Frances Peters-Little

Frances Peters-Little is a Kamilaroi/Uralarai woman and Research Fellow at ANU. Before coming to Canberra, she was a filmmaker for the ABC and left in 1995 after working on more than 18 documentaries as researcher, producer and director. The film she is best known for was Tent Embassy, which screened for the True Stories series on the ABC and won a Sundance Award. She was the Australian producer for the international documentary co-production the Storytellers of the Pacific series. Today Frances Peters-Little spends most of her time writing, and is currently in the final stages of her book entitled The Return of the Noble Savage: By Popular Demand. She is also working on her second book, the official biography on the life of her father, Jimmy Little, which is expected to be published by ABC Books. Her other projects include the ARC Discovery projects Unsettling Histories (2004) and A Historical Study of Indigenous Higher Education Centres in Australia (2002).

Passionate Histories »

Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia

Edited by: Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, John Docker

Publication date: September 2010

This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history. Each chapter throws fresh light on an aspect of history-making by or about Indigenous people, such as the extent of massacres on the frontier, the myth of Aboriginal male idleness, the controversy over Flynn of the Inland, the meaning of the Referendum of 1967, and the policy and practice of Indigenous child removal. For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.

Download for free

Indigenous Biography and Autobiography »

Edited by: Peter Read, Frances Peters-Little, Anna Haebich

Publication date: December 2008

In this absorbing collection of papers Aboriginal, Maori, Dalit and western scholars discuss and analyse the difficulties they have faced in writing Indigenous biographies and autobiographies. The issues range from balancing the demands of western and non-western scholarship, through writing about a family that refuses to acknowledge its identity, to considering a community demand not to write anything at all. The collection also presents some state-of-the-art issues in teaching Indigenous Studies based on auto/biography in Austria, Spain and Italy. For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.

Download for free