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Displaying results 71 to 80 of 211.
They Came to Murramarang »
A History of Murramarang, Kioloa and Bawley Point
Edited by: Sue Feary, Alastair Greig
Authored by: Bruce Hamon
Publication date: October 2015
Bruce Hamon’s They Came to Murramarang, first published in 1994, provides a unique combination of local history and personal recollections from a writer who witnessed the transformation of the Murramarang region from the timber era to modern times. This new edition retains the original character of Bruce’s engaging prose with additional chapters relating to Bruce’s life, the writing of the book, the Indigenous history of the region and the transformation of the area since the book was written. The book has also been enhanced by the insertion of additional photographs.
Indigenous Intermediaries »
New perspectives on exploration archives
Publication date: September 2015
This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world.
These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.
‘This is a very fine collection of essays. It offers a deep and richly textured assessment of the crucial work of indigenous intermediaries in imperial and colonial exploration.’
— Professor Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago, New Zealand
Strings of Connectedness »
Essays in honour of Ian Keen
Edited by: P.G. Toner
Publication date: September 2015
For nearly four decades, Ian Keen has been an important, challenging, and engaging presence in Australian anthropology. Beginning with his PhD research in the mid-1970s and through to the present, he has been a leading scholar of Yolngu society and culture, and has made lasting contributions to a range of debates. His scholarly productivity, however, has never been limited to the Yolngu, and he has conducted research and published widely on many other facets of Australian Aboriginal society: on Aboriginal culture in ‘settled’ Australia; comparative historical work on Aboriginal societies at the threshold of colonisation; a continuing interest in kinship; ongoing writing on language and society; and a set of significant land claims across the continent. In this volume of essays in his honour, a group of Keen’s former students and current colleagues celebrate the diversity of his scholarly interests and his inspiring influence as a mentor and a friend, with contributions ranging across language structure, meaning, and use; the post-colonial engagement of Aboriginal Australians with the ideas and structures of ‘mainstream’ society; ambiguity and indeterminacy in Aboriginal symbolic systems and ritual practices; and many other interconnected themes, each of which represents a string that he has woven into the rich tapestry of his scholarly work.
Long History, Deep Time »
Deepening Histories of Place
Edited by: Ann McGrath, Mary Anne Jebb
Publication date: August 2015
The vast shape-shifting continent of Australia enables us to take a long view of history. We consider ways to cross the great divide between the deep past and the present. Australia’s human past is not a short past, so we need to enlarge the scale and scope of history beyond 1788. In ways not so distant, these deeper times happened in the same places where we walk today. Yet, they were not the same places, having different surfaces, ecologies and peoples. Contributors to this volume show how the earth and its past peoples can wake us up to a sense of place as history – as a site of both change and continuity.
This book ignites the possibilities of what the spaces and expanses of history might be. Its authors reflect upon the need for appropriate, feasible timescales for history, pointing out some of the obstacles encountered in earlier efforts to slice human time into thematic categories. Time and history are considered from the perspective of physics, archaeology, literature, western and Indigenous philosophy. Ultimately, this collection argues for imaginative new approaches to collaborative histories of deep time that are better suited to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Contributors to this volume, including many leading figures in their respective disciplines, consider history’s temporality, and ask how history might expand to accommodate a chronology of deep time. Long histories that incorporate humanities, science and Indigenous knowledge may produce deeper meanings of the worlds in which we live.
Vietnam as if… »
Tales of youth, love and destiny
Authored by: Kim Huynh
Publication date: August 2015
Vietnam as if… follows five young people who have moved from the countryside to the city. Their dramatic everyday lives illuminate some of the most pressing issues in Vietnam today: ‘The Sticky Rice Seller’ explores gender roles; ‘The Ball Boy’ is all about the struggles of sexual and ethnic minorities; ‘The Professional’ examines relations between rich and poor; ‘The Goalkeeper’ delves into politics and ideology; and ‘The Student’ reflects upon family and faith. The stories also reboot several classics of Vietnamese literature for the twenty-first century, including ‘Floating Dumplings’ by feminist poet Ho Xuan Huong, Vu Trong Phung’s satire of French colonialism Dumb Luck, Nguyen Du’s epic account of fate and sacrifice ‘The Tale of Kieu’, and the proclamations of Ho Chi Minh. These novellas reveal the deepest sentiments of Vietnamese youth as they – like youth everywhere – come of age, fall in love and contest their destiny.
In 2011 Kim Huynh returned to Vietnam, having left more than three decades earlier. He had few plans other than to experience as much of his birthplace as possible. That year he came into contact with a wide range of people and took on many trades. Kim drank and dined with government officials, went on pilgrimages with corporate tycoons and marched in the streets against foreign aggression. He sold sticky rice, was a tennis player and also a ball boy, attended all manner of rituals and celebrations, eavesdropped on people in cafés and restaurants, and went back to the classroom as both a student and a teacher. Rich in detail and broad in scope, these tales capture Kim’s experiences and imaginings of Vietnam as if….
Songs of the Empty Place »
The Memorial Poetry of the Foi of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea
Authored by: James Weiner, Don Niles
Publication date: July 2015
For 31 months between 1979 and 1995, James F. Weiner conducted anthropological research amongst the Foi people in Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. This book contains the transcriptions, translations, and descriptions of the songs he recorded.
The texts of women’s sago songs (obedobora), men’s ceremonial songs (sorohabora), and women’s sorohabora are included. Men turn the prosaic content of womenís sago songs into their own sorohabora songs, which are performed the night following large-scale inter-community pig kills, called dawa. While women sing sago songs by themselves, men sing their ceremonial songs in groups of paired men. Women also have their own ceremonial versions of such songs.
The songs are memorial in intent; they are designed to commemorate the lives of men who are no longer living. Most commonly they do so by naming the places the deceased inhabited during his lifetime.
These song texts and translations are introduced by Weiner. Ethnomusicologist Don Niles then brings together information about each type of song and considers these Foi genres in relation to those of neighbouring groups, highlighting aspects of regional performance styles. Consideration is also given to the poetic devices used in Papua New Guinea songs.
Eighteen recordings illustrating the Foi genres discussed in this book are available for download.
It remains uncertain how such songs may be affected by the major oil extraction project that has been undertaken in the region for more than two decades.
This book will interest students of anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, verbal art, aesthetics, and cultural heritage.
From 'Stone-Age' to 'Real-Time' »
Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities
Edited by: Martin Slama, Jenny Munro
Publication date: April 2015
There are probably no other people on earth to whom the image of the ‘stone-age’ is so persistently attached than the inhabitants of the island of New Guinea, which is divided into independent Papua New Guinea and the western part of the island, known today as Papua and West Papua. From ‘Stone-Age’ to ‘Real-Time’ examines the forms of agency, frictions and anxieties the current moment generates in West Papua, where the persistent ‘stone-age’ image meets the practices and ideologies of the ‘real-time’ – a popular expression referring to immediate digital communication. The volume is thus essentially occupied with discourses of time and space and how they inform questions of hierarchy and possibilities for equality. Papuans are increasingly mobile, and seeking to rework inherited ideas, institutions and technologies, while also coming up against palpable limits on what can be imagined or achieved, secured or defended. This volume investigates some of these trajectories for the cultural logics and social or political structures that shape them. The chapters are highly ethnographic, based on in-depth research conducted in diverse spaces within and beyond Papua. These contributions explore topics ranging from hip hop to HIV/ AIDS to historicity, filling much-needed conceptual and ethnographic lacunae in the study of West Papua.
New Accountabilities, New Challenges »
Publication date: April 2015
This important and challenging volume of essays draws on insights from leading academics and public servants from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere. It provides an excellent series of critiques of both the systemic accountabilities and the policy processes of government by drawing on meticulously researched, topical and real-world case studies of governance. Its contribution to the understanding of the applied processes of government in this way is exemplary. Topics covered include: restoring trust in government, parliamentary scrutiny of the APS, administrative law and FOI, budgetary reforms, implementation issues, competition policy, indigenous administration, collaboration with the NGO sector, educational reforms and the changes to the Auditor- General’s mandate.
Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria »
Edited by: Leigh Boucher, Lynette Russell
Publication date: April 2015
This collection represents a serious re-examination of existing work on the Aboriginal history of nineteenth-century Victoria, deploying the insights of postcolonial thought to wrench open the inner workings of territorial expropriation and its historically tenacious variability. Colonial historians have frequently asserted that the management and control of Aboriginal people in colonial Victoria was historically exceptional; by the end of the century, colonies across mainland Australia looked to Victoria as a ‘model’ for how to manage the problem of Aboriginal survival. This collection carefully traces the emergence and enactment of this ‘model’ in the years after colonial separation, the idiosyncrasies of its application and the impact it had on Aboriginal lives.
It is no exaggeration to say that the work on colonial Victoria represented here is in the vanguard of what we might see as a ‘new Australian colonial history’. This is a quite distinctive development shaped by the aftermath of the history wars within Australia and through engagement with the ‘new imperial history’ of Britain and its empire. It is characterised by an awareness of colonial Australia’s positioning within broader imperial circuits through which key personnel, ideas and practices flowed, and also by ‘local’ settler society’s impact upon, and entanglements with, Aboriginal Australia. The volume heralds a new, spatially aware, movement within Australian history writing. – Alan Lester
This is a timely, astutely assembled and well nuanced collection that combines theoretical sophistication with empirical solidity. Theoretically, it engages knowledgeably but not uncritically with a broad range of influences, including postcolonialism, the new imperial history, settler colonial studies and critical Indigenous studies. Empirically, contributors have trawled an impressive array of archival sources, both standard and relatively unknown, bringing a fresh eye to bear on what we thought we knew but would now benefit from reconsidering. Though the collection wears its politics openly, it does so lightly and without jeopardising fidelity to its sources. – Patrick Wolfe
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Innamincka Talk: A grammar of the Innamincka dialect of Yandruwandha with notes on other dialects »
Authored by: Gavan Breen
Publication date: April 2015
Innamincka Talk: A grammar of the Innamincka dialect of Yandruwandha with notes on other dialects is one of a pair of companion volumes on Yandruwandha, a dialect of the language formerly spoken on the Cooper and Strzelecki Creeks and the country to the north of the Cooper, in the northeast corner of South Australia and a neighbouring strip of Queensland. The other volume is entitledInnamincka Words.
Innamincka Talk is the more technical work of the two and is intended for specialists and for interested readers who are willing to put some time and effort into studying the language.Innamincka Words is for readers, especially descendants of the original people of the area, who are interested in the language, but not necessarily interested in its more technical aspects. It is also a necessary resource for users of Innamincka Talk.
These volumes document all that could be learnt from the last speakers of the language in the last years of their lives by a linguist who was involved with other languages at the same time. These were people who did not have a full knowledge of the culture of their forebears, but were highly competent, indeed brilliant, in the way they could teach what they knew to the linguist student.