Description:
This article examines Alfred Deakin’s attitudes towards, and impacts upon, Aboriginal people during the period 1880-1910, drawing on newspaper articles and parliamentary debates as principal source materials. The discussion begins by charting the long, influential and often positive relationships Deakin had with several Aboriginal communities during a period as a Victorian MLA between 1881 and 1884. It then proceeds to document Deakin’s extraordinary descent into paternalism and racially-based fatalism which pervaded his later association with Aboriginal affairs whilst Victoria’s Chief Secretary (1886–1890), Victorian MLA for Essendon and delegate to Federal conventions (1890-1900), as the Federation debates took shape. And finally, the article outlines the attitudes Deakin expressed towards Aboriginal people in his various post-Federation political roles, including Attorney-General, Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs. In doing so, the discussion draws out the connections between Deakin’s advocacy of a white Australia and his attitudes towards Aboriginal Australia, and demonstrates the extent to which the creation of a new nation both informed and responded to socio-racial ideologies that mandated the exclusion of non-white identities from the nation-to-come
Description:
Indigenous peoples' participation in Australia's modern military conflict's has until the 1970's been largely sidelined by historians. Recent scholarship in this field has revealed far greater participation numbers than previously thought. The general consideration is now that Indigenous people in the Great War participated as an extension of their ongoing effort to shape and alter their social and political realities. "From abstract"
Description:
"The Wadawurrung are the Aboriginal people whose Country includes the cities now known as Ballarat and Geelong. Fred Cahir examines the contact history in the period 1800-1870 of the Wadawurrung and the ngamadjidj (generally translated as white stranger belonging to the sea). Divided into chronological and thematic section, the book chronicles three waves of invasion: the early invasion period incorporating trespassers predominately from the sea, the sheepherders or squatters who followed in their wake and usurped the Wadawurrung of all their Country for sheep runs, and the third wave of invaders - the gold seekers. This historical study is transformative as it presents a compelling argument of how the Wadawurrung were active agents of change and sought cultural enrichment in the midst of the frontier war on their Country." --back cover.
Description:
The Aboriginal story of the Burke and Wills Expedition and relief expeditions is at once multi-faceted and complex with many interconnected threads that have rarely been teased out in historical analyses. In many respects the Aboriginal story has been overshadowed by the tragedy and misfortune of the expedition in which seven men, including Burke and Wills, died. Yet the exclusion of Aboriginal perspectives is a structural matter, as epitomised in Moorehead’s analysis. The description of central Australia as a ‘ghastly blank’ (Moorehead 1963, p. 1) where the land was ‘absolutely untouched and unknown, and except for the blacks, the most retarded people on earth, there was no sign of any previous civilization whatever’, is representative of the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the narrative and if Aboriginal people are discussed, it is often in racist tones. As Allen (2011, p. 245) rightly pointed out:
Description:
While much has been written about Chinese miners, much less has been said about Aboriginal miners and even less about Aboriginal-Chinese relations on the gold fields and elsewhere. Historians and other writers, such as Stephenson, Dunstan, Gittins, Cronin, Ramsay and Edwards and Shen, have largely ignored Aboriginal associations with Chinese people in colonial Victoria. Eric Rolls's study is representative of this absence - when discussing Australia's colonial racial policies towards the Chinese on the Victorian gold fields, Rolls is reluctant to draw many parallels between the Chinese, one group of people largely hidden from the historical gaze, and Aborigines, another group almost expunged from memory. A similar pattern can be seen in the historiography of encounters in other nations between Indigenous and Chinese people, such as in New Zealand and British Columbia where the paucity of the records initially led Yu to note: 'Here was a world only glimpsed'.
Description:
In 1837, Joseph Tice Gellibrand and George Brooks Legrew Hesse disappeared near Birregurra. Popular history says that their bodies were never found and their deaths are a mystery. However, letters, records, contemporary newspaper articles and early histories outline the disappearance and discovery of the bodies. Isaac Hebb's history in the 1880s refuted primary sources, claiming that the whereabouts of the bodies were never found. This article re-examines early historical documents, many of which Hebb may not have had access to or opted not to include in his work. We critique Hebb's analysis and reinvestigate the story.
Description:
Indigenous Australians have long understood sustainable hunting and harvesting, seasonal changes in flora and fauna, predator-prey relationships and imbalances, and seasonal fire management. Yet the extent of their knowledge and expertise has been largely unknown and under-appreciated by non-Aboriginal colonists, especially in the south-east of Australia where Aboriginal culture was severely fractured. Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-eastern Australia is the first book to examine historical records from early colonists who interacted with south-eastern Australian Aboriginal communities and documented their understanding of the environment, natural resources such as water and plant and animal foods, medicine and other aspects of their material world. This book provides a compelling case for the importance of understanding Indigenous knowledge, to inform discussions around climate change, biodiversity, resource management, health and education. It will be a valuable reference for natural resource management agencies, academics in Indigenous studies and anyone interested in Aboriginal culture and knowledge.
Description:
In the 1960s Australian historians were criticized for being the ``high priests'' of a cult of forgetfulness, for neglecting Aboriginal history, and for excluding a whole quadrant of the landscape from their research. In this article, the authors argue that the same criticisms may be leveled at the interpretation of goldfields history. Taking the Goldfields Tourism Region in western Victoria as their focus, the authors show the richness of the Aboriginal side of the goldfields story, and show that their exclusion from this story is not due to a lack of material. On the contrary, the barriers that exclude Aboriginal experiences from goldfields tourism are based on the perception and choice of tourism agencies and managers. The practice of history of the Sovereign Hill Museums Association in Ballarat serves as a case study for this article. The authors argue that the heritage industry has a responsibility to ensure that Aboriginal experiences are not excluded from their interpretation. Just as the writing of mainstream history had for many years dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and kept them out of sight, and out of mind, it is time for the historiography of gold to reappraise its ideology and find a balance that no longer excludes Aboriginal themes that have a legitimate place in goldfields history. There are several ways that Sovereign Hill may present indigenous perspectives as it interprets the history of gold mining in Ballarat and Victoria from 1850. More information can be made available, by such means as a series of publications ranging from books to Web pages and activity sheets for children. Interpretive displays focusing on the specificity of Aboriginal people and gold, centered around the themes reviewed in this article, could be constructed. Aboriginal guides could interpret this rich heritage for visitors to the museum. Aboriginal people were present on the Ballarat goldfields, and elsewhere, in many capacities, as Native Police, as miners, guides, and gold finders, as wives and sexual partners, as farmers and entrepreneurs trading cultural items and food, and as local residents going about their everyday lives, staging corroborees and other forms of interaction with other inhabitants. Many of these interactions could be ``activated'' by Aboriginal people; for example, there is scope for activation of the corroborees staged in Ballarat in the 1850s, of the Aboriginal encounter of the traveling musical troupe as witnessed by Antoine Fauchery, of the trade between Aboriginal people and miners, and of the critical role played by the Aboriginal Native Police in maintaining law and order in Ballarat and other goldfields in the early 1850s.
Description:
In the 1960s Australian historians were criticized for being the ``high priests'' of a cult of forgetfulness, for neglecting Aboriginal history, and for excluding a whole quadrant of the landscape from their research. In this article, the authors argue that the same criticisms may be leveled at the interpretation of goldfields history. Taking the Goldfields Tourism Region in western Victoria as their focus, the authors show the richness of the Aboriginal side of the goldfields story, and show that their exclusion from this story is not due to a lack of material. On the contrary, the barriers that exclude Aboriginal experiences from goldfields tourism are based on the perception and choice of tourism agencies and managers. The practice of history of the Sovereign Hill Museums Association in Ballarat serves as a case study for this article. The authors argue that the heritage industry has a responsibility to ensure that Aboriginal experiences are not excluded from their interpretation. Just as the writing of mainstream history had for many years dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and kept them out of sight, and out of mind, it is time for the historiography of gold to reappraise its ideology and find a balance that no longer excludes Aboriginal themes that have a legitimate place in goldfields history. There are several ways that Sovereign Hill may present indigenous perspectives as it interprets the history of gold mining in Ballarat and Victoria from 1850. More information can be made available, by such means as a series of publications ranging from books to Web pages and activity sheets for children. Interpretive displays focusing on the specificity of Aboriginal people and gold, centered around the themes reviewed in this article, could be constructed. Aboriginal guides could interpret this rich heritage for visitors to the museum. Aboriginal people were present on the Ballarat goldfields, and elsewhere, in many capacities, as Native Police, as miners, guides, and gold finders, as wives and sexual partners, as farmers and entrepreneurs trading cultural items and food, and as local residents going about their everyday lives, staging corroborees and other forms of interaction with other inhabitants. Many of these interactions could be ``activated'' by Aboriginal people; for example, there is scope for activation of the corroborees staged in Ballarat in the 1850s, of the Aboriginal encounter of the traveling musical troupe as witnessed by Antoine Fauchery, of the trade between Aboriginal people and miners, and of the critical role played by the Aboriginal Native Police in maintaining law and order in Ballarat and other goldfields in the early 1850s.
Description:
The Tracker is a Dream for filmmakers, explorers, myth makers, writers, politicans, academics alike. He can represent Aboriginal privilege, Aboriginal complicity, oppression, containment. He can represent settler powerlessness, powerfulness, arrogance, ignorance and illegitamacy.
Description:
The Tracker is a Dream for filmmakers, explorers, myth makers, writers, politicans, academics alike. He can represent Aboriginal privilege, Aboriginal complicity, oppression, containment. He can represent settler powerlessness, powerfulness, arrogance, ignorance and illegitamacy.
Description:
This book relays the largely untold story of the approximately 1,100 Australian war graves workers whose job it was to locate, identify exhume and rebury the thousands of Australian soldiers who died in Europe during the First World War. It tells the story of the men of the Australian Graves Detachment and the Australian Graves Service who worked in the period 1919 to 1922 to ensure that grieving families in Australia had a physical grave which they could mourn the loss of their loved ones. By presenting biographical vignettes of eight men who undertook this work, the book examines the mechanics of the commemoration of the Great War and extends our understanding of the individual toll this onerous task took on the workers themselves.
Description:
This detailed examination of Aboriginal people on the goldfields of Victoria provides striking evidence which demonstrates that Aboriginal people participated in gold mining and interacted with non-Aboriginal people in a range of hitherto neglected ways.
Description:
Maggie Black’s work as a writer has focused on disadvantaged people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Her view of the damaging impact of contemporary forms of development on Indigenous societies is articulated in her book, International Development: Illusions and Realities (New Internationalist, 2015). This proved a useful basis for studying her great‑grandfather’s pioneering life in Victoria. Niel Black’s archive found its way to State Library Victoria thanks to Margaret Kiddle, author of Men of Yesterday (Melbourne University Press, 1961), which also drew heavily on his remarkable voice. This article is a shortened version of a chapter in the author’s Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glenormiston 1839‑1880 (NewSouth, 2016).
Description:
Maggie Black’s work as a writer has focused on disadvantaged people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Her view of the damaging impact of contemporary forms of development on Indigenous societies is articulated in her book, International Development: Illusions and Realities (New Internationalist, 2015). This proved a useful basis for studying her great‑grandfather’s pioneering life in Victoria. Niel Black’s archive found its way to State Library Victoria thanks to Margaret Kiddle, author of Men of Yesterday (Melbourne University Press, 1961), which also drew heavily on his remarkable voice. This article is a shortened version of a chapter in the author’s Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glenormiston 1839‑1880 (NewSouth, 2016).
Description:
Anthropological and ethnographical studies of the use of clothing among Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia indicate that garments for thermal protection were often not worn in the warmer months of the year. The increased use of Aboriginal clothing in the colder months of the year point to it being a behavioural adaptation to exposure to cold (Gilligan 2008). Colonial writers often remarked on Aboriginal people’s nudity or being scantily clad, which was really a Eurocentric social construct rather than an actual state of nakedness as Aboriginal people were known to make significant behavioural adaptations to cold weather in order to keep warm, including feathers, ochres and animal fat (Stephens 2014; Massola 1971; Smyth 1878). Dawson (1881) described some of the methods that Aboriginal people used to protect themselves from the cold that did not require ‘clothing’. "From abstract"