AustLit

'It was not until I reached the third year of an undergraduate degree in the early 1990s at Melbourne University that I finally had an opportunity to read some anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. An assignment required us to develop a mock research grant application and we were given a blank slate to work with in terms of possible topics. At last! I thought, I can read some books I’d been keen to read and project myself into the imagined space of an anthropological fieldworker. Fred Rose’s The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines was one of those books, one readily picked up in second-hand bookshops, its lush cover photo depicting Aboriginal women harvesting file snake and turtle in some verdant northern Australian scene. I was enthused by the book and drafted a research project for a study of women’s contributions to Aboriginal community economy, pitching myself somewhere between Rose’s study and another book about which I had formed a more critical view, Jon Altman’s Hunter-Gatherers Today, which to my eyes lacked sufficient appreciation of women’s roles.' (Introduction)

'Reasons to dislike Facebook are not hard to find, but its recent censorship of the iconic image of Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc (running from a napalm attack on her village) was a gift to critics of the social media platform. When author Tom Egeland posted an image of the ‘Napalm Girl’ alongside other photos that ‘changed the history of warfare’, Facebook removed the post, citing community standards about images of naked children. Egeland’s subsequent posts about the photo were also removed. Norway’s largest newspaper reported Egeland’s story (using the photo in question), only to find its coverage also deleted from Facebook. It took an open letter from the newspaper’s editor and pressure from print media around the globe to force Facebook to reinstate the photo. Facebook’s ban on a historic image considered important in mobilising anti-war sentiment because it couldn’t distinguish between photojournalism and pornography, and its subsequent censorship of any discussion of this decision, did nothing to assuage fears of its growing power and lack of judgement.' (Introduction)