Wendy Shaw , School of Geography, The University of New South Wales. w.shaw@unsw.edu.au

I'm Dreaming of a White ... [postcolonial city].

The inner Sydney Aboriginal settlement known as "The Block" or Aboriginal Redfern, is unique in the Australian context as the first and only deliberate urban Aboriginal neighbourhood. Since its largely unexpected formalisation in 1972-3, this urban Aboriginal settlement continues to be a paradoxical presence for the largely non-Aboriginal community that surrounds it and geographically binds it in place. The "return" of Aboriginality to a place from which it had been banished is a postcolonial paradox. It elicits desires within the non-Aboriginal community to arrest this paradox. The emergent fantasies for the future of the area include an Aboriginal presence that is effectively contained and "tamed" as part of the city's multicultural diversity. The second fantasy is post-Block, a fantasy in which the area has rid itself of the Aboriginal presence. In a place with a continually reinscribed racial binary in operation, the ways in which such fantasies are mobilised and activated provides a unique window to observe the elusiveness of "whiteness" in its negotiation of a postcolonial encounter with an indigenous community in an Australian city.