Cirrus@Austlit

'Sue Taffe first heard of Mary Montgomerie Bennett (1881–1961), or ‘Mimi’, while conducting oral history interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists for an earlier book about the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Their term for Bennett, ‘spiritual mother’, stuck with the author. In this book, Taffe provides a detailed and convincing biographical interpretation of a young woman growing up between two worlds. The book focuses for almost half its length on Bennett’s early life, between her pioneer Scottish pastoralist father in Australia and her London artist mother in England and Europe.' (Introduction) 

'This article takes inspiration from the methodology of ego-historie, where political or intellectual history, institutional affiliations and research trajectories are interwoven with personal reflection, to make connections between context and content. In his essay on ego-histoire (2014) John Docker writes of the ‘marrano-like’ figure, the stranger as evoked by Georg Simmel, both inside and outside a group, disturbing it by a kind of abstraction, a freedom to question what others in the group take as given. Here I employ my insider/outsider status as a British migrant and a ‘naturalised’ Australian to reflect on the ambivalent at best and deliberately ignorant, at worst, relationship between contemporary Britain and postcolonial Australia. As the child of immigrants to Australia, who has returned to the ‘mother-country’ as an adult, I use aspects of my autobiography to reconsider the dynamics of colonialism and post-colonialism in these two countries.' (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)

''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.' (Source: Introduction)' (Source: Introduction)