Dancing in the park

Date

November 10, 2012

Jenny Brown

Many ancient Aboriginal gathering sites remain public spaces.

The corroboree tree at St Kilda Junction. Photo: Gary Medlicott

An admittedly esoteric strand of archaeology proposes that physical landscapes, even heavily altered landscapes, can sometimes hold the resonances of past cultural uses and spiritual associations.
It's an ''out there'' idea and yet, in looking around the parts of Melbourne that early white settlers recorded as having cultural significance for the traditional Wurundjeri or Boonwurrung Aboriginal owners, there is often an eerie coincidence that many have remained as public open space, or have become the sites of important public buildings and institutions.
Because they attracted unusually large gatherings of natives, white diarists paid closest attention to camping, meeting and corroboree places. A big corroboree was held on the site of Parliament House in 1836. In the following year, colonial police were authorised to break up such ''ngarrga'' or dance celebrations.

William Barak's Corroboree is auctioned. Photo: James Davies

But still they happened. Port Melbourne's founder, Wilbraham Liardet, made a retrospective painting of a full-moon corroboree involving 50 men he had witnessed on the site of South Melbourne Town Hall in 1840.

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A corroboree also took place on the sites of Melbourne Town Hall and the Supreme Court, and on the hill now occupied by Government House. The MCG parklands hosted major moonlight parties, and St Kilda Junction's famous corroboree tree was preserved because pioneer locals could recall scenes of stamping feet ''that haunted the soul for many years after''.
The associations of sacred sites to what later became sporting fields can be manipulated to suggest there might well be a deep resonance to feet moving in circles: Kooyong Park in Hawthorn, and Victoria Park where the Collingwood Football Club played for more than a century, were both corroboree grounds. So were Como Park and Fawkner Park in South Yarra.
An onlooker at Fawkner Park in the 1850s described men with bodies streaked in red and white ochre, dancing ''like skeletons around the blazing fire, shouting and brandishing their long spears while the lubras chanted and played on drums made of wild skins of animals''.
Could the idea of memory-embedded landscape also be drawn with contemporary commercial stamping grounds? Chapel Street is recorded as a corroboree place. Could the link be made between sacred sites of different cultural and spiritual denominations?
Regular corroborees took place on one of Kew's highest points, where Xavier College's Chapel now stands, and on the spot where Christ Church, South Yarra, holds the high ground.
Full moons and high places were among the preferred times and places. Malvern Town Hall sits over a corroboree ground. And around the 137-metre-high ancient volcanic cone of Mount Cooper in what is now Bundoora Park, numerous stone tool quarries, scar trees and artefact scatters suggest a heavily used celebration place. The name Nunawading translates as ''a battle or ceremonial ground''.
In 1857, a young boy watched in awe as 200 ''Gippsland blacks'' headed through Elsternwick towards an inter-tribal dance gathering held on the grounds that Rippon Lea estate now occupies. He never forgot ''the strange grave dances of the corroboree circle''.
In Burnley Park, Richmond, in 1926, another young lad climbed the signposted ''corroboree tree'' and to his amazement retrieved a boomerang that had become wedged in its branches some time in the measureless past when the Kulin, ''the people'', were still dancing.


http://news.domain.com.au/domain/neighbourhoods/dancing-in-the-park-20121109-291hz.html

Seeing the wood for the trees

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Saturday 16 November 2013 1:30PM (view full episode)

Image: Alongside the railway in Burnley, Victoria. Some of the trees in the area are Aboriginal scarred trees, others are caused naturally. (James Pattison; ABC) Link to larger image.

In just one of the countless bends of the Yarra River that snakes its way around Melbourne, the trees tell a story.
The red gums bear old scars where the Wurundjeri people, prior to European occupation, cut away the bark to make canoes. Since the process doesn’t kill the tree this was the district’s first sustainable timber industry.


http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/seeing-the-wood-for-the-trees/5083936

Freeway, Travancore

Enterprise Drive

In Scartree Court

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=3EwulzuN4OsC&dq=liminal+places&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (Google eBook)

Hazel Andrews, Les Roberts

Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities. The ritual, performative and embodied geographies of borderzones, non-places, transitional spaces, or ‘spaces in-between’ are often discussed in terms of the liminal, yet there have been few attempts to problematize the concept, or to rethink how ideas of the liminal might find critical resonance with contemporary developments in the study of place, space and mobility.
Liminal Landscapes fills this void by bringing together variety of new and emerging methodological approaches of liminality from varying disciplines to explore new theoretical perspectives on mobility, space and socio-cultural experience. By doing so, it offers new insight into contemporary questions about technology, surveillance, power, the city, and post-industrial modernity within the context of tourism and mobility.
The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, film, media and cultural studies, art and visual culture, and tourism studies. It brings together recent research from scholars with international reputations in the fields of tourism, mobility, landscape and place, alongside the work of emergent scholars who are developing new insights and perspectives in this area.
This timely intervention is the first collection to offer an interdisciplinary account of the intersection between liminality and landscape in terms of space, place and identity. It therefore charts new directions in the study of liminal spaces and mobility practices and will be valuable reading for range of students, researchers and academics interested in this field.

Thomastown, behind Western Ring Road:

Plenty River bend, Glenauburn Park, Lower Plenty:

http://greensboroughhistorical.blogspot.com.au/