Issue Details: First known date: 2024... 2024 Jennifer Bird Review of Joel Stephen Birnie, My People’s Songs : How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Colonisation has disrupted Indigenous communities’ traditional cultural practices across the globe. It has changed how Indigenous peoples have engaged with the world and imposed Western ideals upon them. Their languages were restricted or banned, and many were physically removed from their culture and all it represented. Contemplating the process of colonisation over hundreds of years in Australia and systematic government-enforced child removal practices brings into question what constitutes family for Indigenous communities. Why are the genealogies of Australia’s Indigenous peoples expected to be proved by linear bloodline? This proof seeks to legitimise or delegitimise individuals’ links to their birthright, culture and Country. There is no scope for understanding how these practices may contest Indigenous community cultural beliefs, nor to believe colonial documents may record information in error.' 

(Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Journal of Biography and History no. 8 2024 27802981 2024 periodical issue 'The Australian Journal of Biography and History (AJBH) was established in 2018
    with the principal aim of promoting the study of historical biography. In her
    2023 book Biography: An Historiography, Melanie Nolan, currently director of
    the National Centre of Biography, situates biography as integral to the practice
    of history, a discipline that stresses the role of the individual rather than focusing
    solely on the structures constraining human agency.1 Consistent with this objective,
    the AJBH publishes lively, appealing and provocative articles that ‘engage critically
    with issues and problems in historiography and life writing’ as well as illuminating
    themes in Australian history.2 Since 2018, the journal has fulfilled its charter with
    three general numbers emanating from a call for papers and four special themed
    issues: Number 2, 2019, Canberra Lives (edited by Malcolm Allbrook); Number 5,
    2021, Political Biography (edited by Stephen Wilks and Joshua Black); Number 6,
    2022, Writing Slavery into Biography (edited by Georgina Arnott, Zoë Laidlaw and
    Jane Lydon), and Number 7, 2023, Convict Lives (edited by Matthew Cunneen and
    Malcolm Allbrook).' (Malcolm Allbrook: Introduction)
    2024
Last amended 2 Apr 2024 11:48:41
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