Colonial Australia

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Colonial Australia
A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove by
Thomas Watling, 1794
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Terra Australis Incognita (unknown southern land)
The first recorded ship to chart the Australian
coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the
Duyfken (Little Dove) in 1606. Captained by
Willem Janszoon and built in the Netherlands in
1595 the ship was just 20 metres from stem to
stern, and 6 metres across the beam, with a
draught (the depth of water it needed to float
in) of only 2.45 metres.
Duyfken (Little Dove) replica
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Abel Tasman - 1642 voyage
VOC Captain Abel Tasman charted parts of the
north, west, and southern coasts of Australia
which was then known as New Holland.
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New Holland
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James Cook
In 1770 the Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook
charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM
Barque Endeavour Cook claimed the east coast
for King George III of England on 22nd August
1770, at Possession Island. This new territory
was named 'New South Wales
Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby
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The First Fleet 1788
Captain Arthur Phillip
New South Wales
The First Fleet, comprising 11 ships and around
1,350 people, arrived at Botany Bay between 18th
and 20th January 1788. The area was deemed to
be unsuitable for settlement and they moved north
to Port Jackson on 26th January 1788
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Matthew Flinders
The process of British colonisation of Western
Australia began in 1791 when George Vancouver
claimed the Albany region in the name of King
George III.

• Matthew Flinders was the first person to
  circumnavigate the continent 1801-1803
• He named it Terra Australis or 'Australia
• The name Australia was adopted for the continent
  in 1817

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Modern Australia
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Archaeology in Australia

• Prehistoric Archaeology (the archaeology of
  Aboriginal peoples from c. 50,000 before present
  to AD 1788)
• Historical Archaeology (the archaeology of
  Australia after permanent European Settlement in
  1788)
• Maritime Archaeology
• In practice these categories often overlap
  within Cultural Heritage Management, which
  encompasses Aboriginal, Historical and Maritime
  sites

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http//www.asha.org.au/ The Australian Society
for Historical Archaeology was founded in 1970 to
promote the study of historical archaeology in
Australia. In 1991 the Society was extended to
include New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region
generally, and its name was changed to the
Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology
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1970s Historical Archaeology

• Early European settlements
• Port Essington Northern Territory
• Corinella Victoria
• Homesteads
• Elizabeth farm - NSW
• Old Saumarez Station NSW
• Industrial sites
• James Kings pottery NSW
• Fossil beach cement work Victoria
• Aboriginal sites
• Whybalenna, Tasmania

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The Archaeology of Convicts

• 161,000 convicts transported between 1788- 1867
• Up until 1840 most buildings, roads, bridges
  built by convicts
• By the mid-1830s only around 6 per cent of the
  convict population were 'locked up
• The majority of convicts worked on projects for
  free settlers and the authorities around the
  nation

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Archaeology of convict-built structures
Sydney The First Government House, Sydney
Rural New South Wales Great North Road
Tasmania Port Arthur
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The First Government House, Sydney, 1789-1846
On 4th June 1789, just sixteen months after the
first landing at Sydney Cove, the early settlers
gathered to celebrate the birthday of King George
III and the grand opening of Government House
The building was designed and built by the
convict brick-maker James Bloodsworth. The use
of brick was initially limited  because of the 
shortage of lime, a key ingredient in making
mortar. Archaeologists have discovered that the
lime used in the first Government House was made
from oyster shells. Government House was used
for 57 years before the old building was
demolished
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The Great North Road
The Great North Road was built by convict labour
, often working in irons, between 1826 and 1836
to connect Sydney with Newcastle and the Upper
Hunter Valley in NSW Much of this engineering
master piece still exists and in parts still
carries traffic
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Great North Road
Grace Karskens University of New South Wales,
Sydney
By juxtaposing the location of different styles
of surviving stonework with the known
distribution of Road Gangs between 1827 and 1832,
she found that a pattern of association between
certain gangs and particular styles emerged. The
Gangs appear to have been organised according to
skills and the difficulty of terrain
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Port Arthur
Port Arthurs Separate Prison was closely
modelled on Pentonville and was known as the
Model Prison. It was built in 184950 with three
wings of cells and a fourth wing containing a
chapel
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Female Factories

• 20 per cent of the first convicts were women
• Women were typically sentenced for periods of 7
  or 14 years, usually for petty theft from their
  employers in England
• The female factories were originally
  profit-making textile factories

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Ross Female Factory, Tasmania
Female convicts were transported to Tasmania
(then called Van Diemen's Land) from 1803, when
the colony was founded, to 1853
The Ross Female Factory operated towards the end
of the transportation period from March 1848
until November 1854. It served as a factory as
well as hiring depot, an overnight station for
female convicts travelling between settlements, a
lying-in hospital and a nursery.
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Ross Female Factory, Tasmania
Eleanor Casella University of Manchester
Solitary cells
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Ross Female Factory, Tasmania

• Networks of underground exchange subverted the
  controlled institutional landscape
• Highest frequency and density of illicit
  artefacts (tobacco and alcohol related) and
  buttons (for exchange) found in Solitary Cells
• While under solitary sentence, the factory
  incorrigibles continued to maintain their
  access to forbidden indulgences, relieving the
  monotonous boredom, cold, and hunger of
  disciplinary confinement with a pipe and a
  bottle
• Eleanor Casella
• Landscapes of Punishment and Resistance p. 117

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Gold mining from 1851
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Dollys Creek, Victoria
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Dollys Creek A Goldfield Community in Victoria
Susan Lawrence La Trobe University Melbourne
Excavation of a miners frame tent encampment
occupied from late-1850s to 1890s homes where
women seem to have lived had most elaborate
assemblagestransfer-patterned tablewaresglass
cake standsfloral wall paperpipe-clay whitened
chimneys with mantel piece and brass
clock Suggests that everyone male and female
- preferred to eat and drink from ceramic plates
and cups, but the tents with women seemed more
intent on pursuing the 19th century ideology of
respectability
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A gold miners tent
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The clock house
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The chimney house
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The Rocks, Sydney
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The Rocks, Sydney (Grace Karskens, again)
Convicts and ex-convicts attempted to refine
their behaviour and eating habits The 700 wooden
bowls and platters sent with the First Fleet were
quickly replaced with decorative ceramics Not
much elaborate tableware prior to 1810, but after
that date gravy boats, milk jugs, sugar bowls and
other fancy settings introduced Drinking however
belonged to an older realm of behaviour and the
habit of passing a bottle or decanter around or
drinking from a shared circling glass (?an
Irish habit) persisted into the 19th century
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Lake Innes Port Macquarie NSW
Privilege and servitude revealed in
archaeological residues.

• Lake Innes Estate flourished in the 1830s,
  declined during the 1840s.
• In its heyday viability was based on the labour
  of transported convicts, but paid free workers
  were also employed.
• A complex social hierarchy, at the top of which
  were the residents of Lake Innes House family
  members and friends of Major Archibald Clunes
  Innes, a retired British army officer who created
  a colonial version of the landed estate that fate
  had denied him in his native Scotland

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Material Culture and Consumer SocietyDependent
Colonies in Colonial Australia
Mark Staniforth, Flinders University, Adelaide

• Research on shipwrecks from the Matthew James
  (1841) in 1974 to the Sydney Cove (1797) in 1994
  led Staniforth to conclude that British imported
  goods were vital to the successful colonization
  of Australia for more than purely economic
  reasons
• to distinguish the colonists from indigenous
  groups
• to reassure the colonists about their place in
  the world
• to help establish the colonists own networks of
  social relations

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Challenging the Great Australian Silence

• The phrase Great Australian Silence was coined
  by W.E.H. Stanner an anthropologist in 1968
• 19th century conceptions of Aboriginal society
  portrayed it as static and primitive the bottom
  rung of the ladder of civilization with Europeans
  at the top
• This view was perpetuated by archaeology and
  anthropology, which searched for the primitive
  and used structural-functionalist models to give
  a static impression of Aboriginal culture
• Even well-meaning attempts to preserve
  disappearing Aboriginal cultures served to
  imply they were the primitive deep foundations
  of the new nation

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Governor Davey's sic Proclamation to the
Aborigines, 1816 Painting - oil painting on
pine board Incorrectly labelled as "Governor
Davey's Proclamation to the Aborigines"
Actually Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur's
proclamation of c.1828-1830
.
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Attempted Genocide
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Aboriginal Resistance
Truganini was a negotiator and spokesperson for
her people. Her mother had been killed by
whalers, her uncle had been shot by a soldier and
three of her sisters had been abducted and sold
to sealers. Her betrothed, Paraweena, was drowned
in the Channel by timber sawyers. In 1838,
Truganini was part of a guerilla war campaign at
Port Philip, Victoria with a group of other
Tasmanian Aborigines. The men were executed in
Melbourne's first public execution. Truganini
returned to Wybaleena in 1842.
Truganini 1812-1876
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Truganini died in 1876. Her skeleton was
displayed at the Tasmanian Museum until 1947.
In 1976 her remains were cremated and scattered
according to her wishes. Samples of her skin
and hair were finally returned from the British
College of Surgeons in 2002. A shell necklace
attributed to Truganini was found in a southern
England museum in 2001.
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Rodney Harrison Christine Williamson
The first book length historical archaeology of
Aboriginal Australia and its application in
researching the shared history of Aboriginal and
settler Australians.
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Kimberley Points
Traditionally, Kimberley points were made from a
variety of fine-grained stone and ranged from
approximately 1 - 8 cm in length. Aboriginal
toolmakers found that glass and ceramic,
including ceramic telegraph line insulators, were
very well suited to the production of Kimberley
points Increased demand - from both Aboriginal
exchange networks and an emergent 'tourist' trade
with non-Aboriginal people led to the refinement
of techniques and their size. Finished glass
points up to 20 cm long have been found.
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Landscape studies
From the late 1980s Aboriginal-European
interaction has been explored in frontier
zones Participation on the cattle industry
offered Aboriginal people a means to remain in
traditional country in co-existence with
settlers, and maintaining their kin
relations Large scale landscape level studies
attempted by prehistorians in Arnhem land,
northern Australia, Aboriginal people gravitated
toward European populations centres and became
sedentary Other studies have explored how
access to traditional sites was cut off following
colonization, or changed in sites that lay
beyond the imperial net
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New studies
In south east Australia most Aboriginals confined
to reserves from the 1860s. Daily life and
experience from that time can be found and
studied in these places, challenging the accounts
of missionaries, etc Where archaeological
representations once stressed the pastness and
stasis Aboriginal culture, they now foreground
regional and temporal variation within Aboriginal
culture over the past 60,000 years, historicizing
our understandings of Aboriginality
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Aboriginal archaeology
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Tim Murray, La Trobe, Melbourne The Archaeology
of Contact in Settler Societies CUP 2004
There is a need to reconcile shared histories
with radically different conceptions of time and
culture, and to acknowledge the European arrival
as an invasion not a neutral colonization of an
empty land This can be difficult some
Aboriginal peoples have adopted a strategy of
refusal rejecting European claims to speak on
their behalf and efforts to construct consensual
narratives of the nation