Urban enactments

Abstract

This chapter explores the aspects of the contested place meanings that were attached to Belfast, Kiama, Kilmore and Stawell as part of the urban process of colonial foundation. The narratives presented bear witness to the discursively bounded localism of Scottish and Irish colonial urban experience. Urban plans and morphology gave physical shape to the acts of colonial discourse. The inclusive colonial presentism and exclusive ethnic memory played their part in the civic performance of places. The narratives of place and identity offered by the Orange Order in Stawell were publicly contested on at least one occasion. Nineteenth-century Australian towns, including Belfast (Port Fairy), Kiama, Kilmore and Stawell, were sites where the white colonial self found expression through agency, memory and identity. The narratives of urban place performed in Belfast, Kiama, Kilmore and Stawell were as varied as the people themselves.