Ways of whiteness: negotiating settlement agendas in (post)colonial inner Sydney

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2001 Wendy Susan Shaw.The Aboriginal settlement known as ‘The Block’, Aboriginal Redfern or Eveleigh Street, forms an Aboriginal neighbourhood in inner Sydney. Since its deliberate and largely unexpected formalisation in 1973, this urban Aboriginal presence continues to unsettle the largely non-Aboriginal community that surrounds it and geographically binds it in place. The Block was founded as the ‘Black Capital of Australia’ and stakes a claim in the heart of Australia’s first and most prominent city, Sydney. The ‘return’ of Aboriginality, however, to a place from which it had been banished, remains a (post)colonial paradox