Abstract
Chapter 5, “Decolonising place”, begins with an overview of the “colonisation project”, viewing it as a special case of dispossession, characterised not just by an unjustifiable appropriation of territory but also by ideological warfare and cultural erasure. In this regard, it will explore the concept of the “wild”, as given meaning by both colonisers and colonised, and utilised in struggles to establish a hegemonic discourse based on the ideology of improvement as a way of justifying a proprietorial relationship to the land. This chapter views decolonisation as a means of calling to account the colonising project, not just in relationship to processes of redress and reparation but also in relationship to discourse, ideology and identity. The decolonisation project has been advanced in huge measure by contemporary assertions of indigenous identity, as indicated in Chapter 4. It is also facilitated by processes of discursive deconstruction guided by indigenous wisdom. The chapter concludes by suggesting that decolonising processes offer a space for the descendants of colonisers to develop hybrid identities which embrace indigenous ways of being, thinking and doing.
Oh wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
Shakespeare: The Tempest
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Notes
- 1.
Brooker, T. (2012). Hamiltons of the world. Hamilton, N.Z.: Hamilton East Rotary Club.
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- 5.
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- 7.
Australians Together (March 8, 2022). Colonisation: Dispossession, disease and direct conflict. Accessed July 18, 2022 at https://www.australianstogether.org.au/discover/australian-history/colonisation/
- 8.
Newman, A. K. (1882). A study of the causes leading to the extinction of the Maori. Trans. N.Z. Inst., 14, pp. 459–477. Newman was president of the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1879 and 1885.
- 9.
Wilkinson, A (2019). “Why Babadook director Jennifer Kent hates period pieces, and why she made one.” Vox. Retrieved July 25, 2022 from https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/31/18197649/nightingale-jennifer-kent-interview-language-gaelic-aboriginal. (Kent would not agree with Wilkinson’s description of the film as a “revenge movie”.)
- 10.
For an account of the debate, see Wood, M. (2000). Conquistadors. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 266–274.
- 11.
- 12.
Kakadu: Land of the Crocodile retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caHtrztOyBM
- 13.
- 14.
For an Australian example, see Denborough, D. (2021). Unsettling Australian histories: Letters to ancestry from a great-great-grandson. Adelaide, SA: Dulwich Centre Foundation.
- 15.
Made in a presentation to Waitohu: Women Reclaiming The Ink, a celebration of mana wāhini hosted by the National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa in October 2020. The reference to traumascapes is from Maria Tumarkin (2005), Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press.
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O’Malley, V. (2020). Historical report on Hamilton street and city names. Retrieved August 9, 2022 from https://4626096.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/4626096/Documents/Website/Historical%20Report%20on%20Hamilton%20Street%20and%20City%20Names%20FINAL.pdf
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Locke, T. (2023). Decolonising Place. In: Sense of Place, Identity and the Revisioning of Curriculum. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 17. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4266-4_5
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