For centuries, scholars have mused and romanticised over the idea of “home” and just what it involves and implies – for T.S. Elliot, it was the place from where “one starts”; for Charles Dickens, “a name, a word… stronger than magician ever spoke”; and for Pliny the Elder, it was simply “where the heart is”.
But despite western civilization’s enduring fixation on it, as the source of endless nostalgic songs and the ultimate goal of a slew of legendary epics, home as a concept is hard to dissect – its meaning is so common sense to us, but to articulate it in words and values proves a highly complex and ambiguous process.
Yet this is just the task Professor David Trigger is undertaking as he returns to UQ after a hiatus of just over two decades.
Twenty-five years since completing his undergraduate degree (with honours) and PhD at UQ, Professor Trigger is helping to strengthen the discipline he graduated from, moving to broaden conventional anthropology and ask questions about sense of place and home among diverse sorts of Australians.
In today’s society, with a significant proportion of Australians boasting migrant backgrounds and population mobility increasing, Professor Trigger says questions of homeland, while complicated, are more important than ever.
His own life circumstances may have left him uniquely receptive to such dilemmas: growing up as part of a small Australian Jewish community whose elders included Holocaust survivors, he was schooled for a moral attachment to the state of Israel that contrasted with his location and place of birth.
But more important in planting these seeds of enquiry, he argues, were the formative years of anthropological study he undertook when completing his PhD at the Aboriginal mission at Doomadgee in northwest Queensland.
“At the age of 24, I was given a powerful Toyota land cruiser, site recording and camping equipment, and told to drive off to the remote gulf country to record Aboriginal sites of significance,” Professor Trigger said.
“Over the five years of doing the PhD-related research, I was embraced into the kinship system of people at Doomadgee and nearby towns.
“Aside from being a wonderful experience, I feel [these] intensive years of mapping Aboriginal cultural landscapes prompted me to ask questions about senses of connection to place, home, nature, built environments (and so on).”
Hard work and considered contemplation were not the only orders of the day, though, as Professor Trigger concedes.
“One of the new experiences I had as a young man during the five years of PhD fieldwork was purchasing and using a shotgun and rifle for hunting.
“I also learned about chewing tobacco… though hardly ever did it myself,” he said.
But along with an attachment to Indigenous Australia, his thoughts about issues of place and “nativeness” persisted as a steady reminder of the experience, developing over time and quickly become a recurring theme throughout his academic career.
In ensuing years Professor Trigger continued to visit Doomadgee, providing research for land claims and cultural heritage surveys.
His continuing links with the mission during the height of the Mabo and Wik cases meant he inevitably became drawn in to native title claims, closely studying indigenous notions of land and home and researching resource development negotiations.
“In fact, I was at Doomadgee on the day the Mabo decision was announced in the early 90s, doing a cultural heritage survey in relation to drilling exploration at the time,” he said.
“I had also prepared land claims earlier on the Northern Territory side of the border.”
Through these experiences and years of ongoing native title work, Professor Trigger says he developed a thoughtful sensitivity to the competing assertions of Aboriginal Australians and settler and migrant descendants who also articulated intense sentiments of belonging to places in which they lived.
“These ideas have certainly developed through my professional thinking about what makes people’s senses of personal and group identity.
“And [in fact], I think addressing the sense of emplacement in Australia is one of the major contributions coming from Aboriginal culture in what is still a fairly young post settler society.
“Given that more than a quarter of the Australian population were born overseas, and a great many more have parents and/or grandparents who began life as “native” to somewhere else, [it is clear] we need a more adequate intellectual framework for engaging with the facts of cultural coexistence among those with Aboriginal ancestry, descendants of settlers, migrants of first, second and third generations, refugees seeking lives in this post-settler nation, and so on.”
Despite its obvious complexities, this is a task that Professor Trigger is deeply committed to. It seems only appropriate, too, that he will be assuming this undertaking, and thereby addressing some of the issues that have characterised his research career, at the place where it first began. In doing so, and simultaneously helping to build a strong discipline of anthropology at UQ, he has his eyes firmly set on a number of goals.
“Generally, I’d like to build a working group of anthropologists concentrating on the significance of place and home for life in a number of contemporary societies,” he said.
“[I will also hope] to have inspired students and colleagues.
“And looking back, I would like to have contributed to the world of ideas in a lasting way”.
Professor David Trigger is author of Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia and a co-editor of Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies.
Further information: Lucy Manderson at UQ Communications (07 3365 2339, l.manderson@uq.edu.au).
