A Multicultural Landscape: National Parks and the Macedonian Experience

The case so far Part 1 of this report has opened a set of interrelated issues. I have argued that ethnicity, being a key factor in determining people’s world views, is, inevitably, highly formative in shaping attitudes to the environment. We have briefly considered the ethnic diversity of contemporary Australia – a diversity that is apparently reflected in the wide range of people who use our parks. At one level, this usage represents a bold statement of the plurality of public culture in Australia. In addition, it provides a ‘mirror’ on the NPWS, prompting reflection on the history and constitution of our own organisation, of national parks more generally, and their early role in fostering nationalism in former colonial societies. This nationalism has historically favoured racial homogeneity. We now live in an epoch when any semblance of homogeneity has disappeared, prompting re-definition of the ‘imagined community’ of the Australian nation.

I have suggested that multiculturalism poses challenges at a variety of levels to government and its agencies. Influenced by Ghassan Hage, I raised the question of whether the doctrine of multiculturalism is about embracing or managing cultural diversity.

Ethno-cultural specificity In discussing the value of ethnicity as a social construct, I have argued for its importance on the grounds that many White people, so often the power brokers in a range of institutional and social contexts in Australia, are frequently incapable of discerning their own ethno-cultural specificity. My deliberate use of the term White people is also influenced by Hage who argues that officially preferred terms like

‘Anglo’ and ‘Anglo-Celtic’ are far from being a dominant mode of self-categorisation by White people whether at a conscious or unconscious level. I will argue that ‘White’ is a far more dominant mode of self-perception, although largely an unconscious one. Furthermore, the category ‘Anglo’ could not account for the many non-Anglos who relate to, and define themselves through, the ‘White nation’ fantasy.^[42]

By acknowledging the ethnic specificity of the world-view that has given rise to national parks in NSW, it becomes possible to recognise and critically evaluate cultural patterns that might otherwise seem self-evident.

Wilderness values As an example, we might consider the veneration of wilderness that is common to many conservationists and NPWS staff. ‘Wilderness’ is probably the most highly esteemed category of land in the national park system. For many Aboriginal people this is of course highly problematic. Far from seeing ‘wilderness’ as country eternally devoid of human influence and corruption, they see a terrain in which the custodians themselves have been expunged.

Marcia Langton has identified the veneration of wilderness as an extension of the doctrine terra nullius, the now discredited conceit that the indigenous occupants of Australia had no legal tenure to the land on which they lived.^[43] As Langton describes it: ‘Where Aboriginal people had been brought to the brink of annihilation, their former territories were recast as “wilderness.”’^[44]

A landscape inscribed My own experiences of travel with Aboriginal people convince me of the high value attached to all sorts of marks and inscriptions within the landscape, whether they be the remains of a fringe camp, an animal’s footprints, art and ceremonial sites, the evidence of a creation ancestor’s journey. Indications that other people have inhabited or engaged with the landscape are not evidence of its corruption. Rather, they provide points of contact through which one’s own relationship to country can be more thoroughly explored.

Chinese perceptions Although the culture and context is, of course, radically different, it was interesting to discover certain resonances between this model of attachment to country and that described by some Chinese-Australian interviewees who I met in April 2000. Tania Kwong is 45 years old and arrived in Australia from Hong Kong in 1987. Prior to emigrating, Tania and her husband, Chi Young Kwong, had been part of a group known as hansang, a kind of hiking club. During vacations they would visit mainland China and climb some of the great mountains. These journeys typically took at least a few days. Tracks and steps are carved into the mountains. Frequently there are monasteries where people can stay. They showed me photos where beautiful calligraphy was carved into the rock face. These were proverbs or poems paying homage to the mountain. One translated as ‘The scenery, just like a picture.’ Culture and nature were inextricably fused in these experiences, each contributing to the appeal of the other.^[45]

Marking park landscapes in Australia With the significant exception of (usually pre-contact) Aboriginal sites, poetry and works of art are generally not to be found in Australian national park landscapes. This is evidence of the extent to which non-indigenous Australians are part of a culture that is still attempting to situate itself in this environment. We are cautious of the landscape being an expressive space; still captivated by narratives of discovery. Consequently, the ways in which we do inscribe the landscape follow rigid conventions, as a research team from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) observed in a study of the Minnamurra Rainforest walking track system in Budderoo National Park south of Wollongong.

The UWS researchers, who have offered valuable insights to this project and opened future possibilities for collaboration with NPWS, are similarly interested in ethnicity and landscape. They have used the Minnamurra Rainforest as a case study, arguing that the failure of interpretive infrastructure within the park to communicate to non-English speakers, is part of a broader pattern in which particular forms of knowledge are privileged and others excluded. Commenting on the many educational plaques located along the Minnamurra walkway, the team argued that

The referent in all these signs is what can be labelled, for convenience sake, the ‘natural sciences’. It locks each plant or animal into a singular description, or name, as though no other possibilities exist. In national parks, natural science is the dominant language and because of the authority that science carries culturally, the pervasiveness of the natural sciences does several things simultaneously: it communicates an assumption that this knowledge is universal, authoritative, and seemingly, outside the realm of contestation; it assumes that the knowledge is organically bound to the object being viewed (there are but two names for all objects and the botanical, written magisterially in Latin, is positioned as the most significant) and that knowledge is organically bound to the landscape being experienced, and by implication, this binding of knowledge to specific objects or landscapes excludes, or marginalises, other types of knowing.^[46]

A matter of recognition To explicitly recognise and acknowledge the value of other ways of knowing the landscape is the predominant challenge presented by this project. It is a challenge that is by no means unique to the NPWS. Rather, it is woven into the social fabric of Australia. In recent years a body of scholarship has emerged which considers the phenomenon of diaspora.^[47] The large scale movement of peoples across the globe, the voluntary and involuntary relocations, can be seen as perhaps the most distinctive trait of the modern era. As Peter Read puts it so evocatively, ‘Most countries in the world are lands of forced exile to somebody now living in Australia.’^[48]

Read is the author of Returning to Nothing (1996), a study of the values people ascribe to lost places. He shows how the intimation of uprootedness is utterly fundamental to contemporary Australia, manifest not only in the experiences of refugees, but of Aborigines displaced from their country, communities forced away by development, people who have suffered fires and cyclones, those cast aside when the motorway comes through.

Community values Working from in-depth interviews with people who have suffered such experiences of loss, Read presents a method of enquiry and exposition exemplary to this project. In many ways his book is a lament at the inability of government to acknowledge that community values are in fact things of value. In an argument of great bearing to the NPWS, Read compares the romanticism with which our predominantly urban culture has celebrated bush and wilderness while discounting the integrity of inhabited environments.

The elevation of the undifferentiated and unlocalised bush to iconography made it correspondingly harder to save from destruction the local, the familiar, the specific, the lived-in, the un-unique and the un-universal – especially the suburb, the street, the private house and the country town. Compared to the rich and complex aesthetic of wild country bequeathed to us by nineteenth-century Romanticism, Australians have no adequate discourse to conceive, describe and hence defend our apparently ordinary
homes and suburbs...^[49]

Historically, the NPWS has often been insensitive to values derived from human association with estates within its care. Only in recent years were reforms implemented that saw the protection (rather than the active demolition) of huts and dwellings in locations such as Royal and Mount Kosciuszko National Parks. But clearly, we have further to go, especially in the recognition of important sites where material evidence of human association is slight. Much of the next section of this report, where the values and meanings of the family gatherings and picnics of Macedonian Sydney-siders are described, seeks specifically to engage with the quotidian yet socially significant uses that are made of national parks.

^[42] Hage, White Nation, p. 19.

^[43] The doctrine of terra nullius was ruled invalid by the Mabo judgement. See Mabo v. Queensland, Canberra: 3 June, 1992, High Court of Australia.

^[44] Marcia Langton, ‘What do we mean by wilderness?: Wilderness and terra nullius in Australian Art’, paper presented at The Sydney Institute, 12 October, 1995.

^[45] Focus Group Discussion, 9 April 2000 at Centennial Park, involving Chimin Chang, Rod Haslam, Tania Kwong, Chi Young Kwong and Nathaniel Kwong.

^[46] Staiff et al, ‘From Museums to parks’, p. 6.

^[47] For a precis of the diaspora debate see Robin Cohen, Global diasporas: An introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

^[48] Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. ix.

^[49] Ibid., pp. 146-7.