Memories of the Past, Visions of the Future: Changing Views of Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Australia
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Memories of the Past, Visions of the Future: Changing Views of Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Australia Jane Lydon & Alan Burns
Published online: 14 January 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract Former missions and reserves occupy an increasingly important place in Australian Aboriginal heritage, as sites of recent memory, ancestral resting-places, and the foci of social action in the present. Since the 1970s heritage managers have drawn heavily upon archaeological research in reclaiming places such as Ebenezer Mission for Aboriginal descendants as well as the non-Aboriginal community. This program of research and conservation has been shaped by Aboriginal memories and values that express the community’s self-understandings and its hopes for the future, in a process that reveals the relationship between tangible and intangible aspects of the past. Keywords Missions . Aboriginality . Colonialism . Heritage
“Only for the missionaries …” Former missions and reserves continue to occupy an important place in Aboriginal memory, as sites of recent memory, ancestral resting-places, historical landmarks, and the focus of social action in the present. Mainstream perceptions of these places prior to the 1960s were predominantly shaped by a humanitarian framework that emphasized redemption and transformation, “success” or “failure.” Missionaries sought to Christianize and “civilize” the indigenous residents through spatial and material practices, creating an idealized landscape intended to teach through example, performance, and the creation of individual subjects. Their attempts were deemed “failures” until the conversion of Nathaniel Pepper by Moravians in 1859 confirmed their settlement at Ebenezer, in northwestern Victoria, J. Lydon (*) : A. Burns Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. Burns e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2010) 14:39–55
to be a model of missionization. Ebenezer had been sited on the traditional country of the Wergaia-language speakers (Fig. 1), at a place known to them as BunyoBudnutt. In this paper we aim first to explore a range of representations of the Australian Aboriginal mission through the example of Ebenezer. We also explore the recursive relationship between material evidence and social value, often expressed most clearly through oral histories. During their first decade, these new “civilizing experiments” were exhibited to an urban audience through panoramas such as this view of Ebenezer, framed by a narrative of successful transformation evidenced by spatial order and European housing. For missionaries, the Aboriginal residents’ appropriation of domesticity, defined by material culture and everyday practices, was an index of progress, a Western view that equated material goods and circumstances and outward appearances with moral and intellectual status. They became a central visual theme, representing the reserves in spatially transparent terms as productive, o
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