Nervous Landscapes

The experience of being on the receiving end of racial segregation has been fundamental to the way generations of Aboriginal people in NSW view the landscape. Racial segregation was and is a spatial system with a plenitude of dividing lines, but the lines were unmarked more than marked, the conventions unvoiced more than spoken. Historically, in the Australian case, it was a system that covered its own tracks and left few marks apart from those it left on the lives of its victims. The colonial, cadastral mapping of land was instrumental in racial separation. In theory, the colonized were gridlocked by the cadastra but there were always ways through it and ways of subverting it.