Cirrus@Austlit

'Winners write the history but, in the case of colonists, what they most often write is an excuse.

'James Kirby, an early commentator on European–Aboriginal contact history on the Murray River, described the massive clay weirs built through the riverine system and only reluctantly admitted that they must have been built by Aboriginal people.'(Introduction)

'These are stories, histories. They emerged in part from encounters between scholars from Australia and Europe that offered a transnational way to think about culture, class, ethnicity, identity, inbetweenness and whiteness in Australian Indigenous studies. Our intention was to weave together professional and personal accounts of studies that have Australia and Indigeneity at their heart. The origins of this book lie in a discussion between Anna Cole and Vanessa Castejon that took place after a European Australian Studies conference at the Universitat de Barcelona’s Centre d’Estudis Australians in 2008. Over breakfast they wondered why many of the Australian scholars speaking on Indigenous topics at the conference did not reflect on their role in representing Indigenous Australia in and to Europe, despite the achievements of self-determination and self-reflexivity. That this conversation took place one morning in Barcelona—the place that Vanessa’s parents had been exiled from during the Spanish civil war—was significant. The power of place to unlock stories and to allow them to be felt and have an impact was something we had learned to articulate from working alongside Indigenous Australian historians and cultural custodians. So Vanessa and Anna started with themselves, trying to understand more about how their histories fed their motivations to work in Australian Indigenous history. Subsequently Anna and Vanessa were invited by John Docker, Ann Curthoys and Frances Peters-Little to publish these ego-histoires in Passionate Histories (Peters-Little, Curthoys & Docker, 2010) and so began the process of taking ego-histoire out of its strictly European origins and into ‘a broader history of colonialism and postcolonialism’ (Curthoys, 2012).' (Introduction)

'Sometimes I think I was born an historian. I was certainly a child who asked many, many questions. This was often a burden and an embarrassment to my mixed-race mother, who could be identified as Aboriginal in some contexts, and who was anxious to fly under the radar in conformist and settled rural New South Wales of the 1950s and 1960s.' (Introduction)

'Despite an interest in history during school years, my engagement in post-graduate historical research was delayed until retirement. My childhood home was in the town of Lubeck, in the Wimmera district of Victoria, where my paternal grandparents, having migrated from Wales, opened a general store in 1877. My parents later conducted this business until retirement in 1952. In the 1930s, the population of Lubeck, with its store, post office, hotel, school, hall, two churches and railway station, was approximately 75, with a similar number living on farms in the surrounding area. Living in this small country town, it was beyond imagination that one might progress to university. I left school in 1946 to work in a bank, just as had my three older siblings. A feeling of call to train for the Presbyterian Church ministry led to enrolment in the University of Melbourne in 1950. Appointed to an Aboriginal mission in 1958, I worked for two decades with Anangu Aboriginal people. This experience not only shaped my subsequent life and work on every level, but also prepared me to lecture in Aboriginal Studies in the first Indigenous tertiary education unit in Australia. In this role, I confronted the tendency of some academics to negatively stereotype Aboriginal missions.' (Introduction)

'In 1997, I accompanied the oldest Ngarrindjeri person, the distinguished storyteller, Aunty Hilda Wilson, then aged 86 and becoming a staunch friend, home to Country, to the Aboriginal community of Raukkan, the former Point McLeay Mission on the southern edge of Lake Alexandrina. Aunty Hilda was born there in 1911, a year that marked the legal separation of South Australian Aboriginal and settler peoples with the passing of the SA Aborigines Act 1911.2 As we stepped onto the shore of Lake Alexandrina, she led me to a clump of rushes in the sand, where her mother, Olive Varcoe (née Rankine), once sat and picked the fine but sturdy fibres with her sisters and Country-women, weaving the famous Ngarrindjeri baskets for sale and personal use. The women washed clothes here in a kerosene-tin over an open fire, gossiped and laughed, cared for little ones, and discussed important business. Aunty Hilda soon told me of sitting patiently alongside her great-grandmother, Ellen Sumner (1842–1925), at large ceremonial gatherings near this site during the 1910s and 1920s. From Ellen Sumner, renowned composer and singer, she also learnt Pata Winema, ‘the old corroborree song’. Hilda claimed to discern the meaning of only one of its lyrics, lieuwen: to ‘lay down’, ‘sleep’ or ‘rest’. Many believe this was adapted as a sorcery song against settlers for the destruction their intrusion brought (Bell 1998, p. 155).' (Introduction)

'Since the beginning of my career as an anthropology undergraduate in the mid-80s, and then as a PhD student in the early 90s at the London School of Economics, I have been aware of the issues raised by the so-called reflexive turn in the discipline. I was, in fact, particularly affected by the methodological and ethical concerns of what is known as ‘cultural critique’ or more generally the ‘politics of representation’: dismantling the power of the interpreter, the strategies of othering, as well as debunking the pitfalls of essentialism, the illusion of objective truth, and the partiality of ethnography (Clifford 1988; Fabian 1983; Marcus & Fisher 1987; Rosaldo 1989; Torgonvick 1991). I was equally exposed to some of the proposed solutions to these questions, such as the shift to embodied experience, and intersubjectivity in everyday life and in fieldwork research (Jackson 1983, 1989, 1998; Stoller 1989). My past interest and ongoing commitment to these issues in my current practice as a fieldworker, author, and lecturer also stem from personal, as well as professional motivations, choices, experiences and encounters which have brought me to anthropology.' (Introduction)

'It is a very hot day in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia; really hot and very dry. It is the kind of day when the shimmer of the temperature distorts the horizon line of the Indian Ocean that I can see when we go to swim. The beach is ten minutes walk from my parents’ house, a 1970s dream home, originally with shag pile carpet, which has long been replaced. On days like this it is too hot to walk, and we drive for our mid-morning swim, the second swim of the day. The heat from the bitumen makes the air shimmer and the sand sears our feet, so we get as close to the sea as possible before running shoeless for the water and gentle waves. It is perfect weather for drying laundry, yesterday’s dirty washing is white, pristine, folded and put away before lunch. It is Perth and this is Christmas. We return ‘home’ regularly to visit relatives and old friends, to reconnect with our shared history, but by the end of two weeks I am always ready to go back to the east coast, where my real life is disconnected from my Western Australian past, which is how I prefer it. Besides, all that swimming gives me water brain and all I can imagine is immersing myself in the salty water of the Indian Ocean in order to get cool, and I cannot think. The distance between there and here is geographically and psychically great, and ‘home’ pulls in both directions. That past continues to live into my present, hounding my academic endeavours, luring me into remembering history and acknowledging it.' (Introduction) 

'This chapter explores the different discourses of race as they affected my position as a German-speaking scholar of Indigenous Australian studies. There are difficulties, at times even impossibilities, in translating Australian meanings of race into a German-speaking context. The silencing of ‘race’ in German-speaking academia, especially in leftist circles, has led to a difficulty to reclaim difference. This silencing was cracked in Australia, where I had suddenly ‘inherited’ more than one race. The retranslation of these discourses into German-speaking contexts meant, again, a loss of my race and proved a difficulty for German-speaking scholars to handle a concept so profound for (Indigenous) Australian studies: race.' (Introduction)

'As a scholar from an Aboriginal background who is deeply embedded in the western academe and its claims to universal truth, in this chapter I consider the possibility that Australian Indigenous studies may simply function to re-inscribe the power/knowledge claims of European ideas. This outcome is contrary to the stated claims of the field, which proclaims to offer an anti-colonial platform from which Indigenous peoples can be heard within the academe. Seeking to expose the problematic relationship that exists between Australian Indigenous studies and the European ideas that underpin its critical gaze, my discussion takes place in the context of my own research on the historical and contemporary involvement of Aboriginal people in Australian Football. Applying the notion that Europe exists as an idea that is implicit in the western academe, this chapter develops a critical discussion of key ways in which European understandings of self and other are applied in the research of Aboriginal peoples in Australia. Referencing the work of Gayatri Spivak, I offer a personal and self-reflective insight into the paradoxical nature of research generated in Australian Indigenous studies. This chapter challenges readers to consider if Australian Indigenous studies, instead of disrupting the power of the western academe, has assumed the status of the new anthropology.'  (Introduction)

'I admit I had not come across the term ego-histoire until sent a flier for the conference that stimulated this volume. My attention was caught immediately, however, as I crudely translated the subtlety of the French phrase into English as ‘self-history’. This seemed to echo precisely my own broad methodological engagements with the relationship between myself as feminist scholar and the subjects of my writing. What story was I telling, from where, and whose? Did ego-histoire offer another avenue to pursue my politico-intellectual search for an ethical writing practice sufficient to render the past and present in tones appropriate to a post-colonising and (hopefully) cosmopolitan future?'  (Introduction)

'I am a cultural historian, which I feel gives me a licence to wander. Over the decades I have been interested in literary and cultural theory, popular culture, postmodernism and poststructuralism, monotheism and polytheism, diaspora, historiography, Jewish identity, and Gandhian non-violence. I have always written personally, mixing theory and analysis with life stories and family history, and am currently writing an ego-histoire, Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi: Memoir of a non-Australian Australian. Since the mid-1980s, I have written critiques of Zionist nationalism and settler colonialism, and reflected on partition in Palestine and India, and Martin Buber’s idea of a bi-national Palestine. I have devoted the last several years to genocide and massacre studies, exploring Raphaël Lemkin’s suggestion in his originating definition in 1944 that genocide is constitutively linked to settler colonialism (Docker 2008a, 2012b). My most recent books are The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide (Docker 2008b) and (with Ann Curthoys), Is History Fiction? (Docker & Curthoys 2006).'  (Introduction)

'At the entrance to the exhibiton of Australian Indigenous art in the German city of Cologne in 2011, ‘Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal Painting since 1960’, I can just see over the shoulder of the gallery guard collecting tickets and into the first room. On a near wall I see something familiar. ' (Introduction)

'Aboriginal life stories during the 1980s and 1990s changed the face of Australian history and literature. Aside from a few important exceptions, prior to these times Aboriginal life stories had not emerged as a genre and the majority of life stories at this time were penned by white writers and were semi-fictional. Sally Morgan’s book My Place (Morgan 1988) marks the beginning of a new genre of Aboriginal life writing and other Aboriginal people followed her lead by publishing their stories. These stories made a significant intervention into Australian history, telling first-hand how Aboriginal people survived under the strict state government laws enforced upon them. It was something of a time of enlightenment for many of Australia’s literati and the general public as Aboriginal people penned their way to a new genre. Now there are many life stories told by Aboriginal people and a developing critical literature growing up around Aboriginal life writing. Oliver Haag has written a comprehensive study of Aboriginal biography and autobiography in his paper, ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream’ (Haag 2008) and traces Aboriginal writing from David Unaipon in 1951, and Theresa Clements in 1954, to the current times. Anne Brewster’s two books on Aboriginal autobiography and biography, Literary Formations: Post-colonialism, nationalism, globalism and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (Brewster 1995, 1996), are significant contributions to the field. Both books give insights into Aboriginal writing of life stories, especially the latter, which studies Aboriginal women’s life-story writers such as Ruby Langford and Doris Pilkington (Langford 1988; Pilkington 1991). Drawing on these surveys of the field, I argue that Aboriginal autobiographies are conceptually different from western forms of autobiography in that they spring from prior Indigenous sovereign traditions.'  (Introduction)

'This is a story about how I came to write. In 2010, when I was in my late 40s, 
I completed a PhD and wrote a volume of poetry and a novel. This is a story. It is not an essay or an article or a treatise or anything else that ‘scholarly’ writing is called in western literature. This is a story because Aboriginal people live for and by stories. This is the story about how I came to write all that I did and how I came to find my place and my voice in a nation that until the early 1970s was dominated by an official White Australia Policy. It can be argued that, even in the twenty-first century, vestiges of the ‘white nation’ still prevail.'  (Introduction)

'It is autumn 1999 and the vigorous crashing of the metal knocker on the front door of my house in Glebe has me in a state of alarm as I leave the quiet study and run downstairs. I open the door to a dark, dishevelled figure, wild hair, lean and edgy. A gravelly, menacing voice says, ‘I’ve come to make a land claim on this property’. The grim expression dissolves as I exclaim, ‘Frank Doolan!’ He shakes my hand with a flamboyant black man’s double gesture, still tense, ready to cut and run, ready for a fight—or fun. ‘How are you?’ I ask, and he says, ‘I’m still goin’. But more important, [dramatic pause] how are you?’' (Introduction)

'This article brings together two Indigenous scholars who have come to better know their Indigenous history as they story it alongside their work as historians and academics. We find that the historical landscape changes when family history is better understood: time and space become embodied, history becomes personal. Sámi scholar May-Britt Öhman speaks of singing to the hillside in a ‘Sound of Music’ style, and then feeling forced to break out of song and into yoik.1Similarly, Aboriginal Australian scholar Frances Wyld writes about her connection to land and family history, including a visit to desert Australia where she no longer saw a world of silos, but of solace. Through embodiment comes a new identity, shared and understood. As scholars understanding the power-laden binaries of colonised and coloniser, writing at the intersection of personal and public using ego-histoires, we find shared methodologies to tell stories of the self inhabiting lands of fire and ice. Applying ego-histoire, we argue for a new version of history as academic discipline: a discipline which includes the Indigenous peoples’ embodied vision and experiences; a history discipline which challenges the coloniser’s current Hi-Story, within which Indigenous peoples are made the other, the exotic, primitive and invisible ‘vanishing race’; a history which empowers and strengthens ourselves as scholars and at the same time provides our students (Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous) with a history which takes into account Indigenous peoples visions, experiences and stories.'  (Introduction)

'Well, it was a long time ago now—

when I was in Halls Creek—

I’d been there a few times—

different times,

coming and going, you know—

bits of research, this and that—' (Introductory verse)

'The invitation to submit an essay as part of this collection on ego-histoire has enabled me to reflect on a series of intra-Aboriginal narratives between different peoples along the Tweed River that I had been exposed to in my early childhood. Over the passage of time, I have begun to understand how these narratives (and vivid fragments of story) have formed my basic dispositions, in a manner analogous to the Bourdieuan concept of habitus. Bourdieu sees habitus as ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions’ (Bourdieu 1990, pp. 82–83). The dialogic, quasi-magical world represented in these stories has intrinsically shaped my historical-consciousness and underscored my subsequent work in the academe, both in bringing Aboriginal epistemologies to the fore of pedagogy in Aboriginal studies at the University of Melbourne, for example, and in exploring notions of the uncanny in Aesopic philosophy (Morrissey 2011).' (Introduction)

'Ego-histoire is an unlikely import into Australian Indigenous studies. At least so it seemed to me in Paris in December 2011 at the conference that became a prehistory to this collection of essays. I listened as a non-Indigenous Australian researcher, sharing a concern for ethical ways of living, researching and teaching in Aboriginal country, and wondered why it was that ego-histoire was so confronting, and so unfamiliar in its address to Indigenous Australian studies. A number of writers here reflect this uneasiness, and in Pierre Nora’s essay ‘Is “Ego-Histoire” Possible?’ (translated here in the Appendix) we see why this is so. Nora highlights the features of the intellectual environment in France that led to ego-histoire: ‘the return of the subject’, the historiographical turn, and the new regime of historicity in France in the late-1970s and early-1980s. The transposition of each of these to Australian Indigenous studies now immediately unsettles the gendered, national and individualist presuppositions of the project—limits of the genre that remain unremarked in Nora’s essay. As a ‘bemused’ Jane Haggis suggests, Nora’s cool, encompassing, explanatory gaze and its singular unitary history of the nation is unsettled in contemporary Australian studies. Like a number of other writers here, Haggis turns to ‘entanglement’ to understand the relations between self and other, the history of the narrator and the narrated, that circulate in contemporary Australian autobiographical writing, a writing that draws the contact zone and the incommensurability of Indigenous and settler histories into thinking about the self and its professional conduct as a humanities scholar. There is, Gillian Cowlishaw argues, a messiness in thinking about ‘us’ and ‘other’. In response, Cowlishaw turns to the diary as a genre that personalises the professional life, as do a number of other writers here (see, for example, Jan Idle’s ‘field notes’, and Ros Poignant’s journal). This self-reflexive form of writing breaks down the distinctions between ‘research practice’ and ‘findings or data’, and what emerges is an ‘entanglement’ of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds that is both personally felt and professionally practised. The diary grasps that intimate immersion of the self in other worlds, a destabilising and disorienting knowledge and experience of otherness that recurs in this ‘provincialisation’ of ego-histoire into postcolonial space and time. More generally, these essays practise forms of autobiographical writing that enable a performative sense of self,, a working through memory and recognition, and what Franca Tamisari calls ‘a personal way of knowing others’ that finds expression in the classroom as well as in research practice: a ‘methodology of encounter’, Jan Idle suggests, where observing ‘self out of place becomes part of the project’.' (Introduction)