Aboriginal Studies Press

Monumental Disruptions could not be more timely. Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly present settlers – whom historian Patrick Wolfe denoted ‘colonisers who never left’ – with a handbook on the failings of mythologised colonial history and the negative ramifications of this mythical history to this day. They argue that this history-telling is structurally intrinsic to many ideologies held by settlers since their fraught but recent history on this continent began. Over the course of ten comprehensive chapters Carlson and Farrelly describe the history behind colonial monuments and their relevance to a modern Australia.

Family photographs add so much to Aboriginal autobiography. Aboriginal people will scan them to see who they know and what the buildings, clothes, and area looked like then. Photographs are an open invitation to connect with your people, no matter where they are from. 

In the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subject to the forced removal of their children by state authorities. Exemption certificates promised family safety, dignity, a choice of work, a passport to travel, and freedom. Too often, in practice, exemption also meant enhanced surveillance, family breakup, and new forms of racial discrimination and social segregation.

Protests, Land Rights and Riots examines indigenous politics in New South Wales in the 1980s. The discussion focuses on several protests, including the infamous 1987 ‘Brewarrina riot’, which followed the death of a young Aboriginal man in police custody, as well as a 1990 demonstration against amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (New South Wales). Morris, an anthropologist, provides the background to these and other events, and captures the tensions that characterised indigenous politics at the time, as well as the post-colonial ‘fantasies’ and ‘anxieties’ that infused the broader society around its bicentenary.

A Cautious Silence is about the establishment of anthropology as an academic and applied discipline in Australia from about 1920 until after World War II. During this period, anthropological research in Australia largely focused on indigenous Australia, New Guinea, Papua and some Pacific islands. A signal event marking the beginning of the period covered in the book was the foundation in 1921 of the Australian (rather than British) National Research Council (ANRC). Marking the end were the debates over the establishment of the Woomera Rocket Range and the consequences for Aborigines in the region. Geoffrey Gray’s afterword deals briefly with university and research politics in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) was a national organisation that existed, in one form or another, from 1958 to 1978. For the main part, it drew its members from a network of both black and white groups, from active citizens and from those who wanted to be counted as such.

Two recent books examine the impact and legacy of this organisation. Black and White Together, by Sue Taffe, provides a detailed overview of the organisation from an historian’s perspective, while Seeking Racial Justice is an ‘insider’s memoir’, written by one of its non-indigenous members, Jack Horner. Both books tell this story in the context of the political shift from segregation to assimilation policies (1938–61), from assimilation to integration (1959–67), and from integration to self-determination (1968–78).

For many Australians, Patrick Dodson is the guy with the land rights hat and flowing beard. With Paddy‘s Road: Life Stories of Patrick Dodson, Kevin Keeffe ensures that Dodson will also be remembered for being the first Aboriginal priest and for his contributions to the reconciliation movement.

Barbara Cummings’s history combines archival research, interviews with her peers, and autobiography to declare the common experiences of an Aboriginal sub-culture, the ex-inmates of the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin. She deems it ‘a first step in our healing process’. It is also an outstanding contribution to feminist and Aboriginal history.