Curious Indeed, or Curious in Deed? Some peculiarities of post-settlement relations with an antipodean river

Abstract

Prominent in many historical accounts of European first contact with Australian nature are stories of encounters between European curiosity and curious Australian biota, such as the platypus and the eucalyptus. In this paper, I argue that post-settlement relations with the Goulburn River, one of the largest rivers in south-east Australia, likewise attest to the centrality of curiosity in early European engagements with Australian landscape. In mapping several relational ontologies of the Goulburn River, I attend to the socio-material practices in which this river has been performed as different and as normal. My interest is in a specific form of difference, that of antipodean difference: the river as topsy-turvy, backwards, unusual, or inverted in relation to some presumed norm, whether that norm be rooted in memories and experiences of European rivers or imaginings of an original state of nature. This is a story of how an extraordinary river became ordinary, and of how we might understand antipodean difference as curious in deed (i.e. as performed), rather than as curious indeed (i.e. as an innate quality of Australian nature).

Keywords:

• Goulburn River
• antipodean
• Australia
• rural settlement
• performing difference
• relational ontology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michaela Spencer, Gro Ween and Sara Maroske for their comments on the article in draft form, and to participants of Performing Nature at the World's Ends, Workshop IV, for their feedback on the original presentation of these ideas. Thanks to the Office for Environmental Programs at the University of Melbourne for sponsoring this workshop, and to the University of Melbourne and CSIRO for supporting my doctoral research.

Notes

1. This construction of the town to face away from the river simultaneously reflected a discomfort with the Aboriginal settlements developing on the river flats from the late 1930s until the 1970s, as residents dissatisfied with working and living conditions abandoned the Cummeragunja Mission Station near Echuca (Vibert 1975). Whilst this paper specifically addresses European settler relations with the Goulburn River, it is worth noting that these are sometimes entangled with their relations with local Indigenous people and their connections to the river. Prior to European settlement, the Goulburn River had been a focal point for the habitation and sustenance of substantial populations of several Aboriginal communities (West 1962).

2. This river meandering is part of an ongoing process of sediment erosion, transport, and aggradation: flow erodes river banks, carries sediments downstream, and deposits them elsewhere. Land and water are constantly redistributed, and, under certain conditions, the Goulburn River shifts from one path to another (Erskine et al. 1993; Sinclair Knight Merz 2006).