Tracking displacement: the role of the railways in the transformation of Noongar Country, Western Australia

Keywords: Colonisation, infrastructure, Australia, urbanisation
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Railways are a lively and fraught character in the memory and story of the people of the Noongar nation in south-west Western Australia. Trains, rail tracks and sidings are experienced both as a profound curtailment of proper access to Country as well as locations of connection and mobility. This paper reports on one aspect of a project led by Noongar Elders to share their history and perspective of the Western Australian railway network. Taking railway infrastructure as “both an object and method of inquiry” (Cowen 2020, p471) the paper tracks the march of the railway line out from the colonial site of Perth providing a historical spatial mapping of the engineering decisions, political manoeuvring and land deals that still shape social orders and relationships. In so doing, the railways signalled the dispossession and dis/re-location of Noongar people and the shifting of Noongar Country into new material relationships and configurations. The paper focuses on one small but emblematic story and place, Badjaling in the Western Australian wheatbelt, where a way of life became dominated and shaped by the presence of the railway line. Infrastructure thus emerges as a key line of inquiry for understanding the intersection of colonialism and urbanisation and the paper considers what we might learn about the imperial afterlives of urban life.

Cowen, D. (2020) ‘Following the infrastructures of empire: Notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method’, Urban Geography, (41)4:469-486