Cirrus@Austlit

Anna Haebich investigates how the West Australian Department of Indigenous Affairs archives (1898-1972) have been utilised by Indigenous writers/researchers.

'It is not widely known that many Australian colonial natural history collections are represented in German museums and herbaria, nor that there are initiatives to transform these artefacts of colonial heritage and science back into objects from living cultures with living custodians and their own stories to tell.' (Introduction)

'No one was  surprised when, in 1977, the Western Australian Government put a blanket ban on its recently decommissioned Aboriginal archive and even threatened legal action against researchers. The archive was a ticking time bomb: the dutifully documented words in its files exposed for the first time the extent of despotic powers wielded by state governments over Aboriginal people during the twentieth century. Read in the present context they show how racism, denial of rights, segregation, incarceration and breaking up of families structured and institutionalised the Aboriginal problems of today. These words from the past speak directly to the Uluru Statement: they ‘tell plainly the structural nature of our problem…the torment of our powerlessness’.' (Introduction)

'Dancing in Shadows explores the power of Indigenous performance pitted against the forces of settler colonisation. Historian Anna Haebich documents how the Nyungar people of Western Australia strategically and courageously adapted their rich performance culture to survive the catastrophe that engulfed them, and generously share their culture, history, and language in theatre. 

'In public corroborees they performed their sovereignty to the colonists and in community-only gatherings they danced and sang to bring forth resilience and spiritual healing. Pushed away by the colonists and denied their culture and lands they continued to live and perform in the shadows over the years, in combinations of the old and the new, including indigenised settler songs and dances. Nyungar people survived, and they now number around 40,000 people and constitute the largest Aboriginal nation in the Australian settler state. The ancient family lineages live in city suburbs and country towns and they continue to perform to celebrate their ancestors and to strengthen community wellbeing by being together.

Dancing in Shadows sheds light on a little-known history of Nyungar performance.' (Publication summary)

'Warren Braedon, named by his adoptive parents Louis St John Johnson, was taken from his mother in Alice Springs at just three months old. Told he had been abandoned, Louis’s adoptive parents, Bill and Pauline Johnson raised him in a loving family in Perth. Despite a happy childhood, Louis was increasingly targeted by school bullies and police for his Aboriginality. As he grew older, his need to meet his natural family prompted visits to Alice Springs with his parents, but they were thwarted by bureaucracy. He was planning to return to Alice Springs when, walking home on his nineteenth birthday, Louis was brutally murdered by a group of white youths whose admitted motive was ‘because he was black’. Originally published in the multi-award-winning and seminal history of the Stolen Generations, Broken Circles by Anna Haebich, the story of Louis Johnson/Warren Braedon captures the dark heart of racism in modern Australia, through the tragic story of one boy and his short life.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The 2010 film adaptation of Bran Nue Dae was a risky venture for Rachel Perkins, despite her being a major Aboriginal filmmaker. She was tinkering with the much loved and awarded original stage musical by Broome musician Jimmy Chi, which revolutionised Australian theatre in the 1990s. It also marked a major creative shift from her previous dark and challenging works, One Night the Moon (2001) and First Australians (2008). As Perkins explained in an interview with Margaret Pomeranz, the film was to be enjoyed ‘for being light, for it being entertaining, for it being joyous and celebratory, and a little bit silly and mad . . . not to teach about Aboriginal history, or Indigenous politics or culture’.' (Introduction)

'Sensational rumours of the murder of three small children by their stepmother ignite the passions of Perth citizens in 1909.

Shocked by horrific descriptions of how she poisoned the children, they demand her execution as one voice. But did she do it? Or was she a victim of the prejudices of her persecutors?

Anna Haebich brings to life the people of Perth and the entangled mesh of self-righteous bigotry, slander and unbridled revenge they invoke to propel the trial of Martha Rendell to its inevitable end.

We see the accused woman's downward spiral from her dreams of a new beginning with her lover to a life of domestic drudgery and deceits; then her final days on the edge of the abyss - becoming the last woman in the state to be hanged.

Based on a true story and meticulously researched, this compelling novel is driven by passion, imagination and an eerie conjuring up of the past.' (From the publisher's website.)

'In Spinning the Dream, the author re-evaluates the experience of Assimilation in Australia, providing a meticulously researched and masterfully written assessment of its implications for Australia's Indigenous and ethnic minorities and for immigration and refugee policy'. (Source: Fremantle Press website)