{"id":1522,"date":"2019-11-26T12:51:46","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T01:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/?p=1522"},"modified":"2019-11-26T15:04:29","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T04:04:29","slug":"paths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/2019\/11\/26\/paths\/","title":{"rendered":"Paths"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following long read\nis based on my recent keynote presentation at the 2019 Research Applications in\nInformation and Library Studies (RAILS) Conference, Towards Critical\nInformation Research, Education & Practice, hosted by the School of\nInformation Studies at Charles Sturt University (28-29 October 2019).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I acknowledge that we meet today on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I am curently working with the Rediscovering the Deep Human Past<\/a> laureate program and the Research Centre for Deep History<\/a> at Australian National University (ANU), and continue to be staggered by the scale, depth, and diversity of the history of this continent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a white academic with a Scottish mother, and a settler father who started out as a sheep farmer in Tasmania, I don’t speak on behalf of Indigenous communities. Though I refer to ideas from Indigenous academics, writers, and artists in this talk I understand that these do not come close to representing the diversity of language groups, peoples, and perspectives found across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia. In extending my welcome to Indigenous colleagues in the room today, I recognise the substantial and ongoing work you do in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and in the broader community, to challenge our professions and institutions and change them for the better. But I also believe that the labour required to critically engage with existing practice and effect change should fall to all of us, and it is in that spirit that I am talking to you today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until recently I lived and worked in Melbourne, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Below is an image of the centre of Melbourne, known as the ‘Hoddle Grid,’ as it appeared in 1855, just after the founding of many large colonial institutions including the University of Melbourne (1853), the State Library of Victoria (1854), and the National Museum of Victoria (1854).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Plan
Melbourne and its suburbs [detail], compiled by James Kearney, draughtsman;
engraved by David Tulloch and James D. Brown (1855)
State Library of Victoria. http:\/\/search.slv.vic.gov.au\/permalink\/f\/1cl35st\/SLV_VOYAGER786996 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The grid carves up and colonises the land, segmenting it into neat, geometric blocks divided by straight thoroughfares named for royals, aristocrats, navigators, and government officials<\/a>. Elizabeth Street, near the centre of the grid, paves over what was once a creek, flattening the landscape beneath a linear stretch of asphalt lined with imported architectural styles\u2014though nature periodically reasserts itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Black
Flash flooding on Melbourne’s Elizabeth Street in February 1972
THE AGE Picture by NEVILLE BOWLER, FXJ49866 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As of mid-2019 I live\nhere in Canberra, at least some of which is the result of Walter Burley\nGriffin’s plan (drafted by his wife Marion Mahony Griffin) for an ideal city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city\u2014a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future.<\/p>Walter Burley Griffin<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"Plan
Canberra design competition submission by Walter Burley Griffin drawn on the Commonwealth contour map, c.1911. National Archives of Australia <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Though the layout is more fluid than a rectangular grid, its hard-edged geometric designs continue to colonise the landscape even while drawing some inspiration from the area’s topography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is more, it seems many pedestrians are keen to step outside the clean lines of one person’s imposed ideal. Desire paths are found throughout the Canberra landscape, more ubiquitous here than perhaps any city I have visited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dirt
Canberra desire paths.
Mike Jones (2019).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These paths are found in reserves and parks, crossing empty blocks, and running over the ANU campus where I work. But what is visible by satellite is often missing from Google Maps. The path is an emergent property of the landscape, not one which is planned. When looking at a diagrammatic abstraction of the world this less formal piece of community-generated infrastructure disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
ANU desire path.
Google Maps.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Like all such abstractions, maps conceal as well as represent. Over the centuries visible signs of movement, or reference to the ships, surveyors, journeys, and processes which led to their formation, have gradually disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility [\u2026] the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonises space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it<\/p>Michel de Certeau<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Through this process, constrained perspectives become universalised and selectiveness is treated as objective vision. Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch, referencing Borges in her 2019 novel The Yield<\/em>, considers the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a story I read about someone who wanted to build a map that was the scale 1:1 so that the map covered all the oceans and all the mountains and land at its true size. That made the girls laugh when I told them\u2014imagine walking underneath and holding the thing above your head in the dark? That\u2019s a little what a map does, takes the light out so you can\u2019t see.<\/p>Tara june winch<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Just as maps mediate our connection with landscape, the registers, spreadsheets, and databases which fill our institutions shape collections-based knowledge. They order, intersect, and dissect it, separating the pieces into disciplines, or cutting them up further into classes and classifications, all the while excluding and concealing other possible groupings and relationships. The processes and people responsible for this work are usually as invisible as the creators of maps, though the work is similarly interpretative. Collection description and documentation shapes our knowledge, privileging certain types of infrastructure, leading us down some pathways while concealing others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written elsewhere on this blog<\/a> about well-known artefacts like the Gweagal shield, and the ways in which the information captured about such objects decentres Indigenous peoples and knowledges. As Mowgee Wiradjuri man Nathan Sentance writes<\/a>, the colonial bias of much museum documentation implies:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

that First Nations knowledge or culture doesn\u2019t exist until it gets white acknowledgement. That our culture, like our land, needs to be \u2018discovered.\u2019 Furthermore, it doesn\u2019t recognise First Nations people as creators of culture and history or as knowledge holders, but rather gives them the roles of subjects<\/p>nathan sentance<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The connections\nprovided by the formal infrastructure of such records are rigidly colonial. But\nwhen we explore collections we navigate through information systems following\nour own paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One such starting point for me was an exhibition I visited at the Cobb+Co Museum<\/a> in Toowoomba. I confess that my expectation was (perhaps unfairly) that I would encounter an institution dedicated to colonial infrastructure. And there were a lot of carriages. But in the first space I walked into the text panels and object labels were all bilingual, featuring English and Walpiri. The exhibition was about Bush Mechanics<\/em>, a four-episode television series set in Central Australia, and one of the first shows broadcast where most of the dialogue was in Aboriginal language. For those who have never seen it, here\u2019s episode four, ‘The Rainmakers.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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