David McKnight

Over the past few years, no term has been more ubiquitous, among political scientists and political commentators alike, than ‘populism’. The 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, Donald Trump’s election later that year, and, more recently, the formation of a government mostly supported by two populist parties ...

With James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch grinning smugly on its cover, Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge projects a strong message that they are indeed the company’s smiling assassins. Pamela Williams mounts a case that these scions of Australia’s traditional media families ...

This is the last of David McKnight’s quartet of books on the Lardil people of Mornington Island, with whom he has worked from his first field trip in 1966 until his most recent in 2001. (For reviews in these pages of two of them, From Hunting to Drinking and Going the Whiteman’s Way, see the October 2004 and the February 2005 issues, respectively.) The title is characteristically challenging. A struggle for power in what we are always being assured was a tranquilly ordered society? Most of us have seen the pretty diagrams representing ‘traditional Aboriginal marriage practice’. How could violence and sorcery intrude on those elegant, iron-clad arrangements? Where all is prescribed, how can there be a struggle for power? And power over what?

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

David McKnight made the first of many field trips to Mornington Island in 1966, when the old people could still remember how it was before the white men came. The Lardil largely escaped the violence that accompanied white intrusion, and had kept possession of their land, although in time they were made to share it with survivors from the region. A mission, established in 1914, had preserved them from further predation, but at a cost: hunter-gatherers were rounded up and made to live cheek-by-jowl in a ‘supercamp’ close by the mission, and their children were taken to be raised and educated by the missionaries, with only casual contact with their parents.