Remembering where they sat: the making and remaking of an Aboriginal place

In inner city Melbourne, a place known colloquially as ‘the park’ has been an important Aboriginal community meeting place for decades. This place is a group of seats around a small paved area, sheltered by trees, and located within the landscaped grounds of a high-rise public housing estate.

‘The park’ and ‘the meeting place’ are located within Atherton Gardens, a public housing estate built in the mid-1960s – three high rise towers set in landscaped grounds – and designed to replace a neighbourhood of nineteenth century houses condemned as a slum. This area was then home to Aboriginal people who had moved into working class Fitzroy from a variety of missions and reserves from across Victoria. People from many clans and tribes were living together for the first time and this community of ‘Fitzroy Blacks’ gave birth to powerful Aboriginal advocacy and welfare organisations.

Demolition of the neighbourhood impacted on the Aboriginal community, but the network of Aboriginal organisations sustained people through this difficult time. Soon after the public housing estate was completed, Aboriginal people started gathering in the ‘park’, occupying a group of seats and making it into their ‘meeting place’. It served as an information welcome centre for Aboriginal people newly arrived in Melbourne, a place where homeless Aboriginal people slept and a place to sit around the fire, to smoke, drink and talk. In essence it became a space apart from the everyday life of the suburb – a liminal space. It became ‘Aboriginal land’.

The paper looked at personal and collective identity, the reasons for intense resistance to change, and the prospects for continuing to remake this place and its meanings; it is based on research and interviews done in 2013.