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Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station: Redrawing Boundaries
Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station Redrawing Boundaries Author:Fiona Davis In 1938, the anthropologist Norman Tindale gave a classroom of young Aboriginal children a set of crayons and asked them to draw. For the most part the children, residents of a government-run station Cummeragunja, drew pictures of aspects of white civilisation boats, houses and flowers. What now to make of the records of this event? Were they e... more »ncouraged, pressured, or did they draw of their own volition? Did the fact that they were Aboriginal change the meaning of their art, as they sketched out this ubiquitous colonial imagery and coloured the spaces inside the images they had drawn? Colouring within the Lines traces Cummeragunjas history from its establishment in the 1880s until the 1960s, when Aboriginal residents regained a level of control over the land. Taking in oral history traditions shared by Cummeragunjas Aboriginal elders reveals the competing interests of settler governments, scientific and religious organisations and nearby settler communities; the nature of these interests have broad implications for understanding settler colonial history. The scene of children drawing was indicative of the process of negotiation and appropriation that Cummeragunja people undertook from the time the station began. Never mere victims, the childrens illustrations were part of a trajectory of Aboriginal activity on Cummeragunja that sought to make the best of what they had in white society, within the context of settler colonialism. Just like the boundaries in the drawings, white society set limits on Aboriginal behaviour and movement, but Aboriginal people had agency within and, at times, beyond these lines.« less