Aboriginal Histories,Aboriginal Myths: An Introduction

The article reopens the issue of the supposed absence of historical consciousness among traditionally oriented Aborigines, and reviews Hill's and Turner's attempts to define the difference between myth and history. It then discusses some narratives of colonisation from Western New South Wales, and re-analyses some Aboriginal stories about Captain Cook.     

Essentialism,Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity

This paper is about how the discourses of white intellectuals operating in Aboriginal Studies create a knowledgeable gaze which seeks to police the cultural practices through which Aborigines produce themselves. Aborigines have become the focus of a gaze which analyses, questions, and problematises their resistances and even their identities. Determining the boundaries of Aboriginal authenticity has become the preoccupation of some European intellectuals whose concern with situating the culture of Aborigines is at the expense of acknowledging the positioning power of their own cultural practices. This paper seeks to reverse this knowledge-power relationship by focusing on discourses operating in Aboriginal Studies and the effects of power created by the custodial pastoral roles which some white intellectuals have taken on.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

Missionary Masculinities,the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915

The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension and violence were common. White's attraction to the Aboriginal male body indirectly assisted all Aborigines by drawing attention to the ill effects of colonisation but his ambivalence to the female body left him uninterested in the plight of Aboriginal women, who suffered ‘extraordinary brutality’ on the frontier.     

Taking Part in Mutawintji: Aboriginal Involvement in Mootwingee National Park

Aboriginal involvement in the management of parks was conceived as a means by which Aboriginal and conservationist interests could be reconciled. Participation in the management of parks increases Aboriginal control over land deemed to be of conservation value. Involvement in the management of parks as a means of empowering Aborigines is examined through a case study of Mootwingee National Park, in far western NSW. The management history of the park reveals that Aboriginal involvement has been facilitated by a policy commitment to consultation. Participation premised only on policy provisions has resulted in Aboriginal interests being underestimated or ignored. Aborigines will truly be empowered if their involvement is based on Aboriginal ownership of parks and a formal commitment to joint management.     

The Clear Categories of Olive Pink

This paper explores Olive Pink's writings of the 1930s, with particular emphasis on her stern moral convictions, and her insistence that persons of mixed Aboriginal and other descent were not Aborigines. It suggests that these two issues were linked, and may best be understood in the context of the contemporary preoccupation with saving a race which had long been regarded as doomed to extinction.     

Anthropology,Self-determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north-east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non-Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.     

Christianity and Indigenous Peoples: A Personal Overview

This article summarizes its author's response over more than 30 years to the various arguments advanced against the possibility of the appropriation of Christianity by indigenous peoples. It sets out the intellectual and evidential reasons for rejecting these arguments. However, it admits that while indigenous appropriation of Christianity is always possible, under some circumstances it has been improbable. Many indigenous peoples have made use of Christianity but in the past there has been comparatively little appropriation by Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. This article explores the reasons for this. When the factors that have accounted for resistance and rejection rather than adaption no longer exist, it may be expected that Aborigines will indeed appropriate Christianity. The article concludes with a brief examination of academic work on African appropriations and suggests that new developments in Aboriginal Christianity will reveal how far comparisons can be made.     

The Great Shoe Store Robbery1

This article contributes to the significant debate on the effects of the Australian criminal justice system on Aborigines and in particular Aboriginal youth. This debate fed into nation-wide concern over an ever increasing number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, recently culminating in the Federal Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Through the use of case studies and other ethnographic data drawn from investigations in the country town of Port Augusta, South Australia, the author illustrates how the agents of the legal and welfare systems in this state operate to present a view of Aboriginal juvenile crime as a normal response to these children's social environment and social conditioning. This process in turn, it is argued, reinforces and legitimates Aboriginal juvenile crime and contributes to its continuance, and the subsequent over-representation of Aboriginal youths at all stages of the juvenile justice system. Yet it is forcefully pointed out that Aboriginal children are not passive victims of the legal and welfare systems. Rather, they form their own interpretations of these systems and their ‘criminal’ activities are often attempts at defiance and capturing some form of control of their own lives in the face of a legal/welfare system seeking to impose control over them. Unfortunately, it is these very activities which return Aboriginal children to the legal and welfare systems they act against.     

Rural and Urban Crime Rates Amongst Aboriginal Youth: Patterns of Different Locational Opportunity

In the 1960s the crime rates of Aboriginal juveniles in Adelaide were substantially lower than those of their rural counterparts. By the 1980s, this pattern has been reversed. Moreover, appearances by city-dwelling Aborigines are now more likely to take place by way of arrest rather than summons, are more likely to come before a Children's Court rather than an Aid Panel, and are more likely to involve youths with a previous record than is the case for country youths. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal youths in the city and country commit broadly similar offences. These factors may be contributing to the virtual cessation of Aboriginal migration into Adelaide in recent years.     

‘Narratives of Survival in the Post-Colonial North’

Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history‘. If we follow Turner's (1988) suggestion that myth is the formulation of ‘essential’ properties of social experience in terms of ‘generic events‘, while ‘history’ is concerned with the level of ‘particular relations among particular events’, we need not restrict ourselves to seeing myth as charter for a social order distinct from western influence. In the paper I examine two stories of cultural and physical survival from the Katherine area, Northern Territory, and seek to identify in them fundamental themes and enduring narrative precipitates of social experience lived in intense awareness of colonial and post-colonial relationships between Aborigines and whites.     

Rethinking Aboriginal ‘Resistance’: The Community Development Employment (CEPD) Program

In this paper I wish to contribute to an understanding of ‘Aboriginal resistance’ by a study of the politics of remote Aborigines' ‘employment’. I begin by highlighting some themes in recent discussions of the Community Development Employment Projects (cdep ) policy, before looking back at some features of the welfare and pastoral economy in the Central Australian hinterland, c. 1950 to c. 1975. My aim is twofold: to show some of the cultural continuities in the relationships between remote Aborigines and government; and to criticise constructively the notion of ‘Aboriginal resistance’, to advocate a structural and processual notion of ‘resistance’ and to move away from one based on the clear identification of actors.     

Sir Robert G. A. Jackson (1911–91): an Appreciation

Abstract

Although the celestial observations made by the Aborigines were precise, the significance attached to them was conceptual rather than perceptual. It could not be derived from observation but only from knowledge gained by initiation into tribal values. The legends which embodied the astronomical knowledge had a threefold pragmatic role in tribal culture: they functioned as a predictive calendar for terrestrial events; they were associated with stories which reinforced the moral values pertaining to tribal identity; and they contributed to the belief system which provided a philosophical rationale for a tribe’s understanding of the universe. Selected myths relating to the sun, moon, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, Venus, and various constellations are outlined and illustrated by traditional bark painting designs to provide examples of these general statements. Parallels are drawn with the theories of some contemporary philosophers of science.     

Not told by victims: genocide-as-story in Aboriginal prison writings in Canada, 1980–96

When criminalized Aboriginal peoples serving time in Canadian prisons wrote in penal presses, they often used genocide as a framework to discuss both their personal life histories and the colonial history that led to overrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples in prisons. Genocide, though, is not a straightforward idea, and the ways that Aboriginal prisoners wrote about genocide differed significantly from how scholars or politicians used the term. By interpreting these writings within Aboriginal storytelling traditions, this article illuminates the lived experience of genocide, how those experiencing incarceration viewed genocide within their belief structures, the ways that genocide became a critique against the Canadian government, and the spiritual basis for discussion of genocide. By reading Aboriginal prison writings as valuable intellectual pursuits, we can begin to interpret genocide within frameworks that differed from the insights from academia. First, genocide was experienced as part of both colonial and personal processes, meaning it was experienced at the community level and in personal violence in pre-carceral lives. Second, by telling stories of genocide, prisoners asserted their own survival, which reflected the goals of their organizations and functioned as a political critique against the Canadian government. Third, genocide became an identity-shaping force in the lives of criminalized Aboriginal peoples, which in turn shaped their experience of incarceration. Finally, genocide was not uniformly experienced, as it had important gendered differences. This article shows the nuance in prisoners' discussions of genocide by proposing a new way of interpreting genocide within Aboriginal history in Canada by analysing penal publications as part of Aboriginal storytelling traditions, what the author refers to as ‘genocide-as-story’.     

Strange Relatives: Mutualities and Dependencies between Aborigines and Pastoralists in the Northern Kimberley

In the northern Kimberley (WA) Aborigines and Europeans living and working on pastoral leases have improvised means of staving off, incorporating and generally managing the other's demands on their psychophysical resources. Local racial politics configure a hierarchised social field around a few central figures: founding European lease‐holders and their male children by non‐local, mixed‐descent Aboriginal women, mixed descent head‐stockmen born of a European leaseholder and a local Aboriginal woman, and then local Ngarinyin people who constitute most of the work‐force. In this paper, I analyse the inter‐cultural dynamics of this social field employing R.D. Laing's notion of the ‘family phantasy‘. The subject‐matter also entails theoretical reconsideration of questions concerning the relative openness or otherwise of Indigenous Australian socio‐cultural categories.     

Memory,forgetting and the reconciliation process

The descendants of Aboriginal people in Queensland during the colonisation process have access to an enormous store of documents regarding their ancestors. This store is accessible through application to the state and is often used in the procurement of land rights, state recognition and personal history narratives. The process of receiving mass information about the past is fraught with power dynamics and emotional distress. This paper explores how this process can be understood critically and how Aboriginal people are manipulating the system to reassert narratives of healing from a traumatic past.     

The Aboriginal Adjustment Movement in Colonial Victoria

Whilst much has been written about Aboriginal religious syncretism in Australia, particularly about what has become known as the “Adjustment Movement” that occurred in Arnhem Land in the 1950s (see McIntosh 2004), there were several remarkable examples of spiritual adjustment by Aboriginal people a century earlier on the Victorian goldfields that hitherto have not been explored by historians. Building on Magowan's (2003) discussion of the connection between Christianity and the ancestral law of Aboriginal culture in northern Australia, this article will examine how Christian influences in colonial Victoria competed with, and conversely moulded, southern Kulin ancestral understanding. Several Kulin ceremonies — including the Myndee ceremony and the “Veinie Sacred Sunday Dance” — will be examined. These ceremonies were described by colonial officials (Joseph Panton, a Gold Commissioner, and William Thomas, the Aboriginal Guardian of Aborigines in Victoria) in the midst of a second wave of invasion and rupture for Victorian Aboriginal people — the first being the sheep herders in the 1830s, and the second being the gold rush which commenced in 1851. Serving as exemplars of what might be called the Victorian Aboriginal Adjustment Movement, these ceremonies demonstrate the extent to which Aboriginal people on the goldfields of Victoria engaged in a culturally congruent mode of Christianity.     

Resource Development and Aborigines: The Case of Roebourne 1960–1980

The pervasive and dynamic influence of economic restructuring on political and social relations is highlighted in many aspects of Australian daily life. The effect of economic restructuring on already marginalised and disempowered groups in society is often overlooked Development of iron ore mines and associated new towns, railways and ports transformed the regional economy of Western Australia's Pilbara region in the 1960s and 1970s. For Aborigines in Roebourne, this restructuring represented a new phase in their relations with ‘White Australia’. Interacting historical legacies, corporate strategies, government policies and economic processes further marginalised the region's Aboriginal population and linked the region to the global economy in ways which created significant barriers to the development of Aboriginal self-management strategies. This paper reviews this period with particular emphasis on the social impact of the iron ore ‘boom’ on local Aboriginal people. In the current climate of renewed economic and political crisis in Western Australia, this review provides a timely reminder that such processes occur in a broader context than is often recognised in regional planning processes.     

Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post‐Colonial Australia

This essay is written round four ‘funny stories’ from Northern Australia. Metamorphosis instigated by a Dreaming is central to all four stories and this is why the stories are counted as ‘funny,’ and received with glee. The analysis illuminates a topic that has been attracting attention in recent contributions to Aboriginal ethnography: how Dreamings irrupt into contemporary histories and act in ways that have political significance, contesting whitefella paradigms and re‐asserting the world‐view of the original Australians.     

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

This paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.