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Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 47 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: September 2024
This volume opens with Joakim Goldhahn, Sally May, and Jeffrey Lee’s study of renowned Badmardi artist Nayombolmi, best known for his rock art but here considered as an artist who produced a number of bark paintings for collectors in the 1950s and 1960s. They show us how his representation of public stories of Spirit or Ancestral Beings emerges from a negotiation between the artist, collectors, and dealers, shaping the forms in which he shared Badmardi story.
The following two articles take up the theme of negotiation in contexts of segregation. Sam Furphy describes Yorta Yorta memory activism relating to Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Yorta Yorta Country in 1954, considering memories of the fence that was erected to place Yorta Yorta people beyond the Queen’s view and prevent any direct relationship between peoples. Cameron Raynes continues to study segregation by considering the disastrous health impacts of the colour bar that excluded Aboriginal people of the Point Pearce Station from the nearby Wallaroo and Maitland Hospitals in the early-mid twentieth century.
The next articles turn to relationships between Aboriginal people and colonists in Queensland. In a collaboratively written article, Alice Buhrich, Lewis Richards, Brian Bing, Jimmy Richards, Sharon Prior, Jenny Lacey, Tania Casey and Megan Mosquito narrate a history of past and ongoing Ewamian resistance to European invasion that stands in stark contrast to myths of Ewamian disappearance. Rebeka Manning and Sally Babidge read archives of Queensland pastoral stations for traces of Aboriginal women’s and girls’ domestic service, taking these hints as occasions for Aboriginal storytelling.
The final article, co-authored by members of the Aboriginal History Archive Will Bracks, Coen Brown, Clare Land, Gary Foley, John Hawkes, Kim Kruger, Rochelle le Pere, Natasha Ritchie and Shannon Woodcock, describes the work of that archive to produce a historical understanding that can provide the basis for describing and enacting Aboriginal self-determination.
The volume also includes a series of book reviews, as well as reflections on the life and work of Niel Gunson and Gordon Briscoe, two key figures in Aboriginal History whose influence is evident throughout these pages.
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
A Grammar of Warlmanpa »
Authored by: Mitchell Browne
Publication date: 2024
As spoken by Bunny Naburula, Danny Cooper, Dick Foster, Donald Graham, Doris Kelly, Elizabeth Johnson, George Brown, Gladys Brown, Jack Walker, Jessie Cooper, Jimmy Newcastle, Julie Kelly, Lofty Japaljarri, Louie Martin, May Foster, Norah Graham, Penny Kelly, Penny Williams, Selina Grant, Susannah Nelson, Topsy Walker, Toprail Japaljarri and William Graham.
This volume is a descriptive analysis of Warlmanpa, a highly endangered language traditionally spoken northwest of the town of Tennant Creek, where most of the remaining speakers now live.
This grammatical description is based on language work carried out by community members and linguists since 1952, and is the first published reference grammar of the language.
The major areas of analysis include phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume also provides description of typologically notable features, including: a two-way stop contrast at each place of articulation; a complex second-position auxiliary system containing participant and tense/mood/aspect information; associated motion; and a lack of evidence for noun phrases.
This volume lays the foundation for future Warlmanpa language work.
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Dreaming Ecology »
Nomadics and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia
Edited by: Darrell Lewis, Margaret Jolly
Authored by: Deborah Bird Rose
Publication date: May 2024
In the author’s own words, Dreaming Ecology ‘explores a holistic understanding of the interconnections of people, country, kinship, creation and the living world within a context of mobility. Implicitly it asks how people lived so sustainably for so long’. It offers a telling critique of the loss of Indigenous life, human and non-human, in the wake of white settler colonialism and this becoming ‘cattle country’. It offers a fresh perspective on nomadics grounded in ‘footwalk epistemology’ and ‘an ethics of return sustained across different species, events, practices and scales’.
‘This is the final and most substantial of Debbie’s love letters to the Aboriginal people of the Victoria River Downs. I say this because there is such a sense of reverence, wonder and respect throughout the book. The introduction of concepts of double-death, footwalk epistemology, wild country … are not only organising ideas but characterisations arising from what Debbie hears, sees and feels of herself and Aboriginal others … I think of it in terms of love, if love is care, reciprocal respect, deep connectivity and a strong desire to never make less of the people she chose to commit herself to.’
—Richard Davis
‘This book was a pleasure to read, filled with careful description of people, places, and various plants and animals, and insightful analysis of the patterns and commitments that hold them together in the world.’
—Thom van Dooren
Yagara Dictionary and Salvage Grammar »
Authored by: Karen Sullivan, Glenda Harward-Nalder
Publication date: March 2024
Most English speakers in Australia know a few words of Yagara, the Pama-Nyungan language traditionally spoken in the area that now includes Brisbane and Ipswich. For example, Australian English yakka ‘work’ comes from the Yagara verb yaga ‘to work’. However, no fluent native speakers of Yagara remain. The current volume compares the written records of Yagara to facilitate revitalisation of the spoken language.
Part 1: Grammar introduces the Yagara sources, which are then compared to extract a picture of Yagara’s structure – its sounds, its words, and its grammar. Attention is also given to the system of kinship terms, moieties, and totems.
Part 2: Dictionary contains the most complete Yagara-English dictionary to date, with over 2,200 entries, the original source spellings for each word, standardised spellings, and anthropological notes. Entries include traditional place names, fun insults, and everyday expressions such as the greeting wi balga ‘Hey, come’. The dictionary is followed by an English word finder list.
Part 3: Texts consist of full versions of all known texts in Yagara, including sentences, songs, and three Bible stories. Standardised versions are accompanied by English translations and the original unedited renditions.
Format: Hardback
Memory in Place »
Locating colonial histories and commemoration
Edited by: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell
Publication date: November 2023
Memory in Place brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners grappling with the continued potency of memories and experiences of colonialism. While many of these conversations have taken place on a national stage, this collection returns to the rich intimacy of the local. From Queensland’s sweeping Gulf Country, along the shelly beaches of south Sydney, Melbourne’s city gardens and the rugged hills of South Australia, through Central Australia’s dusty heart and up to the majestic Kimberley, the collection charts how interactions between Indigenous people, settlers and their descendants are both remembered and forgotten in social, political, and cultural spaces. It offers uniquely diverse perspectives from a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, memory studies, archaeology, and linguistics from both established and emerging scholars; from Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors; and from academics as well as museum and cultural heritage practitioners. The collection locates some of the nation’s most pressing political issues with attention to the local, and the ethics of commemoration and relationships needed at this scale. It will be of interest to those who see the past as intimately connected to the future.
Ebenezer Mission Station, 1863–1873 »
The Diary of Missionaries Adolf and Polly Hartmann
Edited by: Felicity Jensz
Publication date: July 2023
This book contains the annotated diary of Adolf and Mary (Polly) Hartmann, missionaries of the Moravian Church who worked at the Ebenezer mission station on Wotjobaluk country, in the north-west of the Colony of Victoria, Australia. The diary begins in 1863, as the Hartmanns are preparing to travel from Europe to take up their post, and ends in 1873, by which time they are working in Canada as missionaries to the Lenni Lenape people.
Recording the Hartmann’s eight years at the Ebenezer mission, the diary presents richly detailed insights into the daily interactions between Aboriginal people and their colonisers. The inhabitants of the mission are overwhelmingly described in the diary as agents in their lives, moving in and out of the missionaries’ sphere of influence, yet restricted at times by the boundaries of the mission. The diary reveals moments of laughter, shared grief, community, advocacy and reciprocal learning, alongside the mundane everyday chores of mission life.
Through the personal writings of a missionary couple, this diary brings to light the regular, routine and extraordinary events on a mission station in Australia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—a period just prior to British high imperialism, and a period before increasingly restrictive legislation was enforced on Indigenous people in the Colony of Victoria.
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 46 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: July 2023
The articles in Volume 46 each take provocative and generative approaches to the challenge of historical truth-telling. Examining the public memory of massacres in Gippsland, Victoria, Aunty Doris Paton, Beth Marsden and Jessica Horton trace a history of contestation between, on the one hand, forms of frontier memorialisation articulated to secure colonial possession and, on the other, the sovereign counter-narratives of Gunai Kurnai communities. Heidi Norman and Anne Maree Payne describe Aboriginal campaigns to repatriate Ancestors’ stolen remains over the past fifty years, showing how these campaigns have proceeded along with and as part of nation-building movements towards land rights and self-determination. Their call for Aboriginal relationships with Ancestors to be represented in a National Resting Place aligns their research with these movements. We return to Gunai Kurnai Country in a piece authored by Rob Hudson and Shannon Woodcock, who show how the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place has formed an important site and tool of community work towards cultural resurgence; the article itself demonstrates the value and importance of collaborative and co-designed research methods. The volume then includes a conversation between Laura McBride and Mariko Smith about their curation of the Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition, through which they responded to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s Endeavour voyage along Australia’s east coast by telling true stories that put Cook in his place.
Islands of Hope »
Indigenous Resource Management in a Changing Pacific
Edited by: Paul D’Arcy, Daya Dakasi Da-Wei Kuan
Publication date: May 2023
In the Pacific, as elsewhere, indigenous communities live with the consequences of environmental mismanagement and over-exploitation but rarely benefit from the short-term economic profits such actions may generate within the global system.
National and international policy frameworks ultimately rely on local community assent. Without effective local participation and partnership, these extremely imposed frameworks miss out on millennia of local observation and understanding and seldom deliver viable and sustained environmental, cultural and economic benefits at the local level.
This collection argues that environmental sustainability, indigenous political empowerment and economic viability will succeed only by taking account of distinct local contexts and cultures. In this regard, these Pacific indigenous case studies offer ‘islands of hope’ for all communities marginalised by increasingly intrusive—and increasingly rapid—technological changes and by global dietary, economic, political and military forces with whom they have no direct contact or influence.
Something's Gotta Change »
Redefining Collaborative Linguistic Research
Authored by: Lesley Woods
Publication date: March 2023
Indigenous people are pushing back against more than 200 years of colonisation and rejecting being seen by the academy as ‘subjects’ of research.
A quiet revolution is taking place among many Indigenous communities across Australia, a revolution insisting that we have control over our languages and our cultural knowledge – for our languages to be a part of our future, not our past. We are reclaiming our right to determine how linguistic research takes place in our communities and how we want to engage with the academy in the future.
This book is an essential guide for non-Indigenous linguists wanting to engage more deeply with Indigenous communities and form genuinely collaborative research partnerships. It fleshes out and redefines ethical linguistic research and work with Indigenous people and communities, with application beyond linguistics.
By reassessing, from an Indigenous point of view, what it means to ‘save’ an endangered language, Something’s Gotta Change shows how linguistic research can play a positive role in keeping (maintaining) or putting (reclaiming) endangered languages on our tongues.