Unmaking Angas Downs Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station

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 A?angu 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. It grapples with the question of how people experience profound dislocation and come to make a place for themselves in the wake of rupture. Angas Downs emerges as a place of dynamic interaction and social life - not only lived in, but also made by A?angu.

Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, researcher and writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. While living in Mparntwe and working with A?angu, recording the stories that form the foundation of this book, Shannyn worked for the A?a Iritija Project, has a PhD in History from the ANU and works to develop community-engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural conversations and collaborations.