Beyond presence and absence: Re-membering through rubble and ruins

At the heart of settler-colonial time-space narratives (chronotopes) are binaries and dualisms. Underpinning the settler-colonial imagination is a broader Western dualism of hierarchical oppositions, which bifurcates the world into that which is “Self,” normative, or essential presence (White, man, culture, civilization) and that which is “Other,” a negative, or an absence (Black, woman, nature, savagery). As Deborah Bird Rose (2005) highlights, in Australia the myth of the presence of land (terra) and perceived absence of pre-existing land ownership (nullius) was used to legitimate settler-colonial invasion by discounting pre-existing Indigenous presence and land tenure systems as an absent “Other.” Settlers created a myth of absence, used violence in an attempt to make this absence a reality, then disavowed this process through myths of an inevitably doomed Indigenous peoples (Veracini 2010). Rose (1997) therefore argues that the settler-colonial chronotope in Australia is structured such that time is seen as singular, irreversible, and broken into epochs that hinge around the central axis of a frontier space, where presence and absence, culture and nature, savagery and civilization meet and intermingle. In the settler-colonial chronotope, this epoch is believed to be followed by the epoch where settlers come to replace Indigenous people (see Veracini 2010; Wolfe 1998).

And yet, in Australia this final stage of the chronotope has not come to pass. Rather, the “frontier” period of violence and erasure has continued in many forms. The ongoing structures (Wolfe 1998) of settler-colonialism in Australia is particularly evident in continued violence against Indigenous people, land rights issues, denial of self-determination, disproportionate incarnation of Indigenous people and removal of Indigenous children, and lack of reparations. The violence of settler-colonialism might thus be thought of not as binaries of presence and absence as the colonial chronotope would have it, but as what Walter Benjamin (1969: 257) alluded to as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” And yet, Indigenous culture has shown itself not to be some singular, reified text that might be “replaced”; Indigenous cultures continue in multiple, adaptable forms, capable of responding to processes of ruination with strength and agency. In this wreckage of colonialism, then, presence and absence are not binary or absolute qualities (see Bille et al. 2010; Forty and Küchler 2002; Hetherington 2004), but part of a mutable space.

I thus propose that approaching “frontier” spaces such as Outback Queensland through mutable entanglements of presence and absence, rather than the linearities and binaries that characterize the settler-colonial grand-narrative, might enable scholars to consider multiple histories in Australia. In doing so, I build on work by various theorists (DeSilvey 2006, 2017; De-Silvey and Edensor 2013; Edensor 2005; Stewart 1996; Trigg 2006, 2009) who have engaged with the image of ruins as material and metaphorical challenges to dominant narratives. These authors show that ruins contain an excess of meaning, filled with gaps, interruptions, departures, and questions, challenging common understandings of categories and order. Within such a space, there is the potential for new sensory and imaginative understandings of the past and alternative chronotopes to emerge. Seen this way, ruins and rubble have proven a useful entry point for anthropological examinations of the ongoing structures of colonialism. Anthropologists such as Ann Laura Stoler (2008, 2013), Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009, 2012), and Gastón Gordillo (2014: 263) explore ruins as part of an “affective geography” (Navaro-Yashin 2012) where multiple temporalities of acts, conditions, and causes unfold in relation to seemingly disparate events, places, people, and things. These scholars highlight the idea that processes of ruination allow for the interrogation of colonial histories not as past “events” that exist in binaries of presence and absence, but as ongoing structures.

In this article, I build on the literature about ruins to examine processes of settler-colonial ruination in Australia alongside ideas of hybridity and mutability. Through ethnography, I show how both ruins and hybrid identities challenge simple binaries and temporal-spatial narratives to produce counter-narratives about patterns of Australian settlement. I turn now to examine polyethnic camps in Australia, before focusing analysis on the case study of Coppermine Creek.

Troubling presence and absence: Polyethnic camps in Northern Australia

In the Northern Australian invasion, settler-colonial imaginings of presence and absence were made manifest through coercive and symbolic violence that was often based on crude binaries between a supposedly vanishing Indigenous people and a supposedly superior White race. This racialized ideology was evident in patterns of settlement in Queensland. The British invasion into the Cloncurry region, the traditional lands of the Mayi-Thukurti (Mitakoodi) people and the geographic focus of this article, was first instigated by a colonial search for grazing pastures in the 1860s, with the town emerging following the 1866 founding of a copper mine. Invasion into the surrounding pastoral lands was violent, with ambiguous policies of “dispersal” leading to massacres of Indigenous people and the establishment of Indigenous camps on pastoral properties or town outskirts that were considered safer than “bush camps” (Reynolds [1978] 1993). By the end of the nineteenth century, most towns in Queensland were associated with a number of Aboriginal “camps” where dispossessed Indigenous people lived a short distance outside the visual boundaries of towns (Memmott 1996). Such distance reflected the racialized social dynamics of the time, where Anglo-Celtic settlers were often heavily reliant on Indigenous people for labor, but also maintained a sense of superiority (Reynolds 1978: 244). Indigenous presences were constrained under paternalistic policies such as the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and its various amendments—commonly known as “The Act”—where Indigenous people's movements, employment, and money were controlled by authorities and where Indigenous people were often forcibly relocated (see Reynolds [1978] 1993). Histories of the Cloncurry region often draw on settler-colonial chronotopes to position such camps as places where culture would be lost and Indigenous people would eventually die out (e.g., Armstrong 1980; Fysh [1933] 1964; Pearson 1949). For example, the Cloncurry Centenary Celebrations Committee (1967: 47) publication for Cloncurry's 100-year celebrations in 1967 expresses a settler-colonial chronotope through subheadings of “custom,” “encounter,” “trouble,” “fringe-dwellers,” and “assimilation.” The section on “fringe-dwellers” reads: “Losing their language, culture and hunting grounds, [town camp residents] camped near the town awaiting handouts of flour, tea, sugar and rum. Thus arose the fringe-dweller, living for the day in a superficial European civilization.” Such narratives position Indigenous people as footnotes to the teleology of the settler grand-narrative and as an imminent absence subsumed by settler modes of being.

And yet, even though living conditions in town camps were often poor and camps were highly regulated under legislation, they also provided a space for agency, with the continuation of cultural practices, kinship obligations, and the innovation of vernacular architectures (Elder 1987: 45, 70; Memmott 1996). Town camps’ existence beyond binaries of “native”/“settler” and “wilderness”/“civilization,” and the continued presence of Indigenous people often thought to soon die out challenged the foundational chronotopes of settler-colonialism. In the latter half of the twentieth century, town camps were often positioned across the political spectrum as “having problems or being problems,” “half worlds,” or “between worlds,” and town campers were seen as “between cultures” and in need of intervention to “improve” their quality of life (Elder 1987: 38, 57). The discursive positioning of in-betweenness in town camps served as reason for Indigenous and polyethnic town camps across Queensland to be shut down or demolished (Elder 1987). In other instances, camps fell down due to prevention of residence when residents were moved into alternative housing as part of assimilation practices.

At the same time, in Northern Australia, partnerships often formed between Asian men and Aboriginal or mixed-ethnicity women, and in many regions these families came to live in polyethnic communities that were spatially separate from solely Aboriginal or Anglo-Celtic settlements (Ganter 1998, 2006a; Trigger 1989; Trigger and Martin 2017). Coppermine Creek was just such a camp. Mining in Cloncurry had brought a number of Chinese miners and gardeners and Muslim cameleer transporters (often referred to as “Afghans”)⁴ who established camps on the western side of the town. Chinese populations, many of whom had been forced to abandon their claims in the northern goldfields due to the hostility of Anglo-Celtic settlers, taxation, and immigrant legislation, would grow to approximately four hundred in the region by 1891 (Cohen 1996: 20). Simultaneously, during the gold mining boom of the late 1800s, there were approximately 40 Muslim cameleers using five hundred camels in the Cloncurry region (Perkins 1996: 6). In the early 1900s, visitors to the Coppermine Creek site could encounter market gardens, strings of camels, and a mosque. Over time, as populations intermarried, the camps appear to have merged somewhat and become known more generally as “Coppermine Creek.” Distinct “mobs” can be identified in the spatial layout of the camp in the twentieth century, including polyethnic family groups and some solitary White settlers.

In contrast to the imagined imminent absence of Indigenous people, rhetoric surrounding Asian settlers frequently emphasized an overwhelming presence that needed to be stopped. Early twentieth century propaganda against Asian migration drew on ideas of “Yellow Peril” and “The Yellow Wave” and led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901—one of a suite of acts commonly referred to as “The White Australia Policy.” Legislation such as The Act and The White Australia Policy was a means of asserting White dominance in Australia and pushing the state further toward the colonial dream of complete White, Anglo-Celtic settler-colonial presence and the absence of other identities. However, as Regina Ganter (2006a, 2006b) argues, “mixed relations” in places like Coppermine Creek troubled simple binaries of racial superiority and thus colonial imaginings of presence and absence. Ganter (1998, 2003; 2006a, 2006b) shows that in the eyes of the colonial government, mixing of Asian men and Aboriginal women was a major concern. The very existence of mixed-descent people challenged simple racial dichotomies, with Asian-Aboriginal people often eluding the administrative labels designed to restrict rights of both Aboriginal and Asian peoples. The Act in Queensland's prohibition of interracial work and marriage may thus be read as responding to settler-colonial beliefs in a whitening race of Indigenous people and the need to “protect” “full blood” Aboriginal people as well as a fear of contributing to the presence of Asian and non-White people. One can chart in amendments to The Act attempts to bring such identities under bureaucratic control through changing definitions of “half-caste,” or someone of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent, and the extent to which they should be subject to The Act. This meant that at various points in time those living in polyethnic camps were targeted by or exempt from restrictive policies pertaining to Indigenous people and migrants, and that in turn mixed-ethnicity people identified more strongly with Aboriginal, Asian, or “colored” identities according to shifting policies and public acceptability (Ganter 2006a; Trigger and Martin 2017). Ganter (2006b: 30) thereby suggests that polyethnic populations “challenged the idea of [W]hite dominance even more fundamentally than Asian migrants or Aboriginal majorities.” For Ganter (2006a: 30) residents in polyethnic communities “undermined the evolutionist prediction of the eventual demise of the [I]ndigenous population and blurred the distinctions between populations on which the idea of white dominance was based.” As the space in which two “problem populations” (Ganter 2006a: 30) and fantasies of imminent absence and overwhelming presence meet, polyethnic camps thus hit a “nerve” in the “nervous system” (Taussig 1992) of the settler-colonial state, prompting White Australian anxieties (see Ganter 2006a: 30; Hage 2003, 2012; Walker 1999).

Today, this “nervousness” may still be evident in the omission from many histories of the role polyethnic populations played in Northern Australian cultures and economies, which extends to forget local sites. In 1972, when Coppermine Creek camp was occupied predominately by those of mixed Aboriginal and Chinese descent, the local council raised health and safety concerns and proposed that the camp be removed. By 1973, most Coppermine Creek dwellers had moved to housing elsewhere and the camp had been demolished. Over time, the remaining dwellings fell down. At the time of my fieldwork in Cloncurry in 2017, there was little information publicly available about Coppermine Creek. There was evidence of the historical presence of Asian and polyethnic families, especially in cemeteries, and key figures in the community did champion these histories. However, it appeared that the most dominant chronotopes of Cloncurry overlooked the intercultural complexities in favor of a narrative of White pastoralists and miners “taming the wilderness” (see Fysh [1933] 1964). While people associated with Coppermine Creek were well known by older members of the community, I found that most residents lacked an awareness of the spatialized aspects of polyethnic history. This contrasted starkly with other acts of collective memory within the community, wherein belonging and identity was frequently negotiated in relation to one's ability to engage with absent buildings, people, and things and where the spatial layout of the town in the past was a recurrent topic of conversation (see Degnen 2013). The absence of Coppermine Creek in my White interviewees’ nostalgic narratives about the town therefore suggests a spatial politics of memory and a hierarchization of what was deemed necessary for one to remember in order to be considered to be a member of the narrative community. This absencing may indicate what Ganter (2006a: 30) has referred to as “the fundamental commitment to Anglo-Celtic history.”

A narrative space: Re-living place

I now turn to the ways, in spite of a physical absence, a place might remain or become present through negotiations of mutable things and multiplicities, and what this means for local embodied and affective dialogues about time and space. I begin by focusing on how members of the Coppermine Creek Mob related to the site of the camp, and the ways they sought to relay that affective attachment to others in the community. To do this, I return to my first trip to Coppermine Creek in early September 2017.

One of the “Reliving Coppermine Creek” event organizers I met that first night, Ros, described her family as embodying a typical Coppermine Creek Mob identity. Their father was a Kuku-Yalanji Aboriginal man from tropical north Queensland and had arrived in Cloncurry as a 19-year-old searching for work. Their mother had moved to Coppermine Creek with her family from a similar polyethnic camp north of Cloncurry and was part of a large family descended from a well-known Chinese man. In interviews with me, Ros and her sister Sharon identified their mother's father as Chinese and Waynii (an Indigenous group with traditional lands north of Cloncurry), and their mother's mother—“Grannie”—as Chinese and Wanyii. They also suggested ancestral links to Indonesian and “Afghan” peoples. Many others in the group were related or had similarly complex ethnic identities, with most identifying as belonging to one or more Australian Indigenous cultural language groups and also as having Asian ancestry. In response to concern among the Coppermine Creek Mob that the camp's history was not included in the town's official sesquicentennial program, Ros and Sharon had organized the reunion and a series of public tours where they would educate visitors about the camp's histories.

On my first visit, Ros, her immediate family, and some friends were preparing for the event and had set up tents in the same location as their grandmother's home once stood. Ros recounted to me that when she first returned to that site with family members in 2014, they had insisted on finding the exact location where the home had been: “We thought, we got to come over and do the walk. Just walk up to Grannie's house . . . Because that's where all the [family] were.” In this way, the presence and absence of homes were evoked simultaneously: one might “just walk to Grannie's house,” as though the building still stands in the present, but justify the reasoning for doing this through an evocation of the past—“that's where all the [family] were.” The family members’ walk back to Grannie's place long after its destruction paid tribute to the enduring importance of that place in familial life, as the convergence of multiple paths frequently trodden (see Ingold 2000). Hearing this, I was reminded of Bachelard's ([1959] 1994: 14) poetic observation that certain places may be “inscribed in us,” so that one might “recapture the reflexes” of moving there long after it has gone. To use the Coppermine Creek Mob's term, one might in this way bodily, imaginatively, and affectively “re-live” place in such a way that acknowledges the ruptures of absencing (and is thus not simply “living” place) but also seeks to make place present (re-living).

Throughout the course of the setup period, members of the Coppermine Creek Mob often disrupted binaries of presence and absence in such ways. During the day, volunteers prepared the site for additional visitors by removing hazardous debris, grading roads, and leveling ground for a parking lot. This work was frequently punctuated by detours to explore places that were meaningful, sort through interesting ruins, and share stories. The relationship between memory and movement within place was particularly evident in the process of drawing a topographical map based on the stories of some community elders who remembered life in Coppermine Creek well. Material traces such as geographical landmarks, leveled ground, remnants of walls, or found objects recursively informed the memories of the map makers. One of the map makers, an 82-year-old man of Chinese, Indonesian, and Wanyii decent, had moved to Coppermine Creek from Burketown when he was 14 to work as a kitchen hand and had returned to the camp periodically over the years while employed as a drover,⁵ ringer,⁶ and railway laborer. Throughout the setup period, he often walked around the camp, following the volunteers to ensure their work was acceptable, or visited particular areas, carefully examining the features. On one occasion, he found a tree that had regrown from a stump that had been sawn down. This large stump reminded him of a story someone at Coppermine once told about how it had taken them three days to cut down a tree so a house could be built. He realized that the tree was the tree from the story, and thus the site of a house he had previously thought elsewhere. This new understanding allowed him to amend the map and provide a more detailed description of the spatial layout, which in turn prompted people to share other spatial memories. A story from long ago thereby combined with material traces and memory to make present the absent home, allowing the man to further guide others in the story of place. The stories, like the material traces, surfaced as mutable fragments that could then be negotiated in relation other memories and understandings of place.

With the map as a guide, volunteers planted pegs with surveyor's taps in the places where homes once were. As a result, even young people born after the camp's closure could point to meaningful places. A young boy excitedly led me around the site saying, “that's where my nanna's friend used to live” and “my nanna, she used to live there when she was fifteen or sixteen.” The boy demonstrated that the “inscription” of place may be rather an act of embodying intergenerational storied knowledge through movement in the environment (Ingold 2011: 157). These places thereby came to be incorporated into the bodily knowledge of “life” at the camp. In a similar exploration of imagining the landscape, Jo Vergunst (2012: 36) observes that those working in a community archaeology dig would incorporate findings about the site into the ways in which they moved within it; for instance, upon realizing there was once a doorway at a point in a ruined wall, the archaeologists would walk through it as if the surrounding walls were still standing. “While in the absence of their dwellers houses may change and decay,” Vergunst writes, “the very act of moving as if one were dwelling there makes it over as a house again.” Put another way, space is re-lived. Likewise, at Coppermine Creek, acts of moving and working were informed by stories arising from ambiguous materialities in an open-ended and changeable way that gave a mutable presence to the past.

An imaginative space: Embodied and imaginative re-collections

So far, I have shown that through acts of collective memory and storytelling associated with ruins, categories of presence and absence became ambiguous and enabled a re-engagement with the past. Now I extend this proposition to suggest that, through engagement with ruins, previously absent or forgotten histories of polyethnic identity became present or are re-collected and re-membered at the community level. I do this by focusing on the tours that the Coppermine Creek Mob led through the centenary celebrations.

Aimed at non-Indigenous people who currently or formerly resided in the town, the primary role of the tours was to make present a place that had been conceived of as an absence in many Cloncurry resident's spatial knowledge. The tour group I joined was comprised predominately of past residents of Cloncurry who had returned for the sesquicentennial celebrations, one current Cloncurry resident who had grown up near a similar polyethnic town camp, and Indigenous siblings whose family members had once lived at the camp. Most of the White tour participants said that while they had been friends with people who lived at the camp, they had rarely if ever been there and knew little about its history. When asked if they had ever visited, one middle-aged woman sarcastically replied in a tone of slight self-admonishment: “Never been down here before. Only lived [in Cloncurry] since 1965.” Another White participant said that when she would visit the camp in the early 1960s with her father to deliver supplies, he would not let her get out of the car. A Coppermine Creek Mob woman later told me while “everyone got along” there was a racialized division where Coppermine Creek residents would always meet with White town resident friends at a point away from the camp. Thus, while the Coppermine Creek Mob were active members of the broader community, and worked, socialized, and shopped there, they were also in a sense often rendered as Other and absent through tacit spatial boundaries. A White woman of a similar age who was not present at the tour contested this account; she said she had frequently visited the camp as a child and felt that racialized spatial segregation had developed much more recently. Nonetheless, it would seem that in the particular group this day White town-dwellers’ lack of awareness about Coppermine Creek arose not only through a lack of narrativization, but a lack of embodied knowledge of place or “lived” experience that connected that place to the ideas of community membership they were more familiar with. As such, the act of visiting the site of the town camp was itself a movement toward re-presenting the camp.

The tours further acted as an introduction to a space in the town that complexified Indigenous identity and agency beyond the linear scope of Indigenous “pre-settler” and White “settler.” While there were Mayi-Thukurti families who resided at Coppermine Creek, the polyethnic nature of the camp meant that the broader Coppermine Creek Mob had ties to diverse traditional lands. At the beginning of the tour, a representative of the Mayi-Thukurti traditional custodians presented a “welcome to country” speech. Then Ros, representing the Coppermine Creek Mob, presented an “acknowledgment of country” speech. Such formalities reflect an acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty and settler-colonial ruptures in Australian places, with the former involving a member of a recognized Traditional Owner group welcoming guests onto land and the latter involving a person who is not from the Traditional Owner group acknowledging the traditional custodianship of that land. Ros then presented a brief speech about her family's membership to both language groups associated with elsewhere and their socio-historical connections to Coppermine Creek community. In doing so, she foregrounded a complex, hybrid, and polyethnic identity that outstripped the simplistic representations of Indigeneity in the settler-colonial grand-narrative. “So that's our geographics,” she concluded, “Dad traveled out here to work, and both Mum and Dad are buried here [in Cloncurry] and Dad didn't want to go home.” As she said this, Ros's emotional connection to Coppermine Creek, which she regarded as her “spiritual place” was clear, and she paused to wipe away tears. After the speeches, Ros's grandchildren performed dances passed down by her father. The dances depicted sensory life in the tropical climate of the Kuku-Yalanji People, such as fishing and squatting mosquitos. As the tour attendees watched the performance, the viewer's own sensory experience of the sun beating down and the dusty, arid air of Cloncurry highlighted the contrast between what the dance depicted and where it was performed. It viscerally communicated the ties that Ros's father and many others at Coppermine Creek had to multiple places. Together, the welcome to country, the acknowledgment of country, the affective quality of Ros's speech, and the dance established an entry into a narrative space that disrupted dominant narratives of time, space, and identity and opened a discussion about hybrid identities, mobility, and resiliency.

The storied, sensory, and imaginative engagement with place continued to play a key role throughout the tour. Using the map that the Coppermine Creek Mob had created as a reference, the tour attendees followed Ros. At an area marked with pink surveyor's tape, Ros gestured: “This here was the home of [an Aboriginal-Asian man with an anglicized Chinese surname].” Ros bid the tour attendees to visualize the home as situated in relation the place “where the ladies of the night lived,” now a bush, and “the old road to Mt. Isa,” now a stretch of grass. In that manner, the tour continued. Some were places Ros remembered herself. Some places that had long been destroyed, such as the mosque, she described through both stories she had been told as a child and accounts she had found in written histories. Often, there were few visual traces of what had once been, but occasionally there would be scraps of building material, rusted household objects, or the vague imprints of paths. Ros animated these collections of materials into re-collections through detailed descriptions of how she remembered places looking and personal stories such as running barefoot through the camp as a child to play with siblings, visiting family members who had floors made from compressed earth, and building toys out of found objects. She emphasized the sense of freedom and community her family had felt there and repeated several times her grandmother's grief when she had been forced to move. This narrative made complex common understandings that saw such camps as merely “in between” spaces where people who did not live a completely traditional Indigenous life nor were fully assimilated into the town lived. It demonstrated that the material space of the camp was, for the Coppermine Creek Mob, one made present through affective and recollected qualities of both “culture” and “home” and while made of mutable substances was able to endure as such.

As the tour continued, it appeared that attendees became more attuned to finding “collections” and imaginatively re-constructing or re-collecting the camp. When the tour group explored the site where a corrugated iron house once was, the material rubble of the iron stimulated conversation about how hot it must have been during the day: “Oh, I can imagine the heat,” a White woman said to murmurs of agreement. The group discussed what it would have been like to spend summer in such a building in a place they were experiencing as uncomfortably hot on the early spring day of the tour. They considered how it might have felt and drew on knowledge of similar dwellings to consider what techniques might be used to mitigate the heat. Later in the tour, as we stood in a spot where a home had been built on the side of a slope, tour participants remarked on the view the dweller would have had over the camp, and how in the evenings there must have been a cool breeze. Through such conversations, the tour attendees drew on their own lived and embodied experiences of being in place, memories associated with other places, and the stories that Ros told to imagine what life at Coppermine Creek may have been like. By imagining themselves within the bodies of those who lived there and attempting to sense what they sensed in everyday life, the tour participants took seriously the narrative of Coppermine Creek not as an absent Other space at the edge of town, but as a place meaningful to individual subjects and still in the process of becoming. The marked areas indicating the absent home, the collections of ruined items, and the stories told imbued the site with new meaning, placing the onus on the individual to actively participate in the narrative space as an extension of one's own lived sensations. Ros repeated an invitation for tour participants to return to the site, suggesting that people bring their friends and relatives. She expressed a wish for people to visit the site, “So that people could just sit here and let the breeze, the wind, bring the stories along with it.”

A mutable space: Re-membering spatial understandings of place

“I think everyone here remembers . . . ,” Ros would say every time we reached a new spot, telling a story of who lived there and linking that place to other places that the tour participants would know. This would launch into a discussion of who was related to who, how, and what this meant for both Coppermine Creek and the Cloncurry community more broadly. Thus, as participants interacted with the material collections and stories of lives, the embodied and imaginative narratives of Coppermine acted to bridge the world of the town and the camp to re-member individuals. Ros wove tour participants into the world of the camp, making the camp present in relation to the social ties of the community and highlighting perhaps formerly unrecognized hybrid identities. Through references to present and absent people and places known to the tour participants as members of the broader community, Ros linked spatialized narratives of belonging and well-known individuals to a broader story of time, place, and cultural complexity. Storying, always an intersubjective re-distribution of being, was here an act of “boundary crossing,” in which one steps beyond boundaries into indeterminate spaces where new understandings might emerge (Jackson [2002] 2013: 47). In the stories told about Coppermine Creek, stimulated by ruins, the spatialized boundaries and social distance between the camp and the town were reimagined, with people from the town coming to understand the often-invisible role that the Coppermine Creek camp played in the towns history, and the importance of the place to members of the community.

At the conclusion of the tour, several participants expressed to me their desire for the camp and the contributions of Asian-Indigenous families to be better highlighted in the official history of the town. One woman later told me that she encouraged many others to visit the camp and learn more about the history of Coppermine Creek and contacted historical groups to request more research on Indigenous and Asian people in the region. While there may have been elements of the settler-colonial grand-narrative to this desire (a kind of “salvage” anthropology amid the ruins), and the experiences of one tour group should not be seen as representative of the community as a whole, this response points to a “re-collecting” and “re-membering” of histories of community members whose stories had often been over simplified or erased. The tours might thus be viewed as a means of redistributing narrative agency, with the Coppermine Creek Mob resisting the teleology of dominant narratives to present a more complex history of place that incorporates themes of mobility, cultural complexity, and continuation that exist in a space between presence and absence.

A disruptive space: Ruins and renegotiating local chronotopes through embodiment and imagination

As both the Coppermine Creek Mob and the tour attendees encountered ruins, they were prompted to imaginatively reengage with the past—by re-living, re-collecting, and re-membering—to attempt to make sense of the ambiguous traces while also being constantly reminded of the impossibility of a singular or stable account. The Coppermine Creek Mob's embodied and affective engagement with place “make it over” as a camp again through lived experience, while their collection of material things opened a “narrative space” for the negotiation of memories. Through tours, tour attendees were asked to employ embodiment and imagination to engage with the affective resonance of Coppermine Creek's rubble as a “narrative space” where previously absent histories could be re-membered as central to the broader community narrative.

Within this space, time and place are re-negotiated as ever-shifting entanglements of presence and absence, past and present, here and there, and self and Other that incorporated hybrid identities and challenged settler-colonial grand narratives. Rather than neat dualisms of an Indigenous epoch (absence) that would be replaced by a White Anglo-Celtic epoch (presence), as predicted in the settler-colonial chronotope, Coppermine Creek was a place where Indigenous and Asian practices intermingled and was marked by cultural adaptation, hybridity, and perseverance. At Coppermine Creek, the ambiguity and ongoing mutability of objects mirrored the way the story that needed to be told about Coppermine Creek (or indeed, Australia) was not singular, simply definable, or pertaining to a finished event, but multiple and unfinished, connecting people, places, and times in a manner that resists linear ordering. This not only conjures the past, but also the future through acts of repurposing found objects, re-walking paths, and discussing reconciliatory modes of telling local history.

At Coppermine Creek, the past was not merely called to memory, but re-lived, re-collected and re-membered, in an act of ongoing interpretation. Such acts of re-living, re-membering, and re-collecting, then, are not a repetition or return to the past. Here the prefix “re” points to a renewed analysis, a mutability, where the slippery past is interacted with in novel ways that reveal gaps and fissures in dominant modes of telling history. In the ruins of the town camp, histories of Australian settlement were re-negotiated beyond the framework of the settler-colonial grand-narrative, as involving complex identities in the process of becoming and capable of unfolding in countless ways.