Chapter 3: Place-based History: Teaching and Researching in Ecologically and Culturally Sustainable Ways

Jennifer Jones

History students are accustomed to learning from texts and in classrooms that are far removed from the sites where historic events took place. Their teacher seldom has a deep connection to the communities they are teaching about. Place-based approaches to history change this status quo by using real-life encounter with places, including heritage sites, to understand how physical and cultural environments change over time. In teaching, these interactions stimulate student self-reflection and develop critical thinking skills. In research, they ensure that researchers are accountable to the communities who nurture bonds to these places.^[1]

A place-based approach is particularly effective when local community members with attachment to heritage places are involved as co-designers and provide ongoing input as co-instructors or co-researchers. These people provide important perspectives that help identify how complex and entangled versions of the past can compete or cooperate as histories. We all have formative connections to the place where we were born or raised. We all maintain important connections to the place where we live. I invite you, dear reader, to consider how your personal place attachments influence your historical research interests or approach to history teaching.^[2]

I do this by first examining my own background and how this shaped my interest in place-based history, including development of a third-year rural studies elective subject offered by La Trobe University called ‘Gone Bush’. This subject is taught in partnership with The Man From Snowy River Bush Festival at Corryong and in cooperation with Indigenous and industry stakeholders in Victoria’s Murray and Upper Murray regions. One of the central aims of the subject is to draw student attention to the convergent and divergent histories, experiences, and perspectives of rural Indigenous and settler communities. The 12-week subject uses a conventional history format, including weekly recorded lectures, topical readings, online activities, and face-to-face tutorials (weeks 1–5 and 7–12) that sandwich the centrepiece mobility experience in Week 6. I adopt a decolonising approach that makes Indigenous experiences and perspectives available each week in the reading list. Weeks 1–5 orient students to the post-invasion historic context. Students then gather at Albury Wodonga for a four-day field trip in Week 6. After returning to their home campuses, weeks 7–12 offer students the opportunity to reflect on the key 20th-century sites and themes they encountered.

In the following section I introduce my rural background and how childhood experiences influenced my philosophy of history teaching and inspired the development of Gone Bush. The chapter then examines the transformative capacity of place-based teaching and learning. As you read, imagine how designing your own units of work, or history research projects, might draw on your attachments to places: to inspire and shape the future treatment of these places and the communities that live there.

How childhood context influenced my history curriculum choices

In Gone Bush, I aim to examine historic diversity and to assist students to recognise and respectfully negotiate competing interpretations of contemporary life. These goals grew from my personal experience of growing up in country New South Wales. As a young person I encountered but did not understand a clashing dynamic in Australian culture that positions country people in a dichotomy with the city, variously valorising and denigrating both. Judith Brett identifies the fluctuating claims about the virtues and vices of the country and the city as part of a struggle ‘over the allocation of symbolic and material resources’.^[3] This contest drew upon and perpetuated intersecting forms of historic injustice that I recognised, even as a child, as differentially impacting the choices and life quality of Australian families and communities.

I grew up on a farm in the Riverina district of Southern New South Wales, the second of three daughters born to white farmers whose grandparents had purchased small parcels of agricultural land in the early 20th century. My mother left school at age 15, helping at home until she married. All her siblings became farmers, and they married children of farmers. They formed and maintained a large and cohesive clan who gathered, volunteered, and contributed to their family and local communities with reliable enthusiasm. Their full tables and open arms modelled the style of ‘sturdy independence’ that fuelled government visions of a hearty rural yeomanry and made my childhood great.^[4]

My father was a talented student from a clever family. He gained honours in his Leaving Certificate despite long seasonal absences from school, helping with sowing and harvest on the farm. My grandfather died when dad was 18, and so dad decided against university to work the farm with his brother. His two sisters, however, went away to teachers’ college and entered careers, encouraged and enabled by their mother. Natal family poverty had forced her out of school and into domestic service when she was 12. Many rural parents then discerned brighter futures for their children in the cities, especially their daughters.^[5] This seemed true when my city cousins came for farm holidays in the 1970s and 80s, citing recent-release movies and exciting social exploits like disco rollerskating, and wearing chain store brands. Our home-made independence seemed drab and dated then, and my aunties’ incomes looked even more attractive as drought and economic rationalism strained traditional gender expectations and accelerated the decline of farming communities.

By the 1980s, government support for farmers under ‘protected development’ legislation was gradually withdrawn in favour of deregulated markets.^[6] Local businesses closed and some of my uncles exited farming under the pressure of drought, debt and market adjustment. My Uncle Peter dissolved the farming partnership with my dad and moved his family to Wagga, where he distributed Amway products and started a gardening business.

Leaving the country for better educational opportunities and careers was widespread and normalised in my generation. But I only lasted one year in the city. All those ideas about the sophisticated city didn’t make it a better place to live. I got married and joined my husband at a regional university on the coast. And stereotypes about backward country people also unsettled me. I knew, for example, that I did not have access to the same quality schooling or higher education pathways as my city cousins, and that my Indigenous cousins had worse treatment in the same rural school and fewer opportunities than I had. My undergraduate degree clarified and informed this knowledge. My eyes were opened to the intersections of class, gender and race, and I was hooked by the power of learning.

Regional, rural and remote students’ experience of higher education in historic context

After eventually completing two higher degrees I began an academic career that included coordinating Bachelor of Arts delivery at La Trobe University’s Albury Wodonga campus (2016–2021). By then, the access and equity issues that hindered regional student participation and success in higher education were well known beyond the lived experience. In the 1990s, Australian universities had been charged with responsibility to improve societal equity through the participation of non-traditional groups.^[7] But by 2008, the Bradley review of higher education found that although widened participation promised many social and economic gains, equal benefit was not availed to all Australians.^[8] The Bradley review identified Indigenous Australians, people from low socio-economic backgrounds and regional, rural and remote students (RRR) as the most disadvantaged groups in Australian higher education. Since then, universities have attempted to increase participation of non-traditional groups. These efforts have gradually shifted the profile and needs of students in higher education, but in 2022, 25 per cent of the students in Victoria’s north-east still experience disadvantage and were drawn from communities with an eight per cent higher education participation rate, when the state average is nearly 17 per cent.^[9]

Formerly excluded groups might gain access to higher education, but they may not be retained or enabled to succeed due to curricula, pedagogy and governance that ignores their cultural needs. Gale and Tranter describe the need for reform in these areas as ‘recognitive justice’, arguing that the knowledge and values of minoritised groups should be accepted and addressed by the academy. This call recognises that students are more engaged and experience higher success when teaching and learning strategies demonstrate relevance to and respect for their daily cultural contexts and aspirations.^[10] Equity principles relevant to the creation of such strategies include learner-centredness and epistemological equity, which consider student identities, interests and priorities in the development and delivery of curricula, and take into account the politics of knowledge production as well as knowledge content.^[11]

For RRR students, one important context is the diversity within this group. Nearly 70 per cent of Australians live in cities, but of the remaining 30 per cent, around 20 per cent live in inner regional areas, nine per cent live in outer regional areas and around two per cent live in remote and very remote areas.^[12] The geographic distribution of Indigenous Australians ‘is quite different’ from this pattern, comprising one per cent in major cities, three per cent in inner regional areas, six per cent in outer regions, 15 per cent in remote areas and 50 per cent in very remote areas. Yet traditional histories and contemporary representations of the country (aside from very remote places) often overlook Indigenous rurality. I wanted to introduce a decolonising and reparative approach to teaching rural history that respectfully challenged this status quo. Holding divergent First Nations and settler viewpoints in productive tension, I hoped, would ‘redress the effective erasure’ of First Nations people from RRR history and contemporary culture.^[13]

I designed a collaborative subject where diverse authentic regional voices shape a narrative that is considerate and gentle but still challenges traditional ways of viewing RRR history, and that immerses regional and metropolitan students in country life together. Drawing upon and innovating place-based pedagogy helped me to achieve these aims. Recognising what inspires your own research or teaching goals is an important first step in the design of any project or teaching unit. The next step is developing or adapting a methodology that will empower you to achieve your objectives.

Developing a critical place-based history pedagogy that gives voice to RRR experience

I chose a critical place-based pedagogy because the approach aligns with my aims to make teaching and learning relevant to local communities and to reacquaint regional students with stories about their own environments.^[14] Place-based pedagogy often finds application in local school and higher education settings where it is used to engage students and community members with histories of familiar local places. The Gone Bush program expanded this understanding of ‘local’ to include the regional and surrounding rural communities within which Albury Wodonga’s La Trobe University’s campus is embedded. Since 2017, this small elective subject has drawn 151 students from La Trobe’s large metropolitan and smaller regional campuses to access selected heritage sites near Albury Wodonga.

Gone Bush was designed to be as a collaborative and inclusive as possible, within economic and social constraints. Members of the Man From Snowy River Bush Festival committee and the Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, and Aboriginal liaison officers based at La Trobe University and at Albury and Wodonga City Councils, were consulted in the subject design phase and variously included alongside industry specialists (paid and voluntary) as co-instructors in subject delivery. To achieve this level of cooperation, I first needed to demonstrate my trustworthiness. This process, of demonstrating and developing trust, drew upon and extended local networks that I developed over many years as a country person living locally. These connections demonstrated and affirmed my ongoing accountability.

Consultation with Aboriginal community members and Elders requires transparency, deference, deep listening and reflection, delicate persistence and continuing effort.^[15] Stakeholders in any collaborative research or teaching project will look for signs of respect for their experience, perspectives and values, as well as the potential for mutual benefit. Gone Bush therefore uses Indigenous-led ‘Learning From Country’ to frame and inform the weekly content and field trip experiences. But it also purposefully retains an overarching focus on the historic and lived legacies of rural settler colonialism. As a descendant of English and German settlers, I recognise that the transformation of sacred Country into European-styled farmland was at the cost of tenacious Aboriginal attachments. I also accept that my primary responsibility, as a person who shares white privilege, is to teach anti-racism.^[16] This priority aligns with the core aims of a place-based approach to research and teaching.

Place-based frameworks recognise that people may not understand how their own environment has been historically ‘disrupted or injured’.^[17] Place-based approaches therefore draw attention to dominant systems of thought that have perpetuated ecological and social injustices, and they equip students or audiences to recognise these impacts.^[18] Dolores Calderon suggests that centring Indigeneity and destabilising settler conceptualisations of place must be central to projects that seek ecological justice. Calderon renames place-based education as ‘land education’ to recognise disruption and injury to land as including displacement of First Nations peoples. This shift critiques settler claims to the land and confronts normalised forms of settler colonialism like education.^[19]

Australian Indigenous scholars promote ‘Learning from Country’ as the best way to engage with ‘diverse Aboriginal experiences and views emerging from local cultures, identities, histories and communities’.^[20] Harrison and Skebneva argue that learning from Country is potentially decolonising, because Country is itself the ‘teacher’, and people ‘are able to listen and observe the patterns of Country’.^[21] Gone Bush uses a playful approach to help build rapport between students and the community members they encounter. To highlight the diversity of rural identities and attributes, and help students to practise compassion rather than judgement, students self-select into small groups according to a preferred identity of Townies, The Squattocracy, Us Mob (providing cultural safety), Cockies (struggling farmers), The Exodists (rural expats), and Tree Changers (city expats). Students bond with ‘their people’ but also build respect for diverse voices by ‘trying out’ other identities and standpoints prior to the field trip. This gentle approach to intercultural and empathic learning encourages intellectual flexibility and courage to engage in respectful dialogue and interaction across social and cultural boundaries during the field trip.^[22]

Five principles for place-based education in Gone Bush

Place-based learning can help students gain deeper insights into historical narratives. I used five key organising place-based principles, which are examined below:

1. Use local settings
2. Acknowledge diversity of place meanings
3. Examine authentic artefacts and representations during fieldwork
4. Encourage ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate decolonising norms
5. Expand historical place consciousness.

I also present de-identified student perspectives on the impact of the critical place-based approach in Gone Bush, as presented in self-reflective essays submitted for assessment in the subject.^[23] These student responses help with examination of the five key principles of place-based history pedagogy.

1.  Use local settings

Gone Bush uses local settings to focus student attention on natural, social and cultural histories. It adopts an anti-racist strategy by examining the social structures of race and class that have historically privileged whiteness, through dual operations of white invisibility and ‘acceptable’ multiculturalism.^[24] The border districts that host the Gone Bush field trip are much less diverse than the national average, and the overwhelmingly ‘Anglo’ cultural environment of the Man From Snowy River Bush Festival is quickly apparent to students.^[25] Albury’s regional population is around 67,700, but only 2.7% are Indigenous and 11.4% born overseas. The national percentages are 3.2% Indigenous and 29.1% born overseas. Gone Bush examines how local perceptions of diversity are impacted by this numerical prevalence and associated privilege. Visits to Man From Snowy River Bush Festival  events are punctuated by a guided tour to Bonegilla Migrant Experience near Wodonga. Bonegilla provided transitional accommodation for 320,000 non-Anglo migrants from more than 30 nations after the Second World War. This migration flow changed the cultural fabric of the nation, including perceptions of the relative importance of the bush myth in Australian identity.^[26] One in 20 Australians has links to Bonegilla, and since 2017, three students have gained insight into the migration experience of their relatives at Bonegilla. In 2023, a student reflected that family knowledge contrasted the rosy picture of welcome and successful transition put forward by Bonegilla’s curation of material and documentary history:

The stories shared [at Bonegilla] about migrants’ experiences were mostly positive: about the new ideas, traditions, and perspectives that helped to diversify Australia. My personal connection evoked mixed feelings about the camp. My great grandparents attended the facility in 1952, after escaping warn-torn Lithuania. My great grandmother’s experience was frightening. She could not speak any English and was separated from her husband on arrival. Despite the negatives, she was always immensely grateful for the safety, and opportunities the camp provided.^[27]

Understanding the difference between officially sanctioned celebratory narratives and her own family stories of insecurity and dislocation also prompted this regional student to examine multiculturalism in her hometown. She noted that, ‘when researching, I was embarrassed to admit that I was naïve in my perception of my town’.^[28] Combining place-based learning with a mobility experience enabled these insights. As Greuenwald et al. note, ‘temporal and spatial analysis of local phenomena also readily leads to an examination of places further afield, and to questions of what should happen to communities and their environments in the future’.^[29]

2.  Acknowledge diversity of place meanings

Learners and teachers bring a range of intersecting positionalities and relationships to their place-based study.^[30] Similarly, the historical development of a physical location is shaped by diverse temporal contexts and dynamics, including changing social and economic inequalities, that intersect with and influence an individual student’s sense of place.^[31]To provide insight into this dynamic, and to encourage critical empathy, I conducted a suite of oral history interviews with members of the Corryong community who have had long involvement with the Man From Snowy River Bush Festival and Man From Snowy River Museum. Students have an opportunity to engage with these narratives before the field trip, where they encounter some of the characters in person. The interviews include members of the organising committee, who also present a Q&A workshop for students in the festival rooms. Many students are critical of the monocultural public representations of rurality they encounter at rural museums and the Man From Snowy River Bush Festival. A common response is to note that the bush festival and museum are ‘heavily focused on European settlement [while] colonisation, dispossession, and enduring struggles for Indigenous rights were notably ignored’.^[32] Another student recognised the intergenerational challenge faced by younger festival participants ‘coming to terms with colonial constructs and the restraints they place on different generations’. Differential willingness and ability to decolonise was central to this sympathetic critique:

[Festival] organisers have made small attempts to acknowledge the traditional owners. For example, a rider carrying a partially unfurled Aboriginal flag entered the rodeo ground. I pictured myself in their position – young, possibly non-Indigenous, within an unenlightened monoculture – tasked to carry a flag; would I have acted differently? I probably would not have carried the flag, given the festival’s milieux of strong identities paying homage to ‘Australian heritage’.^[33]

History teachers, according to Harcourt, need to actively confront difficult topics in settler colonial settings and offer students an opportunity to personally identify with historical actors in a manner that avoids presentism and prejudice by recognising historical agency.^[34]

3.  Examine authentic artefacts and representations during fieldwork

Core disciplinary skills developed by historians and inculcated in their students include the capacity to ‘problematize previous stories about the past, formulate their own questions, and design and follow processes of inquiry’.^[35] During the Gone Bush field trip, students access professional and ‘do it yourself’ (DIY) public histories at three local museums, guided at Beechworth by museum professionals and at Corryong and Wodonga by volunteers. Students enjoy two professionally guided historic precinct tours at Beechworth, and an Indigenous guided tour at the Mudgegonga rock art site, conducted by an Aboriginal curator from the Albury Library Museum. Developing a nuanced appreciation of the ethics of representation and the politics that constrain public history is an important aim of the subject. Students particularly enjoy a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Burke Museum at Beechworth, conducted by the collections manager. Many contrast the professional curation at Beechworth with the ‘DIY heritage’ evident at the Man From Snowy River Museum at Corryong.^[36] Volunteering in the community heritage sector, described as ‘serious leisure’ by Cantillon and Baker, results in ‘tensions, dislikes and disappointments’ alongside rewards. Students notice and critique the individual and organisational consequences of ‘serious leisure’ in the community heritage sector, especially regarding the politics of public history.

Volunteering at the Man From Snowy River Museum, according to one regional student, supports the ‘sustainability of the region’s rural economy’ and enables local knowledge holders to ‘proudly share knowledge seemingly passed down from generations, which evoked a sense of pride in their shared community spirit’. Most students respect the volunteers for presenting their community history with such passion, but many also recognise the ‘institutional authority’ of the museum as a discursive space in which social and cultural dynamics are negotiated and expressed.^[37] One metropolitan student described, for example, the museum’s choices regarding the display and interpretation of Indigenous artefacts. He found the displays to be ‘reproduce[ing] and entrench[ing] the Historical Society’s particularly conservative, inward-looking version of local history’.^[38] Another regional student, who assessed the exhibition of Dhuduroa cultural material as being ‘captive in the coloniser’s display case’, also observed an interaction with elderly volunteers as enabling progressive peer-to-peer learning about the violence of settlement, which included ‘colonising not only land but their descendants’ epistemological understanding of Country’.^[39]

4.  Encourage ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate decolonising norms

Recognising that mainstream conceptions of land are informed by dominant ideologies also enables students to consider how Indigenous agency and resistance are closely tied to Indigenous cosmologies.^[40] Greenwood suggests that place-based subjects can achieve this aim by posing two core questions: “What needs to be remembered in and about this place? What needs to be changed or transformed in this place?”. Place-based history teaching should observe Indigenous protocols for research and teaching, including the right of Traditional Owners and other authorised Aboriginal knowledge holders to control and direct Learning from Country.

5.  Expand historical place consciousness

The power of Indigenous-led teaching dawned upon us, students and teachers alike, when we arrived at the Mudgegonga rock art site in 2023. A group of Traditional Owners  and park rangers were at the site conducting an archaeological survey. Our interaction with these Elders was rich, unexpected, and well beyond my scheduling powers. One exchange student commented on the ‘culture of acknowledgment and respect toward Aboriginal people’ that he observed at the site visit, through contrast with settler–Indigenous relations in his home country:

While both the United States and Australia have both made efforts to install reparations toward their respective Indigenous peoples, the United States’ few policies pale in comparison to Australia’s attempts to repair the damages. [Australia has] created a culture of acknowledgment and respect toward Aboriginal people, a culture I was able to witness firsthand during my time with the Elders on the Gone Bush field trip. Uncle Reg was incredibly knowledgeable about the artifacts found near the rock art structure, pointing them out on the ground where I would have just seen dirt.^[41]

This student also reflected that they did not know ‘the original owners of the land I lived on’ in the United States, and after a ‘quick google search’ after class, they were still ‘only moderately sure [that] the Native American tribes I found were for specifically my state’.

By encouraging students to connect their field trip experience with their personal histories, and their present needs and wants, Gone Bush encourages action-oriented approaches to studying the past.

Outcomes and concluding considerations

The subject outline presented above, and its connection with place-based activities on the field trip, has been finely honed through a yearly cycle of continual improvement. At the conclusion of each field trip, and at the end of semester, I reflect on this year’s proceedings with stakeholders to make necessary improvements. One of the core aims of place-based pedagogy is to recognise and develop place-based sustainability, which must include community perspectives. This approach has developed strong support for the initiative and has grown my appreciation of and capacity for relational accountability. In their critical pedagogy of place, Huffling Carlone and Benavides suggest that the benefits of place-based teaching and learning include collective empowerment to create a more critically oriented perspective of place. The comments that I have cited above provide a sense of the nuanced self-reflective critique that students undertake when encountering historical stories in the places where they happened. At the end of the course students appreciated the value of person-to-person encounters and experiencing diverse views, even though they may have still disagreed with some of standpoints that they encountered. Taking students out of the classroom and into the country is well worth the effort, when the outcomes include empowerment to understand why others experience places and see the past differently. My challenge to you, as future researchers or teachers of history, is to consider how your project or unit design can incorporate community involvement and accountabilities: to harness the transformative power of place.