The racialisation of local heritage

Abstract

The region of Camden, located on the outskirts of Sydney, is a growing area set to morph from a country town to a thriving suburban district. In 2007, a Sydney Islamic charity sought to build an Islamic school in the region. Local opponents protested the application in ways that expressed contemporary forms of anti-Muslim racisms in Australia. This article pays close attention to the narratives of heritage within these voices of opposition, as a sizeable number of protesters claimed the school would violate the local settler heritage in Camden. In uncovering these discourses, it was evident that a narrative of white peaceful settlement informed the ways locals mobilised local heritage in relation to the school. The racialisation and whiteness of local heritage negated the Aboriginal presence and history in Camden, and provided a template for the maintenance of white colonial hegemony and the construction of many racialised discourses. Further, these racialisations underpinned the popular anti-Muslim sentiment expressed in ways that positioned local heritage as that of national significance.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• racialisation
• racism
• Aboriginal
• Islam

Notes

1. This article uses the term Koori instead of ‘Camden’s Aborigines’ to describe the first peoples in the Camden region. Koori is the term that most Aboriginal peoples from New South Wales use to identify themselves, and Camden is located within New South Wales.

2. Littler (2005) argues we should acknowledge how ‘race’ shapes the ways people construct heritage in relation to other forms of exclusion, for example the positions of differently abled peoples and the dynamics of gender. There is truth to this argument, however the scope of this article considers ‘race’ in relation to a case study and there is no room here to examine these other interesting and important topic areas.

3. It is worth noting that since colonisation, a variety of Indigenous peoples themselves identify as Muslim (see Stephenson 2011). Thus, the identities of Koori and Muslim overlap in some instances in contemporary Australia.

4. As this is an Australian case study, there are obvious limitations in mapping out the international significance of this paper. Similar to other Western settler-colonial societies such as Canada, New Zealand, Israel and South Africa; Australians hold biased notions of heritage that are in favour of the colonising populations. It could be argued that this is a common trend among settler-colonial societies that are founded upon the dispossession of the first nations peoples.

5. As discussed in this article, there are local narratives of Koori history in Camden. Around Australia, many non-Indigenous communities became increasingly interested in their neighbourhood’s Aboriginal history in recent decades (Brook and Kohen 1991). However, it is evident that these historical facts of Aboriginal dispossession are often ignored in the prevailing white hegemonic discourse of heritage in particular localities.

6. The Bunorong peoples are the Indigenous peoples of the territory in south-western Victoria, Australia.

7. Interestingly, Macarthur refers to Bono as ‘Hindoo’ further affirms how archaic racialisations of Muslims are fluid – similar to the way they operate in the recent Camden controversy.

8. Langton (2008) admits there can only be speculation on the matter whether the British intentionally planted disease in the blankets given to the local Eora people, outlining ‘the coincidence of the pandemic so soon after the first anniversary of the colony has caused some to ask whether it was deliberately planted in blankets to cause disease among locals’ (12).