Introduction: Wellington Valley, 1826

I take as my starting point an intriguing image (Fig. 1) that seems to disrupt the colonial paradigm of progress, and which conveyed a spark of curiosity through time about a man, whose name has not been recorded, and about the ways in which he knew his landscape. Late in 1826, the travelling artist Augustus Earle journeyed to the westernmost frontier of British settlement in the colony of New South Wales. With convicts and Aboriginal people as his guides, he explored the now well known Wellington caves and visited the most remote of the government stations—an agricultural settlement based on convict labor, established by Governor Brisbane only 3 years earlier in 1823.

Fig. 1
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Augustus Earle, 1826, ‘Wellington Valley, N.S. Wales, looking east from Government House’ NK 12/24, National Library of Australia 1974

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Earle documented his adventures in the Wellington Valley, known as Binjang to the Wiradjuri people, in a series of watercolors, including several striking scenes of the caves, two detailed studies of an unnamed Wiradjuri man, and an intriguing view of the convict agricultural station in its landscape setting (see the National Library of Australia’s website http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/). Today these images form a remarkable repository of perceptions of the encounters which took place here, only 3 years after the first sustained contact between the British and the Wiradjuri.

Earle was an intrepid traveller; he had left England in 1818 for the United States, and then travelled extensively in South America, most famously being stranded for almost a year on the tiny island of Tristan de Cunha, before landing in Hobart in January, 1825 (Hackforth-Jones 1980). Earle sought out adventure and the exotic for his art work, and in Australia he journeyed to the extreme limits of British exploration and settlement. His landscapes and townscapes focused on the “progress” which European settlement had wrought on these far-flung places. His representations are notable today for both the poignancy of his depictions of the impact of contact with Europeans upon Aboriginal people living close to the major settlements, as well as the immediacy, and what Nicholas Thomas (1999, p. 60) has called the “reflexivity,” of his renderings of encounters with Indigenous people.

Earle’s landscape view of the convict station (see Fig. 1) includes a study of a solitary figure—a Wiradjuri man. The same individual is featured in two further watercolors, front and rear studies, which depict the man’s body adornments, as well as the equipment that he carries. As an artist, Earle is not particularly noted for the ethnographic detail of his work, but rather for the way in which his scenes capture a moment of negotiation and encounter between the artist and his subject—as Thomas (1999, 60) puts it: “the artist does not provide an authoritative representation of a scene, lifted out of a particular, shared time, but rather exhibits the transactions which enabled the image to be made—that is, the awkwardness of colonial travel.”

While Earle clearly conveys in this image the achievements and progress of the British outstation in his depiction of the cleared land, the built settlement and the cultivated fields, not a single European figure inhabits the scene and, while we know from contemporary historical accounts that the Government House was the most substantial building in the settlement, it is represented only by a single, Ionic verandah column on the left of the picture.

This watercolor is not one of Earle’s great artistic successes—the human figure is clearly not in scale with the adjacent building which, somewhat strangely in composition terms, just intrudes on the scene from left field. The details of the valley and the settlement are well rendered, but this contrasts with the bare foreground and the unexpected figure of the Aboriginal man, dominating what might otherwise be seen as a bucolic European landscape.

Thomas has discussed Earle’s propensity to portray Aboriginal people as guides and masters of the landscape in a way which makes him stand out in the context of other travel artists of the early to mid-nineteenth century (Thomas 1999, 59). It seems possible that Earle simply added this depiction of the Wiradjuri man, based on his detailed studies, to his landscape view of the convict station, to add some interest to the work. But as he includes no depictions of convicts laboring in the fields, no overseers supervising, the inevitable impression gained by the viewer is that it is this Wiradjuri man who is master of, and at ease in, this landscape. Unlike many of Earle’s other images of Aboriginal people in New South Wales, this man appears to be untouched by contact with colonial settlement, he stands confidently in the scene, but his connection with it is ambiguous. Earle seems to hint at an irony between the imperial vision of progress and the lived world of the Wiradjuri man.

Earle painted many images of Aboriginal people during his time in Australia but prior to the work of Thomas, his interest in them was generally said by scholars to have been negligible, as Earle later wrote in his memoir that he found them lacking in “energy, enterprise and curiosity” (Hackforth Jones 1980; National Library of Australia 1996). His body of work, however, belies this statement and, at least whilst travelling in Australia (his views may have changed later), he appears to have been sympathetic to the plight of dispossessed Aboriginal people, to have shown an interest in capturing their individual characters and also the irony of the colonizers’ reliance upon their Indigenous guides. Surely such an irony is also reflected in this scene? As the commandant of the station up to this period, Lt. Percy Simpson (who probably left the settlement shortly before Earle’s visit) claimed, a substantial establishment had been successfully created by his motley crew of convicts in just 3 years, yet Earle persists in presenting the Wiradjuri man as central.

Who is the man in the picture? He may be the “chief” whose “friendship” Percy Simpson’s letters tell us he had earlier “cultivated”—“a tomahawk, some articles of clothing and a few trinkets have attached him to me and he sets off tomorrow to Bathurst with this letter to return in 10 days” (Simpson report, March 1, 1823, cited by Roberts 2000a, p. 36). The detailed studies of the man show a tall, well built figure, with red feathers in his hair, a string hair-band, a hair or fur-string waist belt with four tassels, a curved boomerang tucked in to it, and a club held in his hand. The image also details the cicatrices on his back and arms. The range of adornments and weapons appear to have interested Earle, leading him to undertake the two careful studies, as well as placing him in the foreground of his view over the Bell River valley and the hills behind (Ireland et al. 2005, pp. 3–25). The detail of these visual studies also hints at the types of communication and negotiation that must have occurred between the artist and his subject. Perhaps aided by an individual attached to the convict station, who had gotten to know the Wiradjuri man some time during the last 3 years, Earle must have negotiated to spend some time with his subject, and the Wiradjuri man must have consented to pose, perhaps in exchange for goods or perhaps out of curiosity at that the outcome.

Earle’s rendering of the co-existence of Aboriginal people and this convict settlement reinforces other historical interpretations, based upon the scanty references in colonial secretaries’ correspondence relating to the Wellington Valley settlement (Roberts 2000a, b, c). The interaction between the convict station and the Wellington Wiradjuri was not only largely amicable but characterized by both curiosity and ambivalence on both sides. The Wiradjuri incorporated the station as the source for a range of resources as they still moved freely around their district. This period of co-existence is surprising in view of the violence being perpetrated between settlers and Wiradjuri only a short distance away around Bathurst. However, it also emphasizes the absence of the causes of this violence, namely intense competition for land and resources, in the Wellington Valley at this time (Pearson 1981; Read 1988). However, this situation was short lived. By the 1830s, pastoral settlement was steadily encroaching upon this area, with devastating effects for Wiradjuri people.

The Wellington Valley Site Today

In 2004, I worked with a team to prepare a Conservation Management Plan for the Wellington Valley convict station and mission site for the New South Wales (NSW) National Parks and Wildlife Service (Ireland et al. 2005, and refer to Acknowledgments this paper). The site had been purchased in 2001 by the NSW government for its archaeological, historical, and social heritage significance—a very rare case of acquisition by the state of an historic site for conservation and protection purposes. The Maynggu Ganai Historic Site (MGHS), as it was to be called, lies 2.3 km south of the center of the township of Wellington, a town of around 8,000 people that was settled from the 1840s (Fig. 2). In 2006, Wellington’s Indigenous population was 16% of the total population of the town, and this region of NSW had the highest proportional Indigenous population in the state. The MGHS was known to the local community as the place of the first colonial settlement in the region and as the first in a long succession of Aboriginal missions and settlements in the Wellington area, which included the later Apsley Mission (1839–48), Blake’s Fall Mission (1848–66), “Black’s Camp” (to 1910), Wellington Town Common (1868–1970), Nanima (1910 to present), Bell River Flats (c. 1940–70), and Bushranger’s Creek (c. 1950–70) (Kabaila 1998, 18–45). In 1995 the Wellington Common Agreement (relating to parts of the Wellington Town Common) was the first agreement in Australia mediated under the Native Title Act (1993). This agreement established, amongst a range of matters, continued rights of access to the Town Common for Wiradjuri people and an acknowledgement that the Common was part of traditional Wiradjuri land. In 2002, the Wellington Historic Site Community Focus Group, which included representatives of the Wellington Wiradjuri elders, Wellington Local Aboriginal Land Council, Wellington Council, Wellington Historical Society, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, agreed to name the site Maynggu Ganai—a name which means “people’s land” in the local Wiradjuri language. According to the statements of the Focus Group the name did not identify any particular group of people and was intended to encompass the whole community as a gesture of reconciliation (Ireland et al. 2005, sec. 1, p. 1).

Fig. 2
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Location plan of Maynggu Ganai historic site (Ireland et al. 2005)

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Physically, MGHS is nothing more than an undistinguished, weedy paddock on the southern outskirts of the town (Figs. 3 and 4), however its history has been the subject of significant research: this includes research on mission history by Woolmington (1983, 1986, 1988) and Carey (1996, 2000, 2009), Carey and Roberts (2002a, b,), and Roberts and Carey (2009) on the Wellington Mission archive, the early activity of the Wesleyan Methodist missionary John Harper at Wellington between 1824 and 1826, and on the Indigenous religious movement known as the Baiame waganna. Roberts (2000b, 2006) has also published on the convict station and produced an important heritage management report on the site which provides an excellent analysis of the historical development of the buildings on the site (Roberts, 2000a). Important broader historical and archaeological studies of the Wiradjuri region, including those by Read (1988), Kabaila (1998), and Pearson (1981), place the site in its broader pre-colonial and colonial contexts.

Fig. 3
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View of the historic site, looking towards the hilltop site of the military barracks, site G1 in Fig. 5 (Photograph taken in November 2003 by the author)

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Fig. 4
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The same view (as Fig. 1) depicted by Earle in 1826, as seen from the site today (Photograph taken in November 2003 by the author)

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As we have seen, the Wellington Valley convict station was originally settled in 1823 on the westernmost frontier of British settlement in Eastern Australia at that time, and in the territory of the Wellington Valley Wiradjuri people. The Wiradjuri are a large and diverse cultural group, speaking many sub-dialects of the Wiradjuri language and living across a wide area of inland NSW. As the first colonial settlement in the region, the station was, therefore, the place of the first sustained contact between the Wellington Valley Wiradjuri and the British. The convict station’s buildings and agricultural infrastructure were handed over to Anglican missionaries in 1832 to become the first formal Anglican mission in Australia (Woolmington 1988). Conflict between the missionaries and the withdrawing of support by the Church Missionary Society and the colonial government, saw the mission fold by 1843 and the entire site was abandoned by the government by 1845. The land was eventually absorbed into grazing and agricultural allotments. Re-usable building materials were purloined by local settlers and anything useful that was left was auctioned in June 1848—the remaining buildings quickly crumbled (Roberts 2000a, p. 35). Only a few foundations were visible on the site in the early twentieth century (Porter 1906, p. 3). The blocks of land purchased by the NSW government to make up the MGHS do not encompass the entire area of the nineteenth-century settlement and it is therefore probable that further archaeological remains exist on the private rural and residential lands surrounding the historic site (Ireland et al. 2005, sec. 7, p. 9) (Fig. 5). However, the part of the early colonial site in NPWS ownership is likely to encompass the sites of the two, isolated hill top buildings shown on the left hand side of Earle’s landscape view—they are the Government House (which later became the mission house) and a military barracks (later used as a residence, harness room, and finally a commercial premises, “Mr. Elkin’s store”) (Roberts 2000a, p. 69). MGHS perhaps also includes the sites of huts built by Indigenous people, as well as roads, gardens and other domestic and agricultural infrastructure, however, the majority of the cluster of government buildings located at the foot of the Government House hill (and clearly depicted in Earle’s watercolor) were probably located outside the current boundaries of MGHS. Several early plans and diagrams of the settlement exist, and although schematic, they were used along with other historical evidence to assess the archaeological potential of MGHS for the Conservation Management Plan (CMP). The CMP concluded that although somewhat disturbed over the ensuing 150 years, MGHS is a very rare, early colonial archaeological site outside the metropolitan area of Sydney.

Fig. 5
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Location of observed surface remains on MGHS. G1, military barracks site, pad of laid river cobbles with associated artifact scatter (clay pipe and ceramic fragments observed); G2, service buildings associated with Government House, high concentration of brick rubble in soil along site boundary; G3, Government House site, benched hilltop site with brick rubble close by; G4, brick-lined well, 1.2 m in diameter, dense, dry pressed bricks in upper courses, some sandbricks below; N1, basalt flagstones, a small area of basalt flags or cobbles, unknown structure

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Further, the lack of intensive later development in the area has meant that the early colonial landscape of the Wellington Valley, as described in the historical documents and depicted in images such as Augustus Earle’s 1826 watercolor and a later work by Conrad Martens of the Wellington Valley in March 1840 (Martens 1840), has survived in a recognizable form. The natural topography of the two small peaks of the site, overlooking the river valley to the south and west, and enclosed by rolling hills to the east, embodies the characteristics of the early colonial landscape, which comprised the cultural landscape of the Wellington Valley Wiradjuri people and was chosen by the British in the 1820s as their strategic outpost. The currently limited and low scale development immediately around the site, the large fields of crops along the river, as well as the uninterrupted views to the distant Mt. Arthur and Mt. Wellesley ranges, allow the landscape to be experienced today in a manner which evokes a sense of the place in the early colonial period (see Fig. 4).

The cultural significance of this place combines the evocative landscape, the tangibility of the archaeological remains and their promise of yielding further information through investigation. But perhaps even more central to this cultural significance is the symbolic importance and centrality of the site in local history for both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, its ability to act as a local focus for history, language and identity, and as a symbol of reconciliation.

Landscape, Cultural Exchange and Heritage

In constructing the cross-cultural history of the MGHS, “landscape” provides the essential frame for an historicized, ethnographic approach to cultural interaction (Thomas 1994). A landscape-based approach has been recognized as a particularly appropriate one for studying the processes of cultural exchange and contact (Torrence and Clarke 2000) and for understanding heritage in the context of colonialism (Byrne et al. 2001, pp. 3, 51). Landscape has also been used as a device for exploring how past and present are intertwined in place, highlighting the multiple experiences constructed through specific political and historical conditions, as well as cultural, gender and power differences (Appadurai 1996; Ingold 1993; Thomas, J. 1996a).

Archaeologists have often employed phenomenological approaches to landscape derived from Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” however, this approach seems to imply a passivity that is out of place in the colonial context (Ingold 1993, p. 152; Thomas 1996b). Understanding settler/Indigenous (re)construction and re-making of place through the processes of contact and colonialism requires a consideration of the way the imperial framework transforms and politicizes the interaction of colonial people in a contested landscape. In this vein, Appadurai’s concepts of the “production of locality” and “ethnocsapes” are particularly useful, despite the fact that he offers them to help understand cultural production in the context of globalization (Appadurai 1996). Colonialism however, is certainly the precursor to more recent forms of globalization and Appadurai’s approach can encompass the phenomenological content of social life within a stronger appreciation of historical and political context. His focus on the production of local identities based on local territories, in the context of broader narratives and structures of economy and group identity, is obviously appropriate to an ethnographic approach to the colonial interaction of European and Indigenous people. Appadurai’s term “ethnoscape” is also used by him to describe a part of the “imagined world” which people carry with them, when they are displaced or travel or become involved in a colonizing project, and which they then employ to transform space into place, or as Appudurai puts it, into “localities” where power is exercised to create order from perceived wilderness or chaos.

Since the 1980s, heritage management in Australia has grappled with the issue of inclusiveness in a variety of ways. It is clear that concepts of heritage in Australia developed on the basis of an essentialized view of Indigenous culture and identity, separating Indigenous heritage into categories of the scientific, archaeological, and anthropological, and that discourses of Aboriginal rights have incrementally increased acknowledgement of Indigenous ownership and control of their heritage (Murray 1996a; Pearson and Sullivan 1995). Research into how this situation developed is ongoing and continues to reveal its more insidious legacies (Birch 2002; Byrne et al. 2001; Colley 2002; Healy 2001; McNiven and Russell 2008). Another response to these issues has been the growth in community based heritage, history and archaeology projects, which have seen “consent and consultation” style research transformed into “community controlled” research (Greer et al. 2002; Marshall 2002). This “decolonizing” of heritage has also seen a great deal of attention paid to Aboriginal historic sites, in an attempt to put Aboriginal people “back” into the Australian heritage landscape (Byrne 2002, 2003).

Building upon the “sharing histories” goal of the 1997 Reconciliation Convention (Goodall 2002, p. 8) historians, archaeologists, and heritage managers have actively sought out “shared narratives of post-1788 Australia” (Harrison and Williamson 2002, p. 9; Harrison 2004). “Shared history” and “shared heritage” are terms that are often used in Australia and elsewhere to describe an approach to the entangled legacies of colonialism (Harrison and Williamson 2002; Murray 1996a, b). However, there is debate surrounding these terms and their implied reconfiguring of a smooth, new narrative into which Indigenous stories have simply been added, without a true disruption of Europe-centred conceptual frameworks. Goodall (2002) has suggested that the notion of “shared predicaments,” rather than shared histories, may be more helpful and also that Indigenous people are now less willing to relinquish their custodial role over the telling of their past. Lydon (2006, p. 304) also points out that while a “shared history” of processes like pastoralism, in the remoter parts of Australia, may have potential, the concept seems to have limited utility on the “contested ground” of southeastern Australia where many Aboriginal people were confined to reserves and missions from the 1860s.

Aboriginal historical archaeology is a vibrant field in Australia, building on international movements to recover subaltern histories in postcolonial contexts (Torrence and Clarke 2000; Harrison and Williamson 2002). The work of Murray (1993) Williamson (2002), Harrison (2004), and Paterson (1999) illustrate the development of approaches to landscape and artifactual evidence in this field. Importantly, much of this work is multidisciplinary, for instance Lydon’s (2002) analysis of colonial photography to reveal Indigenous agency in this form of representation. Lydon’s continuing archaeological work on the Ebenezer mission (2003) aims to use material culture to explore issues of gender organization and transformation and continuity of cultural identity. Prior to the current volume, relatively little archaeological work concerning Aboriginal life on missions and reserves had been undertaken, despite their importance as Aboriginal living places through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout southeastern Australia (Lydon 2006, p. 304).

MGHS has enormous potential to contribute further information about colonial cultural exchange through archaeological research. No excavated archaeological evidence currently exists for missions to Aboriginal people in Australia prior to 1845. The Wellington Valley was in fact the site of the first frontier missionary activity of its type in Australia, with the work of John Harper of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, who stayed at the convict station between 1824 and 1826. Harper’s reports on Aboriginal culture and his success in learning Wiradjuri language became a subject of great controversy when published in the Sydney Gazette, although a special District Hearing in 1826 later upheld his industriousness and integrity (Roberts and Carey 2009, p. 15). The Wesleyans then abandoned Wellington, and the later Anglican (CMS) mission was not established until 1832. The CMS Wellington Mission was therefore preceded only by the earlier work of the Wesleyan Harper at Wellington, the work of a number of missionaries at Macquarie’s Native Institutions in Parramatta and Blacktown (although this institution was not in fact a mission) and the London Missionary Society’s Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld’s long lived mission at Lake Macquarie, established in 1825.

While a significant historiography of Indigenous experience in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century missions and reserves exists, much is yet to be understood about Indigenous responses to early missions (Carey and Roberts 2002b). Archaeological evidence for Indigenous experience in this early period has the potential to complement and build on research on later nineteenth-century missions (Lydon 2003) and reserves (Paterson 2000), and to enhance and refine our understanding of this key colonial process in Australia.

To date, no substantive excavation of MGHS has been undertaken, but the landscape itself and the few surface remains which have been identified through survey, can be powerfully combined with the rich historic record for this site, to suggest interpretations of cross cultural interaction in this place. In seeking a more open exploration of what occurred between people in this place—foregrounding Indigenous agency, the nature of cultural traffic, and its impact on the people involved—the landscape and its material evidence is crucial in providing an alternative account of cross-cultural interaction.

The Wellington Valley Mission

The colonial settlement of the Wellington Valley came at a dramatic period in the history of race relations in NSW, when armed conflict between settlers and Wiradjuri around Bathurst (approximately 150 km southeast of Wellington) lead to the declaration of martial law by Governor Brisbane in 1824 (Read 1988). Although the convict station had only been in use for a decade, in 1832 the colonial government gave the site and its infrastructure for the use of the Church Missionary Society of London. At this period the colonial government had little interest in supporting missions, however, because of the significant violence and conflict seen in this region between pastoralists and Indigenous people in the 1820s, the mission was seen as a mechanism that might help facilitate successful pastoral expansion. Conflict between Wiradjuri and settlers was a direct result of the reduction of land available to the Wiradjuri for their traditional use, as all grazing land, including woodland and watercourses, was occupied by settlers (Pearson 1981, p. 351). To give some idea of the jolting speed and impact of this process, Pearson analyzed the official figures for the alienation of land, showing that in the Bathurst district this jumped from 2,520 ac (1,020 ha) in 1821 to 91,636 ac (37,084 ha) in 1825 (Pearson 1981, p. 204).

Around Wellington in the 1820s, however, settlement pressure was not yet as great as around Bathurst and the small and contained convict station established there had generally amicable relations with the Wellington Valley Wiradjuri people, presumably because it did not threaten their access to resources. As settlement expanded, the colonial government had some interest in supporting the Wellington mission as a means of facilitating the settlement process—largely by attempting to make the Wiradjuri a part of the expansion of agricultural industry as workers and servants. However, the colonial government’s interest in the mission was sporadic. The mission was run by the missionaries themselves, reporting to the Church Missionary Society (CMS). This fact produced one of the most significant aspects of the history of this place. The letters, journals and reports of the missionaries Reverends Handt, Watson and Gunther, amounting to more than a thousand manuscript pages, have been preserved in the archives of the CMS. These papers provide a unique perspective on contact history in Australia¸ although the problems involved in their interpretation as highly politicised documents should not be underestimated. However, the information they contain about Wiradjuri life and language, the experiences, beliefs and thoughts of the missionaries, their families and their encounters with Wiradjuri people, have made them a significant resource for historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and linguists.

“The Dominion of Old Men”

“If a stronger control could be exercised over [the Aborigines]; if for instance the dominion of the old men, with their absurd laws, could be counteracted, polygamy the root of so much evil prohibited, and those frequently occurring feuds, which constantly drive them in the bush, prevented, then better things might be expected” (Gunther, Annual Report for 1841, in Historical Records of Australia 1842, p. 735).

A major paradigm for the historical and archaeological investigation of missions and other forms of early colonial settlement and industry in Australia has been an analysis of their success or failure (Carey 2000; Ireland 2003; Woolmington 1988). This concentration on long term success or failure is structured by a colonialist teleology of progress and has tended to limit analysis of the nature and meaning of the experiences and cultural interactions that actually did occur in these situations. Missions to Aboriginal people have been described as “unsuccessful” “until land annexation had largely been completed,” indicating that while Aboriginal people had the choice, they continued to control and shape the nature of their interaction with missionaries and their settlements (Kociumbas 1988, p. 147). This makes the physical aspects of these early colonial interactions particularly interesting to try to understand in historical and archaeological terms, especially as an opportunity to glimpse Indigenous interests, actions and motivations. Though the Wellington CMS mission may have been a “failure” in its own historical and evangelical terms of reference, this framework needs to be recognized as the product of a set of cultural preconceptions which should not shape historical and archaeological analyses.

With the decision in 1832 to establish the Wellington mission the interactions between Wiradjuri people and colonial expansion became less a by-product of the occupation of land and more a matter of overt intention and intervention. There was an expectation of improved race relations and hence concrete results for settlers from the establishment of the mission. However, by 1842 funding was withdrawn from the mission, and the missionaries’ primary aim of conversion to Christianity was not realized.

Early Australian missions are generally considered to have been unsuccessful because they not only failed to baptize and convert, but also failed to convince Aboriginal people to settle down and live in the mission settlements. Carey (2000) concludes that the early missions ultimately failed due to the pressure of European settlement and diseases, a factor never fully realized by the missionary authorities who had uneasy relationships with colonial administrations. In the records of the missionaries themselves, the reason for the failure of their evangelical aims was often attributed to “the dominion of the old men”—that is the robustness of the Wiradjuri social and cultural networks in enforcing their own “cultural laws.” Hence, missionary William Watson’s emphasis on gathering children, some perhaps orphaned and others perhaps not, to live with him and his wife at the mission house, where they endeavored to “protect” them from the cultural influence of the outside community.

Although the conversion and settlement of Wiradjuri did not occur, cultural exchange, and transformation of a rapid and dramatic nature was indeed taking place around the Wellington Mission in the 1830s and 40s—one example of this may be the Indigenous cultural or religious movement called the Baiame waggana ceremonies which have been closely analyzed through the Wellington mission papers by Carey and Roberts (2002a, b). The biaime waganna may be the earliest documented example in Australia of a religious response to the challenges to Indigenous social and physical well-being that were brought about by colonization, although this interpretation is debated (Carey and Roberts 2002a, p. 823, Swain 1993). The mission journals record the stories and descriptions given to the missionaries by Wiradjuri people. The descriptions are subject to the missionaries’ lack of subtlety in language translation, and to their cultural prejudices but in between these filters, the missionaries describe, between 1833–5, the development of a creative cultural response to the combined colonial onslaughts, particularly smallpox.

From 1829–31 the Indigenous population of NSW was afflicted by a devastating smallpox epidemic, referred to as “Thunna thunna” (Carey and Roberts 2002a, p. 847). The epidemic reached Wellington Valley shortly before the final closure of the government convict station, and reports of 1831 indicate that it was particularly severe in its impact, with the local population possibly reduced by as much as a third (Carey and Roberts 2002a, pp. 827–829). This additional impact compounded the ongoing cultural and demographic stresses resulting from expansion of the pastoral frontier into Wiradjuri lands, other diseases such as influenza, and non-Indigenous men’s sexual depredation of Wiradjuri women, which is described as causing particular social stress in this region.

Carey and Robert’s interpretation of the Biame waganna, and of the role of the Wellington Valley missionaries in recording it, provides an intriguing insight into the social and cultural tumult that surrounded the fixed point of the Wellington Valley mission, as pastoral settlement expanded in the region disrupting Wiradjuri social and economic networks, most devastatingly through the impact of disease. It has been argued that the Wiradjuri incorporated the convict station and later the mission into their resource networks, utilizing the useful materials and food that the mission was prepared to distribute. These resources may have meant that in colonial times larger and longer gatherings of Wiradjuri occurred than had been possible in pre-colonial times (Pearson 1981, p. 72). Such gatherings were one of the mechanisms via which the idea of the biame waganna was spread, and may also have been an opportunity for Wiradjuri to discuss and compare their experiences of interaction with the different aspects of British settlement.

The Archaeological Landscape

Although occupied for only 22 years in colonial times, this site’s history of development and use reflects the markedly different purposes of its occupants, their activities and issues of control and authority, remembering that after the convict station was abandoned, the missionaries had to make use of the same facilities and had limited resources to replace or modify them. The fine Government House, which Augustus Earle so conspicuously failed to record in his view of the Wellington Valley convict station, later became the mission house. It had been constructed, for no doubt strategic reasons, in an attractive location on a hilltop to the north of the convict stockade and government buildings, looking towards the main road approach from Sydney, and with a clear, 360° view of the valley (G3, see Fig. 5). The quality, size and location of the house impressed the missionary Watson, who wrote that “we took possession of the Government house which is finely situated upon a hill and commands a beautiful view for several miles round … I never anticipated having such a house as this in the Bush” (Watson Journal, October 3, 1832, in Carey and Roberts 2002a, b). The hilltop site of the Government House has unfortunately been ploughed for crops in the twentieth century. However a pile of handmade colonial bricks, perhaps tossed aside during plowing, indicate that some deeper subsurface features may survive in this location.

On the neighboring hilltop, in a similarly strategic location, was the military barracks (G1, see Fig. 5). At the base of the hills, and close to the arable land and deep soils of the valley floor, was a cluster of buildings including the convict stockade, grain store, smithy and other government stores and allotments to the north along the road—unfortunately now built over and not incorporated as part of the historic site. One small allotment in the valley has been incorporated into MGHS and it contains an intact, brick lined well, which could date to the period of the convict station or mission, but this is difficult to determine on the basis of current evidence.

The mission was at first confined to the hill top sites but Watson later took up residence in the convict stockade with his family and the Indigenous children he had “collected” from the region. But this was only after his relations with the other missionaries, living in the mission house, had completely broken down. In his efforts to civilize, missionary Watson was notorious for taking children for the mission, sometimes forcing their mothers to give them up, to the point that he was known as “eagle hawk” among the Aboriginal population, and missionaries in general as “kidnappers” (Gunther Diary, December 16 and 17, 1839, January 17 and 19, 1840, in Harris 1990, p. 63). His motives were founded in his knowledge of many girls with venereal disease (e.g., Gunther Diary, March 5, 1833, August 18, 1833, in Carey and Roberts 2002a, b) and the belief that education in Christian belief and culture would benefit them. His colleagues however, did not agree with his position, reporting to the CMS with dismay that Aboriginal people hid their children when the missionaries approached (Harris 1990, p. 63).

Historical sources confirm that Indigenous people lived on and moved through the site throughout its use as both convict station and mission. Larger Indigenous camps were located on the banks of the Bell River about a mile away. The missionaries were frequent visitors to these camps, often going down after dinner in the evenings to talk with the men. The historical records paint a picture of constant comings and goings of Indigenous people through the site—some built huts there and lived in them for a while and their cooking fires were blamed for several fires that damaged a number of buildings, which of course had mostly shingled or thatched roofs. Convicts and soldiers shared their huts with Indigenous people in bad weather, curious children made a nuisance of themselves around the convict station and although consorting with native women was forbidden, reports by outsiders, such as John Harper the Wesleyan Methodist missionary who spent two controversial years in the convict station from 1825, confirmed it was occurring (Roberts 2000a, p. 19). This problem did not cease during the life of the mission and the revelation that the mission’s agricultural specialist, William Porter, was having sexual relations with a number of native women, was one of the last straws for the mission (Carey 2000).

Carey has drawn attention to the significance of the work of the missionary wives at Wellington, who are, she argues, far more prominently reported in the CMS archives as actively involved in mission work on this site, than is the case for other early missions in Australia (Carey 1996, p. 258). Women and their activities can therefore be closely associated with particular areas of the site, most importantly the mission house and the service buildings behind them (G2, see Fig. 5). The wives instructed Indigenous children in reading and bible study, as well as domestic tasks. Caring for sick and dying Indigenous people, afflicted by influenza, smallpox, venereal disease, and so on, was perhaps the most demanding role for the mission wives and perhaps the most significant work carried out in the mission.

Between the mission house and its service buildings (G2 and G3, see Fig. 5), fenced enclosures, called the “Playgrounds” were built to contain the Indigenous children and young women who lived in the mission. These play enclosures were created to keep children and girls separate from both the white and black people who moved through the landscape. Sexual danger for young girls was a major preoccupation for the missionaries and physical confinement of their charges was their premier tool against this.

There were never many Aboriginal people resident in the mission buildings themselves (Roberts 2000a, b, c, p. 21). Indigenous children were housed in dormitories, but most of the Indigenous population continued to reside elsewhere, coming and going to relieve social tensions and according to the fluctuating availability of resources, including blankets and stores, as well as traditional foods and materials. Pearson extracted observations of Aboriginal people’s movements around the mission site over an 8 month period, 1837–8, from Gunther’s diaries (Pearson 1981, pp. 72–76). The maximum number of people who gathered over this period was 80. Between February and April 1838, when a “corroboree” was in preparation, the camp, with a large number of 40–80 residents, moved four times, from 300 yds to 1.5 mi (274–2,414 m) away from the mission. The location of these camps is not stated, except for “nearer the river” when the weather was hot, but presumably they were on the slopes of the hills above the river flats. Gunther reported that the people seldom camped more than three nights in the same locality. There are likely to have been even more shifts in locale than those Gunther documented, including some further into the bush that he did not observe.

This gives a picture of the strong contrasts in the use of the space of the mission and its surrounding lands by Wiradjuri and missionaries. Within the structures of the earlier convict station, the missionaries re-used government house, in its strategic position, as the domestic and authoritarian hub of the mission. The mission house also controlled the “playground” enclosures designed to keep Aboriginal girls and children separate from the corrupting influences of other settlers and itinerant Aboriginal people. As the domestic hub, the mission house was also the space for women’s work—the mission house, a long rectangular service building behind it (G2, see Fig. 5) and the surrounding “playgrounds,” created a domestic compound, rendering a “civilized” enclosure within the wilds of the broad river valley—the Wiradjuri landscape—which it overlooked. The Wiradjuri appear to have used the mission as a focus and to their own advantage, frequently camping around it and moving through it. They were not, however, absorbed into its structures of enclosure and moved through the site irrespective of these real and perceived European boundaries, in an active response to the challenges which intensifying European occupation and contact introduced.

Place Making and Heritage

Heritage places are most significant when the past they represent strikes the most powerful and poignant chords in the contemporary cultural and historical consciousness. As the place of the first sustained colonial relations between the British and the Wellington Valley Wiradjuri, and also of the first Anglican Mission to Indigenous people in Australia, Maynggu Ganai resonates with some of contemporary Australia’s most pressing cultural issues: contested frontier histories; the origins of the “stolen generation” policies; and notions of “shared” or “separate” Australian historical narratives and their implications for local and national identity. The challenge for heritage management at Maynggu Ganai is to bring to life the history of a place that has been worn away by time and dumbed down by the simplistic narratives of colonial progress. By focusing on this place as a landscape of colonial interaction, by investigating moments of communication and misunderstanding, of colonial control and resistance, teleological renderings of colonial progress can be disrupted and the complexity of the colonial project, the diversity of the personalities, interests, and motivations of its actors, both black and white, might be revealed. As Goodall (2002, p. 12) has pointed out, such forms of historical understanding remain rare in public, popular and official contexts, such as the arena of heritage management. Although oral testimony, memories, and stories of later mission sites around Wellington have been recorded, here, it is the place itself which, through its form and its name, now acts as a memory and agent of continuity, rather than as a receptacle of memories.

Heritage Values and the Community

The former NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) (today Department of Environment and Climate Change) has been very influential in promoting new approaches to cultural heritage management in Australia (Byrne et al. 2001). Past understandings of heritage value have tended to reflect the cultures of expertise and professionalism which support their construction—such as architectural, historical, and archaeological values—rather than the more integrated ways in which communities actually understand places for what they mean in terms of local memory and identity. Coming to grips with the latter, naturally highlights cultural difference, and the NPWS has been influential in commissioning studies based on a solid methodology of consultation and analysis of the contemporary community attachment to place. The brief for the CMP for MGHS was a good example of this approach.

In the Wellington community in 2003–4, when our research was carried out, both Indigenous and non-indigenous people valued this site but, unsurprisingly, for different reasons (Ireland et al. 2005, sec. 5). Non-indigenous people valued the site most primarily for its association with the convict period. The reasons for this seem to relate to the unambiguous role of the place as the first settlement in the area and to the mythology surrounding convicts as key foundational figures in nationalist historiographies. Genealogists and family historians tend to draw pride from identification of a convict ancestor and early revisionist histories represented convicts as “forced” migrants and workers, rather than hardened criminals. As the “first” white settlement in the region the place provides an origin site and birth myth for Wellington’s settler community, even though members of the white community are unlikely to have any direct ancestral relationship to the historical figures involved in the Wellington Valley site.

Overwhelmingly, Indigenous people valued the site for its time as a mission and for the importance of this first mission in their local history—but also as symbolic of the first contact between Wiradjuri and “government men.” Although relatively few Indigenous people actually lived in the Wellington Valley Mission, it was the first in a long line of mission settlements around Wellington and members of the community could trace their ancestors back through these settlements. Some community members interviewed reported that they had baptism and marriage certificates of ancestors signed by Reverend William Watson, the missionary from the Wellington Valley site who stayed in the Wellington area for the rest of his life, long after the Wellington Valley site had been abandoned. Watson was in fact spoken about in familiar and affectionate terms by a number of the Wellington Wiradjuri elders, as a well known historical figure who “helped” Aboriginal people, contrasting with his reputation as a “kidnapper” in some of the historical literature.

On the other hand, younger members of the Indigenous community clearly articulated the importance of the place in the context of the “stolen generations”—that is to say as a significant example of the colonial assimilation policies which involved removing children from their parents and their culture. Peter Read had noted the Wellington Valley Mission and the “child procuring” activities of the missionaries, as the precursor to later child removal—a policy of assimilation which is often most clearly associated with the twentieth-century actions of Australian governments, which were recently formally apologized for by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 (Read 1988, 1999). Lydon (2005) has examined an even earlier colonial example of this practice associated with the school for Indigenous children in Sydney, the Blacktown Native Institution, and has also considered how shifting historical understandings of these colonial processes transform related heritage places into active and symbolic political sites. These transmutations of meaning and value reinforce the importance of the Wellington site, and other places like it, as they take on new suites of meanings for Indigenous people, and for the broader community, as the history and implications of these processes of colonialism are dealt with.

While the values of MGHS were contested locally, particularly over the State government’s decision to give it the Aboriginal name Maynggu Ganai, a group of community representatives had been working together on the management of the place and they claimed it as an important vehicle for the local reconciliation process (Ireland et al. 2005, sec. 5, p. 2). These community members clearly saw this as a place which could be valued by both black and white people together, as a symbol of their entangled cultural heritage, and perhaps also as a symbol of their shared future as a community living together. As you might expect, people with this kind of positive view were very enthusiastic about our research project and thus were keen to be interviewed and involved in our project and the management of MGHS. However, our research team also endeavored to record the range of contemporary cultural values associated with this place, in order not to produce an overly resolved concept of its heritage value and to produce a Conservation Management Plan which recognized that some aspects of the cultural values of MGHS were incommensurable.

Conclusions: From Mission to Maynggu Ganai

Today the mundane landscape of Maynggu Ganai says little overtly of the tumultuous colonial exchange which centred on this place. However, through the practices of cultural heritage it has again become a focus for a community living with the difficult legacies of that colonial history. The themes of our Conservation Management Plan project revolved around the ability of this place and its landscape to evoke a living past—a past which is clearly still embedded in contemporary social and cultural conditions. The landscape itself provided the frame for the need to understand the dynamics of the early colonial cultural exchange which had occurred within it. While the need to re-read and re-interpret the available physical and historical evidence derived from the community’s focus on this site as relevant to the present and to inform our present questions. What emerges is an appreciation of a story which is far richer than the simple spread of the pastoral industry and the inevitable, inescapable confinement of Wiradjuri people into a series of missions and fringe camps. In the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s none of these outcomes was a foregone conclusion and only later nation-building histories and teleologies have made it seem that way.

Augustus Earle’s image of this place, which refused to sit neatly within those established interpretations of colonial ethnography and dispossession, inspired curiosity about the nature of colonial cultural exchange and communication that was played out in this place, first between Wellington Valley Wiradjuri and the convict establishment, and later with the Anglican missionaries. In terms of the cultural significance of this place—as an archaeological site with a real presence and place in the contemporary life of the community and its various of concepts of identity—these historic images, as well as the Wellington mission archive, play a crucial role in the ability of heritage management processes to re-animate this landscape, integrating the place with aspects of its history that time has dispersed—reflecting both the global processes of colonialism within which it had been involved, as well as the more intimate local encounters between individuals, negotiating the quotidian transactions of co-existence in this landscape.