A 28,000 year old excavated painted rock from Nawarla Gabarnmang,northern Australia

We report new archaeological excavations from northern Australia revealing part of a charcoal design likely to be c. 28,000 years old (and chrono-stratigraphically constrained within the period 15,600–45,600 cal BP) on a small rock slab fallen from the ceiling at the rockshelter of Nawarla Gabarnmang in Jawoyn country, Arnhem Land. This represents the oldest confirmed pictograph in Australia.     

Rock Art and Ritual: An Archaeological Analysis of Rock Art in Arid Central Australia

Rock art researchers throughout the world have explicitly or implicitly invoked ritual as an activity associated with the production of rock art but the articulation between the structure and composition of rock art assemblages and ritual behaviour remains poorly understood. Anthropologist, Roy Rappaport (1999) argued that all ritual, whatever the content or focus, has a universal structure. We review this proposition in the context of ritual studies and propose a method aimed at assessing the potential for identifying ritual structure in rock art assemblages. We discuss an archaeological analysis undertaken on the rock art assemblages in arid Central Australia, which aimed at distinguishing such a ritual structure among engraved assemblages, likely to have a Pleistocene origin, as well as more recent painted, stencilled and drawn assemblages. This analysis, despite its limitations, provides the foundation for developing a model, which will enhance the understanding of the relationship between the production of rock art and ritual.     

Challenging ideals of reciprocity in undergraduate teaching: the unexpected benefits of unpredictable cross-cultural fieldwork

Geographers are increasingly grappling with the theoretical and practical implications of integrating an ethics of reciprocity into undergraduate learning and teaching. This paper draws on the unexpected experiences of a third-year human geography research methods fieldtrip to examine the process of balancing undergraduate student learning and assessment outcomes, with tangible outputs often-desired by Indigenous tour operator partners. Reflections from students and academic staff highlight the challenges of realizing ideals of reciprocity within the complex and ever shifting cross-cultural research context.     

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.     

浅谈体态语在小学英语教学中的应用

体态语是语言的一种,属于非言语性的语言。它是由人的面部表情、身体姿势、肢体动作和体位变化而构成的种种图象符号。体态语是教学的一种辅助教学手段,在小学英语教学中有着极其重要的作用,有时甚至会“无声胜有声”。近年来,笔者在英语教学时,根据教材的内容,创设情景,注意挖掘教材中可用体态语教学的内容,激发了学生的学习积极性,促进了师生交流,提高了教学效率,取得了良好的效果。     

Boats on Bark: an Analysis of Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Bark-Paintings featuring Macassan Praus from the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition, Northern Territory, Australia

This paper examines a group of Aboriginal bark-paintings featuring Macassan prau s that were collected in 1948 during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. These paintings were studied in an effort to understand issues related to Aboriginal and Macassan cross-cultural interaction, stylistic adaptation and change, and maritime technologies. Furthermore it is one example in which the collaborative efforts of maritime and Indigenous archaeologies can achieve a more holistic technological and stylistic cross-analysis of watercraft imagery.
© 2009 The Authors     

Monuments, Memory and Marginalisation in Adelaide's Prince Henry Gardens

Social and cultural dominance is (re)produced in the landscape by the exclusion or marginalisation of subordinate and minority groups. This paper illustrates the long-standing and ongoing exclusion of representations of indigeneity in and around Prince Henry Gardens, part of one of the most significant cultural and memorial sites in South Australia. Prince Henry Gardens is home to a large number of monuments and memorials that commemorate almost solely non-indigenous people and events. This is a selective and deliberate landscape of the dominant culture. It confirms a legacy of indigenous dispossession and is symbolic of ongoing marginalisation. While there have been recent compensatory initiatives by state and city agencies to create landscapes of reconciliation through symbolic gestures such as renaming parkland areas, these are argued to be contentious. They associate indigeneity with the city's margins, with violent places and public drunkenness, and perpetuate problematic associations between ‘real’ indigeneity and nature. The paper concludes with some ideas for new memorial landscapes intended to help construct a postcolonial Australian city.     

Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation,Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness,and the State Effect

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades‐long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation (LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal ‘state’ in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra‐Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of ‘state’ within a state, responsible for world‐shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of ‘stateness’ that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory.     

Engaging with the (Un)familiar: Field Teaching in a Multi-Campus Teaching Environment

Field trips have long been central to geography, but have been subject to assessment of the role of the ‘field’ in teaching. At the same time, academics face barriers to running field trips. Distance education and enhanced educational access for non-metropolitan students represented such an obstacle at an Australian university. These obstacles were taken as an opportunity to draw on the regional nature of the students and staff to enhance teaching goals, run critically informed field trips by and manage academic workloads. We evaluate the field trips by conducting surveys and interviews with students and tutors, and as an example of innovation within constraints.