Caging the Rainbow: Places, Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town

One: Places and People of Katherine Town

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - One Places and People of Katherine Town 1 Ma n y w r i t e r s have observed that,in the ways in which Aborigines position themselves around settler locations—missions, pastoral stations (ranches), and towns—they have tended to reproduce,within a small space,differentiated orientations to “country,” the lands to which they regard themselves as having primary ties.This chapter gives an account of the diversity of spatial orientation among Aboriginal people to the town of Katherine. It also begins to explore how this diversity relates to their differentiated and changing ties to hinterlands outside the town. No doubt, such spatially relative orientation re- flects continuity in practice from precolonial times. Thus, Bell (1983:8), writing of the Central Desert settlement of Warrabri north of Alice Springs,noted of the distribution of locally recognized social groupings that “Warlpiri and Warumungu oriented their camps to their traditional land west of the settlement , while Alyawarra and Kaytej oriented their camps to the east. Contact between east- and westsiders was minimal and occurred in the service core of the settlement where the whites lived and worked” (see also Myers 1986:34–36 concerning Western Desert peoples’ spatial orientations in a settlement context and Kolig 1981:12–22 and Memmott 1991:44 for comparisons with situations in remote northwestern and southeastern Australia, respectively). Often, such spatial arrangement even continues to be strongly manifested in “fringe camps” around complex urban centers (see, e.g., Sansom 1980 writing of “fringe dwellers”around Darwin,the NorthernTerritory’s chief city).The extent to which urban encampments are appropriately understood as spatially relative to each other and differentially oriented toward hinterlands depends upon the extent to which the Aboriginal people concerned sustain salient concepts of socio-territorial identity and differentiation under the particular sociohistorical conditions and reorientations they have experienced. Such concepts are quite strongly maintained among many Aboriginal people living in Katherine, in varying ways on which this book seeks to provide perspectives. Recognizing that spatial orientation is a constitutive dimension of social identity and difference is an important element of understanding towns like Katherine “in Aboriginal terms.” In varying but significant measure, many Aboriginal people of Katherine see their lives in terms of “where,” in relation both to other Aborigines and to non-Aborigines.1 Among many Aborigines, it is generally important where one is from in the sense of having socially recognized connection to country, where one has been in the course of one’s life, and where others are to whom one is closely linked.To varying degrees,these socio-spatial orientations are mirrored —partly realized in forms of social practice and also altered over time—in the way that Aborigines position themselves in relation to the town (moving in and around it), in the ways they relate to other people, and in the spaces they typically occupy. To many Katherine Aborigines, whites and other outsiders are obviously originally from somewhere else, not from the range of country that they know.Yet outsiders have been around Katherine for a long time, and some have had strong and far-reaching influence upon Aborigines’lives,as employers and workers established in local places. Aboriginal social and spatial orientations to town and hinterland, and the relations between these, have not remained static. However,Aboriginal people envision the temporal dimension of these relations variably. Sometimes they do not recognize, or have in mind as a possibility, that changes in social identification of people and territory have come about for which good “objective” evidence can nevertheless be presented. (Building on some material in this chapter, chapter 4 deals explicitly with 2 • c h a p t e r o n e the question of variable recognition of change and the emergence of new forms of historical consciousness in the town setting.) Towns and other places of settler development had significant effect uponAboriginal populations in earlier times and still do,in changing ways. Such centers were always in places with access to water and other requirements for settler life and livelihood. Such siting inevitably disrupted Aboriginal people, often forcing them into situations of competition with settlers and introduced animals. In the Katherine region,exploration for the establishment of the Overland Telegraph from the 1870s and initial pastoral settlement from 1879 at Springvale just downstream of the present town (see map 1) doubtless caused the decimation of Aboriginal numbers and, very likely...