Using Archaeology to Teach Australia’s ‘Difficult’ Indigenous Past

Abstract

The inclusion of the topic ‘Ancient Australia’ in the new Australian Curriculum is causing teachers to rethink the way they teach history in schools. Year 7 students are now required to understand that Australian ‘history’ began with the arrival of the First Australians around 50,000 years ago, not with the arrival of the British First Fleet in 1788. Consequently, a number of epistemological, historiographical, and ethical challenges have emerged. In this paper I discuss the implications of this reconceptualization of Australian history in the curriculum and explore ways in which archaeology can address the ‘difficult’ history of the First Australians.     

Ireland’s eternal Easter: Sorley MacLean and 1916

Abstract

This essay examines the treatment of the 1916 Easter Rising by Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. From his early work onwards, the Rising assumes a mythical significance in MacLean’s poetry. Throughout, this aetheistic, socialist poet uses rhetoric borrowed from the Gaelic Christian tradition to present the rebels of 1916 as exemplary secular martyrs. James Connolly plays a crucial role as the Scottish son of Irish immigrants. MacLean’s later praise poem for Connolly, “Àrd-Mhusaeum na h-Èireann”, deploys biblical rhetoric to present the Rising as an act of ritual sacrifice, recalling Patrick Pearse’s “Fornocht do Chonaic Thu”. MacLean’s valorisation of violence takes place against the backdrop of the modern Troubles, and prompts a reassessment of the political legacy of his poetry.     

A vision of Ireland, 1967: John Montague’s aisling ghéar

More than fifty years after its publication as a broadsheet ballad, John Montague’s “The Rape of the Aisling” (1967) retains its satirical force. Whilst not the first instance in Irish writing to acknowledge sexual abuse of young people by priests (two years earlier John McGahern’s The Dark had been banned partly on the grounds of its rendering of clerical malfeasance), Montague’s rough ballad nonetheless places sexual abuse at the very heart of its assault on the Catholic Church’s baleful influence on a society on the cusp of dramatic social change. By adopting, and radically adapting, that most malleable of literary forms – the aisling or dream-vision poem – Montague seems to suggest that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland it is not the “Saxon occupier” who poses a risk to Republican ideals. Now, it is members of a home-grown patriarchy, the “access-all-areas men in black” who abuse and rape children and young people in their care, who seek to compromise the Proclamation’s promise to cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.     

Unearthing Barrow Island’s Past: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial-Era Exploitation,Northwest Australia

The “modern world” of recent centuries is characterized by colonialism and imperialism, greater instances of cultural encounter and competition, increasing global connectivity, and the enhanced movement of resources and people especially for their labor (Falk 1991; Orser 1996). Northwest Australia provides important insight into these elements of modernity, as a region where the capitalist production of resources for international markets followed British colonization and relied on forms of non-European labor, both Indigenous Australian and Asian. This paper describes Barrow Island in the Northwest Australian maritime desert where archaeological research at recently discovered historic settlements indicates the deliberate translocation of Aboriginal people to the island presumably by white pearlers. The sites provide new information regarding commercial extractive industries, particularly the colonial pearl fisheries and their multicultural and exploitative nature.     

Territorial development,planning reform and urban governance: the case of Ireland’s second-tier cities

The increased emphasis within Europe on the role of second-tier cities has implications for the ways in which these urban centres are considered within national spatial planning strategies. In centralized, monocentric states such as Ireland, there has been a general ambivalence towards urban policy for cities outside the capital city, and historically, this has prevented the development of a strong, diversified urban hierarchy undermining prospects for balanced regional development. This paper examines the extent to which a new found emphasis on Ireland’s second-tier cities which emerged in the ‘Gateways’ policy of the National Spatial Strategy was matched by subsequent political and administrative commitment to facilitate the development of these urban centres. Following a discussion of the position of second-tier cities in an international context and a brief overview of recent demographic and economic trends, the paper assesses the relative performance of Ireland’s second-tier cities in influencing development trends, highlighting a comprehensive failure to deliver compact urban growth. In this context, the paper then discusses the implications of current development plans for the second-tier cities and proposals for Irish local government reform for securing compact urban development.     

“Hugon come erindwards”: Finnegans Wake and Ireland’s Huguenots

This paper analyses the rich variety of allusions to the Huguenots in Finnegans Wake, and considers the reasons for Joyce’s interest in this group of Protestant émigrés. Joyce makes several references to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the apotheosis of Huguenot persecution at the hands of the French Catholics, and he draws analogy between their experience and that of other groups of heretics and dissenters. Joyce celebrates the social, commercial, and cultural impact made by the migrants and their descendants, which was disproportionately great for the size of the diaspora. I argue that there are several reasons for Joyce’s engagement with the Huguenots. Their story of sectarian persecution, dispossession, and exile recalls the Irish Catholic experience, but it offers balance to the narrative of Catholic victimhood in depicting a Protestant group that suffered comparable oppression. Most importantly, the remarkable success with which the Huguenots integrated into Irish society offers a positive model for the plurality that Joyce espoused throughout his writing career, culminating in his final work.     

Homelessness Regulation and Neoliberalism’s Imperial Past: The Janus Face of Anti-Homeless Urbanism and Tokyo’s Modern Socio-Spatial Development

Using historical ethnography and a systematic review of research on homelessness in modern Tokyo (1868–2019), I illustrate how imperial formations, or historically established asymmetrical relations of power, are bound up in homelessness regulation. I argue that the delegitimisation of unsheltered existence—seen in multiple policy fields across history—is a vessel for imperial formations that necessarily propagate anti-democratic limitations on rights and protections. Moreover, I advance that this continuous invalidation of the right-full existence of persons experiencing homelessness serves as a platform for paternalistic Janus-faced interventions co-constituted from corrective, compassionate, and middling ambitions. This research seeks to amend false dichotomies of a chiefly punitive past and a compassionate complex present, and redirects attention from presumed policy intent to the actual legal and social roots of urban injustice.     

’Elephants are contagious’: Fintan O'Toole's Ireland

The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities Fintan O'toole, 1998 Dublin, New Island Books pp. 172, ISBN 1.874.597.723, £9.99 (hb)     

France’s ‘elites’, Islamophobia,and communities of friendship in Sabri Louatah’s Les Sauvages

Sabri Louatah’s Les Sauvages (2011–2016) joins an ongoing discussion over the French political class’s relationship with the racial and religious divides in contemporary French society. Louatah portrays the political class as imposing from above a divide between French descendants of Muslim immigrants and their majority-culture compatriots, and suggests that the functioning of the modern state makes this necessary: states are founded upon communities of belonging which require the exclusion of given minorities, and will reimpose that exclusion with force if a more inclusive model of community threatens to emerge. Two readings of how Les Sauvages suggests we should respond to this are possible. One suggests that subjects should reject the state entirely, seeking to form inclusive communities escaping its control. Another suggests that the structures of the modern state should be appropriated to promote inclusion, but that the nature of modern democracy will prevent such action from succeeding completely; as such, traditional political engagement must work in conjunction with more radical attempts to form communities free from exclusion. Both readings, however, hold in common the idea that racial and religious divides are imposed from above and that these divides cannot be completely overcome while working within mainstream political structures.     

Hegel,Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon

In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy’s “pharmakon”—both its “poison” and its “cure.” Traditionally, Hegel’s philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel’s philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: (1) the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s, Philippa Foot’s, and Putnam’s opposition to the fact-value distinction; (2) the rehabilitation of Hegel’s theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and (3) the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the “cure” for analytic philosophy. The combined outcome of these changes, both ironic and fitting, is that the Hegelian principle of internal critique has played a significant role not only in analytic philosophy’s rapprochement with Hegel’s philosophy but also in overcoming the Analytic-Continental philosophical divide.