Liz Conor
Liz Conor is an ARC Future Fellow at La Trobe University. She is the author of Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWAP, 2016) and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is the editor of Aboriginal History, a columnist at New Matilda, and has published widely in academic and mainstream press on gender, race and representation.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4516-8379
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 42 »
Edited by: Ingereth Macfarlane
Publication date: December 2018
In this volume, Peter Sutton provides a survey of the articles published by linguist Dr Luise Hercus (1926–2018) in Aboriginal History, honouring the contribution she has made to the journal since its inception. The seven articles this year highlight the wealth of sources that feed into historical research of Indigenous Australia. The role of performance in the events organised by the National Aborigines Day Observance Committee (NADOC) in 1957–67 in Sydney shows up the contest between state assimilationist goals and Indigenous participants’ insistence on distinction, continuity and survival (Jonathon Bollen and Anne Brewster). The then radical agenda – in a protectionist policy regime – of the advocacy group, the Aborigines’ Protection League in South Australia in the 1920s–30s, is examined in a detailed study of the group’s campaigns and campaigners (Rob Foster). A picture of colonial reception of Aboriginal performance and the public assertion of local Aboriginal cultural priorities in 1893 Darwin is developed in the historical contextualisation of a collection of Aboriginal artefacts found in the Marischal Museum, Aberdeen (Gaye Sculthorpe). A nuanced analysis of the relationship between the Catholic Benedictine Mission at New Norcia and the Western Australian Native Welfare Department draws on the correspondence between the Abbot of New Norcia and A.O. Neville (Elicia Taylor). A large body of reader responses to a recent online article on the deep history of Aboriginal Australia provides a way to map the strengths and weaknesses in the general Australian public’s apprehension of that long history (Lynette Russell and Billy Griffiths). A spatial history argues against the concept of ‘fringe camps’ and for a pattern of demonstrable continuities between precolonial, colonial and recent Aboriginal people’s favoured camp places and the locations of urban contemporary park spaces in Brisbane and townships in south-eastern Queensland (Ray Kerkhove). In the format of an interview, the themes concerning the writing of Aboriginal history and contemporary political debates that are developed in Tim Rowse’s recent book Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 (2017) are explored (Miranda Johnson and Tim Rowse).
Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Download for free
Not available for purchase
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 41 »
Edited by: Ingereth Macfarlane, Liz Conor
Publication date: December 2017
The articles in Volume 41 bring to light historical sources from the colonial frontier in Tasmania (Nicholas Brodie and Kristyn Harman) and South Australia (Skye Kirchauff) to provoke reassessments of colonial attitudes and expectations. Karen Hughes brings into focus little-known, intimate aspects of Indigenous women’s experience with African American servicemen on the World War II Australian home front. Diana Young’s study of accounts of Pitjantjatjara women’s careful productions in the Ernabella craft rooms in the mid-twentieth century deepens our understanding of a relatively neglected aspect of the art history of ‘first generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples’. Nikita Vanderbyl explores records of tourists’ visits to Aboriginal reserves in the late 1800s and early 1900s, focusing on the emotive aspects of the visits, and making the links between such tourism and colonialism. Janice Newton provides a close examination of the cross-cultural signs implicated in a documented ceremonial performance in early Port Phillip. Heather Burke, Lynley Wallis and their collaborators compare a reconstructed stone building in Richmond, Queensland, with other reputedly fortified structures, and find that the historical and structural evidence for this interpretation are equivocal, pointing to imaginaries of the violent frontier as much as tangible experience.
Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Download for free
Not available for purchase
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 40 »
Edited by: Liz Conor
Publication date: December 2016
In this volume, Katharine Booth and Lisa Ford present the details of a watershed Northern Territory legal decision. Angela Lapham challenges our understanding of the term ‘assimilation’ in her study of Stanley Middleton. Charmaine Robson looks at Australian leprosy control policy in the twentieth century. The ‘entanglements’ of Aboriginal and European people within farming and pastoral industries on Yorke Peninsula (Guuranda), South Australia, are recorded by Belinda Liebelt, Amy Roberts, Clem O’Loughlin and Doug Milera. The positive memories of Aboriginal residents on missions are interrogated by Laura Rademaker. She sifts through their petitions to mission authorities in the 1960s, uncovering the rare instances of Aboriginal voices asserted within the missionary archives. In a collaborative article, Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, Vanessa Sullivan and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation (RMMAC) investigate Aboriginal–European early contact on the western Central Murray. Adopting a landscape perspective, they visualise the sociospatial processes of violent engagement that occurred between Aboriginal and European people along the Overland Stock Route. Archibald Meston, Southern Protector of Queensland Aborigines from 1898 to 1904, is brought to life by Judith McKay and Paul Memmott. Meston was the major architect of Queensland’s 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Meston’s venture as a showman of live Indigenous people, who he publicly paraded as ‘noble savages’, is shown to have shaped his policies and informed this influential legislation. In 1838, French Captain Abel du Petit-Thouars recorded his impressions of Australia. Colin Dyer provides a translation of the captain’s journal, providing a new resource in English for researchers.
Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Download for free
Not available for purchase
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 39 »
Edited by: Liz Conor
Publication date: December 2015
Volume 39 presents a special section on Aboriginal war service, edited by Allison Cadzow, Kristyn Harman and Noah Riseman. The contributors reappraise narratives and foster new avenues of inquiry, particularly on the impact of war service on families and communities, and explore how the entrance of Aboriginal men into Australian military service disrupted accustomed notions of defence of country. John Maynard extends this service back to the South African Anglo-Boer War. Andrea Gerrard and Kristyn Harman track the aftermath of the First World War for Tasmanian soldiers of Aboriginal descent. Philippa Scarlett challenges the ‘mateship myth’ of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) of the First World War. The denial of repatriation benefits fuelled Aboriginal people’s post-war disenchantment and the political agitation of the 1920s and 1930s, as Jessica Horton shows. She finds it was demand for land exacerbated by the Soldier Settlement Scheme that precipitated the closure of reserves, creating a new ‘home front’ for Gunditjmara veterans resisting ongoing dispossession. Kristyn Harman looks at correspondence between white women and Aboriginal soldiers during the Second World War as overseen by the Aborigines Uplift Society’s national comforts auxiliary.
In the other articles in this volume, Sharon Delmege investigates policy implementation at Allawah Grove Native Settlement (1957–69). Anne O’Brien focuses on provisioning at Ernabella mission, South Australia in 1937. Steven Anderson looks at Indigenous executions in colonial South Australia, where public hangings were reintroduced, but only for Indigenous capital offenders. Greg Blyton casts light on the little-known story of Harry Brown, guide to Ludwig Leichhardt on two expeditions into the interior. Robin Barrington provides a corrective to the colonial visual archive in her examination of public constructions of Yamaji individuals by Daisy Bates and Alexander Morton.
Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Download for free
Not available for purchase