AustLit

'Introductory comment, Editor

In 1993, Allen and Unwin published a second edition of Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming. In the important Epilogue to the book, Bell comments: 'In explicating the critical perspective from which I write in 1992, I am writing reflexively of my earlier reflexivity!' (1993, 273). In undertaking this project, she makes the point (277): 'It is obvious to me now that building a case for the merits of an ethnography that begins with the experience of women entails methodological and epistemological considerations'. Her discussion of epistemological considerations is informed by standpoint theories, the attraction of which, she suggests (282), is 'that they balance the feminist intuition that women have something real to say about their lives with the anthropological injunction to transcend individual experience in our ethnographic accounts'.' (Introduction)

'In the month of July, 1876, Western Aranda resident in the area marked out by Ltalaltuma, Emalkna, Ljaba and Roulbmaulbma — the area west of Uruna now called Missionary Plain, and bordered to the north by the Western MacDonnells — may have sighted the first European settlers on their lands. It was during this time that a forward party from a Lutheran mission group set out from Dalhousie Springs, some 285 miles south, to inspect the mission lease along either side of the Finke River complex (Bowman n.d.:68-9). It was about a year later that the main party arrived via Owen Spring, the first cattle lease established in Central Australia. Initially they travelled to the area south of Jalpalpa, now known as Glen Helen. Then the Lutherans travelled south, to a point on the Finke below Ntaria waterhole. They sank a well and determined to build their community there; at the place they would call 'Hermannsburg'. ' (Introduction)