#settlersociety — Public Fediverse posts

"The town capitalists and plantation patriarchs are in the saddle – while our revolutionary inheritance, Paine’s “universal struggle for liberty”, awaits its next reinvention."

""Emancipation and expansion are twin pillars of the American revolutionary narrative."

"Rather than finding new sources for expansion – moral or material – our American age is one of attrition and low expectations, small yards, high fences, new trade barriers, rising mid-life mortality, border walls and prison bars."

The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it’s all but collapsed >>
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/28/america-250-origin-myth-narrative-power
#expansion #empire #EuropeanColonisation #FoundationalNarratives #IndigenousPeoples #dispossession #SettlerSociety #AmericanDream #systemic #inequality #EthicalInfrastructure #emancipation

Grass of empire - Mowing the lawn: the colonial ghosts haunting our suburban ritual

"The lawn – the “telltale patchwork quilt of European settlement” – arrived in this country with the British. The ones established over here were intended to mimic and to elicit an emotional connection with the ones left behind."

"Like the introduction of other exotic flora and fauna, pastoral farming and parliamentary government, the laying down of the lawn was one of the ways in which colonisation marked this land."

"Perhaps not at the very beginning, when most new arrivals would have been busy felling trees, draining wetlands and burning bush. But once the footholds had been established and life had become a little less precarious, it was time to take up the challenge of civilising the new colonial spaces by reproducing the landscapes of Home. Time to impose order upon chaos and inscribe empire on the land. Time to cultivate the lawn."

"This is also the lexicon used by those who colonise to characterise what must be done to those who have been colonised. Indigenous people need to be kept in their place just as much as indigenous flora does, and for much the same reason: give them half a chance and they’ll get away on you."

"Of the knowledge that colonisation is not just about the movement of people and power across time and space. Ideas, too, are instruments of empire. As is grass and the land it grows on." >>
https://theconversation.com/mowing-the-lawn-the-colonial-ghosts-haunting-our-suburban-ritual-283270
#lawn #mowing #suburbia #SettlerSociety #ExoticGrass #FossilFuel #pollution #NoisePollution #colonisation #TheColonialProject #British #empire #ColonistGrass #flora #extinction

Image: The “telltale patchwork quilt of European settlement” at the Mid North Coast of NSW. The palms were in the way of the machinery and had to go. The leaves will soon be blown onto the road/drain by a leaf blower.

"... With this arrival, this conquest, one idea reigns supreme. You are a numbers person. You believe in possession through measuring the thing. The land is this many metres, the elevation is this high off the ground. Where a traveller may have seen the land, been curious about what 50 names say about the tree, already your mind was quartering, the stake hammered right in..."

"Possession—the numbers game—requires brute strength and the willingness to eradicate the speakers too."

- Yumna Kassab, The Conquest of Land and Dream

#land #biodiversity #life #quality #diversity #dispossession #commodification #quantifiability #ratability #scalability #values #language #naming #LanguagePolicies #SettlerSociety #EuropeanColonisation #IndigenousPeoples #writers

https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-conquest-of-land-and-dream/

Americana meets the Aussie bush

Trying to get some bread in a cafe on Bellingen's main drag. Once the obstacle course of the packs of dogs on extendable leads are overcome it is time for waiting in a long queue on a Saturday. Many hipster families are there to have breakfast done for them.

One set was showcasing their three toddlers in a full 'American Western-inspired aesthetic', cowboy hats and boots. Mum had that Instagrammable ‘Mar-a-Lago face’.

Wide-brimmed hats are ideal to protect oneself from Australia's sun, but this was in the comfort zone of a cafe.

The "cowboy core" aesthetic facade harks back to the wide‑open‑spaces where cattle-herders (cowboys, stockmen/ringers) managed grazing livestock, for the pastoral industry, particularly in the Australian outback or American Western frontier.

Already in the 16th century, the Conquistadors and other Spanish settlers brought their cattle-raising traditions to Mexico and Florida.

The Western portrayed the cowboy as an enduring cultural figure representing freedom.

So why are these urban folks from the suburbs running around in 'costumes' looking like pastoralist workers from a mythical past? What 'sense of belonging' do they buy?

Maybe the fashionable habitus points to a vibe shift of the wannabe cowboys expressing preemptive subordination or imperial obsequiousness?

The rise of cowboy core: What's behind it.>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-10/dr-karl-how-things-work-cowboy-core-fashion/106336574

Plastic surgeons wrestle with requests for ‘Mar-a-Lago face’:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/18/mar-a-lago-face-plastic-surgery

Image :
In 1859 European wild rabbits were introduced into Australia so they could be hunted for sport. Now hats are made out of some of the invasive species.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/rabbits-introduced

#cowboys #pastoralism #SettlerSociety #fashion #WesternWear #CattleHerders #belonging #Bellingen #culture #MiddlePowers #subordination #RupturedGlobalOrder #BellingenObservations

Mapping the promised land for God’s chosen people
Imagined lands, biblical narratives and monotheistic practices and beliefs.

* First 'Bible map' published 500 years ago still influences how we think about borders, study suggests
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-bible-published-years-borders.html

* Assmann, Jan. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691157085/the-invention-of-religion

#territory #maps #borders #expansion #PromisedLand #monotheism #BoundaryMaking #ReligiousAuthorisation #sovereignty #BiblicalLiteralism #GodsWill #christian #fundamentalism #theology #LandClaims #ImaginedCommunity #PlaceNames #SettlerSociety #narratives #GodZone

The uneasiness of small town narratives in unfamiliar landscapes

"But there are negative consequences to this construction of the detective as outsider when the outback setting is presented as something unfamiliar, something to be feared. These arise from the origins of Australian Gothic, which scholars have long recognised as an expression of settler-colonial anxiety about the violent dispossession of the country’s Indigenous people."
>>
https://theconversation.com/why-jane-harpers-outback-noir-novels-make-for-comfortable-and-uncomfortable-reading-266228
#unsettling #SettlerSociety #SettlerColonialAnxiety #SettlerGothic #HauntedSpaces #noir #unease #anxiety #WillfulIgnorance #comfort #landscape #outsiders #narrative #HeteroglossicSpaceMaking #culture

The housing shortage and wealth accumulation in Australia.
Houses/ 'homes' as commercial enterprises

" In Australia, the origin of the idea that housing is to be valued primarily as a commodity for producing private wealth is colonisation. It is part of our creation story. " Former Victorian Supreme Court justice Kevin Bell.
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-02/need-for-housing-inspires-artist/105939626

Plan to apply commercial council rates for short-stay rentals
"These properties operate as a commercial enterprise...They generate income and place higher demand on infrastructure and social services, similar to any hotel or motel."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-02/mount-gambier-council-short-stay-rates-airbnb-changes/105943950
#housing #homes #IndigenousDisplacement #unhoused #inequality #insecurity #Airbnb #shortterm #accommodation #speculation #traffic #TourismImpacts #MultipleProperties #BellingenShire #commercialisation #suburbia #BAU #MeInc #SettlerSociety #narrative #landlordism #rentierisation

"Fire-resilient landscapes” and “fire-adapted communities” through biocultural restoration as a fire risk mitigation strategy.

A clear-eyed view on historic harms by settler societies: Settler transition to large-scale agriculture (plantations) transformed ecohydrological conditions and introduced weeds. The neglected land and extractive tourism practices drive increases in fire risks.

"We argue that decolonizing postplantation landscapes through the restoration and reconnection of people to land will not only help prevent future catastrophic fires, but also address social and environmental inequities.The connections of colonialism to contemporary extreme fire regimes are not unique to Hawaiʻi. The dispossession of Indigenous communities worldwide has suppressed cultural burning and altered fire regimes that support the production of food and material culture."
>>
On the anniversary of the Maui fires, a call for Indigenous land care to mitigate future disasters, D. Nākoa Farrant et al
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401045121
#bushfires #fires #colonialism #SettlerSociety #extractivism #water #plantations #SettlerSocieties #unsustainability #dispossession #IndigenousPeoples #IndigenousKnowledge #BioculturalRestoration #CulturalBurning #restoration

"Indigenous people here speak of the lack of memorials on this land.
But every bordered property is a site for dark tourism in Australia.
Dark tourism is the effort to seek out destinations of violence and devastation, but it is not hard to see genocide from our front door in this country...Tim Rowse has called the “ongoing colonial encounter sometimes called ‘Australia’”
>>
https://theconversation.com/dark-tourism-is-attracting-visitors-to-war-zones-and-sites-of-atrocities-in-israel-and-ukraine-why-240119

Gumbaynggirr Country is located on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. It is also known as the Bellingen/ Gleniffer Valley and has curated three reserves in the 21st century with memorials which are all named after white settlers:

The Arthur Keough Reserve (Never Never River) is named after the first settler pioneer families to arrive in the Gleniffer Valley.
http://www.bellingennow.com/about/index.html

Angel Gabriel Capararo 'modernised' the Promised land.
http://www.bellingennow.com/Angel_Gabriel_Capararo/index.html

Earl Preston reserve was named after a settler who arrived in 1929
http://www.bellingennow.com/Earl_Preston/index.html

Nothing about the massacres and the poisoning to death of local Aboriginal people.

Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1788 to 1930
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
https://howlinginfinite.com/2021/03/22/dark-deeds-in-
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/189773560
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_poisonings_of_Aboriginal_Australians
#GumbaynggirrCountry #Bellingen #Fernmount #Gleniffer #TheDrive #MidNorthCoast #IndigenousPeoples #massacres #memorials #tourism #DarkTourism #violence #TuthTelling #denial #SettlerSociety #colonialism

One man’s pilgrimage navigating on foot along the Brisbane River
Everything is Water by Simon Cleary

"The shadow a city can cast upon its river before it is no longer a river”.

"He asks whether our urges to categorise and organise might be “unhelpful” and “prevent us from other ways of seeing”."

"It’s something deeper; a bodily recognition and lament at how swiftly white settlement has desecrated and altered a landscape which Indigenous people have cared for so intimately. One of Cleary’s refrains is that what used to be “kangaroo and emu country” is now considered “cattle country”."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/06/everything-is-water-by-simon-cleary-review-one-mans-pilgrimage-along-brisbane-river
#rivers #FootTraffic #walking #Australia #Brisbane #Bellingen #SettlerSociety #livestock #Bellinger #water #cattle #Biodiversity #wildlife #platypus

‘Property poetry’?
"Real estate is another way to say Australia."

"Kate Holden connects Turnbull’s persistence in illegally clearing vast tracts of koala habitat, and his murder of Turner, to British Enlightenment theories of property. The English philosopher John Locke, she observes, “placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it. Holden traces associations between Locke’s ideas, the history of terra nullius and the “strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land.”

"[b]y the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights […] Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, man was only an object."

"Yet the contradictions and inequities surrounding the trade in stolen land are rehearsed largely without reflection or analysis across contemporary Australian culture."
>>
https://theconversation.com/property-poetry-real-estate-ads-and-literature-have-more-in-common-than-you-might-think-214835

#SettlerSociety #TruthTelling #dispossession #silence #IndigenousRights #RealEstate #speculation #HomeOwnership #HouseHunting #NationalImaginary #Australia #writing #degradation #koalas #JLocke #books #deforestation #AusCulture