As the ‘fresh’ collides with the ‘salt’ at the convergence of Northern Tasmania’s two Esk River systems and the Tamar Estuary much more than troublesome silt is deposited on the riverbed.
All these waterways are named for others elsewhere. Yet this river junction is a feature in a unique and evolving cultural landscape that has a human history of 40,000 years plus. More to the point, it is very much its own place in the world with its own geography and histories.
Two centuries ago there was a cultural collision at this set of coordinates that is now Launceston that involved two different sets of cultural imperatives and two distinctly different knowledge systems – each of which shapes, and has shaped, place in different ways.
Interestingly, the waters come together here at a point pragmatically and geographically described, and mapped, in 21st Century terms, as Catchment 43. Right here at this junction, the ‘spectre of the flood’ is possibly part of the explanation of place that is being navigated. Along with a hope of somehow accounting for the Launcestonian cultural landscape multidimensional mapping is an evolving process.
As a consequence of postcolonial mapping, in the hope of better understandings of place, Tasmania’s ‘waterways and catchments’ have been ascribed numbers in an attempt to better understand geographies, bioregions, topographies, ecosystems, cultural landscapes and the phenomena these things involve and exist within.
Current technologies enable us to look at multiple interfaced, interrelated and layered imaginings of place from never before anticipated vantage points. The amenities ascribed to places need to be mapped and asserted. Here, in Catchment 43, what is being identified is an ecologically and geographically defined network of phenomena – an ecosystem rather than a mathematically measured and mapped physical geographic feature.
The mapping here is ‘deep’ in so much as it is inclusive of all the phenomena that constitute ‘place’ – landforms, resources, populations, habitats, environments, cultural sensibilities, stories, etc. The mapping brings with it a kind of scientific compulsion to gather up multidimensional classes of information. It’s an open question as to whether that has yet been achieved.
Unsurprisingly ‘water’ is place defining and in multidimensional ways. Likewise, the various shifts in meaning relative to the changing understandings invested in a place’s amenity values, water sources come charged with cultural values and social obligations. Equally, in cultural landscapes, and in the cultural imperatives invested in them, water is a no small consideration.
On The Tamar for instance, in an attempt to downplay cultural considerations, and to focus on more pragmatic issues with added ‘scientific’ accuracy, the ‘water catchment‘ has been given the number 43 – or more precisely the name, Catchment 43 … likewise 40 for the Macquarie system; 41 for the South Esk; and 42 for the North Esk. It’s a ‘place’ that finds its physicality in a ‘waterway’ as well as the adjoining land and placescaping located at the confluence of the Tamar and Tasmania’s two Esk Rivers.
Catchment 43 is a place that might be understood, even if somewhat differently, as ponrabbel if we invoke palawa-kani, Tasmanian Aboriginal language, and thus invoke palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal!) cultural imperatives. Here palawa understandings and palawa knowledge systems created a cultural landscape. ponrabbel is a palawa understanding and imagining of place and the place’s utility and amenity.
Putting colonial and palawa imperatives to one side for just a moment, the naming of a ‘place’ is unavoidably invested with layers of cultural narratives. Likewise the ascribing of numbers carries a narrative – it’s just another narrative. And, it’s so even if it’s ostensibly to play some role as a part of some ‘scientific cum ecological effort’ to better understand, disguise, soften, moderate perhaps, some exploitive purpose. Nonetheless here the ‘agenda’ comes with a level of universal transparency of a kind – and with a hypothesis of uncontestability.
While ‘numbering’ seems to carry the implications of detached precision, nevertheless the presumed lack of ambiguity is ultimately a somewhat complex and impossible notion. It is not so precise in fact and in the end it is wide open to interpretation. Numbering, strategically, and to some extent blatantly, has a kind of currency that links it to modernity and contemporaneous understandings. Yet it doesn’t (hasn’t?) really fundamentally changed the imperatives of placedness when we think about water catchments and the amenity bound up in them.
The naming, the numbering, imposes and implies connectivity to, a reliance upon, and a sense of purpose relative to placespecific locations. In the end, when stripped down to the supposed fundamental necessities, the dispassionate essentials, numbering simply swaps one kind of cultural imperative for another – one belief system for another … one knowledge system for another … one cultural paradigm for another.
The Tamar River was named by Van Diemen’s Land’s colonists after an ‘elsewhere place’, the River Tamar in Cornwall. That river in South West England itself, apparently, carries an elsewhere name.
Colonel William Paterson named what was to become an important colonial Van Diemen’s Land waterway, harbour and port in December 1804. By so doing he was paying respect to some elsewhere imperatives and sensibilities – and arguably imaginings of home. The naming here assumed that there was a void to be filled but the truth was otherwise.
Despite its name ‘the Tamar’ is not actually a river, it’s a saltwater tidal estuary and when it comes to ‘placedness’ this is not insignificant.
The name ‘Tamar’ is said to have its origins in antiquity and thought to mean "great water". The Tamar is one of several British rivers whose ancient names are assumed by some to be derived from a prehistoric ‘river word’ assumed to mean, "dark flowing". Likewise, it seems that these places have been deemed to have human and/or spiritual cum supernatural qualities of some kind.
Yet, like the invocation of Aboriginal naming, palawa-kani naming, such assumptions, by the time they are made, are by-and-large made from outside a cultural perspective and without reliable cultural contextualisation. Thus ‘the naming’ is somehow empty and decorative. Placenaming is a troublesome business.
In Tasmania, and in the language of another time and elsewhere places, ‘the Tamar’ is deliberately invested with cultural sensibilities assumed to be universal at some subliminal level and fitting well enough in an elsewhere and empty place, a cultureless place – someplace where the terra nullius idea could be assumed to have credence.
Except in politics, the assumed transplantablity of culture and its placedness is a somewhat bizarre idea. In Western language systems the concept of places as Proper nouns, the asserted uniqueness of place, is at once sustainable and untenable. Putting aside the anthropomorphism of a kind that seems to be in play with ‘elsewhere placedness’ looking to reinvent elsewhere as ‘home’ it is worth looking to Indigenous sensibilities, knowledge systems and belief systems for some guidance. Aboriginal placedness belongs to, and in, places and perhaps it offers more sustainable understandings of the places they belong to and that we belong to – eventually.
In one sense, in Tasmania, a quest for sustainable placedness might prove profitable as there is 40,000 plus years of human habitation to draw upon – and approximately 8,000 years of that in splendid isolation. In another sense it’s a quest blighted by the lack of dispassionate scholarly observation, research and information gathering to underpin the visualisations and contemporary imaginings.
Largely, in places like Launceston in a 21st C context, we are very often left with the speculative and hypothetical gleanings and imaginings of colonists with something other than a scholarly quest for knowledge on their minds.
Nevertheless, scholarship is not entirely absent but it remains the case that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was decimated and dispossessed in about four generations. Too few questions were asked and too many assumptions were made – time bears this out.
At the same time Western ‘civilisations’ were breaking new ground; crossing new frontiers; inventing new ways to be in the world; overturning past imperatives; and doing so largely careless of what was being displaced in the wake of the so called ‘enlightenment’.
The confrontation with the rhetoric of genocide played out in WW2’s Holocaust and elsewhere has its resonances in Britain’s colonial cum genocidal cum ethnocidal past in Tasmania. All this leaves its imprint on places like riverbanks, upon waterways and within placescapes that were shaped by different albeit largely ignored cultural sensibilities – and to some degree, indelibly so in the ways cultural imperatives change … and as quickly as it turns out that they have.
In 1803 in the British colonial outpost on this island that we know as Tasmania, and by 1806 in the settlement now known as Launceston, there was a devastating and cataclysmic cultural collision. When the colonisers arrived there was an Aboriginal population in Van Diemen’s Land numbered in the tens of thousands that included at least nine culturally and linguistically distinct and self-sustaining cultural groups. Within four generations that population had been decimated. Likewise, the cultural placescaping that had sustained Aboriginal people for 40,000 years prior to colonisation was being overrun and in places carelessly pillaged. All of this was being played out in Catchment 43; in and around ponrabbel and on ‘The Tamar’.
At the end of the conflict contemporaneously known as the ‘Black War’ in the 1820s, just a generation into the prevailing colonial imperatives, resources were finding their way onto ships headed to other colonial outposts in the Antipodes, to the ‘motherland’ and to elsewhere. .
Colonisation was both exploiting and utterly overturning palawa placescaping. The placescaping of ponrabbel, the palawa placescaping at the confluence of the two Esks, and The Tamar, was transposed into what essentially became, among other things, a colonial port – an exit and entry point to and from elsewhere.
Here, speculatively, it might be more profitable to understand ‘ponrabbel’ as being adjectival rather than finding some parallel Anglocentric placenaming where ‘property’ is the dominant factor behind the naming. Hence we might imagine ponrabbel as speaking more loudly of the qualities a place embodies, the amenity it offers, rather than who owns and occupies it – describing its power rather than the powers/authority humanity has over it.
Clearly the idea of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction is a myth, and undeniably there are enduring Aboriginal communities whose ancestors had escaped the attempted ethnic cleansing of the 1830s. Nonetheless, the devastating scale of the infamous Tasmanian genocide is so striking that it cannot be ignored. Importantly, the concept of complete extinction points to a central feature of the Van Diemen’s Land genocide. Moreover, it was fully reported and well understood in the drawing rooms, the colonial administrations and the ‘halls of power’ in the ‘colonial motherland’. This was not some unfortunate calamity in the most far-flung colonial outpost, it was a story that was told and retold at home. It was a story that was variously accommodated and understood throughout the entire British colonial enterprise.
Somewhat curiously Launceston has chosen 'The Tasmanian Tiger' as its logo cum mascot. Subliminally at least this ties Launceston in to the 'extinction idea' that is inescapably invested in the 'Thylacine image'. Contemporaneously, its an idea that is impolite when linked to Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Yet along with the motto "Progress With Prudence" these extinct mammals are emblazoned on Launceston's Town Hall in all their glory.
In the colonial outpost of Van Diemen’s Land’s Launceston, and from early on, penetrable placescaping was being transformed into a military camp; a gaol; a network of farms; a larder; a mining centre of a kind; a harbour; a colonial outpost and port; a displaced Anglocentric community; and all this with the makings of a globalised city – an end point now realised in 2016, if not an aspiration in 1806.
So, if the notion of the terra nullius idea lacks substance in its implication that ponrabbel was "nobodies land"; like it had never had any prior sovereignty over it, expressly or implicitly; and thus, by occupation and default, it had became British by default; what indeed was the status of ponrabbel and who owned or governed it?
Was it anything that could be determined by deeming? Of course it was, and simply because colonial enterprise depends entirely upon it being so.
Although many people at the time terra nullius was proclaimed by the colonial Governor Bourke, 10 October 1835, recognised that the Aboriginal occupants had rights to the land, this was not reflected in colonial law. Despite the fact that Aboriginal rights to land was confirmed by the British House of Commons in 1837, the law nonetheless followed and almost always applied the terra nullius principle expressed in Bourke’s Proclamation.
Thus the long dark colonial shadow cast by the terra nullius idea fell heavily upon ponrabbel until the Australian High Court’s decision in the Eddie Mabo Case in 1992. Even so, irrevocably it seems, the Mabo decision to acknowledge prior ownerships has had no real impact upon ponrabbel and how it is imagined at the confluence of three waterways. The waterway remains but ponrabbel, the cultural landscape, has been overrun, radically reshaped and obliterated by colonial enterprise.
How might ponrabbel be better understood? As discussed earlier, Indigenous understandings of ‘place’ are distinctly different from those that inform Western Anglocentric ‘placenaming’. Western placenaming aims to, via the linguistic device of the proper noun, assert uniqueness. Simultaneously it implies the ownership of, the sovereignty over and/or the human relationships relative to ‘place’.
Even so, Launceston’s placedness was not entirely tied up in its utility. On board HMS Lady Nelson in 1804 William Collins, surveyed The Tamar, or as he called it the Harbour of Port Dalrymple. In regard to the North Esk he writes “On my return I examined the Arm taking a S.W. direction; upon opening the entrance I observed a large fall of water over rocks, near a quarter of a Mile up a strait Gully, between perpendicular Rocks, about one hundred and fifty feet high; the beauty of the Scene is probably not surpass’d in the World; this great Waterfall or Cataract is most likely one of the greatest sources of the beautiful, River, every part of which abounds with Swans, Ducks, and other kinds of Wildfowl.”
Later in the year, on December 6, 1804, Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson, recently appointed Governor of Northern van Diemen’s Land, wrote of his first experience of Collin’s South West Arm, “The Entrance to the first fall is picturesque beyond description: the Stupendous Columns of Basaltes on both Sides, together with the narrow entrance up to the Cataract, has a very grand appearance, and what made it more so was the number of Black Swans, who could not fly, in the Smooth Water close to the fall; ... “
Collins and Paterson were revelling in the sublime vista as much as the fecundity and the resource potential of the place. Possibly, for the brief time it took to assess this palawa place, this ponrabbel place, there was a meeting of two sensibilities and well before one dominated the other. Even so, the Anglocentric belief systems, and the imperatives of elsewhere, were clearly ascendant.
The European imperative of place ownership is encoded in placenaming. Names and place descriptions are ancient forms of geographical information transmission. Placenaming assists us in navigating our way through physical and cultural landscapes and its functions over time as a way of marking locations that have ownerships attached to them and places that have cultural or spiritual significance embedded within them.
Placenaming conveys a geographic feature’s, a place’s, identity and cultural context and especially so when it comes to placescaping. This information is intended to pass from person to person, group to group and generation to generation. Likewise, this 'place knowledge' is integral to navigation and the negotiation of one’s place in the world. Placenaming, and thus placemaking too, evolves from simple word of mouth transactions, to hand drawings and paper maps. Currently, it also applies to sophisticated real-time 21st Century digital manifestations relevant to cultural landscapes and the placescaping and placemaking that go on in them.
Here the underlying cultural imperative is that places belong to people, groups of people, nations, empires even.
Conversely, in Aboriginal cultural settings, people belong to and in places, and in ways that are timeless and with a connectivity that cannot be contested. They are a part of the ecosystem; they coexist; they have dynamic and interfacing relationships in place; they understand themselves as a part of the ecosystem rather than separate to it. Here people are ‘place literate’ – or put another way, ‘landliterate’ and thus cognisant of a place’s health or ill health. Quite apart from anything else, landliteracy is a survival strategy. It is to do with being in the world that depends upon mutual coexistence and that is understood and managed in acknowledgement of the closed loop humanity has a part to play in.
Currently, the incompatibility and the apparent irreconcilability of the two conflicted cultural paradigms in Tasmania, on The Tamar and within ponrabbel, is delivering negative dividends. palawa ponrabbel placescaping was essentially a closed loop eco-system – and a largely self sustaining system. In contrast post European settlement Launcestonian placescaping increasingly became a place that was/is an open exit cum entry point with new economic inputs entering from, and their outputs going to, ‘elsewhere’.
European settlement opened the palawa closed loop and converted a ‘cultural placescape’ into a translocated economy with agronomy, commerce, social engineering and technology working together to reconfigure the placescaping at the confluence of two river catchments.
Unpicking the current cultural landscape, geography and the placescaping that is Launceston, and deeply mapping the underlying placescaping that was ponrabbel, we unavoidably bump up against multiple layers of divergence.
Within largely incompatible cultural paradigms, in one model ‘ownership of place’ is an imperative, whilst in the other, ‘ownership’ is largely an alien concept – in one, places belong to people ... in the other, people belong in/to places.
Nonetheless, in both paradigms, humanity’s attachment to ‘place’ is fundamental and culturally defined.
Like the collision of ‘the salt’ and ‘the fresh’ in ponrabbel in 1806 there was a collision of cultural paradigms that impacted upon, not only the ponrabbel cum Launceston cultural landscape, but its ecology, geography and topography as well.
Prior to European settlement what was to become a Eurocentric Launcestonian cultural landscape can be imagined in its palawa context as a network of trails and waterways shared by macropods, wombats, emus, waterbirds and so on plus Aboriginal people – and in splendid isolation for at least eight millennia.
ponrabbel was clearly a managed placescape, and even if intuitively, there was purpose to the management regime. Increasingly, European settlement and colonisation changed those management and cultural imperatives that shaped place. And, it fundamentally reshaped it.
Landliteracy, palawa landliteracy, palawa capacity to read place, was not interrogated in any depth by the new arrivals to ponrabbel. Rather, their Eurocentric understandings from ‘elsewhere’ prevailed and their ‘Launceston’ was imagined as a military outpost, a penitentiary, potential farmland, mercantile centre, port and eventually it became an industrial zone.
In the globalised 20th Century Launceston the ‘city’ appeared much as any urban landscape in the so-called ‘developed world’. In Tasmania’s Launceston there are streetscapes and architectures to be found almost anywhere albeit that there are local and idiosyncratic variations that lend a sense of place.
However, the confluence of two river catchments with an estuary is still place defining. The spectre of ‘the 100 year flood’, indeed any flood at all, and the ‘blight of the silt’ are omnipresent … idiosyncratic even. If there is consistent effort expended attempting to engineer “solutions to the problem” it is place defining.
Time is yet to overcome the place’s histories, palawa realities, colonial histories and global cultural dynamics, defined as they are by the imperatives of ‘elsewhereness’. The prospect of the place imagined as Launceston ever becoming absolutely idiosyncratic shrinks over time as technologies continue to bring disparate places and cultural imperatives closer and closer together.
Ray Norman February 2016
The mapping here is ‘deep’ in so much as it is inclusive of all the phenomena that constitute ‘place’ – landforms, resources, populations, habitats, environments, cultural sensibilities, stories, etc. The mapping brings with it a kind of scientific compulsion to gather up multidimensional classes of information. It’s an open question as to whether that has yet been achieved.
Unsurprisingly ‘water’ is place defining and in multidimensional ways. Likewise, the various shifts in meaning relative to the changing understandings invested in a place’s amenity values, water sources come charged with cultural values and social obligations. Equally, in cultural landscapes, and in the cultural imperatives invested in them, water is a no small consideration.
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Catchment 43 is a place that might be understood, even if somewhat differently, as ponrabbel if we invoke palawa-kani, Tasmanian Aboriginal language, and thus invoke palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal!) cultural imperatives. Here palawa understandings and palawa knowledge systems created a cultural landscape. ponrabbel is a palawa understanding and imagining of place and the place’s utility and amenity.
Putting colonial and palawa imperatives to one side for just a moment, the naming of a ‘place’ is unavoidably invested with layers of cultural narratives. Likewise the ascribing of numbers carries a narrative – it’s just another narrative. And, it’s so even if it’s ostensibly to play some role as a part of some ‘scientific cum ecological effort’ to better understand, disguise, soften, moderate perhaps, some exploitive purpose. Nonetheless here the ‘agenda’ comes with a level of universal transparency of a kind – and with a hypothesis of uncontestability.
While ‘numbering’ seems to carry the implications of detached precision, nevertheless the presumed lack of ambiguity is ultimately a somewhat complex and impossible notion. It is not so precise in fact and in the end it is wide open to interpretation. Numbering, strategically, and to some extent blatantly, has a kind of currency that links it to modernity and contemporaneous understandings. Yet it doesn’t (hasn’t?) really fundamentally changed the imperatives of placedness when we think about water catchments and the amenity bound up in them.
The naming, the numbering, imposes and implies connectivity to, a reliance upon, and a sense of purpose relative to placespecific locations. In the end, when stripped down to the supposed fundamental necessities, the dispassionate essentials, numbering simply swaps one kind of cultural imperative for another – one belief system for another … one knowledge system for another … one cultural paradigm for another.
The Tamar River was named by Van Diemen’s Land’s colonists after an ‘elsewhere place’, the River Tamar in Cornwall. That river in South West England itself, apparently, carries an elsewhere name.
Colonel William Paterson named what was to become an important colonial Van Diemen’s Land waterway, harbour and port in December 1804. By so doing he was paying respect to some elsewhere imperatives and sensibilities – and arguably imaginings of home. The naming here assumed that there was a void to be filled but the truth was otherwise.
Despite its name ‘the Tamar’ is not actually a river, it’s a saltwater tidal estuary and when it comes to ‘placedness’ this is not insignificant.
The name ‘Tamar’ is said to have its origins in antiquity and thought to mean "great water". The Tamar is one of several British rivers whose ancient names are assumed by some to be derived from a prehistoric ‘river word’ assumed to mean, "dark flowing". Likewise, it seems that these places have been deemed to have human and/or spiritual cum supernatural qualities of some kind.
Yet, like the invocation of Aboriginal naming, palawa-kani naming, such assumptions, by the time they are made, are by-and-large made from outside a cultural perspective and without reliable cultural contextualisation. Thus ‘the naming’ is somehow empty and decorative. Placenaming is a troublesome business.
In Tasmania, and in the language of another time and elsewhere places, ‘the Tamar’ is deliberately invested with cultural sensibilities assumed to be universal at some subliminal level and fitting well enough in an elsewhere and empty place, a cultureless place – someplace where the terra nullius idea could be assumed to have credence.
Except in politics, the assumed transplantablity of culture and its placedness is a somewhat bizarre idea. In Western language systems the concept of places as Proper nouns, the asserted uniqueness of place, is at once sustainable and untenable. Putting aside the anthropomorphism of a kind that seems to be in play with ‘elsewhere placedness’ looking to reinvent elsewhere as ‘home’ it is worth looking to Indigenous sensibilities, knowledge systems and belief systems for some guidance. Aboriginal placedness belongs to, and in, places and perhaps it offers more sustainable understandings of the places they belong to and that we belong to – eventually.
In one sense, in Tasmania, a quest for sustainable placedness might prove profitable as there is 40,000 plus years of human habitation to draw upon – and approximately 8,000 years of that in splendid isolation. In another sense it’s a quest blighted by the lack of dispassionate scholarly observation, research and information gathering to underpin the visualisations and contemporary imaginings.
Largely, in places like Launceston in a 21st C context, we are very often left with the speculative and hypothetical gleanings and imaginings of colonists with something other than a scholarly quest for knowledge on their minds.
Nevertheless, scholarship is not entirely absent but it remains the case that the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was decimated and dispossessed in about four generations. Too few questions were asked and too many assumptions were made – time bears this out.
At the same time Western ‘civilisations’ were breaking new ground; crossing new frontiers; inventing new ways to be in the world; overturning past imperatives; and doing so largely careless of what was being displaced in the wake of the so called ‘enlightenment’.
The confrontation with the rhetoric of genocide played out in WW2’s Holocaust and elsewhere has its resonances in Britain’s colonial cum genocidal cum ethnocidal past in Tasmania. All this leaves its imprint on places like riverbanks, upon waterways and within placescapes that were shaped by different albeit largely ignored cultural sensibilities – and to some degree, indelibly so in the ways cultural imperatives change … and as quickly as it turns out that they have.
In 1803 in the British colonial outpost on this island that we know as Tasmania, and by 1806 in the settlement now known as Launceston, there was a devastating and cataclysmic cultural collision. When the colonisers arrived there was an Aboriginal population in Van Diemen’s Land numbered in the tens of thousands that included at least nine culturally and linguistically distinct and self-sustaining cultural groups. Within four generations that population had been decimated. Likewise, the cultural placescaping that had sustained Aboriginal people for 40,000 years prior to colonisation was being overrun and in places carelessly pillaged. All of this was being played out in Catchment 43; in and around ponrabbel and on ‘The Tamar’.
At the end of the conflict contemporaneously known as the ‘Black War’ in the 1820s, just a generation into the prevailing colonial imperatives, resources were finding their way onto ships headed to other colonial outposts in the Antipodes, to the ‘motherland’ and to elsewhere. .
Colonisation was both exploiting and utterly overturning palawa placescaping. The placescaping of ponrabbel, the palawa placescaping at the confluence of the two Esks, and The Tamar, was transposed into what essentially became, among other things, a colonial port – an exit and entry point to and from elsewhere.
Here, speculatively, it might be more profitable to understand ‘ponrabbel’ as being adjectival rather than finding some parallel Anglocentric placenaming where ‘property’ is the dominant factor behind the naming. Hence we might imagine ponrabbel as speaking more loudly of the qualities a place embodies, the amenity it offers, rather than who owns and occupies it – describing its power rather than the powers/authority humanity has over it.
Clearly the idea of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction is a myth, and undeniably there are enduring Aboriginal communities whose ancestors had escaped the attempted ethnic cleansing of the 1830s. Nonetheless, the devastating scale of the infamous Tasmanian genocide is so striking that it cannot be ignored. Importantly, the concept of complete extinction points to a central feature of the Van Diemen’s Land genocide. Moreover, it was fully reported and well understood in the drawing rooms, the colonial administrations and the ‘halls of power’ in the ‘colonial motherland’. This was not some unfortunate calamity in the most far-flung colonial outpost, it was a story that was told and retold at home. It was a story that was variously accommodated and understood throughout the entire British colonial enterprise.
In the colonial outpost of Van Diemen’s Land’s Launceston, and from early on, penetrable placescaping was being transformed into a military camp; a gaol; a network of farms; a larder; a mining centre of a kind; a harbour; a colonial outpost and port; a displaced Anglocentric community; and all this with the makings of a globalised city – an end point now realised in 2016, if not an aspiration in 1806.
So, if the notion of the terra nullius idea lacks substance in its implication that ponrabbel was "nobodies land"; like it had never had any prior sovereignty over it, expressly or implicitly; and thus, by occupation and default, it had became British by default; what indeed was the status of ponrabbel and who owned or governed it?
Was it anything that could be determined by deeming? Of course it was, and simply because colonial enterprise depends entirely upon it being so.
Although many people at the time terra nullius was proclaimed by the colonial Governor Bourke, 10 October 1835, recognised that the Aboriginal occupants had rights to the land, this was not reflected in colonial law. Despite the fact that Aboriginal rights to land was confirmed by the British House of Commons in 1837, the law nonetheless followed and almost always applied the terra nullius principle expressed in Bourke’s Proclamation.
Thus the long dark colonial shadow cast by the terra nullius idea fell heavily upon ponrabbel until the Australian High Court’s decision in the Eddie Mabo Case in 1992. Even so, irrevocably it seems, the Mabo decision to acknowledge prior ownerships has had no real impact upon ponrabbel and how it is imagined at the confluence of three waterways. The waterway remains but ponrabbel, the cultural landscape, has been overrun, radically reshaped and obliterated by colonial enterprise.
How might ponrabbel be better understood? As discussed earlier, Indigenous understandings of ‘place’ are distinctly different from those that inform Western Anglocentric ‘placenaming’. Western placenaming aims to, via the linguistic device of the proper noun, assert uniqueness. Simultaneously it implies the ownership of, the sovereignty over and/or the human relationships relative to ‘place’.
Even so, Launceston’s placedness was not entirely tied up in its utility. On board HMS Lady Nelson in 1804 William Collins, surveyed The Tamar, or as he called it the Harbour of Port Dalrymple. In regard to the North Esk he writes “On my return I examined the Arm taking a S.W. direction; upon opening the entrance I observed a large fall of water over rocks, near a quarter of a Mile up a strait Gully, between perpendicular Rocks, about one hundred and fifty feet high; the beauty of the Scene is probably not surpass’d in the World; this great Waterfall or Cataract is most likely one of the greatest sources of the beautiful, River, every part of which abounds with Swans, Ducks, and other kinds of Wildfowl.”
Later in the year, on December 6, 1804, Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson, recently appointed Governor of Northern van Diemen’s Land, wrote of his first experience of Collin’s South West Arm, “The Entrance to the first fall is picturesque beyond description: the Stupendous Columns of Basaltes on both Sides, together with the narrow entrance up to the Cataract, has a very grand appearance, and what made it more so was the number of Black Swans, who could not fly, in the Smooth Water close to the fall; ... “
Collins and Paterson were revelling in the sublime vista as much as the fecundity and the resource potential of the place. Possibly, for the brief time it took to assess this palawa place, this ponrabbel place, there was a meeting of two sensibilities and well before one dominated the other. Even so, the Anglocentric belief systems, and the imperatives of elsewhere, were clearly ascendant.
The European imperative of place ownership is encoded in placenaming. Names and place descriptions are ancient forms of geographical information transmission. Placenaming assists us in navigating our way through physical and cultural landscapes and its functions over time as a way of marking locations that have ownerships attached to them and places that have cultural or spiritual significance embedded within them.
Placenaming conveys a geographic feature’s, a place’s, identity and cultural context and especially so when it comes to placescaping. This information is intended to pass from person to person, group to group and generation to generation. Likewise, this 'place knowledge' is integral to navigation and the negotiation of one’s place in the world. Placenaming, and thus placemaking too, evolves from simple word of mouth transactions, to hand drawings and paper maps. Currently, it also applies to sophisticated real-time 21st Century digital manifestations relevant to cultural landscapes and the placescaping and placemaking that go on in them.
Here the underlying cultural imperative is that places belong to people, groups of people, nations, empires even.
Conversely, in Aboriginal cultural settings, people belong to and in places, and in ways that are timeless and with a connectivity that cannot be contested. They are a part of the ecosystem; they coexist; they have dynamic and interfacing relationships in place; they understand themselves as a part of the ecosystem rather than separate to it. Here people are ‘place literate’ – or put another way, ‘landliterate’ and thus cognisant of a place’s health or ill health. Quite apart from anything else, landliteracy is a survival strategy. It is to do with being in the world that depends upon mutual coexistence and that is understood and managed in acknowledgement of the closed loop humanity has a part to play in.
Currently, the incompatibility and the apparent irreconcilability of the two conflicted cultural paradigms in Tasmania, on The Tamar and within ponrabbel, is delivering negative dividends. palawa ponrabbel placescaping was essentially a closed loop eco-system – and a largely self sustaining system. In contrast post European settlement Launcestonian placescaping increasingly became a place that was/is an open exit cum entry point with new economic inputs entering from, and their outputs going to, ‘elsewhere’.
European settlement opened the palawa closed loop and converted a ‘cultural placescape’ into a translocated economy with agronomy, commerce, social engineering and technology working together to reconfigure the placescaping at the confluence of two river catchments.
Unpicking the current cultural landscape, geography and the placescaping that is Launceston, and deeply mapping the underlying placescaping that was ponrabbel, we unavoidably bump up against multiple layers of divergence.
Within largely incompatible cultural paradigms, in one model ‘ownership of place’ is an imperative, whilst in the other, ‘ownership’ is largely an alien concept – in one, places belong to people ... in the other, people belong in/to places.
Nonetheless, in both paradigms, humanity’s attachment to ‘place’ is fundamental and culturally defined.
Like the collision of ‘the salt’ and ‘the fresh’ in ponrabbel in 1806 there was a collision of cultural paradigms that impacted upon, not only the ponrabbel cum Launceston cultural landscape, but its ecology, geography and topography as well.
Prior to European settlement what was to become a Eurocentric Launcestonian cultural landscape can be imagined in its palawa context as a network of trails and waterways shared by macropods, wombats, emus, waterbirds and so on plus Aboriginal people – and in splendid isolation for at least eight millennia.
ponrabbel was clearly a managed placescape, and even if intuitively, there was purpose to the management regime. Increasingly, European settlement and colonisation changed those management and cultural imperatives that shaped place. And, it fundamentally reshaped it.
Landliteracy, palawa landliteracy, palawa capacity to read place, was not interrogated in any depth by the new arrivals to ponrabbel. Rather, their Eurocentric understandings from ‘elsewhere’ prevailed and their ‘Launceston’ was imagined as a military outpost, a penitentiary, potential farmland, mercantile centre, port and eventually it became an industrial zone.
In the globalised 20th Century Launceston the ‘city’ appeared much as any urban landscape in the so-called ‘developed world’. In Tasmania’s Launceston there are streetscapes and architectures to be found almost anywhere albeit that there are local and idiosyncratic variations that lend a sense of place.
However, the confluence of two river catchments with an estuary is still place defining. The spectre of ‘the 100 year flood’, indeed any flood at all, and the ‘blight of the silt’ are omnipresent … idiosyncratic even. If there is consistent effort expended attempting to engineer “solutions to the problem” it is place defining.
Time is yet to overcome the place’s histories, palawa realities, colonial histories and global cultural dynamics, defined as they are by the imperatives of ‘elsewhereness’. The prospect of the place imagined as Launceston ever becoming absolutely idiosyncratic shrinks over time as technologies continue to bring disparate places and cultural imperatives closer and closer together.
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| 21st Century Launceston ... ponrabbel lost |
Ray Norman February 2016
