Uncanny Brisbane: new ways of looking at urban indigenous place

Revealing new types and forms of place and place networks can render a place ‘uncanny’ leaving the mainstream unsettled and disturbed from its previously fixed and secure colonial version of the past. These forms of place are created and used by contemporary urban Indigenous people both as part of their daily personal lives, and as part of their self-consciously constructed Indigenous identities with social and political motives. The author’s current research into Indigenous places in suburban Brisbane reveals a set of places and networks which are both unsettling to the mainstream history of Brisbane’s origins and continue to offer alternative ways of inhabiting, valuing and using the city. New versions of the traditional meeting and gathering places are being created, maintaining and renewing traditions in the suburban landscape. Contemporary types of places are also created which have no equivalent in the traditional past, but support traditional values of holding community and kin together, in the multi-cultural suburban context. Indigenous geographies and places are both affirming traditional Indigenous place systems, and creating new versions of Indigenous place, with unique and specific forms in the suburban context. This paper will examine initial findings from fieldwork currently being undertaken in Inala, on Brisbane’s South West edge. It will reveal that far from being ‘not proper blackfellas’ Indigenous people in suburban Brisbane have a proud and continuing heritage of place, which is parallel to and unsettling for, the settler version of Brisbane