y separately published work icon Aboriginal History periodical issue   non-fiction   peer reviewed assertion
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... no. 41 2017 of Aboriginal History Journal est. 1977 Aboriginal History
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

"The articles in Volume 41 bring to light historical sources from the colonial frontier in Tasmania (Nicholas Brodie and Kristyn Harman) and South Australia (Skye Kirchauff) to provoke reassessments of colonial attitudes and expectations. Karen Hughes brings into focus little-known, intimate aspects of Indigenous women’s experience with African American servicemen on the World War II Australian home front. Diana Young’s study of accounts of Pitjantjatjara women’s careful productions in the Ernabella craft rooms in the mid-twentieth century deepens our understanding of a relatively neglected aspect of the art history of ‘first generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples’. Nikita Vanderbyl explores records of tourists’ visits to Aboriginal reserves in the late 1800s and early 1900s, focusing on the emotive aspects of the visits, and making the links between such tourism and colonialism. Janice Newton provides a close examination of the cross-cultural signs implicated in a documented ceremonial performance in early Port Phillip. Heather Burke, Lynley Wallis and their collaborators compare a reconstructed stone building in Richmond, Queensland, with other reputedly fortified structures, and find that the historical and structural evidence for this interpretation are equivocal, pointing to imaginaries of the violent frontier as much as tangible experience."

Source: ANU Press.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2017 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
[Review] Settler Colonialism and (re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings, Alexandra Roginski , single work review
— Review of Settler Colonialism and (re)conciliation : Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings Penelope Edmonds , 2016 multi chapter work criticism ;

‘What might an Indigenous-led emancipatory politics and a truly postcolonial sociality look like? What are its limits and possibilities within this fraught paradigm, the double bind of reconciliation?’ Penelope Edmonds poses these urgent questions in Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances and Imaginative Refoundings. In recent months, her transnational study has become pressing reading as the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’1 reignites perennial debates about the relationship between Indigenous people and the settler state.'

Alexandra Roginski (2016)

(p. pg. 179-181)
[Review] Gumbaynggirr Yuludarla Jandaygam: Gumbaynggirr Dreaming Story Collection, Luise Anna Hercus , single work review
— Review of Gumbaynggirr Yuludarla Jandaygam : Gumbaynggirr Dreaming Story Collection 2016 anthology short story ;
A review of a work "clearly the result of many years of work by dedicated and knowledgeable people, both Gumbaynggirr and European. The stories are from three different dialect areas of Gumbaynggirr, in mid-north coastal New South Wales."
(p. 183-184)
[Review] Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country, David Carment , single work review
— Review of Yijarni : True Stories from Gurindji Country 2016 selected work prose ;

The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory’s southern Victoria River District are well known because of their 1966 walk-off from Wave Hill Station that led to equal wages in the pastoral industry and federal land rights legislation. Their history before the walk-off, however, has received less attention and is the subject of this impressive book. Yijarni, the Gurindji word for true stories from the period following the Dreamtime, brings together a wide variety of accounts dealing with that history.

(p. 185-187)
[Review] Pictures from My Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman, Diana James , single work review
— Review of Pictures from My Memory : My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis , 2016 single work autobiography ;
Pictures from My Memory is an engaging personal memoir of Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis, a Ngaatjatjarra woman growing up in the Australian desert and becoming a national multilingual interpreter. It also contains an overview of the Ngaatjatjarra language, culture and kinship system as an appendix by the anthropologist Laurent Dousset. It is a book for both the wider community and academics interested in Australian Indigenous history and culture told from an insider’s point of view.
(p. 189)
[Review] Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity, Lyndall Ryan , single work review
— Review of Into the Heart of Tasmania : A Search for Human Antiquity Rebe Taylor , 2017 single work biography ;
Rebe Taylor is no stranger to the complex debate about Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction. In her first book, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (2002), she explored the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community on Kangaroo Island and how it was forced to ‘disappear’ into the wider white community. In her latest book, she focuses on two leading British extinction theorists of the Tasmanian Aborigines in the twentieth century, Ernest Westlake (1855–1922) and Rhys Jones (1941–2001). She not only explores their collection of evidence for the antiquity of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, she also shows how they overlooked other aspects of their findings that indicated that far from becoming extinct, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people had survived into the present.
(p. 209)
[Review] Indigenous Australians, Social Justice and Legal Reform: Honouring Elliott Johnston, Constitutional Recognition of First Peoples in Australia: Theories and Comparative Perspectives, Treaty and Statehood: Aboriginal Self-determination, Peter Cane , single work review
— Review of Constitutional Recognition of First Peoples in Australia : Theories and Comparative Perspectives 2016 anthology criticism ;

'I approach these books as a lawyer with interests in history, governance and the development of law and legal systems, but very little background in Indigenous studies. My hope, in reading and reviewing this substantial body of work, was that I would learn more about Indigenous law. That hope has not been disappointed.'

(p. 219)
[Review] Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa, Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis , Inge Kral , single work review
— Review of The Wanarn Painters of Place and Time : Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa 2015 single work art work ;

'Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa does indeed take us into the world of older Ngaanyatjarra painters – born into a time and place that is fast disappearing – who are spending their last days in the Kungkarrangkalpa Aged Care Facility at Wanarn in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Western Desert. Beautifully written and illustrated with colour plates of the paintings, this book weaves together social history, anthropology and art history. Through painting, the authors David Brooks, an anthropologist, and Darren Jorgensen, an art historian, take us into the historical circumstances that have formed the Ngaanyatjarra identity. The book describes the establishment of the Wanarn Painters program from Warakurna Arts by Eunice Porter, who was one of the directors of Warakurna Art, and others. The Wanarn painters are in their final stage of life, much of their strength and short-term memory has gone, and while this comes through in the way they paint, their long-term memory and links to Tjukurrpa (the Western Desert term for the Dreaming) remain strong because of their regular links to family, ceremony, song and dance.'

(p. 225)
[Review] A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off, Rolf Gerristen , single work review
— Review of A Handful of Sand : The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off Charlie Ward , 2016 single work non-fiction ;

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

(p. 233)
[Review] Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story, Maggie Brady , single work review
— Review of Atomic Thunder : The Maralinga Story Elizabeth Tynan , 2016 single work prose ;

'This is a highly readable account of the history and consequences of the British nuclear testing program in Australia – primarily the minor and major trials at Maralinga, South Australia, and the 1985 royal commission investigation and findings. Tynan’s closest competitor, Robert Milliken’s No Conceivable Injury: The Story of Britain and Australia’s Atomic Cover-up, was published in 1986 and was thus unable to cover subsequent scandals associated with the tests, the more recent reviews of veterans’ claims and entitlements, the 2003 Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) report on the studies of the test site ‘clean-up’, and even the involvement of Wikileaks. Tynan addresses these developments with aplomb, and while her book covers much of the same ground as Milliken, Atomic Thunder has immediacy and verve, while successfully weaving in a huge amount of complex material. One chapter out of 12 deals with the impact of the tests on Aboriginal people: the Western Desert groups who moved between Warburton, Ernabella, Cundeelee, Ooldea and Lake Phillipson near Coober Pedy.'

(p. 235)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 27 Jan 2022 14:58:27
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