Infrastructures of settler colonialism

Presenting author: Rebecca Clements (University of Sydney)

Other authors: Tooran Alizadeh (University of Sydney), Crystal Legacy (University of Melbourne), Glen Searle (University of Sydney), Liton Kamruzzaman (Monash University)

The existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing 'infrastructure gaps'. These infrastructure gaps are commonly conceptualised in several ways, such as the distance between strategic planning processes and actual infrastructure delivery within a neoliberal governance paradigm, disconnects between place-based needs and inequitably distributed resources, and antagonistic or tokenistic processes of community participation in decision-making. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure's capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate justice. However, these framings are often silent on the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure, and rarely acknowledge Australian cities, where infrastructure planning occurs, as Indigenous places, implicating land, development, property ownership, and sovereignty in decision-making.

This paper will report the preliminary findings of a systematic literature review on the topic of infrastructure governance, and reflect upon the substantial research gaps regarding epistemologies of decoloniality, and settler-colonial 'epistemic silences' (Mignolo, 2009). These gaps will be contrasted with the framings and demands of key critical scholarship on decolonising cities and urban governance, to give shape to identified research gaps, and direction to future research. This research agenda will be discussed alongside reflections from the Infrastructure Governance Incubator project on the complexities of positioning a decolonisation agenda via infrastructure governance scholarship and policy.

Presenting author: Vanessa Whittington (Western Sydney University)

This paper explores the way in which infrastructures of Australian national parks can operate within the context of settler-colonialism as a "postcolonising" (Moreton-Robinsion 2015) force, and some of the questions that need to be posed if we are to address these dynamics. The ways in which settler-colonials have claimed and taken possession of these places, include not only legal frameworks and land use management and planning regimes, but the practical enactment of these regimes via infrastructures ranging from new tourist townships, airports, access roads and walking paths, to heritage interpretation and conservation technologies. The development of these infrastructures historically occurred without regard to the wishes and priorities of Aboriginal peoples, and these legacies often continue in an unquestioned way within the contemporary context.

Rather than assuming public right of access to this territory based on the presumptions associated with the designation of 'Crown' land and/ or national park, I argue for the primacy of Indigenous knowledge systems which are not based on the presumption of free or open access to places or knowledge. These issues will be explored with reference to two case studies, that of Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park, owned and jointly managed with Anangu Traditional Custodians, and Red Hands Cave within the Blue Mountains National Park, land which remains the property of the 'Crown' and is not subject to joint (or sole) management by Aboriginal peoples.

Presenting author: Wenjing Zhang (University of Melbourne)

Other author: Michael Webber (University of Melbourne)

State planning in China has imposed numerous effects on environmental and institutional systems during its implementation. Water reallocation through water infrastructure (inter-basin water transfers) has been the solution to the uneven distribution of water in space and time.

This paper interprets the use of an existing water regime to fulfil the needs of urban development through an analysis of a Chinese future eco-liveable model city - Xiong'an. The new city typifies standard practice: an urban dream (a state-level new area) made concrete by centralised urban planning that influences the water system through an engineering-heavy governance regime, creating novel hydro-social configurations. This planning practice poses challenges to local, regional and national water sources. The analysis concludes that Xiong'an is yet to reflect the transition of China's current urbanisation model to comply with sustainable principles. Its implementation has also influenced core-periphery relations as powerful cities export water scarcity and pollution to their stakeholders.

Presenting author: Holly Randell-Moon (Charles Sturt University)

This paper analyses contemporary tourism in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a form of colonial tourism productive of an apparatus of forgetting. I argue that despite the material presence of settler colonisation in the tourist sites and built landscapes of Dunedin, city-branding works to discursively and institutionally forget this city's violent and racist settler colonial history.

I analyse both officially sanctioned tourist spaces identified by the Dunedin City Council, such as the Railway Station, the Botanic Garden, and Larnach Castle, as well as independently run tourist endeavours such as ghost tours as constitutive of an apparatus (in the Foucauldian sense) that reproduces an institutionally sanctioned version of Dunedin's history. City-branding anchors this apparatus through the circulation of texts and experiences that draw on gothic horror tropes and Victorian romantic discourse to heighten the affective dimensions of heritage buildings and brand Dunedin with aesthetic distinction within the experience economy.

While this aesthetic framing of Dunedin's history highlights tragic events, it is selective and does not engage with the violent racism of settlement. This selective aesthetic framing suggests only certain experiences of history and historical events can be rendered commodifiable within the dominant tourist industries in Dunedin.

Presenting author: Alistair Sisson (University of Wollongong)

Other authors: Naama Blatman (University of Sydney), Ben Silverstein (Australian National University), Phil McManus (University of Sydney), Rae Dufty-Jones (Western Sydney University)

Research that destabilises narratives of 'heroic', 'nation-building' infrastructural expansion into 'empty land', narratives in which First Nations peoples are given passing mention at best, is long overdue. This presentation offers some preliminary lines of inquiry into the interaction and entwinement of Aboriginal peoples and Countries with railway infrastructure in NSW. Specifically, we draw attention to the role of the railways in processes of dispossession and displacement, as well as their significance as sites of Aboriginal labour and rural/urban mobilities.

Three brief examples are given: Central Station, where many members of the Stolen Generation were separated from family; the Eveleigh railyards, where a large number of Aboriginal people worked, having in many cases moved to Sydney to do so; and the 1870s-80s 'unofficial policy' of free rail and tram travel for Aboriginal people, which facilitated Aboriginal people's rural-urban and intra-urban movements. Drawing on Cowan's (2019) approach to infrastructure "as both object and method of enquiry", the paper gestures towards 'following the rails' as a method for surfacing multifaceted encounters between Aboriginal people and colonial infrastructure, stories of infrastructure as a 'colonial beachhead' (Curley 2021) as well as Aboriginal people's enduring use of this infrastructure for various purposes.

Presenting author: Alex Vella (Western Sydney University )

Other author: Rae Dufty-Jones (Western Sydney University)

Infrastructure developments in Australia are often (but not always) assessed and approved through labyrinthine governmental infrastructures of laws, policies and procedures that are founded on and enact settler-colonial rationalities of Australian planning. This paper engages with the conference theme of 'infrastructures of settler-colonialism' through a critical examination of one example of settler colonial legislative infrastructure: the New South Wales Government's Draft Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill (2018). Our analysis shows that the Draft Bill provides discursive recognition of the authority of Aboriginal peoples knowledges of their cultural heritage, that Aboriginal cultural heritage in NSW is living and should be viewed as the 'property' of Aboriginal peoples.

However, despite the rhetoric of reconciliation, our assessment of the components that require different stakeholders in infrastructure development to actively engage with the protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage in NSW find that the Draft Bill remains problematically settler-colonial. Specifically, the Draft Bill continues to privilege scientific knowledge over Indigenous expertise and prioritises non-Indigenous settlement patterns over the need to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage. We argue that, if enacted in its current form, the Draft Bill - as a type of legislative infrastructure - would continue the devastating legacy of settler-colonial infrastructure planning in Australia. 

Presenting author: Taylor Coyne (UNSW)

Lachlan Swamps are set within Sydney's Centennial Parklands, which were opened in 1888 to celebrate the centenary of British occupation in Australia. The swamps connect this part of Sydney to a broader system of waters that highlight the fluidity of the landscape; the waters that bubble up in the springs at Lachlan Swamps are waters that are part of the 'Kamay Swamplands'. In this paper, I will move to suggest that the way Sydney's "conventional" stormwater management became what it is cannot be separated from the import of colonial  engineers like John Busby, who was charged with finding a suitable source of drinking water for the settlement. In 1827 constructing a bore that would send water underground 3.6 kilometres from the peripheral south-eastern swamp into Hyde Park.

The project took a decade to complete, utilising overworked, unpaid convict labour. The hydro-imperial knowledges which those like which Busby brought from Britain are deeply rooted in unevenly preferencing whose knowledges should be listened to, and whose shouldn't. This paper will draw on Colonial archival material to question the role that settler-colonial hydraulic urban design has had in shaping contemporary ways of thinking about spaces like Lachlan Swamps. 

Presenting author: Ed Challies (University of Canterbury)

Other author: John Reid (University of Canterbury) 

Infrastructure development has shaped and reshaped environment and society across Aotearoa-New Zealand over the last 150 years, as regional settler colonial economies have evolved around extractive industries and primary production. Successive rounds of investment in infrastructures to harness and control resources and the environment have locked in particular development trajectories with complex, cascading social and ecological consequences. Radical social and environmental change has particularly impacted tangata whenua, who in many places have suffered alienation from tribal lands and resources, loss of cultural practices and economies, and subsequent impacts on social fabric and loss of autonomy.

This paper explores how infrastructure development in Waitaha-Canterbury has continued to erode access by Ngāi Tahu to their traditional resources and cultural and economic practices, through an examination of the interconnected impacts of regional irrigation scheme development and flood control works. Both irrigation and flood control works have remade the Canterbury Plains, driving rapid land-use change and development, with significant impacts on local communities and ecologies. As investment in irrigation and flood control infrastructure has increased, freshwater systems have suffered from deteriorating water quality, degraded ecological health, and diminished flows. This has serious implications for people – and in particular for Ngāi Tahu – whose culture and economies are reliant on and intimately intertwined with lowland freshwater systems.

Presenting author: Katie Maher (University of South Australia)

This paper considers the Australian railways as an infrastucture of both settler coloniality and mobility justice. It views the photographic artwork 'Trained Man' by Ngalkban Australian artist Darren Siwes through a mobilities lens, attending to the artist's claim that his work is about creating the "what if". Drawing on the work of First Nations artists, scholars, and activists, the paper speaks to truths and imaginaries that reside and move with 'Trained Man'. 

It traces how the artist plays with time and space to intervene in past and present practices of training Aboriginal people into whiteness, disclosing the attempted erasures of settler colonial projects of protection and assimilation. It considers the railways as carrying "two lines of destiny" with potential moving in both colonial and decolonial directions. In conclusion, the paper proposes that shared spaces such as the railways might open possibilities for mobilizing the "what if".