The Politics of Traditional Culture under Australian Settler Colonialism 1963–2007

Description

The Politics of Traditional Culture under Australian Settler Colonialism 1963–2007 interrogates the deployment of the term ‘traditional culture’ within Indigenous affairs discourse from the 1963 Bark Petitions to the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention. In so doing, this critically important book establishes how a shifting and malleable discourse on Aboriginality operated as a key method of engagement between the Australian state and First Nations peoples. Over a forty-year period, ‘traditional culture’ was increasingly employed by First Nations and settler actors in diverse and often contradictory ways. Throughout politics, policy, academia and media, ‘traditional culture’ emerged as a foundational political concept, central to the granting or retracting of rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Understanding this contested discourse around ‘traditional culture’ helps to reveal the complexities of settler responses to Indigenous peoples’ aspirations around sovereignty, self-government and Country. By exposing this discourse, this book speaks to issues that strike at the heart of modern Australian national identity, revealing the ultimately ambiguous and fickle nature of settler sovereignty.