Cirrus@Austlit

'Genealogies that demonstrate a continuous historical lineage play a critical role for native title evidence as well as contemporary negotiations concerning Indigenous identity. The complexities of this genealogical research are compounded in regions with lengthy histories of disruption from traditional lands and contestation concerning the forebears of Indigenous individuals, families and wider groups. This article presents a case study that introduces a forensic methodology to demonstrate challenges facing researchers and family members investigating Indigenous histories. It explores a history of the renaming of an Aboriginal man photographed wearing a breastplate inscribed with a name, Jackey Jackey. In this review of the extant historical data, we outline our genealogy of names that have been attached to Jackey Jackey. We suggest that two men named Jackey from different parts of the Logan Valley region, south-east Queensland, have been conflated into a single person’s identity and then renamed firstly as Bilinba and then as Bilin Bilin. We explore what these symbolic acts of renaming mean for the first wave of Indigenous descendants researching their family history, pose questions about the significance of this renaming, and identify the consequential issues for those now seeking legal recognition of traditional rights in land.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Aboriginal community–controlled radio station Radio Redfern was a  critical site in the protests that took place in Sydney on 26 January 1988 against the Australian Bicentenary celebrations. This article focuses on a 17-hour recording of Radio Redfern’s broadcast on that day. It explores the important role that Radio Redfern played in the protests as a means of organising and as a site of protest itself. At the heart of the politics of the protests was the idea that Indigenous people had survived the onslaught of invasion and the ongoing attempt by the settler colonial project to eliminate and assimilate them. Radio Redfern – a station made by the community, for the community – is testament to this survival, which can literally be heard in the ‘liveness’ of the many voices one hears in the recording. The article seeks to understand the Radio Redfern recording in its full significance as a radio and an aural source. To do this requires not only a close-listening to the content of what is said, but also a closer listening to how things are said; how they reverberate in other speeches; to what other sounds can be heard; the multitude of voices; and the silences.' (Publication abstract)

'The last glimpses of Tasmanian Aborigines born before or around the time of the British invasion of Tasmania were recorded just 10 years after the introduction of photography to the island in 1846.1 Among the earliest and best known of these photographs were those taken at Oyster Cove by Tasmania’s first bishop, Francis Russell Nixon, and displayed at the London International Exhibition in 1862. More intimate studio portraits were made by locally born photographer Charles Alfred Woolley in 1866. Woolley’s images were highly successful and used to illustrate the earliest international publications on Tasmanian Aborigines by Enrico Giglioli and James Bonwick.2 A consistent presence across these portfolios is the face of a woman who has become emblematic not just of an entire people, but of our survival of an attempted genocide and ongoing need to liberate our story from the legacies of an oppressive colonial narrative.' 

 (Introduction)

'Sustaining Indigenous Songs (2020) is a recently published ethnography based on fieldwork in Yuendumu, a predominantly Warlpiri-speaking community in the Northern Territory. At least nine anthropological monographs have come out of Yuendumu in the last 50 years,1 making for a rich diachronic study of social life in a central Australian community.'

'Ceremony Men is a significant contribution not only to the history of Australian anthropology, but also to the study of Aboriginal collections that scholars and custodians alike wrestle with as a tangible legacy of the discipline’s flaws and merits.'

'The opening of south-east Queensland to ‘free settlement’ by the British colonial authorities in 1841 signalled the end of the convict era and the rapid establishment of the pastoral industry. An immediate consequence of the decision was the escalation of violence between the Indigenous traditional owners of the land and the new arrivals. The Battle of One Tree Hill by Brisbane historians Ray Kerkhove and Frank Uhr provides a detailed account of Queensland’s first theatre of frontier conflict. Fought across the Lockyer and Brisbane river valleys for much of the 1840s, a coalition of Indigenous groups enacted a determined campaign of resistance against the European colonisers who took their lands and violated their laws and traditions.' 

 (Introduction)

'This well-researched book considers the biographies of two independent, eccentric women whose lives overlapped, although they were from different generations: Daisy Bates was born in 1863, Ernestine Hill over 30 years later in 1899. Both women felt more at ease living and travelling away from urban and rural centres, preferring remote Australia, the ‘Loneliness’. Much has already been written about Bates, much less about Hill. Eleanor Hogan became interested in their overlapping stories when she began researching the life of Hill after reading her book The Great Australian Loneliness, and came across correspondence from Bates to Hill that catapulted her into writing this double biography.'

'Henry Reynolds has been truth-telling for the better part of 50 years. Books such as The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (1987), This Whispering in Our Hearts (1998), An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (2001), and Forgotten War (2014), each reveal uncomfortable truths about Australia’s past, as well as the unevenness of its remembrance.'  (Introduction)