Indigenous Studies
Dreaming Ecology: Nomadics and Indigenous ecological knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia by Deborah Bird Rose
Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal people and colonial commemorations in so-called Australia by Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly
Why did Australia vote against the Voice referendum?
... (read more)The defeat of the proposal in the recent Aboriginal constitutional referendum was unsurprising given the forces at work, which I discussed in ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023). Most importantly, it lacked the support of the Liberal and National parties once their leaders decided to oppose it, largely for partisan purposes.
... (read more)Do you know whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised in your state Constitution? If you responded with a mental shrug and a muttered ‘No idea’, then you would fall within the vast majority. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, each Australian state amended its Constitution to insert recognition of their Indigenous peoples. Yet the effect has been negligible and hardly anyone knows it happened. Why?
... (read more)Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective by Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh
Tiwi Story by Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker & The Old Songs Are Always New by Genevieve Campbell with Tiwi Elders and knowledge holders
The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages edited by Claire Bowern
Like the nation at large, the University of Melbourne has a troubling history. Stretching back to Victoria’s early colonisation, that history is entwined with the oppression and dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
... (read more)Who’s your mob?
In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner lamented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples had been omitted from narratives of the nation’s past. Contending that this omission was ‘a structural matter’, he likened Australian history to ‘a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. He proposed that the kinds of stories which could bring Indigenous history into view for Australian readers would focus on the lives of individuals.
... (read more)