The extraordinary collection of letters has remained unpublished for nearly a century. It sheds vivid light on race relations, social conditions and Aboriginal culture in Central Australia, It also documents a crucial and poorly understood period in the history of anthropology. The book makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of central Australian Aboriginal society, and to current debates concerning land rights.
This book contains sensitive material. It is not available for viewing without prior permission of the current head of the Indigenous Cultures Department.
The highly popular AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia is now available in a compact, portable A3 size. Available flat or folded (packaged in a handy cellophane bag ) it s the perfect take-home product for tourists and anyone interested in the diversity of our first nations peoples. The handy desk size also makes it an ideal resource for individual student use. For tens of thousands of years, the First Australians have occupied this continent as many different nations with diverse cultural relationships linking them to their own particular lands. The ancestral creative beings left languages on country, along with the first peoples and their cultures. More than 200 distinct languages, and countless dialects of them, were in use when European colonization began. While people in some communities continue to speak their own languages, many others are seeking to record and revive threatened ones. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples retain their connection to their traditional lands regardless of where they live. Using published resources available from 1988-1994, the map represents the remarkable diversity of language or nation groups of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. The map was produced before native title legislation and is not suitable for use in native title or other land claims."
This is Strehlow's most widely regarded work and the culmination of his anthropological work related to the Aranda (Arunta) people of the Alice Springs region. In this work Strehlow records the patrilineal chants or songs of the Aranda people and puts them into a wider context of totemic cultural understanding. Of particular interest is Chapter 10, the love songs of the Aranda people, which pre-date European romantic conventions by several thousand years.
A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.
This detailed ethnographic study explores the intercultural crafting of contemporary forms of Aboriginal manhood in the world of country, rock and reggae music making in Central Australia. Focusing on four different musical contexts – an Aboriginal recording studio, remote Aboriginal settlements, small non-indigenous towns, and tours beyond the musicians’ homeland – the author challenges existing scholarly, political and popular understandings of Australian Aboriginal music, men, and related indigenous matters in terms of radical social, cultural and racial difference. Based on extensive anthropological field research among Aboriginal rock, country and reggae musicians in small towns and remote desert settlements in Central Australia, the book investigates how Aboriginal musicians experience and articulate various aspects of their male and indigenous sense of selves as they make music and engage with indigenous and non-indigenous people, practices, places, and sets of values.Making Aboriginal Men and Music is a highly original, intimate study which advances our understanding of contemporary indigenous and male identity formation within Aboriginal Australian society. Providing new analytical insights for scholars and students in fields such as social and cultural anthropology, cultural studies, popular music, and gender studies, this engaging text makes a significant contribution to the study of indigenous identity formation in remote Australia and beyond.
