Indigenous Studies

Communities, extended family connections, and role models have been keys to Aboriginal participation in Australian sport. Other factors – racist exclusion among them – have limited the appearance of Indigenous athletes in professional running and boxing. The high proportion of Aboriginal footballers now playing in the Australian Football League and both rugby codes inevitably begs the question of absences in other major sports.

Many Australians are hungry for answers to Indigenous disadvantage. In recent years, anthropologists have been among those who have proposed solutions. This latest offering is from Diane Austin-Broos, professor emerita at the University of Sydney and long-time ethnographer of the ...

This bold book, with its lucid prose and vivid illustrations, will be discussed for years to come. It is not original in the narrow sense of the word, but it takes an important idea to new heights because of the author’s persistence and skill. Bill Gammage, an oldish and experienced historian of rural background ...

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is the major event on the Indigenous visual arts calendar. Its significance rests with the quality art exhibited under the mantle of the award and the crowd it attracts to Darwin every August. Artists from disparate communities mingle to cement relationships through shared kinship, songlines, and history. Excited coordinators from community cooperatives mix with urbane curators and gallery owners – projects are conceived. Collectors jostle to reserve the best works.

Pack the overnighter, put on the black dress – she wears it like a skin – kiss the kids, grab the wheel, don’t let go until back home. So Hetti Perkins begins ‘Home + Away’, the title of the first program of her recent television series, art + soul, and also the first chapter of the accompanying book.

This special issue of La Trobe Journal is guest edited by Lynette Russell from Monash University, and John Arnold, the Journal’s new general editor (since No. 82). Titled Indigenous Victorians: Repressed, Resourceful and Respected, it showcases new historical scholarship that draws on the State Library of Victoria’s unrivalled collections. Topics covered in the twelve essays are diverse: Aboriginal guides to the Victorian goldfields, fisheries in western Victoria, cricketers at Coranderrk, Lake Tyers Aboriginal settlement, the Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League, and government legislation relating to Aboriginal Victorians, among others.

This is a complex book from an anthropologist who has carried out research and established close relationships with indigenous people for four decades. Peter Sutton has lived through and participated in the Aboriginal protest movement from the early 1970s onwards, done extensive studies in support of securing tradition-based rights in land, and faced firsthand the well-publicised tragedies of many indigenous communities.

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.

Our lives are awash with opinion polls. The daily newspapers, television, radio, and internet poll people on just about every subject. The survey of public opinion has become, since the 1940s, a pervasive feature of everyday life, and is now central to the political process. Sophisticated, large-scale polling of attitudes at the national level – such as the National Social Science Survey, the Australian Election Study, Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and the World Values Survey – is increasingly reported on in the newspapers, with the more complex analyses of these findings left to academic journal articles and books. Alongside regular national polling on issues and leaders by AGBMcNair, Irving Saulwick and Associates, ACNeilson, Roy Morgan Research and Newspoll, political parties commission their own secret internal polling and focus group studies in order to tailor their message to their audience. In this federal election year, we hear clear echoes of this as the ALP leadership repeatedly drops in the key words ‘clever’ and ‘even cunning’ whenever they mention John Howard.