partner: The Sydney Olympic Parklands Authority
This project is under development. It will trace the complex history of the lands which have become the Homebush Bay Parklands Precinct. The area holds has a complex biological heritage in its landscape, waterways and wetlands, flora and fauna. But it has an even more complex human history, reflecting the lives and uses of traditional Dharuk owners, and then sequences of occupation, including settler farmers, Navy armaments fabricators and decommissioners, industrial owners, chemical waste disposers, immigrant workers in factory and abattoirs and working class residents. Only most recently have these lands been modified to serve a glittering role, celebrated as host location to the 2000 Olympic Games and now turned over to be reshaped yet again as parklands. This project will investigate how these lands can be understood as particular precincts and as a complex whole, in an engagement between social and environmental histories, across cultures and across time.
'Black Stump' by Stephen Evans
Land of the Black Stump: a history of Australia's Inland Corridor, 1815-2005
Researcher: Heather Goodall, Alan Mayne, C Fahey, Raelene Frances, Lionel Frost, Jenny Gregory, Patricia Grimshaw, Rodney Harrison, Richard Hosking, Richard A Nile
This project provides a model for integrating the complex history of inland Australia into our national history, and uses this model to explain the problems confronting rural and regional Australia today. The model of the Inland Corridor will be used to trace social and environmental change since the start of large-scale European inland settlement. The Corridor became the heartland for Australia's pastoral, mining, and agricultural industries. Visions of it are embedded in Australian culture. These overlay but do not erase the social and cultural landscapes of Aboriginal peoples. This project seeks to help reconcile Aboriginal and European encounters in Australia.
The project explains the origins of key areas of current interest and concern about rural and regional Australia. It provides historical lessons that address four key areas (sustainable water and land management, sustainable communities, technological innovation, and Australia's regional and global context). The project highlights the historical importance to Australia of inland regions, industries, and communities which today are undergoing fundamental economic, technological, and social readjustments. It identifies the relationships that bind urban and rural Australia yet problematise racial reconciliation. It brings together a national network of researchers and provides vocational training for students.
Photo: Andrew Jakubowicz
RePlacing China - a research network on the imaginative geographies of cultural transformation
Researcher: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald; Carolyn Cartier, University of Southern California; David Goodman, UTS; Tim Oakes, University of Colorado at Boulder; Louisa Schein, Rutgers University; Kate Barclay, UTS
RePlacing China brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the ideational dimensions of changing spatial practices, identities and subjectivities in China. Research focuses on changing place imaginaries in relation to new patterns of mobility and exchange, uneven development, and the rapid growth of China's cultural economies.
Working Party in Collarenebri Aboriginal Cemetery, 1999
Photo: Heather Goodall
The Collarenebri Aboriginal Cemetery Documentation Project
Researcher: Heather Goodall; Kate Waters, UTS
Partners: The Collarenebri Aboriginal Cemetery Committee; NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (Tamworth)
This has been a community-initiated and -directed project which has documented the unique Aboriginal cemetery at Collarenebri by both digital and hardcopy means. It has been the outcome of a long period of dedicated community maintenance and care. The Aboriginal Cemetery Committee applied for funding for the documentation project to the NSW Heritage Office in 1997 and received support to carry it out from 1998 to 2002. It has been assisted by a consultant historian, Associate Professor Heather Goodall, by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, particularly by Brad Sulter and Dr Denis Byrne, and locally, by Mr Harry Denyer, the Collarenebri undertaker.
The project involved intensive periods of oral and archival research which significantly extended the data collected in a previous project. The outcomes of the project were, firstly, that most of the 250 people buried in the graves in the Aboriginal cemetery have now been identified. This information has been recorded on a newly developed digital database, using Filemaker 5, which has been mounted on a community organisation computer. Preliminary workshopping of community members has begun to develop their skills in entering data and this process will continue with the next phase of the project, continuing in 2004. The database allows not only family tree genealogical information to be added, but family and personal life stories as well.
The database has been used to develop and check an updated map of the cemetery, which has been printed on large format, heavy duty paper and distributed widely in the community [from 2002]. The hardcopy map allows those members of the community who are less comfortable with computers to have a readily-accessible record of the graveyard to which they can add, in pencil or colouring, any details or information they regard as important for their own family's graves. The map, drawn in the computer application Illustrator, can be updated regularly and redistributed at minimal cost to allow hardcopy as well as digital updating. The documentation project has been one part of an ongoing interest in the cemetery by the Aboriginal community and has been entwined with other activities like working parties to the cemetery in which repair work on graves was done at the same time as stories were collected to aid with grave identification. One of many results has been the successful lobbying to tar the road out to the cemetery, so that for the first time it is reliably accessible in wet weather.
This project was awarded the National Trust Commendation for Community Heritage, 2003.
Evans Head Bandjalang Native Title Claim
Researcher: Heather Goodall
This research has been carried out in consultation with the Aboriginal community on the far north coast of NSW, to provide advice to the Federal Court in relation to the Evans Head claim before the Native Title Tribunal. The research focused particularly on the early evidence of Indigenous presence in the claim area and the interactions between traditional owners and incoming settlers. The relations between peoples and between people and land in the region throughout rapidly changing political and environmental circumstances have generated a complex history which is only partially documented in the settler-authored archival written sources to which the Federal Court chooses to adhere as its major body of acceptable evidence.
