Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how presences and absences were negotiated during a rural town's 150th celebrations. I pay particular attention to memory work conducted by people of mixed Indigenous, Chinese, and "Afghan" descent at the site of a former fringe camp.

Paper long abstract:

Popular narratives of Australian places are often patched together from ellipses and erasure, legend and debate. The notion of terra nullius and subsequent mission to "settle" the vast arid regions of Australia's "outback" has led some theorists (Rose 1997; Furniss 2001) to discuss rural Australian chronotopes as bound to a liminal state of "frontier" mythology.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Queensland, this paper examines how narratives of place, including frontier mythology, were expressed and enacted during the commemorative ceremonies surrounding an outback town's 150th birthday celebrations. During the festivities, many past residents returned to the community for rituals of collective memory, often through sensuous and corporeal activities in particular places. While Indigenous histories were largely overlooked in the official program, some families of Indigenous, Chinese, and Afghan descent hosted their own event by returning to and establishing temporary camps in the fringe settlement where their forbears had lived. This memory-work event was known as "re-living Coppermine creek".

I examine how those involved "re-living Coppermine Creek" sensuously engaged with place to reflect on and negotiate ideas of time, cultural identity, memory, and mobility. I argue that the embodied commemoration of Coppermine Creek created space for fluid temporalities and in doing so disrupted dominant frontier chronotopes of the region.