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Australian Aboriginal Studies 2009 volume 1 Abstracts
Social Engineering and Indigenous Settlement: Policy and demography in remote Australia
John Taylor
In recent years neo-liberals have argued that government support for remote Aboriginal communities contributes to social pathology and that unhindered market engagement involving labour mobility provides the only solution. This has raised questions about the viability of remote Aboriginal settlements. While the extreme view is to withdraw services altogether, at the very least selective migration should be encouraged. Since the analytical tools are available, one test of the integrity of such ideas is to consider their likely demographic consequences.
Accordingly, this paper provides empirically based speculation about the possible implications for Aboriginal population distribution and demographic composition in remote areas had the advice of neo-liberal commentators and initial labour market reforms of the Northern Territory Emergency Response been fully implemented. The scenarios presented are heuristic only but they reveal a potential for substantial demographic and social upheaval.
Aspects of the semantics of intellectual subjectivity in Dalabon (south-western
Arnhem Land)
Maïa Ponsonnet
This paper explores the semantics of subjectivity (views, intentions, the self as a social construct etc.) in Dalabon, a severely endangered language of northern Australia, and in Kriol, the local creole. Considering the status of Dalabon and the importance of Kriol in the region, Dalabon cannot be observed in its original context, as the traditional methods of linguistic anthropology tend to recommend. This paper seeks to rely on this very parameter, reclaiming linguistic work and research as a legitimate conversational context. Analyses are thus based on metalinguistic statements — among which are translations in Kriol. Far from seeking to separate Dalabon from Kriol, I use interactions between them as an analytical tool. The paper concentrates on three Dalabon words: men-no (intentions, views, thoughts), kodj-no (head) and kodj-kulu-no (brain). None of these words strictly matches the concept expressed by the English word mind. On the one hand, men-no is akin to consciousness but is not treated as a container nor as a processor; on the other, kodj-no and kodj-kulu-no are treated respectively as container and processor, but they are clearly physical body parts, while what English speakers usually call the mind is essentially distinct from the body. Interestingly, the body part kodj-no (head) also represents the individual as a social construct — while the Western self does not match physical attributes. Besides, men-no can also translate as idea, but it can never be abstracted from subjectivity — while in English, potential objectivity is a crucial feature of ideas. Hence the semantics of subjectivity in Dalabon does not reproduce classic Western conceptual articulations. I show that these specificities persist in the local creole.
Health, death and Indigenous Australians in the coronial system
Belinda Carpenter and Gordon Tait
This paper details research conducted in Queensland during the first year of operation of the new Coroners Act 2003. Information was gathered from all completed investigations between December 2003 and December 2004 across five categories of death: accidental, suicide, natural, medical and homicide. It was found that 25 percent of the total number of Indigenous deaths recorded in 2004 were reported to, and investigated by, the Coroner, in comparison to 9.4 percent of non-Indigenous deaths. Moreover, Indigenous people were found to be over-represented in each category of death, except in death in a medical setting, where they were absent. This paper discusses these findings in detail, following the insights gained from the work of Tatz (1999, 2001, 2005) and Morrissey (2003). It also discusses a further outcome of this situation — the over-representation of Indigenous people in figures for full internal autopsy.
Finding your voice: Placing and sourcing an Aboriginal health organisation’s
published and grey literature
Clive Rosewarne
It is widely recognised that Aboriginal perspectives need to be represented in historical narratives. Sourcing this material may be difficult if Aboriginal people and their organisations do not publish in formats that are widely distributed and readily accessible to library collections and research studies. Based on a search for material about a 30-year-old Aboriginal health organisation, this paper aims to (1) identify factors that influenced the distribution of written material authored by the organisation; (2) consider the implications for Aboriginal people who wish to have their viewpoints widely available to researchers; and (3) assess the implications for research practice. As part of researching an organisational history for the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, seven national and regional collections were searched for Congress’s published and unpublished written material. It was found that, in common with other Aboriginal organisations, most written material was produced as grey literature. The study indicates that for Aboriginal people and their organisations’ voices to be heard, and their views to be accessible in library collections, they need to have an active program to distribute their written material. It also highlights the need for researchers to be exhaustive in their searches, and to be aware of the limitations within collections when sourcing Aboriginal perspectives.
Radiocarbon dates from the Top End: A cultural chronology for the Northern
Territory coastal plains
Sally Brockwell , Patrick Faulkner, Patricia Bourke, Anne Clarke, Christine Crassweller, Daryl Guse, Betty Meehan, and Robin Sim
The coastal plains of northern Australia are relatively recent formations that have undergone dynamic evolution through the mid to late Holocene. The development and use of these landscapes across the Northern Territory have been widely investigated by both archaeologists and geomorphologists. Over the past 15 years, a number of research and consultancy projects have focused on the archaeology of these coastal plains, from the Reynolds River in the west to the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the east. More than 300 radiocarbon dates are now available and these have enabled us to provide a more detailed interpretation of the pattern of human settlement. In addition to this growing body of evidence, new palaeoclimatic data that is relevant to these northern Australian contexts is becoming available. This paper provides a synthesis of the archaeological evidence, integrates it within the available palaeo-environmental frameworks and characterises the cultural chronology of human settlement of the Northern Territory coastal plains over the past 10 000 years.
Ladjiladji language area: A reconstruction
Ian Clark and Edward Ryan
In this reconsideration of the Ladjiladji language area in northwest Victoria, we contend that while Tindale’s classical reconstruction of this language identified a fundamental error in Smyth’s earlier cartographic representation, he incorrectly corrected that error. We review what is known about Ladjiladji and through a careful analysis demonstrate not only the errors in both Smyth and Tindale but also proffer a fundamental reconstruction grounded in the primary sources.
Australian Aboriginal Studies 2009 volume 2 Abstracts
Darkness and a little light: ‘Race’ and sport in Australia
Colin Tatz (AIATSIS & Australian National University) and Daryl Adair (University of Technology Sydney)
Despite ‘the wonderful and chaotic universe of clashing colors, temperaments and emotions, of brave deeds against odds seemingly insuperable’, sport is mixed with ‘mean and shameful acts of pure skullduggery’, villainy, cowardice, depravity, rapaciousness and malice. Thus wrote celebrated American novelist Paul Gallico on the eve of the Second World War (Gallico 1938 [1988]:9–10). An acute enough observation about society in general, his farewell to sports writing also captures the ‘clashing colors’ in Australian sport. In this ‘land of the fair go’, we look at the malice of racism in the arenas where, as custom might have it, one would least want or expect to find it. The history of the connection between sport, race and society — the long past, the recent past and the social present — is commonly dark and ugly but some light and decency are just becoming visible.
Coming to terms: ‘Race’, ethnicity, identity and Aboriginality in sport
Colin Tatz (AIATSIS & Australian National University)
Notions of genetic superiority have led to some of the world’s greatest human calamities. Just as social scientists thought that racial anthropology and biology had ended with the cataclysm of the Second World War, so some influential researchers and sports commentators have rekindled the pre-war debate about the muscular merits of ‘races’ in a new discipline that Nyborg (1994) calls the ‘science of physicology’. The more recent realm of racial ‘athletic genes’, especially within socially constructed black athletic communities, may intend no malice but this search for the keys to their success may well revive the old, discredited discourses. This critical commentary shows what can happen when some population geneticists and sports writers ignore history and when medical, biological and sporting doctrines deriving from ‘race’ are dislocated from any historical, geographic, cultural and social contexts. Understanding discourses about race, racism, ethnicity, otherness, identity and Aboriginality are essential if sense, or nonsense, is to be made of genetic/racial ‘explanations’ of sporting excellence. Between the two major wars boxing was, disproportionately, a Jewish sport; Kenyans and Ethiopians now ‘own’ middle- and long-distance running and Jamaicans the shorter events; South Koreans dominate women’s professional golf. This essay explores the various explanations put forward for such ‘statistical domination’: genes, biochemistry, biomechanics, history, culture, social dynamics, the search for identity, alienation, need, chance, circumstances, and personal bent or aptitude.
Traditional games of a timeless land: Play cultures in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
Ken Edwards (University of Southern Queensland)
Sports history in Australia has focused almost entirely on modern, Eurocentric sports and has therefore largely ignored the multitude of unique pre- European games that are, or once were, played. The area of traditional games, especially those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, is an important aspect of the cultural, social and historical experiences of Indigenous communities. These activities include customs of play that are normally not associated with European notions of competitive sport. Overall, this paper surveys research undertaken into traditional games among Indigenous Australians, as well as proposals for much needed further study in this area.
Culture, ‘race’ and discrimination in the 1868 Aboriginal cricket tour of England
David Sampson
As a consequence of John Mulvaney’s important historical research, the Aboriginal cricket and performance tour of Britain in 1868 has in recent decades become established as perhaps the most famous of all public events in contact history involving Aborigines, white settlers and the British metropolis. Although recognition of its importance is welcome and significant, public commemorations of the tour have enveloped the tour in mythologies of cricket and nation. Such mythologies have obscured fundamental aspects of the tour that were inescapable racial and colonial realities of the Victorian era. This reappraisal of the tour explores the centrality of racial ideology, racial science and racial power imbalances that enabled, created and shaped the tour. By exploring beyond cricketing mythology, it restores the central importance of the spectacular performances of Aboriginal skills without which the tour would have been impossible. Such a reappraisal seeks to fully recognise the often trivialised non-cricketing expertise of all of the Aboriginal performers in 1868 for their achievement of pioneering their unique culture, skills and technologies to a mass international audience.
Football, ‘race’ and resistance: The Darwin Football League, 1926–29
Matthew Stephen (Northern Territory Archive Service)
Darwin was a diverse but deeply divided society in the early twentieth century. The Commonwealth Government introduced the Aboriginals Ordinance 1911 in the Northern Territory, instituting state surveillance, control and a racially segregated hierarchy of whites foremost, then Asians, ‘Coloureds’ (Aborigines and others of mixed descent) and, lastly, the so-called ‘full-blood’ Aborigines. Sport was important in scaffolding this stratification. Whites believed that sport was their private domain and strictly controlled non-white participation. Australian Rules football, established in Darwin from 1916, was the first sport in which ‘Coloured’ sportsmen challenged this domination. Football became a battleground for recognition, rights and identity for all groups. The ‘Coloured’ community embraced its team, Vesteys, which dominated the Northern Territory Football League (NTFL) in the 1920s. In 1926, amidst growing racial tension, the white-administered NTFL changed its constitution to exclude non-white players. In reaction, ‘Coloured’ and Chinese footballers formed their own competition — the Darwin Football League (DFL). The saga of that colour bar is an important chapter in Australia’s football history, yet it has faded from Darwin’s social memory and is almost unknown among historians.
That picture — Nicky Winmar and the history of an image
Matthew Klugman (Victoria University) and Gary Osmond (The University of Queensland)
In April 1993 Australian Rules footballer Nicky Winmar responded to on-field racist abuse by lifting his jersey and pointing to his chest. The photographic image of that event is now famous as a response to racial abuse and has come to be seen as starting a movement against racism in football. The racial connotations in the image might seem a foregone conclusion: the power, appeal and dominant meaning of the photograph might appear to be self-evident. But neither the fame of the image nor its racial connotation was automatic. Through interviews with the photographers and analysis of the use of the image in the media, we explore how that picture came to be of such symbolic importance, and how it has remained something to be re-shown and emulated. Rather than analyse the image as a photograph or work of art, we uncover some of its early history and explore the debates that continue to swirl around its purpose and meaning. We also draw attention to the way the careful study of photographs might enhance the study of sport, race and racism.
‘She’s not one of us’: Cathy Freeman and the place of Aboriginal people in Australian national culture
Toni Bruce (University of Waikato) and Emma Wensing (Independent scholar)
The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games generated a national media celebration of Aboriginal 400 metre runner Cathy Freeman. The construction of Freeman as the symbol of national reconciliation was evident in print and on television, the Internet and radio. In contrast to this celebration of Freeman, the letters to the editor sections of 11 major newspapers became sites for competing claims over what constitutes Australian identity and the place of Aboriginal people in national culture. We analyse this under-explored medium of opinion and discuss how the deep feelings evident in these letters, and the often vitriolic responses to them, illustrate some of the enduring racial tensions in Australian society.
Sport, physical activity and urban Indigenous young people
Alison Nelson (The University of Queensland)
This paper challenges some of the commonly held assumptions and ‘knowledges’ about Indigenous young people and their engagement in physical activity. These include their ‘natural’ ability, and the use of sport as a panacea for health, education and behavioural issues. Data is presented from qualitative research undertaken with a group of 14 urban Indigenous young people with a view to ‘speaking back’ to these commentaries. This research draws on Critical Race Theory in order to make visible the taken-for-granted assumptions about Indigenous Australians made by the dominant white, Western culture. Multiple, shifting and complex identities were expressed in the young people’s articulation of the place and meaning of sport and physical activity in their lives. They both engaged in, and resisted, dominant Western discourses regarding representations of Indigenous people in sport. The paper gives voice to these young people in an attempt to disrupt and subvert hegemonic discourses.
An unwanted corroboree: The politics of the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout
Heidi Norman (University of Technology Sydney)
The annual New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout is so much more than a sporting event. Involving a high level of organisation, it is both a social and cultural coming together of diverse communities for a social and cultural experience considered ‘bigger than Christmas’. As if the planning and logistics were not difficult enough, the rotating-venue Knockout has been beset, especially since the late 1980s and 1990s, by layers of opposition and open hostility based on ‘race’: from country town newspapers, local town and shire councils, local business houses and, inevitably, the local police. A few towns have welcomed the event, seeing economic advantage and community good will for all. Commonly,
the Aboriginal ‘influx’ of visitors and players — people perceived as ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’, ‘non-taxpayers’ — provoked public fear about crime waves, violence and physical safety, requiring heavy policing. Without exception, these racist expectations were shown to be totally unfounded.