The Impermanence of Concrete: White Domination of the Canberran Landscape

Abstract

The construction of Canberra has been analysed as a nexus of “Australian” identity, but it is yet to be analysed as a settler-colonial project. I wish to fill this gap by uncovering how White Anglo-Saxon settlers are positioned at the very top of the social power structure through the construction of a universal “Australian” identity in the central monumental district of Canberra. This thesis rests on an Indigenous epistemological practice of participant phenomenological observation. Observing the landscape as a collection of connected symbols, each have their own histories of conception, and their own position in the urban social fabric. With this data we can construct narratives that connect the disparate social messages of top-down monument construction, into a cohesive framework of settler power. This thesis finds the narratives presented in the Federal district continue to position White settlers above as both the default “Australian” body, and as natural inheritors of the “Australian” continent. Uprooting settler-nationalism requires more than the liberal multicultural expansion of the ideal of what it is to be “Australian.”