AustLit

'This article addresses the question: does (or should) settler colonial studies have a future as a unified or distinct ‘field'? It does so via a consideration of two vigorous, but largely disconnected, areas of uptake and critique: American Studies and Indigenous Studies in North America; and within Australian historical scholarship. I argue that connecting these debates reveals the great diversity of a field that is often represented as decidedly singular – and typically equated with the individual scholarship of Patrick Wolfe. This characterisation elides the wealth of Indigenous studies scholarship that has constituted the field. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's contention that settler colonial studies must simultaneously engage Indigenous studies to produce meaningful scholarship is thus a central focus. I particularly explore implications for my own scholarly areas of Indigenous and colonial history and emerging commentary advocating a return to history as a way out of impasses that currently confront the field. Given the competing visions of what settler colonial studies is or should be, ultimately I argue that the field may either disintegrate in the pursuit of singularity, or flourish in the embrace of its abundance and in the recognition of its limits and ethical obligations.' (Source: publisher's abstract)

'The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignties alongside each other. By examining the imposition of restrictions on Chinese people’s capacity to work and to employ Aboriginal labour in Darwin around 1911, I locate a racialised labour politics and capitalism as central to the obstruction and production of sovereignties. In doing so, this article engages with two recent criticisms of settler colonial studies: one that impresses upon scholars the need to write not only of settlers but also of Indigenous peoples; and another that insists on attending to the specific conditions of settlers of colour or precariously racialised migrants to settler colonies.' (Source: publisher's abstract)

'This article traces the spatially grounded operation of ‘medical sovereignty' by reading property alongside medical practice and regulation in a settler colonial city. It does so through the lens of the Antipodean life of one Canton-born doctor, James Lamsey, who was a prolific proprietor in the regional Australian city of Bendigo and used his interlinked proprietorial and medical powers to mediate between the Bendigo Chinese community and white settlers and doctors. Reading medical power through the lens of Lamsey’s life, shaped, as it was, by European-made laws, shows how settler medical sovereignty was enacted in a dynamic relation with Chinese medical sovereignty, performed here in the urban context of Bendigo, on unceded Indigenous Dja Dja Wurrung land. With support from the common law system, health-related boards were, in the late nineteenth century, intensifying a settler sovereignty, where board members and doctors practised increasingly exclusive forms of discretionary power and exercised the right to exclude non-white people from membership. At the same time, Lamsey was enacting a diasporic medical sovereignty that drew on Chinese imperial and British colonial authority. He leveraged his medical sovereignty towards promoting collective Chinese entitlements to health and to counter the exclusions of a whitening settler sovereignty.' (source: publisher's abstract)

'Defined as ‘borderlands’ by Tracey Banivanua-Mar, the sugar towns of North Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were populated with a great variety of non-white ethnic minorities: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, ‘Malay’, Pacific Islander and later southern European. Instances of violence between these population groups have been recounted as if they were detached from the socio-historical conditions dictated by settler colonialism. Against this stance, this article examines the case of three South Sea Islanders attacking an Italian farmer in the city of Ingham in 1927. As the motive behind the incident remains unknown, the incident is recounted through the individual histories of those who were involved and against the wider context of anti-Italian migration sentiment. In doing this, this article demonstrates how these histories of presence in Ingham challenge the discursive rendition of the assault as a random act of violence and, accordingly, throw into sharp relief who could be counted as a permanent part of the Australian population. This article concludes by pointing to the necessity of examining similar instances of violence by setting them against migrants’ implication in the subjection of ‘natives’ and South Sea Islanders to the project of European replacement. When this implication is considered, violence can be theorised as much as a means that migrants, such as Italians, use to claim belonging as a technology settlers employ to manage ‘undesired’ populations.' (source: publisher's abstract)

'The Bundian project is an initiative of the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council on the far south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Aboriginal Elders and activists working on the project are restoring an Aboriginal pathway that stretches from the coast to the high country. This article examines the experiences of four young Aboriginal men employed to work on the project. Drawing on qualitative research, I analyse how these young men are using and reconceptualising settler histories of early cross-cultural encounters to propose new ways of living well in settler-colonial Australia and to contest the dominant settler historiography that has positioned Indigenous people as either ‘violent, ignoble savages’ or the fading victims of colonisation. In their rearticulation through the project, these stories of early cross-cultural relations are reclaimed as powerful critical histories of settler colonisation. Through this project, Aboriginal people are critically interrogating discourses of settler colonisation while opening up new historical spaces that speak to the ‘truth’ of Aboriginal lived experience in contemporary Australia.' (Source: publisher's abstract)

'Aboriginal-influenced compositions have been central to Australian art music practice since the 1960s, and key to conceptions of an Australian style. While in other creative arts practices (for example, dance and visual arts) appropriative practices have largely become unacceptable, or at least highly contested, compositions influenced by Aboriginal music have retained a central role in art music composition. In this article, I trace this practice back to touring post-war performances of the ‘Aboriginal songs’ of Alfred and Mirrie Hill, Arthur S. Loam and Victor Carell from Carell and Beth Dean’s ‘Dance and Song around the World’ shows in the early 1950s. I suggest that the performance of these songs familiarised audiences with a notional ‘Aboriginal’ sonority that has continued to influence composers and their audiences. Dean and Carell’s claim to authoritative representations of Aboriginal music and dance has had ongoing reverberations throughout Australian performance history, disconnecting Indigeneity from individual Aboriginal people (historical and living) and their traditions. Although ultimately these representations have failed to replace the performance of culture by Aboriginal people, reductive portrayals of Aboriginal musical characteristics remain persuasive.' (Source: publisher's abstract)