Unmaking Angas Downs by Shannyn Palmer

Unmaking Angas Downs by Shannyn PalmerA new work of history that seeks to unmake mythologies of pioneers, pastoralism and possession in the Northern Territory Some stories dominate how we see and interpret a place, while others are obscured from view. Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of what has happened there. Like all places it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Listening to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and

A new work of history that seeks to unmake mythologies of pioneers, pastoralism and possession in the Northern Territory




Some stories dominate how we see and interpret a place, while others are obscured from view. Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of what has happened there. Like all places it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time.
Listening to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, two Anangu with deep and abiding connections to Angas Downs, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have shaped understandings of the past in Australia, particularly in the Northern Territory.
Unmaking Angas Downs traces a history of colonisation in Central Australia by tracking the rise and demise of a rural enterprise across half a century, as well as the complex and creative practices that transformed a cattle station into Country.