Cirrus@Austlit

'In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner lamented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples had been omitted from narratives of the nation’s past. Contending that this omission was ‘a structural matter’, he likened Australian history to ‘a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. He proposed that the kinds of stories which could bring Indigenous history into view for Australian readers would focus on the lives of individuals.' (Introduction)

'Prior to colonisation there were approximately 250 different Aboriginal languages spoken by some 500 clans throughout Australia. Each clan possessed numerous Dreaming stories, depicting how the land was traversed and marked by the Ancestral Beings, who created land-forms, people, animals, plants and celestial stars.' (Introduction)

'Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in their own homelands, ‘replaced’ by European settlers who sought to ‘eliminate’ them and their connections to the land. Yet, in recent years this approach has been subject to more critical evaluations, key amongst them, by some First Nations scholars. In this article I explore how Indigenous scholars advocate, interrogate, critique or challenge settler colonial studies as an emerging field of enquiry. I conclude by discussing Indigenous-authored extra-colonial histories, which bypass colonial expropriation and exploitation to focus on Indigenous worlds.'  (Publication abstract)

'Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers' motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred.' (Source: TROVE)

This paper contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the significance of emotions in the history of cross-cultural encounters... it examines how emotions governed European engagements with Aboriginal cultural landscapes and shaped Europeans' imaginings of how places could be constituted as sacred. It looks specifically at the writings of Francois Peron, one of the scientific crew of the Baudin expedition, a French Revolutionary voyage that visited Australia and Timor between 1801 and 1803. During the exploration of Australia the French expedition discovered two Aboriginal places that were interpreted as religiously significant to the local people: a grove discovered at Geographe Bay in the south-west of Australia and two tombs found at Maria Island off the south-east of Tasmania. Peron's extended discussion of these Aboriginal sites highlights the significance of emotions in the construction of ethnographic accounts, as well as the role of emotions in transcultural perceptions of place.' (Publication abstract)

The Aboriginal Male in the Enightenment World seeks to outline the first contact between Aboriginal males and European settlers. This is the first study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Konishi argues that many of the first encounters were not as negative as originally depicted, the novel seeks to present evidence to support a more nuanced view of 'first contact'. Specifically, Konishi examines the response to the Aboriginal body within a number of contexts.

'The convenors of the “Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Reviewed” conference look at the film’s engagement with Indigenous history'