LA CULTURA EN SU DIMENSIÓN FORMAL: EL EJEMPLO DE LA LENGUA

It is instructive to consider just how long there had been pressure from some quarters in Australia for state protection of Aboriginal sites. In 1889 Robert Etheridge wrote that there was so little interest in these remains:

as almost to amount to a national disgrace. Their burial-mounds, "kitchen- middens", and other traces likely to become geologically interesting, are disappearing so fast... that ere long few or no traces will be left.

Etheridge 1889: 15

In the Sydney area the attention given to rock art, most notably by the recording programmes of Campbell, led to the question of its protection being raised in the NSW parliament in 1905 (Hawke 1975: 7-8). The government was prompted to make provision in the Crown Lands Consolidation Act of 1913 for the creation of special reserves (e.g., Bobadeen) for the protection of art sites. Management of these, however, was left in the hands of local government which tended to be 'apathetic' unless it could turn the sites into tourist attractions (McCarthy 1938: 121; Wright

1941: 10). W. J. Walton, an amateur natural historian wrote to Mankind to say that after years of effort to get art sites in Warringah Shire protected three small reserves had been gazetted in 1932 (.Mankind 1932 1 [6]: 144). The Australian Museum at about this time was urging the Chief Secretary to take action to preserve the Brewarrina fish traps - the local Town Council had expressed an interest in such a move (Mankind 1933 1 [7]: 168). It seems that in certain cases, where Aboriginal sites (mainly rock paintings and engravings) were spectacular, accessible, and on public land, local governments were prepared to consider them a local resource and a certain section of the public was interested in visiting them. It is clear, though, that the NSW Government did not consider them a state resource.

Local historical societies and field naturalists' clubs took an interest in the protection o f some art sites as did bush-walkers' clubs (McCarthy 1938: 124). The first bush-walking club in NSW was formed in 1914 and as the movement grew in strength through the 1920s and 30s it engendered an interest in nature conservation (see Thompson 1986) and sometimes, as a corollary, in rock art sites occurring in the bush. (It would be wrong, though, to attribute to the bushwalkers the romantic vision of Aborigines held by the Jindyworobaks). Maps issued to 'hikers' by the Royal National Park Trust and the Railways Department (NSW) showed the location o f rock engravings but no effort was made to protect them (Wright 1941: 10).

In the 1930s the Anthropological Society of NSW mounted a campaign to pressure the government to take responsibility for Aboriginal 'relics'. McCarthy had for some time been disturbed by the destruction of Aboriginal remains, particularly rock art sites, in the course of urban expansion and at the hands of vandals. In collaboration with Professor J.L. Shellshear, a retired anatomist from the University of Hong Kong, who arrived in Sydney in 1936, he began directing the Society's attention to

the need for protective legislation. A plea for legislation received 'strong support' at the Society's AGM in 1937 {Mankind, 1938 2[5]: 138). McCarthy described the current ad hoc system of protection under the 1913 Act as 'extremely unsatisfactory' and insisted upon blanket protection for all 'sites of prehistoric or aboriginal origin' (1938: 121). The ASNSW strategy was to make representations to the government while simultaneously calling on the public to provide it with details of sites under threat. They then canvassed relevant State government departments (particularly the Lands Department, the Public Works Department, and the Main Roads Department) and local governments to take action. McCarthy, meanwhile, through the Australian Museum, in 1939 began submitting copies of protective legislation enacted in Britain, the United States, and South Africa to the Premier's Department. The Government called for a preliminary draft of legislation and this was drawn up by McCarthy and submitted in 1939 (du Cros 1983: 61). But war broke out and the Government

changed in 1941 before any action had been taken. The campaign continued, however, and in 1947 the ASNSW appointed a sub-committee to draw up another draft of legislation which was duly submitted in 1949, again without result.

The ASNSW appears to have been instrumental at the 1937 meeting of ANZAAS in Auckland in having the Council forward a resolution to various governments which called their attention to the 'existing unsatisfactory state of affairs and asked that remedial action be taken’ {Mankind 1938 2[5]: 138). The Australian Anthropological Association, formed in 1939, also provided a means of taking the protection issue to a broader forum (du Cros 1983: 61).

The pressure for legislative protection of Aboriginal remains in NSW thus seems to have been no less intense in the 1930s and 40s than it was in the 1960s (protection was finally enacted in 1970). Sharon Sullivan has maintained that it was not the addition of archaeologists to those demanding legislation which tipped the balance but an awareness by the government of 'growing public interest and support' for

protection; by 1970 'such legislation had become an acceptable social goal' (1975a: 24). I would agree with this but would place 'public interest' and 'social goal' fairly firmly within the context of a shift in the construction of national identity and would suggest that the state was as much leading as being led by public interest.

In 1902 Etheridge called on landholders in Western NSW to send Aboriginal artefacts to the Australian Museum rather than allow them to be 'further disseminated over the world and lost to the people of the State' (see Mankind 1931 1 [ 1]: 6). There is a clear sense here of these artefacts being the property of the nation. They were seen

as the property of science and of the nation but were not seen as the heritage of the nation. The latter embodies the understanding that they are o f us. When the protective legislation was finally passed the rationale was that Aboriginal sites were our

patrimony rather than our property, a distinction which, I maintain, is worth bearing in mind. In the earlier view, Aboriginal artefacts such as those in Museum collections 'are the State collections and the people's collections and are always available for study by workers desiring to do so' (McCarthy 1938: 122). The campaign in the 1940s to have the Customs Regulations amended to prohibit or control the export o f Aboriginal artefacts seems mainly to have been intended to guarantee access to collections by local scholars, a far cry from the spirit of the UNESCO Convention on the Means o f Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer o f Ownership o f Cultural Property (1970) which is concerned with the loss of 'cultural patrimony'. The 1940s concept of property was one which in no way implied a nationalistic identification with the material.

The rejection of European stone artefact typology by Kenyon and the Melbourne Materialist school which Mulvaney saw as informed by a 'bleak nationalism' (1977: 264). But this was the nationalism of distinctive Australian products rather than the nationalism of heritage. Even when remains were referred to as 'national monuments' (McCarthy 1938: 120) or 'national relics' (Wright 1941: 7) this was still not the same thing as 'national heritage'. Writing of a Sydney resident's gift to the State in 1941 of an area of land containing Aboriginal rock engravings, McCarthy extolled him thus: 'Mr Howe was a keen advocate of the permanent preservation of these relics because he realized their great historical and scientific value' (1947: 322). Such a statement would be almost unthinkable at the present time without also invoking their

significance as national heritage. What was missing was the sense of identifying with their Australian essence.

This chapter has aimed to show that Europeans have been able to derive a number of different meanings from the Aboriginal material past. The earliest observers read Aboriginal products as a system of signs allowing Aborigines to be classified in terms of commerce and science. The discourse of natural history continued this process after settlement as did the related though particular discourses of archaeology and

antiquarianism. These discourses could and did coexist, even in the work of the same people, though in the post-war era the totalizing ambition of archaeology saw a hardening of distinctions between proper science and curiosity. In the work o f writers like Clifford (1988) and Thomas (1991) we are offered a vision of objects wherein the solidity lent to them by their material nature belies a surprising degree of instability at

the level of meaning. They readily acquire new meanings as they move from one culture to another and as they move through time: 'As socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in defiance of their material stability' (Thomas 1991: 125). The grafting of the Aboriginal material past onto the Australian national identity is a

striking example of this instability. Objects which only a few decades previously had displayed the inferiority of the Aboriginal 'race' were now transformed into objects which rooted the white Australian nation more firmly into the continent's soil, landscape and history.

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