AustLit

‘What might an Indigenous-led emancipatory politics and a truly postcolonial sociality look like? What are its limits and possibilities within this fraught paradigm, the double bind of reconciliation?’ Penelope Edmonds poses these urgent questions in Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances and Imaginative Refoundings. In recent months, her transnational study has become pressing reading as the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’1 reignites perennial debates about the relationship between Indigenous people and the settler state.'

Alexandra Roginski (2016)

The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory’s southern Victoria River District are well known because of their 1966 walk-off from Wave Hill Station that led to equal wages in the pastoral industry and federal land rights legislation. Their history before the walk-off, however, has received less attention and is the subject of this impressive book. Yijarni, the Gurindji word for true stories from the period following the Dreamtime, brings together a wide variety of accounts dealing with that history.

'I approach these books as a lawyer with interests in history, governance and the development of law and legal systems, but very little background in Indigenous studies. My hope, in reading and reviewing this substantial body of work, was that I would learn more about Indigenous law. That hope has not been disappointed.'

'Wanarn Painters of Place and Time: Old Age Travels in the Tjukurrpa does indeed take us into the world of older Ngaanyatjarra painters – born into a time and place that is fast disappearing – who are spending their last days in the Kungkarrangkalpa Aged Care Facility at Wanarn in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Western Desert. Beautifully written and illustrated with colour plates of the paintings, this book weaves together social history, anthropology and art history. Through painting, the authors David Brooks, an anthropologist, and Darren Jorgensen, an art historian, take us into the historical circumstances that have formed the Ngaanyatjarra identity. The book describes the establishment of the Wanarn Painters program from Warakurna Arts by Eunice Porter, who was one of the directors of Warakurna Art, and others. The Wanarn painters are in their final stage of life, much of their strength and short-term memory has gone, and while this comes through in the way they paint, their long-term memory and links to Tjukurrpa (the Western Desert term for the Dreaming) remain strong because of their regular links to family, ceremony, song and dance.'

'This book is an excellent and accessibly written local history of the 20 years following the celebrated 1960s Wave Hill Walk-off. Perhaps surfing – as much as creating – an attitudinal shift in the mainstream Australian community, the Gurindji Walk- off came to symbolise Aboriginal resistance to oppressions as well as persistence in the face of hostility from powerful establishment interests. Elements of the non- Aboriginal Australian community (some unions, some activists and eventually the Labor Party) accepted this Indigenous aspiration and allied with the Gurindji. A wave of support promised to realise the Gurindji’s dreams. Aspirational purity was then overgrown and stunted by some political hostility allied with much more bureaucratic incapacity and incoherence. Ward is a historian who was peripherally involved in the events he describes, although he is generally even-handed in his assessments. He introduces the usual characters of settlement politics, bickering activists, robber opportunists and passing bureaucrats that still interpose between the Aboriginal people of northern Australia and the state. After the post–walk off struggle, the Gurindji themselves started to divide, so that the dreams of the old heroes of the 1960s began to be less important as social change hit their community, as it did similar communities across remote Australia.'

'This is a highly readable account of the history and consequences of the British nuclear testing program in Australia – primarily the minor and major trials at Maralinga, South Australia, and the 1985 royal commission investigation and findings. Tynan’s closest competitor, Robert Milliken’s No Conceivable Injury: The Story of Britain and Australia’s Atomic Cover-up, was published in 1986 and was thus unable to cover subsequent scandals associated with the tests, the more recent reviews of veterans’ claims and entitlements, the 2003 Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) report on the studies of the test site ‘clean-up’, and even the involvement of Wikileaks. Tynan addresses these developments with aplomb, and while her book covers much of the same ground as Milliken, Atomic Thunder has immediacy and verve, while successfully weaving in a huge amount of complex material. One chapter out of 12 deals with the impact of the tests on Aboriginal people: the Western Desert groups who moved between Warburton, Ernabella, Cundeelee, Ooldea and Lake Phillipson near Coober Pedy.'