Cirrus@Austlit

'On 13 October 1985 Arthur Malcolm was welcomed back to his north Queensland home community of Yarrabah. The previous day he had been consecrated in St James Cathedral in Townsville as the first Aboriginal bishop within the Anglican Church of Australia. Arthur Malcolm’s parents, both born around the larger Kowanyama region of Cape York, were brought to Yarrabah under the Queensland policy of family removals. Arthur, born in 1936, left Yarrabah at the age of 16 to attend the Church Army College near Newcastle. Nearly 50 years later he returned as an Anglican bishop with an Australia-wide responsibility for Aboriginal Anglicans.' (Introduction)

‘The Grand Experiment’ was the Spanish Benedictine monk Rosendo Salvado’s decision to take two Aboriginal boys, eleven-year-old Joannes Maria Dirimera and seven-year-old Francis Xavier Conaci, from Western Australia to Rome in January 1849. His intention was for them to train for the priesthood so that they could evangelise their own people. As an early attempt to ‘Aboriginalise’ an arm of the Catholic Church in Australia, it might be regarded as being a bold and far-sighted idea at the time. In reality, it was a complete disaster. Both boys contracted undiagnosed but fatal diseases, Conaci dying in Rome in October 1853 and Dirimera a few months after his return to Western Australia in August 1855. Three more boys who were subsequently despatched to Europe also died, as did all the young Aboriginal girls sent to the Mercy Convent in Perth. Another boy from New Norcia, Upumera, had died in early 1848 on the voyage to Europe with Salvado’s Catalan colleague, José Serra.'  (Introduction)

'In a paper published in Australian Aboriginal Studies, Bob Reece (2007:54) explains his purpose in writing about Daisy Bates:

'My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Bates as an ethnographer…As an historian, I see it as my ultimate task to make available from her extensive correspondence sufficient of her own writings for people to make up their minds about her motivation and beliefs, and about what kind of person she really was.

'He charts her early life in Ireland, arrival and work in Australia, her interest in Aboriginal peoples and her consequent development as a fieldworker (a self-taught anthropologist), and her final days working as a journalist in Adelaide. Reece makes the assertion that she was the first to undertake intensive participant/observer fieldwork, which became the template for modern anthropological fieldwork. (This is contested by the work of AC Haddon in the Torres Strait in 1898, and Baldwin Spencer in Central Australia in the 1890s). She is described as not engaging in theory, just stating the facts as she witnessed them — empiricism at its most pure. In response to a criticism by JB Cleland that she was misled by informants who provided the answers that they thought she wanted, Reece defends her: it ‘is hardly a convincing accusation against a highly experienced field worker who was perfectly aware of the hazard’ (p.88). Her unsubstantiated arguments about the existence of wholesale cannibalism among the desert people seems to seriously undermine his defence.'  (Introduction)

'Nearly 30 years ago, two senior Yolngu lawmen, Mungurrawuy at Yirrkala and Burramarra at Galiwin’ku, independently requested that Jill Stubington publish the results of her research with Alice Moyle ‘in order to teach balanda (non-Aboriginal people) the deep significance of their music’ (p.iii). This book fulfils their wishes, not only for Yolngu music but for many other language groups throughout Australia because it seeks to correlate and to contextualise ethnomusicological research in Australia within the period 1960 to 1980.'  (Introduction)

'I think that the role of the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Aboriginal heritage and protection and culture is much richer in New South Wales for the efforts put in by Shoonkley Tiger Ray. I don’t think that at the time, because of the uniqueness of it, and a lack of understanding of people in the service, that would have occurred without his diligence and passion and persistence [John Delaney in Kijas 2005:105].

'Ray Kelly was a man of many parts. Passionate about the traditions of his people, a boxer and potato digger, a seeker of the meaning of life and a pioneer in the work of reuniting the Aboriginal peoples of New South Wales with their cultural heritages. Ray was a Dunghutti man from the McLeay River. He had both the privilege and the privation of growing up on the Bellbrook mission near Kempsey — always for him the heart of his Country.'  (Introduction)