‘Progress is Great … ’: Making Sense of the Colonial Past in Outback Australia

Eve Vincent

doi:10.5130/csr.v21i1.3373

Abstract

This essay deals with the residue of the past in the present, in the small country town of Ceduna. Empirical historical detail about the history of this isolated place is interwoven with ethnographic material about people—Aboriginal and white—making sense of that past.

Highlights

Upon entering the museum building, the visitor sees an old barber’s chair with a yellowing, brown-‐studded leather seatback and ribbed silver footrests
Ceduna lies on South Australia’s far west coast, the last in a string of isolated settlements beyond which looms the desolate stretch of the Nullabor Plain
A wall lined with grainy, black and white images features photos of a camel team in front of the Globe Hotel, Fowlers Bay, in the late 1800s; bagged wheat being loaded on the train to be railed to Thevenard jetty in 1960; the cutting of hay with horses at Coorabie in the 1920s; a mouse plague in the wheat stacks at Denial Bay in 1917; the Waratah Gypsum Plaster Factory at Thevenard in 1959; assorted football teams and a new year’s day picnic at Laura Bay in 1910—the women sitting stiffly for the portrait in long, white dresses amidst the low-‐lying scrub

Summary

Introduction

Upon entering the museum building, the visitor sees an old barber’s chair with a yellowing, brown-‐studded leather seatback and ribbed silver footrests.

Results

Conclusion