Publications

by Ann McGrath

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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.

by Bruce Buchan and Eddie Synot

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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.

by Bruce Buchan

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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.

by Jane Carey & Ben Silverstein

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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.

by Ben Silverstein

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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.

by Laura Rademaker

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Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.

edited by Ann McGrath

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Mickey Dewar: Champion of History Across Many Genres
Edited by: Ann McGrath

Mickey Dewar made a profound contribution to the history of the Northern Territory, which she performed across many genres. She produced high‑quality, memorable and multi-sensory histories, including the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the reinterpretation of Fannie Bay Gaol. Informed by a great love of books, her passion for history was infectious. As well as offering three original chapters that appraise her work, this edited volume republishes her first book, In Search of the Never-Never. In Dewar’s comprehensive and incisive appraisal of the literature of the Northern Territory, she provides brilliant, often amusing insights into the ever-changing representations of a region that has featured so large in the Australian popular imagination.

by Michael Jones

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In 2017 archaeological evidence was published which indicates that modern humans first arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago. Through the countless generations since, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples built deep connections to the landscape, developed rich material culture infused with story and myth, and used oral and ceremonial traditions to transmit knowledge over thousands of years. Yet, since European invasion at the end of the eighteenth century, the provenance of ethnographic and institutional collections has largely been documented with reference to white collectors and colonial institutions. Attitudes are starting to change. Recent decades have seen significant moves away from the idea of the authoritative institution toward relational museums and the co-creation of knowledge. But the structure and content of much museum documentation continues to lag behind contemporary attitudes. This paper looks at the documentation of Australian ethnographic and anthropological collections through the lens of changing perspectives on provenance, including archival notions of parallel and societal provenance. When placed in the context of recent developments in material culture theory, these collections help to highlight the limitations of existing documentation. The paper concludes with a call for community involvement and a more relational approach to documentation which better encompasses the complexities of provenance and the entangled institutional, archival, oral, and community perspectives that accumulate around artefacts in museums.

by Ann McGrath

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When Garry Smith visited Western Australia’s Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in 2013 to retrieve copies of his great-grandmother’s death certificate, he was shocked. The word “Aboriginal” had been removed. Previously, when he had searched online, he had found a certificate from 1915, originally inscribed “Kitty Aboriginal”; in the printed copy, it was just “Kitty.” When Smith and a relative of his asked why the word had been removed, they were told that it was because “Aboriginal” was an “offensive” term. Smith’s great-grandmother’s identity had been “whited” out. Smith said later that the erasure made him feel sick, as if he was expected to be ashamed of being Aboriginal. He also feared that this might create more obstacles for those who make native title claims to Australian land and waters…

by Laura Rademaker

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In the 1950s, anthropologist Jane Goodale had bright hopes for her informant Happy Cook, an Aboriginal girl from the Tiwi Islands in North Australia, who she considered constrained by paternalistic government policies. Goodale was devastated witnessing Cook’s suffering over following decades. Looking at Goodale’s feelings of friendship turned to grief over the second half of the twentieth century, this article reveals a crisis of self-understanding among researchers in late twentieth-century Australia. This grief, originally private for Goodale, became increasingly public and performed in white anthropologists’ discourse as they wrote on Aboriginal communities’ experience. Goodale later concluded that this supposedly new era was, in many ways, similar to what had come before, a conclusion that brought on a grief shared by many of her generation. Her experience reveals how ethnographers’ subjective dilemmas and their performances of anti-racism through friendship shifted as they entered what they hoped to be a post-colonial context.