Aboriginal History in Australia

'Wanton With Plenty'Questioning Ethno-historical Constructions of Sexual Savagery in Aboriginal Societies, 1788–1803

by Shino Konishi

Snakes that are Rainbows: Indigenous Worldviews and the Constitution of Autonomy

by Ravi de Costa

In William Coleman, Steve Streeter and John Weaver (eds) Empires and Autonomy: Moments in the History of Globalization. Globalization and Autonomy Series (UBC Press, 2009).

Globalization and autonomy have special importance for the world’s indigenous peoples who have often been and still... more Globalization and autonomy have special importance for the world’s indigenous peoples who have often been and still are subject to the globalizing effects of colonization.  In keeping with this volume’s efforts to convey ideas through selected moments, the following account seeks to explore indigenous views of the meanings and potentialities of globalization and autonomy. It uses three distinct episodes from the history of indigenous Australia, but binds them with an Aboriginal account of the making and remaking of the world.  The purpose of this recurring moment is to remind us that the different ways humans understand the natural world are significant for ideas about our collective autonomy. As we will see, a people’s understanding of autonomy arises out of the interplay between a particular cosmology or worldview, and the social and natural environment in which those people live. Aboriginal cosmologies predated the arrival of Europeans, and those cosmologies both authored and authorised indigenous societies’ social orders and understanding of human freedom. Colonization assaulted their social and natural environment, profoundly challenging such worldviews.  Yet this did not result in a complete assimilation of European ideas.  Rather, an indigenous worldview was brought into relations with Europeans and shaped indigenous peoples’ responses to the destructive forces of colonization. A notion of autonomy as survival in the face of cataclysm emerged in the late and post imperial periods, shaped largely by the growing sense of indigeneity that arose from connections with and understandings of other indigenous peoples in the world.

Il divenire arte aborigena. Due mostre di oggetti aborigeni dalla collezione Berndt

by Ilaria Vanni

Bridging the gap: the production of tourist objects at La Perouse

by Ilaria Vanni

Objects and Histories: Representations of Aboriginality In Exhibitions of Aboriginal Objects, 1855–1957

by Ilaria Vanni

Il Suono degli Oggetti Smarriti

by Ilaria Vanni

This article reflects upon the exhibition Sound of Missing Objects, which I set up as a collaborative project with... more This article reflects upon the exhibition Sound of Missing Objects, which I set up as a collaborative project with Jonathan Jones and Panos Couros at Perfomance Space, Sydney in 2003.

"The McClymonts of Nabiac: Interracial Marriage, Inheritance and Dispossession in C19th New South Wales Colonial Society" in Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes (Eds) Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011.

by Victoria Grieves

The link is to a sample of the book, the introduction, the chapter has now been uploaded...

...for the book: In recent years race has fallen out of historiographical fashion, being eclipsed by seemingly more... more ...for the book: In recent years race has fallen out of historiographical fashion, being eclipsed by seemingly more benign terms such as culture, ethnicity and difference. This timely and highly readable collection of essays re-energises the debate by carefully focusing our attention on local articulations of race and their intersections with colonialism and its aftermath. In Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes have produced a collection of studies that shift our historical understanding of colonialism in significant new directions. Their generous and exciting brief will ensure that the book has immediate appeal for multiple readers engaged in critical theory, as well as those more specifically involved in Australian and New Zealand history. Collectively, they offer new and invigorating approaches to understanding colonialism and cultural encounters in history via the interpretive (not merely temporal) frame of the moment.

CALL FOR PAPERS, JEASA 3.2 Special Issue - Indigenous marriage, family and kinship in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific: the persistence of life and hope in colonial and neo-colonial contexts.

by Victoria Grieves

This edition of JEASA aims to focus on the development of the Indigenous/mixed race family in Australia, New Zealand... more This edition of JEASA aims to focus on the development of the Indigenous/mixed race family in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific from the early colonial period up until the present, set against the persistence of Indigenous cultural, social and political innovations through the generations and against genocidal forces. It will be edited by Dr Victoria Grieves of the University of Sydney and Dr Martina Horakova of the University of Masaryk.

From the beginnings of contact with newcomers from different cultural contexts children of mixed race have been conceived and various family formations have developed to care for them, with or without usually destructive state interventions. In the cases where the state has intervened and the course of peoples' lives moves out of their control, the overwhelming reaction has been to reconnect. For example, the bringing home of stolen Aboriginal children, the enormous endurance of children who followed the Rabbit Proof Fence, and the reunion of the children of American GIs in the Pacific with their American families.

Moreover, in the midst of poverty and despair, individuals such as Samson and Delilah have formed enduring and mutually supportive liaisons while the protagonist in Mad Bastards is attempting to reconnect with family, life and hope. Thus the assertion of life and hope that continues in the many varied cultural and cross-cultural connections that are revealed in history, film, literature and theatre are inextricably bound with the celebration of survival amongst Indigenous peoples of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

The solidity and persistence of Indigenous family and kinship ties is sometimes foregrounded but is also often a subtext in the portrayals of Indigenous lifeways in history, biography and autobiography, theatre, film, literature and dance. Moreover, contemporary political commentary such as that occurring around the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), the Intervention into Aboriginal communities is couched in terms for the protection of children. Since the advent of colonialism the impact of settler colonial pubic policy on the Indigenous family has been overwhelmingly destructive, but this recent development paradoxically sees the state claiming to hold the key to the protection of children in family environments constructed as toxic and dangerous.

Thus it is that Indigenous family histories can be a vehicle for revealing an "other" history of settler colonialism, unjust and inhumane, that sought to destroy the Indigenous family and the life and hope inherent in the projection of family into the future. This history illuminates developments about race thinking, social ostracisms and "passing"; including policy innovations as attempts to control racial intermixing, such as "protectionism", segregation, control of marriages, removal of children into institutions, dormitories and boarding schools and adoption into white families.

These histories also highlight the development of cultural hybridity evident in Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous cultural innovations in literature, film and the arts. Also evident in resistance to governments' control, including political activism, cultural innovation and the maintenance of cultural lifeways and relationships with kin, within the surviving Indigenous family.

We welcome interdisciplinarity! Scholarly articles from history and literature to film studies, sociology and cultural studies that relate to any of the issues raised above, that engage with an aspect of Indigenous marriage, family and kinship in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific are welcome.

Submissions should be sent to Dr Vicki Grieves at vicki.grieves@sydney.edu.au by April 30, 2012.

Formatting instructions can be found on the journal's website, but for now any scholarly model will be appropriate until an article has been accepted.

JEASA is a peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed, open-access online journal, whose first issue appeared in 2009. The journal's website may be found at http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/jeasamainpage.html

Martin, P. 2011. 'Mining and Mindsets in Aurukun'

by Philip Martin

Arena Magazine, 2011 Issue 115: Dec 2011 – Jan 2012

Economic growth strategies tying improvements in Aborigines’ wellbeing to the jobs created through mining in Cape York... more Economic growth strategies tying improvements in Aborigines’ wellbeing to the jobs created through mining in Cape York have for 50 years failed to produce practically any of the expected or desired outcomes. Further, they have left Aborigines contingent on parties and timetables they are unable to influence. In this paper I review the history of mining on Cape York, and argue that because economic growth strategies which tie improvements in Aboriginal wellbeing to the jobs and royalties created through 3rd party mining are still considered in policy circles to be ‘right’ and replicable, despite rarely having produced expected or desired outcomes, continuity, not change, can be expected in the direction of the Western Cape Aborigines’ slide into oblivion.

But I also argue that the July 2011 withdrawal of the Chinese Aluminium Consortium’s (Chalco) Aurukun mining lease presents an historic opportunity for the Queensland Government to radically improve the function of mining in Aboriginal communities. I suggest that granting Aboriginal entrepreneurs from Aurukun (in concert with Traditional Owners) the right to mine and sell bauxite would for the first time enable them to take full responsibility for their economic futures. Such an arrangement could incentivize the private, public and 3rd sectors, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to work with Aurukun’s Aborigines as full business partners, instead of beneficiaries. It also likely would motivate more individual Aboriginal entrepreneurs to develop small and medium size businesses, and, by and modeling the social advantages of Aboriginal economic autonomy, inaugurate a new path for Aboriginal community development in Australia.

Australian Aboriginal Words in Dictionaries: A reaction

by David Nash

* a reply to Dixon 2008 doi:10.1093/ijl/ecn008; replied to by Dixon 2009 doi:10.1093/ijl/ecp011, to which see my rebuttal http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2008/10/an_unsaleable_bent_stick_boome_1.html#comment-572801
* written up with further comment by Frederick Ludowyk 'Boomerang, boomerang, thou spirit of Australia! ' OzWords 18.2(October 2009),1-3.
* formatting fix: on page 181, 7th line up: unindent and insert paragraph break before "Troy's"

A study of the etymology of 'boomerang' shows it comes from a neighbouring language of the Sydney Language. A study of the etymology of 'boomerang' shows it comes from a neighbouring language of the Sydney Language.

La segregacion en accion

by Bastien Bosa

Published in 'Revista de Estudios Sociales' (Colombia), 2009

Aboriginal cultural heritage must be managed by our mob

by Victoria Grieves

In this article published in a newspaper, the National Indigenous Times, Dr Vicki Grieves explores the importance of... more In this article published in a newspaper, the National Indigenous Times, Dr Vicki Grieves explores the importance of Aboriginal philosophy, its connection to cultural heritage, knowledge development and wellbeing. This means that Aboriginal engagement with our cultural heritage will secure a pathway for Aboriginal economic development.

Review of 'Shaking hands on the fringe' (Shellam)

by Ruth Morgan

Limina, 2010

Indigenous Knowledges in Latin America and Australia: Locating Epistemologies, Difference and Dissent | December 8-10, 2011

by Victoria Grieves

This two day symposium and one day film festival will bring together Indigenous educators and intellectuals from Latin... more This two day symposium and one day film festival will bring together Indigenous educators and intellectuals from Latin America to Sydney to meet with interested Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators, scholars and activists, as well as non-Indigenous practitioners and allies, to discuss different models and approaches of Indigenous KnowledgeS and Education in the tertiary sector and beyond.

This project aims at helping educators and researchers in the Higher Education sector of Australia and Latin America to identify opportunities for integrating in their research and teaching and learning relevant aspects of Indigenous Knowledges in the areas of culture, education and sustainability.

Apart from the symposium itself, academic publications, public lectures by distinguished visitors and the creation of a website, the project will stimulate debate on Indigenous Knowledge and film production in Latin America and Australia by hosting a documentary screening on the topic. The selection of documentaries will be done in collaboration with the Sydney Latin American Film Festival, and this event will be targeted to the student population and the wider community.

Walking a Different Road: Recording Oral History with Darby Jampijinpa Ross

by Liam Campbell

Published in the ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA JOURNAL NO. 26, 2004

Yuendumu lies in the arid Tanami region about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, and was established shortly... more Yuendumu lies in the arid Tanami region about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, and was established shortly after WW2 as a settlement for predominantly Warlpiri-speaking Aboriginal people of the area. The author is a PhD student who first visited there as a schoolboy in the 1980s, has now lived there for nine years, and for some time has been recording oral history with Darby Jampijinpa, a respected Aboriginal elder and advocate of Warlpiri culture. Deeply conscious of the strong contrasts between his own back- ground and Warlpiri values and world view, the author describes an odyssey of discovery in understanding the region’s history (including massacre and displacement of its indig- enous population), and in his personal friendship and interview work with Darby. A website based on collected material has been established, and a book is planned. Oral history interviewing was consciously approached within an academic framework, engag- ing a wide range of source material in Australian Aboriginal studies, and this paper includes many reflections on the relative authorial aspects of the voice of the informant and the interviewer/author’s presence, and with Aboriginal concepts of place, time and space.

Sukovic, Suzana and Peter Read. 2011. A History of Aboriginal Sydney…digitally delivering the past to the present.

by Suzana Sukovic

Paper presented at Information Online 2011, 1-3 February, at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

For more than two centuries, the history of the Indigenous people of the Sydney region has remained locked away in... more For more than two centuries, the history of the Indigenous people of the Sydney region has remained locked away in archives, held within families, or obliterated by the dominant culture. Now, with community approval and co-operation, our project, A history of Aboriginal Sydney, is beginning to use digital tools to restore Sydney's Aboriginal history in forms which can be appreciated and shared by the families themselves, by high school students and by everyone who values the history and culture of Australia's first peoples.

Our project is based on the developing knowledge management platform, which integrates historical records, methods and tools of e-scholarship, and solutions for delivering research data for different uses. The project team employs methods such as marking of topic threads, and linking data with interactive timelines and digital maps to enable online learning and information discovery on the website1. The project itself is based in the Department of History, University of Sydney and is funded by an Australia Research Council, Australian Professorial Fellowship and Discovery Grant. The research data are archived in ATSIDA (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive), which provides long-term preservation and manages appropriate access to the data.

Fighting the Enemy Within: Anti-Communism and Aboriginal Affairs

by Lachlan Clohesy

Lachlan Clohesy, 'Fighting the Enemy Within: Anti-Communism and Aboriginal Affairs', History Australia, vol. 8, no. 2, August 2011, pp. 128-52.

Whilst the links between Communists and Aboriginal activism have often been alluded to, there has been no attempt to... more Whilst the links between Communists and Aboriginal activism have often been alluded to, there has been no attempt to analyse systematically the impact of anti-Communism on Aboriginal activism.  This article seeks to explore this influence by placing Aboriginal affairs in a Cold War context, concentrating on the 1960s and early 1970s.  It will examine the policies and actions of key individuals and organisations including Charles Perkins; the Office of Aboriginal Affairs and its Director, Barrie Dexter; the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation; and, particularly, the prominent Australian Cold Warrior, W. C. Wentworth.  This examination will reveal that anti-Communism had a significant impact on Aboriginal affairs, which manifested itself in a variety of ways.

'Windradyne’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1580-1980

by David Andrew Roberts

C. Cunneen (ed.), Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005, pp. 408-9.

WINDRADYNE (c.1800-1829), Aboriginal resistance leader, also known as SATURDAY, was a northern Wiradjuri man of the... more WINDRADYNE (c.1800-1829), Aboriginal resistance leader, also known as SATURDAY, was a northern Wiradjuri man of the upper Macquarie River region in central-western New South Wales.

Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy In Australia

by Andrew Schaap

As a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was... more As a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972, demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992, Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper, we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

Review of Henry Reynolds, Nowhere people: how international race thinking shaped Australia's identity, Viking, Camberwell, 2005 in the Journal of Australian Colonial History Vol.10, No.1, 2008

by Victoria Grieves

Not yet online.