"Using archival records, oral history interviews, and company documents, this book charts the relationship between economic change and the human experience of that change in Port Kembla, Australia, an area seen by many Australians as a polluted wasteland. Also explored are industrial society and the impact of economic decline and deindustrialization, drawing together themes of migration, gender, class, and identity."
Compilation of primary sources in chronological order; includes notes on ritual, territorial groupings and myths; extracts from explorers journals; accounts of contact history and violent conflict; settlement of Illawarra region; Macquaries punitive expedition; trial of Seth Hawker; extracts from Dumont DUrvilles journal; battle of Fairy Meadow; Murramarang Massacre; blanket distribution lists includes listings of individual recipients; census data includes Maneroo and South Coast 1843-1848 and Berrima Cencus 1851; reminiscences of Alexander Berry; Milton and Ulladulla Benevolent Society; Aborigines Protection Board Reports; Roseby Park Reserve; Bomaderry Aboriginal Childrens Home; artists representations of Aborigines; various references to death and disease; economic activity including fishing; Bunan and initiation ceremonies; Aboriginal reminiscences; various vocabularies; archaeological reports bibliography; Appendices include; Index to Blanket Lists (1833-42) sorted by English and Aboriginal names.
This book traces the decline of the public comprehensive high school. New educational markets emphasized school diversity and parental choice rather than social equity through common schooling, and they were criticized for declining standards. The book also considers government education policies and their regional manifestations.
Whiteness and Social Change provides a comparative engagement with whiteness – the unearned and at times unmarked social-structural privilege afforded to some at the expense of others – in contemporary Australia and Canada. Through a detailed examination of high profile community campaigns at Sandon Point (New South Wales, Australia) and the Red Hill Creek valley (Ontario, Canada) – situated alongside an analysis of white interpretations of the 1966 Wave Hill walkout (Northern Territory, Australia) – the actions of broader communities supporting First Peoples struggles expose whiteness as manifesting itself irrespective of intent. Existing scholarship in sociology, science studies, political theory and critical whiteness studies are drawn on to identify means through which whiteness can be destabilised. The outcome is an identification of how collaborative struggle and the politics of experience produce moments of cognitive dissonance amongst white supporters. These moments are transformative, lay foundations for respect and recognition, and the move towards a fair and just society.
Australia is a large continent and before British colonisation there were over 250 First Nation areas with different languages and cultures. The Wadi Wadi nation lived on an eastern coastal region south of Sydney, which was covered with thick subtropical rainforest and bordered by the Pacific Ocean which provided fish and shellfish in abundance. With its rich volcanic soil, it was one of the first areas to be taken by colonising farmers. The land was cleared and the food, culture and Dharawal language were all almost wiped out. Many First Nations people died from massacres, hunger, and European diseases. This story began in a deep valley ‘Willow Gully’ with remnant rare subtropical rainforest, inhabited by wallabies, echidnas, possums and hundreds of birds in a small coastal town called Kiama. The gully was settled in the 1840s by two British farming families, and in 2015 the remains of a small farm cottage was unearthed in the rainforest. By coincidence the Aboriginal family who lived there in the 20th century were discovered and they have shared their personal stories. This has provided links to the amazing history of the Wadi Wadi people all along the coast. Through this book find their stories, but also meet an Indigenous King and Queen, WW1 soldiers, a poet, fishermen, sports stars, and silent film makers. Many people have hidden their Aboriginal heritage as racism was rife. The 50,000 years of continuous indigenous heritage is at last being recognised. However, a referendum to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution, held in October 2023, failed due to misinformation by opponents. But there is still hope!
For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Everywhere I had ever travelled across the vast expanse of the fabulous country where I was born I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans... One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in southeast Queensland that, after a century of logging, clearing, and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn't think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart's ease. Beyond the acres of exotic pasture grass and soft weed and the impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes there were Macadamias dangling their strings of unripe nuts, and Black Beans with red and yellow pea flowers growing on their branches ... and the few remaining White Beeches, stupendous trees up to120 feet in height, logged out within forty years of the arrival of the first white settlers. To have turned down even a faint chance of bringing them back to their old haunts would have been to succumb to despair. Once the process of rehabilitation had begun, the chance proved to be a dead certainty. When the first replanting shot up to make a forest and rare caterpillars turned up to feed on the leaves of the new young trees, she knew beyond a doubt that at least here biodepletion could be reversed. Greer describes herself as an old dog who succeeded in learning a load of new tricks, inspired and rejuvenated by her passionate love of Australia and of Earth, the most exuberant of small planets.
Provides electronic access to oral history endeavour in Australia. The database allows you to search within tens of thousands of hours of oral recordings.
Cultural Encounters in Translated Children's Literature offers a detailed and innovative model of analysis for examining the complexities of translating children's literature and sheds light on the interpretive choices at work in moving texts from one culture to another. The core of the study addresses the issue of how images of a nation, locale or country are constructed in translated children's literature, with the translation of Australian children's fiction into French serving as a case study. Issues examined include the selection of books for translation, the relationship between children's books and the national and international publishing industry, the packaging of translations and the importance of titles, blurbs and covers, the linguistic and stylistic features specific to translating for children, intertextual references, the function of the translation in the target culture, didactic and pedagogical aims, euphemistic language and explicitation, and literariness in translated texts. The findings of the case study suggest that the most common constructs of Australia in French translations reveal a preponderance of traditional Eurocentric signifiers that identify Australia with the outback, the antipodes, the exotic, the wild, the unknown, the void, the end of the world, the young and innocent nation, and the Far West. Contemporary signifiers that construct Australia as urban, multicultural, Aboriginal, worldly and inharmonious are seriously under-represented. The study also shows that French translations are conventional, conservative and didactic, showing preference for an exotic rather than local specificity, with systematic manipulation of Australian referents betraying a perception of Australia as antipodean rural exoticism. The significance of the study lies in underscoring the manner in which a given culture is constructed in another cultural milieu, especially through translated children's literature.
