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Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum
by Mike Jones
Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of polyphonic, relational thinking on collections documentation.
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Narlim’s Fingerprints: Aboriginal Histories and Rock Art
by Sally May, Laura Rademaker, Joakim Goldhann, Paul Taçon and Julie Narndal Gumurdu
This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Aboriginal rock art artists, drawing together insights from the disciplines of archaeology and biography, as well as from Indigenous knowledge-holders, in order to explore the life and work of a relatively unknown rock painter from western Arnhem Land in Australia: Narlim (born c. 1909)
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Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines by Gay’wu Group of Women
by Ann McGrath
It is not very often a book comes along that I cannot stop quoting. Indeed, in writing this review, rather than interpreting the book in an academic style review, I was tempted to simply share appealing excerpts. Though it would be difficult to choose which ones, for there are so many.
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Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology
by Mike Jones
In the two decades since the first edition of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies there has been a flood of work exploring the decolonisation of history, education, pedagogy, universities, maps, landscapes, nature, literature, museums, health and healthcare, diets – the list goes on. Into this crowded market comes Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, edited by Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem,
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‘Throwing Mud’ on Questions of Sovereignty: Race and Northern Arguments over White, Chinese, and Aboriginal Labour, 1905–12
by Ben Silverstein
This article addresses two arguments about Chinese settlers in the Northern Territory. The first, in 1905, was sparked by criticisms of Chinese mining practices and accusations that Chinese people contaminated those Aboriginal people with whom they came into contact. The second was prompted by the imposition, in 1910–11, of restrictions on Chinese rights to work and employ in the Territory. Both were opposed by the Chinese, who represented themselves as deserving and indispensable settlers who had made their home in the Northern Territory. The article argues that these arguments demonstrate the centrality of Aboriginal people to settler practices of being and belonging. Placing Indigeneity and migration in uneasy relation, it examines the emergence of racialised modes of representation as ways of both producing and obscuring sovereignties.
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‘All things will outlast us’: how the Indigenous concept of deep time helps us understand environmental destruction
by Ann McGrath
The bushfire royal commission is examining ways Indigenous land and fire management could improve Australia’s resilience to national disasters. On the face of it, this offers an opportunity to embrace Indigenous ways of knowing. But one traditional practice unlikely to be examined is the Indigenous concept of “deep time”. This concept offers all Australians a blueprint for understanding the land we live on.
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Terra nullius interruptus: Captain James Cook and absent presence in First Nations art
by Bruce Buchan and Eddie Synot
Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.
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Anthropocene Time
by Bruce Buchan
Humanity is both a collective noun and a moral aspiration. Tenuously subsisting between these meanings lies our shared fate in the Anthropocene, the era named for the indelible traces humanity has now inscribed into the archaic record of geological time. Humans, along with the many species and ecosystems on which their futures also depend, are rapidly running out of time.
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Thinking with and beyond settler colonial studies: new histories after the postcolonial
by Jane Carey & Ben Silverstein
The past two decades have seen the dramatic emergence and, according to some accounts, the seeming rise to dominance of settler colonial studies across a broad range of disciplines. As an approach has become a field, and has perhaps become institutionalised, a series of critiques and debates has prompted both revision and rearticulation. This special issue reflects on the current state of what might now be called the ‘field’ of settler colonial studies. It showcases new directions in scholarship in North America and Australia, regions which have been pivotal in the articulation of settler colonialism as a distinct political, territorial, and epistemological phenomenon.
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Reading sovereignties in the shadow of settler colonialism: Chinese employment of Aboriginal labour in the Northern Territory of Australia
by Ben Silverstein
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignties alongside each other. By examining the imposition of restrictions on Chinese people’s capacity to work and to employ Aboriginal labour in Darwin around 1911, I locate a racialised labour politics and capitalism as central to the obstruction and production of sovereignties. In doing so, this article engages with two recent criticisms of settler colonial studies: one that impresses upon scholars the need to write not only of settlers but also of Indigenous peoples; and another that insists on attending to the specific conditions of settlers of colour or precariously racialised migrants to settler colonies.
