‘We don't do dots ‐ ours is lines’ — Asserting a Barkindji Style

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a ‘Barkindji style’ art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art‐making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the role of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to ‘belong to us’ is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art ‘styles’ and material culture from what is widely referred to as south‐eastern Australia.     

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.     

The Buffalo Nations/Luxton Museum: Tourism,Regional Forces and Problematising Cultural Representations of Aboriginal Peoples in Banff,Canada

This paper examines the cultural representations of Aboriginal peoples at the Buffalo Nations/Luxton Museum in Banff, Canada. The museum has been part of the cultural landscape of the tourism industry in Banff since 1952. Using interviews, newspaper articles and analyses of the exhibits, I problematise the museum's representations of Aboriginal peoples by focusing on the challenges associated with navigating regional power relations while participating in forms of capitalist exchange. My findings suggest that the museum's representations engender complex readings of Aboriginal peoples that need to be interpreted considering the processes of production, but also the broader conditions that are embedded in this history. This paper puts cultural representations of Aboriginal peoples into socio‐economic, political, cultural and historical contexts in ways that may interest scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines and specific fields such as museum, recreation, tourism, heritage and Indigenous studies.     

Erasing Culture and Race: Practising ‘self-determination’1

This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the process heralded by the progressive policies of Aboriginal self-determination. The discourse of self-determination was based on anti-racist ideals and a break with the past. However, state officials did not divest themselves of their cultural baggage, and proceeded by trial and error to implement a program of creating autonomous Aboriginal communities for people of whom they had no knowledge. In attempting to reshape communities there was little recognition of the cultural specificities of the Aboriginal domain let alone the way difference, both as race and as culture, had been constructed and perpetuated in practice. The state erased its own white past. The ordinary practices of state officials became a glass barrier, precluding Aborigines from responding either as expected or as they themselves desired. Neither incompetence, ignorance nor ill-will is at the root of these failures, but rather the liberal, common sense, anti-racism which informs the state's refusal to deal with the social realities of history and race. The absence of history and race from anthropology's study of cultural dynamics frames the discussion.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

Going for Wombat — Transformations in Wirangu and the Scotdesco Community on the Far West Coast of South Australia

ABSTRACT Becoming an object of touristic interest is only one of a series of ways that Aboriginality is being transformed in contemporary Australia, as the space opens up for individuals and groups to reposition themselves as Aborigines within the nation, with a distinctive culture in various forms. The nation's appetite for Aboriginal ‘culture’, within desirable limits (Povinelli 2002) and energised by a sentimental politics (Cowlishaw 2010), continues to grow. There is, however, a destructive flip side to the politics of difference being played out within Aboriginal societies. This is evidenced by the many battles for access to or control of ‘cultural’ resources for their commercial benefits or collective survival value. In many places communities or groups are faced with the terrible choice of distinction or extinction (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009). That is, they must find, and make alienable, something distinctive about themselves or face collective extinction. How one Aboriginal community is responding to these threats and challenges is the subject of this paper. This paper also adds to the growing literature on ethno‐commercialisation by focusing on the central role of language in these processes.     

From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.     

Wards,Words and Citizens: A.P. Elkin and Paul Hasluck on Assimilation1

This paper explores some of the ambivalences and contestations within assimilationist discourses in mid-twentieth century Australia. It focuses on the writings of A. P. Elkin, using Paul Hasluck's utterances mainly insofar as they throw Elkin's arguments into sharper relief. While Hasluck's version of assimilation was based on the assumptions of liberal individualism, Elkin drew upon ideas of cultural progress and social anthropology (among other intellectual currents) to propound a less totalising form of assimilation, wherein the attainment of citizenship could be reconciled with the retention of Aboriginal identity and cultural distinctiveness. Even so, Elkin had misgivings about cultural diversity and insisted on the need for expert scientific management in attaining the recommended reconciliation.     

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian,we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.     

Betwixt and Between: Trauma,Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the history of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, mostly focussing on its development, its white officers, how much the Colonial Government genuinely knew about the actions of the Force, and how many people were killed during the frontier wars. Far less attention has been given to the Aboriginal men of the force, the nature of their recruitment, and the long-term traumatic impacts on Aboriginal peoples’ and communities’ psyches rather than broadscale changes to Aboriginal culture per se. This article examines the historical and ongoing psychological impacts of dispossession and frontier violence on Aboriginal people. Specifically, we argue that massacres, frontier violence, displacement, and the ultimate dispossession of land and destruction of traditional cultural practices resulted in both individual and collective inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal peoples. We posit that, despite the Australian frontier wars taking place over a century ago, their impacts continue to reverberate today in a range of different ways, many of which are as yet only partially understood.     

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.     

The Green Frog and Desalination: A Nyungar Metaphor for the (Mis‐)Management of Water Resources,Swan Coastal Plain,Western Australia

ABSTRACT In common with Aboriginal groups around Australia, the indigenous people, or Nyungars, of Perth adopt a holistic attitude towards groundwater resources. Of cultural significance are lakes, springs, soaks and watercourses that feature in Dreamtime creation narratives. Perth is experiencing major water shortages and many Nyungars feel that the degradation of the freshwater supply is a result of mismanagement and unsustainable development by non‐Aboriginal people. Proposals for dealing with the issue are seen as equally out of balance with the natural order of things. Water regulators have much to learn from indigenous Australians about water and environmental management. Although water continues to be central to Nyungar identity, the study on which this article is based found evidence of attenuated knowledge about the Dreaming, with discontinuities evident in the way significance is increasingly being read in everyplace rather than in specific ‘story places’.     

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality,Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.     

Caretakers of the Earth: integrating Canadian Aboriginal perspectives on culture and sustainability into local plans

Abstract

While still contested in most jurisdictions, a consensus on the four-pillar approach to sustainable development is slowly emerging. This perspective attempts to integrate the environmental, social, economic and cultural elements of a community into local sustainability planning processes and has been widely adopted in Canada as the basis of Integrated Community Sustainability Plans. However, Aboriginal perspectives have generally been marginalised in such efforts, largely because Aboriginal peoples take a more holistic approach to both sustainability and culture than Western-educated planners and decision makers. This article examines current approaches and methodologies adopted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Canada to integrate culture in sustainability planning and presents several case studies that examine the application of medicine wheel and other Aboriginal integrative worldviews to community sustainability planning. It discusses whether Aboriginal perspectives on culture can provide an alternative narrative that will advance our understanding of culture’s role in community sustainability and counteract the monocultural perspectives that are the legacy of colonialism throughout the world.     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

Sharing the colonial burden: Treaty‐making and reconciliation in Hul’qumi’num territory

This article explores different understandings of reconciliation within the context of modern treaty making in British Columbia, focusing on the role of the BC treaty process in resolving the longstanding dispute between Aboriginal Peoples and the Crown over rights to land. Although the treaty process was created to reconcile competing interests in the land, Crown and Aboriginal negotiators often have contradictory understandings of how this reconciliation is to take place. Drawing on a case study of the Hul’qumi’num Peoples, a group of Coast Salish First Nations, I examine how different understandings and approaches to reconciliation impede progress at the treaty table. I conclude that progress towards treaty and reconciliation in this case will require coming to terms with the Hul’qumi’num territory's colonial history and geography, something that the current treaty process actively avoids, plus the crafting of a treaty agreement that allows for a more equal sharing of the burden that colonialism has created in this place. More particularly, meaningful reconciliation will require a fuller recognition of Aboriginal title and rights across the breadth of the territory and a commitment to meaningful compensation of Hul’qumi’num Peoples for the wrongful taking of their lands.     

Interpreting umeewarra mission

Abstract

Indigenous occupation of Australia for at least the last 60,000 years, was followed by European settlers in 1788. Christian missions and government reserves established at this time, often removed Aboriginal children from their parents, families and land. These children are ‘the Stolen Generation’. One such mission was Umeewarra Mission at Port Augusta in South Australia, which was established by the Brethren church in the 1930s and operated until recently. Some of the former children who were raised at the Mission have established a committee, the Umeewarra Nguraritja (meaning ‘place’ or ‘home'), to oversee the Mission site. The Umeewarra Nguraritja wants to establish an Interpretive Centre to tell the Aboriginal and missionary history of the Mission. It needs to preserve and interpret the mission culture in a way which maintains the integrity of that history and presents the material culture, the oral histories and stories from former children of the mission, sensitively to visitors. This paper reports on the research process being used for strategic planning of site management and interpretation. The paper addresses in particular the need for the researchers to be sympathetic to both indigenous and missionary cultures, playing both supportive and leadership roles in order to give something back to the ‘stolen generation’.     

“Mixed up in a Bit of Do‐Goodery”: Judy Inglis,Activist Anthropology and Aboriginal History

As one of few people to study urban Aborigines in the early 1960s, Judy Inglis was well situated to comment on the workings of government policies such as assimilation. Her sudden death in 1962, aged thirty‐two, cut short her contribution to contemporary debates and froze in time her thinking. Inglis wanted her academic work to help the subjects of her study. Although she struggled with the idea of blending anthropology with activism, her desire to effect positive change ultimately outweighed other considerations. By her own account, she was “mixed up in a bit of do‐goodery”. In the decade after her death, the same impulse drove her friend Diane Barwick and mentor W. E. H. Stanner, both fellow anthropologists, to bring into being “Aboriginal History” as a field of study. This article explores the links between Judy Inglis’ approach to anthropology‐as‐activism and the origins of Aboriginal History.