Onsman provides a new look at how one of the most influential portrayals of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the one put forward in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, has changed from simply reflecting an academic idea to becoming pro-active in presenting contemporary images: a change that began when the museum employed an Aboriginal curator to manage its collection.
Reclaiming the Land: The indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia once inhabited the whole continent. For over 50,000 years their rich and varied culture revolved around the land. In 1788 began the white invasion of Australia which destroyed many Aboriginal communities. Thousands of Aborigines died of disease, from poisons, and in frontier wars when their land was stolen and used for agriculture, grazing and mining. Aboriginal rights were unrecognized in law. Two centuries later Aborigines have achieved legal equality. But their rights are often disregarded and they suffer massive inequalities in housing, education, employment and health compared to other Australians. They are more likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Since 1980 over 100 young Aboriginal men have died while in police custody. But the greatest loss has been of land and it is the need to regain and protect the land which has been the impetus behind contemporary Aboriginal political activity - a struggle which many Aborigines believe has been betrayed by successive governments. In the Northern Territory and South Australia large areas have come under Aboriginal ownership but other states have conceded little or nothing. Today an historic High Court judgment has opened the way to a new relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians gives a concise and factual account of the major problems currently facing Aborigines. This updated edition traces developments into the 1990s, including the Mabo judgment and its consequences. A useful and detailed report on a unique people and their fight for justice, it should prove an invaluable resource for teachers, students, the media and all those interested in racism and Australia.
This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact. The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society.
This book explores storytelling as an innovative means of improving understanding of Indigenous people and their histories and struggles including with the law. It uses the Critical Race Theory (‘CRT’) tool of ‘outsider’ or ‘counter’ storytelling to illuminate the practices that have been used by generations of Aboriginal women to create an outlaw culture and to resist their invisibility to law. Legal scholars are yet to use storytelling to bring the experiential knowledge of Aboriginal women to the centre of legal scholarship and yet this book demonstrates how this can be done by way of a new methodology that combines elements of CRT with speculative biography. In one chapter, the author tells the imagined story of Eliza Woree who featured prominently in the backdrop to the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Dempsey v Rigg (1914) but whose voice was erased from the judgements. This accessible book adds a new and innovative dimension to the use of CRT to examine the nexus between race and settler colonialism. It speaks to those interested in Indigenous peoples and the law, Indigenous studies, Indigenous policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, feminist studies, race and the law, and cultural studies.
The contemporary study of Australian literature ranges widely across issues of general cultural studies, the politics of identity (both ethnic and gendered), and the position of Australia within wider postcolonial contexts. This volume intervenes in the most significant of issues in these areas from a variety of international perspectives.
A history of the role of biological theories in the construction and "protection" of whiteness in Australia from the first European settlement through World War II.
Oceania has a rich and growing literary tradition. The imaginative literature that emerged in the 1960s often reflected the forms and structures of European literature, though the ideas expressed were typically anticolonial. After three decades, the literature of Oceania has become much more complex, in terms of style as well as content; and authors write in a multiplicity of styles and voices. While the written literature of Oceania is continuously gaining more critical attention, questions about the imposition of European literary standards and values as a further extension of colonialism in the Pacific have become a central issue. This book is a detailed survey of the expanding amount of critical and interpretive material written about the imaginative literature of authors from Oceania. It focuses on commentary and scholarship concerned with the poetry, fiction, and drama written in English by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. The criticisms have appeared in academic books and journals since the mid-1960s. They have developed to the point at which critical issues, related to decolonization and the expression of ideas without having to first satisfy foreign expectations, often determine the direction of such discussions. Entries are grouped in topical chapters, and each entry includes an extensive annotation. An introductory essay summarizes the evolution of Pacific literature.
This account of imperialism explores recent intellectual, theoretical and conceptual developments in imperial history, including interdisciplinary and post-colonial perspectives. Exploring the links between empire and domestic history, it looks at the interconnections and comparisons between empire and imperial power within wider developments in world history, covering the period from the Roman to the present American empire. The book begins by examining the nature of empire, then looks at continuity and change in the historiography of imperialism and theoretical and conceptual developments. It covers themes such as the relationship between imperialism and modernity, culture and national identity in Britain. Suitable for undergraduates taking courses in imperial and colonial history.
It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However, as this book demonstrates, it is a fallacy that colonized locals merely collected material for interested colonizers. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes biographies for five objects that exemplify the tensions of nineteenth century history.
