Indigenous Studies

Morphy’s monograph is an instance of a problem in anthropological writing about Australian Aboriginal people, a problem of audiences. The public this book will reach (and please and enrich enormously) is international, made up of several thousand mostly Anglophone anthropologists students of art, particularly those researching or teaching about the contexts in which the art of non-Western peoples is created and first consumed. Yet the art of North East Arnhem Land (the Nhulunbuy/Yirrkala region) appeals to a much larger and more heterogeneous public than this. It is likely that Australians comprise a majority of this second public. Morphy, adviser to the Australian National Gallery in the later 1970s and early 1980s, can take some credit for that. And there is a third and even larger public still: those Australians who infrequently go to art galleries (they might spend a few hours in the ANG on a Canberra trip) but who are susceptible to a more informed perception of the subtlety, beauty and (most important) resilience of the classical heritage of Aboriginal culture.

If John Hewson leads the next Australian government, we are likely to see a reversal of the current government ban on mining at Coronation Hill and the lifting of other impediments to mining. Should the fight to preserve an indigenous right to negotiate other’s access to mineralised lands have to be renewed, these two books will make invaluable background reading. They document the awesome political responsibilities on nation-states wishing to encourage economic development but trying also to satisfy the legitimate and changing claims of the traditional owners of mineralised lands. National leader’s political commitment to indigenous rights is only one of the issues highlighted here. Of equal importance is the complex and changing attitudes of the landowners themselves.

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.

I first came across the name of Eric Michaels through a review article he published in the journal Art & Text titled ‘Para-Ethnography’. The article rigorously critiqued Chatwin’s The Songlines and Sally Morgan’s My Place, situating them as ‘para-ethnographic’ texts. It was very impressive. The note at the end remarked that ‘Eric died on 24 August 1988 after a long period of illness’. I heard later on that he had died of AIDS.

This book is a collection of papers from the first Aboriginal Writer’s Conference, held at Murdoch University in February 1983. Despite the long (unexplained) lapse between the conference and the appearance of this book, the papers raise a number of urgent and complex problems, for writers and commentators.

Keith Willey died on 6 September 1984. He had just submitted the manuscript of what was to be his last book. A study of Australian humour in adversity titled You Might As Well Laugh Mate, it summed up the man, not least in his last days. Sardonic, self-effacing, unashamedly Australian.

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.

When I was a small boy in Hobart, my mates and I would often go down to the Tasmanian Museum after school; and one of the exhibits that interested us most was what we called ‘the human skeleton’. It stood in a glass case on the stairs, and it was only when we were older that we took in the fact that these were the remains of ‘Queen’ Trucanini, last of the Tasmanian Aborigines. There was no general notion abroad then that there was anything wrong with exhibiting these bones; but I remember a vague sense of unease – of being in the presence of something shameful. Such a sense exists in all of us; but there is no god so powerful as science in persuading men to suppress it.