Excerpt from review of Rob Riley
Quentin Beresford

Paul Kraus, Weekender, July 29, 2006
Of the many books that have been published in recent years on Aboriginal society and people, this biography must surely rank as one of the finest.

In reading this detailed story of the life and times of the Aboriginal activist, the late Rob Riley, we cannot fail to be highly indignant of the injustices White Australian society has perpetrated on the indigenous population.

This biography is informative and deeply thought-provoking.


Warren Brewer, The Mercury Magazine, Saturday June 17, 2006
This is an account of a modern tragedy and it weighs heavily. It will be daunting for the casual reader, enlightening to students of political change and inspirational to those committed to the betterment of indigenous people.


Stephen Saunders, The Canberra Times; Panorama, Saturday June 15, 2006
Going deeper, maybe some real positives emerge from Riley’s chequered career. In my view, Beresford largely lives up to his credo of balancing natural sympathy and professional detachment. I therefore congratulate Aboriginal Studies Press and the Australian Council (which also gave assistance) and commend this instructive book to inquisitive bleeding hearts and white armbands alike.

Excerpt of review of Compromised Jurisprudence
Lisa Strelein

National Indigenous Times, July 27, 2006
Lisa is an internationally recognised expert on native title whose work has been adopted by judges and has influenced legal practitioners. Her book provides an overview of each of the key native title decisions with balanced analysis and identification of some of the key themes and trends.

Compromised Jurisprudence also contains a very useful annotated case list which of itself is an excellent reference. It is written in a clear and concise way that will be accessible to non-lawyers but Strelein’s understandings of the themes and nuances of each case will also inform legal experts, academics and students.

Compromised Jurisprudence will be mandatory reading for anyone wanting to learn more about development of native title law. It is an important and informative book.

Excerpt from review of Cleared Out
Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson & Yuwali

Louis Nowra, Review of the Week, SMH, January 2006
This book has many things going for it - the superb maps and pictures, the clarity of narrative and the admirable restraint in apportioning blame or making moral judgements. If anyone wants to know about how misunderstandings arose from the first moments of contact between white Australians and Aborigines throughout our shared history, then begin with this wonderful book.


Nicolas Rothwell, The Weekend Australian, November 2005
Hence, for the authors of Cleared Out, the need for an ‘honourable dialogue’ in which the dominant society discards its sense of social and cultural sovereignty. Their meticulously compiled and presented book is as much policy analysis as desert adventure tale; it builds to this urgent closing note, much like the rising façade of a cathedral.

Andrew Stevenson, News Review, SMH, November 2005
Try to image, for a minute, the scene. You’re 17 and the 20th century has just come rolling into your world, the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Metal does not exist; your tools are made of wood or stone. You have never eaten wheat flour, drunk tea or tasted sugar. You have never seen a white person. Everything is about to change…For decades Yuwali did not return to the Percival Lakes. When she did, in 1999, she found her grinding stone, just where she left it.

Excerpt from review of Uncommon Ground
Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins & Fiona Paisley (eds.)

The Canberra Times, Saturday August 20, 2005
An edited collection of biographical essays, written in the main by academics, both black and white, male and female, it responds to a professional curiosity as to what white women contributed, if anything, to the struggle of Aboriginal rights in the early decades of the 20th century.

Importantly, these essays seek to understand — rather than praise or condemn — and to put these women in a very complex history. The collection also contributes to current debates concerning the appropriateness or otherwise of white people writing Aboriginal history. The editors argue, quite rightly, that white women need to understand their relationship to Aboriginal women in a historical and an ongoing context.

The most engaging chapters are those whose authors, such as Christine Brett Vickers and Victoria Haskins, have a personal relationship with their subject. Haskins, for instance, little imagined “that I would find the history of Aboriginal oppression and resistance directly embedded in my own family history”. Her great-grandmother, Joan Kingsley-Strack (Ming), was a rather conservative, privileged North Shore wife and mother who, because of her relationship with domestic worker Mary, became active in Aboriginal rights in the 1930s. Drawing largely on the correspondence between Mary and Ming, Haskins asserts that such “documents as Ming left provide a powerful reply to the stolen generations: the silence of the white households onto which Aboriginal girls were placed”. Other chapters in the collection, such as Stephanie Gilbert’s and Cole’s, remain rather dry, reading as mere catalogues of events.

Perhaps the most fascinating topics in this collection are contained in the fourth and final section, “Knowing the Aborigines”. Discussed here are Daisy Bates and Billingee’s collaboration to produce an illustrated book on the Kimberly’s culture heritage, Elizabeth Durack’s creation of Aboriginal artist “Eddie Burrup” and Catherine Martine’s 1923 novel, The Incredible Journey. Margaret Allen suggests the “Martin… might be seen as the first Australian writer to critique the removal of Indigenous children in a literary work” and this at a time when removal was official government policy in all states. These topics are certainly worthy of book-length studies.
These two important and complimentary books will, in the end, appeal to quite different audiences. While both contain excellent notes, sources and indexes, the approaches taken could not be more different…
Cole, Haskin and Paisley’s collection of academic essays targets a specialised audience, one comfortably au fait with the history of Aboriginal rights in Australia.

Anette Bremer, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, API Review of Books, April 2006
[T]he essays in Uncommon Ground by and large eschew theoretical jargon and grand narratives of the fissures and differences between colonised/colonisers. The volume's focus is biographical, with an emphasis on the particular circumstances underpinning the cross-cultural relationship under examination: 'in the political climate…an approach that seeks to get personal, to break down categorical statements and explore the nuances of lived experience and relationships, is crucial'. (p xxix)…

This is an extraordinarily refreshing collection of essays, each contribution teasing out different aspects of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Louis Nowra recently praised Aboriginal Studies Press for publishing quality works re-examining what has been pejoratively called the 'black-armband view of history'; Uncommon Ground continues this fine tradition.

Extract of review Paint Me Black
Claire Henty-Gebert

Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald, August 6-7, 2005
It is a tragedy that Australia has so few first-person accounts of Aboriginal life in the 19th century, but Aboriginal Studies Press is attempting to redress the balance with fine contemporary accounts.

This is a simple but beautifully told story of the life of Claire Henty-Gebert, the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a vicious property owner, who was born around Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory at some time before 1929.

It tells the story of her happy life at the Methodist mission on Crocker Island, of her evacuation to Otford, south of Sydney, during Word War II, her marriage, her children, dealing with Cyclone Tracy in 1974, and her eventual reunion with her family in 1989.
This is an important first-person account of a slice of Aboriginal life in the Northern Territory. It is told without rancour, although many of the stories are tinged with sadness and great personal hardship.

Review of Seeking Racial Justice
Jack Horner

CHOICE, Vol.42, No.10, June 2005
Horner’s personal memoir traces the development of the Australian “whitefella” side of the movement for Aboriginal advancement from roughly 1938 to 1978. The most notable organisation is the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, or FCAATSI. The growth and demise of FCAATSI is the focus, though the narrative and the elements of Horner’s story extend to other bodies of white reformist involvement.

The book organises the decades into three periods and themes based on major policy assumptions prevalent in Australia’s national argument about race: segregation/assimilation (1938-61), assimilation/integration (1959-67), and integration/self-determination (1968-78).

Horner’s analysis of the 40 years reveals two pivotal shifts in the story: the ascendance of black leadership in the advancement movement and the ascendance of the self-determination assumption. This unsentimental reflection on some of the motives, shortcomings, and successes FCAATSI leadership from one leader’s perspective will be of interest to specialist reading in the US and other postcolonial countries.
Summing Up: Recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates and above.

S.R Martin, Michigan Technological University

Review of Thinking Black
Bain Attwood & Andrew Markus

Richard Broome, History Australia, Vol.2, No.2, 2005
William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta man, is well known with the Aboriginal community of south eastern Australia, despite passing away over two generations ago in 1941. However, few other Australians or Aboriginal people from other parts of the continent would know anything about Cooper or would even show any recognition of his name. This book of documents by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus aims to correct that and will no doubt make some impact on this ignorance.

In a twenty-four page introduction the authors give a clear outline of William Cooper’s rather extraordinary life, to date only the subject of a brief ADB entry by Diane Barwick and scattered references in other works of Aboriginal history.
The authors discuss the meaning and inspirations of the AAL, the Petition and the Day of Mourning. They recognise the ways in which Cooper challenged existing thinking about Aboriginal rights and citizenship, but perhaps underplay the radical nature of his thinking in the 1930s in their remarks about the conformity of his political methods – his use of meeting, letters, and petitions – in pressing his platform. They discuss his relationship with white activists, especially Arthur Burdeu, a white Victorian who became his trusted colleague in 1936 and was the only white member of the Australian Aboriginals’ League until Alick Jackomos also had that privilege in the revamped body in 1961.

Attwood and Markus have presented us with a rich body of material to ponder and Aboriginal Studies Press have produced a handsome book, appropriately illustrated, to complement their splendid collection of documents.

Review of Mutton Fish
Beryl Cruse, Liddy Stewart & Sue Norman

Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald, July 16-17, 2005
To most non-Aboriginal Australians, the mutton fish is known as abalone, a prized seafood delicacy. This book, which started life as a TAFE project, is an attempt by two Aboriginal women and their TAFE teacher to record an oral history of Aboriginal abalone fishing on the NSW South Coast.

The result is an interesting mix of oral history and research that provides an overview of the importance of the mutton fish in indigenous coastal cuisine over the past 20,000 years. The writers use extensive first-person accounts from local Aborigines to recall not only a history of the mollusc, but also to provided a sensitive account of the changing nature of coastal Aboriginal life from Wollongong to the Victorian border.

At times, the abalone story seems almost secondary to the fascinating picture of everyday Aboriginal life, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.

Review of Whitening Race
Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.)

Fiona Probyn, Australian Humanities Journal, June 2005
One last thing from this reviewer – the title of the book. It makes strange things happen. It makes possible sentences like this: 'Whitening Race contributes to the displacement of white privilege in this country'; or 'Whitening Race will disrupt the way we think about race'. To 'whiten' race can be, in the terms of critical whiteness studies, to make it disappear, to turn it into a norm, allowing whites to recentre themselves again. But surely Whitening Race seeks to do the opposite, to racialise whiteness, to render its specific characteristics up for discussion and debate in the context of race and racism. The title demonstrates the risks inherent in the field. Whitening Race does a great job of racialising whiteness and demonstrating the need for whiteness to be taken more seriously within academic and non-academic forums. The contributors and Editor demonstrate the importance and timeliness of this collection. And if anyone from the Department of Education is reading, please note that copies should be sent to all History teachers before they die.
See http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-June-2005/probyn.html

An excerpt from a review of Whitening Race in the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal follows:

‘This book is an important and inspirational addition to the critical writings on race…historically in Australian scholarship on race, the object for study has been the other, in particular the non-white other. The privileged subject position of the white Australian and the structural location and cultural practices of whiteness are rarely examined…The essays provide rigorous scholarly material that is accessible and useful for students coming freshly to whiteness studies and for researchers engaging with the fraught field of race relations. The collection extends existing material in the field and challenges and inspires everyone to rethink and reconsider.’

Maryrose Casey
Australian Studies Centre
University of Queensland

The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA) Journal is a peer-reviewed online publication. The inaugural issue from which this excerpted review derives was free. Future issues will be available only to ACRAWSA members. The journal aims to facilitate inter-disciplinary discussion of race and whiteness and to provide a forum for publication, whether research, commentary or reviews.
Visit www.acrawsa.org.au.

Review of Paddy’s Road
Kevin Keeffe

Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald, September 2003
The title Paddy’s Road is a clever and accurate description of the rich historical journey that underpins this biography of the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson. Rather than just recounting Dodson’s life, this is a poignant, and often troubling, story about Broome and the Kimberley, from the first sighting by William Dampier to the modern day. Indeed, apart from scattered vignettes of events in Dodson’s life, the chronological details of his life do not start until page 148. Prior to that, anthropologist and friend Kevin Keeffe explores the dark and brutal history of black-white relations in far-north Western Australia. Then it is on to Dodson’s life – as a footballer, the first Aboriginal priest, and our most powerful Aboriginal leader (until he found he could not work for the Howard Government). This is a careful, well-researched biography of a remarkable Australian.