Who were bennelong and Pemulwuy? Museums in Sydney and interpretation of eora aboriginal culture

Abstract

The Eora Aboriginal People are the original inhabitants of the Sydney region [in NSW, Australia]. There are an estimated 2, 000 Aboriginal rock engravings in Sydney. Some museums in Sydney now acknowledge the traditional Aboriginal owners and use Eora words to name their exhibitions. These include: Ngaramang bayumi – music & dance (Powerhouse Museum); Merana Eora Nora – first people (Australian National Maritime Museum); Yiribana (Art Gallery of New South Wales); and Cadi Eora Birrung: Under the Sydney Stars (Sydney Observatory). The Aboriginal history of Sydney, however, is only told at the Museum of Sydney with installations, videos and spoken exhibits about Eora, the indigenous peoples of Sydney. This paper reviews the Eora Aboriginal exhibits at the Museum of Sydney. It questions whether visitors to Sydney learn about Bennelong and Pemulwuy, two key Aboriginal figures in the the early European settlement around Sydney Harbour. Sydney Aboriginal Discoveries on their Dreamtime cruise of Sydney Harbour provide another interpretation of Eora history and culture. The paper suggests the Eora heritage of Sydney should be more widely interpreted in Museums, National Parks and other public venues to rightfully acknowledge this Aboriginal history.     

Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.     

Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park

The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners. The local know‐ledge and rights of ‘Territorians’[non‐Aboriginal Northern Territory residents] are continually pitted against the local knowledge and rights of Aboriginal traditional owners. Under these circumstances, debates between non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners are overwhelmingly dominated by the unequal power relationships created through an alliance between science and the State. The complex and multi‐dimensional nature of Aboriginal traditional owners’ concerns for country renders these concerns invisible or incomprehensible to government, science and non‐Aboriginal fishers who are each guided by very different epistemic commitments. It is a state of affairs that leaves the situated knowledge of Aboriginal traditional owners with a limited authority in the non‐Aboriginal domain and detracts from their ability to manage and care for their homelands.

相似文献   

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.     

REVIEWS

Australian Aboriginal Mythology. L. R. Hiatt. (Ed.). Canberra, Australian Insttitute of Aboriginal Studies. 1975. Pp. viii + 213.     

Still Under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

ABSTRACT Both the colonial encapsulation and post‐colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life‐worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot calls ‘state effects’. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life‐worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life‐worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post‐colonial Aboriginal subjectivities.     

“Where the spirit of wisdom lies”: Inculturation,self-determination and the authority of First Nations

By the 1970s, Christian missions to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were enthusiastic supporters of Indigenous self-determination, even as they sought to maintain a missionary presence in Aboriginal communities. This article asks how missions continued to seek to influence and direct Aboriginal churches and communities through espousing self-determination, and how Aboriginal leaders engaged with and exploited this apparent contradiction. Focusing on contributions to the missiological publication Nelen Yubu from Deacon Boniface Pedjert, Patrick Dodson, Miram Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Dyiniyini Gondarra and Alice Kelly this article considers how Aboriginal leaders and thinkers managed and challenged non-Indigenous expectations set for them around how their decolonisation was to proceed. Self-determination, for missionaries, could be achieved by a new, supposedly more enlightened mission to “inculturate” the gospel. Whereas missionaries presumed Aboriginal church leaders' authority rested in their cultural authenticity, these Aboriginal leaders were also asserting other sources of authority including their culture, but especially the authority that arises from Country itself.     

Australian Aboriginal Policy: Aboriginal Pressure Groups or Government Advisory Bodies?

Western democracies in the 1970s including Australia experimented with more permanent mechanisms for obtaining policy advice at the national level from their politically unorganized indigenous minorities. This paper examines some of the difficulties encountered when federal governments attempt to foster national Aboriginal organizations with possible pressure group functions. As a case study in federal policy-making this two-part paper analyzes the steps by which the Australian government terminated the initial experiment with the government-created National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (1973–76) and, using selectively a commissioned report by Dr L. R. Hiatt (Part I), structured in detail two new bodies: the National Aboriginal Conference and the Council for Aboriginal Development (Part II). The paper argues that unless governments develop a serious policy of Aboriginal political development at the national level, governments will subvert their own goals by fostering Aboriginal organizations in which neither they nor Aboriginals have confidence.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

Cultivating ignorance of Aboriginal realities

The principal problem in Aboriginal education in Canada is the education of Canadians. This article exposes Canada's long history of ignorance of Aboriginal Peoples and suggests that while education may not be the source of ignorance, it is now perpetuating it. Using the Ontario secondary school curriculum as an example, this article looks at mainstream Canadian and World Studies, of which geography is an integral part, and Native Studies courses, offered in Ontario since 1999, but available for study to few young Ontarians. Curricular reforms during recent decades have removed the worst expressions of racism, but have not addressed fundamental colonial attitudes in the mainstream curriculum. As a citizenry we are complacent about a deep‐seated ignorance of the country's past and present, affecting both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal Canadians. Lack of interest in traditional and modern Aboriginal cultures doom immigrants and established settlers to a dysfunctional relationship with the growing and increasingly internationally recognized indigenous population. As university educators and teachers of teachers, geographers must assume responsibility for promoting truthful and inclusive perceptions of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and, in recognizing the subtle strategies of cultivating ignorance, examine how geography as it is currently taught in schools might exclude Aboriginal People and understanding.     

The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object

In this article, I examine an Aboriginal ritual object, the secret/sacred tywerrenge which in many respects lies at the heart of Central Australian Aboriginal religious belief. Given its ritual power, the tywerrenge has always held a special place in the administrative rationalities of both colonial and post-colonial authorities. For certain missionaries, the tywerrenge was seen as an object to be eliminated as it constituted an impediment to Aboriginal “salvation”. For early anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, they offered material evidence supporting social evolutionist theories regarding the “staged” transformation of “primitive” religious beliefs into science. More recently, tywerrenge have been subject to an intensive regime of inspection and evaluation by government authorities, museums, and land councils. Indeed, they have come to play a significant role in the enforcement of Australian law under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act since the possession of a tywerrenge can decide the ownership of traditional lands. In short, these religious objects—and the beliefs associated with them—have been co-opted and employed by a variety of authorities in order to achieve a range of governmental ends. In this sense, tywerrenge have been transformed into instruments of colonial and post-colonial rule.     

Rowley on the aboriginal condition

C. D. Rowley, Aboriginal Policy and Practice, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970–71: Volume I, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, pp. xii + 430; Volume II, Outcasts in White Australia, pp. xiv + 472; Volume III, The Remote Aborigines, pp. vii + 379. $6.50 per volume. All three also in Penguin, Melbourne, 1972, at $2.50 per volume.     

A post-contact Aboriginal mortuary tree from southwestern Victoria,Australia

Abstract

Here we document the investigation of the first Australian Aboriginal mortuary tree found since the early 20th century and the first studied by archaeologists and Aboriginal traditional owners. In 2001, a landowner discovered Aboriginal skeletal remains inside a fallen, dead tree while evaluating the tree’s potential as firewood, leading to the investigation of the site. The tree was located near Moyston, in southwestern Victoria, in traditional Djab Wurrung country and held the partial skeletons of three Aboriginal individuals—two adults and a child. Clay pipe-stem wear on several teeth belonging to the two adults indicates that these remains were broadly contemporaneous secondary placements from the early post-contact period (ca. a.d. 1835–1845). Along with five additional mortuary trees within 30 km of the Moyston tree, this practice constitutes a previously unknown traditional mortuary pattern and contributes to our understanding of the complex mortuary behavior of the Aboriginal people of southwestern Victoria.     

The Brief Reach of History and the Limitation of Recall in Traditional Aboriginal Societies and Cultures

In native title cases a judge must determine the extent to which the current practices of applicants for native title relate to the practices of their forebears at sovereignty. It is proposed that evidence of the continuity and preservation of tradition from the time of sovereignty must be derived from records and/or expert opinion. This is so because brief historical recall is instituted in Aboriginal societies and cultures and, therefore, Aboriginal witnesses cannot testify to continuities that belong to what, for them, is time immemorial. Relevant observations are cited from the literature to establish the quiddities of brief recall and the editing of histories of deviation. Aboriginal hunter‐gathers are then compared with the peoples of feuding corporations, blood‐debt and the heritable grudge in order to answer the question: Why in Aboriginal Australia is there an instituted and rapid onset of temps perdu?     

Social scientists and native title cases in Australia

Abstract

Recent legal developments in Australia have led the courts to reject the doctrine of terra nullius, which denied pre-existing Aboriginal rights to land ownership, and Aboriginal prior occupation and ownership of land are now acknowledged. However, in the absence of consent determinations the courts have to evaluate the justification for legally recognizing native title based on specific local evidence for continuities in the traditional customs and laws of Aboriginal claimants since British sovereignty. Much of the evidence for such continuities can come from the Aboriginal claimants themselves. However, proving the time, depth and relevance of these continuities and presenting them in a form that is considered acceptable by the courts has drawn upon the ‘expertise’ of academics. This paper considers the types of evidence that anthropologists, linguists, historians and archaeologists are able to present and makes some suggestions as to how this could be improved in the future.     

Unstable properties: British Columbia,aboriginal title,and the “new relationship”

In the span of a few years, Premier Gordon Campbell transformed himself from a strong political critic of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia to their apparent champion within a “new relationship.” The subsequent sudden collapse of Campbell's alliance with First Nations is a window into federal‐provincial relations, constitutional change, Aboriginal political organization, and the consequences of decisions made more than a century ago. Drawing on Nietzsche, we argue that Campbell's intentions, either to control or support Aboriginal peoples, were almost irrelevant; our focus should be on the “will to power” and efforts to stabilize power through territory. As a result of the collision of Aboriginal political mobilization, the expansion of natural resource development, and a series of court decisions, the unresolved nature of Canada's territorial claim to most of the land that is now British Columbia has finally reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, either politically or legally. However, the province lacks the legal authority to recognize or deny Aboriginal title, leaving the provincial government and indigenous peoples in British Columbia equally held hostage by the federal government.     

REVIEWS

Dialectic in Practical Religion. Edited by E. R. Leach. The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji. By Peter France. Aboriginal Advancement to Integration—Conditions and Plans for Western Australia. H. P. Schapper. Aboriginal Settlements—A Survey of Institutional Communities in Eastern Australia. J. P. M. Long. Social Change and the Individual. By Norman Long. Ekagi—Dutch—English—Indonesian Dictionary. By J. Steltenpool. A Subgrouping of Nine Philippine Languages. By Teodoro A. Llamzon     

Suzanne MacKenzie Memorial LectureConceptually unclad: feminist geography and Aboriginal peoples*

This paper argues that feminist geography can provide some useful lessons in an attempt to increase Aboriginal peoples' representation in geography. It asks the question: How can we use the example of feminist geography to think about a geography that is more inclusive of Aboriginal people? The paper focuses on the issues of content in teaching, drawing on examples from urban and social geography, and on methodological challenges, especially the issue of reflexivity. Feminist geographer Suzanne Mackenzie argued that an emerging feminist geography left the discipline ‘conceptually unclad’, challenging scholars to consider new theoretical frameworks and new perspectives. I argue that emphasising the geographies of Aboriginal people also enriches geography, including feminist geography.     

Dispossession 1990s style: Aborigines,islanders and the policy making process of the Goss labor government

Aboriginal and Islander people in Queensland remain unempowered in the policy making process of government. This is achieved by downgrading and under‐resourcing the relevant portfolio, by co‐locating it with welfare, by giving other departments statutory rights in decision making on indigenous issues which are not reciprocal, by relocating key indigenous policy areas into otherwise antagonistic departments, by ghettoising the issues in Cabinet and by failing to elucidate clear policy guidelines on indigenous issues. The Goss government has also ensured that indigenous people remain unempowered outside of government by failing to legislate for regional land councils, Aboriginal majority on national parks boards of management and an Aboriginal‐controlled statutory acquisitions fund and by retaining excessive discretionary power in the administration of the 1991 Land Acts.