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Notes to chapter 5 on pages 242–44. 123 The burns that rush so swiftly down our hillsides are not the creeks that wander through these deep woods. The high hills are not these low lands and the spirits of our rocks and hills and burns, the old ones who dwell in the unseen world, are not here. But we are not to grieve. The old ones came to our hills in the ancient times. It began somewhere. It began there long ago as it begins here now. We are the old ones here. —Janet Lunn, Shadow in Hawthorn Bay 5 Space, Time, Nation During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, a historicist world view dominated critical social theory. Michel Foucault describes as follows the nineteenth-century preoccupation with time and history: “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile . Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.”1 This historicist orientation was deeply teleological, construing social life and practice in terms of events and movements that were seen to relate to one another chronologically and causally, and that afforded the possibility of projecting how the future might evolve out of the past. Space was regarded merely as the background against which history played out, an inert locus. As the geographer Edward Soja shows in his seminal work Postmodern Geographies (1989), the 1960s saw the beginnings of a reconceptualization of space exemplified by the work of Foucault and the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who sought to show, Soja argues, how “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology .”2 Postcolonial studies focus precisely on the politics and ideologies of human geographies by investigating how colonizing powers incorporated the spaces of colonized lands into their own modes of thought and belief, and by examining the extent to which postcolonial textuality interrogates or supports those colonial conceptions. The notions of space that dominated British imperialism were predominantly visual. Bill Ashcroft notes that Western “ocularcentrism” involved the following components: “its habit of objectivism, the revolutionary development of modern mapping, the discovery of longitude, the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time, the emergence of the discipline of geography, in short,the whole gamut of European ways of constructing space and place.”3 Such strategies of surveillance and categorization effected a distinction between space (as an abstract idea of measurable land or territory), place (as an inhabited and known location), and temporality that was foreign to many preContact cultures. As Anthony Giddens points out, “in premodern societies, space and place largely coincided, since the spatial dimensions of social life are, for most of the population…dominated by ‘presence’—by localised activity .”4 Moreover, practices such as hunting, social gatherings, and ceremonies were generally carried out according to daily and seasonal routines, so that time and place were locked together. As colonizers appropriated land, caused populations of Indigenous peoples to shift from one place to another , and effected environmental change, they also disrupted the time–place relations that informed Indigenous cultural practices. It is clear that the impact of mass communication and global capitalism has radically and irrevocably separated space from place, since even the most remote of Indigenous communities, such as those in the Northern Territory of Australia and the territory of Nunavut in Canada, engage in transactions with people and institutions far removed from them in space. For instance , Aboriginal artists in the deserts of Australia and Inuit carvers in Nunavut produce artworks that are displayed in European galleries; decisions made by governments located in Canberra and Ottawa affect the lives of people living in these distant places; members of remote communities in Alaska and the Torres Strait watch television sitcoms made in metropolitan centres. To acknowledge that the separation of space from place is integral to modernity, however, does not imply that place–time relations are definitively sundered, or that place is not resonant with significances for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of settler societies. In children’s literature produced in these societies, a key concern is precisely how selfhood and place relate to each other. Non-Indigenous inhabitants of settler societies belong to what Stephen Slemon describes as a “neither/nor territory.”5 White settlers were both colonized and colonizers, simultaneously subject to imperial rule and engaged in processes of colonization in relation to Indigenous peoples; and their descendants , as well as other immigrants, are bene...

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