ABSTRACT
This chapter compares and contrast the spatial practices of pre-colonial Indigenous Australia with European urban settlements and reveal the politicisation of space that colonisation produced. Nonetheless, it is a typology from which many contemporary metro politan Indigenous cultural centres have evolved. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) provides a case study of how one Indigenous cultural centre has endeavoured to navigate these complexities. The practice of centring populations spatially in cities is often linked to the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States, where urbanisation escalated dramatically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gary Murray argues that a metropolitan cultural centre would offer urban Aboriginal people a place they can identify as their own. For both traditional owners and the diaspora of Indigenous Australians who live 'off-country' in regional Australia, the spatiality and typology of the centre needs to be re-thought.
