AustLit

'This article describes a “working model” that started as a culturally appropriate workshop created by students and staff involved in the Certificate III in Visual Arts at Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE, Shepparton Campus, Victoria in 2018. The Yubbi Yarning Circle Model (YYCM) sees First Nations Artists, as both Facilitators and Storytellers, expressing the ongoing effects of Aboriginal Exemption using visual storytelling. We explore how the model of a visual narrative can be utilised in further cultural activities planned for research into Aboriginal Exemption and how this art resource may effectively be disseminated to Storytellers who not only have a history of Aboriginal Exemption, but also more broadly in the wider community. The YYCM approach is multi-disciplinary and combines the cultural healing practices of the Yarning Circle, the Mariku knowledge of symbology, participatory action research using decolonised methodologies and findings on behavioral research from Northern Ireland about how the narrative can heal trauma.' (Publication abstract)

'This article examines of the life of Nancy Verna Power, an Aboriginal woman born in north-west Queensland in 1910. Nancy Power was given an exemption certificate in 1933. The certificate released her from control by the Department of Native Affairs in 1933 and led her to remain silent about her identity in the later years of her life. This article examines Nancy's early life as a domestic servant, when she was under the control of the Chief Protector, the superintendent of Purga Mission and other government administrators. Using Phillips and Bunda's principles of “storying” each author describes a period of Nancy's life with an eye to their own connection to, and ability to tell, the story. Judi Wickes, Nancy's niece, tells her story from 1910 to 1924 and from 1934 to 1950 using family records and her own memories. Katherine Ellinghaus, a non-Indigenous historian, uses the official written records created by the Queensland government to describe Nancy's life between 1930 and 1934.'(Publication abstract)

'The historical study of exemptions has focused on escape from protectionist policies designed to control and monitor Aboriginal people in Australia — restricting their freedom of movement, intruding into their family life, and reducing their ability to participate on equal terms in the labour force. In this paper, we consider a contemporary policy — income management — which primarily restricts the freedom to dispose of personal income and has targeted Aboriginal people and communities, both directly and indirectly. Provisions for individual exemptions have been incorporated inconsistently within the many iterations of income management, and Aboriginal people are significantly less likely than others to be granted an exit from this form of financial control. The study reported here is an example of mixed-methods social research, rather than an historiography. We use techniques of historical comparison to illuminate contemporary practices and identify the ongoing influence of settler-colonial governance in the lives of Aboriginal people.' (Publication abstract)

'The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, which introduced the system of exemption certificates, also initiated another form of “exemption” — one based on employment. The Act permitted “lawfully employed” Aboriginal people to be “excepted” from forcible removal to reserves. Those placed on an Aboriginal reserve faced a restrictive life of disconnection from Country, kin networks, and traditional practices and way of life. Many Aboriginal people found employment in the pastoral industry and thus avoided the Act's provision of removal to a reserve. This paper interrogates government records and reports to provide an understanding of the development and implementation of this legislation and the racial ideologies underpinning it. The 1898 diary of a Queensland pastoralist who employed Aboriginal men on his station is also examined to obtain an understanding of the roles, experiences, and position of Aboriginal people in the pastoral industry during this period. These findings reveal that despite hardships faced in the pastoral industry, Aboriginal people found advantages in this form of employment. Through their highly sought-after pastoral skills and expertise, and strategic engagement with Europeans, Aboriginal people excelled in the pastoral industry, and many achieved significant levels of freedom and success.' (Publication abstract)

'In the archives lie the stories of our past, stories that knowingly or unknowingly live in our present. For Aboriginal families, finding records can be a critical source of great healing, enhance and affirm identity, and provide families with new understandings of how things came to be. This essay affords agency to First Nations families looking to the archives for their stories, reading historical documents against the grain, and telling their stories their way. Through family memory, reflection, and archival research, it delivers the microhistory, rich in feeling, of one First Nations family, through the experiences of Mabel Ita Eatts (née Frederick), an ancestral matriarch, a Jaru woman, and the Great Grandmother of the author. Mabel was a member of the Stolen Generations and was later deeply influenced by exemption policy. Her story brings to life the struggles faced by Aboriginal ‘half-caste’ women living in Broome and Derby in the 1920s and 1930s, explicitly highlighting not only the invasive oppression expressed through this policy but, more importantly, how Mabel actively negotiated the system. This paper is a powerful example of how one Aboriginal family writes back to the colonising archive.' (Publication abstract)

'Two hundred years of constant and deliberate disruption, dislocation and mistreatment of First Peoples has not just been experienced individually but collectively between generations and across communities. The legacy of discriminatory treatment continues for many First Peoples in archives where their stories are still locked in police files, exemption files, child welfare reports and in some instances privately owned records, meaning they are not always able to locate their story or own their identity. People whose family members were impacted by government policies (such as exemption) need to undertake extensive archival research in order to know their family history. This paper describes how the author combined auto-ethnographic description of her personal experience of archival research with documentary evidence to create a personal and historical narrative. This narrative has been captured in a “her-storical biography”, a cultural artefact meant for family. This paper argues that the First Nations re-authoring of colonial narratives described here might work as a model for people looking for family her-stories of exemption in the written archive.' (Publication abstract)

'Rather than rewarding applicants seeking relief from the draconian 1905 Aborigines Act, Exemption Certificates in Western Australia became a bureaucratic weapon to enforce their rigid control through enforced prohibitions on alcohol for Nyungar people. Applications were routinely rejected, regardless of the applicant's way of life, which quickly deteriorated under the “care” of the Aborigines Department. At the same time, new laws further enforcing prohibitions through increased fines and imprisonment, meant few had any hope of release. This combination derailed the exemption process. The injustices were recently revealed by the Ancestors' Words: Nyungar Letter Writing in the Archives Project, which located activist application letters written by Ancestors of today's Nyungar families, letters which were held for many decades in archive files of the Aborigines Department. The files also contained devastating letters of rejection written by the Minister, his officers and local police. The Ancestors' letters of courage and their distressing rejections in reply are examined here in a powerful case study developed in conversations between two Nyungar Elders, the writer's granddaughter, and the project researcher. The study also reveals how the project's respectful return of letters to the Elders can restore these important stories from the past to the flow of living family memories, down the generations.' (Publication abstract)

'Diverse questions might be contemplated once we consider the gender implications and impacts of Aboriginal exemption policies. The article traces such questions in relation to a series of distinct episodes in the history of exemption. The first of these focuses on postwar New South Wales, where marital status was core to the application process from the point of its introduction, and the system built upon older policies of ‘training’ Aboriginal girls as servants. The second moment, moving back in time, discusses a petition for collective exemption for a group of women domestic workers in Broome, Western Australia, that was presented to a government enquiry in 1934. The third concerns the quest for release from government controls by several domestic workers brought to Adelaide in South Australia, from the Northern Territory, in the late 1920s. Finally, the article reflects upon the efforts of young women placed in service in early-twentieth-century Brisbane, Queensland, to secure exemptions, and the responses of the authorities. While exemption policies may have been designed to impose Anglo-Australian gender norms of female dependence, Aboriginal women who worked in service consistently subverted these aims, by using the discourses of domesticity to challenge and resist the authorities' power.' (Publication abstract)