AustLit

'My friend Hobbles Danayari and I once camped together in a brokendown vehicle on a night when it was difficult to sleep. It was just after Christmas; the rains were sporadic, and the heat was intense. We, along with many other people, were visiting a small community north of Yarralin in the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory. Hobbles apparently felt lively that night, and his vitality often sought outlet in stories. During that one night he told me stories which set the agenda for much of the research in which I was then engaged. His stories so expanded my sense of the possible that nine years later I continue to consider the issues of time, space, and narrative which they raised for me.'  (Publication abstract)

'For many years the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies has attempted to conduct or direct research that is not simply responsive to Aboriginal views, but is directed and structured by them. This book epitomizes the research strategy and its results manifest the contradictions that are inherent in it. As an archive of photographs of the seventeen selected communities it is deliberately partial, highly selective and multi-faceted—for there are many public faces for each community and Aborigines have diverse languages and voices.'  (Introduction)

'In the mid-1950's my requests of a number of bookshops for publications on matters Aboriginal yielded but one: A.O. Neville's Australia's Coloured Minority (1947), the analysis and prescriptions of a retired Western Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs. This was the era of 'The Great Australian Silence' of W.E.H. Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lectures. That silence has since been broken; and these two books make a welcome further contribution. They also serve as reminders that the tasks of getting the story together, sorting out the terms of reference, and relating the past to the present, are still in their early days.' (Introduction)

'Historians looking at Aborigines in the pastoral industry are generally obliged to opt, in their final analyses, for one of two positions. Stated simply, one emphasizes the external relations of brute colonialism under which Aborigines were exploited, ill-treated and powerless, reluctantly maintained on the stations at minimal standards by employers dependent on their labour but contemptuous of them. The other emphasizes the world that station blacks constructed for themselves within this introduced regime, at once achieving a new self-esteem as indispensable and skilled workers, and maintaining a protected space of traditional continuities. Born in the Cattle is the most thorough exposition yet of the latter view.'  (Introduction)

'There would be a number of reasons to pass briefly over this posthumously published second volume of Geza Roheim's Children of the Desert. As Morton notes in his excellent introductory essay, anthropologists have long had a negative disciplinary 'take' on R6heim's psychoanalytic work because of 'his cavalier attitude towards his material' (p xi), a view that is rightly skeptical of the broad narratives of universal humanity in which he embedded most of his interpretations of Aboriginal culture. Roheim is deficient, as Morton (p xxii) says, in lacking 'any close appreciation of ho w the symbolic forms he uncovers relate to larger social processes in any thorough way' W e are certainly not provided with any information, for example, about the indigenous contexts or occasions in which folk tales or dreams, the subject of the present volume, are presented. Social analysis is not Roheim's forte. One might well ask, too, whether the time has passed for considering the significance of Roheim for the understanding of Aboriginal people when the trend is towards themes of historical contact, of the hegemony over Aboriginal people and their local aggregations by the State and by the universalising discourses of development, civilisation, citizenship, and improvement.'  (Introduction)

'This beautiful little book is one of four produced in 1987 by Magabala Books, an Aboriginal controlled publishing house in Broome, established in 1987 under Bicentennial funding.'  (Introduction)

'Tom Brady, one of the most respected senior men of the Lake Eyre region, passed away at Oodnadatta on the 10 July, 1989. Tom's life of about seventy-six years spanned an important era in his country's history. According to community records he was born near Hermannsberg in the Northern Territory around 1913. In an active and vigorous life, Tom saw at first hand all the key features that now make up the Aboriginal history of the western region of Lake Eyre: the Afghan camel strings in which he took part, the old 'Ghan' railway he rode (which in one circumstance was instrumental in getting him signed on for World War Two), traditional spear fights, magic, ceremonies and healing, floods, droughts, epidemics of measles and influenza, stock work on the cattle stations Mount Doreen, Macumba and Mount Dare, and finally retirement to Hamilton Station.'  (Introduction)