Books
Browse or search ANU Press' range of books or find out more about the publications' authors and co-publishers. Download the book for free or buy a print-on-demand copy.
Displaying results 21 to 30 of 87.
Rebellion at Coranderrk »
Authored by: Diane Barwick
Publication date: August 2024
More than a century ago an Aboriginal community in Victoria campaigned for recognition of their right to occupy and control the small acreage they had farmed for 25 years. Others wanted to develop this tract. Government spokesmen denied that the occupants had inherited any rights to this land and declared that, anyway, they were not really Aborigines. This book is about the rebellion at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station between 1874 and 1886. It describes how Coranderrk families fought to keep their land. To explain why they fought I must begin with the years before, to show what this ‘miserable spadeful of ground’ meant to them, and how they came to be there. Finally, I sketch what ultimately happened.
First published in 1998, 12 years after the death of its author Diane Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk was an attempt to rectify some of the injustices of the past two-hundred-plus years in Australia, and to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
It remains acutely relevant.
This book includes the names and images of people who are now deceased.
‘All Australians have good reason to be grateful to Diane Barwick.’
— H. C. Coombs
‘The painstaking research, the perceptive judgements of people and events, and the brilliant prose combine to produce a magnificent account of the Kulin and their European “administrators”. The book is simply packed with historical reinterpretation and vivid reconstructions of families and individuals.’
— C. T. Stannage
‘The author’s research found that Coranderrk is an excellent example of … an Aboriginal (farming) success story. It is very relevant to modern land-rights protests throughout Australia.’
— Canberra Times
Culture in Translation »
The anthropological legacy of R. H. Mathews
Edited by: Martin Thomas
Publication date: September 2007
R. H. Mathews (1841–1918) was an Australian-born surveyor and self-taught anthropologist. From 1893 until his death in 1918, he made it his mission to record all ‘new and interesting facts’ about Aboriginal Australia. Despite falling foul with some of the most powerful figures in British and Australian anthropology, Mathews published some 2200 pages of anthropological reportage in English, French and German. His legacy is an outstanding record of Aboriginal culture in the Federation period.
This first edited collection of Mathews’ writings represents the many facets of his research, ranging from kinship study to documentation of myth. It include eleven articles translated from French or German that until now have been unavailable in English. Introduced and edited by Martin Thomas, who compellingly analyses the anthropologist, his milieu, and the intrigues that were so costly to his reputation, Culture in Translation is essential reading on the history of cross-cultural research.
The translations from the French are by Mathilde de Hauteclocque and from the German by Christine Winter.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Indigenous Mobilities »
Across and Beyond the Antipodes
Edited by: Rachel Standfield
Publication date: June 2018
This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion.
‘This volume is the first to take up three challenges in histories of Indigenous mobilities. First, it analyses both mobility and emplacement. Challenging stereotypes of Indigenous people as either fixed or mobile, chapters deconstruct issues with ramifications for contemporary politics and analyses of Indigenous society and of rural and national histories. As such, it is a welcome intervention in a wide range of urgent issues. Second, by examining Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand, this volume is an innovative step in removing the artificial divisions that have arisen from “national” histories. Third, the collection connects the experiences of colonised Indigenous peoples with those of their colonisers, shifting the long-held stereotypes of Indigenous powerlessness. Chapters then convincingly demonstrate the agency of colonised peoples in shaping the actions and the mobility itself of the colonisers.
While the volume overall is aimed at opening up new research questions, and so invites later and even more innovative work, this volume will stand as an important guide to the directions such future work might take.’
— Heather Goodall, Professor Emerita, UTS
Engaging Indigenous Economy »
Debating diverse approaches
Edited by: Will Sanders
Publication date: April 2016
The engagement of Indigenous Australians in economic activity is a matter of long-standing public concern and debate. Jon Altman has been intellectually engaged with Indigenous economic activity for almost 40 years, most prominently through his elaboration of the concept of the hybrid economy, and most recently through his sustained and trenchant critique of policy. He has inspired others also to engage with these important issues, both through his writing and through his position as the foundation Director of The Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy research from 1990 to 2010.
The year 2014 saw both Jon’s 60th birthday and his retirement from CAEPR. This collection of essays marks those events. Contributors include long‑standing colleagues from the disciplines of economics, anthropology and political science, and younger scholars who have been inspired by Jon’s approach in developing their own research projects. All point to the complexity as well as the importance of engaging with Indigenous economic activity — conceptually, empirically and as a strategic concern for public policy.
In the Eye of the Beholder »
What Six Nineteenth-century Women Tell Us About Indigenous Authority and Identity
Authored by: Barbara Dawson
Publication date: November 2014
This book offers a fresh perspective in the debate on settler perceptions of Indigenous Australians. It draws together a suite of little known colonial women (apart from Eliza Fraser) and investigates their writings for what they reveal about their attitudes to, views on and beliefs about Aboriginal people, as presented in their published works. The way that reader expectations and publishers’ requirements slanted their representations forms part of this analysis.
All six women write of their first-hand experiences on Australian frontiers of settlement. The division into ‘adventurers’ (Eliza Fraser, Eliza Davies and Emily Cowl) and longer-term ‘settlers’ (Katherine Kirkland, Mary McConnel and Rose Scott Cowen) allows interrogation into the differing representations between those with a transitory knowledge of Indigenous people and those who had a close and more permanent relationship with Indigenous women, even encompassing individual friendship. More pertinently, the book strives to reveal the aspects, largely overlooked in colonial narratives, of Indigenous agency, authority and individuality.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
In Good Faith? »
Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825-1855
Authored by: Jessie Mitchell
Publication date: January 2011
In the early decades of the 19th century, Indigenous Australians suffered devastating losses at the hands of British colonists, who largely ignored their sovereignty and even their humanity. At the same time, however, a new wave of Christian humanitarians were arriving in the colonies, troubled by Aboriginal suffering and arguing that colonists had obligations towards the people they had dispossessed. These white philanthropists raised questions which have shaped Australian society ever since.
Did Indigenous Australians have rights to land, rationing, education and cultural survival? If so, how should these be guaranteed, and what would people have to give up in return? Would charity and paternalism lead to effective government or dismal failure – to a powerful defence of an oppressed people, or to new forms of oppression?
In Good Faith? paints a vivid picture of life on Australia’s first missions and protectorate stations, examining the tensions between charity and rights, empathy and imperialism, as well as the intimacy, dependence, resentment and obligations that developed between missionary philanthropists and the people they tried to protect and control. In this work, Mitchell brings to life hitherto neglected moments in Australia’s history, and traces the origins of dilemmas still present today.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Passionate Histories »
Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia
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.
The Two Rainbow Serpents Travelling »
Mura track narratives from the ‘Corner Country’
Authored by: Jeremy Beckett, Luise Hercus
Publication date: September 2009
The ‘Corner Country’, where Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales now converge, was in Aboriginal tradition crisscrossed by the tracks of the mura, ancestral beings, who named the country as they travelled, linking place to language. Reproduced here is the story of the two Ngatyi, Rainbow Serpents, who travelled from the Paroo to the Flinders Ranges and back as far as Yancannia Creek, where their deep underground channels linked them back to the Paroo. Jeremy Beckett recorded these stories from George Dutton and Alf Barlow in 1957. Luise Hercus, who has worked on the languages in the area for many years, has collaborated with Jeremy Beckett to analyse the names and identify the places.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Indigenous Biography and Autobiography »
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.
Transgressions »
Critical Australian Indigenous histories
Edited by: Ingereth Macfarlane, Mark Hannah
Publication date: December 2007
This volume brings together an innovative set of readings of complex interactions between Australian Aboriginal people and colonisers. The underlying theme is that of ‘transgression’, and Michel Foucault’s account of the necessary dynamic that exists between transgression and limit. We know what constitutes the limit, not by tracing or re-stating the boundaries, but by crossing over them. By exploring the mechanisms by which limits are set and maintained, unexamined cultural assumptions and dominant ideas are illuminated. We see the expectations and the structures that inform and support them revealed, often as they unravel. Such illuminations and revelations are at the core of the Australian Indigenous histories presented in this collection.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.