AustLit

'This study presents and justifies a detailed explication for the Australian Aboriginal Jukurrpa concept ('Dreamtime', 'the Dreaming'), phrased exclusively in simple cross-translatable words. The explication, which is partitioned into multiple sections, depicts a highly ramified and multi-faceted concept, albeit one with great internal coherence. After a short introduction, our paper is organised about successive stages in the evolution of the current explication. We present and discuss four semantic explications, each built on - and, hopefully, improving upon - its predecessor as our understanding of the Jukurrpa concept expanded and came into sharper definition. We focus primarily on Central Australian languages such as Warlpiri, Arrernte and the Western Desert Language (Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra etc.). We do not claim to have necessarily arrived at a full, perfect or correct lexical-semantic analysis, although in principle this is the goal of semantic analysis. Rather our purpose is to share a hermeneutic process and its results. The guiding framework for our process is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to meaning analysis.' (Abstract)

'Central Australian songs are renowned for their association with tracts of land and for texts that are difficult to decipher. The Alyawarr women's songs of the Antarrengeny land-holding group are remarkable in that most verses can be parsed into speech equivalents with considerable consensus among the singers. The songs are thus revealing of how traditional Aboriginal verse is constructed. Drawing upon recordings from 1977-2011, this paper identifies 78 different verses, comprising 107 different lines of poetic-musical text. All 107 lines are set to one of 14 rhythmic patterns, which are arrangements of smaller 2-note and 3-note rhythmic patterns. Despite the transparency of the text, one question that arises concerns the role of the ubiquitous bar-initial consonant 'l', which appears to be the Alyawarr relativiser ='arl' ('where, which'), also common in placenames. Is this its meaning in the songs, or is it just a syllable inserted to achieve the preferred 10-syllable line structure? This paper suggests that ='arl' is both: it enables the preferred line structure to be met and alludes to a place through its structural resemblance to a proper name. In an area where songs, like places, are owned by family groups, this structural similarity expands the 'song-land relationship' (Moyle 1983). ' (Abstract)

'As much scholarship has shown over the past decades, settler attitudes to Indigenous peoples thrived on difference and righteousness — the latter not in a religious sense (necessarily) but in an absolute conviction, one sunk deep into the settler heart, of the moral and material justness of their usurpation of Indigenous country. This conviction sanctioned settler violence and outlawed Indigenous resistance. Difference not only denied the humanity in the Indigenous face; it made the people objects of curiosity, to be quickly described, analysed and catalogued for science before they ‘disappeared’ as naturally as one season disappears into another. There arises in this a paradox: genocidal practice combined with the apparent sympathy of curiosity. In the Australian colonies of the last half of the nineteenth century this paradox was no more greatly manifest than in the person of Edward M Curr — enough in itself to make him the subject of analysis, but Curr is even more ripe for study since, as Samuel Furphy shows in this biography, he has had a particularly potent afterlife.'  (Introduction)

'Encounters with indigeneity surveys the career work of renowned Australian anthropologist Jeremy Beckett. This important book highlights a scholarly engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that spans the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrates how these encounters prompted Beckett to move beyond the disciplinary limits of anthropology to produce a body of work that is characterised by its overtly inter-disciplinary approach to the study of indigeneity. In this sense, Beckett is much more than an anthropologist as he engages with history, political science, economics, sociology, literary studies and post-colonial studies to develop understandings and insights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that are rich in detail and complex in analysis. As a collection of works, Encounters with indigeneity demonstrates the ease with which Beckett is able to show how local issues concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples often have implications that are felt in the politics of the nation-state and increasingly in the politics of the global community. Unlike many of those who preceded him,' (Introduction)

'In Australia the formation of a national cricket team acted as a popular exemplar of the nationbuilding project, a touchstone of an emergent national identity and an important precursor to the political establishment of a white nation. Reflecting the attitudes of a nation-state that viewed membership of the white race and cultural adherence to British standards of civilisation as mandatory to national belonging, it is unsurprising that in the twentieth century the Australian cricket team also came to represent itself as the exclusive domain of white men. Popular narratives that mythologised Australian cricket celebrated matches against England as ‘Tests’ of white Australian masculinity. Cricketing victories against England were seen as indicative of the physical and moral superiority of the British race in Australia measured against those born in the mother country. No player publicly known to be Aboriginal has ever been selected to represent Australia in Test Match cricket, a fact that demonstrates the enduring strength of the historic relationship between Australian cricket and white nationalist sentiment.' (Introduction)

'Coranderrk: we will show the country is the result of an intensive and fruitful collaboration between University of Melbourne historian Giordano Nanni and the director and playwright Andrea James. Conceived as part of the Australian Research Council–funded ‘Minutes of evidence’ project, it brings to the stage the events of the 1881 Parliamentary Inquiry into the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve. The book is, at the same time, a scholarly historical study of the Coranderrk Reserve, a script of the stage production and an examination of the complex creative processes undertaken by the authors during the development of the project.' (Introduction)

'The heaven I swallowed is a novel set in post-war Sydney. It is told through the eyes of Grace Smith, whose husband did not return from the Second World War. Alone, with only the company of an insincere and gossipy group of widows, Grace decides to adopt a young Aboriginal girl who was forcibly removed from her family. The child is Mary — a name that Grace had chosen for the child she miscarried soon after her husband left for the war.'  (Introduction)