Revealing Intercultural Burial Traces: Tiwi and Colonial Approaches at Fort Dundas, Melville Island, Far Northern Territory, Australia

This paper contextualises inhumation and commemoration practices in the short-lived British military settlement of Fort Dundas (Punata) on Melville Island (Yermalner) in remote northern Australia during the 1820s. Death significantly impacted colonial life and traces of inhumation and commemoration practices resonate to the present. Settlers conveyed cultural meaning, ownership, and social status through the inground interment of bodies, employing funerary practices imported from Britain – and filtered through new laws and conventions established in emerging New South Wales society. The isolated burials on this remote island thus reveal much about societal values, intercultural interactions, and spatial approaches to death in the early nineteenth century. We examine early formal colonial sepulchral practices at Fort Dundas between 1824 and 1829, alongside ongoing care by Indigenous peoples, to highlight the intercultural and transient nature of sepulchral traditions. In doing so, we show that an examination of the architectural and landscape traces of colonial burials in remote settlements can reveal much about the cultural meaning and significance of human life and death. Aboriginal people’s respect for the site continues, so where tangible colonial traces have mostly been lost, Aboriginal communities have overlaid a continuum of remembrance and have inscribed new post-colonial hybrid meanings.