My first field excursion to Kuringai-Chase National Park in early September was a guided tour let by my Anthropology Professor. Preliminary discussions of the tour centered on the retelling of Australia’s dark history to include the injustices inflicted on the marginalized Indigenous populations by their colonial oppressors. Our tour began atop a ledge over looking the bodies of water (Hawkesbury River, Pittwater and Cowan Water) that suround the National Park.
Image one represents one of the many points of entry utilized by European settlers to gain access to the vast Australian landscape. Australia was once believed to be uninhabited prior to the arrival of the first fleet of settlers in the late eighteenth century. In a systematic process …show more content…
On the bus ride back into the city, my professor invited us to reflect on these words and our time at Kuringai. A month passed before I would revisit these ideas. After reading Val Plumwood’s publication, Shadow Places and Politics of Dwelling, these compelling words began to resurface in my mind. This prompted my second visit to Kuringai-Chase National Park, where I spent a great deal of time contemplating the notions of dwelling, attachments to place, identity, consumerism marginalization, and environmental …show more content…
This prompted me to rethink about colonial endeavors. The land and the Aboriginal people were exploited by these western civilizations as a means of expanding their political economy. Operating under the doctrine of terra nullius, the European settlers stripped the land of its preexisting meanings and ascribed onto it their own. What is interesting to think about here are how European settlers imposed their consumerist ways of being onto the landscape and the Indigenous of Australia. These ways of being, as Plumwood mentions, “engender a false consciousness of place”(1). The original meanings ascribed to the land were erased or, rather, undermined by a commodity culture whose limited capacity only allows for place to be conceptualized in terms of its instrumental value. European settlers approached the natural, observable world through the scope of consumerism. Colonial oppressors consumed the land along with the cultural and historical traditions of Aboriginal Australians. Thus, marginalized landscape and Indigenous population served as the sustenance of colonial
Image one represents one of the many points of entry utilized by European settlers to gain access to the vast Australian landscape. Australia was once believed to be uninhabited prior to the arrival of the first fleet of settlers in the late eighteenth century. In a systematic process …show more content…
On the bus ride back into the city, my professor invited us to reflect on these words and our time at Kuringai. A month passed before I would revisit these ideas. After reading Val Plumwood’s publication, Shadow Places and Politics of Dwelling, these compelling words began to resurface in my mind. This prompted my second visit to Kuringai-Chase National Park, where I spent a great deal of time contemplating the notions of dwelling, attachments to place, identity, consumerism marginalization, and environmental …show more content…
This prompted me to rethink about colonial endeavors. The land and the Aboriginal people were exploited by these western civilizations as a means of expanding their political economy. Operating under the doctrine of terra nullius, the European settlers stripped the land of its preexisting meanings and ascribed onto it their own. What is interesting to think about here are how European settlers imposed their consumerist ways of being onto the landscape and the Indigenous of Australia. These ways of being, as Plumwood mentions, “engender a false consciousness of place”(1). The original meanings ascribed to the land were erased or, rather, undermined by a commodity culture whose limited capacity only allows for place to be conceptualized in terms of its instrumental value. European settlers approached the natural, observable world through the scope of consumerism. Colonial oppressors consumed the land along with the cultural and historical traditions of Aboriginal Australians. Thus, marginalized landscape and Indigenous population served as the sustenance of colonial