AustLit

'Ceremony Men makes a fine addition to a growing scholarship on engaging with and making sense of historical collections of Aboriginal material today, particularly contentious collections that carry a fraught legacy. The collection in question in Gibson’s study is that assembled by linguist and ethnographer T.G.H. (‘Ted’) Strehlow, now housed at the purpose-built Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. Gibson describes this archive as ‘a wondrous collection of diaries, papers, maps, genealogies, audio recordings, films and artefacts’ (40). And due to Strehlow’s detailed record-keeping, ‘each item can be linked to other parts of the collection’ (40).' (Introduction)

'Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers' motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred.' (Source: TROVE)

'The book Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country is an annotated version of the script of a play by the same name, complemented by a couple of excellent chapters on the history of the Coranderrk Aboriginal settlement and another on the play's development, production, and performance. Using the method known as verbatim or documentary theatre, the play's script is composed almost entirely of extracts taken from the minutes of evidence to an inquiry into Coranderrk held in 1881. The inquiry was the outcome of a sustained campaign by the Kulin people, including petitions and deputations to government, for the right to control their own affairs. Historian Richard Broome has argued that for the Coranderrk residents matters of ‘right behaviour’ and proper governance were at the heart of the inquiry and the broader struggle for autonomy of which it was a part.1 After a litany of complaints against authoritarian superintendents and repeated calls for the reinstatement of the Kulin people's preferred manager, John Green, a board of inquiry was established. It met over two and half months, hearing testimony from 69 witnesses, including 22 Aboriginal people, and it also generated further letters and petitions from the Aboriginal residents.'  (Introduction)

'How do Aboriginal people in settler-colonial Australia negotiate the entwined experiences and histories of displacement and emplacement? Romaine Moreton’s short film The Farm (2009) engages with these experiences and histories through the perspective of Aboriginal people who travelled to participate in seasonal work on white-owned farms. Set against the hard physical labour of bean picking, the film is a meditation on the ‘work of mourning’ and the ‘labour of remembering’ that Aboriginal people perform to make a place for themselves within colonized landscapes and to survive under colonial conditions. By analysing the three lineages into which the film’s young protagonist Olivia is invited, and the different kinds of historical traces and memorial acts that mediate her connection to various pasts and ancestors, I examine how the film engages with and contributes to discourses about place, remembrance and belonging in mid-twentieth-century settler-colonial Australia.' (Author's abstract)

'The convenors of the “Baz Luhrmann’s Australia Reviewed” conference look at the film’s engagement with Indigenous history'

'Where are the Aboriginal intellectuals?” asked the cultural theorist, Stephen Muecke, a decade ago. Britain has Stuart Hall, he observed, but where was a comparable figure on the Australian cultural and intellectual landscape? Blacklines, a compendium of essays by fourteen Australian indigenous “intellectuals”, all originally published in the 1990s, claims to answer Muecke’s rhetorical question.' (Introduction)