Aspects of the historical geography of Central Australia; brief historical context and description of Aboriginal regional occupation - Aboriginal sites of significance mentioned; contact history sites - description, physical layout and history of Hermannsburg and Phillip Creek (Manga Manga); chapters on pastoral homesteads, wells on north-south stock route, mining at Arltunga and Tennant Creek, urbanisation of Alice Springs; cultural resource managment in Central Australia.
The Archaeology of Difference presents a new and radically different perspective on the archaeology of cross-cultural contact and engagement. The authors move away from acculturation or domination and resistance and concentrate on interaction and negotiation by using a wide variety of case studies which take a crucially indigenous rather than colonial standpoint.
The chunk of land bordering Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland is known as Namatjira. For most of us it is remote; geographically and metaphorically it is the heart of Australia. After a period of loss and much change, Saskia Beudel was inspired to begin long distance walking. Within 18 months, she had walked Australia's Snowy Mountains, twice along the South Coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. Throughout the course of her journeys, she experienced passages of reverie, of forgetfulness, of absorption in her surroundings, of an immense but simple pleasure, and of rhythm. The book that emerged contrasts her internal landscape with the external landscape, considering her relationships with her family in the context of environmental and anthropological histories. It champions the history of Australia's Namatjira country and conveys social and environmental issues. A Country in Mind is a narrative memoir of one woman's reflections on home, family, and belonging, while traversing remote and ancient landscapes. *** "The Australian Outback is depicted with such gorgeous language in Beudel's book that it almost feels as though you're seeing it with your own eyes. There is, however, more to this book than just description. The history and spirituality of the region is the glue that binds this alluring memoir together and turns it into a journey through Australia unlike any other." - World Literature Today, Jan/Feb 2015Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
The red kangaroo is at the heart of Australia’s ecological identity. It is Australia’s largest terrestrial land mammal, the largest extant marsupial, and the only kangaroo truly restricted to Australia’s arid interior. Almost nothing was known about the ecology of the red kangaroo when Alan Newsome began to study it in 1957. He discovered how droughts affect reproduction, why red kangaroos favour different habitats during droughts from those after rains, and that unprecedented explosions in red kangaroo numbers were caused by changes to the landscape wrought by graziers. Most importantly, he realised the possibilities of enriching western science with Indigenous knowledge, a feat recognised today as one of the greatest achievements of his career. First drafted in 1975 and now revised and prepared for publication by his son, The Red Kangaroo in Central Australia captures Alan’s thoughts as a young ecologist working in Central Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It will inspire a new generation of scientists to explore Australia’s vast interior and study the extraordinary adaptations of its endemic mammals. It will also appeal to readers of other classics of Australian natural history, such as Francis Ratcliffe's Flying Fox and Drifting Sand and Harry Frith's The Mallee Fowl, The Bird that Builds an Incubator.
Storytracking is a work of theory and application. It is both a study of history and culture and the academic issues accompanying the interpretation and observation of other peoples. Sam Gill writes about Central Australia, but, more importantly, he writes about the business of trying to live responsibly and decisively in a postmodern world faced with irreconcilable diversity and complexity, with undeniable ambiguity and uncertainty. Storytracking includes engaging accounts of many of the colorful figures involved in the nineteenth-century development of Central Australia, and it is an argument for a multiperspectival theory of history. It presents descriptions of an important aboriginal culture--the Arrernte--and it critically examines ethnography. It exposes the colonialist underbelly of all modern academic culture study, yet it embraces the situation as one of creative potential outlining an interactivist epistemology with which to negotiate the classical alternatives of objectivism and subjectivism. Gill presents an examination of the emergent academic study of religion focused on two exemplary scholars--Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith--offering a play theory of religion as the basis for innovative critical discussions of text, comparison, interpretation, the definition of religion, academic writing style, and the role of "the other." Based on painstakingly detailed research, Gill exposes disturbing and confounding dimensions of the modern world, particularly academia. Yet, beyond the pessimism that often characterizes postmodernity, he charts an optimistic and creative course framed in the terms of play.
The frontier is one of the most pervasive concepts underlying the production of national identity in Australia. Recently it has become a highly contested domain in which visions of nationhood are argued out through analysis of frontier conflict. DISLOCATING THE FRONTIER departs from this contestation and takes a critical approach to the frontier imagination in Australia. The authors of this book work with frontier theory in comparative and unsettling modes. The essays reveal diverse aspects of frontier images and dreams - as manifested in performance, decolonising domains, language, and cross-cultural encounters.
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.
65,000 years ago, modern humans arrived in Australia, having navigated more than 100 km of sea crossing from southeast Asia. Since then, the large continental islands of Australia and New Guinea, together with smaller islands in between, have been connected by land bridges and severed again as sea levels fell and rose. Along with these fluctuations came changes in the terrestrial and marine environments of both land masses. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea reviews and assembles the latest findings and ideas on the archaeology of the Australia-New Guinea region, the world's largest island-continent. In 42 new chapters written by 77 contributors, it presents and explores the archaeological evidence to weave stories of colonisation; megafaunal extinctions; Indigenous architecture; long-distance interactions, sometimes across the seas; eel-based aquaculture and the development of techniques for the mass-trapping of fish; occupation of the High Country, deserts, tropical swamplands and other, diverse land and waterscapes; and rock art and symbolic behaviour. Together with established researchers, a new generation of archaeologists present in this Handbook one, authoritative text where Australia-New Guinea archaeology now lies and where it is heading, promising to shape future directions for years to come.
Mining was one of the primary elements of colonial enterprise in Australia and a factor in movement on colonial frontiers. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, mining—particularly of gold—saw transformations of the land itself, as well as in the way that people working in mining engaged with the landscape around them. Landscape archaeology provides a theoretical perspective that allows an articulation of how people created and understood the place in which they lived and worked. The impact of and narrative surrounding gold mining has meant that it has long been a focus of study, both historical and archaeological. The archaeology of mining has traditionally fallen under the umbrella of industrial archaeology, with analyses based on historical, economic and technological evidence. However this is changing. From an industrial focus, examining the remnants of mines and associated processing equipment, archaeology has progressed towards understandings of the social aspects of mining, recognising that people, not just equipment, occupied these landscapes. Nevertheless, there remains a separation between industrial/technology-based studies and purely social/ household-based archaeological studies—a division that overlooks the integration of home and livelihood. This work addresses these very challenges, using a landscape-based approach that articulates a nuanced, meaning-ladened and experienced mining landscape. Integrating the social and the industrial, the case study of Mount Shamrock, a gold-mining town in Queensland, Australia, demonstrates how this methodology can enhance our understanding of the past. The work presents an integration of social and industrial perspectives in a mining settlement, and provides an exemplar in the application of landscape theory to Australian historical archaeology. These concepts and approaches, developed in an Australian context, are of universal interest.
