Australian History

Unfinished business

Item: Forgetting Aborigines
Author: Anthony Moran

by Anthony Moran •

December 2008–January 2009, no. 307

Forgetting Aborigines by Chris Healy

UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 256 pp

Australian History

Unfinished business

by Anthony Moran •

December 2008–January 2009, no. 307

Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliation process ground to a halt during the Howard government, Aboriginal issues receded into the background. They re-emerged spectacularly in 2006 with the cataloguing of widespread sexual and physical abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This was in the lead-up to the government’s Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory.

Anthony Moran

Anthony Moran is a lecturer in Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia. He teaches in the areas of ethnicity, race, indigenous issues, nationalism, qualitative research methods, political sociology, social policy, and community studies. He is the author of Australia: Nation, Belonging and Globalization (Routledge, 2005), the co-author (with Judith Brett) of Ordinary People’s Politics (Pluto Press Australia, 2006), and the co-editor (with Sean Watson) of Trust, Risk and Uncertainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He has published many articles in international journals on issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, indigenous/settler politics and relations, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. He is currently writing on multiculturalism in Australia.