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The Polygamy Question: Missions, Marriage, and Assimilation
by Laura Rademaker
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.
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‘In Search of the Never-Never’
edited by Ann McGrath
Mickey Dewar: Champion of History Across Many Genres
Edited by: Ann McGrathMickey 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.
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Collections in the Expanded Field: Relationality and the Provenance of Artefacts and Archives
by Michael Jones
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.
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‘See No Evil’
by Ann McGrath
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…
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White grief, happy friendship: Jane Goodale and emotional anthropological research
by Laura Rademaker
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.
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Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting traditions
by Laura Rademaker
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V follows the spatial, cultural, and intellectual changes in dissenting identity and practice in the twentieth century, as these once European traditions globalized. While in Europe dissent was often against the religious state, dissent in a globalizing world could redefine itself against colonialism or other secular and religious monopolies. The contributors trace the encounters of dissenting Protestant traditions with modernity and globalization; changing imperial politics; challenges to biblical, denominational, and pastoral authority; local cultures and languages; and some of the century’s major themes, such as race and gender, new technologies, and organizational change. In so doing, they identify a vast array of local and globalizing illustrations which will enliven conversations about the role of religion, and in particular Christianity.
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Governing natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia’s north
by Ben Silverstein
In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory. By the late 1930s, Australian settlers were coming to understand the Northern Territory as a colonial formation requiring a new form of government. Responding to crises of social reproduction, public power, and legitimacy, they re-thought the scope of settler colonial government by drawing on both the art of indirect rule and on a representational economy of Indigenous elimination to develop a new political dispensation that sought to incorporate and consume Indigenous production and sovereignties. This book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in a broader governmental context.
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Aborigines more popular than Captain Cook?
by Ann McGrath
Professor Ann McGrath AM says Captain Cook was not always popular with the Australian public.
The crowd celebrating Australian federation in 1901, at the re-enactment of Cook’s 1770 Landing, actually cheered for his opponents.
Waiting for the landing show to begin on 7 January, many in the 5,000-strong audience tired of standing in the hot sun. To amuse themselves, they drank and let off fireworks.
Then suddenly, many stormed the roped-off VIP area, grabbing the best seats. Others snatched fine foods. One man was seen gnawing at a huge turkey skeleton.
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Mickey Sue Dewar OAM (1956–2017)
by Ann McGrath
Mickey was born on New Year’s Day, 1956, in Caulfield, Melbourne to Elizabeth (née Taylor) and Geoffrey Dewar. She majored in classics, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Honours at the University of Melbourne in 1978. She gained a Graduate Diploma of Education from the Darwin Community College (now Charles Darwin University) and a Master of Arts from the University of New England. She was awarded the first Doctorate from Charles Darwin University in 1994, and completed a Masters of Library and Information Management at the University of South Australia in 2015.
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Review: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony 1788–1817
by Ben Silverstein
Recent years have seen the publication of a good deal of compellingly sensitive histories of the early years of British invasion and settlement in and around Warrane or Sydney Cove. Historians have been attracted to the possibilities inherent in stories of mutual misunderstanding and grasping negotiation, moving us towards a new national origin story, one that has emphasised entanglement and accommodation on a middle ground that was tragically to be overtaken by conflict as the British expanded, invading the hinterland and engaging in a series of increasingly brutal frontier wars.
