Negotiating Settlement Agendas in (Post)Colonial Inner Sydney

Ways of Whiteness: Negotiating settlement agendas in (post)colonial inner Sydney Wendy Susan Shaw Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2001 School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne Produced on acid-free paper Abstract: (362 words) The Aboriginal settlement known as ‘The Block’, Aboriginal Redfern or Eveleigh Street, forms an Aboriginal neighbourhood in inner Sydney. Since its deliberate and largely unexpected formalisation in 1973, this urban Aboriginal presence continues to unsettle the largely non-Aboriginal community that surrounds it and geographically binds it in place. The Block was founded as the ‘Black Capital of Australia’ and stakes a claim in the heart of Australia’s first and most prominent city, Sydney. The ‘return’ of Aboriginality, however, to a place from which it had been banished, remains a (post)colonial1 paradox. This paradoxical presence elicits responses from within the non-Aboriginal community. The modalities of race relations, that are part of Australia’s history of repression of the indigenous ‘other’, are being reproduced through the transformation of the residential inner-city. The demise of The Block is forecast, but still it remains. This persistence elicits responses, including the increasing defensiveness of white space. Other responses include the specificities of the adaptability of whiteness to the Aboriginal community. One way to adapt, to what is increasingly constructed by the media in particular as an ever-present ‘pathology’, is to imagine being ‘elsewhere’. The desires for heritage housing, and the battles to protect non-Aboriginal heritage environments in the local area, are producing racialised exclusions that are based on an imagined past. This past has been conjured from an era before the return of Aboriginality to the city. Similarly, in the latest phase of Sydney’s Manhattanisation, a boom in New York style loft apartments is promoting lifestyles that can deny, and sometimes consume, urban pathologies within its own version of urbanity. The populist commentaries about the area construct a future that is both inclusive and exclusive of an Aboriginal presence in the city. One version includes maintaining an Aboriginal presence, but one that is very different from its troubled contemporary status, and does not necessarily include the existing Aboriginal residents. The Block could be effectively contained and ‘tamed’ as a part of the city’s multicultural diversity. On the other hand there is post-Block fantasy that prevails as part of the new gentrification script for the area. If the area rids itself of this troubled Aboriginal presence, gentrification will proceed unencumbered. In a place with a continually reinscribed racial binary in operation, the ways of mobilising and activating urban settlement fantasies provide a unique window to observe the elusiveness of whiteness in its negotiation of a (post)colonial encounter. 1 The colonial is still present in (post)colonial times (Jacobs 1996). I use parentheses when the term (post)colonial is used ‘in a temporal sense … [and] parentheses are omitted when using the term to indicate a theoretical perspective’ (Taylor 2000, 34). ii DECLARATION This is to certify that: (i) The thesis comprises only my original work, except where indicated in the preface (ii) Due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all other material used (iii) The thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices Signature: PREFACE This thesis acknowledges all sources from which information has been derived and the work of others in the text. This thesis was not carried out in collaboration with others and no work from any other qualifications has been included. No work was carried out on this project prior to the PhD candidature enrolment. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to my friends and family for their support during the thesis process and to Jane M. Jacobs for her supervision. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Pages Title Page i Abstract ii Declaration iii Preface iii Acknowledgments iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures v Chapters vi Postscript 214 Bibliography 216 Appendices 234 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page numbers Figure 1.1 Location map 1a Figure 1.2 Case study area (map) 1a Figure 3.1 Set data sets 55 Figure 3.2 Ice-Breaker questions for gathering basic statistics 59 Figure 3.3 The unplanned events 64 Figure 4.1 Street map of case study area 74a Figure 5.1 Examples of ‘drug headlines’ 87 Figure 5.2 Examples of reports on policing The Block 88 Figure 5.3 The ‘usual’ confrontations 91 Figure 6.1 Fast food chains in heritage buildings 109a Figure 6.2 A row of smaller terrace houses (Caroline Street) 125a Figure 6.3 Reproduction terrace houses and original terrace houses 125a Figure 6.4 Examples of thinking about ‘heritage’ 130 Figure 7.1 ‘Health Minister admits ... It’s Wrong’ 149a Figure 7.2 Letter to Residents 151a Figure 7.3 ‘Petition’ for collecting crime-victim stories 151a Figure 7.4 ‘Are you Nervous ...’ 155a Figure 7.5 Wilson Brothers factory site community consultation process 160 Figure 7.6 Three options for the Wilson Brothers factory site 160a Figure 7.7 ‘Option 4’ for the Wilson Brothers factory site 165a Figure 7.8 Flier for ‘Redfern Residents Wilson Brothers site Action Group’ 165b Figure 7.9 DRAG’s first street meeting 170a Figure 7.10 DRAG Survey Results 172 Figure 8.1 Sydney’s SoHo Syndrome: New York! New York! 179a Figure 8.2 Contemporary imaginings: New York, New York! 192 Figure 8.3 Dakota Apartments new York City and Sydney 191a Figure 8.4 The Alpha House story 194a Figure 8.5 Examples of ghetto-referenced headlines in newspaper articles 196 v CHAPTERS Page numbers 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 The context of Ways of whiteness: A geographical study 2 1.1.1 A pre-thesis observation (of whiteness?) 6 1.2 A case of racialisation and non-ethnicity in the case study area 7 1.3 Studying Whiteness 8 1.3.1 Personal Positioning 9 1.4 The Block and the case study area 9 1.4.1 Fields of whiteness in the case study area 11 1.5 Organisation of this thesis 12 Endnotes 14 2 UNRULY PATHWAYS TO WHITENESS 2.1 Unruly pathways 15 2.2 New ways of seeing the city 20 2.3 Critical race study in geography 22 2.3.1 From segregation studies to cultural geographies of racialised groups 23 2.3.2 From ‘Whiteness Studies’ to studies of Whiteness/Racialisation 27 2.3.2.1 ‘Whiteness studies’ 29 2.3.2.2 Criticisms of ‘whiteness studies’ 31 2.4 Cities as cultural constructions: on urbanism and gentrification 32 2.4.1 Towards a cultural politics of gentrification 33 2.4.2 Urbanism and urban lifestyles 35 2.4.3 Locating ‘the indigenous’ in critical race studies of the city 38 2.5 Towards a geographical study of whiteness in the (post)colonial city 41 Endnotes 42 vi 3 METHODOLOGY 3.1 Context 43 3.2 New cultural geographies of locality 44 3.3 Towards ethnographic methodologies in geography 49 3.3.1 Positioning the personal in the field of whiteness 52 3.3.2 Personal knowledge(s) of place 53 3.4 Generating data in the case study area 54 3.4.1 Quantitative data: property values 56 3.4.2 Qualitative techniques: non-directional interviews or informal surveys 56 3.4.3 What interview subjects were required to do 58 3.4.4 Narratives and discourses 60 3.4.5 Discursive environments 63 3.4.6 Participant observation in the case study area 64 3.5 Data analysis 65 3.6 Building the ‘themes’ of the following chapters 66 Endnotes 67 4 URBAN INDIGENEITY: A (POST)COLONIAL PARADOX 4.1 The paradox of urban indigeneity 68 4.2 A history of urban blight 1 - The Dangerous City 71 4.2.1 Industrialisation and ‘Slum’ Landscapes 71 4.2.2 Urban Blight and Suburbanisation 72 4.3 A history of urban blight 2 - The Endangered City 74 4.3.1 University expansion into Darlington 74 4.3.2 Loss of Darlington Identity 76 4.3.3 Other losses 77 4.4 The return of indigeneity 78 4.5 Racialised Resentments 79 4.6 Conclusions 81 Endnotes 81 vii 5 SECURING THE PARADOX: SURVEILLANCE, FEAR AND POPULAR DISCOURSES 5.1 Maintaining the paradoxical status of urban indigeneity 83 5.2 Systems of Surveillance 84 5.3 The emergence of a racialised fearscape 86 5.3.1 Production of fear: police ‘blitz’ Block-related crime, then withdraw 91 5.3.2 Infectious fear 93 5.4 Securing the status of paradox: Discourses of Decline 94 5.4.1 Whitewash 95 5.4.2 Whitewish - the promise of gentrification 104 5.5 Conclusion 105 Endnotes 106 6 THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF WHITENESS: HERITAGE HOUSING 107 6.1 Building (white) Heritage 108 6.1.1 Heritage dreaming in inner Sydney 108 6.1.2 Heritage and white settlement in Australia 111 6.1.3 Victorian(a) revisited: gentrification (cycles) in inner Sydney 112 6.1.4 Heritage dollars 116 6.2 Selective Heritage 120 6.2.1 Select pasts and peoples 120 6.2.2 Working-classes and Industrial façades 124 6.2.3 New-build ‘heritage’ and retro chic 126 6.3 Heritage discourses in the case study area 129 6.4 Escaping into imaginaries of the past 133 6.5 Conclusions 135 Endnotes 135 viii 7 DEFENDING WHITE HERITAGE 137 7.1 Urban Social Movements and Resident Activism 138 7.1.1 Urban Social Movements and NIMBY activism in Darlington 140 7.1.2 From Green Bans to the heritage protection movement 143 7.2 Protecting white territory in the case study area 144 7.2.1 Neighbourhood Watch 144 7.3 The emergence of grass-roots ‘tactics’ in response to The Block 147 7.3.1 Caroline Lane Action Committee 148 7.3.2 Caroline Lane - a government response 149 7.3.3 Little Eveleigh Street medical facility 152

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