Under the same sky: two British settlements in early colonial Australia.

Paterson, Alistair

JIM ALLEN. Port Essington: the historical archaeology of a north Australian nineteenth-century military outpost (Studies in Australasian Historical Archaeology 1). xvi+142 pages, 111 illustrations, 95 tables. 2008. Sydney: Sydney University Press/Australian Society for Historical Archaeology; 978-1-920898-87-8 paperback AUS$ 49.95 + p&p.

GRAHAM CONNAH. The same under a different sky? A country estate in nineteenth-century New South Wales (British Archaeological Reports International Series 1625). x+270 pages, 174 illustrations. 2007. Oxford: John & Erica Hedges; 978-14073-0059-7 paperback 45 [pounds sterling].

The publication of two archaeological monographs on key Australian colonial sites of the first hall of the nineteenth century is a significant event in Australian archaeology. The books will also be of interest to those interested in British settlement and colonial societies more generally.

Port Essington

In 1969 Jim Allen completed the first PhD dissertation in historical archaeology in Australia with his study of this British military outpost. Port Essington is the thesis published largely as submitted, with new useful prefaces by Tim Murray and the author. In Allen's 'Retrospective Introduction' we learn that when a Pleistocene topic fell through, Port Essington was proposed by John Mulvaney as a suitable project--which it was. The British settlement of Victoria located on Port Essington in far northern Australia was established in 1838 and abandoned in 1849. It was a significant part of the story of the colonisation of northern Australia and of British ambitions, successes and failures. The site was historically significant, relatively undisturbed, and largely abandoned by Europeans after its use as a fort. This was remote fieldwork, and one imagines the tropical challenges which confronted the British also affected the field team: isolation, poor supply lines and troublesome insects. Allen's thesis was seminal in the then nascent discipline of historical archaeology. While Allen's distinguished career was devoted largely to Australian and Pacific prehistory, he made further contributions to historical archaeology by publishing the results of his PhD with respect to British colonisation (Allen 1973), wrote on methods and theory (Murray & Allen 1986) and contributed to the development of the Australian heritage sector. This is covered in greater detail in Tim Murray's introduction to Port Essington and in Anderson & Murray (2000). In his introduction Allen is downbeat about his own contribution to historical archaeology; however Port Essington is not only a significant historical document, it is a good study and reveals a critical and capable historical archaeologist.

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The book begins with a detailed description of the excavations and recording of the site, which included building remains as well as rubbish deposits and Aboriginal middens. Allen considers how architecture reflected British building traditions, and their adaptations to the local tropical conditions and the threat of white ants. Separate chapters describe the ceramics, glass, metal, stone and bone. These reveal that, in the absence of comparative studies, Allen had to rely on research in Europe and North America, mainly in historical and industrial archaeology. The data is presented in sufficient detail to allow comparisons to be made today. The final chapters contextualise the findings by considering the sequence of British settlements in northern Australia, and argue that Port Essington was never intended to be commercially successful but was a political manoeuvre designed to secure British claims of sovereignty over the whole continent. Allen states in his retrospective introduction that the historical sources and archaeology could have been better integrated in his analysis; however the assessment of life at Port Essington (chapter 8) is quite an effective synthesis. Since 1969 many historical archaeologists have struggled with the Sisyphean challenge posed by integrating data, and this, to a degree, encapsulates how historical archaeologists define themselves.

The study stands out as an early investigation into culture contact and Aboriginal history, a theme that would become popular from the 1980s onward. Allen considers the archaeological evidence for Aboriginal uses of the site before, during and after the fort phases. His analysis of the glass (chapter 4) provides a detailed account of the evidence for flaked glass artefact production and defines a range of artefact types in a classification that remains extremely useful to contemporary studies of g[ass tool production. In addition, Allen excavated Aboriginal middens close to the fort; these were first used at least 500 years ago, and appear to have been more intensively used while the fort was occupied. There is also evidence for post-abandonment use of the site as a quarry for resources. Allen also considers the evidence for British interaction with Macassan trepangers (fishermen from Sulawesi exploiting trepang or sea cucumber) who visited northern Australia well prior to the arrival of Europeans, and were reported as visitors to the site. Macassan ceramics found in the excavations support accounts of this interaction. These aspects of the book will be useful to those interested in the sequence of culture contacts in northern Australia over recent centuries.

Lake Innes

If Jim Allen largely left Australian historical archaeology behind, the reverse is true for Graham Connah whose career in African archaeology preceded one in historical archaeology in Australia where for several decades he has been actively involved. 'Of the hut I builded', first published in 1983, was the first accessible textbook on the archaeology of Australia's history. The same under a different sky? reports on fieldwork at Lake Innes, coastal northern New South Wales, conducted between 1993 and 2001. The book has many contributors, marshalled into a coherent whole by Connah.

Lake Innes was a rural property established in the 1830s by Archibald Charles Innes, a Scot who aspired to wealth and status in the antipodes he probably could never have achieved in Britain. His aspirations are reflected in the title of the publication, a loose translation of sidere mens eadem mutato. Innes used assigned convict and paid free labour to build an estate, the remains of which include the brickbuilt main house and stables, two nearby servants' cottage blocks, a convict village, a small farm for workers, brick-making sites, roads and a boathouse. With the cessation of convict transportation Innes' unfree labour force dried up while the colony fell into recession. By the mid-nineteenth century Innes' venture was washed up, and the complex was eventually abandoned. Connah was interested in this early convict-based colonial enterprise as a reflection of one man's aspirations and as an Australian version of the plantation economy that developed over the last millennium, and which was often based upon unfree labour.

Connah begins with a historical overview of Innes and the estate, as well as the many archaeological field seasons and participants. Then, similar to Allen's monograph, Connah describes the individual field investigations before discussing key material culture. Chapters 2 to 9 describe (with detailed descriptions of the buildings and key assemblages) the investigations at the main house, the stables, at worker's cottages and work sites. As these are based on reports by various workers over the years, each chapter stands alone as a mini-report of part of the estate. Chapters 8 to 12 include the analysis of ceramics (Alasdair Brooks; a summary by Brooks & Connah appeared in Antiquity 81 (2007): 133-47), glass (Jean Smith), metal (Rob Tickle), buttons (Sylvia Yates), sewing items (Beryl Connah), clay pipes (Kris Courtney), coins, the faunal material (Catherine Tucker) and geomorphic and sedimentary history (Robert Haworth & Brian Tolagson). These reports do not cross reference each other. In Chapter 13 David Pearson discusses a painting by the Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese that apparently once hung in the Innes house and which, he argues, revealed the family's status and taste. In the final chapter Connah considers whether the historically known socio-economic differences at the estate--Innes family, assigned convict servants and free servants-are reflected in the archaeological record. Perhaps unsurprisingly the best places in the landscape were used by the Innes family, while the least comfortable structures were used for servants (both free or convict). This evidence could be compared with that presented in the growing archaeological literature on social differentiation, power and labour. The way people organised themselves in the landscape and manipulated material culture and the built environment--revealed by room sizes and the spatial organisation of sites across the estate--could be compared with plantations, particularly those established in the Americas since 1492.

Conclusion

What is the significance of these publications? They are both works that future archaeologists will mine for methods and comparative data. Given the relatively small number of published historical sites in Australia these are useful. Both also are useful examples of archaeological description and illustration, particularly of architectural remains (regrettably some images in the BAR publication are too dark). Allen's study will be of particular relevance to those working on British military sites, early Australian colonial settlements, European colonisation, and culture contact. Connah's study invites comparisons with other contexts where status in colonial circumstances was deliberately manipulated.

Allen's monograph is a historical document in its own right, and despite the author's reservations he and the publishers must be commended for publishing it. The dissertation was a pioneer project and is now the first in the Studies in Australasian Historical Archaeology series. Reading it reminded me of reading the Australian anthropologist Jeremy Beckett's Masters thesis (1958, now published as Beckett 2005), a landmark study which like Allen's has been 'out there' and always turned up in reference lists, but was not easy to find. It is encouraging to see landmark studies in press for a current generation of researchers, as well as new studies. Connah has been a strong advocate for getting the results of historical archaeology published, and we welcome the publication of the results of this long-running archaeological project.

References

ALI EN, J. 1973. The archaeology of nineteenth-century British imperialism: an Australian case study. World Archaeology 5:44-60

ANDERSON, A. & T. MURRAY (ed.). 2000. Australian archaeologist: collected papers in honour of Jim Allen. Canberra: Coombs Academic Publishing, Australian National University.

BECKETT, J. 2005. A study of Aborigines in the pastoral west of New South Wales: 1958 MA thesis with new introduction and preface. Sydney: University of Sydney.

CONNAH, G. 1988. 'Of the hut I builded': the archaeology of Australia's history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MURRAY, T. & J. ALLEN. 1986. Theory and the development of historical archaeology in Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 211: 85-93.

Alistair Paterson, Archaeology, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6008, Australia (Email: paterson @arts.uwa.edu.au)