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The ‘Proper Settler’ and the ‘Native Mind’: Flogging Scandals in the Northern Territory, 1919 and 1932
by Ben Silverstein
In the interwar period, controversy attended allegations of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal workers in Australia, particularly in the Northern Territory. This chapter examines two such scandals, in the course of which many settlers argued, on the basis of their knowledge of the ‘native mind’, that violence was a privileged element of the proper relationship between settlers and Aboriginal people. Their instrumentalised claims about Aboriginal people—who were considered both childlike and subjects of an ordered normative system—echoed and contributed to a debate among anthropologists and psychologists regarding the nature of the ‘native mind’. The knowledge that incited violence was scientific; it was to become the official knowledge of Australian settler colonialism.
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Going Native: Converting Narratives in Tiwi Histories of Twentieth-Century Missions
by Laura Rademaker
Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia, is illustrative in that it uses Tiwi oral histories of the ‘conversion’ of a priest in order to invert assumptions about inculturation and conversion. They insist that they did not accommodate the new faith but that the Catholic Church itself converted in embracing them. Their history suggests that conversion can occur as communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples.
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From catalogues to contextual networks: reconfiguring collection documentation in museums
by Michael Jones
The idea that knowledge relies on interconnection is not new. However, despite the impact of technology, splits remain within and between museum collections. A range of factors have contributed to this, including legacy practice, the early tenets of the ‘museum archives movement,’ the professionalization of archivists and the continued focus on object management and item-level description in museum collection management systems. Though recent sector-wide movements, such as convergence and linked data, have done little to alleviate this issue within individual institutions, disciplines with strong links to cultural heritage (including archaeology, anthropology, folklore and history) have become increasingly interested in text, context, networks, relationality and entanglement. This article explores these conflicting trends of (administrative) separation and (theoretical) interconnection, and argues that archivists and museum professionals need to work together to develop collection documentation that better reflects contemporary practice. Such documentation should be based on aggregates as well as individual items, support organizational knowledge management, include the potential for ‘thick’ relationship descriptions, and be more effectively historicized and linked to evidence. Doing so will raise interesting challenges for the sector; but change will also produce important benefits, contributing to the significance of the objects preserved and helping to support future research.
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Found in Translation: Many Meaning on a North Australian Mission
by Laura Rademaker
Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.” In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia’s era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization’s position in their lives.
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Conflict, adaptation, transformation: Richard Broome and the practice of Aboriginal history Paperback
by Ben Silverstein
This collection traces the legacy of Richard Broome’s pathbreaking work in Aboriginal history by presenting innovative work that assesses and transforms a broad range of important debates that have captured both scholarly and popular attention in recent years.
The book brings together a range of prominent and emerging scholars who have been exploring the contours of the field to make notable contributions to histories of frontier violence and missions, Aboriginal participation in sport and education, ways of framing relationships with land, and the critical relevance of Aboriginal life history and memoir to re-considering Australian history.
Readers will be interested in the novel arguments on Indigenous networks and mobilities, of memoirs and histories, frontier violence, massacres, and the History Wars, as well as Noel Pearson and issues of paternalism in Aboriginal politics.
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Linking Items, Connecting Content: The Donald Thomson Collection
by Michael Jones
Cataloging standards practiced within the traditional library, archive and museum environments are not interoperable for the retrieval of objects within the shared online environment. Within today’s information environments, library, archive and museum professionals are becoming aware that all information objects can be linked together. In this way, information professionals have the opportunity to collaborate and share data together with the shard online cataloging environment, the end result being improved retrieval effectiveness. But the adaptation has been slow: Libraries, archives and museums are still operating within their own community-specific cataloging practices.
This book provides a historical perspective of the evolution of linking devices within the library, archive, and museums environments, and captures current cataloging practices in these fields. It offers suggestions for moving beyond community-specific cataloging principles and thus has the potential of becoming a springboard for further conversation and the sharing of ideas.
