Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern W.S. SHAW The inner Sydney Aboriginal settlement known as The Block has been monitored by police, the media and welfare organisations since its inception in the early 1970s. The Block is the subject of an ongoing commentary, a ‘discourse of decline’ about a place that is commonly considered to be Australia’s own Harlem-like ‘black ghetto’. In stark contrast, the predominantly non-Aboriginal suburbs of Darlington, Redfern and Chippendale, which surround The Block, are undergoing gentrification. Within this zone of gentrification there are complex and seemingly confused responses to the presence of The Block. The responses challenge and/or embellish the official (‘white’) narrative that The Block is imploding in a sea of drugs, crime and cultural inferiority. Aboriginal Redfern, or The Block as it is known locally, 1 is an Aboriginal community located in the centre of Sydney, Australia (Figures 1 and 2). The site straddles the suburbs of Darlington and Redfern, just to the south of the central business district of Sydney. This indigenous 2 place existing within another place has had a pressured and contested existence. In a complicated battle for Aboriginal rights and the accompanying storm of non-Aboriginal protest, the federal Labor government granted The Block, a site consisting of 70 Victorian terraced houses, to the inner city Aboriginal community in 1973. As Anderson (1993a, 81) noted ‘[Aboriginal] Redfern became a sphere of indigenous protest, an heroic site of resistance to European culture and colonialist control.’ Born out of struggle, The Block remains embattled. Its continuance provides a focal point for some of Australia’s most contentious race relations issues. It is presented, simultaneously, as a place of successful Aboriginal political struggle and as an example of failed (urban) Aboriginal self-determination. After several difficult decades, The Block seems increasingly ‘out-of-place’ (in the sense of Cresswell [1996]). It sits in glaring juxtaposition to the predominantly non-Aboriginal suburbs that surround it. In the recent rush of renovation, restoration and redevelopment in the surrounding areas of Darlington, Redfern and Chippendale, the impoverished ‘blackness’ of the inner Sydney Aboriginal community has become bounded by a sea of increasingly affluent ‘whiteness’. During the 1990s, a new urgency in the development of theory about ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ emerged in response to conservative 291 Australian Geographical Studies • November 2000 • 38(3):291-305 Wendy Shaw is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia.