Dreaming of an indigenised Australia
- Authors: Tout, Dan
- Date: 2024
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 48, no. 1 (2024), p. 135-151
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- Description: This article offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation it terms, following Anthony Moran, indigenising settler nationalism. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone. When read in the context of a broader indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Griffiths’s approach is revealed as neither unusually problematic nor uniquely complicit in the dynamics the article draws attention to. On the contrary, the genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work I offer here is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Aboriginal fire-management practices in colonial Victoria
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian , Tout, Dan , Wilkie, Benjamin , Clark, Jidah
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Aboriginal History Journal Vol. 45, no. (2021), p. 109-130
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- Description: Through a close reading of particular episodes and a focus on the minutiae of action and context, this article adds to the literature on the customary use of fire by Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia by highlighting the historically significant role Aboriginal people played in toiling alongside colonists and fighting fires during the colonial period. By scrutinising the written colonial records it is possible to reveal some of the measures that Aboriginal people used to help the colonists avoid cataclysmic fire. Lacking many direct Indigenous sources due to the devastation caused by rapid colonisation, we do this for the most part through a detailed examination of sheep and cattle graziers' journals, newspapers and government records. The article commences with an overview of colonists' observations of and attitudes regarding Aboriginal practices in relation to fire with specific reference to the region now referred to as Victoria and New South Wales. It concludes with an examination of the few recorded instances in which Aboriginal people tutored colonists in fighting fires, educating them how to use fire as a management tool, and the significant value they placed in Aboriginal knowledge relating to fire. © 2022 Astra Salvensis. All rights reserved.
Rex Ingamells and Ted Strehlow : correspondences and contradictions in Australian settler nationalism
- Authors: Tout, Dan
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 44, no. 3 (2020), p. 254-270
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- Description: The standard story of Australian national cultural development revolves around a fundamental conflict between the forces of empire loyalism or universalism on the one hand and Australian nationalism on the other. Yet this narrative structure neglects the complexities of the settler-colonial, as distinct from the colonial, situation. This article is premised on the proposition that the settler-colonial situation is conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement of pre-existing Indigenous populations. While at certain historical moments exclusive emphasis on the settler–metropole relation may be maintained, at others the disavowal of the settler–indigene relation common to both sides of the “two Australias” divide is rendered untenable by changing circumstances. It is into such a moment this article aims to situate its subjects—Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks—and it does so with reference to the correspondences between Jindyworobak indigenism and the indigenising settler nationalism evident in the “salvage linguistics” of Ted Strehlow. In doing so, the article aims to reveal the complexities and persistence of what it terms the settler predicament. © 2020 International Australian Studies Association.