On Anangu Country

A deeply storied place in Central Australia

Eleanor Hogan

Unmaking Angas Downs: History and myth on a Central Australian pastoral station

by Shannyn Palmer Melbourne University Press

$39.99 pb, 287 pp

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

Unmaking Angas Downs is a recalibration of Central Australian history spanning the seismic shifts in Indigenous–settler relations during the mid-twentieth century, from the pastoral era through the assimilation period’s ‘ration times’ and welfarism’s ‘sit-down times’, the expansion of tourism, to the emergence of selfdetermination and the return-to-Country movements. The effect of Anangu stories, recounted to Palmer and included here, is an unravelling of station mythology with its romanticised conceptions of Territorian life during the twentieth century.

Unmaking Angas Downs is based on Palmer’s doctoral research and reflects her commitment to developing a community-engaged ethnographic practice with Anangu. Palmer first became aware of Angas Downs through anthropologist Frederick Rose’s book The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962 (1965), a materialist analysis of the impact of the cash economy on Anangu through their encounter with the burgeoning tourist industry. She travelled to Imanpa community, about seventy kilometres from Angas Downs, where many Anangu with connections to Walara now live. They directed her to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, senior people whose families were among the earliest arrivals at Angas Downs, with the authority to speak for the place.

For over four years from 2012, Palmer travelled to Walara and beyond with Armstrong and Tjuki, accompanied by interpreter and translator Linda Rive. Tjuki and Armstrong collaborated willingly on the project, recounting stories relating their deep connection to Walara for future generations. Excerpts from these are interwoven in the text and signalled by a different font.

While Palmer’s project has its roots in the immersive participant observation practices of Western anthropology, it is a recuperative, place-based ethnography informed by her Anangu guides’ ‘itinerarising’ mode of storytelling as a way of unsettling chronological historical tropes. The alternating rhythm of ananyi (travelling) and nyinanyi (camping) associated with this mode is fundamental to how Anangu experience Country, visiting ‘an inventory of places encountered along a lifetime of travelling’, anchoring stories to specific locations and reflecting the ancestors’ travels as they created the physical world. Through following these ‘story tracks’ with Tjuki and Armstrong, Palmer comes to understand Angas Downs ‘as a deeply storied place – not only lived in, but (un)made by the Anangu who lived there’, layered by local First Nations languages, stories, and knowledge, and the intricate interrelationship between Tjukurpa, Country, humans, and other species.

As a researcher, Palmer employs an open-ended, nuanced approach to understanding the ‘storied landscape’ beyond Angas Downs, and resists drawing simplistic conclusions, discarding some of her original assumptions in the process. In revisiting the monolith of the Territorian station in the outback imagination, Palmer observes that pastoral colonisalism never grafted successfully onto Central Australia’s harsh geography. Angas Downs was a relatively small, marginal enterprise compared to the pastoral empires of northern cattle barons, and the isolation that pastoralists like Liddle experienced in Central Australia fostered their interdependence with local Anangu for survival. While not dismissing the power asymmetry between Anangu and white settlers, Palmer recounts that Tjuki did not view the exchange of labour for tea, sugar, blankets and so on in working with Liddle as exploitative, but as a way of maintaining some autonomy and connection to Walara.

Intriguingly, Angas Downs was wholly run by First Nations people in its heyday as a tourist port-of-call during the 1950s and 1960s, after Bill Liddle sold the property in 1948 to Arthur and Milton, two of his sons with his Arrernte wife, Mary. By the 1980s, many Anangu shifted to Imanpa when it became a service centre or returned to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands through the homelands movement. After Arthur Liddle’s death, the property was sold to Imanpa in 1994, but subsequent proposals from senior Anangu to revive Angas Downs as a tourist enterprise for younger generations at Walara came to nothing. For Tjuki and Armstrong, whose identities were rooted in their nguraritja (custodianship) of Angas Downs, these developments were deeply traumatic.

Unmaking Angas Downs is an immensely readable, clear-eyed, often moving account of the dislocation experienced by Anangu in mid-twentieth century Central Australia, rich in insights and observations drawn from Palmer’s conversations with Tjuki and Armstrong. Like Kim Mahood’s writing, Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs is grounded in sitting and travelling with First Nations people in remote Australia over significant periods of time. In this respect, her book, like Mahood’s, diverges from the more common trajectory of white male settler writers on a journey to the Centre in search of metaphysical or political enlightenment. With its focus on the densely layered microcosm of Anangu stories and connections to Country beyond an obscure derelict pastoral station, it is a shame that Unmaking Angas Downs may be overlooked in favour of writing that embraces more readily recognisable tropes and terrain. There is certainly more scope for recuperative ethnographic work of the calibre of Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs g