AustLit

'Joel Birnie’s achievement in My People’s Songs is to show that Tasmanian Aboriginal people have long had to assert themselves against and with a colonial narrative (mingling sorrow, triumph and self-criticism) that Aboriginal Tasmanians had been wiped out. From the late 1960s, politicians and public servants began to relinquish the idea that only those deemed “full-bloods” are “Aboriginal”, abandoning blood quantum in favour of personal identification. In the 2021 census, 30,186 residents of Tasmania identified themselves as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, a 28 per cent increase from the 2016 census.' (Introduction)

'A new biography shows how William Cooper set out to civilise white Australia'

'Nowadays, ‘ethnography’ often arouses moral disgust. A post-colonial imaginary makes analogies of the removal of minerals, the removal of human remains, the removal of children and the removal of Indigenous knowledge.' (Introduction)

'How can fiction contribute to the “truth” that the Uluru Statement asks us to tell? Allen and Unwin’s answer to that question is, in part, one of paratext. By composing a book’s paratext, a publisher addresses the reader about how to experience the book. The paratext of Paul Daley’s Jesustown includes 12 signed commendations on the first four pages and a four-page “Author Note” at the end of the story.' (Introduction)

'Anna Clark could have titled her book “Remaking Australian History”, for that is its narrative arc.'

'Based on interviews with 31 non-Indigenous Australians during 2015–2017, this article argues that there is no “typical” non-Indigenous Australian way of talking and thinking about Indigenous Australia. Rather, a more plausible reading of our data is that non-Indigenous Australians are experiencing, in a self-aware and cautious way, the ascendancy of the idea that the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction is culturally, morally and politically significant. While interviewees varied in their views about Indigenous difference, their awareness that Indigeneity poses relatively new and compelling questions for Australians was evident in their reflexive ways of talking, as they took up a position in (what they evoked or implied as) a field of non-Indigenous opinion. We propose a model of the orthodoxy that defines this field. Reviewing previous research on non-Indigenous Australians’ everyday attitudes and opinions about Indigenous Australians, we seek to replace accounts that postulate non-Indigenous thinking as a singular edifice. We present popular discourse as the self-aware taking of positions, in known or imagined fields of opinion.' (Publication abstract)

'Through the struggles of Indigenous Australians for recognition and self-determination it has become common sense to understand Australia as made up of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and things. But in what ways is the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction being used and understood? In The Difference Identity Makes, thirteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics examine how this distinction structures the work of cultural production and how Indigenous producers and their works are recognised and valued.

'The editors introduce this innovative collection of essays with a path-finding argument that ‘Indigenous cultural capital’ now challenges all Australians to re-position themselves within a revised scale of values. Each chapter looks at one of five fields of Australian cultural production: sport, television, heritage, visual arts and music, revealing that in each the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has effects that are specific.

'This brings new depth and richness to our understanding of what ‘Indigeneity’ can mean in contemporary Australia. In demonstrating the variety of ways that ’the Indigenous’ is made visible and valued the essays provide a powerful alternative to the ‘deficit’ theme that has continued to haunt the representation of Indigeneity.' (Publication summary)

'As Australia became a nation in 1901, no-one anticipated that ‘Aboriginal affairs’ would become an on-going national preoccupation.

'Not ‘dying out’ as predicted, Aboriginal numbers recovered and – along with Torres Strait Islanders – they became an articulate presence, aggrieved at colonial authority’s interventions into family life and continuing dispossession. Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 narrates their recovery – not only in numbers but in cultural confidence and critical self-awareness. Pointing to Indigenous leaders, it also reassesses the contribution of government and mission ‘protection’ policies and the revised definitions of ‘Aboriginal’. Timothy Rowse explains why Australia has conceded a large Indigenous Land and Sea Estate since the 1960s, and argues that the crisis in ‘self-determination’ since 2000 has been fuelled by Indigenous critique of the selves that they have become.

'As Indigenous people put themselves at the centre of arguments about their future, this book could not be more timely.' (Publication summary)

'Let’s allow our history to be complicated, argues Tim Rowse in this review of two new books about black–white relations'

'The Indigenous public servant is a relatively recent phenomenon — a product of the maturing of the programs of assimilation and the inception of the programs of self-determination. That the Indigenous administrative memoir is recent follows from this, but it is also relevant to point out that the genre Indigenous autobiography is itself not yet fifty years old. In this essay, I will tell you about three Indigenous autobiographies in which the authors (all male) have produced an account of themselves partly by reflecting on their times as a public servant. In each case, the theme ‘impersonality’ is prominent, but each time in a different way.'  (Introduction)