AustLit

'Over the course of the twentieth century, scholars have found diverse ways of reading ‘Aboriginal Dreaming’ stories as historical accounts of events in Australia’s ‘deep time’. This article argues that, when analysed alongside developments in Australian settler–Indigenous relations, the various readings of Aboriginal stories map onto changing views of Indigenous difference as well as the usefulness and value of Indigenous culture as a ‘deep history’ or heritage for the settler nation. This analysis reveals that merely engaging with Indigenous stories is not inherently decolonising. Rather, the interpretation of Aboriginal story is best done with great care and in partnership with Indigenous owners of this knowledge.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay explores the familial and historical circumstances that shaped my pursuit of historical research and, subsequently, underpinned my discontent with some of the practices that surrounded it at Australian universities from the 1970s through to the 1990s. I explore some of the ideas and inspirations that drove my research on childhood, the writing of a volume of the Oxford History of Australia, as well as my engagement with and support for Aboriginal History at the University of Sydney.' (Publication abstract)

'Trove was never one thing. When version 1.0 of Trove was released by the National Library of Australia in November 2009, it brought together a range of existing discovery services. Some of these had their own long histories. Libraries Australia, for example, contributed millions of catalogue and holdings records from libraries around the country to Trove. But Libraries Australia itself was only the latest incarnation of the Australian Bibliographic Network, established in the early 1980s. Picture Australia was one of a series of specialised portals absorbed into Trove. Launched in September 2000, Picture Australia was an early example of how metadata could be aggregated from multiple collections to provide a single search interface. Similarly, Australian Research Online built on collaboration between universities, research agencies, and the National Library to enable users to search across research repositories and collections of digital theses. And then there was Pandora, established in 1996 as one of the earliest efforts to archive the web itself. Pandora was uncomfortably bolted on to Trove, as the National Library sought to provide users with a single point of discovery for Australia’s cultural collections.' (Publication abstract)

'An aging man ambles down a dirt road, walking slowly away from the camera. He seems to be alone, until we realise he’s stalking an emu, which crosses to the other side of the track. He stops and turns to look at the camera, looks back to the emu, and begins walking towards us. The emu cautiously follows, and the pair walk up the hill in lockstep. This extraordinary cinematic moment provides an apt symbolic opening for Molly Reynolds’ documentary portrait of one of Australia’s finest actors, David Gulpilil. Its power, however, is immediately undercut by the subsequent image of the same man hooked up to medical equipment, receiving treatment for his now various ailments.'  (Introduction)

'Amanda Scardamaglia’s Printed on Stone focuses on the work of Charles Troedel and Company, a lithographic printing firm established in Melbourne in the mid-nineteenth century. A history based on the archives of a local Australian printer may seem, at first glance, to cater to a very specialist – and perhaps correspondingly small – audience. Yet Scardamaglia’s story of Charles Troedel deserves a wider readership than its subject suggests. Clearly designed to attract the general reader, with its large format, hard cover, and rich collection of images drawn from an extensive archive, Printed on Stone connects that material with wide range of academic approaches, from Scardamaglia’s own specialty, trade mark law, to cultural history.'  (Introduction)

'I wish this book had been published in 2009. Then, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd infamously called those facilitating the journeys of asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia ‘the absolute scum of the earth’, adding for good measure that in his view, they should ‘rot in hell’. Then, Smuggled could have contributed to exposing Rudd’s influential remarks as little more than a hysterical attempt to save his prime ministership.'  (Introduction)

'A radical polymath himself, Jack Lindsay recalled Vere Gordon Childe as ‘a bubble-pricker’ yet retained an affectionate regard for this deeply enigmatic man. ‘He was the most detached person I knew’, Lindsay continued, ‘and yet one felt all the while there was a warm core to his gently spoken and deadly sarcasm’ (124). Terry Irving’s biography, similarly, gently works its way around Childe, a figure who demands a measure of introspection as well as a breadth of scholarly investment from those seeking to understand and ‘place’ him.' (Introduction)

'In his latest publication, Henry Reynolds surveys international laws that challenge the audacious claim the British made on the Australian continent in the eighteenth century. In his trademark enigmatic style, Reynolds draws our attention to two significant sections of Uluru Statement from the Heart authored at the National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017, which calls for a Makarrata (Yolgnu – coming together after a struggle). The first declares that First Nations peoples never ‘ceded or extinguished’ sovereignty over their land and secondly this sovereignty ‘coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown’ (viii–ix). The book’s timely arrival amidst increasing demands for truth-telling about Australia’s colonial past strikes a decisive blow to long-held assumptions about the basis on which European sovereignty was established.'  (Introduction)

'In Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, Catherine Kevin presents an elegant and engaging insight into the social, political and personal terrain upon which Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film Jedda was made. Jedda continues to endure in Australian cultural and intellectual life. The film is remembered as a classic piece of Australian cinema and has received significant attention from scholars of film, gender and race alike. Kevin extends this rich body of literature. Dispossession and the Making of Jedda is at once a detailed account of the film’s production, release and reception, a rigorous examination of how the settler colonial project operates and a powerful encounter with Kevin’s own family’s history. Begun from ‘fragments of family stories’ (4), Kevin has written a book that suggests what it is to understand your family as agents of settler colonialism and how such agency has ‘generated privilege that travelled through the generations and into the present’ (113).' (Introduction)