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'Paper presented at the Boyer lectures 1968; racial relations and consequences; Phillips native policy; very brief note of kidnapping of Arabanoo, Colby and Bennelong; attitudinal changes, unimportance of native question; discusses development of attitude and relations since 1930, Tennant Creek area; removal of Warramunga people from tribal lands by gold miners 1934; intensification of pastoral industry around 1880s and obliteration of tribes as a result; early ethnologists and their work, native method of fighting, relationship to land and consequences through deprivation; brief account of some leaders; Yagan , Midgegooroo, Durmugan, customs, law and etiquette, mineral industry and effects in Arnhem land, attitudes to new way of life; killing the Dreaming, assimilation problems, land rights, law and Crown lands.'
Source: Trove.
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Works about this Work
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State of the Nation?
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin , September vol. 82 no. 3 2023; (p. 20-23) 'Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner spoke in his famous 1968 Boyer lecture ‘After the Dreaming’ about the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ that pervaded the Australian national psyche.' -
'Sun Arise' : The Appropriation of Australia’s First Peoples’ Music, 1956–1974
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 42 no. 3 2018; (p. 357-373) -
The ‘Great Australian Silence’ 50 Years On
2018
single work
essay
— Appears in: The Conversation , 3 August 2018;'It’s 50 years since the anthropologist WEH Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent mindedness”:
It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.' (Introduction)
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Books That Changed Me : Ian Lowe
2016
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sun-Herald , 24 April 2016; (p. 10) -
Discursive Manipulations of Names and Naming in Kate Grenville's 'The Secret River'
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 36 no. 1 2013; (p. 21-32) 'This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville's three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia's frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville's averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the modern nation's shameful origins, her recent historical fiction betrays a refractory tendency to portray Australia's past in a sentimental light. The second is that names and the act of naming constitute a dominant strand in the narrative weave of each of the novels. In the discussion that follows I seek to demonstrate the existence of a causal link between these two apparently unrelated observations by showing that a recurrent narratorial emphasis on the affective importance that names of places, people and things assume in the life of the colonial subject constitutes a vital element in the "empathetic history" (Gall 95) of Australia's frontier era that Grenville is intent on creating. Although this analysis can be applied to all three of Grenville's colonial novels, the present article will focus solely on the trilogy's opening volume, The Secret River - the work in which the author's discursive manipulation of names is most transparent and the ideological direction the rest of her frontier saga will follow is clearly signposted.' (Author's abstract)
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The Haunting of Settler Australia : Kate Grenville's The Secret River
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 125-142) In this essay, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick states: 'Kate Grenville's The Secret River, an elegantly-written, meticulously-crafted and extremely readable novel, provides a classic example of white Australian anxiety and ambivalence over the nation's origins. More significantly perhaps, and in direct contradiction with the author's declarations about her book, The Secret River is paradigmatic both of the difficulty settler descendants have in facing some of the grim truths of colonial history, and of their consequent inability to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the national conscience.' (p. 126)
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My Hero
2011
single work
essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 70 no. 4 2011; (p. 94-109)'Eight or nine years ago I found myself thinking about the strangeness of a place in which I'd lived as a boy, strange in several ways, but most vividly because there, in Tennant Creek, unlike any other place in which I'd lived before or have lived in since, there were Aborigines. I knew almost nothing about them, either in general or in Tennant Creek in particular, and I began reading. Early on, and more or less by chance, I came across a slim volume titled After the Dreaming, by a W.E.H. Stanner, and picked it up simply because it wouldn't take long to read. That was a miscalculation of ignorance. Only three or four pages in I was already slowed by the force, density and passion of the argument. Soon I was reading line by line, word by word.' (Publication abstract)
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'White Aboriginals' : White Australian Literary Responses to the Challenge of Indigenous Histories
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 2011; (p. 71-86) 'Chapter 4 examines the phenomenon of the 'white Aboriginal,' a putative figure of cultural synthesis as proclaimed in Germaine Greer's maverick manifesto Whitefella Jump Up (2003). However, in texts such as Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993), Liam Davison's The White Woman (1994), and Stephen Gray's The Artist is a Thief (2001), the 'white Aborigine' figure progressively modulates into a sign of appropriation rather than of reconciliation.' (From author's introduction, 12)
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Finding Fault : Aborigines, Anthropologists, Popular Writers and Walkabout.
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Cultural History , vol. 28 no. 2/3 2010; (p. 179-200) 'The popular middlebrow magazine Walkabout was published between 1934 and 1974. Its principle aim was to promote travel to and within Australia and to educate Australians about their continent. It aspired to be an Australian geographic magazine, and to this end it focussed on inland and remote Australia, and natural history. For this reason, and because it was published throughout a period, particularly in the early decades, when only those Aborigines living afar from populated regions were recognised as Aborigines, many of Walkabout's articles were about Aborigines or, more commonly, made mention of them. There are very few critiques of Walkabout, but those that do exist are critical of its portrayal of Aborigines. Notwithstanding that there are many reasons to find fault, it is possible to read this material in a more salutary light, even against the apparent intention of at least one of the contributors, Ernestine Hill. This article considers the work of a number of popular writers and two of the anthropologists who contributed to Walkabout, and finds reason to be less critical and more cautious in our assessment of their narrative representation of Aborigines than is generally allowed. The period of analysis is from 1934 to 1950.' (Editor's abstract)
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Discursive Manipulations of Names and Naming in Kate Grenville's 'The Secret River'
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 36 no. 1 2013; (p. 21-32) 'This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville's three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia's frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville's averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the modern nation's shameful origins, her recent historical fiction betrays a refractory tendency to portray Australia's past in a sentimental light. The second is that names and the act of naming constitute a dominant strand in the narrative weave of each of the novels. In the discussion that follows I seek to demonstrate the existence of a causal link between these two apparently unrelated observations by showing that a recurrent narratorial emphasis on the affective importance that names of places, people and things assume in the life of the colonial subject constitutes a vital element in the "empathetic history" (Gall 95) of Australia's frontier era that Grenville is intent on creating. Although this analysis can be applied to all three of Grenville's colonial novels, the present article will focus solely on the trilogy's opening volume, The Secret River - the work in which the author's discursive manipulation of names is most transparent and the ideological direction the rest of her frontier saga will follow is clearly signposted.' (Author's abstract)
