NEW: Emerging scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies
NEW: Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies was initiated by Philip Morrissey from the University of Melbourne and Heidi Norman from the University of Technology Sydney in 2015. The journal provides a platform for publishing undergraduate scholarship in Indigenous studies and attracts high quality student work. Cover image Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018): 2018 Sydney Festival installation, 4000 Fish, Emily McDaniel. Photographer: Jamie Williams.
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The essays in this inaugural edition of New: Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies are the work of undergraduates from Social and Political Sciences, at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the Australian Indigenous Studies Program, University of Melbourne.
Copyright (c) 2016 Heidi Norman, Philip John Morrissey
The Human Reality: A struggle for recognition and justice
This paper follows a seminar discussion held 18th May 2014 on the topic: Recognition and Justice. The seminar, with reference to contemporary advocates of recognition and justice (Charles Taylor 1994, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth 2003), focused on the struggles for recognition: what it means to recognise and be recognised and the limited theoretical approaches to understanding recognition and justice. This latter point is the focus of this post-seminar paper. With specific reference to the contested meaning of ‘Welcome to Country’ (herein WTC) rituals I explore here the ideas of recognition and justice with respect to the experiences of Aboriginal people in Australia.
Copyright (c) 2015 NEW: Emerging scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies
Heather Goodall, Anti-Apartheid activist and historian has written an account of the life of Kevin Cook, not so much a biography as a portrait of a man whose involvement in Aboriginal affairs since the 1970s defines the term ‘mover and shaker’. Originally begun as a history project for the Rona Tranby Oral History Trust, this collaborative work tells a story about the politics and people of that time and the ground-breaking achievements that occurred with ‘Cookie’, as he was known, as a central player. The themes raised encompass racism, employment discrimination, feminism, the politics of liberation and in particular the long struggle of Aboriginal activism through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the present day.
The Form and Function of Narrative Perspective in Kim Scott’s True Country
The floating, shifting narrative of Kim Scott’s first novel True Country (1993) is one of the most captivating elements of the text that explores contemporary modes of Aboriginality. The narrative of True Country does not simply move the story from event to event; it underpins the moral of the text itself. With shifting perspectives and an unwavering sense of hope, the narrative embodies Billy’s acceptance into the community of Karnama, the home of his grandmother.
Bran Nue Dae: an essentially conservative work sacrificing politics for a Utopian reconciliation?
Bran Nue Dae, written by Jimmy Chi, directed by Andrew Ross, and with a score performed by Kuckles, uses the eccentricity of the musical theatre genre to communicate political messages in innovative and unexpected ways. Indeed, the play’s origins are in Broome, a city that as Peter Bibby articulates in the script’s introduction, ‘is such a long way from anywhere that it might as well be nowhere, which is perhaps a good starting point for surprises’ (Bibby 1991, p.6). Part of what characterises the text and makes it so surprising is its combination of non-naturalistic techniques and hard-hitting political statements. In this essay, I will first weigh up three separate issues; whether Bran Nue Dae can be considered conservative, the extent to which it is political, and the nature of its conclusion which, as the essay question suggests, presents a utopian reconciliation that compromises its political aims. Following this, I will assess the question as a whole, determining whether the musical’s conclusion jars or aligns with the rest of the text. Ultimately, I will argue that although the musical theatre genre enables Bran Nue Dae to be blatant and outlandish, the political issues it explores are incorporated into the text in complex, subtle and oftentimes abstract ways.
Copyright (c) 2015 Charlotte Salusinszky
An essay on the works of Western Desert women artists and Aboriginal culture
The works of Western Desert women artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, confront the viewer with the embodied reality of Aboriginal culture. These works are intercultural expressions of Aboriginal ways of being, imprinted within the frame of the canvas. This essay explores the implications of Kathleen Petyarre’s paintings for Settler Australians, and the potential for such works to create a greater appreciation of Country. I suggest that the acrylic paintings performed by Western Desert women artists can be understood as both expressions of the Dreaming and as evocations of sensibilities to be experienced and felt by Settler viewers. With reference to Jennifer Biddle’s Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (2007), I maintain that the work of Western Desert women artists departs from the dominant modes of representing Country, Dreaming narratives and Ancestors – instead articulating bodily experiences and expressions particular to Aboriginal women’s ways of being in and knowing the world.
‘The Millennial Generation Reading the Past through Literature’ - The Past Matters Festival, Montsalvat, 27 July 2013
The Past Matters Festival, Montsalvat, 27 July 2013 Forum Participants: James Burgmann-Milner, Fiannuala Morgan, John Morrissey, Jon Ricketson, Kate Leah Rendell
Copyright (c) 2016 Philip John Morrissey, James Burgmann-Milner, Fiannuala Morgan, John Morrissey, Jon Ricketson, Kate Leah Rendell
Same Same but Different: A history of the relationality between Aboriginal Australians and the Australian nation-state
The Australian polity’s approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has historically emphasised integration into the colonial nation-state. This essay argues that these paternalistic principles continue to inform 21st century policy to the detriment of meaningful progress towards coexistent Aboriginal sovereignty. Keywords Australian politics; Aboriginal sovereignty; self-determination; activism
The sizes of truth: how Ivan Sen’s Wind helps us understand a complex contemporary identity
Set in 1867, Ivan Sen’s short film Wind tells the story of a young Indigenous tracker named Jess who, in the process of hunting a wanted criminal with his sergeant, begins to trace the footsteps of a community and a heritage he has barely known. This story is set entirely in the mountains, with few references to the wider contexts of Jess and the sergeant, placing it almost completely apart from the plateaus of central ‘big’ truths (Read 2002, p. 54) that constitute the crux of Aboriginal Australian history. Jess’ story acts as a representation of one of the complex anomalies that were a part of early frontier life. It not only tells, but shows audiences that it’s just not that simple.
No healing without recognition: a review of Mark McKenna’s Moment of Truth
In late 2017, between the furore of the Commonwealth citizenship saga, Malcolm Turnbull quietly rejected the Uluru Statement from the Heart; a statement borne from days of deliberation between Indigenous leaders from across Australia as part of the Referendum Council. The statement called for constitutional reform enshrining the establishment of a ‘First Nations Voice’, a Makarrata Commission and, importantly, a treaty (Referendum Council 2017). It is with a blistering critique of Turnbull’s choice to reject the statement that Issue 69 of the Quarterly Essay, titled Moment of Truth (McKenna 2018), opens. Mark McKenna traverses modern Australia, drawing upon historians, academics, advisory bodies, and personal narratives to consider the role that both white and Indigenous history have had in forming today’s nation, delving into the erasure of key moments in Australia’s past and confronting our past and current violence towards Indigenous peoples.
The significance and influence of Aboriginal culture at Ballast Point Park, dually named Walama, is understated and subtle. Located on the traditional grounds of the Dharug-speaking Gadigal people, the park is diverse and unique in its landscape. Stepping off the road and into the rocky clay clearing, there is the distinct feeling of leaving one place and entering a new one. I notice first the red and orange tones that are lit up under the harsh sun as I cross the clearing to reach the shaded path. All paths snake down the rocky cliffs to the water's edge where you have a panoramic view of the harbour. The site is known for its post-European settlement industrial history and littered throughout the park are remnants of tanks, pipes, and concrete slabs that pay homage to this chapter. However, what is striking about this park is not the industrial remains themselves, but the way in which they have become interwoven and hidden among the native Australian plants.
Stephen Gapps’ The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony 1788-1817
Stephen Gapps’ The Sydney Wars covers the period of conflict in the Sydney Basin area between 1788 and 1817, detailing the various battles and massacres that took place in the early years of the Sydney colony. The book promotes itself as the first ‘detailed account’ of these conflicts in the Sydney area, and detailed it is. Gapps weaves together contemporary accounts from diaries, official dispatches to the British Empire, news reports and court testimony to present a thorough reckoning of the destruction dealt to lives and property across the three decades from first European contact. He paints a nuanced picture of the conflict which offers, in some respects, a dissenting voice in the narrative surrounding these frontier wars – a term Gapps himself takes some issue with.
Neocolonialism: the true intention behind the Northern Territory intervention
While colonialism in Australia has ‘officially’ ended, it is evident that its impact on Indigenous people has been enduring. This essay argues that, beyond simply being ‘legacies’ of colonialism, latter-day interventions by Australian governments such as the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act are an insidious form of neo-colonialism. Keywords NT intervention; neocolonialism; white paternalism; the colonial gaze
World travelling and speculative truth-telling: a review of Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman
I read Terra Nullius (Coleman 2017) after listening to an interview with Claire Coleman. She was intelligent, with a clear, striking voice that didn’t hide her discomfort, but challenged us to feel it too. She said: White people say that Australia is the lucky country, well…who is it lucky for? Because it’s certainly not lucky for us. People always talk about closing the gap, well I think the gap that needs to be closed is the gap between the fiction of Australia and the reality of Australia. The fiction of Australia is terra nullius. The reality is that terra nullius was actually a lie. (‘For us, happy endings feel dishonest’ 2017).
The Stolen Generations: competing histories
The high rate of removal of Indigenous children from their families has produced a devastating impact on Aboriginal communities. In discussing how an ongoing failure to appreciate the intergenerational impact of forced removals has led to a failure in policy as well as the continued removal of Indigenous children from their communities today, this essay argues the importance of acknowledging the complexity of the Stolen Generations over simplistic narratives that foster divisiveness. Keywords Stolen Generations; assimilation policy; history wars; interventionism
Constitutional recognition: French perspective
The Constitution of France is based on principles from the 1789 revolution, stating in its first article that it is an “indivisible republic” and that it “ensures the equality before the law of all citizens without distinction of origin, race or religion.” Growing up in such a unitary country (as opposed to multicultural), it was hard for me to completely grasp the idea of recognition of indigenous groups, of ethnic or cultural minorities. Yet, France recently recognised the existence of such local groups in territories outside the mainland – for instance, New-Caledonia. It mostly refers to memorial issues, reflecting on “the shadows of colonial times”, and further affirmative action. This draws on the concept of the ‘right to recognition’ theorised by Le Pourhiet (2014), with objective principles of cultural diversity and the grant of collective rights to more vulnerable groups.
Constitutional recognition: which way forward?
Though the topic is often evaded by mainstream news, the proposition of Indigenous constitutional recognition has been increasingly discussed within recent years and particularly so since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Act of 2013 was proposed under Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Several possible mechanisms for recognition have been proposed by government and Indigenous peoples, however the prevailing models to be fulfilled, if any, are yet to be known. In researching such mechanisms, I personally find myself to be confounded by the multiplicity of suggestions, complexity of needs from individual bodies, and the ramifications of enacting particular methodologies over others.
White Australia, Black Bodies: the use of Aboriginal bodies and artefacts in Australian public discourses
Indigenous bodies, artefacts and material cultures have largely been represented in the public sphere in ways that reflect and reinforce colonialist understandings of Aboriginality. This essay examines how discourses which position European whiteness in a place of primacy in direct contrast with an Indigenous ‘other’ continue to prevail in the contexts of museums, the art world and the tourism industry. Keywords the colonial gaze; othering; politics of representation
“When you walk here today, you walk among the spirits of our ancestors,” reads a brand-new Welcome To Country sign above the front desk of the La Perouse Museum, the text an evocative reminder of the resilience of Indigenous Australians in places where they have struggled for a voice. While this demonstrates a shift in recent years to acknowledging and valuing the Indigenous heritage of these places, an exploration of the museum makes the precedence given to eponymous explorer Lapérouse clear. This is a place where the French community has long celebrated their own place in Australia. However, despite their tens of thousands of years in the area, the addition of Aboriginal history is a recent one. If Aboriginal history can be considered a battlefield of conflicting accounts and perspectives, then the exhibits in this museum are the survivors of a long war.
I had walked past Victoria Park several times, seen it through the window from the bus on City Road, and sat on the grass at its edge just opposite Glebe Point Road, but never actually walked around it until the Aboriginal Political History Introductory Week excursion.
The site I chose to reflect on is Murramarang beach. This is an important place when thinking about Aboriginal political history, as it depicts life prior to colonisation but was also significant during colonisation. Murramarang would have been the carinya (‘happy home’) to either a single tribe or a meeting place between surrounding tribes, but my connection to this land lies in it being my second place of home.
Parramatta Girls: a review of the Riverside Theatre and the relevancy past events still have in contemporary Australia
Feminism and issues of violence against women are at the forefront of the contemporary world. However, although women are speaking out for themselves, there are still minority groups whose voices remain unheard. With the recent Women’s Marches and International Women’s Day, it is important to place emphasis on the mistreatment of all women throughout Australian history, particularly that of Aboriginal women, who have often had issues which have been ignored by the government and media. The Riverside Theatre (Parramatta Girls 2014) acknowledges the voices of Aboriginal women in their production of Alana Valentine’s Parramatta Girls (2007), a verbatim-style play that tells the true stories of women who grew up in a training home for girls. Through the plot device of memory, an integral theme throughout the performance, eight women meet in the old Parramatta Girl’s Home at a reunion, reflecting on their experiences they each had with each other and their determination to escape and survive the psychological, physical and sexual abuse inflicted on them as young girls.
Copyright (c) 2018 Georgina Stortenbeker
The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is “a rich and haunting allegory for all ages, all cultures” (Marsden & Tan 1998). The 32-page picture book is a reference to Australia’s colonial past, exploring the history between British colonisers and Australia’s Indigenous population.
The Settler and the Land: Using Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination to understand frontier violence in Australia’s colonial era
Whilst it is the heinous acts of physical violence that are often foregrounded when imagining frontier violence, it is the structural forces of colonialism that have had a continued effect on Aboriginal culture and identity. This essay will discuss the legitimacy of Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination in the face of frontier violence, examining the more insidious ways in which colonialism manifests itself in modern Australia. Keywords settler colonialism; frontier violence; Indigenous dispossession
Four Thousand Fish, curated by Kalari (South-West NSW) woman Emily McDaniel, is an exhibition that very precisely highlights the act of participation in sharing, shaping and taking responsibility in narratives. There are multiple overlapping aspects and commentaries that this exhibition touches upon; however, for the purposes of this review I am wanting to focus on how McDaniel goes about framing and shaping narrative, particularly with a narrative that has somewhat been hidden behind a colonial front, and highlight the importance of McDaniel’s telling of this story.
The silent narrative you may have missed in Jedda
Jedda, directed by Charles Chauvel and written by his wife Elsa Chauvel, was a landmark film for Australian cinema because of its groundbreaking firsts: it was the first film to cast Indigenous actors in lead roles, the first to be shot in colour, and the first Australian film to compete in the Cannes Film Festival. Jedda is largely of Australian historical interest as it offers an insight into race relations of the 1950s, ideas of Aboriginal assimilation, and inadvertently, the Stolen Generations.
Bringing the Truth Home: the role of oral history and testimony in building and fragmenting Australian collective history and the Stolen Generations
Australia’s fraught colonial past has made the search for a collective history exceptionally difficult; history wars surrounding policies of child removal in particular are a testament to the nation’s fractured memory. This essay examines the role of oral history in the promotion of both truth and healing – not only for separated Indigenous families, but also for the collective national identity which has suffered as a result of colonial Australia’s failure to pay heed to Indigenous voices. Keywords Stolen Generations; history wars; oral history
Colonial-capitalism and the shrinking possibilities for achieving Aboriginal equality and agency in Australia: a critical study of ‘economic’ strategy for social and political advancement
Subjectivity coded in Indigenous and non-Indigenous minds maintains a fictional spectre of Aboriginal deficiency and dependency. This essay argues that attempts to resist this narrative by economic means may serve in some ways to materially improve the lives of Indigenous peoples today, but are ultimately embedded in the western hegemony that continues to repress and inferiorise Aboriginal culture. Keywords settler colonialism; subjectification; self-determination; economism
The 1967 Referendum symbolised the political and legal emancipation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. However, despite the high hopes the referendum set out to achieve, the equivocation of the ‘yes’ vote over constitutional reform led to no real or clear-cut changes at all
In 2017, Nature, the international journal of science, published research that pushed the dawn of human occupation in Australia even further into deep time: an estimated 65,000 years ago (Clarkson et al. 2017). Inevitably, questions were posed about how this discovery might affect not only our understanding of Australia’s Indigenous past, but also the global story of human evolution. Billy Griffiths’ 2018 book, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, chronicles developments in the field of Aboriginal archaeology from the mid-twentieth century to the current day, and is therefore well-situated to address the possible implications of these new findings. Deep Time Dreaming is an invaluable read due to the way it demonstrates that the study of deep time is not an isolatable pursuit; rather, archaeology is humanistic and often profoundly political, carrying consequences for how we identify and interact with the present.