Dr Alison Barnes - Hiding in Plain Sight: Graphic Heritage, Toponymy and Settler Colonialism in Paddington, Sydney

IAS Alumni Fellow (from the 2023-24 academic year) Dr Alison Barnes delivers a seminar on their research - Street and house name signs in Paddington, Sydney, function as material articulations of the settler colonial project. Both hide in plain sight, yet in diametrically opposed ways. Drawing on a survey of 315 house names and 128 distinct street names, the research develops a taxonomy of naming strategies which are analysed in relation to their design, materiality, and role within colonisation. Street signs foreground legibility and functionality through a 'rhetoric of neutrality', while house names announce their presence through an overt use of materials, colour, and craft. For the house names, it is precisely this aesthetic dimension that obscures their role in the overwriting and taking of place. In contemporary Paddington, where the real estate narrative foregrounds original heritage features and houses sell for millions of dollars, a doubling of dispossession is at play in which graphic heritage, property ownership, and an ongoing ‘white possession’ are inextricably entangled. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias