PLACE NARRATIVES AND THE ORIGINS OF INNER SYDNEY ABORIGINAL SETTLEMENT, 1972-73

The district of Aboriginal residence in inner Sydney is familiar to Australians throughout the country, but its formative processes are much less widely known and certainly less rigorously understood. Using primary sources from three levels of government that have never before been released, this paper charts the story of the founding of the Aboriginal settlement in Sydney's Redfern in 1972-73. Its approach is to frame the quest for territory around the competing narratives articulated to it. It will be shown how the utopian concept of a “Black cooperative” became pitted against the defensive concept of a “Black ghetto" in struggle for dominance that revealed the fracturing ideological regimes of the day and the contradictory practices of a divided polity. European control over the allocation of urban space was on this occasion intercepted by a social movement for a stake in White Australia that for two hundred years had been disempowering its indigenous peoples. It is a struggle that endures in Aboriginal Redfern to this day. © 1993 Academic Press Limited.