Cirrus@Austlit

'It was not until I reached the third year of an undergraduate degree in the early 1990s at Melbourne University that I finally had an opportunity to read some anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. An assignment required us to develop a mock research grant application and we were given a blank slate to work with in terms of possible topics. At last! I thought, I can read some books I’d been keen to read and project myself into the imagined space of an anthropological fieldworker. Fred Rose’s The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines was one of those books, one readily picked up in second-hand bookshops, its lush cover photo depicting Aboriginal women harvesting file snake and turtle in some verdant northern Australian scene. I was enthused by the book and drafted a research project for a study of women’s contributions to Aboriginal community economy, pitching myself somewhere between Rose’s study and another book about which I had formed a more critical view, Jon Altman’s Hunter-Gatherers Today, which to my eyes lacked sufficient appreciation of women’s roles.' (Introduction)