Indigenous History

Alfred William Howitt is a well-known yet enigmatic figure in Australian colonial history. Born in England in 1830 and raised by literary and politically active parents, Howitt grew up amid an erudite and socially progressive milieu. With his father and brother, he arrived in Australia in 1852, hoping to ‘make it big’ on the Victorian gold fields. Enthralled by the natural environment and the liberties afforded to a gentleman bushman in the colony, Howitt decided to stay on while his family returned to London.

Just to north of Darwin is the country of the Tiwi people, spread over Bathurst and Melville Islands. These two new books give voice to Tiwi oral traditions and to the power and resonance within that tradition of orality that encompasses song, narrative, and the ways in which they sustain family and relationships to ancestors and to kin.

It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.

This is a celebration of Aboriginal survival on the Georges River, a river which snakes through the south-western suburbs of Sydney and disgorges into Botany Bay.

The title of this memoir and the cover picture, showing a pretty girl with brown skin and hair and dark eyes walking along an urban street hand-in-hand with a neatly dressed white woman, captures the theme of uncertain identity. The story begins in mid-twentieth-century Australia, when, under the government’s assimilation policy, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were still being removed from their families. Lorraine McGee-Sippel was not stolen from her family by the authorities, but was surrendered for adoption by her eighteen-year-old mother.

Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliation process ground to a halt during the Howard government, Aboriginal issues receded into the background. They re-emerged spectacularly in 2006 with the cataloguing of widespread sexual and physical abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This was in the lead-up to the government’s Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory.

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?