‘We had to be off by sundown’: Narungga contributions to farming industries on Yorke Peninsula (Guuranda), South Australia

Abstract

Aboriginal peoples around Australia have played a significant role in the establishment and development of many of the country's successful agricultural industries. Despite this, Australian rural histories rarely acknowledge or celebrate Aboriginal people's labour as an important contributing factor in the prosperity of agricultural ventures. This lack of recognition is often symptomatic of more widespread absences that exist within Australian historical discourse regarding Aboriginal people's working lives since European colonisation. These absences are often at their most pronounced in rural areas, where there has been a strong desire to erase any contrary evidence that could undermine 'the pioneer success story' or challenge the idea of European settlers as anything other than guileless agents engaged in 'a struggle over adversity that became the foundation stone of nation building'. Increasingly, however, these mediated absences are being contested as a greater emphasis is placed on documenting and including Aboriginal people's historic and lived experiences within farming and pastoral industries around the country. One of the objectives of these studies has been to highlight how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people's lives are often entangled, helping to negate narratives that presuppose Aboriginal people's exclusion and separation from greater Australian working life.4 Finding ways to accurately represent the specificities of these cross-cultural 'entanglements' in appropriate ways for both cultural groups has been an ongoing challenge.