Nervous Landscapes

Race and Space in Australia

Bibliographic Data

ID20072325
AuthorsD Byrne (0000-0001-9799-8572, corresponding author)
Year2010
Pages103-128
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMaking Settler Colonial Space (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230277946_8
OpenAlexW4251757833
ISBN9780230277946
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited24

It almost goes without saying that racial segregation, by its very nature, is a spatial practice. It is about the separation of people in space and the rules and devices that are set up to achieve this. A segregated society necessitates a segregated landscape and one of my premises in this chapter is that the policies and practices of segregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonial state had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. This chapter is interested in the ways in which an Indigenous minority’s presence in and movement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or constrained by the colonisers. But it is also concerned with ways in which Indigenous people have been able to subvert that system of spatial control, transgressing its numerous finely drawn boundaries, poaching on its preserves, tweaking the nerves of a spatial system which was inherently tense with racial foreboding, paranoia, longing and deprivation. The colonial landscape in Australia was a spatial regime that was always, to borrow Michael Taussig’s term, a ‘nervous system’.1

Archaeology · Cartography · Colonialism · Genealogy · Geography · Indigenous · Race (biology) · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · State (computer science) · Tweaking · Computer Science · Ecology · Engineering · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

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