Parish plans as a source of evidence of Aboriginal land use in the Mallee back country
- Authors: Burch, John , Clark, Ian , Cahir, David (Fred)
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Provenance (North Melbourne, Vic.) Vol. , no. 18 (2020), p. 9-21
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- Description: The nature of Aboriginal people's use, indeed occupation, of the Victorian Mallee 'back country' warrants detailed investigation. Probably arising out of the paucity of observations of Aboriginal people on the land before it was pastorally occupied, an historical analysis from the 1870s suggesting Aboriginal people were not occupiers but mere 'seasonal visitors' to the 'back country' was unquestionably accepted for the next century. Growing understanding of the fundamentally sophisticated ways in which Aboriginal people managed their land has led to some recent historical works with a revised understanding of land use in the 'back country', but there is no agreement to move away from the orthodox historical paradigm. Parish plans from the Mallee, part of PROV's 'Parish and township plans' collection, were investigated to determine whether they contain evidence of former Aboriginal land use that could inform this question. It was found that these plans can potentially reveal the presence of pre-colonial Aboriginal water management, pathways, quarries, land management, cemeteries and placenames. Thus, parish plans were shown to be a potentially valuable resource that might have the capacity to support a reinvestigation of Aboriginal land use in the 'back country'. Approaches for a more detailed investigation of the value of these plans are suggested.
Aboriginal biocultural knowledge in South-eastern Australia : Perspectives of early colonists
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian , Clarke, Philip
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
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- 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.
Corroborees in Goldrush Victoria
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Pay dirt! : Ballarat and other gold towns Chapter 2 p.
- Full Text: false
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Exchange on the maritime frontier of southern Australia
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian , Wright, Wendy
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The First Wave: Exploring coastal contact history in Australia Chapter 12 p. 174-192
- Full Text: false
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- Description: The intimate cross-cultural narratives that ocure when British and other European mariners maded early contacts with Australian Aboriginal people have been investigated in a number of influential historical works, including Reynolds's "The other side of the frontier", Shellam's SHaking hand on the fringe', and Clendinnen's Dancing with strangers, This chapter will draw onfrom the concepts established in these workks and explore three facets of early interculturla exchange on the maritime frontier of south-eastern Australia (1790s-1840s) through written narratives focusing on food, tools and story-telling. "From chapter".
Winda lingo parugoneit or Why set the bush on fire? Fire and Victorian Aboriginal people on the colonial frontier
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , McMaster, Sarah , Clark, Ian , Kerin, Rani , Wright, Wendy
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Historical Studies Vol. 47, no. 2 (2016), p. 225-240
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- Description: There is an ethnographic and historical record that, despite its paucity, can offer specific insight into various contextual matters (purpose, motivations, acknowledgement) relating to how and why fire was being used by Victorian Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century. This insight is essential to developing cross-culturally appropriate land and fire management strategies in the present and into the future. This article demonstrates the need for further research into historical accounts of Aboriginal burning in Victoria.
Why should they pay money to the Queen?: Aboriginal miners and land claims
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Colonial History Vol. 10, no. 1 (2008), p. 115-128
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- Description: There is little evidence of Aboriginal involvement in the events of the Eureka Stockade, but there are numerous ways in which Aboriginal people are relevant to the Eureka story. The events took place on Aboriginal land (an obvious but rarely articulated truth) and Aboriginal people were present on the Ballarat diggings, as they were, indeed, on and around most Australian goldfields. The records are full of references to their fundamental and diverse contribution to life and work on the diggings, and to the complex and varied relationships they formed with the invaders. For Indigenous communities already reeling from the invasion of pastoralists, the arrival of 300,000 immigrant miners, swarming onto the alluvial districts of Victoria, represented a second wave of dispossession. But as we have noted elsewhere, there is abundant evidence that gold, at least in Victoria, brought many new economic opportunities for Aborigines, many of whom took advantage of these changed circumstances.' David Goodman argues persuasively for historians to consider an 'edgier interpretation' of the goldfields story. This could include a better appreciation of the social dislocation and cultural adaptations experienced by Indigenous people on the goldfields .
- Description: C1
‘An edifying spectacle’ : A history of ‘tourist corroborees’ in Victoria, Australia, 1835–1870
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2009
- Type: Journal article
- Relation: Tourism Management Vol.31, no.3 (2010), p. 412-420
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- Description: Parsons [Parsons, M. (2002). “Ah that I could convey a proper idea of this interesting wild play of the natives” corroborees and the rise of indigenous Australian cultural tourism. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2(1), 14–27.] has persuasively argued that nineteenth century corroborees performed for non-indigenous audiences may be considered to be Australia's pre-eminent prototypical indigenous cultural tourism product. This paper extends Parsons' [Parsons, M. (1997). The tourist corroboree in South Australia. Aboriginal History, 21(1), 46–69; Parsons, M. (2002). “Ah that I could convey a proper idea of this interesting wild play of the natives” corroborees and the rise of indigenous Australian cultural tourism. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2(1), 14–27.] analyses of ‘tourist corroborees’ in nineteenth century South Australia to corroborees staged in Victoria during the pastoral period and the gold rushes of the 1850–1870s. It argues that an Aboriginal-grown ‘business acumen’ developed rapidly in the economic climate of the Victorian goldfields. It also provides a historical context to this commodification.
The case of Peter Mungett : Born out of the allegiance of the Queen, belonging to a sovereign and independent tribe of Ballan
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Provenance : The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria Vol. 8, no. (2009), p.15-34
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- Description: This paper is concerned with the jurisdiction of the British colonial criminal law over Indigenous Australians, particularly in the area of serious offences such as murder and rape. In particular, the paper examines the attempted use in the 1860 case of Regina v Peter of the legal demurrer that the accused Aboriginal man was not subject to the jurisdiction of the court because he was not born a British subject and had never entered into allegiance to the British Queen. The paper also discusses some of the difficulties which the legal authorities found in dealing with this issue, even as late as 1860. The issue of the amenability to British law was a significant one in the early colonial period; it then largely disappeared from serious public consideration but has resurfaced since the 1980s in the context of land rights, native title, and the status of Aboriginal customary law.
- Description: 2003007342
The historic importance of the dingo in aboriginal society in Victoria (Australia) : A reconsideration of the archival record
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Anthrozoos Vol. 26, no. 2 (2013), p. 185-198
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- Description: Dingoes feature prominently in Australian Aboriginal Creation stories and are also widely regarded as having an intricate relationship with Aboriginal people. A large volume of anthropological work on the complex relationship between Australian Aboriginals and dingoes has determined a considerable uniformity in the human-dingo relationship across northern Australia. Whilst there are many parallels between northern and southern Aboriginal Australia, this reconsideration of the archival record explores the hitherto rarely considered evidence of the relationship between Aboriginal people, British colonizers in Victoria (south-eastern Australia), and dingoes. The data provide an insight into the unique relationship, which indicates some striking differences between northern and southern Aboriginal Australia; especially the utilitarian and symbolic significance of dingoes for Aboriginal communities in south-eastern Australia and how dingoes were used by both Aboriginal people and the colonial usurpers in a bid to spatially dislocate each other. © ISAZ 2013.
- Description: 2003011040
'I suppose this will end in our having to live like the blacks for a few months': reinterpreting the history of Burke and Wills'
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives p. 301-303
- Full Text: false
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- 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:
'John and Jackey': An exploration of Aboriginal and Chinese people's associations on the Victorian goldfields
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australasian Mining History Vol. 13, no. No. (2015), p. 23-41
- Full Text: false
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- 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'.
The Mãori presence in Victoria, Australia, 1830-1900 : A preliminary analysis of Australian sources
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: New Zealand Journal of History Vol. 48, no. 1 (2014), p. 109-126
- Full Text: false
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- Description: This essay explores the presence of M
The Importance of the koala in Aboriginal society in nineteenth-century Queensland (Australia) : a reconsideration of the archival record
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Schlagloth, Rolf , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2022
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Anthrozoos Vol. 35, no. 1 (2022), p. 75-89
- Full Text: false
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- Description: The principal purpose of this study was to gain a greater understanding of the utilitarian and symbolic significance of koalas for Aboriginal communities in Queensland, Australia as recorded by colonists during the early period of colonization and the early twentieth century. It does this primarily through a close examination of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century archival records and contemporary publications that relate to Queensland Aboriginal peoples’ associations with koalas. This paper is the third in a series investigating the historic and cultural importance of the koala according to the location in Australia. It likewise employs the historical method approach, which relies on identifying historical sources, evaluating their relative authority, and combining their testimony appropriately in order to construct an accurate and reliable picture of past events and environments. Through a critique of the published historical sources, the distribution of and the etymology of “koala” are briefly discussed before an examination is made of the animal’s spiritual importance, associated cultural traditions, and simultaneous utilitarian role. Mirroring previous studies published by the authors on Victoria and New South Wales, we confirm that the predominately non-Aboriginal historical records reveal that koalas were hunted for food and their skin in some Queensland regions. It shall be seen that the ethno-historical records are inconclusive about the koala’s distribution in Queensland, whether they were hunted across all of the state at the point of colonization and whether they were considered an integral food source in some regions. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the extent to which they were used varied across regions and between language groups and was subject to certain rules, and that their spiritual significance can be traced directly to epic creation stories. The implications of this paper are consistent with the earlier New South Wales and Victorian studies: regional variations exist in Queensland in relation to the (pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial) historic relationship between Aboriginal communities and koalas and that close consultation with Aboriginal communities needs to be taken into consideration when planning conservation measures relating to koalas. © 2021 International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ).
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.
The historic importance of the koala in Aboriginal Society in New South Wales, Australia : an exploration of the archival record
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Schlagloth, Rolf , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Ab-original Vol. 3, no. 2 (2020), p. 172-191
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Abstract The principal aim of this study is to provide a detailed examination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archival records that relate to New South Wales Aboriginal peoples' associations with koalas and gain a greater understanding of the utilitarian and symbolic significance of koalas for Aboriginal communities as recorded by colonists during the early period of colonization. Anthropological discussions about the role and significance of koalas in Australian Aboriginal society have been limited, some sources are unreliable and interpretation is at times divisive. Many scholars have previously highlighted how using only historical sources as its reference point it is difficult to discern with great specificity that Aboriginal peoples in other regions of New South Wales commonly ate the koala and used its skin. Through a critique of historical sources, we demonstrate that the ethno-historical evidence is inconclusive as to whether they were an integral food source for much of the time period covered by this paper in the area now called the state of New South Wales. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the extent of their use varied across regions and between tribal groups and was likely to have been traditionally associated with lore specific to certain cultural groups, and may have involved dreaming stories, and gendered roles in hunting and resource use, and other aspects of spiritual belief systems.
Homage tourism - Ella Fitzgerald, war memorials, and all that jazz
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Hollick, Mary
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at CAUTHE 2006 conference - to the city and beyond, Melbourne : 6th February, 2006
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- Description: ‘Homage tourism’ is able to include a range of forms of tourism such as visits to memorials, cemeteries, and places where special events took place. Homage tourism then is capable of being understood as a continuum from the sacred homage of religious pilgrimage embracing spiritual subjects at one end to secular or profane homage embracing the sacralization of cultural celebrities and critical events at the other. Secular homage often uses the language and behaviour of the sacred discourse and acts towards and refers to the subject or object of the homage in sacred-like ways - associated places become sacred sites, structures become shrines, actions become religious rites. This paper will explore two dimensions of secular homage, that of adulation or acclaim or tribute and remembrance. It will explore the former through focussing on jazz tourism and in particular the tourism of adulation that has emerged around jazz vocalist Ella Jane Fitzgerald, and the latter through an examination of visitation to the Australian Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Though visitation to a war memorial or visitation to places associated with important people may appear disparate they both share the commonality that they are external actions with reverential intent, they are both examples of homage tourism.
- Description: E1
- Description: 2003001817
George Augustus Robinson : His value as a resource for place names research
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 76, no. 2 (2005), p. 165-179
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001172
Footprints : The journey of Lucy and Percy Pepper
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Aboriginal Studies Vol. , no. 1 (2009), p. 100
- Full Text: false
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Isabella Lucy Bird's visit to Victoria in 1872: The forgotten tourist
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 82, no. 2 (2011), p. 194-211
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Isabella Lucy Bird, the English travel writer visited Victoria and spent eight weeks touring around Melbourne and western Victoria. In 1877, she published a nine-part account of her visit, The Leisure Hour.
- Description: 2003009005
‘The Comfort of Strangers’:Hospitality on the Victorian Goldfields, 1850–1860
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Cahir, David (Fred)
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management Vol. 15, no. 2 (2008), p. 2-7
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed: