Master Narratives and the Dispossession of the Wiradjuri

Abstract

This paper and the concerns it raises developed from my study of Wiradjuri people's relationships to land, as part of a study of the Wiradjuri Regional Aboriginal Land Council's experiences with the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983. At first, it seemed it would be straightforward to identify practices, values and speech acts through which Wiradjuri people understood and articulated these relationships. But as soon as I started to ask, what does land mean to Wiradjuri people today, I found I was writing defensively rather than descriptively I was needing to convince, conscious of a refusal 'out there' in the world of potential readership, academic and non-academic, to acknowledge that Wiradjuri people, encapsulated in the centre of New South Wales' agricultural heartland, had any relationships to land after their 180 years' experience of colonisation. This paper does not look at those meanings I wished to write about, except briefly to contextualise my discussion. Instead, I look at the sources of my disquiet and the larger question which kept confronting me: within what discursive space can one talkabout Wiradjuri people having any meanings at all?