A comprehensive study of the struggle for basic political and social rights for Aboriginal Australians. It examines the intersections between race, history and Aboriginality, the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, and the role of international opinion.
The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this. In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest. Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.
"A history of the Aboriginal rights movement in Australia, based on primary source documents and other historical artifacts. Features include period art works and photographs; excerpts from literary works, letters, speeches, broadcasts, and diaries; summary boxes; a timeline; maps; and a list of additional resources"--Provided by publisher.
For more than seventy years the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) fought to protect the rights of natives living under the rule of the British Empire. Active on four continents, the APS resisted the efforts of white supremacists while defending aboriginal interests across the globe. The APS put Zulu King Cetshwayo in contact with Queen Victoria and brought Maori rebels to the banqueting hall of the Lord Mayor. The society's supporters faced dangerous pushback by the powers they challenged and were labeled Zulu-lovers and traitors by senior British Army officers and white settlers. This book tells the story of the struggle among Britain's Colonial Office, white settlers, and aborigines that determined the development of the empire in its formative years. Particularly, it describes the pivotal role of APS in limiting the claims of white settlers for the sake of native interests. Despite this victory, native protection policy actually expanded imperial rule. Focusing on examples from southern Africa, the Congo, New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, and Canada, James Heartfield shows how the arguments made by supporters of native protection policy indirectly justified colonization. Highlighting the wreckage of humanitarian imperialism today, he sets out to identify its roots in the beliefs and practices of its nineteenth-century equivalents.
Based on a forum held at the National Museum in Canberra this book presents a series of essays by leading contributors on the subject of conflict between Aborigines and settlers.
"Morris deploys the incisive tools of anthropology to deconstruct the way neoliberal policies of the 1980s began to reverse the political gains Australian Aborigines had made in the 1970s...This work is of crucial relevance for thinking beyond the present neoliberal impasse." - Gillian Cowlishaw, Sydney University "Morris reveals the lie underpinning so much recent cant but more sets the situation of Aborigines in the context of larger global forces. This is a much overdue work that should contribute to new understanding and which breaks out of some of the enduring categories that continue to inhibit critical thought." - Bruce Kapferer, University of Bergen "Morris is not afraid to study systemic interrelationships; how history brings together structure and events in ways that might be unique but not random." - Andrew Lattas, University of Bergen The 1970s saw the Aboriginal people of Australia struggle for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were provoked as a consequence of social fragmentation, unparalleled unemployment, and other major economic and political changes. The ensuing riots, protests, and law-and-order campaigns in New South Wales captured the tense relations that existed between indigenous people, the police, and the criminal justice system. In Protests, Land Rights, and Riots, Barry Morris shows how neoliberal policies in Australia targeted those who were least integrated socially and culturally, and who enjoyed fewer legitimate economic opportunities. Amidst intense political debate, struggle, and conflict, new forces were unleashed as a post-settler colonial state grappled with its past. Morris provides a social analysis of the ensuing effects of neoliberal policy and the way indigenous rights were subsequently undermined by this emerging new political orthodoxy in the 1990s. Barry Morris is the author of Domesticating Resistance, Race Matters and Expert Knowledge. He is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Newcastle.
On 27 May 1967 a remarkable event occurred. An overwhelming majority of electors voted in a national referendum to amend clauses of the Australian Constitution concerning Aboriginal people. Today it is commonly regarded as a turning point in the history of relations between Indigenous and white Australians: a historic moment when citizenship rights -- including the vote -- were granted and the Commonwealth at long last assumed responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. Yet the constitutional changes entailed in the referendum brought about none of these things. "The 1967 Referendum" explores the legal and political significance of the referendum and the long struggle by black and white Australians for constitutional change. It traces the emergence of a series of powerful narratives about the Australian Constitution and the status of Aborigines, revealing how and why the referendum campaign acquired so much significance and has since become the subject of highly charged myth in contemporary Australia. Attwood and Markus's text is complemented by personal recollections and opinions about the referendum by a range of Indigenous people, and historical documents and illustrations.
Amanda Nettelbeck explores how policies designed to protect the civil rights of indigenous peoples across the British Empire were entwined with reforming them as governable colonial subjects. The nineteenth-century policy of 'Aboriginal protection' has usually been seen as a fleeting initiative of imperial humanitarianism, yet it sat within a larger set of legally empowered policies for regulating new or newly-mobile colonised peoples. Protection policies drew colonised peoples within the embrace of the law, managed colonial labour needs, and set conditions on mobility. Within this comparative frame, Nettelbeck traces how the imperative to protect indigenous rights represented more than an obligation to mitigate the impacts of colonialism and dispossession. It carried a far-reaching agenda of legal reform that arose from the need to manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane governance jostled with colonial growth.
Tells the story of Cooper and the Australian Aborigines's League, and their campaign for Aboriginal people's rights. Through petitions to government, letters to other campaigners and organisations, Thinking Black reveals their passionate struggle against dispossession and displacement, the denial of rights, and their fight to be citizens.