ABSTRACT
In 1989 the Grampians National Park in the western district of Victoria became a landscape that would test the memory and historic identity of the European ‘settler’ society which dominates the region numerically and culturally. The then Labor Victorian Minister for Tourism, Steve Crabb, announced that certain natural features in the Park would ‘revert to their Aboriginal names’, with the name of the mountain range which dominates the park being restored to Gariwerd. This met with widespread criticism. Europeans in the district feared the indigenous name restoration project threatened their own history of ‘pioneer settlement’. In addition, the recognition of a Koori past in the area incorporated the reality of a living Koori community in the western district. In turn this raised the spectre of the squattocracy’s worst nightmare, the possibility of a land rights claim. Such a fear is evident in hundreds of written complaints against the restoration project, in which the local Koori communities were derogatorily described as either a ‘cultureless remnant’, or as terra nullius, absent from both the physical and historical landscape.
