Brushing against the grain: excavating for aboriginal-European interaction on the colonial frontier in Western Victoria, Australia

© 2000 Dr. Nathan WolskiThis thesis demonstrates the possibility and value of a postcolonial archaeology of the contact period in Australia. To date, the major obstacle confronting Australian contact archaeology has been the inability to systematically locate contact sites. In order to overcome this difficultly, a model for contact period site location is developed for the pastoral frontier of western Victoria. Outstations (shepherd’s huts) are presented as a crucial resource for archaeologists seeking windows into the early contact period. These humble structures were the locus of a wide variety of Aboriginal-European interactions, ranging from violence to friendship, and functioned as a tangible incarnation of the frontier. Excavation of one of these structures (Campbell’s Outstation) is described with results confirming the presence of Aboriginal people around this structure during contact times. These results are compared with the excavations at two other frontier sites – a fringe camp (Carr’s Plain Mound) and a refuge site (Kinghorn 12 Stone Hut Site). Residue analysis of glass artefacts from all three sites furnishes details of indigenous technological and subsistence practices previously inaccessible to archaeological research. These analyses also provide the methodological breakthrough to authenticate the Aboriginality of these sites. The results of these analyses indicate the need for a reorientation in the ways archaeologists in Australia have approached the Aboriginal manufacture and utilisation of glass artefacts. Contact archaeologists must face the fact that many Aboriginal glass artefacts are no more than non-retouched shards. As such, it is argued that a whole range of sites previously unconsidered may well be Aboriginal sites of the contact period. The analysis of these three sites demonstrates the unique ability of archaeology to penetrate beyond the epistemological limit of the historical record and access aspects of the colonised’s life that are rarely if ever preserved. In particular, archaeological research forcefully highlights the need to consider ‘everyday resistance’ in our rewriting of the Australian past. Archaeology, it is suggested, can play a crucial role in the postcolonial endeavour to retrieve the effaced voice of the subaltern