Indigenous Studies
Alexandra Roginski reviews 'The First Wave: Exploring early coastal contact history in Australia' edited by Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode
First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to reconsider historical accounts of the gestures of Indigenous people from within their own cultural frameworks.
... (read more)Bruce Moore reviews Australia’s Original Languages: An introduction by R.M.W. Dixon
Bob Dixon has researched Australian Indigenous languages since the 1960s, has constructed grammars of five languages, and has written numerous scholarly books and articles on Aboriginal languages ...
... (read more)Anna Clark reviews Australia’s First Naturalists: Indigenous peoples’ contribution to early zoology by Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell
What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?
... (read more)'So much at stake: Forging a treaty with authority and respect' by Sarah Maddison and Dale Wandin
Australia remains alone among the settler colonies for its lack of treaties with First Nations. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia have been calling for a treaty for decades – since at least the 1970s and then more forcefully during the Treaty ’88 Campaign ...
... (read more)Richard J. Martin reviews '"Against Native Title": Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia' by Eve Vincent and 'Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea' by Katie Glaskin
The year 2017 marked the twenty- fifth anniversary of the High Court’s 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (Mabo), which recognised the existence of Indigenous people’s traditional ‘native title’ rights over the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. This finding, and the passage through parliament of the ...
... (read more)Kim Mahood reviews 'Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia' by Billy Griffiths
In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths describes the process of imagining the past through the traces and sediments of archaeology as ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds’. In his endeavour to infer ...
... (read more)Philip Jones reviews 'Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901' by Tim Rowse
To the layperson, the shifts and variations in government policy and its effects on Aboriginal lives can be bewildering, even during the past decade. Tim Rowse has done a great service by analysing more than a century of this tangled history, locating its patterns and its driving forces and making sense of it ...
... (read more)Amanda Nettelbeck reviews 'The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the settlers and the protectors' by Bain Attwood
The Good Country begins in February 1840 with a cross-cultural encounter in Djadja Wurrung country, now central Victoria. Two Protectors of Aborigines, recently appointed to the burgeoning pastoral district around Port Phillip, met with an Aboriginal group camped near Mount Mitchell. At this time, the Aboriginal protectorate had been operating for little ...
... (read more)Alan Atkinson reviews 'Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal people of coastal Sydney' by Paul Irish
Nothing has done more to add to the ingenuity of Australian history writing than the study of Indigenous experience. This book, which concentrates on people living in Sydney and its immediate hinterlands from 1788 to the 1930s, is a case in point ...
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