Counter-mapping : New South Wales & Southeast Asia

The relevance of counter-mapping to the Indigenous people of Southeast Asia and Australia derives from their shared need to be able to depict the topographic dimensions of their culture in terms that are intelligible to those empowered others with whom they must negotiate their continued existence. These Indigenous minorities have been living in the shadow of dominant cultures and polities (colonial and post-colonial) for many generations and their survival has depended heavily upon their accumulated knowledge of these dominant cultures and polities. The Aboriginal people of coastal NSW have needed, for instance, to find space for themselves in the interstices of the white colonial cadastre and have thus acquired a knowledge of white cadastral boundaries, categories of Crown reservation, and the personalities and attitudes of white landholders over extensive tracts of terrain – a knowledge that is superior to that of many white citizens. If Indigenous minorities have had to learn the spatial ‘language’ of those who dominate, they have also needed to be aware of and sensitive to the ways in which their own cultures are read by dominant cultures and polities. While colonial society in NSW viewed the spirituality of the ‘traditional’ Aboriginal Dreaming as legitimate and authentic it has tended to ridicule contemporary Aboriginal belief in the supernatural. The denigration of contemporary Aboriginal spirituality occurred not just at the hands of Christian missionaries, school teachers and government officials in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In more recent times, many white anthropologists and heritage practitioners have tended to view contemporary Aboriginal ascriptions of ‘sacredness’ to places in the landscape with suspicion unless they are authenticated in the early ethnography. One Aboriginal response to this is a form of self-censorship in which contemporary spirituality is edited out of the version of their culture which is made available to certain white researchers. This is particularly noticeable in the heritage field where Aboriginal people appear to go along with, and even participate in, heritage mapping exercises in which archaeological sites (mostly pre-contact) are recorded in their thousands but sites of contemporary spiritual significance rarely make an appearance despite them being a common topic in local Aboriginal discourse. I draw attention to this here, in my conclusion, because it serves as a caution against a too simplistic idea of counter-mapping purely as a transaction involving two sides: the locally disenfranchised and the external power. Things are never that simple.