AustLit

'In this book Henry Reynolds shows that today’s white activists for justice for Indigenous people are inheritors of a long tradition.'   (Introduction)

'US slave owners wrote and spoke about liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Similar hypocrisy, buried in the foundations of settler Australia, has escaped comparable scrutiny.' (Introduction)

'Aboriginal affairs has always been a sore point in Australia. Ever since the first Governor attempted to put in place the Colonial Office’s instructions to treat the inhabitants with “amity and kindness” the exercise has been fraught. There is a text-book version of the changing policy landscape and rote school lessons on the gradual acquisition of Aboriginal rights and freedoms. These go some way to conveying the contested ground, political conflict and personal anguish on which this history was built. Yet, they give the impression of evolution and progress. At the same time, the history wars magnified the fractiousness without carving a pathway through. In this paper I recover an important part of the history, which often goes unremarked. I reflect on the role of humanitarian intervention in this politics. Not only has it been critical to the policy landscape — for good and ill — but there are also historical connections and lineages between then and now, which deserve attention. Closely aligned to a history of human rights in Australia, recovering this history seems more pertinent than ever.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper investigates Furphy’s ethnographical writings on Aborigines in the short essays and paragraphs he wrote for the Bulletin and in one of his short stories. It also examines his representation of Toby', an  'Aboriginal stockman in Such is Life, and concludes by examining one of the most difficult passages in a colonial era novel, his account of a Palmer River Aboriginal attack, cannibalism, and settler murder in The Buln-buln and the Brolga. These Aboriginal-focused narratives are told as part of a suite of realistic tales by Barefooted Bob and Tom Collins, by way of counter-narrative to Fred Falkland Pritchard’s fantastical romance/action tales which belong to the ripping yarns/Boy’s Own tradition. The paper argues that, although the narrative method, in its refusal to editorialise, is uncharacteristically and unnervingly oblique, there is more than a little of Lilian Pritchard, the Lady Novelist, in Furphy himself and that the questions he puts into the mouth of the Lady Journalist about Aboriginal culture are probing and pungent.' (Author's abstract)