SEMINAR: Archaeology Seminar Series

This research explores non-indigenous peoples affective responses to Aboriginal heritage within settler colonial landscapes. The study is set on Yorke Peninsula, an agricultural district that yields some of the state's highest wool and grain harvests. The non-indigenous farming community have deep intergenerational ties to the farming land and their settler histories. The Peninsula is also the ancestral country of Narungga people, who have their own profound and ongoing connections to the landscape, seascape, and farming histories.

Despite these similarities, the Narungga and farming community are often perceived as being on opposing sides of a proverbial fence. Historical legacies of racial segregation between the two communities, imposed since European colonisation, result in geographical and social separations that often continue into the present. Underlying this estrangement, the landscape itself contains an assemblage of Narungga and farmers' archaeological cultural heritage, entangling the two communities in complex ways. Using an auto-ethnographic approach, I explore this contemporary 'contact zone', by considering the ways that local Yorke Peninsula residents interact with, and are affected by, Narungga cultural heritage. I reveal some of ways in which Aboriginal sites, objects and sacred places are re-assembled within the social and material networks of rural non-indigenous life, entangled in processes of forgetting and remembering local Aboriginal people's histories, lived experiences, and ongoing struggles for land recognition.