Stone Age to Space Age in 1960s and 70s American sitcoms

One weekend I was idling at home watching cheesy American sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s, and I chanced across a very interesting episode of The Brady Bunch. I was arrested by a theme that I've written about often before: the trope which places the 'Stone Age' and the 'Space Age' in opposition. The Brady Bunch was a pretty unlikely place to stumble across a critique of this, but stranger things have happened.

This led me to recall a double episode of my favourite Space Age sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, set in Hawai'i. I watched this again just as I was beginning to feel my way around my space research over a decade ago, and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. Its themes are similar to the Brady Bunch episodes, and it's interesting to see how they appear to the contemporary eye.

From buffalo to blast-off

In the Brady Bunch episode Grand Canyon or Bust (1971), Cindy and Bobby wander off during a family holiday and get lost. They meet Jimmy, a Hopi boy who has run away from his grandfather.

This is in the midst of the Apollo human spaceflight program: Apollo 14 had been launched in January 1971, and Apollo 15 in July.

Cindy and Bobby meet Jimmy

In the third episode of this story arc, The Brady Braves, Mr Brady rescues the three children. Jimmy says he loves his grandfather, but ran away because his grandfather talked about the past all the time. He says, 'Mr Brady, I'm tired of being an injun [sic]. I want to be an astronaut'. In his mind, the two are mutually exclusive. The 'Stone Age' cannot meet the 'Space Age'. 

When he is reunited with his grandfather, the grandfather says to Mr Brady, "He thinks because I speak of buffalo, I don't understand blast-offs". There are generational dilemmas in this phrase. The implication is that knowledge is lost in simply three generations between the grandparents and grandchildren. The youngsters don't want to know their heritage; the connection between the past and the future is not obvious to them. The grandfather thinks differently, however: for him the buffalo (a term commonly used for North American bison), a species which had been decimated by European invasion, is still the present, not the past. The buffalo symbolises the impacts of colonialism which young Jimmy wants to forget, but the grandfather sees the connections between the 'Space Age' and 'Stone Age'.

Later there's a ceremony in which the Brady Bunch are inducted as members of the tribe and given new names. There is an exchange of values flowing between past and present, invader and vanquished. Of course none of this is as fluffy and light in reality as in Brady Bunch world, but the episodes attempt to break down the idea that there should be a division between buffalo and blast-off - the Hopi boy can have his American Dream without giving up his heritage. It's a hopeful message about the reconciliation between Stone and Space Ages.

'Pity the Indians of Outer Space'

There's quite a few stories of American Indian reactions to the Apollo missions. They centre around the themes of Indigenous knowledge vs 'scientific' knowledge.

In series of stories (I heard one account first-hand from a US anthropologist), American Indian people tell anthropologists who ask their opinion of the Apollo lunar landings that they already knew the Moon was just a grey dusty rock. There was no need to spend billions on a mission to find out what was already known!

Another set of stories has a tribe sending a message to the lunar inhabitants, or the lunar spirits, to watch out for the visitors. They will only steal their land, or ruin the environment as Europeans have on Earth (eg Young 1983: 273).

These stories place Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in opposition, and are told with the intention of mocking Western science - but the 'superstitious' knowledge of the First Nations people is also satirised. The 'Stone Age' and 'Space Age' still define the encounter. Like all good urban legends, the stories stop short of telling you what happened next. The conflict is not resolved but left hanging in the air.

As Young (1983:274) argues, however, these are different registers of knowledge. Although they are juxtaposed in the metaphor, they are not commensurate. Each requires a different class of action. And First Nations people are not, by these stories, positioned as the first astronauts. They are still excluded. The Space Age is seen as unnecessary for them.

I dream of a terra nullius

There's an interesting parallel in the on-location Hawai'ian episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, which are basically US propaganda to justify the illegal annexation of the islands. Hawai'i was an independent sovereign kingdom until the monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was overthrown by an American conspiracy in 1893. In the 1960s, an independence movement was emerging in Hawaii just at the time when tourism was becoming a big industry. The IDOJ episodes represented space as soft diplomacy.

Hawaii was quite an important place in the US space program. NASA built a tracking station on the island of Kauai, in Koke'e State Park, in 1961 to support their first human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. The station went on to support Gemini and Apollo. Neil Armstrong himself was posted to the Kauai tracking station in 1965 when he was the CAPCOM (capsule commander) for Gemini 3. It's now called the Koke'e Park Geophysical Observatory.

The tracking station on Kauai in 1965. Image credit: NASA

The returning Apollo astronauts dropped into the sea; and the Pearl Harbour naval base, near Honolulu, was where the recovery fleet was stationed. (You might remember that astronaut Tony Nelson finds Jeannie's bottle on a tropical beach with palm trees when he steps out of his capsule). The Apollo 11-14 crew were quarantined in Honolulu.

NASA also used the stark volcanic landscapes of Hawaii to familiarise the Apollo 11 astronauts with lunar geology. In January 1965, the crew traipsed over terrain shaped by lava in training exercises, including a hike to the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano.


But of course, these uniquely Hawai'ian landscapes were not a terra nullius, the legal fiction of a land belonging to no-one. They were only a lunar analogue if you stripped away all history and culture; reduced them to a narrow geology where people had never set foot before.

'Oh, you don't think he's serious about this invasion business, do you?'

Oh, you don't think he's serious about that That invasion business, do you?

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=i-dream-of-jeannie-1965&episode=s03e15

Oh, you don't think he's serious about that That invasion business, do you?

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=i-dream-of-jeannie-1965&episode=s03e15

In Jeannie Goes to Honolulu (December 19, 1967), Tony and his comedic sidekick Major Roger Healey are on a 'working holiday' in Hawai'i when Jeannie joins them. The second part is The Battle of Waikiki (January 2, 1968). Tony expresses the desire to meet King Kamehameha, who founded the Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1810, and of course Jeannie summons him up.

Tony and Roger chat to King Kamehameha in downtown Honolulu.
Image courtesy of Sitcomsonline

The script is so entangled with colonial metaphors it would take a whole essay to pull them apart.  I'm not going to do it now! But there are some key points. Famously, Kamehameha was in power when Captain Cook came through and 'discovered' the islands in 1778.  There's a whole narrative of space exploration which co-opts the colonisation of the Pacific by intrepid seafarers, followed by the European colonial voyages, into a supposed universal human 'urge to explore' which leads to space. Thus Hawai'i's subjugation by the US is subsumed into an arc of inevitability. The connections in this narrative are so strongly embedded in space culture that the Apollo Lunar Surface Journals were created in emulation of Cook's journals during his Pacific voyages.

Part of the humour resides in King Kamehameha's reactions to modern technology. 'He has a chance to see what civilization has done for his country' says Roger. The king surveys the office buildings, hotels, sidewalks and motorcycles, but he's not impressed. He insists that they are removed. The astronauts are confused. Isn't it obvious that this is better? 'He's got to be made to see that civilization has helped, and the progress that's been made here', Tony says.

Once again, Indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge are brought face to face. Kamehameha performs a dance and causes it to rain (with intervention from Jeannie). Dr Bellows sees an opportunity:

Dr Bellows: Don't you realize if he went to Washington with us, have you any idea what it would mean? 

Tony:  It would certainly shake up the boys in meteorology.

Dr Bellows: Well I think so! Predicting the weather is one thing, but making the weather? Why, we're just beginning to experiment!

Interestingly, Dr Bellows prefigures the current trend to incorporate Indigenous knowledge in land management. Of course, the joke's on him: as Tony points out, no-one would believe him about the rainmaking.

The King is in no mood to be trifled with, and proposes to raise an army to take back the islands. But the only canoes he can find are rented at $2.00 an hour to tourists, and the only spears are souvenirs for purchase in the hotel gift shop. His soldiers are the staff at the 'Living Hawai'i' museum.

While King Kamehameha plans his moves, the NASA staff all head off for a grand luau with roasted pigs and tropical fruits. Kamehameha's attack is interpreted as a performance and his army desert to participate in the luau. The King gives up in disgust.

By the end of the program, he has been brought to heel. 'I do not understand your way of life but my people seem happy. Perhaps this progress is good for them', he says. 'You make sure your civilization take care of my people.' An interesting statement in light of the social divisions unremarked upon in the episode: the local Hawai'ians are employed to serve food, sell souvenirs, hire out war canoes to white American military personnel and tourists looking for authentic tiki culture.

And so by the end of the episode, all conflict is resolved neatly, delivering political stability in advance of the Apollo 11 mission.

Conclusions

The episodes are both blunt instruments and nuanced in ways you don't expect. The Brady Bunch episode has so many cliches and stereotypes, and yet it is basically promoting the idea that the Stone Age and Space Age are not opposed: the young Hopi boy CAN become an astronaut. The buffalo and blast-off can co-exist, neither erasing the other.

The Battle of Waikiki is a reverie on the continuity of colonial manliness, a theme analysed by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather. King Kamehameha conquered and united the Hawai'ian islands, just like the astronauts are going to conquer space. And like the cannibal mythos, the astronauts have absorbed some of King Kamehameha's heroic qualities. They become his symbolic heirs in conquest. In doing so, they retrospectively bestow value on Indigenous cultures, which are not excluded but incorporated into the narrative while staying firmly fixed in the past.

Hawai'i is still a battleground of Stone Age/Space Age values. It's the location of the Hi-SEAS (Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) habitat, meant to simulate the experience of isolation on a long-duration space mission to Mars. The colonial refiguring of the landscape has morphed with changing USA space aspirations.

More recently, there has been controversy about the construction of a new telescope on the mountain of Mauna Kea.  The easy resort of placing 'Stone Age' in the past while 'Space Age' represents the future is being challenged by protectors resisting a manifestation of colonialism masked in science. It's complex and I don't pretend to understand enough about the issues to explain them here. One commentator, however, has called the protests 'one of the largest uprisings of Native Hawaiians in modern history'.

There are no Indigenous people in space, I have heard stated many times. Space is up for grabs with clean hands as no humans will be displaced, alienated, subjected to genocide. Space is the colonialist's wet dream.

But I would argue that it's a false framing to say that the lack of space Indigenes creates a carte blanche, a tabula rasa, a terra nullius. It's just that we don't recognise how deeply space is now inscribed with white, male, capitalist and colonialist values, as these are the default, invisible to the scientific and military cadres of which the space community is mainly composed. But because these things are defined by what they exclude, the exclusions are already present. You need a different perspective to perceive their power.



References
McClintock, Anne 1995 Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge

Young, Jane 1983 'Pity the Indians of outer space': Native American views of the space program. Western Folklore 46(4):269-279

'This last wild place': Michael Dransfield on heritage, race, technology and landscape

Some years ago I was on a Michael Dransfield mission, having heard a poem of his that I was sure referred to Woomera. I found it eventually after trawling through many volumes of his work. Here it is, from his Collected Poems, published in 1987.

Dransfield dug deep into ideas around heritage, race, technology and landscape. Readers may be struck by his use of a term, once common enough, that is fortunately no longer acceptable in referring to Aboriginal people in Australia. There would be nothing in this poem that is left to chance, and I presume to read this as a comment on the deep legacy of colonialist racism, as well as the impacts of alienation from country. The Army weapons range referred to must, of course, be Woomera. 

Little has changed, you might think, in the thirty years or so since this was published.

Outback

When your skin is worn away
by wind, by time, like the MacDonnell Ranges,
what will emerge
what will be left to face the sun?
Worthless quartz stripped back
may reveal an opal. But you are an island,
your shores are fences built by foreign cash,
you are ripped into beef roads and investments;
the abos move to the cites, their homesickness
cauterised by cheap wine and promises of jobs.
Speculators will ruin this last wild place,
few will protest, for profit eases consciences.
In thirty years
there will be nothing to distinguish this
from mined and gutted countries anywhere.
Our leaders will betray us, sell our heritage,
what remains is not worth stealing,
and so becomes an Army weapons range.



As always, I could write a lot about these images from a historical and landscape perspective, but I will leave their interpretation to you, dear reader. 

Albert Namatjira, Mount Sonder, MacDonnell Ranges c.1957-59
Watercolour and pencil on paper. National Gallery of Australia

When geostationary orbit became real: the cultural significance of Syncom 3

Syncom 3 was the first true geostationary (GEO) communications satellite, launched in 1963, nearly two decades after Arthur C. Clarke predicted the potential of GEO for telecommunications. Prior to the Syncom series, communication satellites were located in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) where they required massive terrestrial infrastructure. Syncom 3 was aimed at providing live television coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, as well as carrying telephone transmissions. But its uses were not confined to the civil sphere. Syncom 3 and its geosynchronous sister Syncom 2 were the primary communications link between South East Asia and the western Pacific in the Vietnam War.

Syncom 3
Image courtesy of NASA

Only six years after the first satellite, Syncom already shows how satellite design has moved past the early templates of the baby moon (Sputnik and Vanguard) and the rocket (Explorer 1). The Syncom series were the first spin-stabilised satellites. The basic design is still in use, for example, in the Aussat and Optus B series.

Syncom 3 is the ancestor of the satellites that provide telecommunication services today. Technologically, Syncom 3’s design and mission helped shape the world of the second millennium where nearly everyone is within reach of almost every point on the globe, and transnational entities flicker and spark into existence between hardware on Earth and in orbit.

Syncom 3 was a major step in the process of globalisation that has been developing since the 1400s when navigation connected previously separate old and new worlds. For some, globalisation has meant new possibilities and opportunities; for others, it has meant the erosion of identity in contexts where colonial exploitation has already exacted a high cost.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.
In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University.

References

Clarke, A. C., 1945 Extraterrestrial relays: can rocket stations give worldwide radio coverage? Wireless World, October, 1945, pp 305-308

From Stone Age to Space Age: the impact of Woomera on Aboriginal people

In 1946–7, as a joint project between the UK and Australia, the Long Range Weapons Establishment was set up [at Woomera] approximately 450 km north of Adelaide. The area was considered remote and unproductive, a treeless gibber plain with few water sources. Everything had to be constructed from scratch: roads, airstrips, workshops, housing, leisure facilities. Water was piped at great expense to supply the new range (Morton 1989:123–126).

However, not everyone in Australia supported the establishment of a rocket range aimed at developing nuclear missiles. There was widespread consternation at the decision, in the wake of World War II, to enter into a nuclear arms race, and concern about the impact of the rocket range on Aboriginal people (Watt 1947; Duguid 1947). Under the leadership of Dr Charles Duguid, the Presbyterian Church spearheaded a nation-wide protest movement that involved over 50 community groups, trade unions and Aboriginal rights organisations.

Image courtesy of
National Museum of Australia

The protest gathered high profile supporters: Duguid himself, the anthropologist Donald Thomson, Member of Parliament Doris Blackburn, the Aboriginal activist Pastor Doug Nicholls, and many others. Debate raged about the place that Aboriginal people held in white Australian society, with views ranging from the familiar expectation that Aboriginal people were on the verge of extinction (e.g. Bates 1938), to calls for greater assimilation - or protection. In response, the Australian government branded the protest leaders as communist dupes and placed them under surveillance.

Advised by Sydney University anthropologist A.P. Elkin, the government took the line that Woomera would, at most, accelerate processes both unavoidable and already evident among the Aboriginal groups of central and southern Australia: 'coming in' from the desert to missions, increasing reliance on European food and medicines, and exposure to alcohol, disease and other vices of civilisation. A supposedly independent committee set up to examine the impact of the range on Aboriginal people dismissed the representations of Duguid and Thomson. Disillusioned, Duguid withdrew from spotlight and the first phase of protests at Woomera was effectively over.

The survey and construction of the rocket range infrastructure progressed throughout the late 1940s, and the first missile test took place in 1949. Now movement was restricted within the prohibited area of the range, and Aboriginal people could no longer access many ceremonial sites and resources: they were competing for precious water with the needs of the rocket range. Roads were pushed through, bringing people, equipment, and encounters for which neither group had much preparation. A policy of non-intervention led to fraught interactions where Woomera and other government employees were forbidden to assist Aboriginal groups even when they were in obvious need of food, water, transport or medicine (Morton 1989:83, 87). This situation held until 1967, when Aboriginal people finally became recognised as citizens of Australia. Meanwhile, in Woomera Village, people collected stone artefacts from the desert, and pondered on the contrast between the Stone Age and the Space Age (Gorman 2005a).

These events are not, I have argued, peripheral to the understanding of the Woomera rocket range as a space site. They are an integral aspect of its significance that relates to the colonial processes at work in the growth of space industry (Gorman 2005b, Gorman 2007). Nor was the conjunction of space/protest an isolated one in the history of space exploration.

This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2007 La Terre et l'espace: rockets, prison, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-167

Further reading and resources can be found at Collaborating for Indigenous Rights.

References

Bates, D. 1938. The Passing of the Aborigines. A lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray.

Duguid, C. 1947 The Rocket Range, Aborigines and War. Melbourne: Rocket Range Protest Committee

Gorman, A.C. 2007 La terre et l'espace: rockets, prisons, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-168

Gorman, A.C. 2005a. From the Stone Age to the Space Age: Interpreting the Significance of Space Exploration at Woomera. Unpublished Paper Presented at the Symposium Home on the Range: The Cold War, Space Exploration and Heritage at Woomera, South Australia, Flinders University, November 2005

Gorman, A.C. 2005b. The Cultural Landscape of Interplanetary Space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85–107.

Morton, P. 1989. Fire Across the Desert. Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Programme, 1946–80. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service

Watt, A. 1947 Rocket Range Threatens Australia. Adelaide: South Australian State Committee, Communist Party of Australia

Cold War, colonialism, and the meaning of space hardware.

Spacecraft are more than utilitarian objects that further industrial, environmental or military objectives. They can also be regarded as artefacts, the material record of a particular phase in human social and technological development. On Earth, the preservation of material culture is considered important at a number of different levels: because it tells a story that is different to that presented in written documents, because it supplements written history, because material culture is the repository of people’s memories, ideas, and attachments. Material culture both shapes the world and is shaped by it:

....the things which constitute our world, which direct its functions, in turn influence our most basic cultural assumptions. A society which has access to jet engines, fast cars, and an international mass media based on television, fax machines and the information super-highway views the world entirely differently from a society dependent on the bullock dray and sea mail. (Anderson 1997).

That people see the material culture of space exploration as important is demonstrated by the popularity of museums such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. More people visit NASM than any other Smithsonian Institution. They don't go to see photographs of space, or to read interpretations of space history on storyboards. Words are not unique, and they are cheap. So why are visitors drawn in such staggering numbers to this museum?

Because the NASM has on display a Gemini capsule, a section of Skylab, and an astronaut's complete moon-walking suit....it's the artifacts, stupid. (Smith 2004)

Skylab module in NASM.
Image courtesy of http://whizzospace.com/

At the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex near Canberra, around 70 000 people each year come to the Visitor Centre to see a piece of the Moon and items of flown space hardware. The material culture of space exploration captures something that no written word can convey, and an object that has flown in space is perceived as more charged with meaning than a model, prototype or unflown spacecraft.

The material culture of space exploration is clearly seen as significant. However, its significance is often assumed to be self-evident. A well-used aphorism in the space community maintains that space exploration is the outcome of an innate human urge to explore. Thus, space objects are perceived to have a globally understood meaning that appeals to our common human nature (Gorman 2005). Just as the great navigators and explorers ventured out into unknown seas to discover the New World, so we have now left the cradle of Earth to satisfy a fundamental curiosity about our universe. This curiosity is one of the most commonly cited rationales for pursuing space exploration, far more palatable than the realpolitik of military and commercial dominance.

Another implicit and popular model for understanding the significance of space material culture is what I have called the Space Race model (Gorman 2005). In this formulation, objects and places have significance for their contribution to the Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR. This model focuses on these two states, ignoring the achievements of other countries like France, Britain, China, Japan and Australia in the development of space technology. It emphasises competitiveness rather than cooperation in space, and overlooks the contributions of and impacts on non-spacefaring countries, such as the colonial territories where potentially dangerous space installations were located. The relationship of space exploration to inequalities between the developed and developing world is unexplored, and indeed unproblematic, in the Space Race scenario, where US hegemony in space is assumed to benefit all.

The significance space artefacts might hold, therefore, is far from obvious.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.

In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University

References

Anderson, M. 1997 Material culture and the cultural environment: Objects and places. Australia: State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Canberra

Gorman, A.C. 2005 The cultural landscape of interplanetary space.  Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-107

Smith, Bill 2004 It’s the artifacts, stupid! Guest Editorial. The Mineralogical Record 35(2):106-107

 

Naming a crater on Mercury and the politics of Indigenous identity

The Mercury-orbiting Messenger spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As part of the celebrations, they're having a competition to name a crater (it closes on 15 January 2015).

It's a celebration but it's also a swan song. Somewhere around March this year, the plucky little spacecraft will run out of fuel and end up as a smear on the planet's surface.

Features on our solar system's innermost planet are named for artists. There's five craters that need names. This is how it works:

According to the IAU rules for Mercury, impact craters are named in honor of people who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to the Arts and Humanities (visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, architects, musicians, composers and so on). The person must have been recognized as an art-historically significant figure for more than 50 years and must have been dead for at least three years. We are particularly interested in submissions that honor people from nations and cultural groups that are under-represented amongst the currently-named craters.  See the current list of named Mercury craters.

I was lying in bed one Saturday morning, lazily turning various thoughts over in my mind, when inspiration struck. I should propose the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira.

Most Australians would be familiar with his work, even if they're not aware who the artist is. Here's a couple of examples:

Alice Springs Country. Watercolour on paper, by Albert Namatjira. Credit: Australian Art Auction Records

The Finke River Gorge at entrance to Glen Helen. Watercolour and gouache over pencil, on paper.  Credit: Queensland Museum

I thought Namatjira would be a good name for Crater C, which has yellow-orange volcanic deposits, not unlike the colours of central Australia in the scenes that became Namatjira's most iconic. And Aboriginal people are definitely an under-represented group in the names not just on Mercury, but in the rest of the solar system.

On looking up the list of existing names, I discovered that there are two Australians already on Mercury (so to speak). They are Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett, a painter, and James "Frank" Hurley, a photographer, and both fascinating people in their own right as you can see if you follow the links. One criterion was met already: only two Australians in a gazetteer of 372 names, and neither of them Aboriginal.

So I started researching and writing, and finally submitted the following 2000-character blurb on Namatjira:

Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) was an Arrernte man born in the Northern Territory of Australia. He was the first Aboriginal artist to become well-known to the white Australian public, and his work won international acclaim. Growing up on the Hermannsburg Mission, he was initiated into Aboriginal cultural law at 13.  In his 20s he learnt to paint from artists visiting the mission and quickly became proficient. His first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1938, and a school of artists built up around him. His paintings represented the colours of the Australian landscape like no other. His distinct style combined Aboriginal approaches to country with modern European landscape painting. He is best known for his paintings of the McDonnell ranges. In his lifetime he received honours such as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation medal (1953) and honorary membership of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales (1955). In 1968, he was the first Aboriginal person on an Australian postage stamp. As an Aboriginal man of this era, he experienced the tensions between expressing his Aboriginal identity and Australia’s administrative regime which tightly controlled the freedoms of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, he became one of Australia’s most well-known and popular artists with his work represented in major galleries. In 2002, the National Gallery of Australia mounted a major retrospective of his work. This is how they described his art: 

"Namatjira's paintings express his relationship with the Arrernte country, particularly the Western Arrernte lands, for which he was a traditional custodian. Through his intense scrutiny of specific places and his sensitive response to their individual qualities, Namatjira enables us to see the Centre as a multi-faceted region of Australia. A region of extremes, central Australia is far from a 'dead heart'”. 

These words could equally be applied to Mercury: the eye of the artist allows us to see beyond the superficial to the complexity within.

For more details, see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which was a major source for the above.

My opinion is that this is an absolute winning proposal, and I really hope the committee thinks so too.

It's interesting, though. The rules of naming are very clear: the name should not have any 'political, religious or military significance'. That's fine as it stands. And Albert Namatjira wasn't a general, or used as a rallying point for radical Aboriginal resistance, or the centre of a cult. Events on Earth won't be upset by having a crater named for him.

But he was an Aboriginal man who lived through a period where Aboriginal people were treated like livestock, and were assumed to be on the verge of extinction. He grew up on a mission, one of the aims of which was to Christianise Aboriginal people and destroy their culture. (You'll notice my subtle attempt to describe these complex issues in the submission). He was treated as if he had given away his Aboriginality by working in a contemporary modernist tradition; yet if he had painted in a 'traditional' way, he would have been constructed as 'primitive'. You can read about how Australia's policies about Aboriginal people affected his life in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

The International Astronomical Union, which administers the naming of planetary features in the solar system, is definitely right to be targeting groups who are marginalised or overlooked.

But there is a sense in which just being Indigenous in the modern world is already political. You can't be neutral as an Indigenous person in a colonial society. The very act of becoming outstanding in some way only serves to bring into sharp focus the inequalities that exist, and Namatjira's life illustrates that.

I hope I've walked the fine line of acknowledging the appalling treatment of Aboriginal people in White Australia while representing Namatjira for what he was: a brilliant artist with a unique vision who deserves to immortalised on Mercury.

Keep your eyes out for the results of the competition in late March/early April!

Insert Namatjira's name here.



Image credits:

1. Australian Art Auction Records

 http://www.artrecord.com/index.cfm/artist/478-namatjira-albert/medium/2-works-on-paper/?page=9

2. Queensland Museum.

 http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/collection/indigenous_australian_art/albert_namatjira

3. Enchanted Learning

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/mercury/mercurymap.shtml

Uganda in space

My erudite archaeoastronomical colleague Alun Salt sent me this article on a bunch of space enthusiasts in Uganda who are building a space shuttle in their backyard: African space research: Dreaming of a manned shuttle.

There's lots to love about this: the general craziness of Uganda (some young thing on the television the other day had never heard of Idi Amin), the sheer guts and determination of the volunteers and their leader Chris Nsamba, the openly nationalist agenda, the jackfruit tree in the backyard, and the almost-tenderness of the journalist, Anne Cavell, towards these dreamers.

I've long been interested in Africa's role in space. Nigeria, for example, had one of the very earliest generations of USA tracking station (a Microlock system, I think); in Mozambique, a crazy Portuguese dude built his own tracking station back in the 1950s. A few years ago I had one of my students do a project on Nigeria's space heritage, to explore the kinds of values that might be appropriate for space places outside of the Cold War western industrial complexes. I love the ambition of Uganda's attempts to participate in space, and why shouldn't they be ambitious? The big spacefaring states have had it all their way for too long.

And of course this fits very nicely into one of the often-overlooked themes of space travel, the role of amateurs and enthusiasts.  The historical importance of rocket societies in the earlier part of the 20th century, and their contribution to space exploration as we know it today, has been well-researched; but people tend to forget that amateurs and the public continue to be involved in making their own kinds of space.  My favourite example of this is Australis Oscar V, the satellite designed and built by Melbourne University students in the 1960s, and still in orbit.

Maybe Uganda won't have their own space shuttle or astronauts in the next decade, but I don't think that's the point. It's what they'll learn and accomplish along the way that makes this a significant project to watch.

Stone Age-Space Age metaphors

I'm always interested in these when I find them, which is quite frequently ...... here is one from Iain M. Banks' latest book, Transition.

"So, if there are civilised aliens, you'd guess they can travel between stars.  You'd guess their power sources and technology would be as far beyond ours as supersonic jets, nuclear submarines and space shuttles are beyond some tribe in the Amazon still making dugout canoes".

My publications on space archaeology

Thought I'd better update my publications list. Some new things coming out this year (see previous post).

Articles (refereed)

Gorman, A.C. 2007 La terre et l’espace: rockets, prisons, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-168

Gorman, A.C. 2005a The cultural landscape of interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-107

Gorman, A.C. 2005b The archaeology of orbital space. In Australian Space Science Conference 2005, RMIT University, Melbourne, pp 338-357

Book chapters

Gorman, A.C. 2009 Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holthorf (eds) Contemporary archaeologies: excavating now. Peter Lang, Bern

Gorman, A.C. and Beth Laura O’Leary 2007 An ideological vacuum: the Cold War in space. In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage: diverse legacies of the Cold War. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California pp 73-92

Gorman, A.C. In press The heritage of orbit. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The cultural landscape of space. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The archaeology of space exploration. In Martin Parker and David Bell (eds) Space Travel and Culture. Sociological Review Monograph, Blackwell Publishing

Short publications and notes

Gorman, A.C. 2007 Saving Woomera. Australasian Science, June pp 38-40

Gorman, A.C. 2005 Space cowboys: the Wild West and the myth of the American hero. The New England Review, February, pp 10-12

Rock art or rockets?

Or perhaps it should be rock art AND rockets. This is a title for a paper that we came up with, late one night after too many champagnes in the earlier part of last year. The illustrious Dr Alistair Pike was present and complicit. I was filing some papers and came across a sheet of scrap paper covered in scribbled notes from this long-ago evening, which also included the proposed title of Alistair's autobiography: "Vermin and physics".

But "Rock art or rockets" may become nicely relevant this year, as I am in discussions with Mr Phil Czwerwinski, who knows this area well, about doing something with both out at Woomera.

The Kokatha and the Cold War

Another conference, another abstract .... Andrew Starkey and I are proposing this one for the Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference in December.

The Kokatha and the Cold War: Indigenous and technological heritage at Woomera, South Australia.

Andrew Starkey (Kokatha) and Alice Gorman (Flinders University)

In 1947, the Woomera rocket range was established in the supposedly “empty” desert north of Port Augusta in South Australia. Over the next 60 years, Woomera was Australia’s primary Cold War site, developing missiles and launch vehicles, and participating in US and European military and space programmes. It is still an active launch site. More recently the Woomera Prohibited Area has been opened to mineral exploration, leading to an increase in cultural heritage surveys.

The desert around the Woomera village is the traditional country of the Kokatha. The Woomera Heritage Centre, recently redesigned, separates the history of space technology from both Indigenous and pastoral occupation. In this paper, we examine the intersection of military and space technology with Kokatha heritage in the Prohibited Area. We argue that in order to understand its significance, Woomera must be contextualised as part of early Cold War space enterprises, where launch sites were located in colonised lands heavily impacted by the introduction of disease, dispossession from country, and development. Woomera can be regarded as a cultural landscape created by the establishment of a technological enclave within Indigenous country, with the underlying theme, from 1947 to the present, of nuclear arms development.

50th anniversary of Vanguard 1

Damn and blast, I missed the 50th anniversary of the launch of my very favourite satellite ever. (It was March 17th, last week). Perhaps it's not too late to do something to commemorate it? My esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis has been honing her cake decorating skills and surely we'd do better this time than our attempts with the sputnik cakes.

Despite this heinous memory lapse, I did have many spacey thoughts on March 17th. The delightful Daryl Guse (Earth Sea Heritage Surveys) was visiting from the Northern Territory, and came for dinner that night. We discussed our plans to do a study of Indigenous interactions with the ELDO tracking station near Nhulunbuy. He knows the Traditional Owners, and I know the space hardware, so it would be an excellent collaboration.

La terre et l'espace: download the article

The full text of this article is available at the following URL:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j30110k220728g73/

This week I am working on gravity - reading lots of stuff on the Newton/Hooke debate (hard to avoid the conclusion that Newton was a bit of a bastard) and thinking about how to define place in space.

La Terre et l’Espace: Rockets, Prisons, Protests and Heritage in Australia and French Guiana

As promised a long time ago, here is the abstract for my Kourou article which has just come out in the journal of the World Archaeological Congress, Archaeologies [3(2):153-168]

Abstract

Space technology is often represented as global, modern and placeless. But one of the earliest forms of space site, the rocket range, tends to be located in places of a very specific kind: remote and seemingly empty colonies. Because of their distance from the metropole, these places also lend themselves to hosting prisons, detention camps, military installations, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste. All of these establishments, including rocket ranges, have inspired reactions of protest. These themes are explored at the rocket launch sites of Woomera (Australia) and Kourou (French Guiana). In 2005, Créole groups in French Guiana were demonstrating against the construction of a new launch pad near Kourou that disturbed archaeological material. My arrival, to deliver a talk proposing that protests in Woomera sixty years earlier were an essential part of the heritage of the space age, revealed the entanglement of imprisonment and protest with space exploration.

Resumé

La technologie aérospatiale est souvent représentée comme étant globale et moderne, et comme n’ayant pas de point d’attache géographique particulier. Néanmoins, le site de lancement, l’une des formes originelles du site aérospatial, tend à être localisé dans des endroits spécifiques: des colonies éloignées, et apparemment vides de populations. Du fait qu’ils sont sités loin de la métropole, ces endroits ont aussi tendance à accueillir des prisons, des camps de détention, des installations militaires, des armes et des déchets nucléaires. Tous ces endroits, y compris les sites de lancement, ont inspiré des réactions de protestation à leur encontre. Ces thèmes ont été explorés aux sites de lancement de Woomera (Australie) et de Kourou (Guyane Française). En 2005, des groupes créoles de la Guyane Française ont manifesté contre l’établissement d’un nouveau site de lancement près de Kourou, dont la construction a perturbé les vestiges archéologiques de l’endroit. Mon arrivée, (pour présenter une communication proposant que les manifestations ayant eu lieu à Woomera soixante ans plus tôt constituent un élément essentiel du patrimoine de l’ère aérospatiale), a mis en avant le lien étroit qui existe entre emprisonnement, protestation et exploration spatiale.

Aboriginal souvenirs at Woomera

During my recent trip, I did hardly any research - most of my time was spent out on the range. However I did manage a few hours in the library looking through the old Gibber Gabber newsletters. I discovered that in the 1960s, the enterprising Jean Macauley set up a business from her home, selling Aboriginal art and souvenirs like miniature weapon sets. There was no indication that they were sourced locally, and the advertisements regularly mentioned consignments of art from Arnhem Land. I have visions of French, German and Italian space scientists, out there for the ELDO programme, browsing in the shop for artefacts to take home, perhaps never aware that Kokatha people were still living in the area.

Woomera trip

Next week I'm going to Woomera, hoorah! Nights at the ELDO, days in the desert ..... actually I'm not doing fieldwork this time, just research. During my last visit, which was for a heritage consultancy, I had about half an hour in the new heritage centre. I was delighted with it, but also dismayed as I couldn't find anything about Indigenous people at Woomera. I later learned that anything non-rockety had been squirrelled away in the old Nurrungar room, and no-one mentioned that it was there!

My understanding, from talking to Geoff Speirs in the early day of the new design, was that these aspects of Woomera's history would be incorporated. The fact that they are not illustrates the very point I have been arguing in relation to understanding Woomera's significance as a space site (for example, in Gorman 2005, Journal of Social Archaeology).

I can feel a new paper coming on .....

Australian Space Development Conference

Tomorrow I leave for chilly Canberra and the Australian Space Development Conference. Today I must finish writing my paper. I am presenting as part of a heritage panel and my brief is to outline Indigenous heritage issues in space exploration. I'm taking three case studies: Woomera, Aussat A, and Tranquility Base.

It will, I am sure, be a seriously suited audience - if any of the space nobs think it worth attending a heritage session. To enhance my credibility I'm going to wear high heels. (Does it work that way? I've really no idea).

Ironically I was out near Woomera on the weekend doing fieldwork with the Kokatha. Very interesting conversation with Eileen Wingfield about Maralinga. But this time I'm not drawing nuclear testing into my arguments. I think some of the basic heritage concepts will be enough for a space industry audience to begin with.

Spaceport good for Woomera's heritage - media release

This was released yesterday, 10th April.

A proposal to give Woomera’s space facilities a new lease of life has been strongly endorsed by a Flinders University academic involved in the preservation of historic sites associated with the “space race”.

Dr Alice Gorman said that using Woomera as a spaceport for the growing space tourist industry would help to preserve its unique heritage values.

Dr Gorman, an internationally recognized expert on the archaeology of space exploration, said that Woomera is one of the earliest rocket ranges in the world, and played a significant role in the Cold War and the space programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

The redevelopment proposed by astronaut Dr Andy Thomas during his recent visit to Australia could incorporate planning to retain significant launch pads and buildings, or to re-use them in a fashion sympathetic to their historic significance.

“In its heyday, Woomera was the second busiest spaceport in the world, after Cape Canaveral,” Dr Gorman said.

“The USA used Woomera to test components, and to track the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programmes. Europe launched nine Europa rockets there before moving to French Guiana in the late 1960s. Australian expertise was vital in developing Britain’s Cold War missiles. In those days, people expected that astronaut missions would soon be launched from Woomera, taking Australians into space on a regular basis.”

But with the closure of the Apollo program and Europe’s decision to relocate its launch facilities to Kourou in French Guiana, the infrastructure and expertise centred in Woomera and the headquarters in Salisbury dissipated. Today, people at Kourou, and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, established in the same year as Woomera, are largely unaware that this remote outback location in Australia was also a major player in the “Space Club.”

Dr Gorman said that once historic structures are abandoned, they start to deteriorate, but if they can be adapted to a new use, their chance of survival is greatly increased.

“There are many successful examples of the reuse of heritage structures, and if done according to principles like those in the Burra Charter developed in Australia, it’s a win-win situation,” Dr Gorman said.

Last year, Dr Gorman convened a symposium at Flinders University, bringing together experts on the history of Woomera. Some of the themes that were discussed included Indigenous lives after the rocket range, Woomera as a Cold War site, the place of Woomera Village in the history of post-war town planning, and the challenges of managing space heritage.

“Everyone agreed that Woomera was significant not only for the part it played in Australian history, but on an international level,” Dr Gorman said.

“Space tourism isn’t just about going into orbit – there are space places on Earth too. It would be very appropriate to recognise and value Woomera’s heritage by giving it a new space future.”

MEDIA CONTACT: For more information contact Alice Gorman on 0428 450 418.