Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Indigenous Australians

The general editor introduces the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia with a number of challenging statements. He does not want it to be ‘just another encyclopaedia’. He has made it his policy, he writes, to have no ‘academic-style text references, linguists and other students of Aboriginal studies rarely appear, and there are no “studies suggest that” ... This encyclopaedia also aims to tum the usual convention on its head by presenting an Australia with no white people except as they impinge on Aboriginal society.’

... (read more)

Australian Art: A visual perspective by Ronald M. Berndt, Catherine H. Berndt, and John E. Stanton

by
November 1982, no. 46
Despite the upsurge in the publication of books about Aboriginal life in recent years and the increased interest in traditional or ‘primitive’ art around the world, very few attempts have been made in this country to either reproduce substantial collections of photographs of Aboriginal art, or to provide serious, but readable. discussions of its relationship to the broader aspects of Australian society. This offering from the Berndts goes some way towards filling the gap between the coffee table glossies and the specialist publications of bodies such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. ... (read more)

A common theme unites the five books reviewed here: the effects on Aboriginals of European and Asian settlement in Australia, and the position of Aboriginals in the society that has developed from that settlement. The work of historians, a political scientist and anthropologists, the writings reflect changes in Australian historiography and anthropology. Reece (1979) recently made a plea on behalf of Australian historiography for more to be done by black and white historians to eradicate the tradition that Australian history was a white history beginning with Captain Cook. A parallel plea has been made to anthropologists in Langton’s (1981) criticism of anthropologists for concentrating their research efforts on remote communities. The work of Aboriginal historians is not represented here, but two of these books are indicative of the quantum leap in the quantity and quality of writing an Aboriginal history. Although anthropology is slow to change, a glance through recent bibliographies published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies reveals an increase in the proportion of social anthropological publications on Aboriginal society outside the more remote areas. That trend appears in the content of the volume edited by Howard.

... (read more)

‘From the day you were born all you ever heard about was how you came from the “Blacks” Camp! You weren’t a person; you were just a thing that had to live out there to keep you away from decent people. It’s not too different today, either.’

... (read more)

Karobran (Togetherness) by the late Monica Clare is not a great (or even a good) novel, but it is an important work and, as such, deserves to be widely read.

... (read more)
Page 2 of 2