General News
8 September, 2022
Former local’s new book examines unwritten history
A book merging historical accounts with the real-life memories of Central Australian pastoral station Angas Downs — and in particular the unrecognised history of the Anangu people — was officially released last month, following years of research...
A book merging historical accounts with the real-life memories of Central Australian pastoral station Angas Downs — and in particular the unrecognised history of the Anangu people — was officially released last month, following years of research by former local Shannyn Palmer.
Unmaking Angas Downs, Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station records the oral histories of the Anangu people who travelled to and lived at the station — established in the late 1920s at Walara, Central Australia — providing a rarely given historical account by First Nations voices compared to the records most often kept for places like Angas Downs by white pastoralists.
Dr Palmer’s own history started in Maryborough where she was born and raised, before heading to Melbourne to do a media degree, followed by a stint living overseas and then a return to Australia to study history, eventually gaining her PHD.
Getting back to rural life to write Unmaking Angas Downs, Dr Palmer said it made her re-think growing up in a rural town.
“I was born and raised in Maryborough which was great,” she said.
“When I was a teenager I couldn’t get to Melbourne quick enough but when I was researching and writing this book I lived in Alice Springs for five years, and I think it was going back to a small country town that made me realise how lucky I was to grow up in a rural town. Now I can’t imagine living in the big city, I’ve come back to those country roots.”
The book’s ties to Maryborough not only come through its author — it was printed by the local McPherson’s Printing Group.
Dr Palmer said the first ideas for Unmaking Angas Downs came when she studied history.
“I was quite shocked and challenged by a lot of what I was learning at university about our past in Australia, and what I didn’t learn growing up,” she said.
“I wondered what it was about the discipline of history itself that’d made that possible. Historians rely on documentary archives and a very linear sense of time, so I began thinking about how that had played into the fact there were no First Nations voices or perspectives in our history writing.
“I wondered what it’d mean to investigate history looking at place, landscape and country as archives and embodied forms of knowledge like memory.”
This led Dr Palmer to a book written by an anthropologist who spent time at Angas Downs, and soon inspired her own research on the station’s history.
“I came across a book from 1962 by an anthropologist who lived at Angas Downs for four months and carried out field work. There’s about 150 photos of the Anangu people who were living on the station at the time,” she said.
“I went out to community with that book and Anangu were very interested in it, they’d never seen it.
“When they were looking at the photographs they’d start telling stories about the station, and I soon developed a sense it was a really interesting place, and what made it interesting had nothing to do with the pastoralism.”
Dr Palmer then spent four years recording oral histories which became the basis for her book, along with some archived history.
In particular, Ms Palmer spent time with Anangu man Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack who travelled to the station as a young boy with his family in the 1930s, and Sandra Armstrong who’s family had also made the journey to Angas Downs some years later.
“Tjuki and Sandra were from elsewhere but had walked to the station in the ‘30s and ‘40s with their families,” Dr Palmer said.
“A lot of what we shared was them recounting how they’d come to be at Angas Downs and all of the things that happened there and how that place became Country for them. It was so much more than a station.”
Dr Palmer said she hopes readers will begin taking a deeper, more critical look at Australian history.
“On one level this book is about questioning the narrative that’s been really dominant in shaping Australian history and identity,” she said.
“So much of our history, particularly in the 20th century was shaped by these ideas of discovery and progress, stories dominated by pioneers and white pastoralists, so this book is really about seeking to unmake those narratives and encourage deeper, critical thinking around why those histories were written and to start thinking about the fact it runs much deeper than that.
“I began this project with an assumption, because Angas Downs was a station, that it was just a product of white pastoral possession and intervention, and that it’d have a particular story that went with it.
“Once I began listening to people like Tjuki and Sandra, I quickly began to realise there was so much more to that place.
“Anangu and their knowledge of country, in particular water, was crucial in the pastoral enterprises in central Australia being established. It was really reliant on the existing knowledge.”
Dr Palmer’s book, Unmaking Angas Downs, Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, is available now at www.mup.com.au/books/unmaking-angas-downs-paperback-softback or some online bookstores including Booktopia, Dymocks and Angus & Robertson.