Re-imagining identities: Aboriginal people living on Darug and Gundungurra lands

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of place, memories and experience in the construction of identity for Aboriginal people living on Darug and Gundangurra Lands ( referred to as ‘Storytellers’ in the text). Through my analysis, I show how the Storytellers embodied their identities and connection to place. My thesis moves beyond the dominant theory that Aboriginal identity is founded on a physical ‘connection to place’. To explore the Aboriginal identities of my Storytellers, I have developed a people- centric approach to my research, which includes but does not reify place as the foundation of their identity. This approach included emotion-as-practice, arts-informed performance, and oral history methodologies. To analyse the diverse identities and relationships that exist within, and between, individuals currently living on Durug and Gundangurra land, I develop the concept of a ‘social-scape’. Social-scape refers to a diverse web of intricated storytelling informed by personal narratives of the Stortytellers and their relationships between people rather than by place. These social-scapes provide more nuanced ways to understand belonging for urban Aboriginal people than traditional past/historical and anthropological approaches. Social-scapes enable historians to partner with Aboriginal people to create history that better acknowledges the subtleties of how individuals construct their identity; it recognises that history making can disrupt individual identities in ways that are harmful to Aboriginal people whose sense of self and wellbeing is not represented within powerful history-making tropes such as history associated with mission-places, the Stolen Generations, Dreaming Stories and land rights. My thesis makes important theoretical and empirical contributions through critique of existing modes of history making and the development of the idea of the social-scape as a means to create more inclusive, empowering histories for people that both honour and question the constraints and context of their identities. Show more